Focus

I've been back from vacation and back at work for a little over a week now. We had a really nice vacation -- very relaxing. Difficult to come back to the cold and snow of course.

Since I've been back I've been focusing on some small things -- eating well and getting enough sleep. I've been pretty happy with my eating, and I've made progress on the sleeping. I set a goal to be in bed by midnight on work nights, and I've made it each night. I do think I need to maybe get to bed a little earlier though as I'm still really tired in the morning. My Fitbit is saying I'm averaging around 6 to 6.5 hours of sleep a night. Might not be quite enough.

I had also planned to start going to the gym in the morning after my kids go to school. I've decided that I'm just not going to be one of those people who runs outside in the bad weather. I'll start running outside again in April. And walking to work in -20 and below weather is just horribly unpleasant. So I decided that I'm going back to the gym. That didn't happen last week because I came home from vacation with some kind of stomach bug and didn't want to risk not making it to the bathroom from the treadmill. So I reset that goal to start this week. Then last night half of our basement flooded (floor drain backed up, pretty gross), throwing my whole schedule out of whack, and once again I found myself unprepared to go to the gym. So tomorrow it is.

An interesting thing happened while I was away. About 6 months ago, I subscribed to receive FlyLady emails. For those of you not familiar, FlyLady has a website ( www.flylady.net ) that helps people deal with getting control over cleaning their houses. I found it years ago when my kids were little and have been following their plans on and off for a long time. Anyway, I re-subscribed to their email reminders about 6 months ago, choosing the digest version because they send out quite a few emails a day, and I figured I didn't want to read them all, I'd just look at the daily digest. Of course what happened is that I never looked at the digest because there was too much information in it, and I found it overwhelming. Well, while I was on vacation, I guess FlyLady changed email service providers, and I started receiving individual emails again. My first thought when I came home and had to plow through over 400 emails was that I was going to unsubscribe from the list. Then a funny thing happened. I started reading the emails. And then I started doing the missions and daily routines. It's been a great help actually having the multiple daily reminders. It has reminded about simple things that help save time, like putting out my clothes the night before, shining my sink, etc. I feel much better having the reminders to follow a routine. I highly recommend it to anyone who is looking for little reminders to help keep on top of things, or people who are feeling overwhelmed about the state of their house. FlyLady's tips and the structure they use is really helpful.

Another interesting thing happened while I was away. I've admitted in the past to being a diet coke addict. There was a time when I probably drank upwards of 6 cans of diet coke a day. Recently, I'd cut down to about 2 a day, but sometimes had more. In Cuba, they didn't have real diet coke. I don't like any other soft drinks, especially not ones with sugar, so I didn't drink any pop when I was there. Since coming home, I've decided that the only time I'll have diet coke is if I'm out at a restaurant. I've stuck with that about 90% of the time. I've been drinking water and club soda. I'm not sure whether this really matters all that much, but I have to believe that all that aspartame can't be good for me.

Anyway, that's it Sparkers. Focus on eating well, getting rest, sticking with routines and limiting the diet coke. And tomorrow, to the gym.