I have been chronicling my effort to make “dramatic changes” in my life over the course of one-hundred days. What have I actually accomplished during that one-hundred days? Not very much.Following is an annotated list, taken from my Day Twenty-Six post, of what I had hoped to accomplish over the course of 100 days. Current status has been added in italics.
- Get the house ready for a real-estate appraisal and possible listing for sale (Of three real estate agents we asked to look at our property, one was not enthusiastic about its marketability even at a considerably lower price than we would need to make a sale worthwhile, one “lost our phone number,” and one totally forgot about the appointment he had made to come out to the house.)
- Complete structural and aesthetic repairs, like painting and patching (Living room and kitchen essentially done. Bedrooms partly done. Exterior needs a lot of work.)
- Clean out the clutter! (Contents of all but three cardboard boxes from The Room of Doom have been transferred to plastic storage tubs. Tubs are temporarily stored in a neighbor’s garage. I need to bring them back home and sort through them again. The contents of roughly a dozen or so cardboard boxes were donated or otherwise disposed of.)
- Resume exercising
- Lose weight – 45 to 50 pounds (starting from 195) (Current weight: 201.8 pounds, a gain of almost 7 pounds!)
- increase cardio endurance (run ultra distances) (No jogging, a half-dozen walks in one-hundred days.)
- Pay off my credit cards (August balance: $22,058; October balance: $21,835; Current – November – balance: $21,864)
- Find or create a new career (No progress.)
- Make a living at a job I don’t hate (Disliking my job more than ever, but I’ve taken no steps to change things.)
- Make more money than I do now (Not happening… yet.)
- Have as much or more free time as I do now (I need to make better use of my “free time” rather than treating it as “free” time.)
- Write and publish eBook novels on Amazon (and other formats) (No progress. Signed up for NaNoWriMo 2014. I’ve tried the National Novel Writing Month challenge several times since 2008, and have never yet reached even 5,000 words, or even 500, let alone 50,000.)
That’s what I’ve been working toward for the past twenty-six days. Oh, and…
- Start a blog
- Post daily for 100 days (Did this!)
- Figure out how to make it look cool (Have not yet invested the time to learn how WordPress and Genesis themes work.)
- Decide if blogging is worth pursuing longer-term (Dunno yet. Some days it’s been a hassle to update. Obviously it’s not helping me succeed.)
Additionally, I no longer have a car; that is, I have a car to use, on loan from a relative, but I donated my PT Cruiser to charity because I couldn’t afford the repairs it needed. Plus, I’m sick again, with another cold, after being sick for about three weeks with one of the worst colds I’ve had in years. That means I’ve been under the weather for about twenty-five percent, a full quarter, of my “100 Days” timeline. Usually I am in fairly decent health. I think the combination of being exhausted both mentally and physically from working at a job I hate, carrying around extra weight that I can actually feel (and managing to gain rather than lose), and not getting adequate exercise or rest is leaving me more susceptible to illness. Or maybe it’s just one of those years. There have been a lot of sick kids and sick co-workers at school so far this school year.
Well. This synopsis is depressingly sobering. A hundred days have passed. I have made no major changes in my life. I have made no improvements to my lifestyle, to my living situation, to my working situation, to my financial situation, or to my physical or mental well-being. And yet here I thought I was trying.
Next steps:
- Read back through the first 100 days and see if I can learn anything.
- Make a revised list for the next 100 days.
- Do it.
- If, after 100 more days, I can document no improvement….