Plans & Goals 2021: Week 45

Totally random question: have you ever begun your day with the sound of someone, somewhere nearby, retching violently in a way that sounds very much as though they’re about to lose a vital organ or two by way of their throat? If you haven’t, I can not-so-proudly say that I’ve got one up on you.

HAPPY MONDAY EVERYONE.

Okay, but seriously, we are at the precise half-point of November, I have been at my present work site for 26 days now, and I am happy to announce that I have not gone stark-raving mad yet. Go me! I ended up doing 22 consecutive days of work (all 12-hour shifts, except for the two that were 13 hours and the one that was 15 hours) before they cottoned on and made me take a few days off. Yes, I did that shit on purpose, because the overtime is fantastic, but if you were go back in time nine years and tell my former self that I’d be doing such a stint, she would have laughed right in your face. My, how the times have changed.

Anyway, living in camp and working positively stupid hours doesn’t leave a lot of time for anything else cool or interesting to be happening in life, so I don’t really have any other excess information to share this week. Thus, let’s go ahead and jump to the goals!

Health

First off, I’m not going to repeat all the same excuses and explanations that I’ve done the past few weeks. You guys know by now that I’m living in a work camp and am therefore restricted to the food that is made available to me. Let’s leave it at that.

That said, I will honestly admit that my willpower has been, hmm….let’s say lacking. There is so much junk food here, you guys. Cookies and pastries and muffins and pop and chips and- Well, you get the point. My psychological ability to avoid such things varies day to day, based on such things as how much caffeine I’ve had, who much water I’ve managed to force down my gullet, what the work day was like, and what shitty thing they’re serving for dinner on any given day. Also, after an extended stint at camp, the cooked food begins to do weird things to my stomach (I suspect it’s the MSG that’s in EVERYTHING), and it becomes physically and emotionally easier to eat the baked goods and packaged junk than the actual prepared meals. That’s not an excuse; that’s genuine facts. My poor stomach, you guys…dear lord.

Anyway, point being that it’s not been the easiest few weeks when it comes to consumption. That said, I’ve been getting better with cramming water into me, which helps with the desire to cram loads of sugar and salt into me, so there is that.

On a more positive note of the physical activity variety, it’s been a long time since I got so many steps so easily. Just walking from my camp room to the dining hall and back is a thousand steps…and I’m not exaggerating there. And that’s to say nothing of the steps I get while actually at work. Plus, earlier last week the area where I was working had a busted elevator…so for three days my coworkers and I had to trek up ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY-TWO STAIRS four times a day. To say that I had an overjoyed reaction of divine ecstasy when the elevator was repaired would be an understatement. If there was ever a way to prove to me, without a shadow of doubt, that I am overweight and out of shape, that was definitely it. Wait, this bit was supposed to be positive, wasn’t it? Oh well, you get my meaning. There’s been physical activity. Without me having to go out of my way to perform it.

Creativity

Hoo, wee, creativity ahoy, my good people! Beyond just the stubborn insistence on cramming as much writing in as I possibly can while I’m writing, I had three days off from work this week and spent a good bit of it on things I’ve been dying to do for a while now but could never find the time.

Let’s actually get writing out of the way first this time, because it’s the normal bit that we’re all used to. I’ve continued to write during every possible waking moment when I’m not eating or working, so things are still going pretty well on that front. Mostly I’ve been scribbling scenes for various works in a notebook that I keep with me at all times, but I also caught up on ‘The Prince’s Consort’ and started working on this year’s ‘Ineffable Holiday’ prompt fics (which I compiled myself with suggestions from friends and followers). Last week Pacemaker.press set me the tough but reasonable goal of 13,498 words, and I managed to squeak past it with 13,890 words. Phew!

