NaBloPoMo 2014: Day 2 "Goals Updatez"

For those of you who have noticed (love you Mom), I've only written ONE blog post since last November:  my 2013 "National Blog Posting Month" challenge. Despite this alarming lack of activity, you can rest assured that it was all for very good reasons.  During last year's NaBloPoMo, I outlined my daily, monthly, yearly, and Korea-time goals. Looking back through those goals, I'm impressed enough with myself to announce that I have dominated in checking these goals off of my personal to-do lists.

A "Success" Summary:

1. I still floss every day.

2. I've completed 2 out of 3 curriculum resource books, and the third (and final!) book is scheduled to be finished by January, 2015. A year ago, we presented the incomplete first book to the Gwangju Office of Education and asked for financial support to complete it and the remaining books. To my group's delight and amazement, the support was granted. I feel hella proud of the materials we've turned out, and the payment that we received - and will receive - for it. I look at the books now, and feel a swelling, awesome sentiment: "I made this." 

3. I'm currently the President of the Gwangju Performance Project, which is where the bulk of my not-writing-blog-posts blame lies. This past spring, I directed and produced 5 performances of Neil Simon's hilarious farce, "Rumors." It was blood, sweat, and tears getting it done, but I'm hella proud of myself and my cast and crew for the excellent productions we created. I remember the moment after the first performance, when I looked at the stage, the gorgeous set, and the actors bowing to the audience's applause, and I felt a swelling, awesome sentiment: "I made this."

Obviously, I wasn't the only one who made these books or shows, but my involvement and motivation  and efforts were crucial in the final results being produced. And that is a sweet, tangy feeling.

The GPP continues to flourish, too. I initiated a monthly workshop series where we teach about various performance arts topics, and anyone in the community is welcome to attend. A choir was started, and has regular practices and performances. A spring raffle fundraiser turned out to be a huge success, and our upcoming fundraiser is an exciting "Cabaret" Dessert Night with singing and dancing and chocolate. We participated in the Busan Shakespeare Theatre Festival, and I got to play Helena from "A Midsummer Night's Dream." I'm currently the producer for our upcoming fall play, David Auburn's "Proof." We recently merged our group with the local International Center, and will hopefully be receiving govt. funding for the arts next year, for our 2015 play lineup. People in the community are constantly creating, performing, and enjoying the arts, thanks to all of the hard-working and passionate members of the GPP.

4 members of the GPP choir (plus Adam in a bear suit - thanks again hon!) just before we won 1st place in a foreigner-only K-pop singing contest. WOOT.

3/4 GPP actresses who participated in the Busan Shakespeare festival. Tho we be but little, we are fierce.

GPP choristers before our first official singing gig!

We  raised over 800 bucks with these baskets, and paid for our set and costumes! WOOHOOO!

In short, I spend most of my free time talking, working, and thinking THEATER. It's delightfully amusing to realize that my college degree is getting as much of a workout as it is. Especially considering that I had no plans to return to theater again after graduation in 2007. 

I believe that's enough gratuitous back-patting for one blog post. Also, it's 1:15 and Monday morning's alarm clock is looming ominously close on the horizon. Tomorrow, we shall all find out what my goals are for this year's NaBloPoMo challenge. ...Myself included.

NaBloPoMo: Day 16 "Goals: Addendum"

Ok, I don't have a lot of time, because Adam is sitting in the next room with wine and Agents of Shield cued up, just WAITING for me to come join him. And holding the wine hostage. >:(

I realized today that I left out a major section of my goals in my previous posts: Korean goals in Korea.

1. Create and design a middle school curriculum. There's a large project I'm working on with several other ESL teachers here in Gwangju to create a curriculum for middle school ESL teachers in our particular program, EPIK. A lot of new teachers (myself and Adam included) get thrown into middle schools with Korea co-teachers who hand us the middle school textbooks and say "You can use these if you want. Or not. Do you like them? I don't like them. You can just do whatever you think is helpful for the students..."  And after looking at the first couple pages of the available textbooks, I have to agree that they are the opposite of compelling for a middle school student. So, I (and most other middle school ESL teachers) attempt to do... whatever I feel is useful. This leads, inevitably, to unequal lesson quality throughout the middle schools of the city (and country). And this is what our determined little group wants to change.

