Oh this year has started off with a struggle. Still not getting enough sleep (6 hours or less). The problem is that I cuddle with Sick Kitty on the couch for an hour, because she loves that, and that delays getting ready for bed for an hour. She doesn't like coming to bed with me, so that's not an option. I thought about bringing her down into the basement on nights that I workout after dinner, but that's not the same as cuddling... although she does like to be with us.
Woke up late, got started very late with everything. I'm feeling this "cold" in my throat and sinuses. At least it's not the flu. I opted out of Warm Slow Yoga this morning, even though I really wanted to go, because of germs, the need for rest, and the lack of time to get ready. I am planning to miss tomorrow morning's yoga at the studio as well.
Monday night is Library Yin Yoga, which I especially like! This is the one with the yogini (teacher) who had weight loss surgery and used yoga as her physical activity. She keeps it real, and it's a nice small group.
Yesterday at work was a minefield. Not only was every file I touched in dire straights, but also, Associate Attorney said that his 19 year old daughter, home from college for the winter break, might have cancer. This would be awful, of course, except that there were just too many holes in his story to make me fully believe him. His main concern was that he had to leave the office ASAP so that he could be at the hospital when the doctor came to talk them in the afternoon. "Do you have an appointment?" No, it's whenever they come around. Later, I find out that he met up with his 3 adult children, who leave to go back home on Sunday, probably for lunch or something, before heading over to the hospital at around 3:45p. Hmm... So what happened to being at the hospital ASAP to speak with the doctor?
And then he seemed very surprised when I mentioned to him to call the Boss over the weekend (the Boss is in Florida until Feb. 15th) to let him know what's going on. Like, "Oh, Boss knows about this?" Well, YES, because if you're going to be out of the office to be with your daughter, we need to find an attorney that will actually BE here to cover closings.
I told husband at dinner that I cannot have 1.5 more months like the last 2 days have been.
I've done well with my reading goals, but finding the time to meditate - or to start meditating - has been difficult. Remember the Difficult Yoga Studio I went to back in September? (See Donkey's Yoga Disaster) They are offering a meditation series on Sunday evenings. 5 sessions, 1-1.5 hours, for $120. That seems a bit expensive to me. Maybe not, for one's time. Sunday evenings (late afternoons) though are not the best time for me. Not sure. I've got time to think about doing this if that's what I want.
Weight-loss goal is not going so well, either as it looks like I gained half a pound. WTHeck... When TOM is here, it's just complete chaos until I can have my own body back.
Progress as of today: 49 lbs lost so far, only 10.5 lbs to go!
Having a hard time getting enough sleep, which is interfering with working on all my other goals! In fact, I'm writing now, on my phone, because this may be the only chance I get today!
I've been fighting something for about 2 weeks, which I'm sure is not helping. I had a breakout of painful sores on my lips last week. The sores are mostly gone, but now I'm battling a sore throat. I wake up congested, which is part of the problem. AND - There are people around me who have family members with contagious flu!
It was good to get back into the studio for Vin-Yin yoga. It is very much the same vigorous yoga at the beginning, but then it transitions into the slower, Yin yoga. I felt invigorated and yet relaxed, at the same time, if that's possible.
Tonight is Veterans Chair Yoga with the husband. Looking forward to this a lot.
Progress as of today: 49.5 lbs lost so far, only 10 lbs to go!
Lately, I've been using the studio's mats, because they are thinner and provide a better balance for one-legged poses. Good point that this could be a source of germs. I'm working on getting a thinner mat.
The sores were cold sores. See, that's what I get for kissing Danny Witten when I was 8. They usually flare up right around TOM. The sores are gone, TOM is here this week. It's usually not this many sores though. This was a particularly bad breakout.
I'm staying home as much as I can this weekend.
in fact, all of your yoga sounds incredible. maybe one day...i'll be doing yoga :)
i hope you can work thru into feeling better xoxo and to getting more sleep this weekend! :)
Son left this morning to go back to Texas and has left a sadness behind.
The hard yoga class has been changed to fast- slow "vin-yin" style. I'm checking the new format.
Progress as of today: 49.5 lbs lost so far, only 10 lbs to go!
Happy New Year 2020, everyone!
I have not been as pro-active as I might have been this morning. Slept in, because I stayed up too late, and haven't done anything too ambitious so far. If I may be frank, the sadness that my son will be leaving tomorrow morning is starting to creep up. It's odd - I can almost feel this sadness in my shoulders. BUT I do not want our last hours together to be sad, so we'll just enjoy the time that we do have remaining.
