New Week, New Energy, New Ideas

A new week. This week, Teenager comes home from his trip to his aunt's. My vacation from parenting is nearly over, and I am coming back into the fray much less stressed. Or at least it feels like it.

I have plans for this week. I am reorganizing two rooms. One used to be the room I had the kids' TV in, and a computer they used to play games and do homework. It became the junk room. I am determined to redeem it from it's junk room status and turn it into a sewing room.

The room that Older Son had as his bedroom is destined to become an office, where I can write (necessary to get away from the internet to do serious writing, I've discovered!), and maybe revitalize my home crafting business, doing historical items and patterns for reenactors and others who like old stuff, which this last year I basically let die because I had been too sick and too depressed (hard to believe I haven't picked up a knitting needle in weeks!).

Lots of work involved in this. But finally, after getting help with depression, after getting a chronic pain problem resolved, and losing what is now 41 lbs, I feel a lot more capable of doing this.

Besides that, there is working out by design, where you spend an hour or whatever, and feel better, but don't have anything made afterwards, and there is labor, which is also athletic, and burns calories and builds muscle, and by which you have something to show for it afterwards.

Right now, I have a lot of the latter to do. And a split level house which has me going up two short flights of stairs a lot, as I move the crafting stuff out of the den my husband and I use as our living space upstairs into the new sewing room.

Yesterday's physical activity was shoveling juniper branches into plastic bags after hubby trimmed the hedges. We have a lot of juniper hedge, on both sides of the driveway. We shovelled up something like seven bags of trimmings. Used a snow shovel to shovel them up with.

All the water retention of yesterday is now resolved. Green tea, lots and lots of water, and no pickles. Lost another half pound on top of that. 41 lbs!