Blog diversion - 79 days

An update on how I'm going on my organisation towards going overseas.

It would be fair enough to say that up until today, I haven't really achieved anything of value.  That's because I've been seriously depressed (and have been in the last 18 months since becoming single, it's been harder than I thought it would be).  Currently, that's just the way it is, and I have to accept it, and go around the problem.

I've been trying to achieve things, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.  Today I tried (and succeeded) to achieve 4 hours of doing things of value.  Here's what I did:

1:00 going out to do things - this is a regular occurrence, probably every 2-3 days

0:30 supermarket shopping - something I try and avoid, so I've bought 1-2 weeks of food and essentials

1:00 I'm not sure if I said that in the Philippines, I wanted to revise my mathematics courses done a number of years ago, for achieving my other goal in life (after reaching goal weight) - finishing my degree.  So that's the plan, 20 hours a week for a year, relearning first and second year mathematics.  I did them a while ago (and passed) so it won't be too hard to relearn and get up to speed for future courses.  I was planning on scanning one textbook, all 1200 pages (I don't want to take any books on my trip, just digital files) but decided to check and see if someone had (illegally) uploaded the book to any file sharing websites, and to my surprise they had.  I have mixed feelings about this, the author is deprived an income but I don't have to cut the book apart and then spend 20 hours scanning the whole book.  I did however need to check that the book didn't have any missing pages, the scanner had forgotten to scan the myriad of equations at the end of the book (not that big a deal, it's just for reference) and there were a few pages that were there twice, and a few that were not straight, but on an angle.  It did take me a whole hour though to check that everything was there.

1:10 something I've been avoiding, adding weight loss blogs to the blogroll here, I want to max it out at 250 and also only show weight loss blogs that are similar to my blog.  I'll do a bit every day until it's done.

1:20 photographing the notes from one of my many courses.  About 120 pages.

4 hours a day is not a lot.  I do have trouble with my big distraction (the Internet) and so I want to only spend an hour a day browsing webpages.  Plus I need to tidy and clean my place (and the garden: 5-10 hours work maybe) and basically get my life organised before I leave, so it's not a big hassle when I come back to New Zealand.

Blog diversion - trip anxiety and 102 days

71kg, 5kg over goal weight

Today is the first of February.  That means (hopefully) in 102 days I'll be leaving Auckland.  I've got a hell of a lot of things to do before I leave, and I'm suffering from the stress and anxiety about the trip. As a result, yesterday I did exactly zero hours of work on "stuff", the things I need to do before I leave.

I wondered what to do about this potential crisis (and yes, it could turn out to be a crisis) so in the middle of the night I decided to post on the blog about it.  For the next 3 1/2 months you'll be reading about what I'm doing, totally unrelated to weight loss.

Sorry about that.

Today I want to achieve 4 hours of doing things.  Most of that is tidying (a tidy place is welcoming to doing things, an untidy place is not in my experience).  I also want to start working on:

1. Getting a tow bar for my car (essential because I need to put all of my stuff in storage, and remove a dead couch out the back collecting leaves)
2. Make an appointment for essential medical tests
3. Start working on getting a passport (today, just a phone call is all I need to do)
4. Print out the form for travel insurance when I go to the doctor next week

The last one is what I'm dreading.  I keep hearing of awful tales related to travel insurance (probably because I read a lot, should cut back on that, right?) and potential life and death situations.  I know I'll probably be alright, but the anxious person in me is starting to worry.  About all sorts of things.  Half of them are related to travel insurance.

Living in New Zealand is like living in a cocoon.  State funded medical care and ACC.  ACC is a compulsory accident insurance system we have here.  It's been around for about 50 years.  What that means is that if you have an accident, ACC will (supposedly) take care of you and pay you money and your expenses etc.  Yes, there are issues and complaints but I'll take that over the alternative any day.  The downside is that you cannot sue.  I'm fine with that.

I just worry about what could happen if....  You get the idea.

So the goal today is to do 4 hours of work.  It could be anything.  From now on, until I've finished all of my tasks, this blog will turn into a motivation blog.

Sorry about that.