I weighed in this morning, and I do not believe the numbers I saw - have to weigh in 3 times, you know. Each time the number was different, but they averaged out to be 137 (137, 138, 136 - go figure!), so that's what I'll go with. I sure felt a lot heavier than that, from the carbs that I had last night. Maybe this scale is finally dying, I don't know. I did not have the time to weigh in on the better scale (the Ironman scale that weighs to the 0.2 and measures body fat %). I wish I had done so.
As promised, I will share my goals for 2020 - but this morning, I was watching a video on a yoga group that someone shared, who said that setting intentions is better than setting goals, because so many times, we set unrealistic goals for ourselves. Well that's just great - why wasn't this video available a week ago????
My theme this year is CHANGE. Making changes, not being afraid to make changes, embracing the opportunity to change as a chance to grow, learn, improve, experience more in life.
Changes to improve habits
Changes to nuture myself:
Changes to my health:
Changes to my yoga practice:
It's an ambitious plan, but it's more about doing better for myself, which in turn, will help be a better person to everyone around me.
Progress as of today: 49.5 lbs lost so far, only 10 lbs to go!
I really love your goals. They all sound so healthy. Your yoga goals are simply amazing, 3x a week, and i know you can pull it off as the sessions do't have to be that long at home - how long at home would you practice for in a session?
You inspire me to try harder and reach further in my goals. I hope to cook even more, maybe this year i will finally cook fish and meat and chicken and buy less pre-made in that category.
So i see your goals are health / happiness oriented. Thank you for sharing that goals do not have to be career oriented or just for learning purposes. i needed to see that i'm not the only one that enjoys the more "basic" nurturing things in life, if you know what i mean.
sometimes i feel like everyone around me is so technologically orientated...
i have a goal to start being more active cardiovascularly...at least on my exercise bike. i have actually sort of fallen off the wagon in terms of cardio. and my weights ...are easy to maintain as i've limited the exercises to just 3: pushups, chest flies, curls, and triceps.
good job being specific on your goals.
and i'm glad your son is headed back to better himself, too.
Day 100: It's been real.
It's almost midnight here in Chicago, but I wanted to write a recap today, before I start next year. Today, I did celebrate a bit with food and was not as strict. I'm OK with that, because I know that tomorrow, I will get back on track. Life goes on, and I'm rolling with the waves.
The main reason for writing TODAY - specifically TODAY, the end of this decade - is that when I started this decade, I was just starting to get out of a very dark place. I had lost all hope. I was drowning in shame. I lost my job. I lost my friends. I was publically humiliated. I almost lost my kids. I almost lost my freedom. I lost my savings. I lost my credit score. I could have lost my husband, but thank the Good Lord that he (and He) stuck with me throughout this entire ordeal. I didn't want to leave the house, I didn't want to live any more.
Sometimes in one's life, something happens that changes one's life so significantly that it divides one's life. I never thought something so major would happen to me like that, but it did. My life became divided into "Before" and "After", and has been defined in those terms ever since.
However, last week, I had another light bulb moment 
where it really HIT me that this is the end of a decade. And realizing this, I thought back to where I WAS, and looked at where I'm at NOW - and realized that I had actually managed to rebuild a life that I now call mine, in the past 10 years. It's not the same life that I had before, but in some ways, it's a better life, an authentic life.
Believe me when I say that I would never EVER want to go through what I went through in order to have gotten to this point, nor would I wish it on anyone else - even if it meant ending up in a better place. (No, some things should NOT ever happen, if they can at all be avoided.) Maybe that's why this event happened - so that I could get to this "better place" - or maybe not. What I DO know is I'm done trying to figure out or understand why things happened the way that they did, and have just accepted what happened, has happened.
My point is that, in looking back, I realized that I've managed - ALMOST - to move forward freely. When I took the Self-Love yoga series, that was the first time in 10-11 years that I was finally able to even think about being able to forgive myself, and even that tiny first step is HUGE to me.
Although this entry COULD be about how we should never give up, that's not what this is. This is an acknowledgment of how far I've come in this decade, and that I'm able to be that friend to myself to say, You did it, Donkey, and I'm really proud of you.
Progress as of today: 50 lbs lost so far, only 0 lbs to go!
Day 99: I am open to change.
This is what I repeated to myself on Saturday during the impromptu, "pop-up" yoga class. It helped!
It was startling to me to see that after a week of no yoga, that I felt a little decrease in balance & stability in holding certain poses. Just an interesting observation and motivation for practicing more often.
