Welcome to August! Let’s take a look back and forward.
in retrospect, July was a month of stress at work for me. A few big events, and then the boss being out of town for the latter half of the month shifted my attention. That’s what I feel when I look at my accomplishments for the month.
But, digging deeper, I’ve been running a lot of D&D. Ravonn’s Tower was spun up this month, and I’ve run something like 11 sessions of my campaign. That’s meant reworking rules, building dungeons, and a lot of other bits of concern. It’s good to be running a weekly game again, and while I have some hangups of not being prepared in ALL OF THE DIRECTIONS, it’s been an amazing time so far and I’ve been having a blast.
Also, artistically, my art group had a pageant this month, and I tend to use participation in that as a way to focus on develop some artistic skills as opposed to doing things the way I always do. So, I did some blender stuff. Hopefully, I learned some things? It’s hard, building fluency in software like blender. There’s so much to learn, and most of it is just small things of learning how to take what you have, what you want to do, and smooth the transition from one to another. Learning new hot keys, lighting tricks, modifiers, and how to identify what the hell is happening with something that should be simple, but has taken 10 hours and works first time if you try it from scratch but how would you know that??
…There’s a reason I make it my yearly Artistic Improvement Push. 10 hours modelling a rope based on a minute long real time tutorial is ridiculous.
Another thing I did in July was a money-based challenge. I was looking at my spending habits and was sort of disgusted at how much money I was spending on Fast Food. So I set myself a rule for the month: No spontaneous fast food. If I knew the day was going to be rough and that I should pick up pizza for lunch, that was fine but deciding to hit Taco Bell or Slim Chickens on the way home was not. So I started to get food to make at home, and focused more on making food at home. Here’s some numbers:
July cost me $50 less than June did all told. I had more than doubled my grocery, but did 1/6th of spending on Fast Food. $20 of the fast food was on the first and the second, before I decided to do this challenge.
The real trick with grocery was that I wasn’t really meal planning, sort of grabbing whatever looked good. And needing to grab porkchops on the regular meant I was inside of a Walmart, where they are doing everything they can to sell me things I didn’t go in there for. With a bit of effort, I think I can get the grocery numbers down. We’ll see what August holds.
August
Speaking of the month ahead, let’s look at my thoughts.
First, related to some of July’s stress, a gym opened up in the same parking lot as my work. Feels like a sign, so I signed up and have gone twice so far this month. I have a general shape of a plan, spending about an hour after work starting with a small bit of upper body muscle, then hitting the treadmill for 45 minutes. I don’t think I can think of a single aspect of my life that wouldn’t be better if I lost a few pounds. We’ll see how it goes although I don’t like treadmill walking.
I am listening to a few podcasts while walking, though, especially Comic Labs, a… successor…? podcast to Webcomics Weekly, made by the people who did the Stripped documentary, its been really interesting so far.
And, well, listening about comics has me thinking about comics. Enough that I am dusting off an old hiatus project and thinking about that while I try not to get sucked in to screens that seem to be split equally between movies I don’t want to watch and advertisements.
I’m happy to report that the next arc of Rachael in Gameland: Pokemon Redd has been roughly plotted, where enough of the events actually make sense to me. I’m working on a prettier pass, the sort of thing I can hand to someone to make sure that the pitch for the arc doesn’t have any glaring plot holes. That’ll be done on my Patreon, for those who are okay with spoilers.
At the end of the month, I’ll get to go see Bug Hunter in concert again. A lot more of my family are going, so that will be fun. I’ll also see Weird Al, but that’s in September.
I think those are the big ticket items. Ask questions if you have them at any of my places, my blog, deviant art, patreon, or wherever you can find me.
Ciao!
The planned fast food change is inspiring!