I have discovered coffee

I have never been a coffee drinker. Mainly because the idea of drinking something hot has always seemed strange to me, due to the climate where I live. When the day is steamy already at 7am, a hot beverage seems silly. Even in the winter, it still feels like hot is for food and cold is for drink.

Recently, however, in desperation for something stimulating, I have been trying coffee. I'm not going so far as to get a coffee maker, instant is just fine to me. I like it with some milk but not sweetener. It isn't like a make-you-high kind of boost, just a little lift of the spirits. It's much better than Diet Coke.

In keeping up with my time and how I spend it, I have discovered that I spend most of my day online, but only a small slice of that time is for things like webcomics. The rest is either reading things that are educational or reading blogs that relate to my Connectedness/Happiness Project. I'm not saying that I don't waste any time, but it looks like I spend a lot more time reading than I thought. I had thought that I didn't read anything any more, but what I was thinking of as "reading" was reading books. "Reading" comes in another form now, and it's one that I wasn't even thinking of as "reading." But it is educating myself about different things with current information and that counts.

Another place I am spending a lot of time online is in the chat room of an online community to which I belong. This is not time that is entirely wasted, for 3 reasons. The first is that the room focuses on "chat challenges" which relate to performing household tasks at certain intervals, so that is how I get the majority of my housework done due to the support and interest generated by this method. The second is that the community has a strong therapeutic bent, with a lot of discussion related to issues like perfectionism and isolation. The third reason is that it is my primary form of socialization during the day; without this chat group, I would be alone all day with no one to talk to. I need more stimulation than that! I work at home, alone, so I can easily get bored and lonely. Talking in the chat room fits in within my scheduled breaks from work and gives me the chance at human contact. It also exposes me to different people, some of whom I am beginning to develop relationships outside of the chatroom with.

So it is okay that I am not yet involved with the community of LibraryThing. I have other things upon which I am spending my time, and I have found them worthy of the investment. I am making time for exercise, which is the most important thing. I am working. I am doing the things that need to be done around the apartment. I am taking part in activities at the church four times per week. I have an 8-hour social commitment every Saturday. I am reading a lot of informational material as well as reading for pleasure. I am writing almost every day. So I am not languishing in the gray fog, I am doing things, I just haven't been recognizing them for what they were. There are specific things I would like to do which I am not yet doing, the time for which will need to come out of my online time, but for now the time I spend at the computer is serving my purposes. It's kind of a relief to know that I'm not inert the way I thought I was.

I'm adding a strength training component to my exercises. Every other day I will be doing a very modified version of a desk-worker's workout found on Sparkpeople.com. It's a series of bodyweight exercises that just use a wall and a chair. I am far too heavy or not yet flexible enough to do some of them as written, but I can approximate them within my abilities and as I progress I can get closer to the proper way to do them. I have also traded my desk chair for a stability ball, as I heard that will help my posture and work muscles that otherwise would not be called upon. So far it is rather weird and awkward, but I am trying to get used to it. It certainly is nicer on my posterior, I haven't gotten "flatbutt" yet. Even with a cushion in the chair, I get flatbutt. I can wiggle around more on the ball, which is probably subconsciously going to be a benefit.

Break is over, time to get back to work.