(Disclaimer: Amazon Affiliate links included where possible and I deem them relevant. I’ll earn a small commission, as described in my privacy policy from eligible purchases made through these links.)

Finally, finally, finally got back into doing Ring Fit Adventure, courtesy of the yet-another-change-in-plans to do a level of Adventure Mode each week (fingers crossed) regardless of what the randomizer gives me for my other workouts.

And…. I completely forgot I’d had Back Assist on. (Well, it had been somewhere between four and five months since I’d turned it on, and I’ve yet to play Adventure Mode in all that time.) So I wound up spending a good chunk of the level trying to figure out why high knees weren’t making a difference slogging through the deep ponds and wondering if it was just me not having done “deep ponds” in the game before that was skewing my expectations.

Turned out, nope! After I got to the Victory Pose, and was temporarily baffled by the game’s requirement to press a button to perform the squat, I realized what had happened: Back Assist, which I’d turned on months ago in the hopes that it would help during sciatica flare-ups (but have since turned off due to not currently needing that help) was completely controlling my character’s running, which meant forward progress but no actual change in pace or high-stepping.

So Thursday I decided to repeat a level for the first time since I started this project, and ran through Nightcloak Pass all over again with Assist turned off.

In other news, I still haven’t decided how I’m going to handle my discovery about The Walk app, so for the time being I’ve removed it from my phone (less about saving space right now and more about not needing to force quit every time my car makes it start up and gives me a notification… so maybe some battery saving going on).

If y’all don’t want to click the link, the summary is that the app is designed to encourage you to get in so many steps per day by unlocking story clips based on how much walking you’ve done. It claims it’s designed to let you just set it and forget it, basically start one of the episodes and go about your day, which is a true claim if all you’re after is the story (which is also available for free as a podcast, albeit without the “get rewarded for walking” element) but doesn’t work so well if you’re trying to collect everything for the gaming part of the app. Since I’m after the gaming element, I can’t let the app run while I’m at work–or running errands, for that matter–and force-quitting it doesn’t stop it from advancing along whatever route I was on, which means I need to be able to use it when I have an hour or two of time to do nothing but watch my phone.

The self-care I chose instead when I got home one night was to spend time reorganizing the clutter that is the mountain of books waiting for me to read and redonate. (The remaining two nights I just spent reading.)

At some point I’d reorganized different clutter for the express purpose of removing said mountain from the piles on my dresser and top of my dorm-room style shelf unit, and line them up somewhat neatly in rows on my desk. Originally I only had the mass market and similarly small books (the ones I take to work to read in my lunch break) in anything resembling a semblance of order, as I use my lists on Goodreads to sort them by book length and read the shortest ones first (so as to donate and declutter faster), and the larger books (that won’t fit in my cooler and therefore I read at home) were all just kind of shoved on whichever surfaces I found room.

On Friday last I decided to get more of them sorted out.

In addition to the smaller books being lined up on the top between my two bookends, I sorted out the larger ones in a similar order.

• Any “at home” book short enough to fit underneath the desk cupboard went there with the boxed set in the next photo serving as a bookend (right up until my computer equipment prevented me from adding more),
• those too tall to fit underneath went on the top shelf with the “lunch break” options,
• whatever was left was crammed–still in order of length–into a completely different dorm-room style shelf unit/nightstand until I ran out of room (stacked two books deep)…
• and the rest are still in a small pile on my dresser.

Oh, and the book on top of the nightstand is the one I’m currently reading at home. It’s whatever Goodreads identified as the shortest of my at-home selections at the time. (In other news, I’ve noticed that not everything on that list is sorted properly; some of it is me selecting the wrong edition but some of it may just be GR having the wrong page count. Oh, well, close enough for my purposes.)

The short-term plan–well, short-ish considering how many books I still have to read through to make it happen–is to add the largest books, the ones too tall to fit on the main desk, to the top shelf as I read through the current selection, but to allow the pile on the main desktop to simply shrink without adding migrating anything. Basically use the top shelf to continue reducing the pile on my dresser but get the desktop to a point where the only thing sticking out from under the cupboard is that boxed set.

The longer term plan is to shrink all of the piles enough that I can start getting my signed copies off of the shelf unit I’d shoved into my closet (getting rid of said shelf unit in the process) and start lining them up on my desk….

At some point I also think I want more clamp-on headphone hangers for my Walkovr motion sensors; a shelf would technically work but I’d prefer the “hanger” style to make it easier to leave them on their respective straps whenever I need to charge them. (I nearly bought a shelf–a clamp-on designed for computer monitors–before remembering that the straps were the reason I was looking for hooks in the first place!) I keep hoping to find a single product that has a row of hooks I can use for the purpose, but barring that five more of the kind my Aftershokz are hanging from will work.

And for the last attempt at a formal workout this week, we have a few more episodes of Zombies, Run!

First is finishing the New Adventure story known as Negative Space.

And next is continuing the main storyline, putting me about two episodes further than I’ve ever been in previous years.

No other screenshots and graphics to post, I’m afraid, what with there being no more homefront/bodyweight exercises (for now) for me to tackle after after work and the issues I’m still trying to solve regarding The Walk.

Suggested products in use, Amazon Affiliate links included where possible:

• GoPro Fusion 360 degree camera
• Ring Fit Adventure for Nintendo Switch