After the last post, I realized how little time I actually spend just on me. I give all my time an energy, mostly, to my husband and stepson, and then my friends and family. But I really never take any time or effort for myself other than what I spend on my phone.
That needs to change.
You know I've been wearing my fitbit since the first of the month, and now that I have a few weeks of data, it's really interesting to see my patterns. First of all, I work at a desk job in front of a computer writing most of the day, so my little pie chart of activity is mostly "sedentary". I'm trying to remind myself to get up more often during the day, even if it is just to take a lap around the office, or go job in place in the bathroom where no one can see me.
Second, I sleep really poorly. Well, I knew that already, but now I have hard data! Admittedly, the geek in me just loves to log on every morning first thing to see my pretty statistics, but it has brought to my attention that while I'm in bed for 9-10 hours a night, I actually sleep closer to 5. No wonder I'm always tired when I get up! I'm hoping being more active will have an impact on this, too.
Third, I can eat good all day long, doing the right things, and not too much. But as soon as I walk in the front door at night, all bets are off. I usually get home ravenous, and I don't tend to track my evening meals until the next morning, and that needs to change. If I have to go to my computer or phone and write it down every time I eat at night the same way I do during the day, I think I'll be a bit less inclined to munch my way through the evening.
As I gather more data and statistics on myself and my habits, I'll continue to update here. I'm debating paying for fitbit's premium package to get access to even MORE beautiful data, but for now, I'm still trying to establish my baselines. I find it incredibly appropriate and amusing that it is technology, in the end, that is really starting to allow me to change ingrained habits and attitudes I've had all my life. The siren song of data and technology - I can't resist.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Friday, January 14, 2011
Addicted to my phone
Does anyone else grab the phone to check email before they even get out of bed? I do. My phone is my alarm, so it's the first thing I grab anyway - yay snooze! - but it goes beyond that. I check my email and clear my morning inbox, run AppBrain to check for any app updates, and read my daily Bible verses before my eyes are even fully open. I also like to check the "Hot Today" list on AppBrain to see if there's anything new I want to install. When I finally roll out of bed, I've probably spent 5-10 minutes on my phone already.
It seems to me this is probably the sign of an addiction.
In the car, I have a mount for my phone, and I use it as sort of a heads-up display. I DON'T text and drive, or check emails while the car is in motion, but I freely admit that when I'm at a stoplight and know I'll be there a few minutes, I'll do a quick check.
At work, my phone sits right in front of me all day. Partially because that's when I charge it, and I like to keep an eye on it to make sure it's unplugged when the battery is full, but I won't kid myself - I'm doing it because I like to check my phone. I have no idea how many times I day I check AppBrain (that, in and of itself, is an addiction). I keep an eye on the notifications bar to tell me when I have new emails or texts. And then I go on my computer to respond to said emails, although I'll text back from the phone.
My calendar is also on my phone, and is the only widget I use. It has both my personal appointments as well as my work calendar, so I'm checking it constantly to make sure I don't miss an interview, or to ensure I get to where I need to go after work.
When it's not sitting on my desk at work, my phone is usually in my pocket. Going potty? Stick the phone in the pocket. Going out to lunch? Pocket. Walking around the house? Pocket. Although at home, if I'm sitting on the couch, I will put it on the coffee table in easy reach.
In short, I have a serious phone addiction problem. I get anxiety if I don't have it where I can get my hands on it. My entire life, it seems, it organized and controlled from my phone. I cut back a while ago on checking work emails on my phone since my husband was tired of me constantly doing it, but at the same time, I've just transitioned to doing other things in place of it. I should probably cut down, but even the thought makes me twitchy. What if there's a new app I must try! What if there's an update that brings unicorns and rainbows to my dull world? What if someone sends me a link to a funny video?!
Yeah. I know. It's bad. But while I recognize the problem, I'm not sure I'm ready yet to do anything about it. After all, I still have a lot of levels of Angry Birds left to 3-star...
How about you? Are you addicted to your phone? I'd love to hear some other examples and ways you beat the addiction, or, alternatively, why you refuse to give up the habit!
