Two events coming up for me, one very long-range and one occurring next week:
The long-range one is a trip that Jim and I are discussing that we’d like to take for our 25th wedding anniversary, which takes place on May 30. We’ve decided that we’re going to go to France, probably sometime in September when the tourist tsunami has passed but the weather is still nice. Right now the trip is in the “wouldn’t it be fun” phase.
I write periodically about the dangers of sugar consumption and my own efforts to control if not banish this substance from my life. Right now I’m working on re-doing my recipes over on the hospitality blog, and for every dessert I’m including information on how many grams of sugar each serving contains. The typical amount is around 25 grams, or about 6 teaspoons, which, coincidentally, is the limit given by most researchers for the daily maximum we should have for added sugar.
On Wednesdays I look forward to listening to Happier with Gretchen Rubin, the podcast that she does with her sister Liz Craft. I know I’ve mentioned this program many times and will continue to do so as long as they keep putting it out, because so many of the ideas ring true to me.
So this week Gretchen gave herself a demerit for getting so involved in a particular task (in her case, doing the edits for her new book) that she neglected her other work and fell way behind. (Her description of this issue starts at minute 37:00.) This type of thing has certainly happened to me. I get involved in some big project and just don’t want to do anything else. The housework suffers. I don’t get out on my walk. I fail to get the grocery shopping done and we end up eating out or getting takeout. (Yes, I do sometimes say to my husband and son, “I’m leaving dinner up to you guys.” That’s fine. On the whole, though, things run more smoothly around here if I’m at least nominally in charge of meal planning.)
I’ve written quite a bit about my periodic attempts to cut out sugar from my diet and have also posted reviews of several books about the dangers of sugar. The most recent material I posted was of an interview that Gretchen Rubin did with Gary Taubes, who has now written yet a third book on this dangerous aspect of the Western diet, The Case Against Sugar. I’m including the link again here; be advised that you have to give up your e-mail address in order to gain access to the PDF. It’s about 23 pages and very worthwhile reading.
Other than the annual chocolate tasting that my sister-in-law leads each year (well, this was the second year), a few sips of pink eggnog and some cookies,, mostly barely-sweet biscotti, I stayed off sweets for the holidays. Sometime in the next couple of weeks I’ll go in and get my A1C checked—a reading that gives a three-month average of your blood sugar load.
I’m pretty sure that I’ve already posted the following quotation, but I’m going to do it again anyway. I’ve read Anne Ortlund’s Disciplines of the Beautiful Woman multiple times and talked about before. She was a writer and pastor’s wife who died several years ago. I think I ran across DOTBW in the bookstore of my old church. I remember reading it while on early-morning duty at the school where I taught and a high-school boy making a snide remark about the title.
Since our out-of-town company arrives this evening for a stay of a week, I may not be posting much over the next few days and figure that I’ll get something written about the resolutions I’m making as of RIGHT NOW. (Why should I wait until Jan. 1?) These resolutions are in the area of small, consistent actions, the kind of thing that I hate doing. I mean, like, DESPISE. My kitchen has been a disaster zone for the past week, for example, because I never got it completely cleaned up after last week’s big baking extravaganza for our church’s Christmas party and then haven’t been very consistent about cleaning up after meals since then.
The Big Thing: How to Complete Your Creative Project Even if You’re a Lazy, Self-Doubting Procrastinator Like Me by Phyllis Korkki, 2016, available through Amazon and many other sources. (Title link is to my Amazon Affiliate page.) Visit the author’s website at www.phylliskorkki.com/.
What are some of my own “big things”? I want to:
1. Prepare all of my music posts (now mostly over on the “Behind the Music” page) for use by choral groups, re-formatting them into pdf files and eventually (I hope) making some money from them.
2. Finish up my e-book on the Benghazi tragedy. (I’ve done a ton of research on this topic and would like to put together a straight-down-the-line “here’s what happened” account that brings all of the threads together.)
with my little garden spade and keep scraping at the thing that confuses me.” Sarah Koenig of Serial, Season One.
Don’t have any idea who Sarah Koenig is, or what Serial is? Then stop reading this post right now and head on over to the Serial Season One website. When you’ve come back up for air you can return here. How I envy you if you somehow managed
“Never let a day go by without learning something new.””No experience is a failure if you learn from it.”
“What you do today is important, because you are exchanging a day of your life for it.”
I don’t think I can add much to these statements. That last one, in particular, is a real shove in the right direction. May I add a quotation from my own book on this subject?
“Time is even more unforgiving than money, because sometimes you can get your money back after you spend it, but that never, ever happens with time.”
My favorite movie of all time is Amadeus, the 1984 film adaptation of the play by Peter Shaffer. (Not the R-rated “Director’s Cut” version, please, but the PG-rated original release.) It’s not historically accurate in many ways, but so what? It is permeated with the glorious, glorious music of Mozart. And I have to believe that Tom Hulce’s portrayal of the this incredibly gifted but often troubled genius is very close to what the real man was like. So many great scenes.