Quick update

 It is the next to last day of school and I could not be happier. Tomorrow will be a super long day as we have school and then graduation tomorrow night. But Thursday will be a super short day with only the awards ceremony and we will be done at noon. So yay!!!! 

Hiking on Saturday was awesome. It was a really nice trail and not very difficult at all, so that was good. I took it really slow and didn't push my knee at all. Of course, my knee was bothering me yesterday and is bothering me this morning. As soon as I was done with PT I stopped doing the exercises and now I can feel that. So last night I stretched and tonight I will do the entire set of exercises. 

My thoughts this morning are on weight loss. I've been 'trying' to lose weight and seemed kind of stalled at 215. I can't seem to get past that number. Now logically I know that I need to do more than I am doing but logic and reality don't always mesh up. I'm thinking that once school is over I'm going to hit the gym 4 days a week; Monday-Tuesday and Thursday-Friday. Going to do upper-lower with a rest day between. I need to be much more consistent than I've been for the past year. I will also need to plan a way to be more consistent during the school year, but let me get the habit in place first. 

Then I need to focus on my food. I've been stretching the eating healthy thing. Yes, I eat salad with chicken on it but then I slather it in sugary dressing. I need to up my eating game over the summer so that I have some better habits in place when school starts up again. 

That's really about it for me. I need to basically just refine everything and not be so lackadaisical about it. 

In other news, tomorrow is the last day of school!!! Oh wait, did I say that already. 

And on that note, I'm out. 

what is a comfort zone?

 So today I am doing something that is so far out of my comfort zone. I'm joining a group of people that I don't know for a hike 90 minutes away. Ummmm, hello, who is this?  Yes, I decided a few weeks back that I want to hike. I like to hike. No, I love to hike. When I lived in Hawaii I hiked a lot. A. Lot. Having my knee injury through prime hiking season is really what made me realize that I want to hike. There are tons and tons of beautiful hikes here in Arizona and I missed out on all of them because I hurt my knee at Thanksgiving. So now I'm trying to make up for it a little. We are getting into the heat of the summer so hiking will only happen early, early in the morning or up north. But I'm okay with that. There is no reason why I can't join these things. 

So, why exactly is this so far out of my comfort zone? Well, I'm joining a group of people that I don't know. That right there is usually a show stopper for me. Don't know anyone? Not going. Don't care what anyone says, I'm a true introvert and being around people I don't know is absolutely draining. But I'm doing it. Not only that, I'm bringing 3 other ladies in my van. What????  Yes, I'll have company there and back. Hello pushing the envelope. But it's time to push myself. I'm not ever going to get Hubby to do some of the things I want to do, so I need to learn to join groups I don't know and do things with people I don't know. So there you have it. My comfort zone has been pushed to the max. 

They say the larger your comfort zone the less fragile you will be. I don't believe that pushing your comfort zone in one area necessarily translates into a larger comfort zone in all areas. But I do believe that if you do things you thought you couldn't, whatever they are, they it is easier to do other things you thought you couldn't. So here I am doing things I thought I couldn't. Yes, I'm nervous. Yes, I'm a little scared. But I'm channeling that nervousness into anticipation. Instead of dwelling on what could go wrong, because everything could go wrong. I'm focusing on what fun it will be. And it will be fun if I allow it to be fun. So I am all in on this one. Charlie is handling it surprisingly well also. He has lined up a bunch of things to do today like clean his car, get the hedges trimmed in back. I'll come back to a new back yard. Yay. 

Okay, that's it the tree has grown. I'm off to get ready. 

A quick update

 So many, many things.  First my head cold seems to be completely gone and that is a good thing. Second, I have been so very, very tired this week and not completely sure why. Part of it has to do with the end of the year and part of it has to do with boredom in classes. We aren't doing anything new and that is just boring for me. 

My new scale is amazing. Part of the reason I thought I was so tired was that I wasn't eating enough food. I had stopped eating breakfast - which is not bad in and of itself but I wasn't making up the calories I missed. Then lunch would be a salad and that is just not enough calories. Also, I had stopped my apple/peanut butter snack after school. So that is part of the reason I think I was getting so tired. So yesterday I added all those things back in again and this morning my weight was down. Weird, huh? But I truly believe that your body responds to stress by holding on. If you aren't eating enough, it holds on to fat to keep you alive. If you aren't drinking enough water, it holds onto what you do drink because you need it. If you aren't getting enough of some mineral, it holds on to it. So by not eating enough food, I was forcing my body to hold on to it and not use it and that was making me tired. When I ate normally yesterday, my body was all, ,oh cool, she's got food again - yay! To me this is all knowledge that I can use. Same way with my Whoop, just getting enough sleep doesn't mean it's good sleep. I need to work on that next. 

