To Me!

Slightly out of date here.

Achievement Earned!

A couple of weeks ago I -finally- performed my Ice Breaker speech for my Toastmaster's club. Was a bit rough, I only knew the basics for what I wanted to say, and wound up making the entire speech up on the spot. There's a lot I could have done better, but that will come in time with a lot of practice and working on my weak spots.

Shave and a Haircut!

Achievement earned!

Pretty simple, all I needed was to get a new hairstyle. Set aside a bit of money, and last Tuesday I went out and got a lot of hair chopped off so that I could enjoy a shorter style.

Grammar Nazi

Achievement Earned!

Last night I was the Grammarian for the Toastmasters meeting.  This achievement felt a bit harder to accomplish than being the Ah Counter. A large part of the reason is because my role was to look for both good and bad use of grammar, which is a lot easier said than done for me. On paper it can be quite a bit easier thanks to my work in English during the school year, but to hear it out loud is still something I need to work on.

I managed to earn a few laughs by doing a valley girl accent while explaining why I chose the word Similar, so I intend to try and do different references and accents for future roles to ease my own nervousness and to give the club some variety instead of simply being "This is my job. I'm going to do it."

3, 3 Ah’s! Ah! Ah! Ah!

Achievement Earned!

This achievement was both fairly simple, yet rather hard. On Weds. night I earned this achievement by being the Ah Counter at the Toastmaster's meeting. It's fairly easy to earn because our VP of Education rotates the roles on a really good basis and gives everyone the chance to complete roles they need in order to finish projects that they are working on.

However.

It's rather hard because this was my first Official Role as a full member of  Toastmasters and I was quite nervous about the whole thing. While they don't mind if I don't catch every single filler word, I still felt like I needed to do the task to the best of my ability in order to give better feedback. With that said, everyone enjoyed my little speech at the beginning where I made a reference to Kermit the Frog, since our piggybank is actually a froggybank.

One achievement down for Toastmaster's, plenty to go!

Achievement System

Ok. So here is my achievement system. Here I will list each area and a basic idea of what I want to accomplish potentially in these areas. This is -not- a short term deal. Many of these are things I want to constantly work on and always add new achievements to earn so that I can always stay focused and keep working toward long term goals years down the road from now.


Area 1: Exploration

Pretty self-explanatory. In this area I will be making, and earning, achievements based off the places I want to explore and go visit. This can be from the super simple places here on Vancouver Island, or in B.C, to as far away as Europe, Asia, and South America.


Area 2: Extracurricular

These are the Fun achievements. While not really pushing me forward towards goals, these still give me a chance to have fun and not constantly be working hard. Some fun things include reading my books, and watching my movies.


Area 3:  Health

This area is going to be a constant, on-going area. I've been dividing this up based on different areas of my health including my diet, workout, eyes, teeth and so forth.


Area 4: School/Education

A large majority of this area is currently focused upon my Grade 12 and all the steps I need to accomplish to earn this. However, in time, I will also be adding college courses and the like.


Area 5: Work/Life Skills

The achievements in this area will focus on my future job for a large part. There will also be achievements based off of life skills I want to learn and improve upon such as Cooking, Driving, and operating the laundry machines.

Area 6: Social

Friends, Family, Volunteer work, and various clubs are all in this area. The biggest focus so far will be on my Toastmasters program and working towards completing the booklets provided. Anything involving going out to have fun will be found in here, and even just having fun social gatherings at home as well.


Area 7: Home Environment

The final area, this is largely going to focus on Cleaning, Downsizing and Moving to Vancouver. Long term goals in this area will also include moving out, and maintaining my own home.

August Update and Changes

Ooook. Once again I fell behind on this poor blog. So let's do a big update and cover all the bases, as well mention the changes I'm going to be making to help me get more focused. :)


School: Been puttering away at it all summer long. Before August is over I will have a new outline in place for what I want to get done, and roughly how long I'm giving myself to try and do it in. I -will- graduate this year even if I have to shut down all electronics in the house and live in a padded room with only my school work for company. >.<

Health: Big improvements since March. Dietician is super duper helpful and I have been meeting with her periodically ever since May. Rehab in Motion has also been really helpful, I have one appointment left with my fitness trainer there and I will be putting that off until I can tweak things a bit more. This is mostly due to my workout making me lose weight, so my fitness trainer and I decided to put off our final, free, appointment until I can boost my calorie intake and not be losing weight while trying to put on muscle.

Mental Health is improving. I have been seeing a therapist once a week to help me stay on track and explore where my stress comes from, why I have it, and helping me to just learn how to do a lot of various things for getting back out into the world.

Downsizing/Moving: Fairly on track. Made some good progress. Hoping to do one BIG clean up this month to really get the ball rolling.


So. Changes that I'm making. One of my good friends suggested that I implement a rewards system. Every time I do something that moves me forward to finishing a  Big Goal, I get X number of points. Those points get built up over time, and then at any point I can choose to 'spend' points on rewards for myself. These can be anything from a 5 point chocolate bar, to a 50 point new piece of expensive clothing. Having used this system for a couple of months, it is helping but I've decided to take it a little bit further by adding it to a new system.

In WoW, there is an Achievement system where at various points in the game if you do something you get a big flash of light, and earn an achievement. These can range from simple "Explore This Zone" requirements to get a "Explored >Insert Zone<" achievement, to the much harder ones that can take all year, or in some cases a couple of years to earn. I've taken that system and changed it to suit real life. Dividing my life up into several areas, I have begun to organize and create achievements for myself that help push me forward to accomplishing my goals, and in effect improving my life (which in itself is a huge reward.).

From now on, when I earn an achievement, I will be posting it here and talk about what I did to earn it and maybe what the reward is for having done it. In a second post today, I will be posting each of the areas of my life and give an idea of how I've organized it.

