Day 161

A good day.

Both my meetings went better than I expected. Spouse sent birthday flowers a day early so they could come to my office in front of everyone. Youngest was waiting in my office after my second meeting with another small bouquet - total surprise there - and a third from a friend was waiting at home. I am awash in roses of varying sizes and colors.

Just as good, though, is how motivated I have become to "get my steps in" now that my new phone has become my pedometer and I have discovered audiobooks. For the past three years I have carried a little pocket pedometer and attempted to get 10k steps per day but not really gotten very far with it. Most days hovered somewhere in the 5 - 6k range mostly because I hadn't been particularly committed to doing the daily 40 min walk needed to boost the step count. However while I was on vacation I had access to a lovely wide well-paved biking/walking lane on both sides of the main road near our house and the elevation is "flat as pancake" so it was pleasant to walk every day. An author I follow had a free download offer with Audible so I gave that a try and discovered I liked it FAR better than music or podcasts because it kept me from getting bored and starting to think "is it time to stop yet?" Not only that but since a book is longer than any given walk it meant I wanted to walk -again- to see what happened next. Also the free pedometer app did a color coded bar graph for each day: you enter the goal and when you are still far away the bar is red then it turns orange as you get closer and finally when you hit the goal the bar turns green and there is electronic confetti on the screen...and the bars stack up next to one another to represent a full week at a glance.

It seems a bit silly in the telling but having the step count on my phone (which I see a million times a day) and having the color coding are effective in a way the black digital numerals in a gray background never were. Don't want to break the streak of green-bar hit-the-goal days, y'know? So far I hit the target every day since I got the phone which I think is is the most consecutive days I have done since starting the whole project years ago. Figured out how to check out online audiobooks from the public library too so I've kept up the streak of "free" too.

I'm just so pleasantly surprised that I'm finally -into- a physical fitness kind of thing.

Pleased but not actually -surprised- to have another day with no thoughts of alcohol.