It seems to me this is probably the sign of an addiction.
In the car, I have a mount for my phone, and I use it as sort of a heads-up display. I DON'T text and drive, or check emails while the car is in motion, but I freely admit that when I'm at a stoplight and know I'll be there a few minutes, I'll do a quick check.
At work, my phone sits right in front of me all day. Partially because that's when I charge it, and I like to keep an eye on it to make sure it's unplugged when the battery is full, but I won't kid myself - I'm doing it because I like to check my phone. I have no idea how many times I day I check AppBrain (that, in and of itself, is an addiction). I keep an eye on the notifications bar to tell me when I have new emails or texts. And then I go on my computer to respond to said emails, although I'll text back from the phone.
My calendar is also on my phone, and is the only widget I use. It has both my personal appointments as well as my work calendar, so I'm checking it constantly to make sure I don't miss an interview, or to ensure I get to where I need to go after work.
When it's not sitting on my desk at work, my phone is usually in my pocket. Going potty? Stick the phone in the pocket. Going out to lunch? Pocket. Walking around the house? Pocket. Although at home, if I'm sitting on the couch, I will put it on the coffee table in easy reach.
In short, I have a serious phone addiction problem. I get anxiety if I don't have it where I can get my hands on it. My entire life, it seems, it organized and controlled from my phone. I cut back a while ago on checking work emails on my phone since my husband was tired of me constantly doing it, but at the same time, I've just transitioned to doing other things in place of it. I should probably cut down, but even the thought makes me twitchy. What if there's a new app I must try! What if there's an update that brings unicorns and rainbows to my dull world? What if someone sends me a link to a funny video?!
Yeah. I know. It's bad. But while I recognize the problem, I'm not sure I'm ready yet to do anything about it. After all, I still have a lot of levels of Angry Birds left to 3-star...
How about you? Are you addicted to your phone? I'd love to hear some other examples and ways you beat the addiction, or, alternatively, why you refuse to give up the habit!
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Fitbit Update
Well, it's been a few days now, and so far, I'm really liking the fitbit, a lot. Having the little flower that grows and shrinks as I move around or sit is surprisingly motivating. Unfortunately, I have a desk job that requires me to be in front of a computer in the middle of an open floor all day, so getting more active is challenging, but I'm trying to get up and move around more, and even pace a bit while making my (healthy) lunch in the afternoon. It's still just a start, but we all have to start somewhere, right?
Friday, December 31, 2010
Getting Fit
This is the resolution for just about everyone, every year, isn't it? Get healthier, loose weight, etc. And it's mine again this year, but the difference is that I'm using geeky tools to try and help me get there.
I've been using sparkpeople.com to track, off and on, what I eat. There's a wealth of information there, and I love the site, but staying motivated to keep it up has been an issue for me. Last night, I bought a brand new Fitbit. This is basically like a pedometer on steroids, that tracks everything from your steps to estimating calories burned, to tracking your sleep patterns. In short, it is the geek's pedometer! I have been wanting one for a while, and I'm really excited that I finally got one. I have it on now, and over the next few weeks, I plan to cross-track on both sparkpeople and the fitbit site.
I'll post updates here as I go on how I like it, how it works, and how close I'm sticking to my goals of doing 5-10 minutes per day of some kind of exercise, along with trying to get up and walk around more in general. Here's hoping for a healthier 2011!
I've been using sparkpeople.com to track, off and on, what I eat. There's a wealth of information there, and I love the site, but staying motivated to keep it up has been an issue for me. Last night, I bought a brand new Fitbit. This is basically like a pedometer on steroids, that tracks everything from your steps to estimating calories burned, to tracking your sleep patterns. In short, it is the geek's pedometer! I have been wanting one for a while, and I'm really excited that I finally got one. I have it on now, and over the next few weeks, I plan to cross-track on both sparkpeople and the fitbit site.
I'll post updates here as I go on how I like it, how it works, and how close I'm sticking to my goals of doing 5-10 minutes per day of some kind of exercise, along with trying to get up and walk around more in general. Here's hoping for a healthier 2011!
