Sarasvati - Of Art and Knowledge

If there was any lingering delusion that autumn wasn't here already, it got blown away this morning, when the temperature dipped as low as it's been thus far: a mere 5 degrees Celcius. The nights are cold enough to really make me appreciative of a nice thick blanket or comforter. The afternoons are warmer, but there's still that particular kind of chill on the breeze that makes you shiver no matter how warm the sunshine.

With that all in mind, I bundled up this morning when I walked my daily three miles.

Well, I say "daily", but I've actually been slack on my walking goals over the weekend. Partly because I spent a good deal of Saturday hanging out with Cass, and Sunday was a day pretty much devoted to staying indoors and watching Rei play Ocarina of Time, watching a movie, and then curling up in bed with old episodes of Ranma 1/2 to keep us company. We did go out, but it was a short walk (a little less than 2 miles) to get some cake.

Tomorrow's going to contain a lot of walking, I'm sure. Not only will I have to walk uptown to get rent money from my bank account (1.5 miles), but then I'll walk from there to the north end (about 2 miles, I'm estimating) to pick up a few groceries, and then home again (1 mile). That's more walking than I normally do, but it all needs to be done, and it'll help me catch up on my weekly goal for HealthMonth. I haven't been doing too badly with those goals, but this weekend's slackness did put me a bit behind schedule, so I'm glad to have a good excuse to make up for that.

Fortunately, that should only take me a couple of hours, so if I leave early enough, I'll still have time to come home and make another batch of baked beans for supper. I want to make some multigrain bread, too, but I'm not sure if I'll leave that until Wednesday, to give me something specific to do on that day. I know I want to make a loaf of bread, and I also thought that using some leftover sausages to make some little sausage-and-cheese buns would be nice, too. Nicely portable, good warm or cold, and handy for Rei to take for lunch if he likes them enough.

Maybe on Thursday I'll try to scrub the rust off the muffin tins (they got rusty thanks to a ceiling leak in the kitchen, and I haven't had the patience to scrub them clean yet) and then make a batch of honey bran muffins for snacks. I might see if Cass's offer to give me some old bananas is still good, and make a loaf of banana bread too, just for fun. I've never made it before, but I do like eating it!

And with the exception of the cheese for the buns, all of these delicious things can be made with what's still in the kitchen, so I don't need to go and waste the little grocery money I have on buying a bunch of ingredients. It makes me feel good to know that I can make so many tasty things without needing to spend a lot of money on them. It just takes a bit of creativity and patience, and I'm learning more how to channel creativity into food and to be more patient with it and myself when I make mistakes. Cooking is good for me in many ways!

Today the only cooking I'll do will be to add another few potatoes and carrots to the leftovers of the turkey-vegetable stew, and some water. I ended up putting too much salt in when I first made it, and adding more vegetables and water to it will end up balancing that out quite nicely, and making the stew last longer. And since we still have plenty of potatoes and carrots in, this gives me a good chance to use them up before they go off.

Oh, for another icon spot so I can add a "Happy Domestic" icon. :p I know that when I get a job again, I'll be buying a paid account here. I really like Dreamwidth, as it's much more like what LJ was before they started to care more about money than pleasing their userbase, and I want to support them where and when I can. Just have to wait until then.

I've managed to keep up both a good amount of reading and writing since the beginning of the month, too, which bodes well for NaNo. I was worried for a while as to whether I could manage to keep pace with my NaNo writing as well as keep reading a good amount for my bookblog, but if this month is any indicator so far, it shouldn't be too big a problem. Even if I end up getting a job next month, so long as I stick to hard copies of books (rather than e-books, I mean) and read over my lunch and breaks as well as during the trip there, I should be just fine.

Making sure I write 1000 words a day this month is also a good warm-up for NaNo. I've been working again on Fractured. I'm only about halfway to where I was when I had to reinstall my operating system and lost everything, but it's going a bit better this time, with the plot and the flow of events, that I don't mind being a little slow with it.

Speaking of NaNo, though, I really ought to devote some time soon to planning out this year's project. I know what I want to write, but I thought that this year I'd actually do more advance work and create a chapter outline plan, so that things flow better and that I have more of an idea of what I'm doing if I end up, say, writing at work. In the past, when I worked in call centres in November, I'd have time to write some in between calls. But given that my main work was at home, I'd often end up starting what I knew I wanted to be the next chapter, whether or not I was done with the previous one. This led to me coming home, updating my writing file, finishing what hadn't been finished of the previous chapter, and trying to finish whatever hadn't been done of the chapter I'd started at work. Things got disjointed easily, phrases got reused far too often, and the whole thing felt like a mess. I didn't enjoy writing that way at all, even though it was a good way to boost my wordcount. So this year I'll do more planning and hopefully be able to avoid such situations in the future.

Of course, if I don't end up getting a job by November, this year may be a repeat of last year, where I met my 50k wordcount goal a little less than halfway through the money, and then couldn't keep myself motivated to write any more even though the story wasn't finished. Chapter outlines will hopefully prevent that from happening again too!

You know, to spruce up my time at the gym and to motivate me through geekish ways, I'm going to undertake the challenge of walking through Middle Earth. I'm the kind of person who gets more motivated when I'm working with milestones and a large number of small goals, so this is the kind of challenge that will work well for me. Even if I don't make then entire journey that the Fellowship did, I'll be interested to see just how far I can get before my gym membership runs out.

This means that I'll end up posting about this a lot, to help keep track of where I am and what I've done. Hope nobody finds that too boring; I promise not to make such entries long and involved. Likely just a brief mention at the end of other entries, unless something particularly interesting happened in regard to my exercise routine.

Starting tomorrow, this challenge gets underway. I'm going to aim for a few miles a day at first, since I'm not used to stenuous walking or biking and I'm not sure how my body will take me doing it on a more regular basis. Probably well enough, so long as my lungs hold out, but we'll see what happens as it happens.

I'm excited about this!