Lovely Manatees!

This beautiful short film was shot in the Crystal River, which is packed with manatees according to Wikipedia. I'm much further south in Florida, but we still get a lot of manatees in our little canals and rivers. Sadly they are often cut up by irresponsible boaters.

Watch the video on YouTube here.

One more perk of a ceramic tile roof

This one comes with a built in mosquito removal system.

Newton's first law of housekeeping

A body in motion stays in motion, and a body at rest stays at rest, unless acted upon by an external force.

Here it is, another beautiful day! You’ve just completed your morning routine: breakfast, exercise, personal hygiene, etc. But instead of jumping on your first task of the day, you find yourself sitting in front of your to-do list, dithering over which task is the best one to get done first. Since you can’t decide, you go to check your email, “just to get it out of the way,” and find yourself on Reddit for the next three hours.

Getting started on a task, aka overcoming your body at rest

It is hard to get moving without a push. What works for me: virtual dice. I make a to-do list of six items, and then pull up any of the virtual dice Flash tools on the internet. Or if you actually have real dice somewhere, that’s fine too. Roll the dice, and let the fates pick what task you start with. When you finish, roll again and move on to the next task. Keep going until your to-do list is done!

This works best if you plan your tasks carefully. I find that tasks that take 15-30 minutes are best. Definitely nothing that takes more than an hour. I try to also mix them up a little, so I have both mental and physical tasks, and at least one that is kind of fun but still something that you'd pat yourself on the back for completing. Here is a sample list:

1. Create lesson plan for Thursday
2. Finish reading library book
3. Round up and hand-wash all drinking glasses
4. Take notes on chapter 8
5. Sweep and mop front room and kitchen
6. Balance checkbook and pay bills

I will list the same task more than once if it is very important and has a time limit. If I have less than six items, I fill up the remaining spots with “roll again.” Keeping a six-item to-do list handy means that if you have a spare half hour, you can roll the dice and get something done, rather than puttering around until time is up.

Keeping your body in motion

According to Newton’s first law, once you are moving you will keep moving unless acted upon by an external force. What are the external forces in your house? The couch? The TV? The bathroom mirror? The phone? If you have three hours to get odd and ends done before your next scheduled appointment – stay away from these danger zones! Email is a dangerous one for me – I always want to respond to new emails the second they come in, and write a new email as soon as a thought occurs to me. I have to remind myself, if it can wait an hour then it should wait an hour.

When you start working on tasks, don’t stop until the list is done or your time is up. Don’t “reward” yourself between tasks. You will have an even harder time getting moving again if you stop for a little snack or a chat with the neighbor or that episode of Santuary on the DVR.

Sometimes the tasks on our list force us to take a break. We have to wait for the laundry to dry before we can put it away, the toilet cleaner to soak in before we can finish cleaning the bathroom, and the pots to finish soaking before we can scrub them. For these situations, set a timer on your phone or in the kitchen, and move onto another task in the meantime. Timers can also help if you are working on a task that allows you to daydream. Some times when I’m working on a report, or a lesson plan, or a blog post, I’ll find my mind drifting off-topic, and the task will take much longer than it needs to. Setting a timer to go off every few minutes keeps me focused and productive. (If you have a roommate or officemate, be considerate with your timers! Set them to go off quietly and shut them off right away, so that the constant beeping doesn’t drive them insane.)

By rolling dice to start a task, and refusing to stop between tasks, I can cram a lot of activity into a short amount of time.

New Healthy Habits

So I know I've been MIA for several months, something that I intended to avoid when I set up this blog, but I had a really good excuse - morning sickness! Not-so-fun fact: morning sickness does not just happen in the morning. From the end of September to the end of December, I feel horrible all day long. To keep my sanity, some things had to go, and regular blog posts was one of them.

I've been spending the last two weeks trying to get back into a routine, while developing good pregnancy habits. Fortunately, I had a lot of healthy habits already:

• Cooking from scratch, or as close to it as possible
• Buying organic produce and hormone-free meats
• No carbonated beverages
• No deodorant with aluminum as the active ingredient
• Very limited caffeine (no coffee or tea, just the occasional chocolate beverage or dessert)
• Very limited alcohol, no smoking
• At least seven hours of sleep at night

Unfortunately, there are a few healthy habits that I've failed to develop. I'm trying to work on them now, but it is not easy! Here are my current health goals, and what I'm doing to make them as painless as possible.

1. Exercise - I hate it. I don't mean physical activity in general. I am totally enthusiastic about tackling yard work or painting a room, and will work at it six hours at a stretch without a break. What cannot become enthusiastic about is the boring hamster exercises that I'm supposed to do every day. I feel like a klutz doing them, and when I finish there is no visible benefit from them. The solution: water aerobics classes, three days a week. They are relatively inexpensive, much less expensive than a personal trainer. But because I'm paying at least something I will be less inclined to allow myself to skip a day. And because they are underwater, so my lack of coordination will be hidden from view. 
2. Substituting water for juice - Yes, juice has vitamins but it also has as much sugar as a can of Coke. What I'm supposed to be doing is drinking water instead, but water is so boring. I can have a bottle of it next to me all day long, and I will just forget it is there. Adding tea bags, Crystal Light, or fruit slices doesn't help. My birth center suggested watering the juice down, but that tastes even more gross than just plain water. The solution: I allow myself 8oz of juice in the morning to wake up, and 4oz in the evening while I'm cooking dinner. The rest of the day, I drink water. When I pour myself a glass, I immediately chug half of it, and then I top of the glass again before leaving the kitchen. That way I get at least some hydration before I get a chance to forget about it.
3. Multivitamin - Pills, in general, make me throw up. It isn't the swallowing of them. I did an experiment in which I swallowed jelly bellies whole instead. No problems there. But my body has always been very sensitive to medication, so when I swallow pills it can be too much for me to handle. Before I realized I was pregnant I was taking kids' Flintstones chewable vitamins and a folic acid pill, since I figured it was better than nothing. But now I have to shallow a humongous and smelly prenatal vitamin every day. The solution: At first the prenatal vitamins made me throw up too. But I found that if I took a pill after dinner and then immediately ate a little bowl of ice cream, or something else really cold, it sort of numbed my stomach until the pill was digested. After a few weeks, the ice cream became unnecessary and now I can tolerate the multivitamins without a problem. I've moved the jar from my kitchen to the bathroom, so that I see it while I'm getting ready for bed, and remember to take one.

I'm only halfway through my pregnancy, so I still have a long time to pursue these habits. I'm hoping they can become second nature by the birth, so that I can concentrate on the baby instead.