Thursday, December 30, 2010
The No-CES-For-Me Blues
As CES draws ever closer, I'm really bummed I'm not going. I've never been to CES, but I trade shows for my day job pretty regularly, and this is one I've always wanted to attend. This year, seeing as I'm the technology editor for my magazine, I even applied for, and recieved, press credentials. However, sadly, I couldn't convince my editor that this is something he needed to pay for airfare and hotel for me to go to.
My magazine is a trade for the hospitality industry, and my arguements that technology introduced at CES will impact hotels down the line just wasn't enough to sway him. So I sit here getting all the releases about new products I can't check out yet, and briefings I can't attend, while my shiny badge sits on my desk and mocks me.
One of these years, I WILL make it to CES. I will find a way.
My magazine is a trade for the hospitality industry, and my arguements that technology introduced at CES will impact hotels down the line just wasn't enough to sway him. So I sit here getting all the releases about new products I can't check out yet, and briefings I can't attend, while my shiny badge sits on my desk and mocks me.
One of these years, I WILL make it to CES. I will find a way.
My Android app list
App List on AppBrain
For anyone curious about what I'm currently playing with on my phone.
Location : Address not available
Posted via Blogaway
For anyone curious about what I'm currently playing with on my phone.
Location : Address not available
Posted via Blogaway
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
The Road Trip From Hell
Okay, I'm going to preface this by noting that we make this drive every year. We know how long it takes, and we know to leave a few hours of flex time for traffic. We've also done it in bad weather, so that wasn't new either.
Tampa to Long Island. In a car. With a teenager. For Christmas.
The drive down couldn't have been any more perfect. Good weather, not much traffic. We beat our previous best time. The visit itself was amazing. I love seeing the family, and it was just nice to be back home for a few days. I've lived on Long Island for 6 years now, and I still hate the cold and snow, and I still consider myself a Floridian. I was born and bred there, and I'll probably always be a native. So getting home for the holidays is always nice, and even more so now that I have a husband and step-son who love it as much as I do, and whom my family loves too.
But the trip back home was bad. Hellishly bad. So bad, that both my husband and I were on the brink of synchronized nervous breakdowns by the time we finally got home.
First of all, the traffic. I think the whole world has gone insane. It's like people get behind the wheel, and immediately start trying to play bumper cars. We were in more near-miss accidents than I have ever been in before. People not paying attention, people cutting people off, people weaving between lanes... And while, by some minor miracle, we managed to avoid being in an accident ourselves, there were many others who weren't so lucky. It felt like we were hitting another dead stop because of an accident every few miles. Seriously. It took us SIX HOURS LONGER to get home than it has ever taken us before.
Second, was the weather. Now, in the southern states, it was beautiful. There was a blizzard that had gone through the whole east coast the day before, but in the south, whatever snow they got was either melted or meticulously cleaned off the highways. So people don't have that excuse for all the accidents. However, once we hit NJ and NY, all bets were off. Yes, they got more snow, but seriously, it's like they've never heard of something called a snow plow. I've never seen a plow job this bad. On major highways, there was barely one lane cleared out of three, and even that was so slick with black ice, we didn't dare get above about 30 mph. My car has 4-wheel drive, so that helped, but we hit quite a few patches of ice and started to skid. My husband was driving and recovered us, but we saw probably 20 cars who weren't so lucky and were stranded in snowbanks along the highways. One one exit, it hadn't even been plowed at all, and there were 4 cars all stuck there, with people standing around outside staring at each other. Keep in mind, this is at around 1am, after a full DAY had gone by since the snow fell.
So we finally get home, frazzled but in one piece. It's about 1:30am at that point, and all we want to do is sleep. We had been up for a little more than 30 hours at that point. My husband was driving because he hates being the passenger, and I can't sleep in cars. The plan was to bring the luggage upstairs, drop it in the kitchen, and everyone go pass out.
It didn't work out that way.
