I’m feeling pretty decent today. I got up, did my mantra, had some coffee, and got to the business of exercising. After that I had some breakfast, and treated myself to a little Rita’s Water Ice (mmm… Mango!) afterward. On the way home from Rita’s I was thinking about how to best improve my time management.

I’ve successfully come up with a very basic and easy to use daily schedule – it’s basically a blank page with lines on it. I write in what I intend to do, or what I’ve done during the day. I have more ambitions for it, but I need to go slow and get used to it. I tried scheduling a whole bunch of stuff for a few days, and what I found was that I’m just not ready for all that. I need to spend some time, maybe a few weeks, just getting used to using the agenda on a daily basis – recording what I’ve done, more than scheduling what I want to do, and prioritizing the things that I need to do.

Still, doing so is a little frustrating because I’m not getting nearly as much done with my days as I’d like. I decided that if I’m to improve my days, I need to start with the morning. Mine starts around 11AM, lately. That’s mostly because I get to bed late. I’d probably be more interested in going to bed earlier if I got more accomplished during the day – I’d be too tired to stay up late! But before I can walk…

So, instead of worrying about what time I get up, I’m going to focus on the things that must be done EVERY MORNING, before anything else gets done (visiting the restroom is a reasonable exception). The things I have come up with, in order:

1. Reading my mantra out loud

2. Coffee with 1 food item

3. Get workout music ready

4. Warmup, exercise, cooldown

5. Shower

One problem I currently have in trying to get these things done is the computer. Each morning, I wake up with the intention of getting up and working out, but I need to set up my music, to help me get going. That’s on my computer, because I’ve never had much use for an mp3 player. I have one, somewhere. If it still works… I don’t know. So I have to open my laptop, and when I do that, I, inevitably, get distracted. After all, my curiosity demands satisfaction – any new e-mail I should know about? What about Facebook? Oh, look – today’s blogs are in my e-mail, I could take a minute to go through them. Ooh, and there’s some really good article finds on Facebook, let me take a look at them.

Suddenly, I realize I’ve been up for an hour and a half and haven’t even read my mantra – which is also on my laptop.

Remedy – I have a droid. While my exercise playlist is on iTunes, and apparently, you can’t get iTunes on a Droid, all of my iTunes songs (yes, all of them) have been converted to a non-protected format – meaning I can put them on any device I damm well please. And I can print out the mantra and put it in a page protector. That means I don’t need to open that laptop until I’m finished with the above list. To help me control that, I’m going to try to remember to shut the laptop down completely at night.

I’m making “Morning Improvement” an immediate goal, so I’ll let you know how it’s going.

On a separate note – I’m removing the food journal and exercise archive from the menu. The archive has outlived its usefulness. I’ve made my daily workouts a feature of the daily blog post. As long as I can meet the demand of a daily post, we don’t need separate documentation, and it’s been long enough since I created that feature.

As for the food journal, there’s no respectable reason for that – I simply don’t keep up with it. However, as I mentioned above, I am working on using my agenda every day – recording my meals and snacks will be a part of that. Once I get good at doing that, I hope to restore the food journal.

JOKE OF THE DAY

Introduction: I’m getting close to finishing Ben Franklin’s biography. It’s quite a thick book, and at some point I began to think that I’d never get close to the end of his life. Amazing to realize that it’s really only a collection of his highlights. In any case, I was reading recently about some of his famous chess matches. Much of his humor came out during these matches, indeed these games may have marked the best of his wit.

He played some notable games in France, while he worked as an American Ambassador trying to get more support from France to the American cause. All the while, Washington was leading men into battle, and losing more often than he won. Support from France was tricky, because, while they hated England, they believed in the unquestionable right of a king to rule. In supporting America, they felt as though they were condoning rebellion against a crown.

Franklin, ever the diplomat, did his best to quell these concerns, but occasionally let his guard down.

The Joke: So, Franklin’s playing a match against one of France’s elite ladies and he noticed that she has placed her king in check, which is against regulations. He should have informed her of her mistake and let her make another move, but Franklin liked to play loose with the rules sometimes. He then took the king, which got him this response – “We do not take kings!” He slyly retorted “We do, in America.”

TODAY’S WORKOUT

This morning’s workout was good. I haven’t really been timing them lately. I do my warmup (stretching and loosening up), then I do about 5 laps to kick off the workout. Since I’m in training for a 5k, I’ve upped that to ten laps. That’s inside the house. When I do laps up and down the driveway, I do less, because the driveway is longer than a full lap inside the house.

Yesterday, I just kept on walking, but today I cut it off at ten and got to doing my blocks and punches – 20 lower blocks in place with the legs spread apart and knees slightly bent, 20 punches, same way. Then I do walking lower blocks – I’ll have to make it a video, in case anyone doesn’t understand. Basically, I step forward and make the block. About ten of those in one direction, then ten punches walking the other direction. Another ten up and back, and I’m back to doing my blocks in place.

Then I do about 5 laps around the house, but this time, I do a normal walking lap, a lap of walking low blocks, another normal lap, a lap of walking punches, and finish with another normal lap. Today, I increased the action laps to double laps.That makes a total of 7 laps around.

I got as far as doing the upper blocks, and another set of laps around the house, followed by getting down on the floor and working on my core – it needs so much help. I can’t do leg lifts, I’m sure my hernia would have a field day with that, but I got pretty close to pedaling my feet while on my back. Felt pretty good, too!

The only problem is Buddha, our puppy (and mascot!) thinks I’m down there to play. I ignored her for a little while until my hand was covered in slobber. Time to get up!

I decided to go for my cooldown, but the dogs made things difficult. I’m not happy with today’s cooldown. I hate to take one over the other, but it seems that’s the way it’s going to have to go.

TODAY’S SPECIAL

It may seem like I just read the same blogs over and over and push their stuff here. Yeah, that’s kind of how it works, but I do add to the list of blogs I read as I have time. I’m working on a new one, now, and if I find her posts useful, or feel that they could be useful to you, they’ll start getting posted here as well! So keep checking, I’m sure you can find something valuable.

Foodimentary covers “National Water Day“, along with “An Overview of Drinking Water“.

SheBANGS gives a tip that’s often talked about and has some benefits in “… Lose Your Utensils“

NK 24/7 shares 8 known carcinogens often found in the home. I wouldn’t suggest you eliminate these from your home, but it’s definitely something to think about.

SOME THINGS BEAUTIFUL

This photo, taken in Scotland, reminds me very much of the film “What Dreams May Come”, with Robin Williams.

Here’s another from… you guessed it, Photobotos, but it’s a little different. Check it out.