Really enjoying cycling in the warmer weather. Always have too. Not sure why eventually I stop. Tire of the same old routes? Not letting that happen at the moment. Exploring Leicester. Great thing about Leicester is it's practically impossible to get lost. If you keep going for long enough, you will hit a familiar main road.
Tonight I did start down a single carriageway section of the A563 that suddenly became a busy stretch of dual carriageway with absolutely no way off. Two police cars rolled past, and for a moment I wondered if I was breaking any laws. Then I remembered that I really don't believe in those types of law. Why do I need to remind myself of that?
Either way, common sense would dictate probably don't cycle on that type of road too often. I've seen and been in cars that use that stretch (you know, the one that goes past the Meridian business and leisure parks) as a racing straight. Natural law says if a car side swipes you at over 100mph you'll probably die.
What happened this week?
1. The food thing continues to go reasonably well. I did eat a few snacks. This is the dumb part of me that thinks i'm doing so well I can have a treat, which of course negates how well it's going. The portion thing is going very well. I now realise that crap about only knowing you're full 20 minutes after eating is at least partially true. That doesn't mean you don't feel hunger later because you ate less than you're used to, but therein lies the real challenge. Must keep machine snacks in check. I've killed the salad portion of lunch now. I'm sick to death of ASDA's ridiculously inconsistent bags of salad, and the tuna actually tastes great on it's own. It is a shame to lose a veg portion, but I eat a banana at breakfast, an apple mid morning, a pear at lunch, an apple mid afternoon and have a veg portion with the evening meal, so I seem to be hitting the all important 5 a day target that someone else set for everyone anyway.
2. I have not even managed to fit in a game of Poker tonight due to cycling. Must remember to log in and collect free chips before bed. Rule remains, and adhered to.
3. Another failure. I went out with work people at the weekend and absolutely intended to take my camera. As it turns out it wasn't really that kind of night anyway, though enjoyable. I remain less and less convinced that this was ever a sensible goal, but until I'm ready to kill it, I continue to fail it.
4. Also out locally with friends this week. All great early on but seemed to get weirdly tense later. I think I'm about at that inevitable age where the enjoyment of going to clubs wanes. I've never been good at hearing voices over music, and consequently if I'm not enjoying the general vibe of the night I get bored very easily because I can't talk to anyone. It just seems stupid when I was having a great time with the same people two streets away half an hour ago.
Harder Stuff
1. Still thinking about what to record in May. Played with a few ideas on Sunday. I'm not coming up with much at the moment. As my skill level has increased, as slightly as that may be, I'm less impressed playing the really basic bar(re) chord stuff I used to stick to, but a move to open chords and capos has led me to a slight stagnation. Put a capo on, play an open D shape, hammer on the pinky, move to the A shape, hammer on again, move to G shape. Time I think to start properly learning the other chords rather than just discovering them accidentally.
2. I officially have no work goals as of my review last Tuesday, which went reasonably well, although I did at one point freeze up when trying to recall a policy from memory. I don't like that these reviews have started to become exam-like. To me being able to talk around the literature of a policy in an intelligent manner proves far more than parroting it's bullet points. Anyways, this goal takes a break until I find out if I have achieved the competency level I wanted to. If so...
3. ...I'll need to do some more towards this goal. I said that core competency in my current role was as far as I wanted to go in the company I work for some time back. By now I had hoped that i'd be a bit closer to some ideas about what i'd do after that, but as anybody reading this will know, this hasn't happened. Needless to say, I continue to be thinking.
4. Exercise. I have cycled four times this week, lifted once and swam once. The pool was chopped in two again but I hogged a wall this time. This is a great idea. Nobody can avoid you on one side, and the only way you can possibly avoid them is to swim right across and round them, which would just be silly, right? Exactly. So what happens? They have to get out of the way. Widths still suck, but it was a lot better than the previous week. The astute will notice that the extra cycling has pitched me way above the goal this week. I'm not going to change the goal, but I'd like to keep this up. There are certainly times when cycling that I feel I absolutely must be getting great exercise.
Okay this is going to go on a bit now.. Specific goal stuff over for this week.
A bit of clarity hit me this weekend. I've been whining about seemingly having a lower level of confidence now than I did 4-5 years ago, when I feel I was happier. I've realised that the confidence came from achievement at work. Between mid 2002 and late 2005 I was constantly moving forward. I actually hit a lull in late 2004 and remember desperately trying to find a new job, but then in April 2005 I took an opportunity to start commuting to another location, which led by application to the job at the level I still remain at (although doing different work). By the company's own HR literature, I am about where I should be three years later, if not slightly ahead, but the somewhat fast track from low level admin to team leadership perhaps set unrealistic expectations. By those expectations I'd be at the next level now (the watershed £30k job)
The problem with the above is that I keep saying I don't much care about my job and that I want to follow a different path, but if it's so clear that I gained my self-confidence through advancement at work, and began to lose it again through failing to advance further, then maybe I'm not placing enough importance on work in amongst all this chatter.
At some point I got re-interested in technology and convinced myself that I wanted to be involved with it, but whenever I try to get back to coding, I get bored very quickly. More so than I do when coding VBA at work (which I still hate using as a self-selling point because it sounds like I write macros, and what I do is orders of magnitude lot better than this).
Somewhere I lost sight of my strengths, or rather allowed myself to believe that my strengths lacked significance because plenty of other people had them.
At uni I could tell for a good while that I had top 10% potential, and also knew plenty of people that I suspected may fail. At some point my priorities changed for reasons that today seem completely pointless, and although I took a good final run after I got past the pointlessness, I never got back to where I should have been. Most of the aforementioned people ended up passing with the same mediocre honours as I did. The Maths of a CS degree was a problem for me, but I know not all that deep down that I was 1st class material. I'm the idiot that worked hard in the first year and then less so later. Did it backwards.
I'm definitely rambling here, and these dots don't necessarily connect. What I'm doing here is exploring motivation. In uni my motivation changed and changed back. I was able to work hard again. At work my motivation changed and changed back. I was able to work hard again. Then it changed again, but since then, it hasn't changed back. I feel little incentive to work hard, but the only time I ever enjoy work would be when the day flies past because I'm working hard. I have plenty to do, but it's all so mediocre and similar to the last piece of work.
What did I learn? I need new motivation. If I think back, writing this blog this year, I can't recall talking about WHY I wanted to do something, just THAT I wanted to something else.
That's the thing to think about now. Apologies for the incoherence beyond the goal review. Helped me a little. This laptop really gets warm.
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