Accountability, and changing habits

One thing that generally helps lift depression for me is the time change. I never do well with Daylight Savings Time, and always feel better in the fall when things go back to “normal”. I’m sort of the opposite of a person with Seasonal Affective Disorder. Another thing that helps is concentrating on self-care and improving my habits. I mentioned in the podcast this week that I’ve been neglecting my blood sugar (ran out of medication and it was a little while before I could get some more), and my diet, and basically everything. It all snowballed into a blood sugar reading of 26 mmol/L on Sunday night, and that scared the hell out of me (for anyone who uses a different system, “normal” is between 4 and 7 on this scale).

So Rob challenged me to come up with a plan, and to write it down. So I did. I sat down with a cup of Green Gables black tea with strawberries that my boss brought back from PEI, and I wrote out a chart on which I get stickers when I hit my goals for the day. I’m a sucker for stickers, so this works well for me 🙂 I thought I would share it – as a Word document, so you can customize it if you want.

Weekly Accomplishments

My plan was to post each week’s completed chart as part of whatever post is going up. I know I promised pickling recipes, and they’re coming. I did nine 1.5 pint jars of beets, and seven 1.5 pint jars of Thai-style carrots yesterday, as well as a pint of sweet onion pickles (I had brine left over from the beets). That post will be up later this week. Episode 57 of the podcast has also been uploaded, so if you haven’t had a chance to check that out, here it is.

We got downright BURIED in snow last night, and of course, my neighbourhood wasn’t plowed this morning. It was a good reminder that I need to bring my boots home from the office. Part of today’s exercise is going to be shovelling around my car and putting the winter tires in the trunk (my appointment is on Thursday). I hope everybody else is weathering things well. The photo is from last week’s temporary snowfall. We got a lot more than this last night!