Not To Be Trusted With Knives

Remember that time I told you about Farm To Fork? Would you believe that they are down to the last 2 days of their crowd sourcing fundraising campaign? And so far, they’ve managed to raise – at the time of writing this blog posting – $10,990 of the $15,000 that they need to do the great work that they are proposing to do.

In case you haven’t read my previous posting, what they are proposing to do is, simply put, to connect people who have healthy foods to donate with the food banks that need those healthy foods to provide to the 1 in 40 Canadians who don’t have enough food to eat. Yes, you read that right – 1 in 40 Canadians use food banks every month.

Raising $10,990 is a pretty amazing feat – but they need $15,000 and they need it now! So check out the Farm to Fork project and consider making a donation - whatever amount you can spare – today!

Where does the time go? I keep thinking about things I want to blog about, but then suddenly 9 days go by and I haven’t blogged a thing! I can give you all the usual excuses – work is busy, school is busy, being on my own means I now have to do all my chores for myself… but blah, blah, blah. Whatevs. I’m here now and in an attempt to get all the things I’ve been meaning to blog about out of my head, here’s a rapid fire blog posting of All The Things.

In The Latest Froggy News:

The final two frogs do, in fact, have names. As you may recall, I named three of my five new frogs: Copernicus the Second, Froggymodo, and Apricot. The final two frogs are named Count Frogula¹ and Beyoncé².

In the Trying To Be Healthy Department:

MayHealth is going swimmingly. It’s actually been quite helpful to me to be organized on these two tasks – meal planning and laying out my outfits for the week on Sunday – as I now don’t feel stressed out having to make these two simple decisions every day. Plus, my meals are much healthier when I actually plan them out, because I’ve given some thought to making them balanced, as opposed to making a decision solely based on BETH HUNGRY!

Training for my half marathon in June is also coming along. Due to the aforementioned omg-I’m-so-busy, I’ve really only been doing the long runs on the weekend, and maybe one other short run during the week. So I’m not expecting to break any records, but I’m sure I’ll be able to finish! I’ve done the last several long runs with Alicia, which has been awesome, because (a) it’s really nice to have company when you have to run for ~2 hours, and (b) Alicia is in much better shape than me, so I’m having to push myself to try to keep up for as long as I can. I’m not really great at pushing myself, so I need the extra inspiration!

In the Things-I-Missed Department:

Yesterday was my car-iversary! Little Zaphod Beeblebrox the Car is 4 years old³! They grow up so quickly.

In the Distraction Department:

Dr. Cath, when we were out for dinner and beers and absolutely no other reason whatsoever the other night, introduced me to an app called Rando. The idea behind the app is that you take a photo and Rando sends it off to some random person in the world who also uses the app. For every photo you send, you get one in return from some random person in the world. If said random agreed to have their location revealed, you will get to see where in the world that photo came from too. So far, I seem to be getting a lot of photos from South Korea, though I’ve also gotten ones from Texas, Brazil, and Paraguay.

In The Knocking Goals Off My List Department:

I’ve been slacking on some of my goals for the year, so to make myself feel better about that, I decided to use my May Health meal planning to help me work on my “make 10 new meals I’ve never made before” goal. So I actually made two new things I’d never made before last week alone! First, I made lamb shoulder chops on a George Foreman grill. Since I was being all organized and planning ahead, I even marinaded the lamb for 24 hours first. It was delicious. Next I made some bison stew! It was OK – the bison ended up a bit tougher than I would have liked and I thought that the stew itself could have been more flavourful (though putting in a bit of extra Worcestershire sauce gave it a nice little kick).

In the Colour-Me-Surprised Department:

There are some condos going up across the road from me and based on the drawings of what the building was supposed to look like, I thought that they were restoring the facade of the old ~ 6 story building that was there and then building a giant glass tower on top⁴. But apparently not, because they’ve completely demolished the whole building:

I’m hoping that they are going to at least build it to look like the old building, because I quite like how this neighbourhood looks, with the classic old buildings along the street.

On the plus side, for the moment at least, I have a much better riverview than I used to!