Okay, that's really it. I have to go. 

Needing to find some balance

 Since I got my new planner I have not written in here as much and that makes me sad. I love writing in here because it's like free form thinking and sometimes things show up that I'm not even aware of. I think I'm going to start doing my planner at night and doing this in the morning again. I find a real difference in my mental state when I write in here. 

Which leads me to a topic that has been floating around my mind the past couple of days. I've been weighing myself fairly regularly for a while now. I do it for a number of reasons, but that main one is that knowledge is power. If I see the scale creeping up I can look at what I'm doing and see if there is something different. Also, I just find that when I'm aware of the number I tend to do better. The number doesn't get me down at all because I know that so many, many things influence it. Which leads me to what I'm thinking about. That number on the scale is really just a relative number and not an exact measurement. Let me explain. Many things affect weight; salt, water, humidity, exercise, etc. And these things can change from one day to the next and sometimes from one minute to the next. So getting a real, true weight is almost impossible. But what the scale is good for is relative weight. So if I weigh 215 today and then tomorrow it's 217, I know logically that I did not 'gain' 2 pounds in one day, but clearly something affected my body composition. That is knowledge and something that I can work with. 

I recently, 3 days ago, got a new scale. This is so high tech that it's scary. It links to an app on my phone and it measures all sorts of metrics; body fat, water, muscle, bone, visceral fat, internal fat, etc. I get like 13 data points every time I step on it. This is more knowledge, more information to work with and the reason I realized it's all relative. On my other scale I was weighing in at 213, on this one it's 217. I'm confident that I did not gain 4 pounds walking from one room to the next, so it's the device I'm using and therefore a relative measure. The same with my Whoop band. It just provides me more information that is relative to me, but I can use to make informed decisions about what I do to my body. So my Whoop has now given me enough of a baseline that I can start playing with the information. The scale is still new. Also, I need to track my food intake and I mean seriously track it. If these data points are going to help me inform my health, I need to have relatively accurate data. 

I'm thinking that I need to bring all this information together. Maybe I'll create a spreadsheet that I can update once a week or so and see what trends are happening. I'll need to think on that and nothing is starting until after next week. The 26th is the last day of school and after that everything changes. 

Poof, now it's Saturday

 The days are going so fast I can't keep up. This always happens at the end of the year. Things just start accelerating. Next week is the seniors last week and the following week is everyone's last week. It's so exciting and definitely needed. The past few years have been pretty darn crazy and the thought of having a nice relaxing summer and then a relatively normal year is more exciting than you can possibly imagine. We used to say at the lab that we were looking for boring. That's what I'm looking for this summer, boring. 

I've been sick with a head cold for 6 1/2 days. I'm pretty much over it. I did start feeling a lot better yesterday after my nap. I also have stopped blowing my nose 14 times a second. So I guess I'm getting better and making progress. It just sucks. I want to feel amazing again like I did before this happened. I also want to get back to working out and being active like I planned. But it's hard to do that when it's hard to breathe. Okay, whining done. 

Last night was prom and I did dress code with my teacher friend. It was fun. It's fun seeing all the kids dressed up like adults. They really do grow up so quickly. 

Had a bit of a serious talk with Charlie yesterday about my wanting to be more active, do more things, and not just sit around the house and get old. He understood but I was hoping to inspire him into doing something, anything, but it didn't seem to work. Oh well, I tried. He's a big boy and I can't force him to do anything he doesn't want to. I just hate that I'm sitting here watching him basically kill himself. Oh well. I guess if I really don't like it I can always leave, right? 

Well, that's about all I have to say at the moment. I'm feeling a little stuffy - ugh! - but no dripping congestion so that's good. Time for another cup of coffee. 

Time for an update

 I only have these 10 minutes so I'll get right to the point. I've been sick since Sunday. This sucks. It's just a head cold but it still sucks. What really sucks is that in this time of Covid I feel bad going out in public sick. But I honestly have no choice. Okay, I could have stayed home yesterday. I took Monday off and it would not have been a big deal to take yesterday off also, but I didn't want to. I laid around Sunday and Monday, I was ready to do something yesterday. It worked out fine. I'm feeling somewhat better today so hopefully it will be a good day. 

In other news, I signed up for a hike with a group that I've been part of for a while but not really joined in. They schedule hikes, slow and easy hikes, in some great places, but I haven't joined in. Well, I put myself out there and decided to just jump in and go for it. It's on the 21st I believe, it's a Saturday, and it's in Payson. It will be a great drive and it will be a great hike and the fact that I'm putting myself out there is the greatest part. I'm excited. 

