Wow! School starts next week, Dry and Mighty starts in October — I think we’ve pegged the first Sunday in October as our recording date. Big things are afoot!

Full disclosure: I am still not good with tracking, and I think I’ve been worse with food than I’ve been letting myself believe. I feel heavy. And while I know there’s no “something will save me” moment in the wings, I’m kind of hoping that the back to school business will make me.. better. The rigid focus will give me a kind of splashover focus that will radiate out to other routine stuff. Because I’ll need that kind of routine to stay sane while doing work, school, and other stuff.

So it’s a bifurcated head thing, where one track is “relax now, you’ll be glad you did when school starts,” and the other track is “you fool, you’re just making excuses to eat Skittles.” I suspect the second one is correct.

Bad sleep again — what’s up, nightmares? Snakes! Weird brain week. But I’m powering through with up early, exercise, and very soon back to bed.

It is a weird brain week. I’m’a chalk it up to a big work project and being back in school soon; this is one of those situations where I feel like things are good and on track, but who knows what mental chaff is ticking around in the back end.

So: shower, and quick nap before work. Good to have exercise done for the morning, even if it’s a short bout.

I don’t know what psychic chaff I’m burning off, but last night was wall to wall nightmares — which, in my world, are usually travel stress dreams, involving lost luggage, missed connections, and at one point being chased by a bull.

Are these even nightmares? My wife dreams of being murdered all to heck my monsters. Those are nightmares! I had a lot of “the road is closed even though the sign said it had one lane open, now I have to backtrack, oh no something is wrong with the clutch and the car keeps slipping into neutral” stuff.

At any rate — I was up and down all night, so let myself sleep in this morning and am now running late for everything. I’m getting back on track (hooray for leftover coffee).

What’s most interesting is why nightmares? Things are going quite well. There might be a temptation to try to read something into travel dreams, specifically, but travel stresses seem to be my sole form of nightmare.

Upcoming schoolin’ and Dry and Mighty, possibly. Work is never without stress; that’s part of the job (but it’s not extraordinary right now, I would say).

Maybe sometimes the brain chaff just builds up and needs to get jettisoned.

Anyway: nightmares! And my nightmares are weird; more about being thwarted and frustrated than physically menaced (except by the bull).

A chilly run this morning, and a reminder, along with the shifting sunrise for morning paddles, that summer’s ending. It seems to have gone quickly this year; a slow ramp into it, and then an abrupt ending. This is one of the perils of staycation — without a week of punctuation and being away, the past months kind of collapse into a same-ness.

Baked bread around a run this morning, which is fun — I like bread! And baking.

With a day in the rear-view, I think the “walk in the woods; do what you feel” approach to Dry and Mighty makes a LOT of sense. I haven’t really thought hard about the impact of six hours of class a week on my schedule, plus readings and assignments. It’s going to be a lot! Not overclocking on another project is likely the most sensible possible way of going about this.

Had a good and long talk with my wife yesterday about Dry and Mighty, with the clear feedback that I need to… walk back on my expectations of this being a major endeavour, and just kind of chill out about all of it a bit more.

I have a tendency to do things to the hilt, and kind of burn out on them, which has always been my way. Slow, steady maintenance of a regular project over the span of forever has never been my jam (in fact, this and writing a webcomic called Man-Man might be the only long-term hobby commitments of my life, really. Oh, and being the webmaster for the Canoe Club. And doing WAFFLES! every week for four and a half– maybe I’m being too hard on myself).

All that to say, the analogy I came up with to ask about her expectations was “are we building a cottage, or is this a walk in the woods?” Both are good things! But a walk in the woods requires little preparation and you don’t really care about any lasting effects. We aren’t inviting people over to our walk in the woods.

It’s looking like the new podcast is going to be more a walk in the woods than a Big Deal, which is wise, given I’m also going back to school in the fall.

Oddly enough, I have to wrap this up so I can go have a literal walk in the woods.

Eeeee boy: WordPress is warning me that my PHP version is out of date, which means it’s time to roll up my sleeves, dip into my host’s documentation, and, um, try.

These things do not always go smoothly, or well — it’s a weird relief that this project is close to its end, because I can’t screw it up THAT badly at this point.

It’s Saturday! Radio show, then my wife is working all afternoon, so I might try to put some more time into the Dry and Mighty site, or just goof around. Who knows?

Great paddle this morning! Uploading a video to YouTube, my second attempt at shooting the paddle, which is much better this second go-round but also involves having the camera in a bracket off the side of the canoe, so the next step is to jerry-rig some sort of cable to make sure it can’t fall into the water.

I feel like I’m firing on all cylinders except tracking and checklists; work is going well, I’m exercising daily, I don’t feel like food is going poorly. I’m just not tracking, which I know is not good, I just haven’t gotten back into it. I need to get my box back up! Or some sort of other big visual cue in the evening.

Canoeing is great but it’s a full two-hour rigamarole in the morning if I’m out on the water for more than an hour, so gotta roll…

A keepin’ on day! Things are going well. Great exercise this morning, work’s chugging along, tinkering with the Dry and Mighty site/writing and looking forward to starting my Master’s in the fall.

It’s kind of a keep-grinding week… wrapping this up and then working on Dry & Mighty for a bit, tinkering with the site, and then back to the office. All’s well!

7k this morning and I can’t stop sweating, which happens sometimes. It’s humid out, but not TOO hot, so I gots the run in without feeling terrible while I was en route, but it was a rough finish. And, like I said, I’m feeling drenched right now.

I’ve been working hard on not getting down on myself about weight loss pace and trusting that health and diet will resolve itself without me beating myself about the head on scale stuff, but I have to admit the recurring theme while running lately has been “this would be easier if I was lighter”. Which is technically true.

Going to wrap this up and go down to get ready for work and also do a bit of Dry & Mighty writing — trying to get in that habit as well, of doing at least one small thing a day there.

Up early for cat reasons, but getting ready for a paddle, with the added twist that I picked up a cheap iPhone mount at Canadian Tire and have screwed it to a piece of wood, to clamp to a thwart and hopefully shoot the paddle from the bow of the boat this morning. We’ll see how it goes.

I… er, forgot to get back on logging/checklist yesterday. Out of sight, out of mind. Despite the masses of “habit” research out there, it’s easy for me to forget even routine things — it was noon on Sunday before I remembered to do Jerkpod this week — and I think I’m pretty average when it comes to remembering, forgetting, routines, etc.

Is habit science garbage? Probably not. But oversimplified and not entirely accurate by the time it reaches the public? Probably.

All that to say — habits! How do they work?