In the Ongoing Saga of My Teeth:

I just realized that I haven’t updated y’all on my teeth situation. The last time I mentioned them, I’d just gotten my prototype crowns and veneer and was soliciting your opinion on them. The next step was to go back to the dentist and tell her the things I didn’t like, which she then fixed⁵, so now my teeth are beautiful! Except they are still prototypes, as she had to take impressions of them to send off to a lab in Quebec, where they will make exact replicas of these beautiful teeth, except out of porcelain, which I have to go back to the dentist to have cemented onto my tooth stubs.

My appointment to get this done isn’t until next week and it’s super annoying because the prototypes are held in with “temporary” cement, which isn’t super-duper strong. A few days after my appointment to fix up the prototypes, the veneer fell off. The veneer pretty much just looks like a press-on fingernail, which gets “pressed on” to your tooth which has been shaved down a bit so that the veneer doesn’t stick out past your other teeth, so there’s not a lot of surface area to do the cementing (as opposed to crowns, which cover the entire tooth stump, so there’s tonnes of surface area). The day it happened my dentist was at a conference in Seattle because dental emergencies only happen when your dentist is out of town, and I had to call around to find a dentist whose office was open on a Friday afternoon and who could take a random stranger in to fix their tooth. I found one and she glued my veneer back on… which then fell off again about three hours later, even though I was being very careful and not biting with my front teeth or anything. She glued it on again the next morning and that time it lasted about 6 hours. At that point, I gave up on her as a lost cause, spent Sunday without a veneer⁶ and went to my own dentist first thing Monday morning. She glued it back on with some slightly stronger temporary cement, which held it on for 8 days. She glued it on yet again and, knock on wood, it seems to be holding up⁷. Ever since the first time it fell off, I’ve been very carefully not to eat anything that require biting with my front teeth – I just cut everything up with a knife and fork and put it in my mouth on the opposite side to the veneer, all the way back to my molars. On the plus side, I’m eating less because eating has become so very annoying, which is helping me with my weight loss goal. Also, I can’t bite my nails, so my nails are actually growing quite nicely. Poor tooth structure = everybody wins! (I’m sure as soon as I get my permenant crowns and veneers next week, it will all go back to the way it was before, and I’ll have my nails bitten down and gain back the little weight I’ve managed to lose!)

In the I Haven’t Been on a Proper Vacation in More Than Three Year Department:

This is a biggie and probably deserves its own blog posting, but who knows when I’m going to get back on here, so I figured I’d better say it now. I haven’t been on a proper vacation since I went to the Dominican Republic back in January 2010! I mean, I’ve been on road trips and I’ve been to Toronto (and Montreal) to visit my family several times since then, but I haven’t been on a real fly-to-somewhere-and-see-the-sights kind of trip. And, as I’ve lamented before, I’ve never left the continent. But all of that is about to change! I’ve booked off three weeks in August and, thanks in large part to a very nice tax return this year, I’m using that time to go to Europe! First stop will be four days in London, England, where I will be hanging out with my mom and two of my aunts, before we hop over to Dublin for our 11-day tour of Ireland! I’m Irish on my mom’s side, so I think it will be fantastic to explore our roots together! After that, my mom and aunts are heading back home, but I’d staying on an extra week. I haven’t yet booked what I’ll be doing during that time, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to go to Greece and relax on the beach. Because after two weeks of running around doing all sorts of touristy things, a week of relaxing in the extreme heat some like just what the doctor ordered.

So, yeah, that’s some stuff that I’ve been meaning to blog about since forever. And now I’m up past my bedtime and will probably regret staying up to write this when the morning comes. But it’s Friday AND it’s a long weekeend! Now I’m off to hit the hay!

