More small stuff

Those SparkPeople were reading my mind yesterday.

My morning routine is to make coffee, feed the dogs, read blogs, write this post and read e-mail. In that order. So yesterday, after I wrote the post about thinking small, I opened an e-mail from SparkPeople with this tantalizing teaser:

• The surprising value of starting small

I'd post a link to the entire article, but unless you're a registered [free!] member, it probably wouldn't work. Oh, what the heck. Here's a link; if it doesn't work, don't say I didn't warn you. And do sign up! You can't beat the price, and the e-mailed tips are quite good.

[An aside: I'm not using their journal to record my food and activity. As I mentioned earlier this week, my standalone software fits my needs perfectly. I'm very happy with the information I've received via e-mail from them, though, and will remain a member as long as these tips are useful. I do love me some tips!]

Anyway. The gist of the article is that small changes are manageable, and will eventually produce big results. It's probably nothing you don't already know – use small bits of time for physical activity, make small substitutions, blah, blah, blah. [One of their suggestions was to use mustard instead of mayonnaise … to me, that's two different things. No way mustard is ever going to taste like mayonnaise! But I do sub light for regular when I want mayo, saving about 60 calories per tablespoon.]

I did better-but-not-great with the intentional exercise yesterday, and I did great with the food. I also have my good attitude back. I lifted weights [two sets of 20 reps of four different weight bench drills] and walked 1.75 miles in 30 minutes on the treadmill. It was very freaking cold yesterday, and even snowed. There's still snow on the ground this morning. Which is fine … as long as it's cold and snowy, I don't have to mow the grass. It's still very freaking cold, though, so I'll probably have to do another indoor workout today.

Here are pix from yesterday's adventures in knitting. First, before-and-after baskets:

Obviously I only took a before-felting shot of one of them. I can't remember what yarn I used for the green/purple one, but the orange/fuschia is Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride. The pattern is the Nantasket Basket, which you can purchase here.

And ... bunnies!

These bunnies are going to babies, and so shall remain tail-less. Free pattern here. The rest of yesterday's knitting was FLAK and more FLAK. I picked up the stitches for the body and started working down toward the lower edge, which I estimate will take about 100 hours to complete. (More than 300 stitches around on size 5 needles for more than 150 heavily cabled rounds. It took two basketball games to pick up the stitches and knit seven rounds.)

Yesterday I downloaded several [10 days' worth] of Renee's podcasts. The first one, which was 20 minutes long, took forever to download, and eventually I had to just stop doing anything else on the computer and let it work on that one thing, without having to divide its brain among several tasks. The other casts are much, much shorter. I've listened to four so far, and it's fun hearing her voice. I enjoy reading her blog very much; hearing her talk about her struggles, plans, hopes and dreams is even better.

Knitting podcasts tend to last half an hour or longer, and my network connection usually times out before the download is complete. Someday high-speed internet will make it out here to the Middle of Nowhere. At least one can hope. In the meantime, I'm grateful for what I have and am practicing patience.

In more ways than one.