2020 Goals Update - Aug

Well, this will be a disappointing evaulation of what I've done so far this year.

I had all these grand plans back in December, of things I could do to be more productive with my free time. Not so much has changed in the last 8 months. I had planned to do a monthly post to give an update on my progress, but because there was so little progress there were no updates coming. I even started one a couple of months ago and then abandoned it because it was too pathetic to talk about what I hadn't done. Also, the world went crazy in March, so there's also that.

But no longer.

I mean, it's still fairly pathetic, but not entirely. And I thought I'd try to follow Cousin Rish's example. Back in February, he and a friend made a goal to write every day, and he also posts a daily update on his blog of his progress. And he has stuck with it for nearly 200 days now. Even when he only writes 50 words or something, he still has managed to write every day, and write an update about it. So, I shall endeavor to be more consistent, like him. Check out his blog at Rish's Ramblings.

Things to accomplish in 2020
These were my goals to work on this year. (Read the original post, if interested.)

Weekly Goals 1 & 2: Bike and Watch Clone Wars M, W, S
Current progress: Zero. None. Nil
Rish and I did watch the Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian, and that was rather interesting. Made me want to watch The Mandalorian Season 1 again. And I will probably re-watch that before I make any progress on Clone Wars or Rebels.
As for exercising, yeah right, like I even need to answer this. I thought I could work on two goals at once by biking while watching Clone Wars/Rebels. Well, it shouldn't take a genius to realize that if I didn't do the easy one, I certainly wasn't going to do the hard one.

Weekly/Monthly Goals: Donate plasma T, F, and maintain 50 items listed on eBay
Progress: This is going well. The plasma is a steady income that helps me make my credit card payments, but by itself it's not enough, so I have been pretty good about keeping a steady churn on eBay. I'm not always at 50, not even at 40 consistently enough, but I have been regularly listing new things and making sales and covering my bills, with enough left over to let me buy stuff now and again.

General Goal: Plan and budget for toy purchases
Status: ehhh, not too bad. I had too many preorders in place that I'm still paying for on credit cards, but I am improving. I have been better about not pre-ordering every little thing that strikes my fancy, trying to be more picky about what I buy, and trying to cut down on the higher end expensive toys. It helps that the new GI Joe Classified line is an inexpensive but pretty decent quality line that has captured my attention, so I can scratch the buy-something urge and the be-satisfied-with-purchase urge, without spending a fortune.

Weekly Goal: Clean out and organize my storage and display rooms.
Progress: Well, here I've actually made some progress, and the progress I'm most proud of.
Turns out, the trick was to offer to pay my 9 and 12 year olds $5 an hour for helping me with the unpleasant work of moving all the crap around and sorting things out. And they've done a great job. One of the first boxes I pulled out of the storage room was a box of DC figures I intended to sell, and they immediately asked if they could have some of them. I started looking some of them up on eBay, thinking I could sell figures to them for half of what I could get on eBay (a family discount price you could say). There are several figures they want that I can get $10-$15 for, and so have been exchanging one figure for an hour's work from them, and they were really motivated for a couple of weeks to work an hour an evening for me. Hopefully this continues for a few more weeks until everything is all cleaned up, cleaned out, packed up, until I have two empty rooms I can start over fresh with.

We've cleaned up and and generally organized stuff that was just in piles in bags or stacked loose on shelves into to-sell and to-keep boxes, and made the storage room, maybe not presentable, but not a shameful eyesore, to where I can actually walk into the room now, and reach almost everything on the shelves, whereas before I could basically stand in the doorway or kindof reach the closet where I put the currently-on-ebay stuff. It was awful, and now it's much improved.

It's hard to understand the progress, because I didn't take pictures before, but where there are boxes neatly stacked in the middle of the room was previously an avalanche of stuff and packing materials and opened figures, or the packaging for figures I had opened. More is now on the shelves and like I said, boxed and stacked semi-neatly. And now you can see the floor!





