The past few months have been quite hectic. We decided we’d had enough of living in the middle of the state and moved back to the western side. I’m able to have a highway free commute which I love. We’re now closer to the parks we like to hike and bike at. All in all it was a good decision. The implementation should have been smooth but it got crazy with stitches for Craig, a few car related incidents, 3 loaner cars and getting to know a collision repair center very well. At some point I’ll post pics of our new place, preferably after the snow has receded.

I’ve been sorely neglecting my design work in favor of sleep and brain candy. Which I might add, I love Dexter. I’ve been focused on being re-inspired and making a point to get out and visit with others in the field. I’ve been attending the Hartford Build Guild meet-ups, as well as attending Drupal Camp Western Massachusetts in January. Along with all of that fun, Stephanie and I have been meeting up for coffee to give support and share knowledge. Steph has been a great source of books. Borders and Amazon have been enjoying my ordering. I picked up copies of CSS Mastery, Head First PHP & MySQL, Drupal’s Building Blocks, and lastly Objective C for Dummies. Of course I need to find a few spare weeks of my life to read these and implement what I learned.

I also checked out Lullabot’s, Drupalize.me site with training videos. I highly recommend their tutorials if you’re new to Drupal. I should be pro at this point, but I have yet to truly focus on a Drupal project without being distracted onto another project. Currently my primary focus is building a Lemonstand App eCommerce site for a client. It’s taking a bit of wrapping my head around their API, but it is going well. I’m looking forward to posting the link to the site in a week or so.

I’m hoping with the return of warmer weather to exercise more as well as get back to shooting photos. Is anyone living this hectic of a life the past few months?

There are some great tips to avoid creative blocks over at Inspired Mag‘s website. The one I have the hardest problem with is #5 self-doubt. Which lead me to remember Leah’s post about Self-Employment: The First Six Months. She mentioned previously feeling guilty when a potential client would say they couldn’t afford her services. I’ve had that feeling many times, and foolishly buckled to bringing down my rate to something where it was no longer respecting my time and services. She summed it up best, “…let go of the guilt that I can’t help everyone.”

The other tip in the article that I need to follow more is #3 Take a Walk and #6 Get Away for a Day or Two. Staying home and just not going out is not the same. My home is my office, and it’s filled with personal projects that also peek at me from behind their boxes and I feel like I should at least be doing those. I remind myself to just go look at my OmniFocus “Due” perspective and only worry about what is there.

Walks are so underrated, I had forgotten how cathartic they can be. We took a peaceful, albeit very cold walk yesterday along the river. It reminded me how much I like what I do, along with memories of our days driving up Route 7 and planning out our future. It gave me hope. I know it sounds kind of cheesy, but somedays it’s what I need to be reminded life is about. The dreams and reaching for them.

Thank you to my dreamer, who constantly reminds me to never give up.

• Turned 30
• Been on unemployment/shared work program for 13 months
• Fought back depression
• Vacationed in Maine in monsoon season
• Vacated in New Hampshire in intense humidity
• Biked the Lincoln Woods Trail (a highlight for the year)
• Finally bought a TV
• Established some new friendships, that I hope will last a while
• Partnered with new people for projects

2010 Goals:

1. Drink water (I just don’t drink anything currently)
2. Eat vegetarian / vegan 4 days a week
3. Bicycle (a lot more)
4. Shoot more photograhy both B&W film and digital
5. Have a gallery showing/or participate in an art show by end of year
6. Drink more tea and less coffee
7. Read 8 books this year
8. Bring in 3 clients in the first half of 2010
9. Schedule alone/creative time each week
10. Cook (and use more herbs and spices)

What are your goals for the new year?

Need help coming up with resolutions for 2010? Visit the New Year’s Resolution Generator.

Personally I never seem to have a problem coming up with a long list of resolutions, my usual over eager self. Of course sticking to those resolutions is a whole other matter. I’ll be following up with a post on New Year’s Day of my, very few, resolutions for 2010.

Speaking of 2010, aren’t we supposed to be seeing monoliths start arriving soon?

While doing errands this morning in the bitter cold, the ideas going through my head were the different items I want to service on my car. It frustrates me to no end that I slacked on keeping the wheels clean over the past 4 years and because of that, brake dust has become caked on.

