Writing Letters to Myself (Part One)

    7. Write letter to myself to open at end of 1,001 Days

    Writing yourself a letter is just weird. For the next item crossed off of my Day Zero List, I went with writing myself a letter to open when this list is done. It's even weirder when you're in a bout of depression, and you write yourself a letter to open nearly three years in the future.

    What's in the letter isn't that important, and I'm sure it won't be important then. Depression is a horrible thing. I don't have the means to get therapy. I don't have the means to get medicine. It's all my own fault, so I don't expect pity. I'm just not the man I'm supposed to be. I'm working on getting my income where it needs to be, though it may take a little while to get there. Maybe when I get my income right, I'll get the help I need. Maybe I need to put THAT on the list.

August Goals

While I have a Day Zero list, I've never been great at short-term goals. Who am I kidding, I've never been great at ANY goals. My first Day Zero list could tell you that, if lists could talk. I'm sorry Original Day Zero List. Anyway, so for August, I've decided to make a list of goals I'd like to try to accomplish, or at least work on, and things I'd really like to buy, or save for.

I've also put $5 into the Day Zero fund since I made a page for the list. And I watched one movie I haven't seen yet. I'll write about that once I watch maybe five I haven't seen, so I can fill up a blog post about it.

Day Zero Items:

• Make some Top 10 Lists
• Find a picture challenge to attempt
• Write letter to myself to open at end of this list
• Write letter to myself at 50 (10 years)
• Write letter to my future Grandchildren (if I have any)
• Work on '101 things I've achieved' list
• Work on '101 Memories' list
• Come up with recipes to put in a personal cookbook
• Write letter to Clayton Sage Johnson
• Work on Halloween blogs
• Watch some movies I've never seen
• Read some books I haven't read
• Work on my weight loss
• 31 Days only water (July 31st was 15 days)
• Eat at a new restaurant
• Try some new recipes
• Have a Lemonade Stand with my daughter
• Send some autograph requests
• Pay some on my debt
• Start a scrapbook
• Work on my music folder

Things not on my Day Zero list, but I want to accomplish or buy in August:

• Start my website
• Continue learning HTML/CSS & JavaScript (DON'T GIVE UP!!)
• Portable monitor for my laptop
• PS4
• Learn how to make a banner for my website in Gimp
• Buy (and workout with) DDP Yoga
• Look at Treehouse for my coding/site
• Take blood pressure every day before breakfast and going bed

What are your goals for the month, for the rest of the year, or your Day Zero list?

Developing my (Beginner) Coder Skills

Besides my health journey, I've decided to try something new to better myself: learning how to code. I'm starting with HTML and CSS. I attempted learning it back around 2012, but gave up about halfway through the book I bought. Then again, with the same book, tried around 2017 or so. Now I'm at it again.

HTML isn't terribly difficult, as most of it, I'm learning to memorize as I go, since everything you make basically has the same things in it. CSS is something I want to memorize some of, but I think as long as I know where to look when I have questions about a problem I have, or am trying to build something, I'll be good.

How I feel after finally understanding something I've been stuck on.

Where it gets tricky is, what to learn next. I've been hearing to learn JavaScript next, then on to other programming languages (the one I hear most). But others say I should learn React, Node, C++, etc. So I'm going to focus on learning HTML/CSS for now, then move on to what the majority says.

Learning new things is scary, but as I tell my daughter all the time: No one grows up knowing everything. You just have to go into something knowing you're not going to know it, and learn what you can.

One of my first goals once I learn what I need to is to create my blog from scratch instead of using a template. If you have any insight into what to do after HTML/CSS, let me know in the comments.

My Health Journey

If you've read my '101 in 1001' list, you'll see that one of the list items is to 'Get down to 200 pounds'. That's the exact same list item I had my original 2011 version of the list. Back then, though, it was slightly easier to get there compared to where I'm at now.

Though I wasn't attempting a Day Zero List back in 2021, I did have a moment of realization in November of that year. I was testing out Reddit's live-streaming after seeing others do it. Being an extreme introvert, it took a week or two of watching other people to finally take the plunge. One day, I just signed on and went live. I had nothing in particular I wanted to talk about, but I just wanted to talk. Maybe I wanted people to interact with.

Though I'm an introvert, and have severe social anxiety, some part of me wants to socialize. I haven't had a friend since May 2004. That's 19 years. It's a long time to not have anyone to 'hang out' with. It wears on you, even as someone who always says he wants to be alone.

Anyway, I went live, and during the near one-sided conversation, a couple people showed up to watch me ramble, and somewhere along the way, it 'clicked' in my mind that I need to take losing weight seriously. So I actually started to. I took one of my Field Notes notebooks, and started making pages to keep track of my weight, what I ate, and over the next several days, how much I walked.

For THREE months, I was on top of it. If you take a look at the first page above, you'll see I went from 292.4 to 259.4 in just 12 weeks. Thirty-three pounds in 12 weeks. I was walking almost every day, jogged on the treadmill a LOT, and was working out. I got to the point where I could jog for 1.1 miles on the treadmill without stopping or walking. Then depression took over. Over the next 16 months or so, I've went back to just one pound shy of my original starting weight.

But on June 2nd of this year, me and my daughter both decided to do something about it once again. I started at 292.4, and am currently 286.2. There was a two week period where I gained five pounds. If it weren't for that two week period, I would be close to 280 right now.

What's crazy is, I took progress pictures of when I started, compared to when I was around 260, and even I could notice the difference. I just wish I had kept it up. Because if I had, I would be around 200. That bums me out, but I've just got to keep going.