Tag Archives: Life

I Set Goals… And Never Came Back

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So. I realized that my last post was setting goals for February. And then I never came back.
Kind of funny how those things go. A lot has happened in the past three and a half months. Work has been extremely overwhelming. I didn’t get the job that I applied for at the end of January, much to my dismay, and in the meantime lockdown due to COVID has been dragging on and on in the Netherlands. We’ve finally had some rules loosened and vaccinations are progressing rapidly so maybe there’s a bit of light at the end of the tunnel.
Next to a lot of disappointments there has also been one big bright point. I guess people driving home the idea that you “shouldn’t look for love because it will find you” scored a point with me this year. I’ve met someone very special, after a long time of being single and basically giving up on the idea that I would meet someone that would love me for who I am. But I’ve met that someone and he’s been brightening my days for the past three months. I’m so incredibly thankful that he came into my life and I hope we can build something that will last for a long time.

As for the gaming front. Well. I guess a lot has happened and not happened.
The World of Warcraft guild I’m in has moved to Horde side. Unfortunately recruitment on Alliance side seems to have completely bled dry so they made the hard decision to swap over to Horde so Mythic raiding can happen in patch 9.1.
I moved with them and rolled a new character and am currently raiding a bit again as Elemental Shaman. I’m having a decent amount of fun although I’ve not really touched Mythic raiding yet and I’ve not really found the time to do Mythic+. I’m hoping with my workload dying down a bit I can spend a bit more time in WoW and push to get some achievements done.

Next to that I’ve been catching up in Final Fantasy XIV. I was a few patches behind and worked my way back up to the patch 5.5 content when it comes to main story. My current goals are getting the final raid of Eden done, the final Nier raid and get completely caught up with the mainstory. I’m also still leveling my crafters and almost have my Alchemist at level 80, which means I only have a few more to go after. With Endwalker getting a release date I have around 5-6 months to get caught up on everything, which should be more than enough time. I just need to remind myself to log in and actually play.

As far as League of Legends goes… I basically stopped playing somewhere in February and I’ve been struggling really hard to get back into the game. I’ve been playing ARAMs and a few normals here and there and participated in some Clash but otherwise I’ve not touched ranked in months. I’m really soul searching on what I want to play and if I still want to make the push towards Gold or not. It also hasn’t helped that I’ve been duoing with people that make me tilt. I think I’m better off staying solo and look to grind up on my own. I’ve been asking for some tips and tricks and once I can settle on a role and a champion I’m going to just start pushing again.

All in all it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster in my life the past few months but I’m finally feeling like I’m landing on my feet again. Let’s hope it will give me enough headspace to do more than just work, sleep and eat.

Establishing routines

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The above screenshot has nothing to do with the topic of my post. But I thought it was pretty so I put it as top image. This post will not be very much gaming related but more personal and real life rooted.

I realise that I kind of skipped over the whole “getting to know you” week in Blaugust. I’ve seen some posts here and there telling people’s “life stories” and gaming history. I don’t really feel the need to regale about my life on here dating all the way back to my childhood. Mostly because my childhood was pretty rough and I don’t really enjoy talking about it so yeah. Instead I want to focus on the me of the present and a few big crossroads that are coming up in my life right now.
So where do I begin…

I think the biggest part is that I’m trying to teach myself new habits. Over the last 6-7 years my physical health has been slowly declining. Back in 2012 I was pretty active at University and I was in a dedicated relationship and happy. I had a sidejob that consisted of me being a mail(wo)man which expanded during the summer as I picked up the areas for people that were going on vacation. During that time I was very healthy and very happy with who I was. I wasn’t overweight and I was happy with how I looked as a whole. Fast forward to now and I’m around 30kg overweight (about 66lbs for my US based readers) and it’s weight that I need to shed. It’s bothering me because I can’t wear the clothes that I like, it’s causing me all sorts of minor aches and most importantly I just don’t feel like my normal self. So I’ve been trying to break some old unhealthy habits and replacing them with newer healthier ones. For instance I make sure to go on a brisk 30-40min walk every day after dinner. This helps me digest better and makes sure I don’t become a couch potato for the entire evening after I’ve already had a day of sitting down at work. As added bonus I’m slowly building up stamina in preparation for my Japan trip next year and I can feel the burn in especially my legs when I come home. Next to this I’ve banned sweets and savory snacks from my home during the week aswell as soda pops. I have a weakness for Diet Coke and Coke Zero and even though they are without sugar they’re still bad for you. Because I’m only human after all I indulge myself with a liter of Coke of choice and a snack that I can drink/eat during the weekend. Anything that is left over will go under lock and key untill the next weekend and I have to say it’s surprisingly easy to just not touch anything food related after I eat dinner.
Another thing that I’ve picked up is doing around 10 minutes of yoga in the morning to wake up and stretch all my muscles. It’s just a quick way of getting centered and prepped for the day and I notice that I arrive at work much more awake than normally. Both of these things mean that I’ve had to adjust my morning and after work routines which now look something like this:
Morning: Get up > yoga > breakfast > wash up > dress > do hair and make-up > leave the house
Evening: Come home > cook & eat > walk > do dishes > shower > blog > game/hobby till 22.45 > go to bed
I’ve only started this routine last week but I hope to be able to keep this up for as long as possible. It’s still nice weather out for evening walks and in the weekends I tend to go during the day on Saturday and Sunday is my “lazy rest day” where I skip both the walk and yoga.