I look under the hood and there’s definitely surface rust on strut bolts and my air horns need to be polished and other items need a coat of armor all. These little things irk me. To add to it, my hood has some chips (8 years of highway commuting, it’s a miracle it’s not worse) and this past fall an acorn tree did some dent damage.

I want to bring my wonderful 8 year old vehicle back to new. Ok, well maybe not brand new, but looking good and feeling tight again. Of course this will take some money and definitely time on my part.

This got me thinking about how much my father’s meticulous attention to detail and care for all items in our home has carried on to me. When I was younger this was a bit insanely stressful. I was always in fear of things not looking exactlyas how I borrowed them.

All of this led me to realize, I am willing to take ridiculous measures to keep things looking new, in pristine shape and thus the ability to last a long time, except my own body. Most celebrities musicians or actors have to treat their bodies as a product, because it is for their professions. I have never really looked at mine like this, instead it was the one item hindering me from just getting things I wanted to get done. Ironically enough, my thought process has been more of a, “When is someone coming to take care of this thing”.

That thing is my own body, so no one else, other than me is going to be taking care of it. For most people this is pretty obvious, but I’ve spent the last 10+ years doing most of my living in my head; reading, studying, creating, analyzing, philosophising. Much like my car, with time and money it is possible to restore my body to a better state, looking “new” again.

I decided to create our own site to log our progress, keep up motivation and keep it semi-private. As you can see from the Archive dates, we’ve had some starts and stops along the way.

This year I decided to record videos of my progress. Also joining in is my sister in law and my mother in law. My best friend Kelly, who is much more on top of nutrition and exercise regimens is writing full blown articles for us and keeping us motivated. Late last year she did the P90X and had great results. Craig and I picked up a copy of Power90, which was more our speed.

Life’s too short to not enjoy every bit of sunshine I can get, breath fresh air and do it in a body I vaguely remember. I am happy I am able to recall the feeling of being very limber and having done gymnastics when I was younger. I used to be pretty coordinated. I can see myself now doing things in a body that is yet to be discovered.

I’m beginning this journey again, not with a sole focus on the end, but enjoying the trip. Discovering new foods, learning new exercises, pushing my limits and breaking out of the box.

My good friend inspired both Craig and I with her dedicated work doing P90X. She stuck with it for the 90 days and did see great results. Craig and I purchased the Power90 system and did do a few days of it in December but fell out of the routine. We do like the system and are going to start back up, along with bicycle riding.

I’ve got the bike rack on my car, I’ve mapped out several trails on my commute route. My goal is to get 2-5 miles in each night after work. I ride mostly dirt roads or dirt trails. I’ll work that number up as the season goes on.

I’m using LoseIt on the iPhone to track everything I’m eating and when I’m exercising, and when I can, I’ll make a video of the progress.

Let the journey begin!

This was taken in June of 07 in Cape Cod. I cannot wait for spring this year, to get out on my bike. 2008 I don’t know even know what to say. I didn’t do anything physical just worked and slept. I am determined to not start my 30′s being the inactive person I’ve been of my 20′s.

I really enjoyed our bike trip that June. I had never been to Cape Cod and I was looking at everything with a fresh set of eyes. Maybe this time we’ll go for longer than 2 days.

(Via swissmiss.)

A brief over view, I’m on the rebound from injuring my back, so intense exercise was out. Just in the past 2-3 weeks I’ve been able to start exercising more intensely. Between being tight on money and really tired, we haven’t been eating the best things. We try to make sure we get a salad each night and get some meat in.

This week I bought some strawberries, even though they’re not organic. I needed something other than Apples and Bananas to go with some cottage cheese. I also started making spinach and egg omlettes again, which I do use organic baby spinach and organic eggs.

Down to the knitty gritty.

This week’s weigh in: 216.5 lbs.

For next week I’d like to see 214 on the scale. I’m going to prepare lunches and breakfast ahead of time this weekend. I’m also going to make sure we use the frozen veggies I bought a week ago. Our dinners tend to be a protein and a starch, and possibly a salad.

