July 13: The Weekly Check-In

A bright & sunny HELLO to you my sexy friends! Today is a great day because I get to review the week and plan the next 🙂 Count my losses but also the wins.

Without further ado:

Stop drinking coffee

This one is definitely a “no-go”. I believe I was only able to stick to the plan for 3 weekdays, beyond that I would slip, especially whenever I’d feel lethargic from my workouts. My conclusion: this isn’t such a big deal to me right now, obviously I love my morning cuppa too much, so I’m going to put my energies elsewhere.

Start Weighing Myself

This is brilliant, I love this idea, I found out I gained 5 kilos from last December, I was really bothered about this but since starting to weigh myself last Monday, I’ve also been conscious about my food intake and managed to lose 1 kilo through some adjustments. Outstanding!

Additional buggers this week:

If there is anything the difficulties & heartaches of being an expat SAHM taught me that would definitely be having little to no tolerance for wallowing in problems. I just cannot indulge in it because I have no one to talk to, so I can’t very well work myself into a state of depression each time, can I? I have developed a very strong bias for action, believing that no matter the circumstances, there is always something you can do to improve your situation.

Vision improvement

I am now reading the book Vision for Life by Dr. Meir Schneider to educate myself some more on this topic.

Exercise Induced Lethargy

It’s mat Pilates exercises for now because my body perhaps is just not ready for anything more strenuous yet. What’s great about it too is that it’s perfect for posture improvement! 🙂

Open item

I managed to visit that gym I was talking about in a previous post. So there’s a check on that finally, even though I am now ambivalent about this after finding out a few more details.

Next week’s challenge

And finally, last but not the least ….

….. I’m very excited about next week’s challenge because, with the success of this, I am 100% certain that with you to hold me accountable, I will be able to complete yet another thing I’ve been procrastinating on ~