Moving on to art, by the time I hit my days off at the end of the week I’d been dying to draw for a while. One of the first things that I did was to have one of our little drawing ‘competitions’ with my daughter, and the models of choice were the Cookie characters from ‘Cookie Run Kingdom’. No, I’m not kidding. lol We’re both a little obsessed with the game, and it has fun characters, so we played at picking characters for one another to draw. I’m not going to share all of the ones I drew because it was a three-day process of constant doodling, but here’s one of my favorites of the ones I did:

Then, of course, I’d been positively aching to draw some NSFW stuff for ages, so I indulged in a bit of that. I finished one piece and did most of another, and obviously I’m not going to share the full images here, but I’ll give you a couple of heavily-cropped bits to give you an idea of what’s going on here… *cough cough*

Both of these are firsts for me, regarding the acts that are happening in them, and knowing that, I’m pretty pleased with how they turned out. I’m thinking that I’ll sneak them in to one of my fics somewhere, because I’m quite certain they do a good job of representing some of the scenes I’ve written. ❤

Then we have a brand new project, because apparently I didn’t think that I had enough going on already. *cough*

I’ve decided to start playing my hand at recording narrations of my stories. I started with my 2019 holiday fics because they’re short, and after the first attempt I got some advice from a friend on noise reduction and avoiding those spitty saliva noises you can get from speaking for a long time. I then re-recorded that first fic, and what I wound up with is now uploaded to a new YouTube channel I’ve set up specifically for this one purpose. If you’re interested in checking it out, here’s my very first ever fic narration:

I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out, if I’m being totally honest with myself! There are going to be growing pains, for sure, but I think that I spoke pretty clearly, and I think I’m half-decent at expressing emotion when I narrate. The only thing that I definitely feel like I need work on is the voices/accents for the dialogue bit, but I’m expecting that that will become better and easier as I record more and more. I’ve already got one more recording already set to go, but I still have to edit it. I’m hoping to get it uploaded sooner rather than later, and then hopefully I’ll get a chance to record some more on my next day off (which should be sooner this time than it was last time).

Down-Time

Please see the ‘Creativity’ section above…lol That’s pretty much where all my down-time went last week. I suppose you can’t really call it down-time, except for perhaps the drawing with my daughter, because it was all work of a kind. But it was work that I wanted to do, so there is that…:P

In all seriousness though, I didn’t do a whole lot of reading, watching, or gaming last week. I read a few short fics, but nothing major because I was more focused on writing. The only thing even remotely close to gaming that I did was a few minutes a day of ‘Pokemon Go’ and ‘Cookie Run Kingdom’. And as for watching stuff? I mean…I had Netflix or Prime running most of the weekend because I like background noise, but mostly it was just silly baking shows playing back-to-back while I wrote or drew or what-have-you. Aside from that I watched a few hockey games and a handful of YouTube videos, and that was pretty much it!

That said, and on a related note, Tik Tok is a goddamn dangerous app that I’m going to have to set major restrictions on myself for. I started scrolling a few minutes before bed last night and ended up looking at the clock with utter dismay two hours later. o.o

And that’s pretty much it for another week. I can’t honestly say that I’m not pleased with how the past week went, and I’m hoping for a similar one this week. Though I don’t have any days off this week, so it might not be quite as productive. lol Wish me luck!

Feel free to let me know how your year is going so far! Do you have any big goals? Specific plans? Anything awesome on the horizon? Share what’s going on with you! ❤

Plans & Goals 2021: Week 40

How are we all doing on this fine Canadian Thanksgiving day, my dears? Let’s start off this post by wishing a happy giving-of-thanks to my fellow Canucks. I hope you had a great Turkey Day with family and/or friends and that you’ve been able to be thankful for something. ❤

The hubby and kid and I had a rather busy long weekend, ourselves. We got up early Saturday morning to travel into the city for our annual Halloween-store hunt and spent a good chunk of the day in the ‘Spirit Halloween’ and ‘Glow Halloween’ superstores. We recorded footage and took lots of pictures, and all three of us ended up picking out costumes, so we’re all prepared for the holiday now.

The drive home from the city, I have to admit, was not a great one for me. The beginning of the day had been quite lovely, honestly, but the afternoon turned into one of those days where a series of small annoyances and inconveniences makes you feel like absolute shit. Hubby and the kid managed to cheer me up in the end, but it was a rough few hours of wanting to curl up in a ball in bed and just be alone. It’s been a while since I had an episode that bad, but it was bound to happen sooner or later, considering how stressful things have been lately.

