Something new.

It turns out that our early morning arising is not a fluke but a thing, an actual thing, which we are repeating daily. Or I am, anyway. This morning, for instance, I awoke at about 6.

In case you're wondering, this does not go hand in hand with going to bed earlier. Not at all! No, last night, I went to bed at midnight and read for a few minutes before falling asleep.

This morning at breakfast, my daughter suggested that within a week I'd be back to normal. Maybe so. I'm kind of enjoying the quiet, the stillness, the freshness of these early hours. This morning, I got up and wrote a little, then took Bruiser for a walk.

I'm loving the light at the beginning of the day and at the end, when the everything seems to glow green and yellow. I'm taking more than one walk, and I love that. So if my sleep readjusts to a more habitual pattern, fine. But if I keep waking up early, fine, too. Better than fine.

So that's the update on The Summer Sleep Project. What's that? What other projects are happening this summer?

2. The Cooking Project, wherein I renew my love of and acquaintance with the making of dinner out of actual ingredients.

3. The Walking Project, wherein I walk several times a day, to give my cardiovascular system something to write home about, to commune with my dog, to let my brain do its synaptic business, to calm my soul.

4. The Writing Project(s). There are many.

5. The Gardening Project. I have big plans. Like, so big that they will require the assistance of able-bodied men, such as my youngest son and upon occasion the Historian. Also, I may not be being realistic. Shh, I'm going to plant delphiniums!

6. The Push-the-Reset-Button Project. In which I will shed my Indispensable Man complex and with it my many (over)commitments. (This also may not be realistic. Check my stress levels in August to see.)

7. The Just Enjoy It Project. Can this be a project? We shall see.

The Writing Project(s) update: today I am writing a Fourteen Hour Sonnet. Check the specs out here.

What shall I read?

Over the holidays, while I was organizing stuff, by which I mean "moving stuff from one place to another," I brought to the surface of my holiday-bedazzled brain this thought: "I should put all the books I want to/should read in the same place, so I will know what I have to read that I haven't already read."

Then I went and ate a couple gum drops and a couple cookies and surfed the internet and scrubbed out the lasagne pan and turned on the Christmas lights and watched sitcom reruns and slept, sort of, and woke up and ate some Frosted Mini-Wheats and thought, "Now what was it I was going to do again?" And hung up some clothes and did some laundry and downloaded some new music and made a list of the movies I want to see this week, if I see a movie every day, which, why shouldn't I? and read some stuff in my files and got the mail and asked myself, "Now what shall I read?"

The reality is, the people, that none of the books on my newly curated Books I Own But Have Not Yet Read shelf are books that have seized me by the epaulets and said, "Now listen, soldier, you need to get off that internet, straighten up and fly right and read me!" and made me say "Sir yes sir!" Instead of thus seizing me and whipping me back into reading shape, what these books are doing is looking at me balefully, pointing out my character flaws, such as

(a) lazy
(b) no stick-to-it-iveness
(c) unfocused
(d) am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be
(e) dawdly and unambitious

Okay, judgmental books, I get it, but you won't tell me the answer to the question: whatever shall I read? I have been in the middle of this one book  for so long that I have forgotten who the detectives all are and the main details of one of the two crimes. But Lord! I do not want to start it over, and heaven knows that I cannot move on to the last two books in the series until I finish it. Also, I fear my library's robot is not paying attention to me, since I put in a hold request for a book that is allegedly on the shelves, and yet I have heard nary a peep, nary a beep boop beep, from the robot. Robot, O Robot, wherefore dost thou turn thy book-reserving back on me?

What is there to do, then, but take pictures of the snow? I ask you.

Today's stats:

New music: Bombay Bicycle Club (thx jason mcf!)
walks: a short one at 10:45 p.m. in the breath-freezing cold
enjoying my life: lovely lunch with friends; dinner and a movie with my husband

You must change your life.

Recently I have been contemplating these:

For your consideration: cherry red velvet Dr. Marten 8-eye lace-up boots. I know: there's really no reason to have Dr. Marten's nowadays, except: velvet. And I saw this one picture where Alexander Wang was wearing velvet Dr. Marten's, and I thought: killer. (In this velvet-boot wearing fantasy, I am a slightly built Asian man, obviously.)

Awhile before the velvet boots, I was contemplating this:

This is a Pamela Love sword ring. It is badass, it cannot be denied.

What these two talismanic items have in common is that they inspire in me a belief that they will change my life. Or motivate a change in my life. A belief that I would be more awesome with this stuff. (One more thing they share in common: they cost more money than I am currently willing to pay to indulge in magical thinking like this.)

What really needs to change in my life is the belief that stuff like this will change my life. Maybe. But sometimes a talisman works, right? New basketball shoes symbolize a new season and the joy of playing ball, or so I'm told. A new haircut symbolizes a new start. New shoes . . . don't even get me started.

