Goals from Last Week – How Did it Go?

Writing

• journal about Moonchild (writing project) at least once – oops, I completely forgot. I usually journal about it on Sunday mornings and today I just got up and went to my regular Moonchild work.
• collect all relevant old notebooks from storage and bring them up into my apartment – still on here, gotta do it – DONE today!
• work on Moonchild all seven days – and to get more specific with what I’m working on with this book project, my goal convert all reeeeeally old Moonchild files that are locked in old ClarisWorks and AppleWorks files (.cwk) into files I can read and search – DONE – there were two files that were too corrupted to be salvaged, but all the rest are salvaged, converted, and saved.
• work on blog at least five days – DONE.
• journal about blog at least once – DONE.
• bank two Better Call Saul recaps for this site – DONE – recaps for “Uno” and “Mijo” are written and scheduled.

Music

• seven guitar practice sessions – did six, will do one extra this coming week
• get up through song 90 of book one of my Hal Leonard Guitar Method Complete Edition book – instead of a new lesson this week, it’ll be a lot of practice integrating from the last several lessons – DONE.
• seven keyboard practice sessions – DONE.
• get up through page 55 in my Keyboard Musician for the Adult Beginner book – yes, this is the same page as last week; it’s a loaded page – and get through the G major/minor scale building and exercises – DONE.

Lifestyle

• sleep without the phone (a struggle you can read about here) – this will put me at 153 nights (five months) in a row – DONE, except my math last week was bad, 147 + 7 = I’m up to 154.
• read through page 477 in All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, which I’m reading for the NOAH (National Organization for Albinism and Hypopigmentation)’s PWA Book Club – DONE. I’m LOVING this book, sad I’ll soon be done with the whole thing!
• write Morning Pages every day – six out of seven.

Reflections on the Week

General

This week felt like a mixed bag. Like two weeks ago, I had some aspects of my week that were particularly emotionally draining, specifically some difficult conversations that had to be had.

I’m noticing that when I have something like that hanging over me, I tend to get really thrown off, both by the time and the energy investment of intense, difficult emails and conversations. And that’s probably pretty normal. And despite all that, this was a pretty successful week.

Nothing got too off-track this week, but I did fall off a lot of the goals on Friday, which was the day of doing difficult things. That’s the day I skipped Morning Pages, and skipped guitar practice, and also fell off all my exercising habits, and felt all out of whack all day.

I think sometimes, when you’re in the middle of something really big and life-changing it’s easy to underestimate the toll and the drainage that comes with it. And I’ve already been running on empty for a long time. I’ve had to have several “I just can’t right now” conversations with a lot of different people over a lot of different things.

For some brief moments on Friday afternoon, and parts of yesterday, I thought I might have corona but I think it was just emotional exhaustion. Which let’s be clear, I’ll take the exhaustion over covid any day.

Having these goals, and these check-ins, has been so helpful in just keeping going, making space for things that matter a lot to me, some that I’ve ignored for far too long.

Better Call Saul

Last week, I announced that Better Call Saul recaps are coming and set a goal of getting two recaps written. I’m going to set a goal for two more this coming week. Perhaps the most indulgent and fun goal on the list.

I’ll post the first recap next Sunday morning, August 30th, and then will release weekly episode recap posts every Sunday morning thereafter.

I have no idea when the final season will start airing. I know the Better Call Saul writers had just re-entered the Writers’ Room when quarantine started, which strikes me as pretty good timing as it was probably easy-ish to shift that virtual, but who knows when they’ll be ready for filming and production, especially with a longer season to plot out, and all the corona complications that could occur.

If it turns out that the new season is slated to come out before these recaps are caught up, I’ll adjust the schedule so that all the recaps are out before the new season starts airing. Right now, with 50 episodes to recap, and posting one per week, the recaps will run weekly through August 8, 2021. I hope I have to move up that timeline because it would mean new episodes sooner, but really who the hell knows at this point.

I’m really enjoying rewatching the series. I forgot how good it is, how much I love the world. A friend is watching Breaking Bad for the first time, and discussing that has also brought me back into this universe. I know some don’t love the slowness of Better Call Saul, the time it takes developing, the more mundane dramas around which law firm Jimmy might work with, but I love the slow and nuanced nature.

Goals for this Coming Week

Writing

• journal about Moonchild (writing project) at least once
• work on Moonchild all seven days
• work on blog at least five days
• journal about blog at least once
• bank two more Better Call Saul recaps for this site

Music

• seven guitar practice sessions
• get up through song 91 of book one of my Hal Leonard Guitar Method Complete Edition book – the keen observer will realize that’s just one more song, and usually I do a couple, but this is a really long song (most are just a couple lines, this is a page and a half) and has a melody part, a harmony part and the rhythm part, so seems like more than enough to tackle
• seven keyboard practice sessions
• Finish page 55 in my Keyboard Musician for the Adult Beginner book – yes, this is the same page as last week and the week before; it’s a loaded page with a lot of transposing, which I’m new to doing so my goal is to get through the rest of the transpositions and then move on

Lifestyle

• sleep without the phone (a struggle you can read about here) – this will put me at 161 nights in a row
• FINISH All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, which I’m reading for the NOAH (National Organization for Albinism and Hypopigmentation)’s PWA Book Club
• write Morning Pages every day

I’m writing this a bit earlier (though still going to release in the evenings as usual) because tonight when this weekly post would usually go live, I’ll be getting a PEDICURE. First of any sort of spa anything this year, and I’m really excited, and also really trust the place that my friend and I are going.

Right now, though, it’s still morning, and I’m about to go crack out the crockpot for the first time this season and make some food so dinner will be ready when I come home after the pedi.

Have a great week everyone! If you have any goals you want to share in the comments, please do!

-April

Notes:

• Morning Pages, referred to in the lifestyle section of these goals, is the practice of writing three long-hand pages right after waking up in the morning.
• You can read about them in this post where I introduce what they are and my history with them, and you can find all posts that mention Morning Pages here.
• The practice comes from The Artist’s Way, the seminal creativity book by Julia Cameron. I’m doing a weekly column called The Artist’s Way Reflections, which was introduced here in my blog re-entry post.
• Moonchild is the name of my memoir project, which you can read about in more detail on my Memoir page or on this old post with a rough sketch. You can also find LOTS of other posts about it here.
• You can check out other posts about goals (goalposts?) here.