Work:

This week at my job we launched a national ad campaign website (not my design), completed the collection of a large amount of materials for a multimedia project, and 3 email campaigns sent out including one which had 27 unique pieces of content that were not dynamic. And in comparison to my boss and co-workers I think my load was lighter than theirs. Even up to Friday night at 6:00 we were still finishing up projects. Wow! I kept saying to people, the weather got nice and the projects just came rolling in.

Personal:

Well I didn’t have much of one until Friday night. Wednesday I took on waking up early. Thursday was semi-successful and Friday, well Craig and I both slept in thinking it was Saturday.

On a fun note. Friday night I met up with a fellow knitter who was thinking about buying a MacBook or MacBook Pro. We met at Starbucks and I showed her around the operating system, answered questions and had her try mine out. She was pretty excited, I told her to think about it, don’t rush. She was making the switch over from a Dell laptop to Apple, and it is a big decision.

This morning I got an email at 7:40, “I’m ready let’s go!”. We met at the Apple store in Danbury at 10am, and purchased her a MacBook Pro 15″. We left it with them to transfer over her files from her old Dell. I headed home and later in the afternoon we met at Panera to go through setting up her email, transferring bookmarks, importing photos to iPhoto and making sure iTunes was all set and running. She’s really excited and I got an email tonight that she’s having a lot of fun.

I’ve successfully switched 7 people from Windows to Macintosh. No complaints.

Goals:

I’m still working on getting up early. Might kick back my wake up time so it’s not quite as aggressive. I want to be successful not insane. As Colin reminded me, “Never give up”. Absolutely true! There’s no time table, no one’s going to punish me and it’s truly a win-win situation.

And… I will be posting on Tuesdays a Weekly Weigh-In, as part of TheDiet. In the sidebar I’m going to keep track of my exercise on Traineo.com. This week I made some much better choices food wise than I have in a while. All in time.

Last but not least, we watched the Transformers movie tonight. It was pretty good, dialogue sucked, but the effects were amazing. I’m such a sucker for cars and driving scenes. Speaking of I’ll be at the NY International Auto Show on Friday for the opening. Drop me a line if you’ll be there that day.

It’s taken a lot of growing up, getting through a lot of personal psychological issues in my own life and my family. For as long as I can remember, someone was telling me I was a brat and lazy. I’ll concede on the brat, when I was younger I was. Some might argue I still am.

Lisa McMillan recommended to me the book The Now Habit by Dr. Neil Fiore. All I can say is wow, every stage of the book I feel like it was my life that was the case study for it. It’s helped me gain a lot of clarity on why I do the things I do, why I react certain ways, why I get overwhelmed and just shut down.

The book also helped me focus on why I have yet to be successful at weight loss. I know how to exercise, I used to sit home in the summers of middle school and early high school watching and going along with Body Shaping. I love to be outdoors doing biking, kayaking or hiking. So that’s not an issue.

Eating. While I don’t choose to make the best decisions all the time, I do know what is good to put in my body and how much of it I should be having. I actually like many more vegetables than I ever did as a kid. Seeing the nutritionist for two months re-affirmed that I’m not clueless and have crazy eating patterns.

What was left… The psychological/mind barrier. Why do I find excuses? Why do I shut down and feel overwhelmed still? What is holding me back from being the successful person I know I can be.

Here are the thoughts that came to my head…

• I try to do too much at once, trying to tackle 8 life changing habits at once
• I think I have to be perfect the first time out, and any falter and I may as well give up
• I feel like I don’t have enough time
• I feel the pressure to go along with what ever others are doing
• I put way too much guilt and negativity on myself
• I put too much weight in others approval of me

Now that I know what the concerns are, I can start to make changes.

STEP 1:
Find time… This is my first goal. Become a morning person. Since my biggest complaint to myself and everyone around me is my lack of time, I need to focus on making more time in my day. Once I can establish that, then I can go back and change what I fill that time with.

That’s the plan!

I cooked up turkey bacon, organic eggs, organic spinach, organic shredded cheese into an omelette. Had some Bolthouse juice and some organic coffee I brewed too! It was quite a morning.

I left on time for the Dentist in Danbury, got there 10 minutes early! Had a perfect visit, no cavities, no issues.

Oh and I even had some time to work on my scarf which I’ve neglected for quite a while!

And last night I “graduated” from physical therapy and am going to transition into their Wellness Program.

I’m feeling really good today!