Sunday turned around significantly. We travelled to hang out with family for Thanksgiving, which meant lots of excellent food, some phenomenal desserts, and a fair bit of boozing. It wasn’t as big a gathering that night as usual, but those of us who did dip into the liquor ended up quite full by the end of things. It was a pretty good night, and I definitely indulged more than necessary, and I’m actually genuinely surprised that I didn’t wind up sick as a dog this morning.

Which brings us back to now, back at home and snuggled up on the couch with the kitty, watching ‘Urban Legend’ on Netflix while I write this post! So now that we’re all caught up, let’s see about those goals, shall we?

Health

A few things of import to mention in this regard. Firstly is the point that the weekend was definitely not a good time for my body. Sooooo much food and booze… Man, holidays are so awful for the waistline.

Secondly, I did restart the ’10 Rounds’ program last week, but I haven’t stuck to it entirely so far, partly because of several days of interruptions, and partly because I’ve let myself get so far gone at this point that each individual day of exercise makes me feel like I need at least a day of rest. I fully intend to continue on, but it just might not be quite as steady as it’s meant to be. I’ll do my best, basically. Wish me luck?

The other important thing, though, is diet, which hubby and I have let get really out of hand for the past while. We both agreed today that some major changes need to be made, because we’ve both gotten badly out of shape at this point. We’ve got guts, for fucksakes. Genuine guts. It’s unacceptable. Not to mention the fact that we both kinda feel like crap more than half of the time. So, yeah, things definitely need to change.

That brings us to a little wager the cousin-in-law and I made late last week. There are no stakes, in the strictest sense, but it’s a kind of matter-of-pride thing. We’re both trying to lose a significant amount of weight, and have figured that the best bet is probably small goals at a time. So we’re going to try competing with one another to try and reach our first goals: 10 lbs for me and 15 for him (because men lose weight more quickly, and it’s a fact, so don’t @ me). We’re going to torment one another to keep ourselves on track, so here’s hoping the sense of accountability to someone helps us both.

Creativity

Okay, I have to say, I’m honestly not sure how I went the entire week without drawing anything, especially considering that there are at least a dozen things I want to draw. So there’s that. Annoyance number one.

Annoyance number two is that I once again managed to not hit my Pacemaker.press goal, despite the fact that I was really doing my best all week to write as much and as often as possible. The goal wasn’t an overly difficult one either: it was a pretty standard 10,428 words. I missed it by a long shot, though, only hitting 8447 words by the end of things. I’m actually a little tempted to say that I must have missed recording some words somewhere, because I’d swear that I wrote at least 8k worth of just the Kinktober fics. But, regardless, if I did miss some words somewhere, I don’t really have a good way of figuring out where they went, so there’s no use in bothering myself over it. All I can do is accept a loss for the week and try to work harder this week.

Down-Time

As we are currently in the month of October, and thus the ’31 Days of Halloween’, our down-time has been mostly spent watching horror movies, as with every year at this time. In the past week we’ve watched a mixture of old, new, standards, and new-to-us movies, some good, some…not so much.

Monday was ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2’, which is a fun slasher, but also a totally off-the-wall sequel that really does nothing to try to live up to the original. Tuesday was ‘Black Sabbath’, an older anthology that was okay, but only one of the three stories was actually memorable (‘The Drop of Water’ story, in case you’re wondering). Wednesday was a favorite of ours: ‘Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight’, which we showed the kid for the first time, and she thoroughly enjoyed Billy Zane being his Billy-Zaniest. Thursday was ‘Motel Hell’, which…I mean, it was fun, but what a strange way to tell a story…every time I felt like I had a handle on it, something new was thrown into the mix. Friday was a brand new flick, ‘Werewolves Within’, which is a dark comedy with some extremely amusing (and lunatic) characters. Saturday was ‘Waxwork 2’, a film that is more laughable than anything, but also features a few ridiculously fun scenes with Bruce Campbell. And finally, Sunday was ‘Urban Legend’, which we’re finishing as I write this post because we put it on after all that drinking and fell asleep before it was over…but it’s a standard teen slasher that is kinda bad, but in an amusing way.

