Since my last post on Wednesday night I’ve had to dedicate a chunk of time to putting together a Unitarian church service for this morning. I tend to need the looming deadline to get flowing on these, but I was prepping this one even more at the last minute than I usually do. I had originally been scheduled to do the service on March 21, which would have been themed around the Vernal Equinox. But another guest speaker needed that date, whereas I’m flexible, so I swapped. But this left me back at the “bang my head against the wall until I get inspired” point.
I looked up my sermons from three previous years when I’ve happened to do a service in mid- to late-February. In all three cases, I took off from Presidents’ Day, and did the service on the theme of leadership, heroism, or teamwork. This year, I decided to talk about Lent, and the whole idea of “giving something up.” I’m partly in debt to one of my LJ friends for this idea, and partly to my own focus on getting back to my dietary regimen (which has continued to be tough). But the service came together nicely once I finally had a “hook” for it. I found a children’s story at the library on Friday (I logged into the online catalog and ran keyword searches the night before, what a time-saver!) and spent most of Saturday writing the sermon.
Things went very well this morning, but now that I’ve shifted my sleep schedule back, I didn’t get to bed until 4:00 a.m. and then was up and in the shower at 8:30 a.m. I was surprised at how alert and perky I felt (that’s the sign of a hopeless ham, when anticipation of an audience makes you all bouncy and high, sheesh). But man, did I crash once I got home. I’ve been a vegetable all day.
My new Internet service has been working perfectly. I decided to wait and not try to cancel Net1plus, or the second phone line, on a Friday afternoon, so I’ll be doing that tomorrow (er, today!).
Add this to all the other changes I’ve been making: I’ve seriously ramped up my workouts. I’ve been wanting to do that, and I was bored to death with the thrice-weekly Bowflex routines. I fell off my workouts altogether for a few days, and got back to them this week with a totally different Bowflex routine. Without designing it specifically for this, what it does is add about 25 minutes to every session and increases the intensity by about 50%. To go along with this, I’ve added five minutes to my exercycling sessions (or twenty minutes per week total) which is all I can stand to add or I’ll fall off the exercycle from sheer tedium. But at the rate I pedal now, according to the monitor I’m working off about 20% more calories per session. So I just started that this week and I’m already feeling the difference. I’m also going through my workout videos a lot faster, *sigh*. I need more audiobooks! I worked out to the unabridged audiobook of Breaking Dawn and it was wonderful, lasted me about two weeks! The trouble with the Bowflex workouts is that for the most part I can’t watch a screen while I do them, I can only listen–and now they’re 85 minutes long.
Aside from that, I’ve been baking, and continuing to find and update logins and accounts for my new e-mail addresses. I’m really going to be glad to have this all done with. Tonight, being too groggy to do much in the way of writing, I worked on something more linear and left-brained, tweaking the xhtml coding for the index page of inannaarthen.com and running it through the W3C Markup Validation Service which picked out all my mistakes. After tweaking it and re-uploading it about four times I finally got a pretty green bar and a message that it was perfect. Amazing how much a little thing like that can boost your mood! Now I need to do the whole rest of the site, and the blog, and then tackle BLUM’s website. I’ve got book review quotes to add!
I can tell winter is winding down. The woodpile is down to its last quarter-cord or so, the freezer is emptying out and the plastic container cupboard is filling up. I only have two apples left from the bags I picked in the fall. Produce seems really high at the grocery store, too–I’m eating a lot of cabbage. Good thing I love it. 🙂
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