New Year’s Eve and it’s been raining most of the day. Strange weather for January! I decided to get a jump on the whole “New Year Resolutions” thing back on November 1st. Step 1 was to start eating better, so I joined the Mayo Clinic Diet program. What I love about this program is it tells you exactly what groceries to buy for the week and what meal to prepare when. No more of the generic “eat less sugar and more veggies!” nonsense. Yeah, that’s great advice, but HOW?! They have lots of menus to choose from so you can try Keto, Vegetarian, Mediterranean, etc. It’s also not just a diet, but a change to the way I eat in general. After the year I’ve paid for is up, I’ll have a nice catalog of recipes built up inside the Paprika Recipe Manager software I have. It’s easy to build my own meal plans in there and it will generate shopping lists and such for you.

After about 4-5 weeks the new meal plans with all the extra cooking/cleaning/shopping felt normal and I moved on to Step 2 – Daily exercise. I’m on the treadmill for about 30 minutes a day now and just keep slowly increasing the incline percentage each week. At some point I hope to mixing in strength training, but am keeping it simple for now.

Step 3 was stretching, and I’ve finally got a basic stretching routine going on. I need to add in more of the stuff my chiropractor recommends, but it’s a good start for now and only takes a few minutes.

The final step in this whole self-improvement program is daily meditation. I was starting to get really good at it as a daily practice before I went on my trip to Thailand, but it all got lost in the craziness after the trip. I’ve signed up for a 6 week course that begins on the 11th through Tergar.org, I’m hoping it’ll get me back on track!

Fingers crossed that I can keep all this going and it will all just be “normal” to me come this summer and beyond! I had hoped to lose 10 pounds by Jan 1st, but I’m not quite there – I’ve been enjoying the holidays! 😁

The movie ripping project continues! I’m finally to the letter “T” in my collection, and it’s been quite the journey with much swearing and Googling to figure things out. The first external drive I purchased for the DVD/BluRay discs crapped out a little past the half-way point in the alphabet. I didn’t buy the cheapest one, but I still thought I’d bought one that would last longer! I’ve had to use a combination of 4 software packages for the project:

• AnyDVD
• MakeMKV
• CloneBD
• Handbrake

Once I finish the movies I’ll need to start on the many series discs I own. Many of them are Anime and I have a new problem I’m going to need to figure out. Instead of giving me a file for each individual episode of the series, it’s stored on the discs as 1 big file. So I’m going to need to figure out how to break up the file, manually, into individual files. 😒 But the end is in sight, and I’ll be glad to get this finished!! Then it will just be a matter of ripping the occasional new disc when I get it.

Over the holidays the expansion bay for my NAS was on sale and I had some credit in gift cards and points on Amazon so I took the plunge and it arrived today! I’m finally able to add the remaining 4 hard drives from our old NAS system to this new one giving me a little under 44 Terabytes of redundant storage:

A relatively large unit of digital data, one Terabyte (TB) equals 1,000 Gigabytes. It has been estimated that 10 Terabytes could hold the entire printed collection of the U.S. Library of Congress, while a single TB could hold 1,000 copies of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

https://www.teradata.com/Glossary/What-is-a-Terabyte

Just the movies I have ripped so far are close to 10 TB of storage! The awesome part is that 2 of these drives can fail and I won’t lose a thing. It’s my primary storage for all these movies plus all my photos, music, audio books, documents, you name it. It’s not going to cloud storage with anyone, it’s all on my local network. I don’t allow the machine to have internet access except for once a month or so when I log in and download any new updates to the software.

I have a nice stack of hobbies waiting to be completed to get me through the winter months and beyond. Quilt/Cross-stitch/Diamond Dotz/Lego kits and more. I’m getting close to finishing the Jack Sparrow canvas, and have a frame ready to hang it when it’s done!

Nyx is still enjoying the remote control car I got her to chase around. I wasn’t sure if she’d like it, but she’s still enjoying it! The wheels are a super soft rubber, so I’m not worried about her hurting herself on them. But that also means I can’t leave it out or she’d chew them off! Jax wants nothing to do with it. Once in a while he’ll sniff at it but then runs and hides behind me. 😒

I decided to get my hair cut short like Jamie Lee Curtis wears hers, and wow, it’s too short! Weirdly, I think it would actually look better if my hair was white/silver! Oh well, now I know and it only takes a couple of weeks to grow out. 😅

That’s it for me! I’ve got both a Mango and a Pear Martinelli’s Sparkling Cider to toast the New Year around 9 or 10 PM and then me and the pups will head to bed. Hopefully any fireworks tonight won’t go on too long and we can get back to sleep quickly! 😆

Love to you all, and best wishes for a happier New Year!!