The reading side of things has been as far away from spooky as possible. The main thing that I actually read was ‘Dark Corners’, a cute Halloween-based ‘Good Omens’ fic that is an adorable human AU meet-cute that practically gave me cavities. It demands to be thoroughly enjoyed!

The other story that I ‘read’ was consumed by way of the podfic recordings, because I adore the girl who read the story aloud. It’s called ‘Romancing the Tome’, and is another human AU that has action, romance, and a lot of super-cute fun and humor, not to mention sexiness. Definitely worth a read or listen, if you like that kind of thing.

And on the topic of games…uh. There haven’t been any. Period. lol Nothing more to say!

So there we go; all said and done for another week. Not the best week, certainly not the worst week, and there’s only twelve more to go in the year. How crazy is that?

So if you’ll excuse me, I have to go give a cat a bath and find another horror movie to watch so that we can keep up the tradition. Cheers, my dears!

Feel free to let me know how your year is going so far! Do you have any big goals? Specific plans? Anything awesome on the horizon? Share what’s going on with you! ❤

Plans & Goals 2021: Week 39

BOO!

You guys, it’s October! You know what that means? It’s spooky month! Are any of you big fans of Halloween like myself, hubby, and the kid are?

I’ll admit that October is a bit of a double-edged sword for me. I adore Halloween, and I always get a bit of relief when the weather starts to cool down again because I tend to overheat in the worst of summer. Alternatively, though, when the sun begins to hide and the days grow shorter, my brain chemistry gets rather…iffy. Excess darkness causes all sorts of badness that makes me extra tired, extra cranky, and just not necessarily in a good way at all. So it’s a delicate balance, really, to manage to actually enjoy the season, while being careful not to overextend myself in ways that turn into surprise bouts of bawling my eyes out for absolutely no reason because I, like…spilled a bit of coffee or something.

And this has become your annual reminder that Seasonal Affective Disorder is, in fact, a real thing with real issues surrounding it, despite the fact that its acronym makes it sound like something an angsty preteen came up with.

Anyway.

Before I get into the goal stuff, I wanted to mention something cool that I took part in this weekend, that will continue on two weekends from now. There is a thing, for fans of ‘Good Omens’, known as ‘The Ineffable Con’. It first occurred in 2019 as a physical, in-person convention in the London area, but because of Covid it has since gone digital. Last year I didn’t really hear from it in time to even decide whether it sounded interesting, but this year I knew well in advance and knew that I wanted to take part if possible. I booked my digital ‘ticket’ months ago, and a couple of weeks ago I submitted a short fic I wrote to the con’s official Fanzine (and it was accepted…yay!). What happened this past weekend, however, was even more exciting. One of the lovely ladies in my fanfic-based-‘book’-group posited doing a panel at the con featured around the psychology of fanfiction…how our moods affect what we read and write, whether we feel represented, what makes the characters of ‘Good Omens’ in particular so enticing, etc. She asked if anyone would be interested in joining her for the panel, and myself and three others jumped on board. This past Sunday, after several weeks of planning on Nina’s (the host’s) part, we officially pre-recorded our panel! It was tons of fun and I think it turned out really well, and I’m incredibly excited to see it as part of the actual convention in a little less than two weeks! We’re also going to be hanging out in Discord server during/after the panel to chat and answer questions and whatnot, and I’m very, very excited at the prospect. How cool is that?? I think it’s incredibly cool. ^_^ And the ‘Good Omens’ fandom has just been so incredibly wonderful on so many fronts, I absolutely can’t wait to hang out with them some more!

Alrighty, so with that said, let’s get on with it!

Health

Last week I explained about how I’d started out well on Monday morning, and then promptly went to complete and utter shit throughout the rest of the week. This past week wasn’t all that much better, truthfully, although it was a bit less extreme.

On the exercise side of things I…didn’t. At all. Unless you count a couple of short walks. This is one of the instances in which the whole S.A.D. thing comes in, because last week was incredibly dark and dreary, with rain from Sunday through Thursday, which put me in “curl up in a blanket and refuse to move” mode. I’ve perked up a little the past few days, although we also spent Friday night drinking and Saturday night recovering, so, you know…there was that.

