December 2020 Week 1 Recap

Let’s jump straight to the numbers for this week.

Tuesday 12/01

• Duolingo: 20 XP earned, ~0 minutes
• Reading: 3% of El Dragón Renacido, ~90 minutes
• Watching/Listening: 1 episode of She-Ra, 1 episode of Calex MP, 1 episode of Arte Divierte, ~60 minutes
• Speaking: reading out loud, ~30 minutes

Wednesday 12/02

• Duolingo: 20 XP earned, ~0 minutes
• Reading: 3% of El Dragón Renacido, ~90 minutes
• Watching/Listening: 2 episodes of She-Ra, 1 episode of Plano de Juego, ~60 minutes
• Speaking: reading out loud, ~30 minutes

Thursday 12/03

• Duolingo: 20 XP earned, ~0 minutes
• Reading: 3% of El Dragón Renacido, ~90 minutes
• Watching/Listening: 2 episodes of She-Ra, 1 episode of Arte Divierte, ~60 minutes
• Speaking: reading out loud, ~30 minutes

Friday 12/04

• Duolingo: 20 XP earned, ~0 minutes
• Reading: 3% of El Dragón Renacido, ~90 minutes
• Watching/Listening: 2 episodes of She-Ra, 1 episode of Daniel San GMR, ~60 minutes
• Speaking: reading out loud, ~30 minutes

Saturday 12/05

• Duolingo: 20 XP earned, ~0 minutes
• Watching/Listening: 5 episodes of She-Ra, ~120 minutes

Sunday 12/06

• Duolingo: 20 XP earned, ~0 minutes
• Watching/Listening: 3 episodes of She-Ra, 1 episode of Daniel San GMR, ~120 minutes

Monday 12/07

• Duolingo: 20 XP earned, ~0 minutes
• Reading: 3% of El Dragón Renacido, ~90 minutes
• Watching/Listening: 2 episodes of She-Ra, 1 episode of Daniel San GMR, ~60 minutes
• Speaking: reading out loud, ~30 minutes

• Total Duolingo: 140 XP, 0 minutes
• Total reading: 1/10 books read, 450 minutes
• Total watching/listening: 7 YouTube episodes and 17 television episodes watched, 540 minutes
• Total speaking: reading out loud, 150 minutes
• Total Time: 16 hours 30 minutes

So after the brief diversion from the norm over the Thanksgiving holiday, we’re back to normal this week.  I’ve stuck with my plan to rewatch She-Ra and have been making pretty good headway through the show, finishing the first season over the weekend and starting into the second.  Aiming for the even hour when watching a show that’s designed for a normal television timeslot’s a little funky, because episodes are always 22 to 25 minutes long, leading me to watch two episodes per weekday and then need to fill in the extra time with other stuff to get my time for the day to the goal.  I could conceivably err in the opposite direction and go for three a day, and it would probably be fine, but the simple truth is that I like even numbers.

For reading, I’m making reasonable process on El Dragón Renacido, though it being as long as it is means that’s still fairly slow going.  At the current rate, I should be approaching the end somewhere around the start of the new year.  I have an additional twelve books to go in the series after finishing it, and considering the length and required time to read them so far for me, there’s a solid chance that I could read them straight through with no diversions and fill up the entirety of 2021, which is a bit overwhelming to consider.  I don’t know if the length ends up varying all that much as these things go on or something, but I may decide to take a diversion or two along the way.  I’ve been enjoying La Rueda del Tiempo, so it isn’t an issue of getting bored, but it might be nice to get a bit of variety going on.

As mentioned last week regarding fiction writing, I’ve been struggling to try and fit that in around my day job, and I might be speaking too soon, but I think I’ve settled on the right solution for that.  In hindsight it’s a pretty obvious solution than I really ought to have considered several weeks ago, but what can I say, I’m a stubborn lady, and it meant altering a schedule I’d been adhering to for basically all of the time I’ve been working from home since March, more or less.

My weekday has largely broken down into looking like this: I get up in the morning about two and a half to three hours before my scheduled work starts (I work a later shift and don’t start until 11 AM, so that’s not as ungodly early as it sounds), and after I brush teeth/shower/get dressed/make coffee, I devote one hour to my daily Spanish watching/listening.  Once that’s finished, I relax until about a half hour before my shift starts (how much relaxing time I get varies a lot), then I get my work systems all up and running so that I don’t feel rushed prepping to clock in, make fresh coffee, and read in Spanish for 15-20 minutes before my shift starts.  I then work until my first break, which I spend a few minutes reading during, then again until lunch.  Over lunch, I watch something light on youtube while eating, then read for most of the second half of the hour.  I read on my last break, and when things slow down a bit in the late afternoon and evening and I have some gaps between calls, I can comfortably fill up the hour and a half of reading I aim for every day.  Then after work, I’m all set to spend the rest of the time relaxing until it’s time for me to go to bed.

It’s a good schedule that’s served me well, with some variance here and there thanks to my work sometimes being too busy to allow for extra reading time and the like, but the problem with it’s been that I’d be all set to relax after work, and just be too tired to devote that recreation time to writing.  Don’t get me wrong, fiction writing is a recreational activity for me, so it isn’t like I’m viewing it as a chore or something, it just takes a reasonable amount of brain power, which has unfortunately fled me by the time I’m clocking out at 8 PM.  I’d tried to plan out that time after work to make room for writing, lower my expected goals per day for how much I’d get done, and tried to rely on enthusiasm for the project to get on board with weekday writing again, none of which worked.  What did work, was spending that hour of Spanish watching/listening time in the morning on writing instead, and saving the watching time for the end of the day.

It’s an obvious answer in hindsight, because of course watching something in Spanish requires very little energy, so it slots in fine to what I’m up for in the evenings, and I can tackle writing while relatively fresh.  I’ve tentatively settled on a structure of doing some watching first thing, just while waking up and having my first cup of coffee, then writing for the rest of it, and have thus far had some pretty good results.  Not sure how it will all shake out in the long run, but it looks pretty good on paper at least.

Anyway, that’s quite a bit more rambling about stuff than I normally do in these recap blogs, so I’m going to leave it there for now.  Next week will be a full blog in Spanish, so we can have a gap of two off weeks over the holidays before we hit the new year.  Take care of yourselves until then, TTFN.