New things come and go

 It’s been five months since I consistently scheduled and wrote in my blog. I’ve unquestionably felt the absence of it, to the detriment of the richness of my life experience.

A brief but unusual period of my life has come and gone in the meantime. For about eight weeks, I worked at a Fedex facility, loading trucks with packages to deliver. As it was almost entirely a physical job, it was something new for me. I worked with other people, but I didn’t really need to communicate with them much. There were slackers that frustrated me because they did affect my work, and sometimes we didn’t have enough loaders or too many boxes were supposed to fit on a single van, but for the most part I enjoyed it. However, the hours were from 3-4 AM (sometimes earlier) until about 8 AM. I like four-hour shifts, but this messed my sleep schedule up so much that I found it difficult to do schoolwork at the same time. The difficulty of the big assignment for the curriculum class I was taking also caused me problems. At the same time, I was trying to work out my practicum with BCA, being able to go and observe several hours of classes there.

During this time, my primary form of diversion was cooking. In mid-July we began a whole-foods plant-based diet (WFPB), in which we eat like vegans while choosing minimally processed foods. It’s a difficult diet I think, but it would have been more difficult ten or even five years ago. The availability of food catering to vegetarians has greatly increased in recent years. Anyway, I still succumb to the temptation of snacks that diverge from the diet, and when the parents go away I usually eat a frozen pizza for a couple of meals, but otherwise I’ve hardly strayed from the diet. I do miss certain things though, especially sauces with sugar or corn syrup. Even so, I’ve made lots of new and tasty dishes based on this diet and continuously find new ones to try. My best dishes have probably been Thai red or green curries.

As always at the beginning of new courses, I’m optimistic that things will get better and I’ll stay on top of my work this time. I’m going to fully commit to planning out my time though, because without doing so I’m certain that it will be difficult to do everything with excellence. I start that from Monday. Also, I’ve been working training my body for various gymnastic feats, and I think I’ve seen some results because I’ve been pretty consistent. I’ll talk more about that later, but I want to expand my goals to include stretching and cardio. This will also begin on Monday.