Shiny Bits of Foil

I work for a personal development company, so we get a lot of coaching and whatnot along with our deadlines and deliverables. One of these development goals was to come up with a personal theme for this year and how you’re going to bring that theme to life.

It took me a while, but I’ve finally found my theme: The Year of Getting My Shit Together. Yeah, it’s a bit broad, but in essence it means that this year I’m focusing on doing all that shit I keep meaning to do but never get around to. In practice, that means that this year I’m making a concerted effort to:

1. Get my currently ectoplasmic ass in shape. I used to be a dancer. I was never Superman strong or Jack LaLanne fit, but I had really bitchin’ tone, some respectable strength, a downright amazing degree of flexibility. So I’ve been looking around at exercise videos and whatnot, seeing what appealed and working up my courage and motivation. Weirdly enough, my final bit of inspiration was this video. Yes, it’s a kitten chasing toys. But watching it, I realized that the muscular grace and control the kitten shows on the video is what I used to feel (even if I was never quite that good). And I want that feeling back.

I’ve settle on BodyRock.tv as my workout of choice, but I’ve also decided to use the in-between-workout/active rest days to take the 100 Pushup Challenge, primarily because I am sadistically obsessed with personal challenges like this, secondarily because I’m curious to see if it actually works and thirdly because I’ve never had much upper body strength and it’d be really nice to change that.

I’ll be using this blog to record and track my results as I go, and cross-posting to Facebook for the whole world to see (well, at least, my own little corner of the world) to keep myself honest.

2. I’m learning math, bitches! I’ve always wanted to be a math geek, a la Charlie on Numb3rs. Now, I’m smart enough to know I’m never going to be a world-class mathematical prodigy, so don’t keep any fellowships at Harvard warm for me. But I do know that with enough hard work and focus, I can get a lot better at it than I am now. Maybe even learn some higher maths and related stuff like chemistry, geometry and physics. To that end, I’ve latched onto Khan Academy’s online interactive learning software. It’s free, which is the first point in it’s favor. It’s fun (oh dear bob, they waved merit badges in front of my face – see above re: personal challenges). And it’s fucking awesome. So there’s that.

So far, all the software addresses is math. But I’m hoping by the time I work my way through the whole learning tree, they’ll have added the chem, geometry and other branches to the game. If not, I’ll still watch the videos and do what I can to learn.

3. I’m focusing on doing all those projects and hobbies that I keep not getting around to. This primarily involves getting off the internet during times when I’m cognitively functional (mostly during the day – after 6 I’m essentially read-only). So far the results have been promising, but nothing to write home about. But it’s early days yet.

So, anyway, that’s my year sewn up. What’s yours?

Sorry, guys. I got crazy and tried to divide by zero and the blog asploded.

Actually, no. Jut a bad plugin that broke the new upgrade. In any case, it’s gone now. Blog is back. And I promise, no more hinky maths.

Eh, not sure if I like it or not. Gotta live with it a while. If you don’t see the new image, dump your cache and refresh. Comments?

Had a conversation with hubby today that has solidified my previously vague interest in setting up another blog on the subject of urban gardening and related topics.  It’s something I’ve been considering for a while now but haven’t really done anything about. However, with this year’s harvest starting to come in (9.4 oz of crisp, tasty snow peas picked today, plus countless ginormous salads and plates of greens over the past few weeks), and local interest stirring over such issues a community gardens and urban chickens, I’m really feeling the pull to do this. And do it in a grand way, with real effort and production values put into it, as opposed to being just a half-assed garden diary for my own use.

So, unless I get caught up in life and forget again, I’ll probably look into setting something up in the next few days. Not sure what to call it yet, although I have a suggestion from hubby that I’m looking into.

What do you think? Anyone have any ideas for names, subject matter, stuff you’d like to see in this vein?  Let me know.

So, today, I can get on the site. I was gone for a few days and shut off my power strip (which cuts power to everything, including the modem) so I’m guessing that this is simply an instance of winning the ip address lottery when I turned everything back on. However, with luck it means that BS reset their DNS servers at some point and my ip isn’t looking like a black hole of fraudulent access to my site servers. We’ll see. Not planning on shutting my modem off again for a while, unless the site goes bye-bye again. Crossing my fingers.

For about two weeks now, I’ve been unable to access my site using my own internet connection. I’m writing this post on my laptop by hijacking my neighbor’s wireless signal that is on a different isp. The weird thing is, I can access every other freaking site on the internet except my own.

I’ve called my isp, and I’ve called my host. No one seems to know what the problem is (or rather, they can’t find a problem in the first place). I can ping the site using the command box, np. Other people can access my site just fine. It’s just me. Which, you know, makes it a little hard to function.

I spent hours the other night trying to fix the problem on my end. Uninstalled my firewall and virus checker, ran around naked on the internet (no help), did a restore, etc. Found that resetting my modem worked then, but not today. Hubby can’t access it either (on the same access), so I’m doubting it’s my computer.

I can access the site no problem through www.ninjaproxy.com, which is a proxy/anonymizer service. Not sure what that means, other than if I want to post to my blog I have to steal wireless or deal with the aggravation of working through a proxy that wants to throw up a pop-up everytime I access a page.

Does anyone out there know what the hell is happening over here?  I could use some help.

For professional concerns, mostly. Move along…we’re just a shrub…move along.

Hey, look!

No, up there ^

Yeah, I got bored and made a new header. I call it “(my)still life.”

Aren’t I clever?

I’m rearranging the furniture again, this time installing a new theme. I like the easy “add a picture” panel up top, which I’ll be able to customize when I get around to it, and the general layout. What do you think?

Update: Hmmm…I’m not too crazy about the lack of whitespace after the post content (see how the text is pushed right up against the “Share This” widget and tags at the bottom?), but I’m at a loss to know how to fix it. I’ve tried inserting break tags just about anywhere I can think of in the index template, to no avail. Anybody got any hints?

I’m tinkering with the look of the blog. Yay, spring cleaning!

So, it may look wonky and ugly until I get it the way I want it. Should be a’right by tomorrow, in any case.

UPDATE: I think I’m happy for now. May tinker more later. If you don’t see the new shiny, just refresh your browser.