Things I may Want to Give Up for Lent

So here's the scoop from Grownup-Central. I've been traveling up to San Francisco really often on long day-trips (leave home at 5:30, get home at 8 types of days) so I've decided that the best thing for me to not feel incredible pain on those days would be if I actually woke up pretty early all the time. I'm not a big waker-up-early person. I work at home which affords me the luxury of rolling out of bed at 8, getting tea and wearing my bunny slippers to work. On days I work at home I don't even wash my face until the evening when I take a bath. Nice, huh?

Anyway, today was the first day of my big Waking Up Early Schedule and you know what? There's actually life at 6am. Weird. The hour from 6 to 7 was largely spent wondering why I thought it was important to get my body used to waking up early anyway. Then at 7 I decided to be super proactive and I did a yoga video. At 7:30 I wrote in my journal. Then the tea kicked in and I was pretty awake. We'll see how this goes, but it would be quite lovely to have morning quiet time with the cats. It would make me feel very zen and mature.

So the whole Lent thing. I'm not Catholic, but I like the idea of giving something up - showing that I have power over it rather than it over me. I've been thinking of giving up Diet Coke for a while anyway. It's really bad with all that aspartame, and especially when I'm pregnant next year, I won't want to give that stuff to Baby. So hence, I do believe I shall give up Diet Coke for 40 days. It seems really harsh. But then again, Jesus wandered around in the wilderness for 40 days, so surely I can give up some chemical-laden-non-thirst-quenching drink for 40 days. I shall, however, indulge in regular coke from time to time (the kind you drink, not the kind you snort) because it's mostly the artificial sweetener that I'm trying to get my system off of.

How about the free Grand Slam at Denny's tomorrow? Since I wake up so early these days, I might just go get me one. Something to look forward to.

Oh, and as far as my entertainment crisis goes, I still haven't managed to find any books that really excite me. So I'm doing the next best thing. I'm listening to books. It feels kind of like cheating, but I am getting only unabridged ones, so I figure it's kind of ok. I'm listening to Bill Bryson's book on Shakespeare right now. I love him. He's just the best. He's also the one author that my non-reading dad actually reads.

The new Matthew Shardlake book comes out on Thursday, though, which is what I've been waiting for to kick-start my way back into the literary world.