:)

End of May Post

Been a while since I've posted. Quick-ish wrap up of what's been going on.

- School: With June coming up stupidly fast I'm going to do what I can and get as much new work possible for the summer. From there I'll simply work to finish it all for Sept.

- Health: Met with my dietitian today, going to start incorporating more foods into my diet to boost things up a bit. Also going to meet with a group called "Rehab in Motion" that will help me make a personalized workout.

- Moving: Working to downsize everything right now. Slowly but surely getting rid of extra clutter and cleaning the house up as best I can. Still a long ways to go, but plenty of time to do it all.

Back From Vancouver

Back from Vancouver!

Going there has really helped me nudge a few things back on track. Eating more, as well as eating more healthy things. I also managed to correct my sleep habits.

Since coming back I've managed to get a few things going, saw my dietician and got started working with her on how to improve my diet and weight. This friday I will be chatting with my Dr. to see about getting my eyes checked, and I will also be meeting with a therapist in the next week or so now that I've gotten that started up. After chatting with the Intake Worker (who I had to meet before the therapist) I managed to work out that I largely want to meet with the therapist to help out with my stress and see what we can do about lowering that, as well trying to manage my time better.

School. Oh school. How I have a Love/Hate relationship with that. My general plan for school now is to make a plan for May, and break it down into easy baby-steps for each day/week. Right now looking at school as "Oh god get 5 courses done!" is just a tad too overwhelming. So by breaking it down it will look much  more easier and manageable.

I DO still intend to move over, however it's looking like I need to push that back by about a year. It kinda sucks that I won't be over as fast, but right now everything I need is here in Campbell River, so until I start tying up loose ends and getting things improved it will be a good thing that I'm stuck here a bit longer. :)

Large-ish Update?

Ok so it's been a while. Shame on me for not keeping up on this.

School is iffy. Not going to finish it this year most likely, so instead of stressing I'll cut my losses and aim to do as much as I can and focus more on taking my time and getting good grades instead of rushing through and getting worse grades than I'm capable of getting.

That being said, it's looking like we won't be moving back over this year. This might be for the best since it can give us a lot more breathing room to find a good place, find a job and get the loose ends tied up here.

Moving along, my health has been doing rather badly the last month and a half. Lots of stress has lead me to feeling rather bad. Been working hard to try fixing things though, keeping in touch with my doctor who has been super helpful. Right now I'll be taking some meds to help lower my stress, which in turn should help me gain weight.

I'll be coming to Vancouver from April 6th until about the 18th roughly for a nice long visit. I'm hoping that in doing this I can nudge a lot of things back on track in my life and make the changes needed.

So hopefully I'll see you all soon. :)

Doctors, School and Regrouping Part 2

Still in the process of regrouping, going to write off the end of Jan. and just spend it planning for a better Feb.

Dr. wanted me to do a pill test -despite- the fact I stated I can't take pills. So that's going to result in a phone call and lots of hassle to get him to hand over the results of other tests I've taken. Going to just move on and go from there.

Managed to get in touch with an old friend though, hoping to spend some more time hanging out with her and get out of this house to take some pictures before cabin fever sets in.

Regrouping.

Bit late on tonight's post.

Had a few rough nights/days lately, especially with the "Not sleeping" bit. Going to the Doctor today/Monday and I'm going to use this as the first step in the right direction to improving things once more. Going to sit down with him and first go over the sleeping thing and see if he can help nudge me onto a proper sleep habit so that I can start making the use of every hour in the day when I'm awake, while still getting a good nights sleep.

Aside from that I'm going to outline to him how I feel about where I'm at with my health and ask his advice on the best way to proceed to fixing things up - especially with my teeth. So right now biggest priorities for my health are A) Improve Sleep and B) Improve Teeth. After those two things are fixed I'm hoping everything else health/goal related can start falling into place more easily.

So here's hoping. :)

Feels like I've hit the point where it can't get worse. Despite my optimism, reality tends to suck when it rears up at you from out of nowhere.

Feeling rather sick this morning as I write a belated update. Nosebleed the other day, haven't been able to sleep despite trying to lay in bed for hours and when I finally do get out of bed I shiver as if I were outside in the snow wearing my pj's. Not sure what else there is to do right now but curl up under a heated blanket, maybe two blanket and try to figure out how to start getting it on track again.

School. Oh silly school....

Ok. Some progress has been made. Omg.

Planning 10 aka Planning 12 is now started. Looks like a super easy course and if I'm lucky it could be done within the month. Go go easy credits!

English. Sadly I didn't start this yet :( I handed in allllll my work just for the teacher to say "Oh by the way. You still have ONE more prep assignment to do." -_- You said that LAST TIME. Please make up your mind >.<


Moving along. Christmas stuff is now all taken down except some stuff outside. As we take it down we've been downsizing it and repacking everything so that next year when we open it up in Vancouver it will be all nicely organized. One less thing to do now for the move :)

First Post of the Year

Despite being a day late, I am hoping to update the blog at least once a week (more than likely on Sunday nights) to recap the week and my hopes for the following week.

Currently regarding school I have failed to finish every single project on my workload. While I was off to a good start and managed to get the more important projects out of the way, I soon became burnt out for energy between working at school and juggling the holidays. After spending a few days to try and get back on track I am hoping to complete at least one sections worth of work to hand in. Given how getting to school can be hard with the one vehicle and gas there is a chance it might take us a couple days to get back, thus giving me another couple days to catch up a bit more.

With January starting up I have decided to proceed with my plans for moving as well. Since they will be most useful for storage, I intend to spend January getting the storage locker and three main closets emptied/organized. By Feb. I hope to have this finished up as well start collecting some supplies so I can keep track of what's getting tossed, sold and kept.