I am all motivated to get up at zero dark early to see this eclipse–I wish I’d unpacked the spotting scope, but our things are still a jumble. I also wish I had the money to excavate the patio and put in the foundation for my shed, but it looks like we need to attend to the crawlspace, first. Talk about the unsexiest of money ever. THE CRAWLSPACE. Woo. <sadface>

And I just cannot imagine how to make any more money than I am right now, and instead am trying to figure out how to do what we need to do with less. Our biggest expenditures are buying gear/clothes and books and food. All of those things are important. Well, our other biggest expenditure is the electric bill–see also crawlspace. So, maybe that will help. I dunno. It is hard not to get despondent thinking about all the ways that this lil homestead will never be what I want it to be, but will always only be some number of steps away from unbearable.

Teachingwise, I have one more day left of my experiment in engagement and better time management. Some of the tasks I struggle with each January and July were much improved. Some were only a little improved. Am I a better teacher, though? Does presence necessarily equate to better quality? That’s another I dunno. At least I was a bit less stressed out a couple of times in the last month. It’s worth something to me.

Tomorrow will be my last day of the better teaching month, and I’ll be on to the better workouts month. Hopefully I will come up with a better name, because I want the month to be less about losing inches and more about considering my relationship to “working out” and how I can reset it. I’d like, through resetting/rethinking to find ways to get through periods of low motivation. Since Feb is 28 days long and a magazine I bought had a “28-days to flatter abs!” cover story, that will be one completely arbitrary parenthesis of the month. I will follow that plan. But also, I want to get in a 30-minute lunchtime walk each workday as the other parenthesis. This second goal is because I want to build a habit that is not related to weight-loss or “workouts,” because I know that regular walking helps my anxiety and my depression. In between those two parenthesis, I plan to read and try other activities that inform my thinking about what it means to “workout.”