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February 2017 Retrospective

February has come and gone and what a doozy of a month it was. From the highs of seeing my niece for the first time to the lows of having my cat being admitted to the hospital for multiple days. On the whole I am not too pleased with the progress I made and am hesitant to come up with excuses once again.

Health

According to my Apple Watch I only exercised 24 times and burned about 61% of the calories I burned in January. My body fat percentage has not changed and I still did not lift any weights. I did manage to start up yoga at the beginning of the month but a vacation and the cat's illness severely hampered my progress. Similarly I started out the month eating quite well but then regressed to previous bad habits near the end.

Taking a glass half full mentality at least I managed to start some changes. For March I think I need to refocus on yoga and cooking and if I feel adventurous try to add some weight lifting to the mix.

Read a book

I finished Cibola Burn about halfway through the month and it continued the solid writing quality of The Expanse. I plan to read the fifth book, Nemesis Games, at some point this year but my current plan to is read The Sparrow in the month of March.

Play a video game

While there were a couple games released in February that I considered playing (Nioh, For Honor, Horizon Zero Dawn) but the Axe of the Blood God podcast had been talking about Persona 4 Golden for the last few months and it really sparked my interest. Holy crap what an amazing RPG. I would honestly put it ahead of other JRPGs like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. I hope to write a whole article on why I love Persona 4 so much but in the meantime if you have a passing interest in JRPGs you owe it to yourself to consider the Persona series. With Persona 5 coming out in April for PlayStation 4 now is the perfect time.

My Nintendo Switch should be arriving this Friday and so finishing Person 4 Golden and beating Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild will be my games for March.

Become conversational in another language

I think this is a dead resolution already. I thought I would be able to make time for this every week but we are two months in and I haven't made even a college try.

Release an app

I also did not work on my app at all in February. I started multiple articles about mobile app foundations but found myself constantly modifying them and was never satisfied enough to publish. Similar to my health at least I took baby steps and did some work. The next goals should be to actually publish a couple of the drafts I have started. Nothing is ever going to be perfect and I need to accept this and be willing to release something that may have some mistakes.

Do not indulge in time killing activities

I would say I wasted similar amounts of time as in January browsing Reddit and watching random films or TV shows. I know I am not unique in saying that after a long day at a work it is hard to motivate myself to focus on a hobby versus just vegitating in front of a screen. I really don't have a solution to this problem at the moment short of sheer force of will.

Conclusions

February continued the same patterns as January. Playing video games and reading books were the only resolutions I truly followed. The same goals that I set in my January conclusions seem like they will carry over. Eating right, yoga and a couple of blog posts about mobile app foundations are what I need to achieve in March.

#MonthlyRetrospective