In other news, I’ve now lost a stone in weight this year.
That puts me on a weirdly OCD number (ending with two zeroes) although still at the high-end of “Functioning fat fucker”, with a way to go.
I’m happy with the progress though. I’d like it to be quicker (wouldn’t we all?) but at least it’s progress.
Over the last couple of months, my creative side has felt like it’s completely locked up. I don’t particularly know why – although I suspect it’s linked to feeling constantly tired, burned out, and unwell.
After this weekend, I’m making some changes again – mainly employment stuff (of which a bit more tomorrow) but also a few life-based things.
With the new job, I’m aiming to limit myself to work-based stuff just in work hours. With the last couple of jobs they’ve been coming home with me, and it’s been sitting in my head. I suspect that’s been a mistake. It’s certainly put me in a position where a lot of the time I don’t even want to look at a computer while I’m at home – although again that may be down to also feeling depressingly run-down – so I’m currently hoping that if I limit myself a bit more workwise, I might have the time and inclination to do other stuff when I’m back at home.
It could also be that I’m going through a bit of a depression dump. It wouldn’t be the first time that I get affected like that once the days have started getting longer. I can deal with – and fight – the seasonal depression of long nights and grey days, but once the days get longer I lower my guard, lower my resistance, and sometimes it just hits hard for a while.
I’m hoping I’ll find some ways to reset myself a bit over the next couple of weeks, but we’ll see.
For the first time in about ten days, I can breathe clearly today. This is A Good Thing.
For the first time in about a month, I can also move without twinges of the muscles in my back, and without wincing. This is A Joy.
I do wonder if I’m not a bit run-down at the moment – things seem to be taking longer to repair than usual, and to be slightly more fragile than they have been.
Or maybe, as BW said a while back, I’m just getting old(er). Not Old old, but approaching middle-age, and all that rot.
I don’t know – I’ll see what happens over the rest of this year. I’m hoping for things to be a bit calmer (although my calm is most people’s ‘chaotic’, as we all well know) but we’ll see.
This year, as I’ve said before (and on many occasions) I’ve been working at getting more exercise, with an aim of losing some weight, improving health, and all that standard crap. At the same time I’ve been keeping track of food intake and so on, which has been interesting rather than overly useful.
I’ve been doing fairly well for a start- I’m tending to average walking about 3-4 miles a day, including at least a mile round the village every day. I started off just making sure I did it even on days when I wasn’t in the mood, or when the weather was vile (and lord knows we’ve had plenty of those so far this year) so that I could establish it as routine, and thus have even less excuse when the weather was good.
It’s slow-going though – which I’m not happy about. I’m eating less than the ‘recommended’ calorie count, and I’m doing more exercise. But weight has stayed fairly stable. As it is, I’ve lost half a stone this year – which is better than it could be, but it’s still hard to monitor when it takes so sodding long.
This week has been different, because of stuffing my back last weekend (which is improving, but still insanely sore in the morning) I made the decision to lay off the walking etc. as much. It’s about halved from the usual, and I’ll actually be glad to get back to it.
Anyway, there’s been progress, it’s just been ridiculously slow. Next step, once I’m back to not hurting (pardon the pun) will be to get back on my bike again and do more work on that score as well. Maybe that’ll help things progress. We’ll see.
Over the weekend, I somehow wrecked my back. I don’t know quite what happened, but yesterday was seriously painful.
I think that I somehow did something stupid – moved in a strange way, or slept in a weird position – because I do recall being vaguely awake and feeling something ‘wrong’ in my back. But then I went back to sleep.
It was OK again in the morning, a bit sore but nothing to write home about. But then I went off for a walk (which I try to do on a regular basis, building up exercise routines and so on) and this time it was down to the local wildlife centre – about 3 miles all told, which isn’t that much. But while there I sat on one of their picnic tables to read my book. I reckon I must’ve been leaning forward over the table for a period of time.
And the return journey was painful, the muscles in my lower back definitely hurting in style. I still walked home, but it hurt a lot more than the first half had.
Over the rest of the day, it got worse, to the point I wasn’t wanting to bend down or anything. I hoped that a hot shower/soak of the muscles would help, but no. I hoped that sleep last night would ease it up, but no. Still exceptionally sore this morning.
It’s eased off a bit today, but time will tell. There’s a good portion of the day remaining, after all. We’ll see. But in the meantime, bloody hell that was sore…