Day 59: That is a LOT of blogging!

 

Hands on hips, my August 1, 2021 progress photo.  That's me.

State of the blog review:  Yesterday I reported there were 239 pages, or 3,581 blogs to review.  This morning, we are working backward, and down to 225 pages, or 3,373 blogs yet to be touched, decided / processed.

And only 13 days in which to address the issue.  You can probably deduct the last 72 blogs, as the "transition off of Spark" blogs, not needing to be saved or even touched.  But still, 3300 blogs, divided by 13 days is... over 250 blogs a day!

Methinks it is time to modify the approach.  I had started by going to the earliest blogs and reviewing them, keep, pitch, classify, etc.  I think now I'm going to go back to the target certain time periods and preserve a selection of important milestones thing.  

Both approaches are emotionally exhausting.  When I get tired of it... I make poor decisions!  So... I have to pace myself.

Meanwhile, in other news, I have always fixed it in my mind that August 4th was my "entering maintenance" day in 2010.  This may or may not be true, but I have been thinking of it that way.  For the record, my weight on that date was 128.6 pounds.  This morning it was 148.1 pounds.  Between those two dates, I have of course varied.  During the most strenuous of my athletic endeavors, 2015 being the year in which I set the most personal best times, I was drifting around 115 pounds.  During the worst of my post-retirement, it has drifted up as high as 160.  Fortunately, it has never got as bad as my old "lifetime highest weight" which was 224 and change.

When I look at the graph since 2013, you can see the effects of both the heavy training, AND the post retirement struggles.

Of interest to me is the last of the "heavy training" low weights is about two months before my fall in 2016.  The rolling pattern of "why try" interspersed with "no way I'm going back there" attitudes show up in the time since.  The most recent consistent downturn has been the time since the announcement of SparkPeople closing their doors!  Complacency has been kicked.  For now.  "Don't get cocky!"  

Also of interest is the seasonal cycle, of losing weight through the Summers and regaining in the colder months!  As I was reviewing the blogs, I found one involving a conversation with my doctor, where he asked if I had such a pattern of cycling, seasonally.  This chart clearly shows that I do.  But at the time, I said to him, "Doctor, my weight cycles don't last months, they last years." Brutal honesty. "Well, let's see if we can speed that up a bit."

And, here we are.

Let's all get out there and live the best Wednesday, August 4th, 2021 we can manage, right where we are!  After all, it's the only one we'll ever get.  And we are worth taking care of, for Life is Good!

✨💖 Keep on Sparking!

Day 58: Time is getting short

 

If you need any proof of the shortness of time, just go outside in an August morning or evening and look at the angle of the sunlight.  It practically shouts that Summer will soon come to a close, that school will soon start, that you'd best stir your stumps and prepare for what's ahead!

I saw this view of the slanted sunlight when I was out on my morning walk.  It is significant because I would NEVER have seen it before this past June, as there used to be a tree in the way of this view!

With yesterday's count of "Spark Days left" down to 15 (14 counting today)... I kind of panicked about my thousands of blog entries over there that I had dragged my feet about reviewing/preserving.

Why did I drag my feet?  Clearly it was the emotional heavy lifting involved in reading and making decisions about them.  I still have 239 pages of blog titles to go through.  The phone app says that is 3,581 blogs!

I had already "printed off" most of the "featured"/"popular" ones, and then I started in on a couple of events of significance:  Kevin's first Boston Marathon.  My first Olympic distance triathlon.  My fall and injury in 2016, and clawing efforts to "not lose the awesome", as I phrased it for my then-trainer.

But now, I went all the way back to the beginning.  To when I posted my very first blog entry... and I found in those blogs from 2009 a lot of interesting time periods of my life.  You see, I started blogging on Spark about the time I joined my then daughter in law at Jenny Craig, to make that attempt to keep her company in her efforts to lose weight and get healthy.  It weaves its way, in smallish paragraph or two long blogs, through the diagnosis of hyper-parathyroidism, the lead up to surgery, son's pre-deployment training, the days surrounding the Fort Hood shooting in November that year... my decision to give up soda... son's deployment, etc.  And that's all in the first year!

I had already decided that "what I don't get to, I won't get to"... but now, reading this history, I realize "OMG, this could be of value to someone who is now where I was then..." and also "this is an awesome example of how far I've come."  There is a lot of history from 2009 to 2021!

So... folks... I'm scrambling to review and print off what I can, and delete those that are no longer of importance to me as I go, so as to avoid duplication of effort.  If I disappear for a bit, don't worry, I'm still "at work".  

What to expect in future:  the resurfacing of some of these "old" blogs in either OKM's Spark Archives or in Encouraging Words from OneKidsMom.  And I may do a little more organizing, perhaps merging some of the shorter entries, or excerpts from them, into a "lesson learned from X period in my journey" kind of blog instead of preserving each individual entry.  Once Spark is gone, and I'm not straddling multiple platforms, that becomes a project worth doing.

Kind of a step on the way to the book some folks kept saying I should write.  Don't know if I'll ever take it that far.  But I know that reviewing some of these old "dash off a paragraph or two of a pep talk before I go to work" blogs has been motivating for ME where I am NOW in the journey.

So... all that dumped out there... let's get out and live the best we can, this one and only Tuesday, August 3, 2021 we'll ever get.  We are each and every one of us Worth It! 

Life is good!✨💖📣🎉