Weekend

On saturday I joined people at Relativity for croquet and other games. It was very fun; I haven't played much croquet, so plunged into it and satiated myself, playing until I'd been standing up for so long my feet were hurting.

Today I found myself mid-afternoon with fewer less < eight hours of things which I really urgently had to do today, and took off up the river to waterbeach. I'm not sure I ever *have* gone for a ride just for fun, as opposed to going for a walk, but the adjusted bike seems fine, and it was really nice.

I felt quite good, because yesterday was fun, I have a relaxing day today, the next two weeks promise to be fun, many nice events, meeting up with a few old friends, meeting up with a couple of new friends, and over the summer when life is a little less hectic have some good plans (details to follow).

Of course, then I got carried away, spent hours out enjoying the sunshine, and had to cut out a few of the less urgent things.

ETA: And while cycling, I wore shorts with trainers and socks. Also, I have kissed a man, have a friend who's a conservative, and have eaten food containing animal rennet. And I'm not ashamed of them, except the last one. Hah, take that, family! :)

Monthly update

I've fallen out of the weekly updates. Suffice it to say I've been good. But at the start of the month I tried to take stock on a longer term, and though there was too much to be easily summarised, I was very pleased to see I've actually made much progress since I last went on an improvement jag.

Organisation

I wouldn't say I've completely beaten procrastination, but it certainly seems not to be a problem any more. I got a system, the key point being that it works when I get behind, so despite occasional wobbles, it's easy to stay in a good place, instead of being kicked into a bad place whenever something goes wrong.

What things do I not talk about? Well, quite a few things. Here, I admit I used to let something get out of control, and then be too scared to look at it. But it seems that working out what I'm scared of, triaging everything else onto next week's todo list, assessing it, asking what's the worst that can happen, and then what do I need to do from here, works. I highly recommend it if any of you ever feel lost :)

Work

I won't go into details, but for a couple of months it's been interesting and productive.

Summary

OK, I'm not as successful as I could be, but I'm enjoying life, which is good :) What I want to do is accept I can only seriously concentrate on one thing at once, and work out what should come next. Having achieved organisation means I *can* :)

Now I'm a bit older, I can think in terms of spending a couple of months aiming to fix something, and get into good habits which could be retained while I get on with my life, rather than feeling I should be able to do X right now, and if not getting dispirited and not being able to face it. Of course, many of you hopefully have everything you want in life right now, but as I say, there's no point pretending I can do something I can't.

1. Diet and exercise[1]. This should have been first a while ago. Let's see if I can follow mum's good example. If in the next year this was the only progress I made that'd be pretty damn good, all in all.

2. Finance. Check all accounts have good rates, all taxes and bills add up to what they ought, pension and stock options are in order, am on best tarrif for everything, that monthly expected and actual expendatures add up, and think about buying a house... Most of this will only take an afternoon, but definitely have good effort/reward, so let's get it out of the way.

3. Social. Concentrate on what/whose I enjoy going to most. Again, easy, can be done in parallel if I recognise it.

4. Work out where I want to go in life. Programmer? Program manager? Mathematician? Actuary? Accountant? Quant? Author?? It's not too late to do some research.

5. A variety of projects I'd like to do at some point.
* A winnie-the-pooh puzzle game I want to finish programming. (Currently in flash, I'm afraid.)
* Writing.
* Drawing. I need to practice. And I need to do a webcomic.
* Actively learn about programming, rather than solving each thing as it comes up.
* Some other programming projects, but with other thinking too, eg. customise a blog to be exactly how *I* want it, possibly make that available to other people too.

[1] Thanks to Simon for embedding in my mind how to spell this. One word at a time :)