Today in Target while buying my college daughter a couple of last things before she goes back to college, I tried on a new pair of shoes. They were pretty gorgeous. Magenta suede (faux), very tall, absurd for everyday life. I believed in myself, for a moment, walking around in them. And then I put them back, because come on--super tall shoes? magenta? Although I may go back to get them, I can't guarantee that I won't.

When college daughter goes home, I will put my energies into my new initiatives, aka my resolutions. (I believe I may have energy to burn when she leaves, because of the sadness.) I read an article about resolutions in the Times on Sunday. To my surprise, it said that resolvers actually are more likely to make a change than non-resolvers, even with the same goal, motivation, and means. That said, the likelihood of a real change is still pretty dismal. Read it for yourself. One other thing it said is you can't resolve more than one difficult thing at a time, because you actually have a finite amount of willpower. That's right. It's not endless. So, if you're trying to stop shopping, you can't also try to lose weight. (Seriously, this idea kind of comforts me.)

I'm pretty sure, though, that I would have more willpower if I had that badass ring.

Changes.

Singing son said he thinks this blog looks crazy now and he can't figure out what is what anymore. "Change it back!" he said, over burritos at lunch yesterday. Well, sonny, you can't go home again. Especially if you never saved a copy of your old template, like some folks do.

Other changes:

1. We are painting our hall bathroom (blue) and our bedroom (green and lavender, which will either be soothing as all get out or will be reminiscent of the Jack Nicholson Joker of the Tim Burton Batman ilk. Or a little of both.). Our eminent housesitter and his able compatriots took down wallpaper while we were gone. They would have painted but the wallpaper was possessed of the spirit of the devil, and thus we are still scraping pugnacious little stripes of ancient wallpaper paste. Wallpaper begone! We hope to have painted by the time the weekend is through, hurray.

2. We bought a new dishwasher. I kid you not, the first thought I had upon waking, after dreaming, I'm pretty sure, about bok choy--why?--was this: I wonder if the dishwasher got the dishes clean? And lo, it did. The dishes sparkled. I'm considering washing every dish, pot, and pan in this house.

3. We bought a new swamp cooler. Our old one was rusting out at the bottom and every year when the historian climbed to the roof to get it going again, he'd say that we needed to get a new one and this had to be the last year. The very last year. We could have gotten refrigeration, but we did not because we're old fashioned like that.

4. We are cleaning and straightening like it's our job because the Scotlands are coming to American next week, and they will be here in the SLC for two and a half weeks. I will spare you all the cleaning details, but let me just say that my books are all on my shelves, mostly, and I have done the once over two or three times on some kitchen counters, and I have a list, I tell you, of the straightening and tidying and cleaning that must be done here, there and everywhere.

It was a big transition (read: change) when, on Monday, we came down the mountain into the valley where it was hella hot, especially compared to the mountain, and for one night, there was no swamp cooler. Luckily, there was a basement, because there is no sleeping in the room of the ancient wallpaper, the palimpsest of which is still, but only barely, visible on our soon to be vivid walls.

A moment and some words.

"The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness."

Earth Day Challenge: Day 7.

The last item for the Earth Day Challenge is not a big one, but it's one I've been thinking about, in terms of simplifying. I cooked most days at home this last week, from food I had on hand. To me, this is both earth-friendly and emblematic of the kind of simplifying I know is better: better for us nutrition-wise, better in terms of how much we consume and how carefully we use what we buy, better because we don't get in a car and drive to buy food.

I like knowing that there's a Thai place not too far from us that we can go to for really wonderful food when I don't feel like cooking. Sometimes, in the thick of the semester, eating out saves us. But I also like looking at the vegetables and staples I have on hand and making from them a dinner that is (bear with me now) soul-satisfying, in the conception, the making, and the eating. I like using our dishes and cleaning up after ourselves. I like remembering where I bought the elements of the dinner, and in the case of the vegetables, knowing who grew them. Tonight we had linguine with roasted tomatoes I froze last fall, some parmesan cheese, sauteed spinach, and salad (greens courtesy of the magnificent Chad, vegetable impresario).

After dinner tonight, the historian and I went over to the store for dog food, bread, Coke. I whipped out my reusable bag and said to the checker, as she prepared to put the stuff in a plastic bag, "Oh! I have this bag, can we put the food in there? It's Earth Day." And that was good: I am now carrying around two reusable bags (they fold up very compactly) in my purse, which means I'm now doing something I've meant to do for a long time, and I can probably almost completely eschew plastic bags. Like theorris, I think I can do the things I've done this past week more or less permanently. It's been good to have a reason to try to do better. I like the feeling.

More things I'll be doing: planting a garden, getting our composter back in business, simplifying further, giving stuff away. Perhaps I'll report intermittently on these activities. Thanks for the challenge, theorris.

Poem.