A Day Of Failures – The Climb #150

Tuesday 20^th June 2017

Today was my biggest day of failure in a long while.
Chasepalooza, like any holiday, cost a bit of money. It was certainly cheaper than previous years. I was working out the costing for my friend, Pat, who wants to chase with us next year if we do it (I’ll be chasing, I suspect the others will as well but it’s useless making form plans until the beginning of next year when people know their personal circumstances). But it still cost a decent amount to do.
As a result, June was supposed to be a lean month. That means not trying not to go out, not buying swords and stuff, and not spending on Kickstarter.
And that’s where I failed. I’m addicted to Kickstarter and love backing projects only for them to turn up a year or more later by which time I’ve forgotten about them. It’s a nice surprise reminder when I get the delivery.
I don’t back a lot of projects, but when I do I tend to go all in. Up until now that’s mainly consisted of tabletop games. Now you’d think that even an expensive tabletop game isn’t a huge amount of money, but you’d be wrong. The decent new ones come in around £100 and then as stretch goals get unveiled and they include add-ons, I get to the stage where I’ve spent several hundred pounds.
And then you get to Shadows of Brimstone, which is my favourite game, and I went seriously all-in. Let’s just say whilst it was a lot of money, what I got for that was valued at probably three times the amount I paid.
I don’t regret it though, as the games I’ve bought have been fantastic. I just wish I had more time to play.
As many of you know, I used to run Action-Figure. This all stemmed from my love of Star Wars as a kid and collecting the action figures. From there I also got big into G I Joe. When I stopped running the site, I also stopped collecting. I used to get sent a ton of product and it was filling up my house.
But now I have my own place, I want to start collecting again without filling this house as well.
I like the Star Wars 4”/3.75” scale. It means I can continue my Star Wars collection. Plus, I keep telling myself that I’m going to buy myself a single G I Joe figure I’m missing on Ebay each month.
But whereas action figure kickstarters used to be mainly the urban vinyl type of figures, it seems 4” is all the rage nowadays. I backed the Virtuvian HACKS figures a year or so back and receiving them last year, it just really reignited my love of that scale. I skipped the Dime Novel Legends cowboy figures and have been regretting it ever since.
So with the Animal Warriors of the Kingdom line kickstarter finishing today, I broke my vow of austerity and backed it.
I didn’t go all in, so I guess that’s something. However, I’m sure that when it comes to the Backerlit, I’ll spend some more.
But it doesn’t end there… because CMON have their new Zombicide tabletop game that finishes in 6 days which I’ve known I was going to back for ages.
And then I’ve found the perfect xmas gift for my dad which I think he’ll go nuts about.
Suddenly, my month of living cheap, has turned into an expensive month.
I tell myself that the tabletop game was budgeted for, and buying Dad’s xmas present now rather than in December is probably better because I have the car MOT around then, but I’ve still failed in my task to try and save a bit of money this summer.
That wasn’t my only failure. I’ve been trying to get my diet back to normal following my trip. As always I put a bit of weight on in the US and have been trying to take it back off. I’m eating healthily but I’ve not been great about portion control. And by that I don’t mean having extra chips. I regulate my macros and attempt to have 200g of protein a day whilst matching a stepping calorie goal.
And I’ve just not been managing that. I’m probably on 100g of protein some days, I’m probably at 2000 calories rather than 1800.
After my initial weight drop upon returning, my body has settled into a new comfortable weight. I want to be leaner than I was before I went away in time for Astolat. I’ve hit the gym again seriously and it seemed to be going well… and then it was so hot I had to have some ice cream.
Gah!
I keep telling myself I need to manage my macros again rather than just eat healthily, but it’s such a lot of work and focus when I’m up to my neck in edits.
I managed to do another 20 pages today. As always, I wanted to do more and thought I was doing well when I came to a section with a couple of pages with no comments. However, I got too excited about this only to then find a comment several pages on that said the section was over-long and I needed to cut it.
What’s fascinating is how easily I managed to do that. I think the way I’ve disassociated myself from the text helps, but just in the course of these edits I’ve really noticed that my editing has progressed massively. It probably doesn’t really show itself in The Climb yet, as these get bashed out at the end of the day and there isn’t just the time to do a decent edit on them
I think it’s fair to say I was a decent writer, but it’ll be interesting to see how much this growth feeds into my overall improvement. It’ll probably be more obvious to me than to someone reading my stuff.
But that progress was not my only non-fail today. My friend Kim left me a message on Whatsapp saying she’s finally found the time to sit down and watch my vlogs. She said some very nice things about them. As did Pat when we spoke about chasing next year. I took some time during a break this evening to actually watch a couple. And you know what? Watching them as a viewer rather than as a creator, I enjoyed them as well. I’ll probably do them again next year although I’ve already said that if I got more time in my day I’d bring back the daily vlogs.
Still, those two wins did not make up for the failures today. I’m particularly bitter about the ice cream.
I blame the heat, which has been so bad, that when I went to shop this evening, I was drenched in sweat. I wiped myself down when I got home only to be in the same state a couple of minutes later.
Given how much time I’m putting into the edits, and their rate of progress, I suspect I’ll miss summer this year. Given how hot it’s been today, perhaps that won’t be too much of an additional failure.
If you want to follow more of my journey, then be sure to check me on my social channels. Likewise, if you’d like me to expand on any point mentioned above, please say so in the comments.