When it comes to the food aspect, last week was neither the best nor the worst I’ve experienced. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I ate healthily throughout the week, but it also wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been, especially considering a night of drinking, a night of recovering, and a day taken up with the aforementioned panel recording (and the tidying of my book room that proceeded it). That said, I’m slowly working my way up to drinking more water and herbal tea rather than seeking out snacks throughout the day, so here’s hoping that helps things at least a little bit.

Back to the exercise side, I did restart ’10 Rounds’ again, so we’ll see how that goes. I’m unfortunately going to miss a day right off the bat because I have to travel for a course tomorrow, but maybe I can sneak that video in tomorrow evening sometime, or else just push the rest of the week forward by a day. We’ll see, I suppose! @_@

Creativity

Well, first of all, I finished the art piece that I shared a bit of a hint about last week. I decided to leave it as blank line art rather than try (and probably fail) to color it, because honestly I just like the way it looks the way I’ve got it.

A little snake for modesty…lol If you’re interested in seeing the NSFW version, you’ll just have to check out my Patron or Ko-Fi pages! 😛

This is definitely going to end up being one of the illustrations for my eventual ebook-style fic files, but I’m not exactly sure which fic to pair it with yet…it could honestly fit with practically any of mine. lol

When it came to writing I had a bit of a flubb concerning my weekly goal again. I thought I was doing pretty well by the middle of the week, but I must have relaxed a bit too much. By the time the weekend had passed I was actually a fair bit behind on what Pacemaker.press want me to have done. My Pacemaker goal was 9737 for the week, and by the time I called it on Sunday evening I’d only hit 7326 words. Annoying, but not insurmountably so. I have faith that I’ll be able to make that up in spaces this week. Fingers crossed, darlings!

Down-Time

Okay, SO. Down-time. Let’s see here.

First off, it is now October, and that automatically means horror movies in this household, as well as Halloween tv specials. So what’s been on the docket so far? Well, for starters we’ve been watching the ‘Simpsons’ ‘Treehouse of Terror’ episodes, as we do every year. We also watched ‘The Fog’ for our first horror movie of the year, which is another annual tradition for us. Then we watched ‘Killer Klowns from Outer Space’, because it’s the kid’s favorite (and what other reason do you need?). Third up was ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2’, which is rather ludicrous in comparison to the original, but enjoyable in a weird kind of way.

A nod, also, to an anthology that we watched before the month even began, called ‘Hellarious’. It featured a bunch of shorts with black comedy at the heart of them, but the show was really stolen by ‘Killer Kart’, in which a shopping cart, of all things, becomes a murderous beast bent on devouring the staff at its store. It is ridiculous in the best kind of way, not the least of all because the actors treat the whole thing so seriously. I was absolutely snorting with laughter. XD

When it comes to gaming, I haven’t really been doing any at all. I popped on ‘Just Dance 2021’ for a little while early in the week, and the kid managed to convince me to download a mobile game called ‘Cookie Run Kingdom’, but that’s pretty much it. There’s just too many other things I care to be doing at the moment.

Then there’s reading, and I imagine you can already guess what’s been going on with that particular topic. I’ve been a little bouncy with the fics lately, though, just because I’ve been focusing more on writing than reading. As thus I’ve been picking mostly at shorter fics, as well as a few super-cute comics. I’ll probably have more to talk about next week, after I’ve finished a few.

And that’s about all that I have to report for the time being! Now, if you don’t mind, it’s time for me to go write some more Kinktober fics to have prepped and ready to go for the rest of the month. XD Cheers!

Feel free to let me know how your year is going so far! Do you have any big goals? Specific plans? Anything awesome on the horizon? Share what’s going on with you! ❤

Plans & Goals 2021: Week 38

Do you ever wonder why your willpower seems to be a floundering kind of thing that changes from day to day, never reliable, never a certainty?

I do. Just thought I’d mention that.

The past week has been…off, somehow. I’m not entirely certain why. Part of it could be the simple fact that we finally finished all we were doing with the basement and the filming for Rob’s documentaries; completing a lot of hard work, after all, makes you feel almost as though you’re owed the time to sit around and do bugger all. Part of it could also be the fact that the seasons have begun to change, and a common side effect of the sudden shift in temperature and amount of sunlight in a given day is that we’ll begin to feel lazy and sluggish. Part of it could be that bad news of the financial variety makes one feel like a useless piece of crap that can’t take care of their family, which has the counter-intuitive consequence of making one want to curl up in a ball and refuse to move while absorbing the extent of their uselessness.