We've been working diligently (usually) on the project for about a year, now, and we are a couple days away from finishing grade 1 of the curriculum (or, 7th grade). Exciting and daunting and time consuming, I'm personally committed to seeing this project through to completion before leaving. I have confidence it CAN be done, but after next month, we'll have (or won't have) assurance from the Gwangju Office of Education that they'll fund the remainder of the project, which will be (HOPEFULLY, CROSS EVERY FINGER AND TOE) a huge relief and motivating factor.

2. Lead a local theatre company. In the past 1.5 years, I've participated in two theater shows put on by the Gwangju Performance Project, which was started and run by other ESL teachers for the past 4-ish years. Next year, however, the entire leadership group is leaving Korea. They've decided they'd like yours truly to be the next GPP coordinator/leader/director, and so I'll be initiating and running the show (ha, literally) starting next March. This is much scarier than the textbook project, but also waaaayyy more exciting, in many ways. I've already got a play in mind for next spring, but I'll keep you posted.

3. Be proud of Adam. This isn't a goal, but I just want to brag a little on my husband. There's a local magazine here in Gwangju that has a pretty significant readership throughout the whole country. He started out volunteering to write articles here and there, and then was quickly promoted to the Online Editor. And now... there are rumors of bigger and better things in the works.

He's awesome. You can check out the online version of the magazine here!

AAHH! Adam's starting the show without meeeeeeeeee....

Carpe November!

P.S. Abs & squats, CHECK -- rest day!
Minimalism, CHECK. Another non-challenge day, another day of uploading pics and pics and pics to my online cloud.

NaBloPoMo: Day 11 "Sick Leave"

9AM: It's day 11! I'm officially more than a third of the way done with all these challenges.

...time passes...

7PM: I was planning on continuing my "goals" theme today, but it is amazing what a difference a mere 10 hours can make. This morning I felt sluggish, but fine. Now, however, I'm curled up in bed with the heat blasting, trying to stretch out the time between swallows as much as possible due to the RAGING sore throat I've suddenly contracted. Out of the blue!! And it hurts like hell, too. Makes last week's brush with sickness look like a sham, actually.

So, I'm not writing more, tonight. Instead, here are some videos/websites I've found recently that made an impression. Enjoy:

Amazing science video!

Love your body video!

Big-hearted youths video!

Heart-warming art video!

Carpe November!

P.s. Abs, CHECK.

Squats, CHECK. I managed to do them all at work before the pain made me too miserable.

Minimalism, I'm gonna say CHECK. But it's cheating, because today's another non-challenge. We're supposed to get rid of all our childhood toys, aaaaand... We have none. At least, not here. I'm sure our respective parents have some objects we could get around to tossing (Mom? Anything if mine you've been hoping to get rid if? ^_^), but that's not something we can accomplish here in Korea. Sometimes, kids, cheating's ok. G'night!

NaBloPoMo: Day 10 "Goals: Part 3"

I've posted 2 (and a partial) entries on goals so far, daily and monthly. Today, I want to share some of my yearly goals, and any strategies I've employed to try to achieve them.

Honestly, though, this is the goal section I struggle with most. Here are some of the goals I have for this year:

(*go to end for tl;dr)

1. Save over $20,000. I say over, because last year we saved ALMOST that amount, and this year, we decided to hit that number and surpass it. Now, this is where I *should* launch into details about our personally-tailored budget and other cool tips on how to stick to said budget. But... I have no budget. Adam and I have probably had 7 conversations wherein we discussed how we "need to make a budget and stick to it..." or how we "should really consider budgeting..." or just how we "spend more money than we should, probably..."

