a few things on my mind:
1. money (always.) today i paid off all my student loans (yayyyy!!), and now i'm thinking of the next step. philip's loans. he has a lot more that we need to pay off, and i'm itchy to just pay them all off in big lump sums. i keep reading about others' successes with becoming debt-free, but it's going to be a journey for us. i wish i could just accept this. he's still in school and we're living on one income and another occasional part-time income. i don't understand how others are able to pay off $30K+ in one year. i don't think it will happen for us.
anyway, my loans are paid. that's one thing to be grateful for!
2. lent and cheese. i've been thinking lately that i eat way too much cheese, especially considering my doctor wasn't too excited about my cholesterol levels last august. sigh. so, for lent, i will be giving up cheese during the week. i'm allowing myself to eat some cheese on the weekend (on saturday night pizza for sure). i'm not sure i can go cold turkey. but hopefully this will lead to better health.
3. exercise. my school is doing a staff fitness challenge through the end of the year. we're on teams and racing to new york. i'm on a pretty incredible team. i can't say i'm contributing my "fair share" of miles (considering i have marathon runners on my team), but i'm certainly out and about more than usual this nasty time of year.
4. february. it's kind of a nasty month. several people i love have birthdays this month (dad, sarah, jordan, abigail...), but otherwise, it kinda stinks. i think the word "doldrums" describes it well. motivation is low (students' and teachers'), and so is patience. the sky is dreary and rainy, with spring feeling far away. (spring here in western washington just means lots of rain, so i'm not really looking forward to it anyway).
5. meetings and obligations. i do like singing in chorale and being on the board, but man, it takes up a lot of time (except tonight. i'm skipping since i'm feeling under the weather. yet another delightful treat from the month of february). i also have school meetings this week and a conference on saturday and worship team on sunday and an oil change and...anyway. it's all hitting at once.
all right. signing off to return to my book. trackers by patrick carman (he's speaking at the children's lit conference i'm attending this weekend). i'm learning a lot about computers (or skimming...)