We live in a building owned by my husband's father. He has a real estate office downstairs, and we live upstairs. It works out nice, because we pay less in rent that we could anywhere else on the Island, and he has someone always there to keep an eye on things. When it snows, usually we're home, so my husband will shovel not only our section, but he'll walk around and shovel the office as well, even though their entrance is on the other side of the building. It's common courtesy. So, silly us, we assumed they would do the same since we weren't home for this one. Not so much. We get home to discover no one had told the men hired to shovel to do anything with our area. Our gate was completely blocked, and of course the snow shovel is in the house by the front door, since that's usually where it's needed. We had to dig out the gate with hands and feet to get it open. Once it's open, we find the snow has piled up almost to my waist. We had to wade through it, and then, of course, dig again to get the stairs going up to the door and the door itself clear enough to get in the house. At this point, it's about 2am.
Emptying the car is out of the question, so it's decided we'll actually dig out and do all that after everyone gets some sleep. My husband had taken the day off to recover from the drive, but I was supposed to be in to work in a few hours. I had a personal day I wasn't planning to use, but at that point, I knew even if I did make it in, I would be useless, so I called and left a voicemail that I would see everyone the following day.
We finally make it upstairs, and the apartment is FREEZING. The heat is connected to the downstairs, so I'm pretty sure it was just knocked out at some point, and since we weren't there to notice it, it wasn't discovered until later. Fortunately, all four cats were all okay. That fur comes in handy. We have a little electric space heater we plugged in, so things started to heat up a bit. We strip out of the clothes we had been in for 30+ hours and all we want at that point is to fall asleep. But no. The mattress was frozen solid. I didn't even know a mattress could freeze. It's one of those foam styles, and it was hard as a board. We had to sit around and wait for the space heater to warm things up enough to at least start to get it soft again before we could go to sleep. We ended up laying down when it was still hard, but at that point, being uncomfortable was less important than just laying our bodies down.
We finally get some sleep, but I wake up far earlier the next morning than I had planned because all the stress and wading through snow let the bug I had been fighting off for weeks finally take hold. I had a fever, I couldn't breathe, and my throat was sore. By the end of the day, I had no voice. But that didn't mean I cold rest, because the car was still packed. The boys dug us out, with my step-son doing a lot of the work. Ahh, to be 15 again. And we all pitched in getting everything upstairs, but then we had to unpack and get everything put away. And of course, there's really no food in the house since we hadn't wanted to leave a bunch of stuff to go bad while we were gone. I finally made some soup last night because I was starving, and sat on the couch sipping theraflu until about 8pm. At that point, I was still exhausted and feeling so bad, that I went back to bed. Unfortunately, this cold kept me up since I wasn't all that comfortable and couldn't breathe, but I did manage to get a little sleep.
Everyone is back to work today, but I have a feeling it will take us through the weekend to completely recover. We're all still frazzled and sore and tired from that long, stressful drive. Next year, we're already talking about starting to look for a flight early enough to actually get something we can afford, and barring that, we might just go with Amtrak.
Tampa to Long Island. In a car. With a teenager. For Christmas.
The drive down couldn't have been any more perfect. Good weather, not much traffic. We beat our previous best time. The visit itself was amazing. I love seeing the family, and it was just nice to be back home for a few days. I've lived on Long Island for 6 years now, and I still hate the cold and snow, and I still consider myself a Floridian. I was born and bred there, and I'll probably always be a native. So getting home for the holidays is always nice, and even more so now that I have a husband and step-son who love it as much as I do, and whom my family loves too.
But the trip back home was bad. Hellishly bad. So bad, that both my husband and I were on the brink of synchronized nervous breakdowns by the time we finally got home.
First of all, the traffic. I think the whole world has gone insane. It's like people get behind the wheel, and immediately start trying to play bumper cars. We were in more near-miss accidents than I have ever been in before. People not paying attention, people cutting people off, people weaving between lanes... And while, by some minor miracle, we managed to avoid being in an accident ourselves, there were many others who weren't so lucky. It felt like we were hitting another dead stop because of an accident every few miles. Seriously. It took us SIX HOURS LONGER to get home than it has ever taken us before.
