Riffday: I'm bored, so I'm boring you

January goals update:  The weekly menu planning thing is a bust.  Completely.  I haven't even done it once.  But I have tried to do the thing I described in this post where I write down my ideas of what we could have for dinner after going to the grocery store, and that is actually helping out.  After my trip to SuperOne yesterday, I have the ingredients for two meals ready and waiting, which makes me feel smug and secure.  Sort of like when I know I have four or five books by good authors waiting to be read.  *sighs with happiness*

The Diet Dr. Pepper thing was easy for the first couple of weeks.  I barely even thought about it.  But Thursday and today I've been jonesing for a DDP so bad that I'm having a hard time not hopping into the car and going out specifically to get one.  (I drank my last one New Year's Eve.)  It makes it harder that I'm not planning on eliminating them entirely, I just want to cut back.  So my bad-influence-self keeps saying: it doesn't really matter, you haven't had one in two weeks, just go get one.  But my virtuous self says: I said I wasn't going to have one for a month.  I gave my word.  It is a matter of honor.

Which then throws the whole thing off, because I don't especially care to be the virtuous, holier-than-thou person that does things because of rules rather than because of some real reason.  But still, there are other things I can drink-- I've drunk so much sparkling water the past couple of weeks I probably have bubbly pee for god's sake-- and I'm going to stick with it, purely so I can pat myself on the back at the end of the month and feel like I followed through on at least one of my goals.

Fitocracy is interesting.  Part of me loves it, and it has definitely given me a renewed interest in my exercise routine.  It's such a great affirmation to come in here after I finish a workout and record my points and watch my numbers climb.  (tomorrow I get to level up!)

But on the other hand, so far I have found exactly three people who are 50 or older.  Pretty much everyone is in their 20s and lifts weights.  Now that I've been watching for awhile, I realize that the point system is stacked toward lifting.  My 45 minutes of treadmill at about 3.4 mph and with an incline of 4% is 93 points; if you lifted for 45 minutes, you'd easily have several hundred points.

So I just have to ignore what everyone else is doing and use it for what works for me.  Because silly as it seems, there have been at least two times when I wasn't all that excited about doing my workout, and my sole motivation for doing it was so I could come in afterwards, record my points, and see that little blue bar on my profile jump up another notch.  Whatever works.

I've let myself have a mini-vacation this week.  I've been out of school since 12/18, but that first week was all the Christmas prep, and then everybody was home and had to be fed and mommed the next week, and the week after that there were many house things to do and all the appointments I'd been putting off for months.  So this past week I slacked off.  Not that I haven't done anything constructive--I've packed up ten or twelve boxes, mailed books that I've sold on Amazon, cleaned out a couple of cabinets, gotten up and gotten MadMax to school every day, picked out tile and paint colors, etc etc-- but I haven't done nearly as much as I could have.  I think I read at least half a dozen books, including three Georgette Heyers.  It was lovely.  But it also worked-- I can feel myself getting a little bit bored, and being ready for a bit more structure and a bit more of a challenge.  I wasn't quite sure that would happen-- I was so exhausted at the end of last semester, it didn't seem like I'd ever recover.  yay for vacations.