As I left my goals list at work, I didn't work on it much. I plan to do that today. For my yoga goals, there are a few poses that I would like to improve on. (My initial thought was to "master" these poses, but then realized that's not really the point of a practice. ) So, I have a short list of poses to hold for a minute. It will be fun to challenge myself in this way.
Some of my goals are habits to establish (e.g. using my waterpik daily) and others have a more progressive intention, e.g. weight-training.
So the list is rather long, and I'm wondering if I should pare it down, thanks to insights from Bear and Happy.
Progress as of today: 50 lbs lost so far, only 0 lbs to go!
You motivate me with your progress and goals...i haven't come up with anything yet!
Day 97: Be the change you want to see.
I really wanted to write yesterday, but I refuse to log in at work, because my login gets stored, and I just didn't have the patience to try to write on my phone....
I had an epiphany yesterday (Friday) morning while exercising on my bike:
If I want to SEE changes, I'm going to have to MAKE changes.
How about that? It is such a obvious "duh" thing to say, but it truly felt like a light bulb turned on in my brain.
As you know, I'm very connected with routine, with numbers, with habits. But if I want to see changes - physically, performance-wise, emotionally, spiritually - I'm going to have to change things up. This means stepping outside of my comfort zone to establish new habits. What I'm doing now is fine, but it's time to change.
I'm still working on New Year's goals & resolutions. I started writing down notes in the planner I use at work, that I mentioned a couple of days ago. Not all of my aspirations are diet and exercise, but when it came to establishing some yoga goals for myself, I completely drew a blank. THAT kind of startled me.
I have a "pop-up" yoga class at the studio this morning at 10am. This is "slow yoga" which has a nice combination of standing and floor poses at a slower pace, which is kind of where I'm at right now. I started missing yoga on Thursday, and yesterday, I was like, "I really NEED yoga soon."
It is rainy and gray here today. Tonight my husband and I are going out for our anniversary - 24 years. Then he has something planned for afterwards, which I'm not sure what that is. Hmm... I'd like to go look at snowblowers, but I'm guessing his is a lot more exciting.
Queen Bee stopped in the office yesterday to pick up her bonus check. She wished me a happy New Year - which I thought was really actually kind of nice of her to do. She continues to lose weight and looks good. I secretly admit to you all that I was a little jealous, actually, but not in a negative way -- that is to say, I'm using her progress to help motivate myself to making more positive changes.
Associate Attorney and Nice Lady will be off on Monday. Tuesday is a shortened day for New Years Eve. Then, my boss leaves for Florida until February 12th.
Progress as of today: 50 lbs lost so far, only 0 lbs to go!
I give some more thought to developing the new habits.
I feel like you are over stressing on the New Year's resolutions. Honestly, I think you work really hard and are too hard on yourself. What if your resolution was just to give yourself a hug every time you fall off track and have more fun?
I'm a big advocate for starting NOW. Don't wait for a Monday, don't wait for January 1st - start today, start now!
What I'm saying is that some of these little habit goals I have for myself could probably start today. It would shorten my list and maybe be kinder too.
So instead of Snow Blowers, you went to see a show,right!? Wonderful.
You sound good and involved in lots of wonderful activities lately and it's wonderful to hear.
Day 95: coasting along until it's done.
Christmas was nice! The kids slept in until around 11a. Opening gifts took about an hour or so. We each take turns opening a gift. Then we all kind of did our own thing. I watched tv with my daughter a little.
I recieved some nice gifts, some related to yoga or relaxing.
Dinner was delicious. I had a serving of lasagna and lots of vegetables. The fruitcake is gone so I enjoyed both apple and pumpkin pies. Later, as we played cards for a couple of hours, we snacked on cookies and crackers. It was a very nice, warm cozy day.
The only downside is coming to work today. I would have liked another day off. And this morning was too busy, I feel. However, life goes on. Daughter is working, so son and husband are out taking care of errands for our son, e.g. renewing driver's license.
I can tell that I'm missing yoga.
Progress as of today: 50 lbs lost so far, only 0 lbs to go!
that's nice your hubby is going with your son to renew his license and everything.
i was thinking how Catholics/Christians must be so busy this time of year - these couple days - and how my office worker also probably hasn't been to the gym (well i know it!) because she's been with family and prepping for Christmas / cooking these few days. I am sure that's how it was for you, too. Did you make the pies or buy them? Playing cards is nice, i have to do that and play scrabble with my parents on NYE coming up!