1. Name courtesy of Dr. Dan, who earned the honour of being Count Frogula’s godfather for coming up with such a cromulent name. [↩]
2. To clarify, she was named after the performer and not the giant metal chicken. I feel the need to clarify, as I have been asked which of those two she was named after. *cough* Dr. Cath *cough* [↩]
3. She’s also fully paid off, which is pretty kick ass. [↩]
4. Which is how most of the buildings in my ‘hood are built, including the one I live in. [↩]
5. She just put some extra acrylic here and some extra acrylic there to add a bit of length to the ones that were too short and fill in the gap I didn’t like – and voila! [↩]
6. Translation: Hiding away from civilization so no one could see my horribleness. (OK, it actually wasn’t that bad, because it’s not like the hideous tooth stumps that are under my crowns. It’s just a bit too short and a bit far back compared to the other teeth and I don’t open my mouth wide when I talk or smile, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. But still). [↩]
7. It’s totally going to fall off again, now that I’ve said that. [↩]

I had a weekend of classes this past weekend, with papers due and presentations to be prepped and oodles and oodles of case studies and book chapters to read. So, naturally, Thursday night I found myself baking¹.

I forgot to take a picture of the chocolate fudge oat bars that I made, but they pretty much looked like the picture on the page from which I took the recipe. They were made with all things bad for you – butter and white flour and sugar and sweetened condensed milk, which must be ounce-for-ounce the highest calorie substance on earth – and therefore were pretty tasty, if I do say so myself.

Procrastination FTW²!

1. I have a classmate who actually painted her house in the most productive bout of procrastinating – procrastipainting? – I’ve ever heard of, so in the grand scheme of things, baking is pretty minor. [↩]
2. Except in the losing weight department. Then it is a procrastination epic fail. [↩]

Where the hell did April go¹? It seems that tomorrow is the last day of the fourth month of the year. Which means that we are just one day away from the May Health Challenge!

As you may recall², last year some fine Guelphites put out a challenge to anyone who is awesome enough to take up said challenge. And that challenge is to set a small, but challenging, health-related goal for the month of May. And then tell people about it – because research shows that publicly stating your goals makes it more likely that you’ll stick to them. Last year, my challenges were to (a) eat breakfast every day³ and (b) do some kind of exercise every day⁴, as those were two things I’d found I’d fallen out of the habit of doing when I turned my life all topsy-turvy by taking on a part-time MBA program in addition to my full-time job. I’m happy to report that those habits seem to have stuck with me, as I am in a routine of eating breakfast most days and am actually on day 121 of consecutive days of doing some kind of physical activity⁵!.

For this year’s May Health Challenge, I decided to again look at what bad habits I’ve fallen into lately – and thus come up with an area where I can work on re-establishing a healthy routine⁶ and one thing immediately came to mind: I haven’t been making dinners at home very much recently. And when I do, they have more often than not been of the quick – and not quite as healthy – variety. In fact, reading Mark’s⁷ blog posting about his May Health Challenge, I saw this statement which pretty much sums up my dining of late:

I eat out because of convenience (laziness), a perceived lack of time (poor planning), or as a social event (I have good friends).

The thing is – I actually love to cook! I love to take fresh ingredients, chop them, mix them, season them, and make them into a feast of deliciousness! I like to put on some music and dance around the kitchen as I do so. On occasion, I even do so with a nice glass of wine. But lately I’ve just not been that organized, so even if I do feel like cooking something, I don’t have any of the things I need to cook something wonderful – and that is if I can come up with an idea of what I want to cook. When I’m busy – as I have been at work and school for more months now than I can even count – I tend to feel overwhelmed by end of the day that making even the smallest choice seems impossible. What should I have for dinner? I have no idea. I’ve already made 100,000 decisions today and I’m all out of decision-making capacity!

Happily, I know exactly the fix for this problem of mine: meal planning. If I actually sit down on, say, Sunday evening, and plan out my meals for the week, I can then (a) not have to make last minute dinner decisions and (b) plan out my grocery shopping accordingly, so I have everything I need when I need it, thus resulting in a less stressed out and more healthily fed Dr. Beth.

Here’s my plan for this week – since May 1 is Wednesday, I figured I’d get a head start and include this whole week:

Friday I’ve marked in a “school night”, since I have class on Friday and will go out for dinner with classmates⁸. My challenge isn’t that I have to cook for myself every day, just that I have to have planned my meals. I think that even just being more thoughtful about making a conscious decision about what I’m doing for my meals will help me be a little more aware of what I’m eating, rather than just kind of going along not paying much attention and suddenly realizing I’ve eaten at restaurants more than half the days in a month.

