If There’s Ever Been a Time, It’s Now

I hear that still, small voice inside.

You know, they should call January “health month”. Everyone has these great goals to be healthier and fitter and then by February, lots of them are back on the couch munching on discounted Valentine’s day chocolate. Well, I think I’m starting to feel the effects of getting almost no exercise beyond the daily “transit dashes”, as I call them. However, gyms repulse me a little so this might be reality until it warms up. I formulated a plan to make me run for probably 20 minutes in the morning… catching the bus at the entrance of Queensland. I have pretty much no desire to do this until the snow is gone, though.

Best exchange of the weekend:

Colette: My back is all tense… I need a massage chair, like what Grandpa has.
Dad: You need to go outside and get some exercise once in a while.
Mike: No, Dad! We need better chairs!!

Last New Years, my resolution was to clear out all the useless stuff in my room and I did it. A few weeks ago, I did it again and I plan on doing it once a year from now on if I can. It makes me feel like moving would be fairly painless, since everything in my room is stuff I know I want to keep, and it’s all organized already.

Speaking of moving, I kind of hope this is the year I move out. It’s a bit of a scary concept, since it’d be the first time I’ve ever moved, but it’d be good for me. I’m still debating what would be best, renting or owning, house or condo, etc. The best would be for me to get a place with my brother, but while in school, I think he doubts whether he could swing rent or house payments, which is fair enough. The other main option is moving out with any or all of Kim, Alex and Mark, but things are a bit up in the air as to whether they’ll be living in Calgary for the foreseeable future.

Anyways, back to the resolutions. Another one for this year is going to be getting more sleep. Once I get home from work, I always feel like I don’t have enough hours to do all the things I want to do. But I think I just need to suck it up and tell myself to wait for the weekend. Going to bed at 10pm would give me four hours of free time every evening, and I guess that’s pretty okay. That would also mean 7-8 hours of sleep, which I think would make me feel less irate at hearing the alarm every morning. It’s worth a shot, anyway. It may mean less time on the computer but that’s probably a good thing.

Exercise, sleep, and the last traditional one: diet. I feel like I eat pretty well overall. One thing I want to do though is try to replace meat with other protein sources more often. The more I read about vegetarianism, the more it seems like a great idea. I just don’t know if I could do it long-term. However I did read that if everyone eliminated one meat meal per week, it would drastically help the environment. It doesn’t seem like a big thing, but when you think about the number of people in North America alone (500 million, give or take), and then multiply that by at least two (meat meals per day), geez, that’s a lot of animals. So to subtract one meal per week per person does make a huge difference. The way it helps the environment is that it would mean less cows (which produce methane, a greenhouse gas. It sounds inconsequential and funny until you remember the amount of cows we need to sustain our beef-loving diets), more land used for crops instead of cows, less pollution from processing and packaging plants, etc. You can read The Food Revolution by John Robbins for more information on that.

Becoming a vegetarian would be, I think, a fairly major and hard decision but I know I can eliminate one (or more) meat meals a week quite painlessly. I went to a cafe across the street from my office today for the first time and they make an awesome veggie sub.

Well, that’s enough resolutions. 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy so I hope that means people will be handing out amazing telescope lenses on the street. What? It doesn’t?