Quick update

A few updates about life, garden, exercise, and food:

Life is good right now! My house is very slowly getting cleaned and organized. I've decided to tackle this issue slowly, in the hopes that cleaning and organizing will become a habit. I guess I'll see how that goes.

The garden is doing well. I've spent several hours there over the last few days, and the ground is cleared of weeds, some of the plants are thriving, and I planted some more squash seeds. I'm hoping they'll do ok.

I've been running and doing the 30-Day Shred. So far, so good. My muscles are tired and achy, but I feel good. I'll have to get to the gym one of these days to weigh myself, though.

I've stopped eating dinner, sort of. I've been eating and energy bar and a few nuts for dinner for the moment. That won't last long, though, mostly because I'm out of energy bars. On the other hand, I've been eating a fairly large breakfast, so I thnk it balances out. I'll update more on how that's working for me. And now it's time for bed!

Garden bonanza

I've got huge plans for food from the garden this week! Tonight, I'm making braised cabbage with a red cabbage that I found in my garden. I had pretty much given up hope on the cabbage, and tonight I went to pull out some older plants, and there it was! I'm also in the process of roasting a pepper from the garden to make frittata for breakfast tomorrow morning, along with tomatillo sauce, frozen from last year. It will be a bit of an experiment. As a side dish for tonight, I'll be making a simple tomato and avocado salad, with heirlooms from the garden. Despite my heirlooms barely producing, I'm determined to enjoy them as much as possible.

In other garden news, the corn has just about petered out. The cucumber is still barely hanging in there, and I'm hoping the removal of some of the corn plants will convince it to grow a bit more. I also have a honey dew melon! I was despairing about not having had any melons from the garden, and lo and behold, there it was! The basil is going crazy and I've barely had time to do anything about it. The tomatillo plant is looking promising, but hasn't produced a lot yet - about enough to make a small batch of sauce. Today, I planted squash in six more places. I'm hoping at least one of the plants will pull through. I bought a packet of multi-colored pattypan squash seeds, and I would love to have white, yellow, and green to make zucchini pickles with.

Sobering news

I just found out that one of my classmates from graduate school has ALS. This is a person that I've thought of occasionally over the last few years, and I recently sent him a friend request on Facebook, not knowing that he was sick. Needless to say, I'm a little upset by the news. He is a person who has been energetic, creative, and surprising the entire time I've known him, and while I can't claim to be good friends with him, I've always thought very highly of him.

I would say that it's a lesson to me to try to be happier and to enjoy life and cherish each experience that I have, but I don't want to reduce him to an object lesson. He's a real person, and I fervently hope that everything will turn out ok.

Thoughts prior to embarking on a new year

My birthday is quickly approaching, and I've decided that I'm going to treat this as sort of a new year's celebration, considering that it's a new year for me. The last year was absolutely awful, and I'm determined that the next year will be better.

I'm preparing for the new year with a few gifts to myself and a few resolutions to get me through to the calendar new year.

First and foremost, I gave myself a haircut and a trip to the dentist. That might seem rather mundane, but it sure feels good to be doing mundane things again. It's been a very long time since I had a haircut, and a much, much longer time since a trip to the dentist.

Some of my new year resolutions include cleaning out and organizing my house, and then keeping it that way, along with saving money, losing weight, and getting in shape. Which have been pretty typical goals for me for a while now. I'm hoping that I'll get my act together to actually accomplish them.

Where did my memory go?

In my quest to shape up my finances, I've been doing a little virtual rearranging. I have labeled my emergency savings account as a true emergency savings account, although I have unfortunately had to dip into a bit lately. But I went to REI yesterday and emerged without buying anything that wasn't on my list, so that was a good start at controlling spending. I also opened an extra checking account for things that aren't regular expenses, such as vacations, car repair, car insurance, etc. I calculated how much I spend on unexpected expenses each year, then divided it by 12 and set up an automatic transfer to put that much money in that account each month. Hopefully this will help me, although until I pay off my credit card (which should happen in another month or two), it's going to be tight.

I now have two dilemmas. I had another savings account, my old, traditional savings account, and I can't for the life of me remember why I kept it open. Maybe I was thinking that I would use it for regular savings, but I'm not planning to have any regular savings until I pay off my student loans.

Which brings me to my next dilemma - my student loans. I HATE being in debt. I've figured that if I take any extra money I have each month, and put it towards my loans, I can cut the repayment period to 16 or 17 years. If I stop contributing to my 401(k) and put all of that towards my loans, I could have them paid off in 9.5 years. But is it worth the peace of mind of having my loans paid off earlier?

It might be time for a gratefulness post...

5 things I'm grateful for

1. Not being homeless, jobless, or health insurance-less. While I'm pretty much living paycheck to paycheck at the moment (and I wish someone had warned me BEFORE I went to school about how little I would make when I finished), I have some emergency money, I have a place to live, I have a good job, and for the moment I have health insurance that prevents me from being homeless.

2. My gym. I love my gym. There are awesome people there, and a lot of them go out of their way to be friendly. When I go to my gym, I feel like i'm surrounded by a community of people who care.

3. My garden. Although it's not producing as well as I would like, there is now a 3-year waiting list to get a plot, so I'm quite happy that I got one when I did.

4. My car. It runs. Enough said.

5. All of the fabulous adventures I'm plotting. I wish I had enough time and money for all of them, but for right now, I'll stick with what I can manage.

Priorities

Bear with me, this story has a point...

I went to a wedding this weekend at one of my favorite places in the region, Lake Tahoe. The location was beautiful, the drive there was beautiful, and the wedding was a lot of fun. This morning, we had a barbecue on the Truckee river. It was supposed to start at noon, and I got there a half hour early. Supposedly a lot of people were heading over early, but when I arrived, no one was there. I walked around a bit, because it was a beautiful spot, but I found myself getting cranky because I had tons of things that I really needed to get done today, and here I was having to wait for everyone, and what in the world was I supposed to do before all the slackers showed up?

And then, I had a small epiphany. One of the things I always envision myself doing, when I try to imagine how I would like my life to be, is to sit outside in a beautiful spot, preferably in the mountains, and read. And here I was, in a beautiful place, in the mountains, with my book! Obviously, I read for a while until people showed up, but it definitely made me think about priorities, and how I need to try to remember what's really important. Getting home and doing the laundry or mopping he floor really shouldn't always be at the top of my list.