Hello friends! Life has been surprisingly busy this past week. It’s been really nice to stay busy and not be sitting alone at home, and I’ve actually been pretty productive! I’ve gotten a lot of work done. I baked donuts for the first time! They were delicious, but no matter how many times I tried to get good pictures with my point and shoot (Steve took the fancy camera to LA. Boo.) they never quite looked pretty. I’ll just have to recreate them when he comes home. Cinnamon sugar cake donuts with a cinnamon brown sugar topping. Yummm. I worked some more, got dry needled again…this time in both legs. Ouch. More work, had the most delicious breakfast ever!

Why yes, that is oats in a Nutella jar. It was just as delicious as you would imagine.

I’ve also been riding my bike a whole lot. Tuesday am I skipped out on spin in favor of getting some much needed work done, so I ended up going to a bike ride that afternoon, and it’s pretty much the only thing I’ve done for exercise every day since. No, I’m not happy about it. Don’t get me wrong, I am in so much love with my bike, and riding it is so fun and relaxing, but you know what? It’s just not the same as running.

Unfortunately, I’ve been in quite a bit of pain lately, and it was enough to stop me from running Tuesday when I wanted to and even Wednesday morning when it was scheduled into my phone. KT, my physical therapist, first gave me a lecture about how I never listen to her, then I got super defensive promised to take any advice she gave me. Of course, I am not a fan of her advice. She told me to take a week off. I know a week isn’t that long, but I’ve only run twice since The Lost Dutchman, and I miss it. I was so excited about my speed work out on Monday, and I was really looking forward to keeping up the momentum and getting faster. I know in reality a week won’t really derail me, and mostly I just want to feel better. When I went shopping with Nicole on Monday, I was hobbling around the store 🙁

In other news, one thing I wanted to start doing was setting goals at the beginning of each month, and check in at the end. Monica does this and I really like it! I set some 2012 goals, then totally forgot about it in February. Whoops. So here we go…!

March Goals:

• Schedule EVERYTHING. I keep double booking myself, and luckily I have amazing friends that have been able to help me out, and understanding family that doesn’t tell me just how much I suck, but I don’t prefer feeling like a flake. One of the hardest parts about my career is the scheduling, so I need to figure out how to make it work for me.
• Always respond to communication. I used to be like the best person about keeping in touch, responding to every email I received and being available pretty much at all times. I think I got a little burnt out, but when you don’t respond to work emails for days at a time, it doesn’t look so great and people may never want to hire you again. I have to be honest when I say that I am SO OVER non personal forms of communication like email and texting, but I know that at least email is necessary, and I need to respond to everything within a 24 hour period.
• Drink water with every meal and snack. I have a confession. I am motivated enough to run for miles on end, but I am literally too lazy to walk to the kitchen for a glass of water. It’s awful. If I go out and have a waiter, I will drink cup after cup until I’m in the bathroom every 5 minutes, but left to my own devices, I am a lazy bum, and that needs to stop, because being hydrated is super important to my health.
• Be mindful of intellectual labelings of emotional responses. WTF does that mean? Well, I learned recently that although our emotional responses are partially chemical, that many emotions are the same in our chemistry, such as sad/disappointed/guilty,  angry/empowered, anxious/excited. We cannot control our chemical response. However, we can take bigger charge of our mood (and sanity) by choosing more appropriate labels. For me the big ones are going to be choosing excitement/anticipation over anxiety, and sad over guilty, because anxiety and guilt are two things that I struggle with. It’s interesting how challenging it is to make an active choice to feel less crappy, or a different kind of crappy in a situation. Once I feel like crap, my mental response is to want to just feel like crap, and I get frustrated at the idea of trying to change it! Well, that’s silly and not very mature, so I’m gonna put on my big girl pants (while still believing in fairies and such) and work on taking some control over how I respond emotionally to my life.

I’ll check back in at the end of the month and see how I did. I have a feeling most of these are going to be a work in progress, so I’m just looking for growth, not a bandaid.

What about you? Any goals you want to accomplish this month??