Shocker

What's shocking is how little "free time" I actually have. When I started this whole cultural fast I'm on I figured that I would spend a lot of time staring around until I decided on something to fill my time - I've been completely surprised to find out how infrequently this is the case.

Instead I'm realizing how much I usually do double duty - I would cook dinner while watching an episode of a TV show, or surf the Internet (do people still call it that? It sounds so stodgy and somehow old-fashioned) while talking to my roommate. For the past two weeks I've been spending a lot more time focusing on one thing at a time. I think about what to make for dinner, experiment and make things from scratch more, spend more time cleaning up... I spent an hour reorganizing my clothes today. It was great.

I've been trying to wake up early so that I can spend some time writing every morning. I've managed it every day this week. I get up and get dressed as quickly as possible, then stop in a coffee shop somewhere to write for twenty or thirty minutes before I go to work. It's really nice - and I want to keep this up. It will be really nice once I have more space so that I don't need to leave the house - I'll be able to get up and make myself a cup of tea and sit and write.

Speaking of more space, Sally and I are trying to draw the perfect apartment to us. We almost had a place a few months ago, but it fell through when the owner's friends wanted it. The night before we found out we didn't get it, Sally had a dream that we were moving into the perfect apartment, so my sadness was tempered by lots and lots of hope. One of my projects this month is putting together vision boards for our place.

Here's my inspiration for our perfect living room:

And our kitchen:

Sigh - I'm so looking forward to it.

In other news I'm trying to fill my days at work with connection and fun. If I'm going to be there every day I want to be enjoying myself, so I've taken it upon myself to figure out how to do that.

Hope your January is going well and you're finding ways to beat the January Blahs. If you need some inspiration I vote you try to make this absolutely amazing sounding Pistachio Olive Oil Cake, which I've included up there in my vision of the perfect kitchen (from design*sponge - which is where most of the images in the two vision boards are from).