Daily Updates, Weekly Updates

Days 125 Through 154 – Weeks Eighteen Through Twenty-One

Weights:  Unknown

Water Consumed:  Unknown

Steps:  Unknown

Accomplishments:  Few

As indicated in my post on day 124, work was extremely busy and draining.  That, combined with a lot of other things meant everything pretty much spiralled out of control for me.  I stopped weighing myself, stopped tracking my water, and only sometimes wore the FitBit (yes, I did get the replacement wrist-strap for it).  And probably worst of all stopped tracking my accomplishments and what I needed to get done.

My mood was extremely low, I was incredibly frustrated, and I just didn’t accomplish much.

That’s not strictly true – I did force myself to do a fair amount at particular times, I just didn’t document it especially well.

Perhaps the biggest thing was substantial progress on cleaning the house.  We took a trip to Holiday World with some friends a few weeks ago, and Alice left from there with the kids (since it was only 45 minutes away) and spent three days with the kid’s honorary grandparents.  I, meanwhile, headed back home (three hours away) and spent those same three days on a cleaning binge.  I ended up doing 38 hours of cleaning over the span of 3 days.  Aside from a few short internet breaks each day, a trip out of the house to eat dinner at a restaurant each night, and sleeping a full night’s sleep, if I was awake, I was cleaning.

I didn’t get as much done as I had hoped, but I was able to complete full deep cleaning of a substantial portion of the house, as well as sorting, organizing, trashing, etc.  Dusting and vacuuming even happened.  In the end, out of the 16 indoor spaces that are not Alice’s sewing room (which I do not touch), I ended up getting 9 of them completely “back to zero” meaning completely clean and tidy.  The rooms which received the treatment:  Master Bedroom, Master Bathroom, Master Closet, Hallway, Linen Closet, Utility Closet, Coat Closet, Entertainment/TV Closet, and the Family Room.

I got all these rooms to the point where I can get them back to zero in about 45 minutes to an hour of cleaning total, which is a big win for me.  I’ve been setting the rooms back to zero about once a week since the deep cleaning originally happened.  The only room that isn’t really true for is the Family Room, but that’s as much a challenge of having to clean it when the kids aren’t home (it’s their playroom) as anything else.  It’s still much better than it was.  I also completely reorganized the furniture in the Family Room so that we can access the Entertainment/TV closet again, and even moved the TV back into the closet so we can hide it behind doors that close whenever we are not watching television.

This leaves me with 7 other rooms to still get in order before the house is properly clean again:  the Kitchen, the Front Room, the Children’s Bedroom and Children’s Closet, the Office and Office Closet, and the Full Bathroom.  The plan is to move the guest bed into my office, but that means moving most of the other furniture out of my office and tightening up the usage of the space quite a bit.  I haven’t quite figured all that out yet.  My goal was to try and get the house the rest of the way clean by early December, but that does NOT look like it is going to happen.

On the Stitchy front, we spent several weeks stagnant on progress because we were having substantial problems getting AJAX calls to work correctly in WordPress.  After spending our weekly gathering for several weeks trying different things and getting nowhere, we finally threw in the towel and divorced ourselves from using WordPress.  So from now on, our technology platform for Stitchy will be vanilla PHP for data access to MySQL, running HTML and JavaScript for the actual pages and AJAX stuff, with a 3rd party Membership plugin bolted on to handle membership and payments.

It is now possible to use the treadmills at work (at least in theory – assuming their network drops are live and I can connect my laptop that way.  I haven’t tried it yet because work continues to be slammed.

I properly rededicated myself to eating better, drinking more, wearing my Fitbit, and tracking my activities today, at the start of a new week.