So far, our only real strategy is to outlaw the use of my bank card. We have separate accounts here in Korea, and so we reasoned that we should be able to live on just the one paycheck and save the other. Since Adam is less impulsive than I, it was quickly agreed that he would have the spending account and I would have the saving account. It's a decent system, except when I forget to get enough cash from him, and then end up using my card, because "we can just transfer the money later..."  But overall, it's true that my paycheck is savings, and Adam's is used up every month.

The problem is, we shouldn't be using up Adam's paycheck every month. Our monthly spending is more than it was when we first came, despite the fact that we make several hundred MORE dollars every month. Especially over the past 4-5 months, we've been exceptionally free with our funds. We take taxis. We eat out. We buy big gifts for people. And worst of all, we aren't aware of and accountable for our own spending habits. 

In August we tried to rectify this situation somewhat. We downloaded a money-tracking app, and used it diligently for approximately 3 weeks. Then one of us would miss a cash transaction, or forget it, or my phone would die, and I couldn't record the transaction immediately - and suddenly, the app was off by 100+ dollars, and fixing it seemed like a headache, so I didn't do it immediately, and then the app was off by too much to count and I quit. It wouldn't have been impossible to just start over, but we just... haven't. (Ugh. Depressing.) The worst part is that I really enjoyed keeping track of my money, and even in just those 3 weeks, we noticed some bad spending habits (... Starbucks...) and were able to make a couple small changes to cut back. 

In the USA, I used mint.com, and had it linked to my bank accounts and debit card, and LOVED IT. If you can make use of that website, I highly recommend it. Unfortunately, it's not available for our Korean bank accounts, so it's useless for us now. 

This is something I'd like to change about myself. I'd like to be more conscious/aware of my spending habits, and I'd like to be keeping track OR have a better budget system in place. I know some people who do the envelope method, and perhaps we need to give that a go...? I honestly don't know.

What about you? Do you have any fabulous tips for keeping track of money out-flow and in-flow? Any strategies or apps you find particularly useful? By all means, please let me know, because something's gotta give here.

Of course, I keep telling Adam that next year everything's going to change, because 4 of our closest friends here are leaving Korea. "So we just need to be careful to NOT make any new best friends, and then we won't ever leave the apartment and we'll never spend money!" Not my brightest idea, but possibly a valid prophecy for next year. :)

2. Get fit. This is another goal I haven't been seriously reaching for until this month. There were several months over the summer where Adam and I went to the gym together (I bought a membership and everything). However, since changing work locations in September, I've been getting home after 6:30 with no desire to go to the gym (which is no longer convenient), and no push from my partner, since he goes immediately after work. I don't like gyms anyways, so I'm not upset about it. But I haven't replaced it with anything yet. Dance? Yoga? Tennis? Bouldering? Running? Biking? I need to establish a workout - one that appeals to me, and that I'll stick to regardless of occasional inconveniences and disruptions. (ZUMBA! PLEASE COME TO KOREA AND SPECIFICALLY GWANGJU!)

3. Do work at work. THIS is the one goal I'm kicking butt at, but I can't exactly take credit for it. Last year was a long slog of late-night lesson planning and powerpoint slideshow-creating, and it was frustrating and time-consuming and unhealthy. The first semester of this year, I made valiant efforts to do work only at work and change my habits, but it didn't always happen. I always felt behind, always felt stressed. However, over the summer I applied for and GOT a brilliant new position as an online teacher for the Gwangju Office of Education. Suddenly, all that stress and those deadlines shrank to nearly nothing. I no longer plan lessons - I only make supplementary materials and teach. And now I walk home every night, perhaps later than before (I get off at 6 instead of 4:30), but with a night of free time stretching before me, and no work to do until the next day. I don't doubt that I'd still be struggling with this if I was teaching at my old middle school, so I count myself doubly lucky for getting such a great position here. I still procrastinate a little when I do have to create materials for classes, but I always finish them before the end of the last day.

Dear god, I've written an odyssey. Well, my apologies for those of you who plowed through all that. For the skimmers:

*Tl;dr: I suck at managing money and exercising, but I'm doing my work AT WORK. One out of three isn't terrible. Pass on tips, if you've got 'em.

Carpe November!

P.S. Abs, CHECK.(groan............)