Part of it could easily be that I hit a wall and am a lazy bitch who needs a really good kick right in the arse.

There are a number of perfectly reasonable explanations, is all I’m saying.

With that established, I would like to first state that I did, in fact, get shit done this week. It was simply only the shit that required nothing more from me than to sit on my ass with my phone, my Chromebook, and/or my drawing tablet.

Okay, that’s not entirely true either. I did get some amateur gardening done as well…I managed to successfully grow tomato and cherry tomato plants this summer, so I thought I’d also try my hand at a few winter-hardy options like garlic and onions, and spent a bit of time ripping up a section of our back yard for the planting. So there is that.

Did you know that you can occasionally grow new plants from plain old kitchen scrapes? Like, the bottom part of a bunch of celery can be chopped off, stuck in some soil, and will actually grow a whole new celery plant? How cool is that? YouTube, man…you can still occasionally learn some sweet stuff on there.

*cough* ANYWAY.

Okay, so, instead of going back and forth on whether I actually accomplished anything worth talking about last week, let’s just take a proper look at things and see what happened.

Health

Well, let’s get the really negative stuff out of the way right from the get-go.

Firstly, exercise. I mentioned last week that I had restarted the ’10 Rounds’ program. Then I stopped. Immediately. And the ridiculous thing is that I don’t even have an excuse. Not even a mockery of an excuse. I simply…didn’t continue to do any more of it. And then I proceeded to feel like crap about it. But that crappy feeling did not, in fact, convince me to get up off my ass and do anything. I want to blame the seasonal changes, because we had a lot of dark days last week that just made me want to curl up under a couch blanket and refuse to come out… And honestly, I probably could blame the seasonal changes, because S.A.D. is a thing that I do suffer from, and it can be a right awful bitch under the right (wrong?) conditions… But, I feel like that’s probably a cop-out. Someone boot me in the arse already. Seriously.

Even worse than the lack of exercise, however, is how I ate all week. I made a few adult decisions here and there, but for the most part I found myself being stupidly snacky, grabbing things that my body most certainly did not need, and stuffing myself to the point of sickness instead of just eating what satiated me. Plus junk. Junk in the form of ice cream, in the form of chips, in the form of booze and sweets and na’an bread pizza (although I’m blaming hubby and kid for that one…they keep requesting it!).

The long and short of it is simply that I did awfully last week, and that makes me depressed. Sure, I know, every day is another chance to start again, and all that motivational BS…but it’s nearly October, you guys. I’m looking at the calendar and beginning to realize that, shit…we’ve only got roughly 95 days until 2022, and I haven’t actually accomplished a bloody thing toward this goal. If anything, I may have gone backwards. That’s some epic failure right there, so you’ll excuse me if I want to pout in the corner for a bit.

Creativity

Okay, this one is a No Pouting Zone, because I actually did pretty well when it comes to creativity last week. For one thing, I finally actually got my butt moving on some artwork. Nothing complete, but some definite forward momentum. These currently fall under early-access content on my Patreon and Ko-Fi, so you only get thumbnails here for now. ^_~

Firstly we have a soft piece that is going to ultimately be an illustration for ‘The Prince’s Consort‘. It’s mostly done (it will likely remain just line-art with no color), but I want to do a few more details and whatnot before I put it to bed:

Secondly, we have a NSFW piece, so it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. There’s nothing explicitly shown, but I think those who see the full image will be able to lay a wager on what’s happening. *cough* This is just a rough sketch for now, but I like the way it turned out so I’m definitely going to work on it some more when I get a chance.

On the writing side of things, I am pleased to be able to say that I destroyed last week’s Pacemaker.press goal which, honestly, was quite destroy-able. Pacemaker wanted me to write 7593 words, and I demolished that by rounding out to 10,139 words by the end of the week. And I’m not going to lie: it felt bloody good.