School is rapidly coming to a close. There are 2 weeks left. Next week is the seniors last week and the following week is it. Boom, done. I cannot wait. It has been such a crazy year, I'm ready for it to be over. Then I get to start working on next year and using a different curriculum. I'm excited about that because I feel like it's more complete than the one I'm using. So that will be awesome. I think I'm going to go to school to work also, that will at least give me a couple of hours of focused time. But initially I think I'm taking at least a week off. I'm going to swim and read and watch TV and go to the gym and get up early and hike and walk and do all the things I want to do. Then I'm going to schedule my summer as I'm not going to be working on school the whole time. I'm going to have some days that are school free but I'm going to schedule them so I have boundaries. I'm going to be a lot more structured in my classroom also, but this is stuff best left for the other blog. I watched a teacher vlogger last night who has quit teaching and is making enough money from YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok to survive. Actually he said he is making more from those than he was from teaching. And he is flying all over the country doing all kinds of things. For a brief minute I got jealous, but then realized that I don't want that. I don't want the pressure of having to keep creating new and interesting content in order to survive. Yes, teaching is hard and it doesn't pay crap, but what happens if you start to lose your followers? Your income goes down? How does that all work? Yikes, no. I'm not that much of a risk taker. 

Okay, the tree has grown and I'm out. 

Off the rails

 Today the eating was off the rails. I wasn't really hungry this morning but I wanted something. So I stopped at McDonald's and got a sausage McMuffin with egg. My thought was that I could eat just the insides and throw the muffin away. Yeah, that didn't happen. Then one of my students came in and gave me a donut for teacher appreciation week and I ended up eating it. The PTO made lunch for us and one of the moms made gluten free brownies. I had one. And then I had 2 more. They were good. Thankfully I did not eat after that until we ate dinner and I kept that under control. 

So in doing some analysis, why did this happen? The truth is I've been craving some carbs for a few days and I've managed to fight it off. I think, and I have nothing to base this on but my anecdotal experiences, but I think I need some carbs every so often. I was expecting to feel like crap, and I may tomorrow, after eating all that, but I actually felt a little energized. I thought the sugar in 3 brownies would send me crashing by 5pm. Nope, felt fine. So I'm beginning to thing that I can eat sweets and carbs at certain times providing I've avoided them for a long time. 

Now I probably will feel like complete crap tomorrow and regret every bite I took today, but right now it's not that bad.

In other news, I got a firmware update to my Whoop and it seems to be working over my tattoo. I'm going to wear it this way tonight and see what happens. 

Panda Planner - a small review

 I love me a good planner. I have reached the point in my life, or maybe I've always been this way just didn't know it, where if I don't write things down they are gone. If I have something to do and don't write it down, chances are it won't get done. If I did something and try to remember when or where, if it's not written down it's gone. So I do love me a good planner. But I could not find one that completely worked for me. I fell into the trap of decorating my planner and that just became too overwhelming and I would stop using it because I couldn't decorate it right or enough or at all. Then I would try to go minimalist, but there are some days when there is just not a whole lot happening and it would look like I didn't have a life. Granted, some days I don't, but I don't want it to look that way. I've tried almost every name planner under the sun; Passion Planner, Plum Planner, Erin Condron, Happy Planner, just to name a few. Then a friend mentioned Panda Planner. Hmmm, I've never heard of that one so I went to check it out. It looked intriguing. 

They have a number of different styles, daily, weekly, etc. I decided to go with the daily just for the things it has. Here is what a page looks like: 

I love this daily page for a couple of reasons. First, it has a morning and evening routine. That is important to me since I forget to look at my planner for days on end. So having a routine where I need to start and end each day is awesome. It also has all that psychological stuff like gratitude, things I'm looking forward to, affirmations, things like that. That is a fabulous way to start the day and one of the reasons I started blogging in the mornings again. 

Then it has a small schedule. I love this because generally my day isn't highly scheduled, there are just general times when I need to do things, so this works for me. But it does have a priority list, which is perfect. Here I put the things I want to get done during the day. Most of the time it doesn't matter when I get them done, just that I do them. So just having a priority list is really works for me. Then there is also a task list for the little things that you must do but don't necessarily require a priority box. 

Then there is the evening routine where I have to sit and wrap up my day. There is also a habit tracker at the top. You pick a habit every month and then you can check off every day that you have done that habit. This is great for me because I will want to do something regularly and then forget about it. Can't forget with this thing. 

They also have a monthly section: 

I don't use the monthly all that much, but I'm going to try with this one. 

And there is a weekly section: 

I have come to love reviews of the past. I love how Passion Planner has a monthly review to complete every month. I really think that I will love this weekly review. I think shorter time spans will work a lot better for me. 

So I've been using it since May 1st and I'm loving it so far. I will update this review at the beginning of June to see how I like it after a month.