There's still a long way to go, I've basically decided I want to completely empty out the display room, anything that has a box will get put back into its box, everything else will be gathered in large boxes of like items, so once it is empty I will have a better idea of what collections I have, and maybe how much space they will need. Plus I can re-evaluate if things are worth keeping or if I'm done with them and they can be passed on to other interested parties.

Weekly Goal: Low carb diet, particularly, no sugar.
Status: Ugh, doing okay on the sugar, except for the occassional cheat because something just looks or smells too good. I don't usually enjoy the sugar right then as much as I hoped, and it makes me feel terrible later, so I will try to cut those monthly-ish cheats out.
For other low carb stuff, been having trouble sticking with it. Keep on trying, though.

Weekly Goal: Add 1 collectible photo to photo gallery, add 1 non-collectible photo to photo gallery
Status: whoops! I'm not sure I've taken any pictures with my good camera this year. Here's one each from our trip last summer. I just hate going outside, which is at odds with trying to take scenic photos, so maybe I'll try to focus more on just collection pics for the remainder of the year, and posting more pics from our Oregan/California trip last year, since I took a lot of photos, I'm sure some of them had to turn out okay.

Goal: Add 4 items to Collection wiki
Progress: I totally forgot about this goal, and have recently changed what my intentions are. Because maintaining a wiki by hand is a pain, and repetive, I decided I wanted to build my own Content Management System (why use a free out of the box solution when you can custom build your own?) where I can enter in my collection information, and design/build a dynamic web site to display said data.
I might have to rethink this, as I just noticed my web host appears to have a couple of different CMS available for me to use. I should look into them, see how they compare feature-wise to what I can/have built, and how they are with the web-side of things. Because I've already built an easy-to-use java swing app and have started doing the data entry. The hard part is photographing everything, and then designing a nice web front-end for the thing. If one of the CMS' my host supports has nice web templates, and I can find a nice way to map the data I have in mind to their DB structure, that would probably be the way to go. As long as I can export a copy of the data to have a backup copy of.

Monthly Goal: Post monthly progress updates
Status: Well, it's Aug and this is the first one, so you can do the math yourself.

Monthly Goal: Make/Upload 1 Video Review
Status: Nope, no plans to even do so any time soon.

Monthly Goal: Monthly What I Got Posts?
Status: None so far, obviously, but I do like the idea. Maybe I'll try to go back once a week and catch up.

Q1 Milestone: Lose 30 pounds
Progress: Nope! I did well-ish the first month, got down 10-15 pounds, then stagnated, gave up, and have gained it all back.

Q1 Milestone: Complete Ocular Max Assaultus
Status: Well, I was all caught up, until just this month when Volatus has come out. I will try to save up to buy it after paying my bills next month.

Q2 Milestone: Complete Zeta Armaggedon
Status: Well, TECHNICALLY it's complete. The last one is in my Pile of Loot at BBTS, waiting for me to ship it. I'll be shipping it by the end of the month, or once the next pre-order comes in stock, whichever happens first.

Q2 Milestone: Paying more on PPC
Progress: Well, I consolidated my debt into one, but with previously-pending preorders, PPC is building up again. So far payments are low enough that I'm paying over the min amount so hopefully it doesn't build up too fast or too quick, and I can get rid of it by the end of the year.

Q3 Milestone: Complete Zeta Aerialbots
Progress: None, and contemplating leaving it off, as at the beginning of the year I started collecting the Fans Toys Aerialbots, which are much nicer figures, but also twice the price. Currently thinking I'll have to abandon those, only two figures in, as the price increased by $20-$30 on the third figure, and the Fans Toys Stunticons are more important to me (and also slightly cheaper).

So there it is, my first monthly update. Not a lot of progress in many areas, but some in some, so that's better than nothing. We'll see how things go in Aug, and hopefully be back with an update in Sept. Maybe the world in general will be less crazy, but I doubt it.

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