Things I did today

I made it! No Added Sugar! I even considered eating cereal on Friday because I started with saying this was a 30 day challenge and Friday was day 31, but I felt like that would be cheating. So, with the exception of half of the honey roll that I thought was a regular roll, and a bottle of Gatorade G2 when I thought I was grabbing a bottle of Gatorade Zero, I avoided added sugar. Here's my nutrition information for the month: The light green is the sugar content I ate for the month. I recall one day, I ate two bananas, which pushed my sugar intake to 61, but my overall average was just over 20 grams per day. I'm going to guess my sugar content will be off the chart today - I'll be having a bowl of cereal and after lunch, I'll head to a bakery and coffee shop downtown for a sweet treat! The start of the sleeping challenge was irritatingly roughly. I went to bed at 10:30 for a good 8.5 hours of sleep. And I couldn't fall asleep. When I did, I kept waking up

Tiny Habits is a course taught by BJ Fogg. I enrolled in his free 5 day course after seeing it mentioned on a website that I've long forgotten where I was. It is a good course, if you haven't already read part of Atomic Habits by James Clear, or if you feel like his book is too difficult. After sign up, they ask if you want to start 'this' weekend, or 'next' weekend. I opted for 'next' weekend, since I wanted to get further in the Atomic Habits book first. They pair you with a coach, who must be handling several people at once. The email responses are mostly form filled reminders  pulled from their course materials and what I provided in the beginning about what small habits I wanted to build.The request everyday was to signify if I did the habit I set out to do, and if I was going to do the habit again the next day. Clearly, this was aimed toward the person who didn't do any research beforehand and wanted just the smallest beginning of habit setti

I'm tired. I don't feel great. I don't want to write. Too bad, I decided to write every day until, well, who knows. Since I don't want to break my streak, I'll keep it going. Today is a struggle, though. I don't feel like I have a lot of positive or life changing things to offer. I grabbed my notebook that I put my to do list on, and read it. The page had: Laundry Clean Guest Room Vacuum Write Blog Post Study for 70-764 Exam It's a list of things I want to do, but it's just not a satisfying list. There are things I'm missing, and if I write down, then strike off laundry, I'll just have to write laundry again next week. Same for other chores like taking out the trash and vacuuming. Okay, I tore out that page, and now I have a new page. At the top, I have: Daily Tasks                                           Weekly Tasks and beneath those headings are said tasks that I want to complete within their generic time frame. Daily Tasks 

I procrastinate quite a lot. If I don't have to get something done straight away, I generally do something else that is more fun. I'm trying to quit, but behind it is a personality trait I dislike: I feel like I should always be doing something. Writing another blog post, cleaning a room even better, learning more about music theory or SQL or photography or playing piano or exercising or doing one of my back burner hobbies like gardening or painting. If I'm going to always feel guilt about not doing something after I've already finished a lot of somethings, I might as well feel the guilt in the start of the process and do something fun and distracting first! I still get everything done. I still feel guilty. I don't see a way out of it. But there is something better than living this way, because I've done it the other way, and it feels good. The feeling of accomplishment and very little procrastination. For my final college class, I actually studied and read th

I'll be starting two long term challenges in February - one on the 1st, and one on the 7th, as well as my normally planned 30 day (ok, 29 day this time) challenges. First, I'll be waking up at 6am for days I'm going to work, and waking up at 7am for days I am not going to work. I'll be going to bed each day so I get chance to sleep at least 8 hours - likely 10pm or 11pm. To help me, I've purchased a light that gets brighter the closer it gets to the alarm I've set for it. I'll also have some Zzzquil around in case I didn't get 8 hours the night before. The other challenge will be regarding SQL exam training. I'm going to go through several Pluralsight courses, and the Exam Ref book, and start taking practice tests for 70-764. Luckily almost no one reads my blog, so I could talk about the things I learned without fear of losing readership. I'm giving myself two months to study for this exam as I've not taken a Microsoft certification exam

It's challenging, just not in the way I expected. I assumed I'd be lamenting the loss of post holiday chocolates and planning out some decadent sugary smorgasbord for the first of February. But, I'm not. Granted, I am going to a dessert place after I go have dinner on February 1st, but I'm not looking to eat as much sugar as I can. And the thing I miss the most? Cereal with milk. Not super sugary cereal, but low and medium amounts of sugar, with a fair amount of oats. Or corn and rice, in the form of Crispix. I miss just being able to eat whatever wheat bread or roll at a restaurant and not having to figure out if it's allowed on my diet. I won't be going to the grocery store and buying candy or cookies or ice cream. But crackers that have 2 or 3 grams of added sugar per serving - those types of things I would like to eat. I'm glad that I've gone through this exercise, because I certainly don't have the craving I had when I started the challeng

I read another chapter of Pete Buttigieg's book. It's still a fun read as he's entering Harvard and immersing himself in politic groups there. I also decided to read through one of the scenarios in a Choose Your Own Adventure book one of my friends lent me. I got stuck in a loop, traversing a set of connected mountain caves, and attempted to fight an orc that I had tricked before. It didn't go well. I died. I'm looking forward to trying again! But the most exciting thing I did, and which took quite some time, was killing the dragon in Minecraft! After traversing fields and mountains and lakes and rivers and killing Enderman to gain pearls and building netherportals to defeat monsters in the nether and find the castle to deposit the ender pearls that then turns into another Portal to the end game stage, you defeat the dragon. It took a while. He's rather tough, and in the end stage, it's best to build pillars to stand on to get a closer shot... But other enem