Spring-spiration

I don’t know about you, but I’ve realized a huge portion of my motivation, activity level and mood are weather-dependent. I know this is ridiculous, and I’m hoping that identifying this problem will lead to me learning to snap out of it, but we shall see.

The incident that made me hyper-aware of the situation was that 68-degree day we had Thursday. Luckily, I had scheduled an interview that morning at a coffeehouse near my house, so I gave myself an extra 10 minutes to walk there and took a little detour along the way.

Suddenly, the whole day felt limitless! After the interview as over, I walked home, dropped off my reporter gear and decided to use my lunch hour, you guessed it, taking another walk. I think I was able to get at least 2.5 miles in around town, and being in the sunshine just fueled me to do more and more. After work I went to Lowe’s and bought some herb and flower seeds and those biodegradable pots to start them in. I stopped by Michael’s and picked up some craft supplies I had been meaning to get all week. And when I got home I made split pea soup, which I had defrosted some homemade broth for on Sunday and then not made all week until then, as well as did four loads of laundry.

No, I was no on amphetamines or a caffeine high, it’s just sunshine and 70-degree weather really peps me up. All winter I put off doing things, even things I WANT to do, because of the gloomy skies and cold (even indoors I have to bundle up, sitting still gives me the chills). By Friday the temperature had taken a dive again, even though it’s remained sunny, but my Friday wasn’t nearly as productive, even though I had a clear schedule and plenty of opportunity.

Since it will be some time until we get consistently warm days, I decided to make a list of things that I want to do and will try to work towards completing one of them every night that I have at least two consecutive hours of free time. Writing this blog was one of them. Starting a second blog for my newspaper website is another one. It’s going to be called “Apples to Apples” (I know, it’s cheesy and I love it) and it will be me talking about how much I love apples and comparing new varieties of apples. I’ll probably only have 10 readers but I plan to get a real kick out of it, so that’s good. When you’re a professional writer, it’s good to have outlets where writing can be strictly for fun.

Other things on my list include cleaning out my flower garden out front. All the dead stuff from last year is sitting there making it look ugly and it really needs more sun for the little green shoots to come up. And I need to start the seeds I bought on Thursday, which was my next planned activity, but a nap kind of sounds more appealing. Hey, it’s freezing outside!

All winter I’ve wanted to make biscotti, the Italian cookie sticks. I’ve done it before and it’s incredibly easy, but kind of time consuming because you cook them for so long to really dry them out. This will be a great activity for a cold evening.

As for the goals I set back in January, well, I'm not doing so good. My goal to lose four pounds by my birthday has technically failed, however, I’ve lost an inch and a half and I’m almost able to use the belt hole two notches from where I was before, so I think that’s a more important success than the number on the scale.

The terrarium project: after reviewing websites looking for special terrarium plants, I haven’t found anything good enough to lead to a purchase. The selection at Lowe’s was also poor, so I need to check out some more local stores. I did see some pre-made ones at Lowe’s though, so apparently this has become a trend.

And my PEEP Show entry, well, I’ve printed out the entry form, and looked up some images on Google of the thing I had in my mind, and I’m still kind of undecided. But, next week’s schedule looks busy so I think I’m going to give myself until the week after to officially tackle that.

Less than two weeks until the official start of spring. Hopefully we can get some more upper 60s days and then I’ll be set!