Checking in for May for my "Designing a Well-Lived Life" blogging. This is about making small changes during the year to make larger changes.

• Dropping expectations: This month was challenging for me. A lot of expectations that I had about my ability to work on things kept cropping up. I had several days where I felt guilty about not working on my projects, and several times when my desires to have things happen a certain way got in the way of what was actually happening. I need to focus on this more and let each day be its own thing.

• Physical Health: About the only exercise I get is once a week when I push the lawn mower in the yard. I need to find more times to get up and move around, even if it's just going up and down the basement stairs more often or wandering around the basement. I'm starting to feel the downward movement of gravity on my body and it's not a pleasant feeling.

• Writing more: This month I had periods where I did well and periods where I didn't do well at all. I've been struggling with my writing project, in part because it's getting to more of the design parts. The way to get around this is to just get the first draft out and then polish it some more. I'm wanting to shit out something perfect in one sitting and unless I'm a goose and I'm popping out golden eggs then that's not happening (and who knows if the goose was shitting out 24K Faberge eggs anyway. I'm thinking not).

• Programming more: I did an exercise this month to just see how far I could get with Z80 programming in a week. It opened my eyes to some of my practicing and habits around practicing. Need to play with this some more. I was hoping to have some ideas on video games for June but I think June is going to be my play with some ideas month and see what falls out. Need to make this more of a conscious practice.

• Mindfulness: This month was one for practicing Nowness, but I wasn't able to practice as much as I would like. Part of that was feeling pressured to do many different things at once. What I learned from this was to just slow down and work on one thing at a time. I need to get back to trusting my lists to feed my work day, and I need to think about my lists enough to have them support that thinking.

• Decluttering: I cleared off some books from our bookshelves and cleaned out some drawers in our kitchen. Taking this slow, but making some headway with it. Also removed some albums that were duplicates from my collection.

• Deeper work: One trick I've found is logging out of social media when I'm done with it. It's helped me to stay more focused. Also found that if I set a timer before a task I'm more focused on the task and less likely to try to bob to the surface to see what happened in the interim. It's not perfect, but it does help.

• Getting out of debt: Still working on this, though I have a plan for a few of the credit cards that we have and goals to have them paid off. Am working with putting things on wishlists before spending the $$ on them in the moment, which works surprisingly well.

I have noticed myself resisting the weekly review each week, so I'm going to try to do one today and notice where the discomfort is coming from. Also going to play around with different programming topics to see if I can get some clarity on what I want to work on for a deeper project. More to come.