Or “My Most Productive Week in a While, With A Few Complaints Thrown in For Fun”
First off, lets start with PLOT. I’ve noticed 3 major things with my weight loss ‘program’
1. I’m finding exercise progressively easier. I’m currently doing 40 sit ups a night and happily walking/cycling at least 4 miles a day. I’ve noticed a steady decrease in how tired I am after each bought of exercise. Now the obvious result of this is that I’m going to have to increase the amount of exercise in order to keep the benefit up.
2. People have begun to comment on my appearance, in a positive way I may add. I had to laugh when Viv told me that her aunt commented that I looked like I had lost weight and Viv was worried that I’d be offended by that. The only way I could have been offended was if her aunt had instead said “Davyd isn’t looking as fat any more” which would have still be encouraging. I’m finding this kind of feedback much more motivating that looking at scales every morning.
3. I’m not losing fat from the desire areas of my body in the order I’d prefer. In order to illustrate this, let me refer you an diagram.
This is me:
Or, more accurately, this is me:
Ideally this is how I’d like to lose weight, with red areas being most urgent, orange being second most, yellow being third most and green being least urgent:
Now this is how I’m currently losing weight:
As you can see, I’ve got much thinner/less flabby arms, but not much change in my stomach, sides and chest. My face is the only area that I’m currently happy with. As I am now, I have knobbly wrists and stringy arms, lol. But it’s still weight loss and I’m going to keep working at it.
Now for something different. This week has been pleasantly productive for me. I’ve finally managed to sort out my job seekers allowance. As some of you may know, I’m currently unemployed and as such have had to resort to claiming benefits. The first of these was job seekers allowance, a not insubstantial sum of £50 a week, which goes a long way when you know how to shop sensibly and eat healthily. After claiming several weeks ago, I received my first payment today, meaning I don’t have to stress over phone and internet bills, which is a weight off my mind.
Secondly there’s housing benefits, in order to help pay my rent. Now I’ve been even more stressed about this simply because it’s taking so long and I’m already behind on this months rent. But today I got a great phone call. My landlord had received my email about needing a proof of tenancy letter and a break down of inclusive bills. Not only is he not annoyed over the delay, he also said that he would make my share of the bills (in other words, how much of my all inclusive rent goes towards said bills) less. Officially this is because I rent the smallest room. What this does mean is that I will receive more towards my rent. Once I’ve got this letter and all my proof is sent off, hopefully it will all finally be sorted.
On a more recreational note, I’ve finally finished writing my second Dungeons and Dragons campaign; volume 2: Evil in the Dark. As some of you know, I dungeon master for a group of my friends and my girlfriend, and as part of this I’m writing a series of custom campaigns. Now these aren’t short little dungeon delves, they’re full on stories. The last volume, The Clockwork Quest, was 3 chapters (a chapter being roughly equal to one in game day) spread over 40 pages. This volume that I’ve just finished is 5 chapters over 55 pages with more monsters and loot than I’ve ever had before. Thankfully my group has scheduled to play fortnightly on a Sunday, which is working out really well, with the next meet up this coming Sunday. I’m currently working on a fictionalised account of the players adventures which I’m going to try and publish on here shortly.
Finally, I’ve managed to fix my adobe CS3 master collection. To add a dash of context, a few months ago, thankfully just after I finished uni, I got a rather unpleasant message about serial authentication server errors when I booted up Photoshop cs3. Since then, no matter how many times I tried to install master collection, none of the programs would successfully install, meaning I was stuck using Photoshop 7! I mean considering that we’re on CS5, using cs3 is pretty dated (Photoshop CS3 was released in April 2007, Photoshop 7 in 2002!) I had all but given up, resigned to the fact that my install file was damaged some how. Then I had an idea, I would install it on my girlfriends computer to check it worked. And it did! So I now knew that I needed to fix the problem on my computer. After a bit of research, I found out the adobe clean script, used to remove all tracers of adobe cs3, had a ‘secret’ level 3 clean mode. Normally you’re only given two levels of clean, with the second being the most thorough. Previously this hadn’t worked for me. On discovering there was a third level, I thought hell, I’d give it a shot. And after a few restarts, a chkdsk scan and a long install, I finally had a working copy of adobe master suite cs3! Spectacular! The main motivation for this was the news that I might be getting a small inheritance sum from my gran, who passed away last year. This made me think about what would be the best way to spend this, and one of the first things that came to mind was investing in an Intuos4 Large graphics tablet by Wacom. Now, I’m not going to bore you with specs, let me just say this thing is a beauty! OLED buttons, touch wheel with 4 modes for zoom, opacity or layer scrolling, 2048 levels of pressure sensitivity as well as tilt sensitivity and a widescreen work area bigger than A4 all means this is the device I need to start producing some serious portfolio work. Now this money is definite, but if it does come through, I will hopefully be able to start publishing some sketches and digi-paintings to my deviant art.
Well that’s all for this longer than average blog. Look after yourself internet peoples!
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