You’ve probably also noticed that I haven’t made a plan for Sunday just yet. I actually just sat down and planned out the other nights tonight, in preparation for this blog posting, and kind of ran out of steam. I’m taking suggestions if anyone has any good ideas!

For my second May Health Challenge, I’m going to do something that doesn’t, at first glance, sound like it has anything to do with health. I’m going to pick my outfits for the week on Sunday night, when I do my meal planning. “But what could this possibly have to do with health?” you ask? For me, it’s about my mental health. I find that on weeks when I pick out my outfits for the week and line them up in my closet so that each morning I can just grab an outfit and put it on, I feel so much better than weeks when every day I get up in the morning, am completely indecisive about what I want to wear, scramble around to find a shirt that goes with the skirt I finally picked, then am not able to find the sweater that goes with that outfit⁹, and on it goes. When I can just grab and outfit and go, I find I get to work feeling more relaxed/less frazzled and ready to take on the day!

So there you have it – my May Health Challenges! What are you going to challenge yourself to do this May?

1. Not to mention January through March. [↩]
2. “May” recall! Get it?? I slay me! [↩]
3. Which I accomplished. [↩]
4. Which I managed to do 26 out of the 30 days of the challenge – as the 31st was reserved for celebrating! [↩]
5. As part of 101 things to do list to do some kind of physical activity every day for a year! [↩]
6. This is actually a good time to set up a new routine, as I recently broke up with boyfriend, so all my routines that I’d established over the last ~a year we’d been living together are gone anyway. Yeah, I just revealed my breakup in a footnote. I’m a heartless bastard. Or one who doesn’t like talking about this stuff on my blog. The jury is still out. [↩]
7. Mark being one of the aforementioned Guelphites. [↩]
8. Going out for meals on class weekends is actually something that I really enjoy – it’s a chance to socialize with my classmates. And in an intense program like ours, the support and camaraderie really does help you get through. [↩]
9. My office is freezing, so I always have to have a sweater. [↩]

So the fine people over at Farm to Fork are in need of your help. Farm to Fork, for the uninitiated:

… began with a simple question: in a culture that wastes nearly 40% of all food produced, how do we connect the people who have fresh food to give to those who need it most?

The Farm To Fork website is part of the solution. Designed to facilitate communication between donors and emergency food service providers, the website aims to increase the quality and quantity of fresh food donated to local food banks and food pantries.

The project involved a bunch of students at the University of Guelph – one of my alma maters – along with my friend, Dr. Dan, and his friend Danny – building prototypes and other such computer-y things to make this project a reality. Now they need your help to take this thing to the next level. They are crowdsourcing funding for beta testing by undergrad students over the summer, some necessary hardware, and to send the undergrad developers to the Community University Expo to spread the word and share their knowledge. Supporting this project means providing quality summer employment for undergraduate students, helping get a really beneficial product to its launch (which will ultimately mean getting more nutritious food to people who need it), and a warm feeling in the cockles of your heart. True story.

So check out the Farm to Fork project and consider making a donation! Do it for your heart cockles.

One of the items on my 101 things to do list is to “bake at least one thing per month for 12 months in a row, without baking the same thing two months in a row”. I’ve been working diligently to get this one done and have been doing quite well since I decided to use the power of actually scheduling it into my calendar. This month has been a busy one, though, so I kept moving my “bake something today!” task in my Google calendar further down the line. Until today. Today, being the last day of the month and all.

I spent most of today doing homework and enjoying the sunshine – first on my balcony and later at the New West Pier Park:

Given my interest in maximizing my sunshine time¹ and minimizing my time in the kitchen, I decided to find a quick and easy recipe. I also wanted something that went with the lovely summer weather we are having², so I decided on lemon squares ³.

The recipe is pretty easy – crust made of butter, flour, icing sugar and lemon part made with sugar, flour, baking powder, eggs, and lemon juice. Serve with a side of insulin.

