Week 12: Flailing

If you're wondering what The Impossible Goal is, you can read about it here. 

Struggle of the Week: Plopping my butt in the chair and MAKING myself practice when I'm really tired and I just want to go to bed.

This is good for me.

This is good for me.

This is good for me.

Maybe if I say it three times like Beetlejuice, it'll manifest.

400 Q&A, 325 Lit is my practice speeds.  My fingers are flailing like Shawn Michaels after a vertical suplex, but the slowdowns -- usually somewhere around 325-350 Q&A -- I'm kinda getting.

Stay positive!

PS:  I couldn't find a .gif of Shawn Michaels flailing (heck, I thought there would be tons of 'em out there) so here's one of Shawn giving the Undertaker huggles.

Week 11: Bring It.

If you're wondering what The Impossible Goal is, you can read about it here.

Time to bump it up.  Am I successfully taking 350 Q&A/300 Lit? NO. But I feel like I'm stalling in progress.  As of today I'm bumping it up to 400 Q and 325 lit.

Well, sort of as of today. See, I'm writing this as if it were Monday (it's really Friday), and in case you didn't know, WWE's Monday Night RAW's 1000th episode is filming tonight LIVE, and I brought my signs:

My Shawn sign. My Miz sign wouldn't upload for some reason.

And I'm going to rush home from work (hopefully no bad rush hour traffic accidents), grab my husband, put on my The Miz shirt <3 <3 and rush to the arena to get there in time. And then I won't be home until late because OMG EVERY ONE OF MY FAVORITE WRESTLERS WILL BE THERE IN-cluding the Rock, IN-cluding Shawn Michaels, IN-cluding the Miz!!!

So Monday I won't be practicing much (because it's hard to practice when you're in Crazed Fangurl Mode, but we're back in business as of Tuesday.

Week 10 -- Speed Bump

If you're wondering what The Impossible Goal is, you can read about it here. 

Monday and Tuesday my CART job lasted all day, and while I write pretty darn short, my hands were done at quitting time.  I did not practice those days, and boy, Wednesday I could tell.  I'm glad I DIDN'T practice, mind you, because we got to take care of our hands.  But yes, I slid back a bit on speed.  Now back to my regular practice schedule.  Ten minutes during the day, ten minutes before supper, and ten minutes before bed -- AT LEAST.  Maintaining estimated practice speeds of 350 testimony (which is feeling fast, but not crazy fast) and 300 literary (which is feeling crazy fast).

Don't know if I already posted this or not, but phrases ending in "thing" like "kinds of things," "this thing," etc. are popping up in my writing.

Received the BackJoy (see previous post's comments--thanks, adm) on Friday and am sitting on it as we speak.  I can indeed tell an improvement in sitting comfort.

Other'n that, not much else to report.  National and State speed contests are coming soon.

Week 9: Training Pays Off on the Job

If you're wondering what The Impossible Goal is, you can read about it here. http://www.stenoray.com/2012/05/impossible-goal.html


Feeling it in my back and shoulders today.  Had an all-day job yesterday while using a hotel conference room chair.  Kids, if you haven't already learned to appreciate a good chair, begin to do so now.  My job tomorrow has good chairs, thankfully.

Yesterday's was quite a good job, quick medical-ly material, but I can DEFINITELY tell short writing and speed practice is totally paying off.  Yes, for medical, you do need your prefixes, roots, and suffixes defined, but anything you're likely to hear often, brief those puppies and drill yourself on 'em.
For projected CART, I like to print out my job dictionary and lay it across my laptop while I'm working to help me keep track of names, speaker IDs, job-specific briefs, etc.  And I project from a netbook running Bridge, so I can use the Briefs Suggest window and enter things into my job dictionary when I can.

There was something else I was going to say, but I forgot.

But yeah, there's something to be said for training for these contest things.  Our consumers deserve the best, and it's wonderful to feel good about your product at the end of the day.

Week 8

If you're wondering what The Impossible Goal is, you can read about it here. 

It's amazing how quickly 360-400 wpm went from sounding like gibberish to merely sounding too fast. Why didn't I practice at these super-high speeds before?? As in ten years ago? Well, all I had then were cassette tapes, I guess, but if I reeeaaalllly wanted to do it, I would have.  Speed and realtime contest winners don't just show up one day and win over and over again.  What are you willing to sacrifice to get that good?

Here's a link to the Simple Dollar blog that talks about the price of training.  Are you willing to pay the price of change?

I've been adding briefs to my dictionary and my flashcard app pretty much systematically, as in going through the Magnum Steno book and adding a column of regular-word briefs, then a column of proper nouns, and then a column of phrases, going page by page. Not every day, but every day I'm working at home I try to add a column. However, these past two weeks I've started hearing a lot of "there" phrases -- "in there," "around there," "were there," etc. So I'm skipping ahead and entering them in my dictionary.

Nashville's less than 13 months away!