Squats, CHECK. (105!)

Minimalism, I made some decent headway on uploading photos. Today's minimalism goal was to take an hour for yourself (away from phones and electronics), and GO AHEAD AND LAUGH, but I spent almost an hour digging the scabs from my dead warts out from under my skin, where they were buried. Grossly fascinating. Thoroughly satisfying. I also took a lovely walk in the sun by the river - it wasn't by myself, so I'm not sure it truly counts, but it was refreshing and wonderful just to be outside near something nature-y.

Photo proof!:

And here's another photo of my face:

NaBloPoMo: Day 9 "Goals: Part 2"

Current time: 9:02
Sleepiness level: low
Yesterday's goal: ACHIEVED.

I'm partly surprised that it's already Day 9 of all my November challenges, and I haven't muffed anything up (yet). It's a good feeling, and actually I think the determination to stick it out is cumulative, for me. The more successful days that pass, the harder it becomes to throw it away. Kind of like with flossing - now that I've done it so many days in a row with no misses, it's unbearably frustrating to think of forgetting and dropping my streak.

In the same way, I've accomplished all of my monthly goals up until now, and I'm pretty intent on keeping up the streaks, no matter if I lose some hours of sleep over it.

There's a definite "high" from deciding to do something and sticking it out. I remember going on "sugar fasts" fairly regularly throughout college: I'd pick a month and just brutally cut sweets and desserts out of my intake for a set period of time. I don't even remember struggling with those challenges, but I do remember feeling... powerful. In retrospect, that seems like a pretty impressive feat - to not even struggle with such a drastic switcharound. Especially considering my particular weakness for sugar. But perhaps no more impressive than building up to 250 squats in one day (...that's such an obscene number of squats), or writing 30 blog posts in 30 days.

Ok, but on to strategies I'm employing to manage this month:

1. At work, I have the Abs and Squats challenges on the wall at eye-level, right next to my computer screen. Effectively, I look at them all day, and mark each day off as I complete it. I also have a photo of the challenge pages on my phone, so I can be accurate on weekends.

2. For the squats, I spread them out throughout the day, so I'm using some tiny cat post-its to keep track of sets of 10 squats. I line up the cats on the wall in the morning, and then I move them down on the wall as I complete each set of ten. Keeps me from forgetting how many I've done!

3. For minimalism, we printed the 30 day challenge out and have it taped to our bedroom wall. Having Adam in on this challenge is definitely the main thing that's keeping me from slacking on this challenge. He's taking it very seriously, and we both feel delighted with the results in our teeny-tiny apartment - even after a mere week, plus. The thing about small apartments, though, is that everything MUST have a home and GO to its home pretty instantly, or things get very sloppy, very quickly. We're finding the things we've been keeping that are frivolous or surplus, and eliminating them. It's refreshing! But I like how this challenge emphasizes how minimalism is a mindset and a lifestyle. With disposable income and an H&M a mere bus ride away, I've been hovering on the brink of a plunge into rampant consumerism. I think this particular challenge came at exactly the right moment. :)

4. For the month of November, I'm doing a theme for my 1 Second Everyday app (of which I'm a fan, bought it for a mere pittance on my iPhone). I've set the app to remind me to take a vid at three points during the day, which it does. After 2 months of these triple daily reminders, I'm sick of them. BUT, I haven't missed a video since Sept 16th, so they're at least doing their job. Sometimes annoying just means "reaction provoking" - and if that reaction is "getting it done" then I'll just deal with the annoyance. I've not yet figured out how to format the videos to look nice online, but as soon as I do, I'll share!

5. The one thing I don't have a "cue" for is posting on here. I haven't needed one yet, though. It helps that Adam is engrossed in his own project, NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), thus our individual writing challenges are daily conversation fodder.

Current time: 1:12 a.m.
Sleepiness level: Super high

Minimalism and making a "workout" youtube playlist interfered a lot with getting this post done in a timely fashion.