Another thing that I need to start thinking about and start making decisions on is where I want to head career wise. I’ve applied for a senior function within my department a few weeks back and I will hear back about it next week. I’m fully taking into consideration that I won’t get the job and then I really need to do some soul searching on what I do want to do then. I’ve been a bit stuck in my department on a job that is becoming less fulfilling over time for a while now. I have my Psychology degree but I don’t really want to pursue a career in that field. Alternatively I can just sit out my time here since I have a steady contract with the company and maybe do some courses or evening school for things that I enjoy. The big question is what is it that I enjoy. As with games I tend to get bored fast of jobs in real life. Once I learn how to do something and am at peak efficiency for said task I get bored and need a new challenge. I’m noticing that I’m just not really having fun showing up at work anymore… And that’s not really a state anyone should be in.

Finally after I lose some weight in the coming months I may want to dive headfirst back into the dating game. Being alone isn’t everything and although I don’t really seek anything serious or long-time right now it would be nice to have someone to share certain things with. I’ve been putting this off since I’m just so unhappy with how I feel right now that I don’t want to burden anyone else with it.

The coming few weeks/months will be crucial for my physical and mental wellbeing and I can only hope everything turns out for the best. If not, it won’t be because I didn’t give it my all!

Living by checklist

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You’ve undoubtedly already seen it from my August gaming goals posts but I am a checklist type of girl. I live by checklists on my job, for games and at home. It’s a habit I’ve picked up early on in life when I started to play Rollercoaster Tycoon and Zoo Tycoon back when I was still a kid. You see I would do the park challenges and they all came with “checkboxes” that needed to be marked to complete said challenge and open up more difficult park challenges. I would write down what I needed to do and cross it off the list when I was done with it. I took this habit with me to my MMO’s, especially World of Warcraft, for when I needed to craft a particularly annoying item. I’d write down what I would need, in which quantities and where to get it so I wouldn’t have to toggle between screens constantly.

Nowadays in my adult life I tend to make checklists based on my emails at work. I take inventory of everything that comes through my email and the standard tasks that need to be done and then make a priority checklist with the most urgent and important stuff up at the top and the stuff that can be done later at the bottom. Along with carving out blocks of time in my planner this is what has caused me to not go completely insane for the past year or so. Seeing as how I deal with a lot of departments and people in my current job it’s important to stay organized and level headed. It also helps that when I cross things off my checklist I have a bit of a “look what I did today” list for my boss to keep her happy aswell. It gives a bit of insight of what everyone does on a given day and that in turn tends to lead to a better distribution of tasks among colleagues.

In my personal life I tend to use task lists on chore days (like today) and when it comes to what I want to do gaming wise. This helps me achieve what I want during the day and helps me focus my time and energy better on what I want to do. I’ll make a list of all the chores that I want doing and stripe them off one by one as I finishe them up. I do the same for gaming related things. Today for instance I wrote down all the roulettes I wanted to run in FFXIV and the dailies that I wanted to do. It helps me have a sense of what I’ve done and how much I still need to do. Of course I can’t always do everything on the list. So I prioritize there aswell. What laundry do I need to do first? Do I really have to vacuum/dust today or can I go another day? Do I have any other interfering plans that means I have to move over some chores to another day in the week.
The same goes for the gaming stuff on my checklist. How much time do I have? What will take me longer, what won’t take me that long? What is the payoff for doing X over Y? In the end though I try to make my lists in such a way that I’m able to check everything off during the course of a day. Unlike work though I don’t really set aside times for what I do when. I tend to do my chores earlier in the day usually but today I spent my morning doing roulettes and dailies on FFXIV instead, giving me the rest of the day to clean my house and do groceries.

I know it sounds boring to “live” like this but in all honestly it helps me in getting stuff done. When you’re away from home for work from 8-6 five days a week and also want to maintain an inkling of a social life besides spending time on your hobbies it’s pivotal that you have some sort of planning system in place. For me it’s checklists and it’s worked so far. I’m slowly trying to combine it with setting aside special “time blocks” for certain things like I do at work. And that works for my evenings when I have even less time to use. However I believe in having the weekend be the weekend and as such I don’t want to plan certain timeframes. For then a checklist for the entire day, or half the day, will be enough.