Day 94: Peace on earth and goodwill towards all... Mantra: Peace be with you.
Spendind some time with my mother in law last night was nice. The food was a little off, for some reason, but it was a good time. She is spending Christmas Day with her other son and his kids.
My kids are still sleeping, LOL, but husband has cinnamon rolls in the oven. It would figure that the one day he prepares something sweet for breakfast, all I really want are eggs. I'm quite the oddball in that I do not care for eggs all that much at any time. This makes me trully an outsider, as everyone at work seems to be eating eggs for breakfast lately.
The eating frenzy is coming to an end soon. We have the following dinners left:
Like Bear, I am formulating some goals for 2020. I will post those on January 1st, since it makes it easier to refer back to them at the end of the year. What MIGHT be helpful is if I also refer to these goals more often, like perhaps at the beginning of each month, as a gentle reminder.
For now, though, I am enjoying the day off. Nice and quiet.
Progress as of today: 50 lbs lost so far, only 0 lbs to go!
Like Bear, you also sound wonderful and i smiled reading your post!
thank you for spreading Peace and for speaking about it today.
You know, i had no idea that you didn't like eggs! though, you don't seem like an outsider to me, although i totally understand your point of view :)
gentle reminders are nice...i sometimes use that exact wording when emailing vendors if they haven't gotten back to me in awhile. do you use the words "gentle reminder" ever in your emails?
enjoy your night and i'd like to know how your Christmas Day was :)
Day 92? 93?
Not much to say. I've been eating way too much fruit cake. It's almost gone, so once it's gone, then I'm done. Left work at 11:30am today. We're taking my mother in law out for dinner tonight, and then a small gift exchange at her studio apartment in assisted living.
We played a 2.5 hour Scrabble game last night. My fellow family members are not really word people. My grandmother was a hawk at Scrabble, so I learned from one of the best.
Progress as of today: 50 lbs lost so far, only 0 lbs to go!
Also, since we live parallel lives, i could have left work as early as 11:30am too! but i left around 12:30 because i wasn't rushing.
what happened was, in our queens office the fire alarm went off, and they said just go home! - instead of having everyone leave the building and have to come back in....so, when that word traveled that the main office went home at 11-11:30am, well, everyone in my office decided it was time to go home too, LOL.
i stayed and ate lunch with my coworker...she was so very spirited and into doing work today! i couldn't believe her energy! and then i left her, but she was busy still talking to people on our floor from the other company who works with us but didn't go home yet. she prob left at least 30min after me....lately, she is full of energy, but always i guess, she inspires me as my boss and her capabilities but sometimes i feel in awe/wishing to be 10% even more like her!
I would love to be THAT person that has energy and enthusiasm like that, but I've always been a quieter soul, more introverted. Still, it's nice to have energized people around for inspiration.
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It is sad to think that the coworker would use such a serious health issue of his child in such a flip way...hopefully she doesn't have cancer and I suspect he is realizing now that he shouldn't have tossed that out there in such a careless way. It does sound like he was just trying to get away from work. Hopefully the yoga will work out when it's right for you...no fun being sick and exercising anyway.
I found out this morning that his daughter had a virus and is out of the hospital. Whatever.
Turns out that some of the yoga instructors are getting sick, so I'm really glad to be staying home this weekend. I do not think I will get any sicker than I am right now, this time around, and this is completely manageable.
I still want my own body back from TOM though, and I should feel more myself on Monday. Oh great, just in time to go back to work.
happy-1 on 01/05/2020:
It's ok to take a break from yoga till you feel better. Do it at home.
Yes, I hope to do a session with the phone app today. However, last night, I had fun just doing a few poses. Not a routine - no flow, but just trying out different things.
happy-1 on 01/05/2020:
And if you are struggling with sleep it is going to make it harder to fight colds. You might need to get more early morning light instead of riding your bike in the basement... And also build up more sleep drive by walking and changing up your exercise patterns.
YES on ALL of this! I've been wanting to do more walking, but just can't seem to get my butt up to do so. Not sure what that's all about.
But doing more walking would definitely be a welcomed change.
Horn_of_plenty on 01/05/2020:
With work, rememember not to get too caught up with lives of your coworkers and to take your life first and foremost as most important to you - not that you aren't, but, try not to stress over what is going on or what coworkers are saying and doing. i guess male coworker had quite a few agendas.
I find myself sleeping tons also on the weekend. i do think that your extra sleep will have you feeling better sooner than anything else will.
plus, your upcoming yoga on Monday sounds wonderful