Most of the words I wrote last week went toward Kinktober 2021, which I’ve been posting to my Patreon and Ko-Fi accounts and will begin posting to AO3 on October 1st, and I can’t lie…it’s a fun project. Humorously enough, almost all of my entries have been rather soft so far, because when it comes to my GO bois I’m just incapable of being any other way, but the spiciness is still there, believe me. If that’s your sort of thing, I mean. Which it is. For me. *cough*

I’ve been doing a lot of coughing in this post. Hmmm…

Down-Time

This past week I completely and utterly forgot to keep track of any of my down-time activities, and as a result I’m finding it really difficult to remember precisely what I did, so bear with me a bit.

When it comes to reading, I know that I read several fanfics, mostly shorts that I can’t quite remember the names of, but also one longer fic called ‘South Downs‘, in which our bois are actors staring in a regency romance. Aziraphale is gay and has been out for ages, but Crowley has gone all this time truly believing that he is straight and just doesn’t particularly enjoy sex. As the result of filming the intimate scenes of the romance, he slowly comes to realize that he is queer in some manner or another because he is very attracted to, and in love with, Aziraphale. There are, of course, consequences to this sudden self-discovery. The story is beautifully written and does a great job of addressing all sorts of the kinds of issues one would face coming out in middle-age (not to mention when in the public eye), and is also super-cute, occasionally SUPER-hot, and very heartwarming. Two thumbs up for sure. I absolutely demolished the 76k word count in a few days.

On the gaming side of things, I really didn’t do anything at all, aside from a few rounds of the Pokemon Trading Card Game with the kid. Hubby finished playing ‘Hades’ on the PS5, and it was such a fun game to watch play out, but I’d like to experience some more of it for myself so I might carve out some time for that over the next week.

And finally, when it comes to watching stuff, we’ve been all over the place recently. The first thing that comes to mind is that we recently watched ‘Dead Sushi’ with the kid. It is an absolutely batty Japanese b-movie about killer sushi that comes to life and starts murdering people. It’s exactly as ludicrous as it sounds, but the people who made it knew exactly what they were creating, so it’s the enjoyable kind of ludicrous. The kid was laughing herself foolish at a few scenes, and officially declared it hysterical afterwards.

I don’t know if I mentioned it before, but hubby and I have been watching a show called ‘A.P. Bio’ at suppertime. It’s about a shamed Harvard philosophy professor who gets trapped teaching highschool biology, but instead of actually teaching he uses his class as a place to plot the downfall of his rival. I wasn’t sure about it during the first few episodes, but the longer it went on the more I was enjoying it. It’s pretty damn funny sometimes. Worth a watch if you’re looking for a comedic show.

I know there were some other things I watched last week as well, but damned if I can remember what they were, so screw it. I’ll just try to remember to actually record things this week. 😛

That’s pretty much that, I should say. So what do you guys thing? Successful week or no? I’d say it was definitely successful in certain areas, but a definite flop in others. :O

Here’s for a better week next week, right? Right.

Feel free to let me know how your year is going so far! Do you have any big goals? Specific plans? Anything awesome on the horizon? Share what’s going on with you! ❤

Plans & Goals 2021: Week 37

I’m not going to lie, you guys…I’m in a wee bit of a mood this evening, so I’m not really feeling the writing of this post. So if it seems like I’m rushing through things or otherwise not being as eloquent as usual (ha ha ha), you’ll know why.

Why am I in a bit of a mood? Well, to be quite blunt (and also quite vague), it’s a financial mood, so I’m not really going to get into it. Just suffice it to say that I am SO bloody done with Covid grinding the economy to a halt. If there are any rich kooks out there who want to sponsor my writing and art and keep me as a ‘pet’, I’m currently accepting offers. 😛

In happier news, though, hubby and I finally finished up all the work we were doing on the basement and our collection, as well as the filming we had to do for the previously mentioned documentaries and toy show. Unless the director comes back to us to ask for any additional footage or changes, we are effectively finished with that project, and as a pleasant side effect the basement has never been cleaner. To these ends we also opened a metric ton of toys and collectibles that had been sitting in their boxes for ages, and also found some more things to sell, as well as some things that we fully intended to keep, but that had gotten buried under the massive mess that was everywhere. So, yeah…that’s nice!

