Mighty May Postmortem

Goal

31 days of perfect Habitica dailies.

Included:

• Paint studies from photo reference
• Sketch from imagination
• Read from self-assigned chapters in art books
• Story development exercises (1hr daily)
• Wake-up exercises
• Knee rehab exercises
• Midday exercises
• Miscellaneous non-fiction reading (1hr daily)
• Nightly fiction reading to decompress
• Daily attendance to garden with the goal of eliminating a pest problem

Rules:

• Reset daily counters at the start of the month
• Complete all dailies, every day
  • Some latitude is afforded for reasonable obstructions to 100% adherence to every bullet of a daily task, but all latitude costs 10g and if you can still do it when you see that you’ve missed it, it must be done
• Attend to daily themes
• Follow the Mighty May folder prompts and reading schedule
• Restrictions:
  • Gaming, show-watching, reference-browsing, and non-educational video watching should be limited to weekends only.
  • No alcohol, as its only proven utility is social lubrication and this month’s goals are not socially oriented.
  • No sugary snacks.

How’d I do?

Art Here’s a consolidated art collection from the month. With some reasonable exceptions (explained later), I managed to stay on top of it. This included some scheduled (and un-scheduled) studies from life on the iPad. I felt like I was slowly developing a process for approaching a painting, but I did sort of waffle on whether or not I was checking the colors I guessed at when the reference was color-pick-able. It felt a bit like cheating to do, and I had some trouble remembering to integrate it into my process, but it probably would have pushed me much farther, much faster. Almost every time I checked a guess, I was surprised about some aspect of it - the extremity of the value or the technical hue of the color, especially.

By the end of the month, I felt a lot more capable of approaching color, and painted one of my favorite character pieces to date.

Reading Complete success. I read Color and Light, Imaginative Realism, and Alla Prima II. They were each well worth the read, complemented each other, and supplemented my photo studies in a major way. Developing a conscious awareness of relative value and color temperature was probably the largest step forward in strengthening my studies through the month. My miscellaneous non-fiction for the month was The Design of Everyday Things and my nighttime fiction was A Song of Ice and Fire and then A Clash of Kings.

Writing By and large I was successful at showing up to the daily hour of writing/story development, but struggled to keep up at the end of the month when things got crazy.

For some structure to apply over the top of my daily sessions, I used the Snowflake Method prompts and had a fairly good time of it. The bulk of the work I’d been doing in my spare time toward story development leading up to May was more focused on world-building than characters, so the narrowed focus was refreshing. I made it through step 3 for several characters in the main cast before getting frustrated with the limitations of text documents.

In reaction to my technical frustrations, I began experiment in transferring the entirety of my varied and disconnected notes into Inkscape about halfway through the month. Inkscape felt like a more satisfying format than a text document or Photoshop ever has; it’s not perfect, but it’s closer to the sort of visually organized overview that I’ve been longing for without the trademark Photoshop chug.

Unfortunately, a large part of what the effort revealed to me was that trying to fit so many different types of tasks into my daily routine was too much to keep up without burning out, given the non-elective, often unpredictable task switching requirements involved in daily caretaking life. At the very least, I’m learning to have a healthy respect for the mental overhead associated with habits that are new; before a habit becomes established, it’s difficult to estimate the proper amount of time to assign, learning and remembering to engage properly requires active effort, and calibration has to happen both for the task itself and its place amongst the rest of your activities.

Exercise Succeeded up until the end of the month, and even managed to expand the morning exercise to include basic boxing footwork and punches, as well as slowly increasing the intensity of my knee rehab exercises. Pleased to say I looked up proper form to try out burpees and found them incredibly efficient as far as exercises go, less pleased to admit that they’re a bit above my pay grade for the time being. Sadder still, my sleep cycle was derailed enough at the end of the month to functionally eliminate my opportunity to exercise before the caretaking began for the day, and I discovered that habits made consistent by routine association are not very resilient to disruption.

Garden By the end of the month, I finally established a flow with the daily watering and check-up/pruning/pest control circuit and managed to beat the shitstorm of pests into submission. Sadly, I lost one of my thyme plants, a couple of smol succulent cuttings, and my rudbeckia. Fortunately, the rest survived a pretty harsh haircut and bounced back at least as healthy, if not more, than before the infestation. I sowed new seeds, and they sprouted within a few weeks.

Shortly before May, a well-loved Target gift card brought home a host of new plant friends that all arrived roughly in the middle of the month and settled in fairly well with the exception of the Bird of Paradise, which wound up in a pot much too large and became the Leaning Tower of Strelitzia.

Some major take-aways: you really, absolutely cannot put off seriously combating an infestation until the time is more convenient. It just gets worse. On the flip side, you also can’t expect the problem to get better over night, especially if you’re using mechanical insecticide/miticides like neem oil and diatomaceous earth. You must wage a patient, consistent war and never lose hope. I found that mixing the DE into the top layer of soil was better than a light dusting on the surface, and that you really can’t spray the neem oil solution close to midday sun hours if you don’t want to burn your plants. At the same time, I found a good balance between saturation and frequency for my succulent watering (less saturated, more frequently-ish because of faster drying times).

Rules In general I adhered well to the rules I established up-front, but I did dip into more Backpack Hero runs than I’d intended. It’s a very cute game that makes inventory management the major mechanic, and it’s turn-based, so low enough investment that I felt comfortable getting up to attend to whatever was happening at the time.

Mitigating Factors A couple of days early in the month flew into the void due to an unexpected need to be away from home, helping to take care of a friend post-surgery. The last week and a half of the month was majorly disrupted by a household case of food poisoning, mild and inconvenient for me but scare-your-pants-off bad for Westly and what felt like randomly recurring bouts in the middle of the night until we realized it had caused a temporary sensitivity to poultry. Big bummer; turned our diet and our schedule upside-down for a long time.