101 Things in 1001 Days

February 26, 2007: I am doing slightly better on both of these. I was inspired somewhat by an article on Lifehack: Throw a Lifeline to Your Future. The hack is to spend 30 minutes building your future first thing each day. It starts with 'what kind of future do you want?' I'll decide that later; but I'm fairly sure that delivering the 101 things would be a great help with whatever sort of future.

For me, spending 30 minutes each day building my future does require me to get up 30 minutes earlier, but it also gives me some hop-out-of-bed inspiration. Luckily, I typically spend at least 30 minutes idling in bed in the morning between when I wake up and when I get up in earnest, so there's scope. I did the hack 3 days in a row, but didn't this morning. Life seemed too hard really. Of course, I had stayed up past midnight the night before, and very much later (I blame Lilian) the night before that.

So, a good night's sleep and then 30 minutes future-building. That's doable.

Posted by Alison Scott at 07:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 26, 2007: I decided to start by researching nail health on the interwebs. And I discovered that most of the nail and skin problems I were having were linked to poor moisturisation. This was a bit of a shock for me because I tend to believe that almost all beauty products are a complete waste of money. So I bought a moisturiser designed for hands and nails, and started using it daily. Within about a week, my nails (or rather, the skin round my nails, which is the big issue here) were looking a whole lot better.

Of course, I then backslid. But I'm starting again. This takes about 30 seconds to do per day. The moisturiser cost about a tenner and I guess there's getting on for a year's worth in the tub; you don't use very much (or at least, I don't use very much).

Posted by Alison Scott at 07:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

26 February 2007: so I'm not doing yoga, and I'm not swimming. I think that counts as backsliding. I am bouncing on the bouncer very occasionally. And walking a bit.

The condition is to do at least 30 minutes of moderate exercise 3 times a week, and sustain it (at least 90%) for six months. In an 'ordinary' week we should in theory swim once, and I should do yoga once. So that only leaves one.

31 August 2006: of course, on holiday I did 30 minutes of moderately vigorous exercise every single day apart from our rest day in the middle of the holiday. Swimming, cycling, dancing, walking.

And I came home to discover that my PT Bouncer had been delivered (this is my attempt to find a compact trampoline-type-item that the whole family can use, unlike Jonathan's trampoline which is too weak for the heavy people). Rebounding doesn't really fit the 30 minutes paradigm as I'm currently at the sort of stage where 30 seconds seems pretty challenging. But they say that it's fine to do 30 seconds, or a minute, of very gentle bouncing, three times a day. We will see.

Posted by Alison Scott at 06:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It turns out that everything in the house falls into one of several categories of stuff:

• things we actually want (I am not sure this is the majority);
  
• actual rubbish, which can go in the bin;
  
• recycling; the recycling men come on Monday, and some of the stuff they take can't really be left outside overnight, so it sometimes takes us weeks to get rid of this;
  
• saleable unwanted things that aren't books, which I'm selling bit by bit on eBay;
  
• books, some of which we're selling on Amazon Marketplace, and some of which we're selling to Porcupine Books.
  
• stuff for the charity shop, including books that aren't likely enough for the previous two categories;
  
• stuff that we'd like to give to a charity shop, but which charity shops won't take, mostly furniture and electrical goods. We've freecycled a couple of things but have found it a wee bit of a hassle. And we take some stuff down to the tip, where an army of scavengers quickly redeem anything usable.
  

Lots still to go, but clearly this is getting better.

Posted by Alison Scott at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)