Second, was the weather. Now, in the southern states, it was beautiful. There was a blizzard that had gone through the whole east coast the day before, but in the south, whatever snow they got was either melted or meticulously cleaned off the highways. So people don't have that excuse for all the accidents. However, once we hit NJ and NY, all bets were off. Yes, they got more snow, but seriously, it's like they've never heard of something called a snow plow. I've never seen a plow job this bad. On major highways, there was barely one lane cleared out of three, and even that was so slick with black ice, we didn't dare get above about 30 mph. My car has 4-wheel drive, so that helped, but we hit quite a few patches of ice and started to skid. My husband was driving and recovered us, but we saw probably 20 cars who weren't so lucky and were stranded in snowbanks along the highways. One one exit, it hadn't even been plowed at all, and there were 4 cars all stuck there, with people standing around outside staring at each other. Keep in mind, this is at around 1am, after a full DAY had gone by since the snow fell.
So we finally get home, frazzled but in one piece. It's about 1:30am at that point, and all we want to do is sleep. We had been up for a little more than 30 hours at that point. My husband was driving because he hates being the passenger, and I can't sleep in cars. The plan was to bring the luggage upstairs, drop it in the kitchen, and everyone go pass out.
It didn't work out that way.
We live in a building owned by my husband's father. He has a real estate office downstairs, and we live upstairs. It works out nice, because we pay less in rent that we could anywhere else on the Island, and he has someone always there to keep an eye on things. When it snows, usually we're home, so my husband will shovel not only our section, but he'll walk around and shovel the office as well, even though their entrance is on the other side of the building. It's common courtesy. So, silly us, we assumed they would do the same since we weren't home for this one. Not so much. We get home to discover no one had told the men hired to shovel to do anything with our area. Our gate was completely blocked, and of course the snow shovel is in the house by the front door, since that's usually where it's needed. We had to dig out the gate with hands and feet to get it open. Once it's open, we find the snow has piled up almost to my waist. We had to wade through it, and then, of course, dig again to get the stairs going up to the door and the door itself clear enough to get in the house. At this point, it's about 2am.
Emptying the car is out of the question, so it's decided we'll actually dig out and do all that after everyone gets some sleep. My husband had taken the day off to recover from the drive, but I was supposed to be in to work in a few hours. I had a personal day I wasn't planning to use, but at that point, I knew even if I did make it in, I would be useless, so I called and left a voicemail that I would see everyone the following day.
We finally make it upstairs, and the apartment is FREEZING. The heat is connected to the downstairs, so I'm pretty sure it was just knocked out at some point, and since we weren't there to notice it, it wasn't discovered until later. Fortunately, all four cats were all okay. That fur comes in handy. We have a little electric space heater we plugged in, so things started to heat up a bit. We strip out of the clothes we had been in for 30+ hours and all we want at that point is to fall asleep. But no. The mattress was frozen solid. I didn't even know a mattress could freeze. It's one of those foam styles, and it was hard as a board. We had to sit around and wait for the space heater to warm things up enough to at least start to get it soft again before we could go to sleep. We ended up laying down when it was still hard, but at that point, being uncomfortable was less important than just laying our bodies down.
We finally get some sleep, but I wake up far earlier the next morning than I had planned because all the stress and wading through snow let the bug I had been fighting off for weeks finally take hold. I had a fever, I couldn't breathe, and my throat was sore. By the end of the day, I had no voice. But that didn't mean I cold rest, because the car was still packed. The boys dug us out, with my step-son doing a lot of the work. Ahh, to be 15 again. And we all pitched in getting everything upstairs, but then we had to unpack and get everything put away. And of course, there's really no food in the house since we hadn't wanted to leave a bunch of stuff to go bad while we were gone. I finally made some soup last night because I was starving, and sat on the couch sipping theraflu until about 8pm. At that point, I was still exhausted and feeling so bad, that I went back to bed. Unfortunately, this cold kept me up since I wasn't all that comfortable and couldn't breathe, but I did manage to get a little sleep.
Everyone is back to work today, but I have a feeling it will take us through the weekend to completely recover. We're all still frazzled and sore and tired from that long, stressful drive. Next year, we're already talking about starting to look for a flight early enough to actually get something we can afford, and barring that, we might just go with Amtrak.
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