My Life Lately
Whewwwww. We’ve had a busy time lately. Well, Dan’s just humming along towards his research that will be his thesis. But my life has been a crazy lump of stuff.
Of course when I chose to finally launch my wedding planning blog, I did not know that my boss would resign within a week at my full-time job. My work days have been long since then as I try to maintain my job and pay attention to hers as well, which means my time at home has been less than usual, and when I’ve bee home, I’ve been tired. I wanted to really push my wedding planning blog from the very beginning with a major load of articles, and I’ve been working to do that, but I haven’t had the time or energy to put as much out there at once as I had hoped. However, I have been focusing on the quality of my posts that I put up there–a practice that was nicely affirmed by this long post by Steve Pavlina. Staying up late tonight, I finally was able to post the second part of my “Having a Greener Wedding” series, a post of which I am quite proud. I need to submit that post to a couple of the blog carnivals. Is it bad web etiquette to submit the same post to multiple carnivals? I have never read that it is, but I am not sure.
Here’s my life in the last few days:
Thursday: Worked 13 hours, including running an applicant meeting; got home at 10 p.m., ate dinner, and crashed.
Friday: Worked 8 hours or so, in which time I had to sit down with my director to bring up whether I will be promoted, which was quite stressful to do (no straight answer yet, but I feel fine about it now); came home and went out for dinner and drinks with Dan, Margaret, & Brett; got home at 11:30 p.m.
Saturday: Got up at 6:45 to run 27 minutes at the park; came back and bathed; walked with Dan to the farmer’s market for this week’s produce; met a high school friend I haven’t seen since high school for brunch and hanging out; hosted a Pampered Chef party; cleaned up a bit from that; went to eat dinner with another couple; came home and slept a couple of hours; decided I would just go to sleep for the night, but instead got up to work on blogging. And here I sit four hours later.
Oh, did you notice that I mentioned I ran 27 minutes straight at the park today? Would you believe that I could run no more than 90 seconds at a stretch 10 weeks ago? I’ve been doing Couch to 5k, and if you set yourself up for success–good shoes, good attitude, good mp3s–it’s an amazing program to use. It really works.
Oh, and I’ve lost 20 pounds this year, too, through eating well and running. As far as my food goes: no strict rules, no counting–just paying attention to my food, dealing with cravings, eating lots of vegetables, and learning to trust myself. I could write a hundred posts on that.
And I am getting killer abs just from running. That is pretty awesome. Having strong muscles feels very powerful.
You may be wondering why I have not mentioned any of the information in the past three paragraphs until now. I have a tendency to be competitive–to go hard or not go at all, to think in black and white. I have to temper that urge, because life is rarely lived that way. Slow and steady wins the race, right? In taking 10 weeks to do what should have been an 8-week running program so far, and in learning to trust myself in how I eat instead of putting my faith in some externally directed diet, I am developing the ability to stick with something while recognizing I won’t have any fast fixes. The last few months have been amazing for me in that way, for me improving slowly, learning to shed the now-or-not-at-all skin I’ve been living in for all these years. Gradual improvements beat rushing, crashing, and burning any day. (I don’t mean to knock any externally controlled diets, because obviously they do work for some people. But learning to trust that my brain and body can do this without being told what to do is key for me. I do know what to do; I know what’s healthy and reasonable. It’s just undertaking doing it and celebrating what I’m doing rather than feeling punished.)
I’m already wondering what’s next, too, now that I am getting this running thing down. I’m starting to get back to believing I can do whatever I put my mind to–if I give it time and consistent effort.
But for right now, what’s next is going back to bed. . . .
