New Year Resolutions, Bullet Journaling and Other Updates

This post was originally titled “Oops, I haven’t posted in 5 months”, but I figured my 3 readers didn’t really need me to tell them that. Instead, I’m going to focus on some new things going on in my life.

New Years Resolutions (in February)

I usually don’t make any resolutions because I don’t ever stick to them, but this year I really wanted to renew my previously lackluster commitment to running. Using a Couch To 5k program, my goal is to run three times a week and sign up for a 5k in the spring. So far, I’m doing surprisingly well. Even though I should be on Week 6 now, I’ve been repeating the Week 5, Workout 1 routine a few times over until I felt comfortable enough to move up to Week 5, Workout 2; 5:1 has 5:00 running intervals and 5:2 has 8:00 running intervals. I feel great, I look great (kind of) and I’m so proud of my progress. Helping me along my fitness journey is Soylent, and I really do believe that this drink is the reason why I’ve been able to get this far in the program.

My second resolution was to blog once a week. Well, we see how that’s been going. The truth is, I think about blogging all the time, but I never feel like anything I have to say is relevent or interesting. That being said, I think I am going to change my blog a little bit soon to make it more about my life and hobbies, as opposed to just focused on knitting. The problem is that I can’t think of a blog name to replace Perfect Purl. I’m open to suggestions.

Some of the things I would like to start blogging about include book reviews, coffee and bullet journaling. Which leads me to…

Bullet Journaling!

I’m really excited about this. If you’ve ever read my blog before, you probably know that I’m a fan of the Erin Condren Life Planner and planning in general. I’ve been stalking following some bullet journalers on Instagram for months, and finally I decided to try it out myself. I didn’t think I would like it. Boy, was I wrong. I love it. Eric and I have been trying it out together, and we both really enjoy it so far.

In Closing

I’m going to do my best to start blogging weekly. My posts will probably be about an assortment of things and I don’t know if I can stay motivated to do it.

Time Tracking and How I Use My ECLP

Since I haven’t been working, I noticed something strange: I couldn’t figure out what the heck I was spending my time on! I had a sneaking suspicion that I was playing more video games that I would admit to myself. So, for the month of July, I decided to use the awesome app/website Hours to track what I was doing. Honestly I didn’t really expect myself to stay with it all month, but I surprised myself. And you know what? I kind of love it.

Since I’m a pretty boring person, my main activities can be broken down into three categories: Gaming, Knitting and Reading. Note that the Gaming categories only including PC/Handheld games, not mobile games (boy would I be in trouble if it did). The Hours website and app are so awesome. You can have multiple “tasks” in categories, so I can see how long it took me to read Stephen King’s It, for intance. Or, on a less productive day, how many hours I wasted playing Civ V.

Every week in my planner I keep track of what I’m reading, listening to, knitting and watching. I used my ECLP month view to write down my totals for each hobby/category at the end of every day. Then at the end of the month I can see how much time I wasted spent on every activity. It’s really not a perfect system, since I sometimes forget to start/stop categories. And one problem I have with the Hours system is that they don’t allow two timers to be run simultaneously. I solved this problem by only tracking the main activity I was doing at the time. So if I was knitting while waiting on my friends to take their turns in Civ V, I only tracked Civ V. I think this really skewed my knitting time, since I finished an entire freaking cowl in the time I was waiting for them, but it works.

Does anyone have some planner decorating tips they can share?

Updates on a Busy Life

After vowing to post more frequently I haven’t. What a surprise. I guess once a month is more often than once every six months. But hey, a lot has been going on. We moved to Indy. I knitted a thing. That’s a lot, right?

So yeah, Indianapolis. It’s nothing like when I lived in Phoenix, but I missed the city life. Indy is strange because it has a city feel and a country feel at the same time. We are driving down a road next to huge buildings, then a mile later we are in a corn field. I don’t dislike it. I could do with a little less corn, though.

Kennedy loves the new house

One thing I like about being here is that there is always somewhere to go. In Evansville, everything was closed between 6 and 8 pm. You weren’t supposed to go to parks and trails after sunset. But here, downtown is well lit. It probably goes without saying that Pokemon Go is taking over downtown Indy. I love it. I think I’ll make friends soon.

Kennedy met a twin at the canal!

I’ve been knitting a lot lately, too. I bought a cowl pattern like two years ago that I loved – it was actually the first pattern I ever spent money on. I started the cowl then promptly lost track of the project. Lately I had the urge to finish it but I couldn’t find the bag I stuck it in with all the moving. Any excuse to buy more yarn, amiright? Of course, shortly after I started the new cowl I found the old one! After finishing up the second one I started, I dragged the old one out again. They’ve got different feels and I can’t decide which one I like more.

Any knitters in the Indy area need a new friend? Cause I’m free all the time.

Engagement Excitement

We got our engagement photos taken yesterday. It was a really beautiful day (probably the last of the year sadly) and we had so much fun. Our photographer posted one of our photos on Facebook and I’m too excited not to share.

Nature Adventure

My fiancé and I are getting engagement photos done on Saturday. We’re really unorganized and kind of lazy, so we just started scouting out locations yesterday. This led to us being outside for the longest amount of time in forever.

I found a leaf that was bigger than my head

We took a lot of pictures and the weather was so nice I almost feel like we’re real photographers. Of course we aren’t and our pictures are nowhere near that nice. But it’s nice to dream.

We also found a cute cat

This is probably the last week that the weather will be nice enough to enjoy without shivering. Gotta love that fickle midwest weather!