Snow all around

I went to church this weekend and was able to log my first hours in the "Spiritual" category of my 2012 records.  After that, it all went uphill.  Or down, depending on how you want to look at it.

We sledded the junk out of Grand Mere that afternoon.  After getting anywhere between 4 and 10 inches of powdery cold fluff the night before depending on how far away you are from the Lake, the little dunes were just frigid with anticipation of our sleds.  A little group of us headed over, armed with new and old sleds, and even a couple of inner tubes.

I learned that rushing downhill in powdery snow into the wind is akin to getting up in the morning, pointing a high-powered fan toward your face, and pretty much slashing your cheeks and forehead with sandpaper you'd left in the freezer overnight.  Spectacular.  Needless to say, we took turns sharing a couple pairs of ski goggles and I was thankful for my beard.

iMoves aren't the best for iPhones, sorry.

I think I only said "I'm going to live somewhere where it snows like this someday" half a dozen times.  Even so, Emily got a little tired of reminding me... I already do.

The sunset turned all the snow pink and red for several minutes as we walked back to the cars.  We were cold and tired and super ready for game night.

After a few hours of popcorn I went to bed.  Okay just kidding.  We also played games, including Risk on Jeremiah's homemade "board," but sometimes I wonder if I could survive on a diet of popcorn alone.  Maybe flavored in crushed up vitamins now and then for a little bonus nutritional value.

Section of the Risk "board" (he made it on a sheep skin)

To round off a pretty stellar 24 hours, I dragged myself from the depths of slumber to witness Bjoerndalen* of Norway win his bajillion and third biathlon race.  He came from behind and this was the 17th year he's won a race.  King of Biathlon, they call him.  It was fantastic.  Another sighting of an historical sporting event randomly caught at a strange time checked off my list [of unknown items and length].

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*Quick description of this 2-minute clip of the race:  We see Svendsen (Norway;red) and Fourcade (France; black and yellow) shooting their fourth (and last) 5-shot round of shooting during the 12.5km race.  They are in the lead at the moment, both of this race and of the World Cup rankings, incidentally, so it's significant how this race turns out.  Fourcade ends up missing two shots, and Svendsen three, meaning they have to do two and three small penalty laps of 150 meters respectively.  This gives Bjoerndalen, who we see start shooting at about :35, a chance to catch up if he hits all his targets.  He does!  And for the rest of the 2.5 or so kilometers, Fourcade trails by just a few seconds (he trailed by only five at one point and ended 13 seconds behind), coming in second, and Svendsen ended up getting passed by a couple folks for fifth, I believe.  Thus, Bjoerndalen, at 38 years old, becomes the oldest to with a World Cup biathlon race (according to that YouTube description anyway), and I think sets (or maintains?) a record of winning at least one race for over a decade and a half.  Get it?  Awesome stuff.

The Professional Crastinator and His Record Keeping

I've been working on data entry for the last couple of days.  Really, I was supposed to have it done by, say, the 3rd of January.  Instead, I have procrastinated as if I was getting paid to, and I'm only getting somewhere today.

I've always liked keeping track of things, but I haven't always kept up with it, especially the past couple years.  This year, since I've been a lazy, unemployed slacker I decided I might as well log all the wasted hours of movie-watching, reading, exercise, etc. that I'm doing.  The secret goal my good self has is that my bad self will see how atrociously my precious time is spent and slowly, subtly, surreptitiously begin to weed itself out of my existence.  Maybe even bad self will want a job someday.

So, I've been scribbling down most of my "significant" activities throughout the days since January 1 in a little yellow notepad.  I think I've settled on a handful of basic categories (mental, detrimental, physical, spiritual, social, and sleep) and would like to henceforth divide my main activities into said categories.


Up to this point the majority of my records only show TV and movie watching, reading, running and workouts, and a little bit of other stuff like sports watching.  But I'd like to start keeping track of time spent with family and friends (like planned time or game time or the like), journaling and writing, and ideally, work and God time eventually.  I'll have to add this blogging time in.  It will be in my mental category.  Ha.

So now you know.  Here's an example of the graphs* I find helpful.  They are the first five weeks of this year, by time spent (in hours) in main categories.  (Note: Week 1 is where detrimental was almost a full-time job.)  (And EDIT:  it doesn't seem to be animated in the post itself, but it's a .gif so if you click it you can see the animation....)

I'm curious if anyone else I know does stuff like this.  I suppose keeping track of exercise, like miles run or something, is more common (I am starting another daytum account* for that, too, and keep track of it at dailymile.com, bee tee dub; exciting, I know), but maybe not so many people keep such ridiculous records?

*I'm using daytum.com, a useful, albeit not-updated-anymore, site for my online record keeping.  It has a few ways to visually illustrate your records (charts, timelines, etc.) that I like.  It took me a while to set mine up the way I like it, with the right categories and items and accuracy when displayed by a certain time frame, but I think I finally got it.