I haven’t got all that much more to talk about in the pre-post this week, simply because SO MUCH of last week was spent finishing up the basement stuff and filming the clips we needed to film, so not a whole lot else happened. So, with that said, I’ll move along…

Health

Well, the good news is that, as of this morning, I’ve restarted the ’10 Rounds’ program, and I even got through the first video without feeling as though I was going to die in the middle of our living room. Along with that, I can add that we went grocery shopping today for the first time in quite a while, and I bought lots of actual healthy things, like fruits and veggies. Go me, right?

Mind you, that’s all stuff that happened today, which is technically part of next week’s post… As far as last week, I can’t really report anything even remotely positive. Being distracted by the basement and the filming meant little to no proper exercise, and definitely no decent food choices. There was a lot of fast food, a lot of cheap-and-easy food, and an inordinate amount of just-plain-junk food. I’m pretty sure I gained about five pounds last week. But I’m refusing to look. Fuck it all.

Move forward and refuse to look backwards. That’s a totally healthy mental outlook, right?

Right???

Creativity

Continuing on with my choice to not lie, I must tell you that last week was my worst week in a very long time as far as creative endeavours are concerned.

Firstly, I didn’t draw a damn thing. Not with pencil and paper, nor digitally.

Secondly, I absolutely flopped when it came to my Pacemaker.press goal for the week. The site wanted me to write 11,810 words, which should have been totally doable, but I only closed out the week with 5926 words…roughly half of the goal. Absolutely horrid.

I did have the excuse of working on the basement and filming, not to mention the fact that my parents visited for a night, so that one was written off. I don’t feel any better about it for having been busy though. I’ve got too many writing projects on the go – that I genuinely want to write – to be allowing myself to write less than a thousand words per day. Supposing I have to find somewhere else to cut time from, I need to start pumping out the words more reliably.

That said, since the basement/filming stuff is off our shoulders now, I should be able to hunt down some extra time this week. Fingers crossed.

For the record, what I did write last week was mostly entries for ‘Kinktober’, which I don’t believe I actually mentioned on here (correct me if I’m wrong). Basically it’s a fandom-based challenge that happens in October, much like the Instagram photo challenges that you might see happening all the time, but it’s for artwork or fanfic, and each entry is a different kink of some kind. Obviously it can get quite explicit, and that’s half the fun, but thus far my entries (which I’m writing and posting to my Patreon in advance) are surprisingly soft and loving. I just can’t get past the whole ineffable romance thing…lol

Down-Time

Down-time? What the hell is that?

No, but seriously, I know you’re sick of hearing about the basement stuff, but that did, in fact, devour our lives last week. As a result we didn’t do much of anything when it comes to media consumption.

One thing that we did watch was a newer horror movie called ‘Malignant’. It’s got viewers divided on whether or not its actually good, with some people loving it, some people hating it, and some people unable to put their brains back together long enough to work out whether they enjoyed it or not. It’s also pretty difficult to describe without ruining it, so suffice it to say that I enjoyed it. I personally thought that the mystery of what was happening was actually fairly obvious, but it was also done in an interesting, fresh way, and the third act was pretty damned entertaining, in my opinion. I’d say that it’s worth a watch, if only to see which side of the divide you’re on.

Games were completely thrown out the window for the entire week, unless you count going over to our friends’ house the night after we finished the filming stuff in order to play card and board games.

And reading, as ever, was relegated to the fanfics I stuffed in my face in the few minutes I could grab here and there between other things happening. Unfortunately I forgot to make notes in my planner last week, so I couldn’t really tell you all what I read, but one that I definitely remember is ‘The Scarecrow’ by Appleseeds, which is positively adorable and definitely worth your time if you enjoy ‘true love’s kiss breaks the curse’ kinds of stories (although, ironically, true love’s kiss does not, in fact, break the curse).

So that’s that, I suppose. Are we good here for now? Alrighty, I’m gonna go have a little sulk, and hopefully I’ll be in less of a mood by tomorrow. 😛

Feel free to let me know how your year is going so far! Do you have any big goals? Specific plans? Anything awesome on the horizon? Share what’s going on with you! ❤