Before I get into everything, let’s get the obligatory excuse out of the way and explain why there wasn’t a post last week. The family was away on a – very rare – vacation to Disney World and my plan was that on laundry day I’d get a coffee and sit with the Windows Notebook, do a little editing and get a post together. Well, anyone who visits the Hollywood Studios park about now will be able to tell you how hard it is to get a Boarding Pass for Rise of the Resistance. Our boarding call came in ten minutes into the laundry being started, so I had just enough time to get the wet clothes into a dryer and then bail for the park.
So. No post last week.
Getting Back up to Speed.
These past few days have been a headache because the window I’d planned to use to get back into the groove of things hasn’t materialized. The plan was to leave Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday, take it easy on the way home, stopping off at a hotel for the night, and then coast home on Wednesday.
Well, the dear wife managed to get a nasty cold, so I spent a little extra time behind the wheel and we got home in the wee small hours of Wednesday, a day given over to the wife for recovering. Thursday and Friday involved enough heavy rain for the school district to close. Finally, while I’m certainly not complaining, until recently the dear wife has worked every weekend, but not this one and very few going forward. All this together meant that normality has had to be postponed until Monday at the earliest.
What About the Trip?
Well, there’s plenty I could write from my own perception of Disney, through some of the issues that we had, to what our favorite rides were, as well as how awesome Kennedy Space Center is.
But that’s not what this blog is really centered on, and this post in particular needs to be more about getting back on track with The Old Man.
How About Those Questions, Then?
1. At the rate of three chapters a week, I should get done with the notes portion of the revision before my next accountability post. Did I make it to the end of Chapter 17?
Well, about that. There wasn’t a whole lot of opportunity to sit and edit, unless I wanted to take the Notebook with me into the park and carry it around from ride to ride in the expectation that I’d get to turn it on at some point, so no, I didn’t make Chapter 17.
I’m at the beginning of Chapter 14 and fully expect to be done with commenting on the rest of the manuscript before the end of this week.
2. So far I’ve kept up with the mindful meditation and gratitude journals. Exactly how much backsliding will I have done in the interim?
Complete and total.
I’m not going to beat myself up about this, I’m just going to work to get back onto the rails. I had hoped that Wednesday we could have got the trip recovered from and I’d have Thursday and Friday to restart the process. That didn’t happen, but normality should resume this week.
3. Where am I with regards to tracking the effort to get more active?
This also got a pin stuck in it, but being at Disney World involved a lot of walking, so I don’t think the vacation hurt that effort.
It’s 10:33 today and, while I’ve remembered my FitBit every other day I’ve been home, it’s only writing this post that’s reminded me today, so it currently reads ‘0’.
4. Have I gotten past procrastination and actually come up with something resembling a positive reinforcement rewards plan yet?
Nope, but I have some ideas that I should be able to implement this coming week, so I’ll be able to discuss those in the next post.
Up Next…
I intend next post to be able to say I’ve hit all four of my targets, which are in the answers to the above questions, but I’ll set them out below for reference.
1. Have I completed the comment phase? Have I achieved anything else that I should mention?
2. Am I back at least where I was with the mindfulness meditation and gratitude journal?
3. I’m not expecting to have a complete game plan for developing a plan to get more active, but do I at least have a baseline for nominal activity levels throughout a couple of normal weeks by now?
4. Do I have more details on the positive reinforcement rewards plan yet?
Again, I’d hoped have gotten more of a handle on everything for this post, but having to adjust my plans so much because nothing has been normal yet since getting home, I am at least happy that the end of the novel is in sight, with just a sneeze over ten thousand words to go. Once these improvements are incorporated, I will be going to Beta – I’ve developed the impression that I could keep combing through it ad infinitum without ever reaching the point where I felt no improvements could be made.
Right now, I’m hoping that I can be ready for Beta by mid to late March 2020.
With that, I hope that everyone’s plans come together at least as well as mine.
Stay warm and have a great week.
Categories: Accountability, My Life, Personal, Revision, Work Update
Andrew Wellington 
Leave a comment