(Apropos of nothing, but it made me giggle.)
And so, now that I'm back into the swing of juggling work and school and such, I was thinking about the fact that I'd rarely have quilty or embroidery stuff to write about and whether I should just put the blog and podcast on hiatus for awhile until I can be interesting again.
But I'd miss y'all.
So here's what I think I'll do instead. Since we ALL have lots of stuff to juggle, even if our deets are different, and since we probably therefore all have issues around stress and anxiety and keeping ourselves healthy in the midst of chaos, maybe it'll be just as important for me to hold myself accountable to all of you--and hopefully inspire you to do the same--around staying balanced. That means I'm going to set myself a goal of blogging on every weekend about my mental and physical health goals for the week ahead--and if I can sneak some fabric and funky threads in there as well, all the better.
I'm home for a few weeks running. Yay. So my goals for this week are:
1. Get my calendar organized around current assignments. I can only do so much of this as we've gotten our fall reading list but not our fall syllabus so I can't get too organized for that until I know what's due when. I do have follow ups due from my August intensive, though, so I can at least wrangle all that into submission. LifeTopix is my favorite tool for this.
2. Set myself up a good habit of consistent journal-writing around my thesis topic. I'm in a "synthesis mode" at the moment, in which I've done a lot of the reading I need to do but I need to allow my brain space to play with it all, making connections, and such. So although I still have plenty of reading ahead of me, I think it's just as important--if not more so, at this point--to slow down the reading for a bit and start the brewing.
3. Prep my groceries to make it easier to eat healthy this week. Okay, so I'm cheating on listing this as I already got it done this afternoon. If I don't slice-n-dice all those fresh fruits and veggies, they tend to sit in my fridge untouched until I have to toss them out. Everything is now ready for immediate use. I'll report in next weekend on how well I did actually eating it all.
4. Get back into the habits of my gratitude journal and habit journal. I was doing really well on these until I had my work and school trips so close together. Back at it. They do help me stay focused...and stay focused on the positive.
5. Get back into habits of moving. I had a "gimme" week last week with all the walking involved in getting back and forth between housing and class in Boston. This week I'm back to having to make an effort. But it's an effort well worth it. Planning some aqua yoga this afternoon to work the rest of the kinks out left over from my long drive home Friday, and back to real exercise tomorrow.
6. Make a decision about re-joining Weight Watchers and going to meetings. MyFitnessPal ain't hacking it for me--nothing wrong with the app, but everything to do with weekly accountability of showing up at a meeting in person. I know I'm happier in general when I feel like I'm taking steps towards making myself healthier, so rather than thinking of the negatives around the whole issue of weight loss I'm working on framing it more positively in my head. And rather than my habitual all-or-nothing approach, I'm reminding myself to take it one day at a time.
7. Get some personal and household appointment-type-reminders into LifeTopix. I've slacked on setting up my reminders for things like "make groomer appointment for dogs" and "renew prescriptions" and such. I'm much happier and more relaxed when I'm not trying to remember things. (David Allen's Getting Things Done is a great resource for helping you learn more about how your brain works when it comes to unfinished tasks!)
That seems like a long list but it's all quite doable as most of those things are integrally related to one another anyway.
What do you need to take care of so that you can feel a little less stress this week?
P.S. Never fear--I do still intend to talk about quilty and embroidery-y stuff when it comes up, which I still plan on having happen on a regular basis. Meanwhile, all this other stuff clears my schedule and head for actually having the fiber stuff happen. So it's all connected!