Julie's Progress Report I

Finance: Spend less, save more, pay off credit card.

This was a pretty successful week in terms of staying within our budget. Of course, we bought a few things we could have done without. Namely, the subscription to Backpacking magazine for me and the Lego mini-figures for Tim, a couple of McFlurry runs, a mid-afternoon cookie, and a gas station trip that consisted of three taquitos, a fountain Coke, and $6 worth of Powerball tickets. (We won $4 back. Lucky number 11.) If all goes according to plan these next two weeks, we should have money left over for an extra credit card payment and to pad our savings. 

Every week I start the week with a $20 for things like McFlurry runs, Cokes, coffees, candy, cookies, lunch out with friends, etc. My mom used to call this practice, “mad money.” I ended up this week bumming McFlurries and taquitos off Tim. I definitely could do better managing my cash. My wallet and my waistline will be grateful.

Goal for next week: Don’t spend all my mad money!

Fitness: Train for marathon.

Man, I am sore today. I got back into a pretty good routine to ramp up mileage to officially start marathon training soon. I worked out five days this week. Two hours and forty minutes of yardwork (trimming bushes), nine miles of run/walk, and 4.5 miles of “hiking.”

A word about my pace: I am so far behind where I have been in the past on pace. For my two, mid-week short runs (two miles), I didn’t wear a watch but I did take walk breaks. For my long run (five miles), I wore my watch and started with a solid 18 minutes and then did the rest at a combo 5 minutes run-5 minutes walk. That averaged out to about 13 minutes/mile. That’s 3+ minutes slower than my pace when I was in shape and could run miles and miles. These are the consequences of laziness!! I figure if I just keep putting the miles in at whatever pace, my legs and lungs will catch up eventually.

Goals for next week: Put in all my miles and less walking. Find more soft surface trails to walk with Tim. (His back doesn’t do well on paved trails. His leg goes numb.)

Career: Have a better attitude.

Man, oh man. I didn’t do well on this goal this week. Sorry feminists, but I have to chalk it up to PMS.

Goal for next week: Focus on progress, not the little annoyances.

Adultiness: Accomplish home repair, waste time better, don’t dwell on bad feelings.

I trimmed our forsythia bushes on Friday and Saturday. Saturday morning, the village police truck pulled up and three fellow villagers offered to help me load up my trimmed branches and haul them off. (It was village dumpster day.) This is apropos of nothing goal-related. It just put me in a “I love people/I love my village” mood.

I commute an hour each way. I resent this on many fronts: price of gas, impact on the environment, toll booth fees, two hours wasted every day, two hours to engage in rumination (see paragraph below). One way I alleviate these bad feelings and waste this time better is to get audiobooks from the library. Because I’m not very adulty, I don’t make it to the library regularly and I’ve also checked out most everything that seems interesting. (I prefer nonfiction audiobooks to fiction. That limits the options.) Plus, I haven’t been to the library lately because I’m avoiding paying my fines. (See above re: not very adulty.) So, I used some OLD iTunes giftcards and downloaded a favorite book A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson. The story of Bryson’s quest to hike the Appalachian Trail makes me consider my overall goals and puts me in a mindset to save more and follow my training plan. And that is a much better waste of time.

I added that last goal since starting this project. I realized that this is a MAJOR fault of mine. Whenever my mind isn’t occupied, especially during my shower-get ready routine, I have a tendency to ruminate on whatever might be going wrong. (Usually the cycle of thoughts is “we have no money-Tim needs to get a job-why did he buy that thing.” Also, I ignore my role in the small amount of irresponsible spending we do these days. "Woe is me/I'm a victim" is the typical and very unhelpful theme of these rumination sessions. NOT very adulty.) All this accomplishes is putting me in a sour-aggressive-angry mood before I even leave the house. It sucks, is unfair to those around me, and I’m going to work on it.

Goal for next week: Streamline upstairs storage, weed gardens, avoid Sudoku and crosswords.