Weekly Rewind: March 13

Phew, this week almost felt like it flew right by! I guess the main theme of this past week was just busy, busy, busy. The week was initially off to a pretty slow start with not too much happening, but because I knew the end of the week was going to be busy, I tried to frontload some of the house-related stuff, like all the packing that I need to do in preparation for the next month. It was pretty difficult to start packing early though because there’s things that I’ll still be needing, and it’s so hard to anticipate what I’m going to need while I’m gone. Especially if I want to do any bounding while I’m away, which I likely will since I don’t have much in terms of April content planned out yet. I’m basically packing things that sort of kind of might be able to be used for some look or another, but the most likely outcome is that I won’t be using any of them and will be cycling through the same couple shirts all month.

One major highlight of the week was finishing up the Blogilates 1000 ab challenge! Oh my goodness what a tough challenge! But also, it felt surprisingly...easy?? Not that the workout or the ab reps themselves were easy because I was shaking through them (and sit ups and butt ups are the worst), but it felt like because I was focusing on working through a smaller set of reps, it was easier to keep going. Within each set of 100 reps, they were broken down further into chunks of 20-25 reps each, and after completing each set and taking a small break and stretch, it didn’t feel like very long at all to get through 100. And towards the end of the challenge, I even stopped taking breaks in some videos, or just did two sets of 50 because I could. Which is amazing! So in total this month, I’ve already done more than 5500 ab reps, and that’s bonkers! The other awesome thing is that because my core is stronger, it’s also made my other workouts feel better too, like I can literally feel that my core is tighter while I’m doing other workouts. I probably won’t embark on another set of 1000 ab reps anytime soon because it still was really tough, but I’m so proud of myself for completing the challenge and not giving up!

Then came the hackathon. At work, we had a hackathon from Wednesday evening to Friday evening, and that basically took up all my energy for the week, in a good way though. I’ll be honest, leading up to the day it started, I was unsure of whether or not I’d even have the motivation to make the project any good. Lately I’ve been feeling super unmotivated at work and getting even more easily distracted than I did at the beginning of quarantine, and I’ve just had such a hard time focusing on my work. And I was worried that with the hackathon project, I’d just not be that into it, and I really wasn’t literally up until like Wednesday night. But I don’t know if it’s the hackathon spirit, or if it’s knowing that I can do whatever I want without having to think of the consequences or edge cases or whatever, but I did suddenly get really into it. It could have also been because I got to work with my sister and maybe being able to collaborate with someone actually really helps drive me to be productive. We worked into the night, and the funny thing is that most of the work that we wanted to do was largely frontend which neither of us work on and neither of us thoroughly enjoy doing as a day job. But when it came to the project, it was just so much fun, and it was fun brainstorming all these goofy ideas. And maybe the best part of working on these hackathon projects with my sister is that because most of our projects have very visual elements that we focus on making, all of our mistakes and weird edge cases make for hilarious middle of the night laughing fits. It really made me realize the real benefit of hackathons, and how because there are no strings attached to this project, that I just have to make what I want to make so that it runs the way I want it to, it almost reinvigorates me. I know I likely will not be able to carry that motivation from the hackathon into my work come Monday, but it’s cool to feel that excitement every once in a while. We literally worked down to the wire on Friday evening and submitted our presentation with just a few minutes to spare, and that was so stressful for me because I had all these ideas of how I wanted to edit our presentation that I threw out the window because there was no time to figure that stuff out, and my computer was totally wigging out on me. But we got our submission in on time, and I have to say I’m actually super proud and happy with how our project came out. While it is a bit a bummer that awards and recognitions are based off of very business-driven categories, it always feels like lots of fun to make something just for the joy of making it, and I think we accomplished that.

But now that all of that is over, it’s time to get back to reality, and reality is that I’ve got a lot of things coming down the pipeline that I need to prepare for, mostly to do with the house, which has just been at the back of my mind all this time, basically causing me all this low-burning stress that I didn’t do something on time or I’m missing something. But it’ll all come to a head soon enough and I’ll figure it out eventually. Now all that’s left is to pack, prepare for all that I can, and hope that I didn’t forget anything major. Wish me luck!