Week 4 Evaluation

Rough sketch of a (now discarded) creature design done over the Sabretooth Tiger skull that I shared previously in these blogs. Still lot’s of room for improvement.

Well it doesn’t look like I’ll reach my numbers goals for this week. Maybe it was too much? Too daunting? Or is the knee pain that I’ve been having since last week a legitimate reason?

Here’s what I do know. It will be amazing if I manage to get to my normal 1000 for the week. Knee pain has been getting worse and even hurts when doing things like Downward Dog (a replacement for pushups). The only day where the pain got better instead of worse was yesterday, Friday, when I allowed myself to not do any Kung Fu at all and only walked a little to do things like let the dogs out. It worked out because I was also disproportionately tired yesterday compared to actual energy output. Haven’t had that lack of energy thing happen for a while.

I don’t know what I did to the knee nor precisely when I did it. It’s functional but painful. There’s swelling but not overtly noticeable. If more rest doesn’t make it better I guess I’ll have to see the physician again.

As for the art… ugh! I can copy photos so easily but trying to take a side view design and now do a ¾ view of it is driving me… it’s frustrating, and I need to do five different ones for my homework. This is one of the reasons I needed to work on my art, to fill in these gaps of skill. I know I’ll get through it but it’s frustrating during the process, especially when it is so easy to do with drawings of buildings. Straight line things (buildings, boxes, cubes) are easy but complex curves (organic forms) are hard. It was interesting too because it wasn’t all that hard to draw a creature over the skull I drew before (copied / studied) but to do a drawing without that structure to draw over is not so easy.

That said, I did get some sketching done in my sketchbook. I want to fill it by the end of the year so it’s nice to get some rough sketches onto a few pages. Plus I needed to take a break from the frustration of the creature design while still moving forward with art. That felt good.

One thing that did get accomplished this week was hand form repetitions. That was mostly thanks to doing a lot of repetitions during IHC class. Paid for it with knee pain but it’s nice that I got at least one goal completed this week.

As I take this approach in blogging, tracking, goal setting, I’m noticing other areas that need to be addressed in ways that I never did before. I guess it’s really true, “what gets measured gets managed”. This resulted in me updating my task notes and organizing them according to my goals so that I can plan better. I try to have at least one to three task(s) per day that goes towards one of my major goals, and I try to keep the major goals to a minimum, which is something that came with decluttering my life.

Numbers:

Pushups (modified): 3156 / 50,000

Situps (modified): 3081 / 50,000

Weapon Form: 157 / 1000

Hand Form: 100 /1000

Random Acts of Kindness: 37 / 1000

Sparring: 20 / 1000

Kilometres: 85 / 1609

Memorize “Mastery”:

Nurture Relationships:

Blogging: 8 / 52

Art Like it’s My Job: 23 / 252 days

Declutter my life: 7 days where some decluttering was done

Greatcoat project:

Improved flexibility: 8 days