Detours

The past few weeks feel like a detour from the course I thought I was on. First, a tree fell on my house (March 2; I wrote about in on my garden blog, link at right).  It could have been worse, but it felt catastrophic and it was hard to focus on anything other than it for a while. Except work, of course (which continues to be a big eater of my life and time but brings its own rewards, yes).  But partially as a result of the neighborhood interest in my tree disaster, I've kicked off some home improvement projects that I have been mulling roughly forever.

Then my back went sproing, subject of the last post. It's not all better yet, and it took at least ten days before I started to feel close to normal. Somewhere in there (it all blurs together) my lovely dog had to go to the emergency vet to have a linen table napkin extracted from his inside. Also somewhere in there was a snowstorm; closed work, and close enough in time to my back thing that I had to hire a young person to do my shovelling, first time ever. I have developed a brand new exercise at-home every morning (well, almost every morning) habit to try to keep the back healthy. I do not want to do physical therapy - too inconvenient. It's hard enough to carve out 20 minutes in the morning at home.

Work continues to absorb my life, but also somewhere in there I decided I needed to get away on vacation. I needed to prove I'm the kind of person that gets out there and does things (to paraphrase a friend). I took some time off, and it will be the subject of it's own post.

All of the above is to explain why its been a month since I posted about trying a different strategy for the late afternoon and it was just this week I tried it. I knew if I was going to the gym it would be right from work, so I brought some meaty chili from my freezer, and ate it around 4:30 pm.  Sadly, no, I still dipped into the candy jar. I was ravenous and real food didn't fix that.  I was also ravenous last night - perhaps the somewhat higher level of work and stress this week is the reason for that.

Still, I'm going to try again to actually eat food instead of snack on some afternoons this coming week. We'll see how it goes.

Meantime, halfway through my first of two weekend days, and I need to get cracking on chores.

Excelsior!