Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas! Happy Hanukkah! Happy Winter!

On the road again

This blog has been suffering terribly since I started writing in my actual paper journal again... Blame it on graduate school!

I'm all packed to go home again, although the appointed day and hour have yet to arrive. My apartment is an unredeemable mess -- well, probably a redeemable one, but not in the time I have before I leave. January will be a very housework-y month.

Boyfriend is out Christmas shopping. Soon he'll return, and we will head off to a fancy dinner and a Christmas concert in the city. Tomorrow morning, we'll have "Christmas morning" at his place, and he'll drop me off at the airport many hours early, to give him a chance to get home to the mountains before too late at night.

I can't believe it's only four days to Christmas. Will the years keep on getting shorter and shorter the older I get?

Merry almost-Christmas, everybody!

Eating habits

All of a sudden, when I want a snack -- particularly after dinner -- I'm as likely to want, say, a little bowl of Boyfriend's beef stew and a biscuit as I am to want a zillion cookies.

It's amazing what a little mindfulness, along with keeping the pressure off myself as much as I can (which isn't much), can do.

Or maybe it's that I keep reaching my absolute sugar consumption LIMIT earlier in the day, being surrounded with Christmas cookies. :)

But I like the mindfulness answer better!

Aw...

Both Boyfriend and I are nearing the end of a 24-hour take-home exam.

Boyfriend just knocked on the door of my office, entered, left half a dozen Christmas cookies and a cold bottle of water on my desk, and left without saying a word.

Self-education 2006

From Seasonal Soundings:

Now is the time to start thinking, planning, gathering, and preparing for your reading and self-education in 2006. You know, if you aim at nothing, you will hit it everytime.

January 1 will be here in, what?, 31 days!

I have been planning my reading for several years, and it has made a world of difference even though I'm never without a book in hand. A plan, a system---flipping around what Alexander Pope said, I say "Without a plan, you have a mighty maze."

We need a variety of selections.....
---for our hearts, some inspiration, some fluff, some brain candy;
---for our souls, some constancy, some daily reads;
---for our intellects, some meat.

Right on.

Some things on my list for January:

Daily Mass readings.

Rice's statistics textbook, because I need to learn a LOT of probability.

Stephenson's Quicksilver, because I'd like to eventually someday finish it.

Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, ditto.

Fruits and Vegetables

Lately my body and mind have been dragging a lot. I have riding lessons on Sunday and Monday -- my major exercise for the week -- and by Wednesday I'm still not just sore but exhausted, dragging myself up the stairs on my way to class. My brain doesn't seem to be working quite right, either. Since "graduate student" is my main occupation right now, this is kind of a problem.

There are a lot of things I need to do to fix this: get more sleep, eat better, work more effectively, relax better. Right now I'm thinking about eating better. My eating habits right now are sort of bipolar. My meals are really pretty healthy -- whole grains, plenty of milk, and so on. On the other hand, I'm not always eating enough at meal time, and my snacks are not especially nutritious. I also don't eat nearly enough fruits and vegetables. The obvious solution would be to eat healthier snacks. The obstacle: at snack time I want sugar! And chocolate! There's nothing wrong with chocolate, but it's not a great nutritional stand-in for fruit. Peanut-butter toast often satisfies me when I think I want a donut or cookies, but I'm already having it for breakfast nearly every morning, and my diet's lacking in variety even more than it's lacking in veggies.

Finally, I've tried, but my warped tastebuds refuse to accept good, plain fruit as a complete snack. What's a girl to do?

Here are some ideas to remind myself:

• Salad at dinner
• Fruit salad for lunch or snacks
• More expensive fruit (peaches, berries...) might be worth it if it gets me eating fruit
• Frozen veggies to microwave with dinner
• Carrot sticks and something not too overwhelming to dip them in
• A supply of plastic cutlery for my office!

I'm starting to feel a little bit like I'm feeding a stubborn toddler.

Got any other good ideas?