Math

Just taking a break from Working The Entire Day to figure my figures. So through March, the year was 24.9% over, and my results are thus:

• Memorize 10,000 words: 25.0% complete
• Walk 1,000 miles: 16.0% complete
• Sell 100 items on eBay: 9% complete
• Lose 10 pounds: 50% complete
• Write 1 children's book: 0% complete

It doesn't seem quite right to have one of these numbers go down, but apparently I gained a pound in March. (I'm thinking that has something to do with cake, maybe?)

Coupla flops

I've been trying to find something Paleo to put in the kids' lunchboxes ever since I took away their tortilla chips, and today I invented a recipe for nut crackers. Unfortunately, no child will ever bring them to school in a lunchbox, because, although quite tasty, they came out not so much crackers as crumbs. I did at least save the crumbs. They might make an interesting topping for something.

With that experiment firmly in the "not-a-complete-failure" column, I went on to take another stab at Paleo pizza crust, this one mostly eggs. It was just meh. I have a recipe for a cauliflower-based crust I'm interested in trying next, but all of these involve a ton of work, and my husband is not a fan of the fake pizza anyway. It might be time to just admit defeat and let him take me out to Old Chicago once a month for my fix.

I'm guessing my kitchen experimenting has come to an end for a while anyway. Dopey just dropped a 500-page book on me, Doc and Bashful's various projects are ongoing, and Sneezy never, ever stops sending me horrible stuff to work on. (Suck it up, buttercup. This is what you do.)

9 a.m. Monday yoga

I hadn't made it to the 9 a.m. Monday yoga class in quite a while. I knew it was a great one, but there's just something about getting up Monday morning, contemplating my busy calendar for the week, and then washing my hands of it and heading straight to yoga that makes me feel too much like a slacker.

Well, I felt like a slacker before the class, anyway. During the class, which was some kind of crazy, fast-paced yoga/aerobics/strength training hybrid, I felt like a yoga-doing beast. (And after the class, I got up to leave but fell back down into a sweaty, quivering heap because of the massive head rush.) I honestly don't think I've worked out that hard since the days of Ironman training, but it was really, really, really fun.

Although eating better has been great, I feel like I've not really been doing the exercise side of things justice. Enough of this one-yoga-class a week thing. From now on, I want to do all the yoga.

P.S. I had a fun day off, but we decided to go out and make some large purchases we had been postponing. Nothing like spending almost $3,000 on Sunday afternoon to send you scurrying back to your place of livelihood on Monday morning. (Right after yoga, obviously.)

My name is Julie, and I'm a somethingaholic

Sometimes my problem is that I'm way too busy. And sometimes my problem is that I'm happily busy, but I don't manage my time well, and then suddenly I'm way too busy again. And sometimes my problem is that I agree to do work I don't even really have to, because…geez, I don't know. Maybe I'm addicted to being busy? Or to making money? Or to being at my computer?

At any rate, it can't be good for me to spend so much time in my office. Much of it is necessary, and some of it I truly enjoy and don't want to give up. But here are the hours of my life I want to reclaim: the ones where I should be doing my work, but I'm aimlessly goofing off online to take a "break" from it.

It's not that I don't need breaks. I just need them out in the real world more often, because I'm starting to forget what it is I even enjoy doing out there.

I was talking this over with my brilliant husband the other night, and he suggested that I take a look at my calendar each week and then figure out when I can take one day completely off. (Yes, I've gotten so bad that it's been weeks—or months?—since I've had a whole day off.) So I did that, and it's tomorrow. It will be interesting to see if I remember how to have fun.

Collaboration

M.H. and I sat side by side in my office all weekend on putting the finishing touches on his book.

We've been asked if it's maritally challenging to work together as writer and editor, and the answer is an unconditional yes. But much more so in the earlier stages, when I'm saying things like, "I don't think this section works at all" and he's saying, "But that's the most precious, interesting, vital part of the entire book," and I'm saying, "Yeah, but it still needs to be completely changed." (When the conversation starts off like that, someone's definitely going to end up sleeping on the couch.) But this round of editing was about the fifteenth time through that puppy, and so I was saying things like, "Darling, I think this sentence needs a comma," and he was saying, "A comma would be divine, my dear."

So the point is it was a fairly nice weekend together, and then it was D.O.N.E. (see related post). Now we're just waiting for the company he hired to design the inside pages and get it set up for all the different ebook formats. I suppose there's some checking and tweaking that goes on at that point, but I'm really expecting it to be for sale sometime next week.

This is pretty big for us. We quit our jobs and moved to Montana nearly six years ago in anticipation of this very event.

Every January, M.H. figures out our family's budget for the year, and then I make a game of sorts out of trying to earn 100% of that magic number that we need to survive as quickly as possible. (I think I hit it in August one year, which was sweet.) But we were talking last night about whether any income from Rhubarb should count toward the official 100%. I had to think about it for a second, but of course the answer is yes. This was a team effort from the beginning, and not just the wacky pie-themed sci-fi book, either.

Night of a million teens

Slumber parties make me edgy.

There are six 14-year-old boys in my basement right now, playing loud music and some shoot-'em-up video game I probably shouldn't be allowing, although I'm not actually going to go down there to see. They yell a lot, and most of them are bigger than I am. Every loud thump and shout makes me fear for their safety and my possessions.

I know I need to relax. I should have learned a long time ago that with boys, it's never as bad as it sounds. These are very nice kids. It's only that they're young and loud and sugared up. I just wish I wasn't hosting so I could leave, is all.

Sunshine

Ah, it was a good day.

I had a heaping helping of bacon-fried kale for breakfast, caught up on all my work, walked 4½ miles in the sunshine, and tonight I get to celebrate the boy's last day of being a 13-year-old. With CAKE.