I couldn’t wait until they were completely cooled to try them, so I took a small piece to sample as soon as they were reasonably cooled, but which ended up being rather messy due to the not-yet-completely-cooled-therefore-not-yet-completely set. Verdict: Delicious.

And now to set a “bake something today!” task into my Google calendar for April!

In completely unrelated news, I really earned my blog title yesterday while trying to cut an avocado for a snack:

The knife slipped as I was trying to get the pit out. It hurt so bad that I actually threw the knife across the counter in reaction to the cut. It took quite some time for the bleeding to stop. Given its location, I don’t expect it to heal quickly.

1. Wearing sunscreen, of course! [↩]
2. Because apparently we skipped spring and went directly to summer – it was 18 degrees out today! [↩]
3. I only made half the recipe, because I figured what the hell am I going to do with an entire 9×13″ pan of lemon squares! [↩]

It just occurred to me that in all of my birthday festivities, I forgot to have any birthday cake! Birthday beer, birthday shots, birthday food, more birthday beer  - all of these things were covered, but somehow cake did not make it into the mix. But I figure +/- a week is within the period during which I can still reasonably say that I’m celebrating my birthday, so I decided to make some brownies tonight when I got home from yoga¹!

The last time I baked brownies², I thought I was using a recipe for fudgy brownies, but they turned out to be cake-y brownies and I hate cake-y brownies. So this time I used a recipe that was actually called “Fudgy Brownies.” It’s a pretty simple recipe – basically, just put everything that’s bad for you into a pan and bake.

More specifically, the recipe goes something like this: Melt butter & chocolate. Add white sugar. Beat in some eggs. Add vanilla and white flour. Pray for your arteries. Pour it into a pan:

Bake:

Write blog posting about said brownies while you wait for them to cool.

OK, I just can’t complete this blog posting without actually doing a taste test to let you know how they turned out. Wait here a second, OK?

.

.

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OMG. Delicious!

1. Brownies will so not help with my goal of losing weight, but I figure that since I did power yoga tonight, I’ll at least break even, calorie-wise [↩]
2. For Kalev’s housewarming party. [↩]

I have just realized that I haven’t posted anything about my birthday – well, other than posting on Bethmas Eve. As it turns out, I was just having too much fun celebrating my 36th trip¹ around the sun to post anything!

On Friday night – i.e., on Bethmas itself – I got a group of friends together for dinner at Rogue on Broadway. Rogue has really excellent food and a fantastic beer selection – in fact, I had a sampler so that I could try 5 different kinds of beer! Best of all was the chance to spend my birthday with some great friends!

Yesterday – i.e., Bething Day – Devon and I went skiing at Cypress Mountain². Bething Day is the Bethmas equivalent of Boxing Day, which typically would mean shopping, but it’s my Bethmas and I’ll make up – and change – the rules as I go along if I want to. Skiing was lots of fun and made me ask myself, “Why the hell don’t I do this more often?”³

Given my renewed interest in skiing⁴, I decided it was high time to invest in some new ski wear, given that my current stuff is one zillion years old and not all that good for its stated purpose⁵. Since there was a sale on ski wear at Atmosphere in Metro-town – I knew this since Devon had gone there to get some ski pants prior to our trip to Cypress – I headed there today with the birthday money my mom had given me⁶. Unfortunately, this was the tail end of the sale and, thus, the pickings were slim. In fact, there was a grand total of one pair of small ski pants in the entire store⁷ and it was just a wee bit too snug to have been comfortable for skiing⁸. Oddly, a medium sized pair of the same brand (North Face) was giant – I probably could have fit two of me in them – so I’m really not sure what to do about that. Is there such a thing as size small-and-a-half⁹? Happily, though, I found a really Burton ski jacket at a great price, so I picked that up. I’m still on the hunt for a new pair of ski pants, but my jacket is black so I figure I can get any colour of pants and they will go with black.

In addition to all that fun, I also played a game of hockey today – which we won in OT! – and managed to do some reading for fun, a bit of homework, and some teaching. All in all, a pretty spectacular Bethmas weekend!