Also, I feel compelled to inform you of a tragic event tonight: I had a random zealous initiative to cook the chicken breasts from the freezer tonight for dinner, only to find out (after setting up the whole butter/herbs/dishes/preheating stuff and getting Adam all excited) that they somehow had gone bad IN THE FREEZER. I didn't know that was possible. :(  And I was le sad. Tres pissed. Triste a l'extreme. So we ate frozen pizza and watched Downtown Abbey and I felt better.

G'night folks! (morning?)

Carpe November!

P.S. Abs, CHECK. At 35 seconds, I officially hate planks now.
Squats, CHECK. (100 today!)
Minimalism.... Partial Check, but not finished. Ok, but I started. You see, today's challenge was to go digital with our picture frames. First of all, I like a few tastefully displayed picture frames in my living space. Second of all, we literally have 3. And I am not getting rid of them. So since this was a non-challenge, I decided to do something a hella lot more difficult: sifting thru and organizing the folders and folders of photos on my tiny laptop and then uploading them to a free online cloud account (I'm using mega.co.nz, a free cloud space company that is serious about privacy). Then I will delete the pics from my tiny, overloaded, super-slow laptop, and see if its performance speed improves. I knew finishing today was impossible, so this is going to be a running project for the remainder of the month. Today I opened my account and got a couple folders uploaded. CHECK.

NaBloPoMo: Day 8 "Goals: Part 1.2"

*grooooan*

SOOO. Yesterday, I wrote a bit about my daily goals and how I keep on top of them.

I was going to continue on today with my goals for this month, and how I'm keeping track of them.

But. It's past midnight, again. And so I would like to add another daily goal: WRITE BLOG POSTS BEFORE SLEEPINESS SETS IN. It's bad enough that I don't have a fun, clever theme, or a specific bloggy goal (other than "discover my bloggy goal") but to be constantly writing thru drooping lids is just asking for crummy posts.

Tomorrow: blog EARLIER.

Here's a photo. Goodnight.

Carpe November!

P.s. Rest day!

No abs, CHECK.

No squats, CHECK.

Minimalism, CHECK. We don't have cluttered corners, so we chose a messy/dirty shelf/table in the kitchen and cleared it of unnecessaries.

NaBloPoMo: Day 7 "Goals: Part 1"

I'VE MADE A DECISION. And felt the need to shout about it:

This will be the first of a chain of posts, all about goals.

Daily goals,

Monthly goals,

5-year plan goals,

Life goals,

Bucket list goals.

I have ALL OF THE ABOVE GOALS, to some degree or another.

My daily goals, I keep track of with an app called "Lift", which I have found extremely effective and useful in staying on track.

These are 5 of my daily goals, and so far I'm doing pretty well. I'm on day 250~ish of flossing every day, and I'm becoming regular with the other tasks as well.

The thing about goals is that one has to have the motivation, habits, and routine to reach a desired goal, and every person has different strategies and techniques for setting and keeping those motivations, habits and routines.

I think the most important thing is finding a strategy that fits. For me, "Lift" is motivating (because I love checklists), habit-forming (because it informs me of streaks, and reminds me to check off all my tasks) and it has become part of my daily routine. So for my simple, daily goals I've really gotten my money's worth out of lift! (Which...was no money. It's a free app...)

It's not gonna be a fit for everyone, though. Adam, for example, as neat as he thought the app was, didn't find it personally motivating or habit-forming (read: he used it for about 3 days and hasn't touched it since) - but that's because he's got completely different wiring from me, mentally.

I read a fascinating and helpful book recently about changing personal habits, and if you're trying to reach a goal by changing some behaviors or making new habits, I'd definitely recommend checking out "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg from your local library, or purchasing it. I found it well worth the audiobook price.

Tomorrow, more gooooooaaals - Carpe November!

P.s. Finished Ender's game 2 days ago... A little ahead of schedule. But boy is that little book hard to put down!

Abs, CHECK.

Squats, CHECK.

Minimalism, CHECK. We were supposed to clean out/declutter our dressers, but since we don't OWN dressers here, we decided to declutter our desks. Finished product!:

Feeling better, physically and mentally ^^