~~ drum roll please!!!

~~~~ making crochet earrings!!!

(Yaaaaay!)

I’ve allotted an entire week for this, so there should be no excuses, I shall have at least 3 pairs of earrings by next Saturday. End of story. 😀

See you on Monday beautiful people. Have a wonderful weekend up ahead! ❤

July 10: Chillax 😎

Good day my friends!

I wasn’t able to get back to you on yesterday’s quest because I was feeling down in the dumps. I thought it was a stroke of ennui again but then I realized, albeit towards the end of the day, that I was just feeling the effects of a new workout video I did on Monday. That plus I slept way past usual bedtime on Monday evening after having discovered a very funny person on Instagram and gobbling up his feed with gusto 😁

Alright then, it’s time for some pictures as promised. My assignment yesterday was to finish a crochet top I was working on. I was really procrastinating on it and couldn’t get a move on until I had you to hold me accountable.

So this was where I started yesterday morning:

And by the end of the day I managed to do a photo shoot for the IG 😊

front

back

I really feel good at how this top has turned out. I crocheted it out of emerald green silk thread that I had in my stash but never really knew what to do with. The drape is absolutely gorgeous by the way, and it just feels so luxurious on the skin ❤

I added the 3 buttons to help me distinguish the back from the front more than anything 😂 Those too I had sitting aimlessly in my stash.

So anyways, this assignment and how you guys have sorta egged me on to the finish line has definitely hatched an idea in my noggin’. But I’m going to share it with you towards the end of this week yet because it’s for next week and it’s a bit of a departure from the original format of this challenge.

Stay tuned for that!

Meanwhile my challenge for today is just to chill, do nothing, kick back on the sofa & contemplate the beautiful sunny Indonesian weather ☀️ ☀️ ☀️

It’s my husband’s birthday today and, although later there’s gonna be dinner & we’ve booked a weekend at a resort 2 weekends from now to celebrate,  I still feel it deserves a day of relaxation & to just sit still in a space of grateful appreciation 😊

So there you go, that’s my update for today. Tomorrow’s assignment is to close off another ‘unfinished business’, an online course this time.

I’ll see you guys then ❤

July 3: Goals

It is said countless times that what separates successful people from all the rest is that successful people have goals written down.

Allez, let us therefor join the ranks of the successful and write down our goals for July, shall we? 🙂

Mine are:

Blog 6 days a week – do mini-assignments everyday

I want to blog again so I’ve given myself a ‘challenge’ to do one small ordinary act with intention everyday, and to blog about it.

I am an expat SAHM who is less-than-happy with my environment. I have found it really difficult to take root in this foreign country despite having lived here for 4 straight years already. Because there is nothing outside the house that I find worth going out for, nothing interesting ever goes on in this city, plus I have a 1-year old, I very rarely go out of the house which, definitely does not contribute to my happiness.

I have since learned that I need to exert more effort than usual not to fall into depression. Blogging gave me an outlet for  my thoughts. It was like I had friends to talk to, and every time a “stranger” (yes, I’m looking at YOU dear) would care to comment, I would feel heard.

So I am coming back to “friends” because I need all the friends I can get, real & virtual 🙂 🙂 🙂

Be consistent with my exercise routine

After giving birth in October of 2017, I was only able to get some momentum going on any type of exercise last May (2019). Pre-childbirth I used to LOVE exercise and HIIT-type routines were my jam, jelly and butter combined with dance fitness & strength training.

That is why it came as a total shock and huge downer for me to observe that my body, 1 year post-natal, still loathed exercise! I just couldn’t bring myself to do anything, not even a beginner 10-minute mat-Pilates routine. Heck, I couldn’t even do a walk-in-place!

I tried several times and each time I would fail. Last May, after reading so many self-help books & listening to motivational podcasts, I finally got myself to walk around the block 2 evenings a week. Fortunately, the experience was enjoyable so since then I have been able to do it 3 times a week and at a much faster pace. (Yaaaaaay!!!)

Inspired by this success, by the end of last month I also started adding in some strength training routines into the mix, but only for 3 times a week.  I am taking it veeery slow because whenever I do a strength training routine, no matter how short & light, my body feels like it’s been hit by a ton of bricks for 5-6 days after! So I only do body-weight, mostly Pilates, and for max 30 minutes at a time only.

Painstakingly slow based on my previous standards, but you gotta work with your body and respect its own drum beat.

That said, I am hopeful that this schedule & intensity will work this time, and my goal therefor is to be consistent with it.

❤

Which brings me to today’s mini-assignment: listen to music & crazy-dance 🙂

❤

 

Apologies To All The Blogs I Thought I Was Following

Once upon a time in the not so distant past, I “spring cleaned” my reader.  I removed a handful of blogs that were no longer active (an error page pops up when you visit them saying the blog hasn’t been updated for some time), those which links also led to an error message (saying something about a transfer or the blog no longer being there) and lastly, those which did not resonate with me (when I started out I went crazy-indiscriminate with the follows).

I did the spring cleaning because I really want to build a community and I want to engage with (become friends with) like-minded bloggers and those whose writing I just really like.

Lately though I’ve noticed that only a few followed blogs make it to my reader. So I started hunting down the recent ones I followed and was confused to find out that I still wasn’t following them. Very strange 🤔🤔🤔 There’s one blog that I keep re-following until I finally realized I wasn’t hormonal, something was amiss!

So I finally try to raise the matter with the “experts”, one responded that he was going to escalate the problem to the more expert, Expert, who has in turn not responded yet until now.

So I try to see if maybe there are others who have experienced the same problem and, indeed there have been.

It turns out that you can be “banned” from following blogs if or when you are too spirited with your spring cleaning. Apparently there’s a certain threshold number of blogs that you can un-follow at one single time and if you exceed this limit, this triggers something in the system which gets you banned. Such spirited spring cleaning behavior is attributed to bots and others of such shady behavior.

So as of this writing, I am still waiting to be un-banned. Apparently only Prof. Dumbledore can undo the hex.

😭😭😭

Has anyone of you experienced this too? How long did it take to resolve, if ever?

 

Everytime I Think of Quitting This Blog I Get A Like Or A New Follower

I’m going to be honest with you guys, since the start of this year I have felt disconnected from this blog and have thought many serious times about stopping and starting a new one. The new one would be more in step with what my current interests are and who I feel I have become.

3 years ago I was busy climbing the corporate ladder. I was independent, assertive, driven. Now, I am a full-time housewife on foreign soil. This blog talks about those 3 years of struggling to find my balance.

I now understand why they say that in order to be successful in blogging you have to have a niche, or a specific subject matter. If you blog about yourself/your life, the blog must evolve with you. And, well … I’m having trouble with this because it just seems so cluttered and messy, direction-less. I drool over blogs that are able to identify their topic of interest and blog about nothing but.

But every time I think of quitting I get a like. Or a follow. And my heart does a happy dance. Because no matter how hard I try to not let it matter, every like and new subscriber makes me proud and happy.

So I don’t know. I’ve read other bloggers who’ve come to this juncture in their blogging journey as well. I don’t know what they do. I don’t know what to do.

What would you do?

✨ Happy New Year ✨

🎄 Merry Christmas! 🎄