Image Credit: Posted by Stephan Mosel on Flickr.

1. Also known as 6². Because who doesn’t love a number that’s a perfect square? [↩]
2. I was originally thinking of going to Whistler but then I remembered that I haven’t been skiing in a while and even the last time I’d skiied, I was beginner level, so then I thought it might make more sense to start off with a local mountain. [↩]
3. On a related note: Mount Seymour has a deal where ladies can get a “free” lift ticket in exchange for a donation to the BC Cancer Foundation. If any ladies are up for skiing on a Monday night, let me know! (Except tomorrow, because I have a webinar I have to do for school). Similarly, Thursdays is Student Night at Seymour, lift tickets are $22 for students – so if any students are up for skiing on a Thursday night, let me know that too! [↩]
4. Translation: I hope to hit the slopes a few more times this year. [↩]
5. For example, my ski jacket doesn’t even have a hood! No hood = frozen Beth! [↩]
6. Thanks Mom! [↩]
7. Other than the ones that cost $300+, which I wasn’t willing to spend. Or the ones that are Spyder brand, because they have a freaking spider-shaped logo on them and I just *can’t* wear a pair of pants with a freaking spider on them. The salesguy clearly thought I was crazy when I told him this, but seriously. Spiders. GAH! [↩]
8. And I certainly would not have been able to fit long johns underneath for particularly cold days [↩]
9. Truthfully, I think it was just the different styles of the pants. If they’d had a medium in the style that I tried on small, it probably would have been fine, and vice versa for the pair that I tried on the medium. [↩]

One of my goals for this year is to “make 10 meals that I’ve never made before.” First up on the list, which I made last night, was the Cornish hen. I’d bought it awhile ago at the farmer’s market and have had in my freezer ever since. Cornish hen is not only something that I’ve never made before, it’s something that I’ve never even eaten before!

I found a recipe online, that I tweaked a bit – it was basically putting a mix of lemon rind, rosemary, salt & pepper under the skin of the breast, putting a couple of lemon wedges inside the hen, and then brushing the whole thing with butter. Cooking pro tip: you can never go wrong with “brushing the whole thing with butter.”

Here’s the result:

It was tender and lemony. Verdict: success!

The meal also included some lemon roasted potatoes and the peaches for dessert. There was supposed to be a veg with the meal, but somebody forgot to pick up some veg and then, to my horror, I discovered we are completely out of canned peas and corn, which are my fall back for days when I don’t have any fresh veg to cook and when it is icky and rainy out and we don’t want to run out to the store. I found some edamame in the back of the freezer, which totally don’t go with Cornish hens, but which I steamed anyway. Sadly, they turned out to be freezer burned beyond all redemption, so the meal was vegetable-less. Hence the peaches for dessert.

So that’s one new meal that I’ve never made before down, 9 to go. Some ideas I’ve had of things I’d like to trymaking include:

• eggplant parmesan
• ribs
• pulled pork
• roast beef

Any other recommendations of things I might want to try?

It’s 2013 in just over 24 hours, so I figured why not set up 13 goals for the new year?

1. Lose the 15 lbs that I gained since starting my MBA. Seriously. I have clothes that I can’t fit into and it’s not good for my health to be carrying around this extra weight, so it’s time to get serious about losing these extra pounds. I’ve been saying this for some time now without it happening, so I realize that it’s time I make an actual plan rather than just vague thoughts about “eating better”. A real focus on diet, exercise, and getting more sleep are all on the list for making this happen.

• First up – diet – I’m declaring 2013 The Year of The Vegetable. I declared Dec 2012 The Month of the Vegetable and that had some moderate success, as I definitely upped my fruit & veg intake over what I’d previously been eating – and over the holidays to boot! Continuing with this momentum, I’m going to continue the concerted effort to eat more fruits and veg – and re-instituting my Sunday night weekly meal planning and keeping a bowl of fruit on the kitchen table will be my first concrete steps.
• Second – exercise –  Item #26 on my 101 list is “do some kind of exercise (anything really, even if it is just a set of pushups, as long as it is beyond just incidental stuff like taking the stairs or walking to a store) every day for a year!” Tackling that item starts TODAY! I played hockey today, so now I only need to do some kind of exercise for the next 364 days and I’m golden! To help with this one – I’m redoubling my efforts to Schedule It! – which will go well with my Sunday night planning (see above). As well, see goals #3-7 below for more exercise-related goodness.
• Third – sleep – I think it’s time to reinstitute my plan.
• Also, I’m reading The Power of Habit, which has got me thinking about my habits – and how to change the problematic ones to better ones, so that’s something I’ll be working on as well^1 , 2.

2. Pay off my car. I’m pretty close to this one, and once I do that I will be debt-free! Go me!
3. Run a sub-2 hour half marathon. This just so happens to be #50 on my list of 101 things to do in 1001 days. And I know that in order to do this, I have to up the intensity of my half marathon training – more speed work and hills, to be specific. Which is just the kind of thing that’s going to help me get goal #1 accomplished.
4. I’m aiming to do 2 half marathons this year – tentatively the Edge-to-Edge in Tofino in June and the Victoria half marathon in October³.
5. Run 400 km. I figure that since I managed nearly 300 km of running training for 1 half marathon, I can easily do 400 km training for two.
6. Bike 500 km. Biking isn’t my main exercise, but I do quite enjoy it and since there is a recumbent stationary bike in the exercise room in my building, which is just perfect for exercise while I read textbooks, I think this one is doable⁴
7. Do 1,300 pushups. This year’s pushup total was 485, so I’ve got a lot of work to do to reach this goal, but I did get slack at sticking to my must-do-pushups-whenever-I-take-a-break-from-homework rule after a few months, so if I bring that back in full force and maybe give the old 100 pushups program another go, I think I can do this one. And given that goals #3-6 are all leg-related, I had to do something for my arms!
8. Go on a fabulous vacation! There are already some vague plans in the works for this one, but I’ll need to get going on some actually planning to make this a reality.
9. Make 10 meals that I’ve never made before. I think it’s time to expand the repertoire, and I have in my freezer a cornish hen – something I’ve never cooked before – that I bought at the farmer’s market to get me started.
10. Redesign my blog. I’m getting bored with my current theme – I think it’s time for a new one!
11. Knock 13 items off my 101 list of things to do in 1001 days. Since it’s 2013, why not go for 13 of them? That’s just one per month, plus one. As part of my newly re-instituted Sunday night weekly planning, I will use the last Sunday of each month to pick an item on my 101 list on which to work for the upcoming month, so that I don’t get to Dec 28, 2013 and say “oh crap, I haven’t done anything from my 101 list!”
12. Make $113,000. Ambitious and I have no idea how I’ll accomplish it, but since I finally succeeded after 3 years of trying to break the $100K mark, why the hell not give it a go?
13. Publish 213 blog postings. Since I did 201 blog postings in 2012⁵, I figure 213 is a reasonable goal for this year. Moreover, if I do that, I will be within 2 postings of my goal of 501 postings in 1001 days as per my 101 list, and I’ll still have 6 months left ’til the 1001 days are up!

Image Credit: Posted by Angie Torres on Flickr.

1. E.g., this book talks a lot about the cues that trigger our habits, and since one habit that I want to reinstitute is regularly eating breakfast, which I used to be good at but seemed to fall out of the habit of when I moved, as all my old cues were gone. So I’m going to set out a bowl and spoon before I go to bed, which will be a cue in the morning to remind me to have breakfast! [↩]
2. I didn’t anticipate when I started writing my list of goals that I’d end up writing such a detailed plan for achieving this particular goal, but now that I have, I feel much better about my chances of accomplishing it! [↩]
3. Which Dr. Dan is also planning to run - but he’ll be running twice the distance! [↩]
4. For the record, I cycled 111 km this year – though that’s from my RunKeeper.com account and I’m not sure if I included all of my stationary bike cycling there. [↩]
5. Or, I will have once tomorrow’s blog posting – which I’ve already half written – goes up. [↩]