It’s kind of fun.

I was writing about my goals the other day. Here is a tag cloud from that writing:

And a cloud from brainstorming about jobs:

It’s kind of artist and poetic looking, too!

Meal Ideas

• Add vegetables like bell peppers, broccoli, spinach, mushrooms or tomatoes to your egg or egg white omelet.
• Add broccoli, green beans, corn, or peas to a casserole or pasta.
• Have soup. You can stick with the basics like tomato or vegetable soup or mix up some minestrone or veggie chili to cut winter’s chill. When possible, choose soups with less sodium.
• Add lettuce, tomato, onion, and cucumber to sandwiches.
• Order salads, vegetable soups, or stir-fried vegetables when eating out.
• add tomatoes, radishes, and green bell peppers to a tuna salad made with mayonnaise.
• Top broiled lean meat, chicken, or fish with salsa. Each 1/2 cup of salsa counts as a 1/2 cup toward meeting your daily vegetable needs.

Salsa counts?? Woo hoo! :)

Make it Quick

1. Store cleaned, cut-up vegetables in the fridge at eye level.
2. Try hummus and vegetables like bell pepper strips and broccoli.
3. Pick up ready-packed salad greens from the produce shelf for a quick salad any time.
4. Snack on mini-carrots at work instead of candy.

Recipes

Vegetable Primavera

1. Choose a combination of different vegetables, such as mushrooms, tomatoes, cauliflower, and bell peppers. Chop the vegetables into bite-size pieces.
2. Sauté in a skillet with a small amount of cooking oil or non-stick cooking spray until the vegetables are tender, but still crisp.
3. Toss with your favorite pasta and add garlic and basil to taste.
4. Top with low-fat or fat-free parmesan cheese.

Make-Ahead Salads

1. Chop up some cucumbers, tomatoes, bell peppers, and onions.
2. Lightly toss with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
3. Store it in the refrigerator in a bowl with a lid.
4. When you’re ready to eat, take a scoop of the marinated vegetables and spoon it over your favorite lettuce and toss.
5. You have a flavorful salad in no time.

I love this make ahead salad idea! What a great way to make a quick, yummy salad!

I need to do something to feel healthier. Since limiting my food intake doesn’t work for me, I’ve decided to ADD to my food intake! My goal is to eat 9 servings of vegetables a day. I did this once years ago for three days and my skin GLOWED. It was an amazing and very noticeable difference. I looked SO healthy. I don’t know why I stopped doing it, but I’ve wanted to do it again ever since.

Here’s a list from Healthy Eating Made Easy that you can print out of what a serving of vegetables is.

VEGETABLE SERVINGS: SIZES

* Asparagus, canned 7 spears
* Asparagus, fresh 5 spears
* Avocado Half
* Aubergine One-third of a large one
* Baby sweetcorn 6
* Baked beans 3 tbsp (1/2 cup)
* Broad beans 3 heaped tbsp (1/2 cup)
* Broccoli 2 large florets
* Brussels sprouts 8
* Cabbage 3 heaped tbsp shredded, (1/2 cup)
* Carrots 1 large
* Celery 3 sticks
* Cherry tomatoes 7
* Chickpeas See Pulses
* Courgette Half a large one
* Curly kale 4 tbsp (1/2 cup)
* Eggplant One-third of a large one
* French beans 4 heaped tbsp (1/2 cup)
* Kidney beans See Pulses
* Lentils See pulses
* Mixed salad Cereal bowl full (1 cup)
* Mushrooms, button 14
* Onion 1 medium
* Parsnip 1 large
* Peas, fresh, frozen or canned 3 heaped tbsp (1/2 cup)
* Potatoes Never count towards your daily vegetable servings, in any form
* Pulses, cooked: kidney beans, chickpeas, lentils etc 3 heaped tbsp (1/2 cup)
* Salad leaves, lettuce etc Cereal bowl full (1 cup)
* Scallions 8
* Snowpeas Handful
* Spinach, cooked 2 heaped tbsp (1/2 cup)
* Spring onions 8
* Sugarsnap peas Handful
* Sweetcorn, fresh, frozen or canned 3 heaped tbsp (1/2 cup)
* Tomato 1 medium
* Vegetable soup 1 serving of fresh or canned soup
* Vegetable sticks Handful of mixed - celery, pepper, carrot etc
* Zucchini Half a large one

When I did this before, I drank V-8, and ate large salads full of vegetables on beds of greens. I’m not sure, but I might not have counted the greens which may mean I was getting more than 9 servings of vegetables. I’ll try out the true 9 servings and let you know if my face glows again.

I’m deciding if I want to take a NIA class this summer. I looked up NIA articles online and found one that gave me a sudden tingle in my stomach and get tears in my eyes. That feeling is a clue.

It was an article about creating space in a NIA class:

…the students created the space every morning and afternoon by coming into a circle, and becoming still in body, mind, emotions, and spirit.

I’ve been thinking about how I want to bring movement to more of our everyday lives. Especially ritual. Maybe that is why I got a teary reaction? Maybe it’s the same teary reaction I get at the end of a yoga or NIA class when I finally pay attention to myself? Maybe I’m longing for that?

Or maybe it was this song I was listening to while I read it. (I dare you to listen to the whole thing.)

The Habit Calendar has a calendar look, which I like better than the list form of Joe’s Goals. I like seeing those green success days adding up on the calendar. (They both use green for “success” and red for “failure.”) I also like that it’s referred to as the HABIT calendar, as that is what I am measuring.

However, there is no way to add it to my blog, which I would really like, and it takes me just a bit longer (like 1 or 2 seconds) to add my success mark. These two factors combined pushed me towards. Joe’s Goals.

The pluses:

Joe’s Goals

• let’s me add a success mark to my goal with one click,
• lets me add multiple success marks (which would be cool if I had a goal to drink 8 glasses of water or something,)
• has a blog badge.

The minuses:

• I don’t love the badge. It doesn’t let me change any of the text, or the color. I would call it Braidwood’s Habits or something like that and take off the giant “Joe’s Goals” (it’s not Joe’s goals, it’s MY habits!)
• The main minus of Joe’s Goals and the Habit Calendar is that I have to go to their website to indicate if I’ve done the habit for the day or not; an ingenious way for them to get traffic, but an inconvenience for me. This is why I’ll switch over instantly when someone develops a Wordpress plug in that works equally well.

Neutral:

• Joe’s Goals lets me give each goal a point value which I find extraneous for my purposes. I’ll just leave it at the default of 1 point per “goal.”

Here is what the blog badge looks like:

Tune in tomorrow for my habit forming tips!

(”Her tips are habit forming? They must be good!”)

I’m investigating goal tracking software that will hopefully help me track and share my progress. I’ve been looking for a goal-tracking Wordpress plug in, or some kind of blog badge where I can give myself some virtual stars everyday to track my progress. Here is what I’ve found so far:

1. GoalsTogether you can type in a goal, share it, and it has a blog badge, but there is no simple way to check off completing the goal. There is a space where you write the percentage complete the goal is. 0-100%, I guess you just keep going back and changing the number everyday. Won’t work for my purposes.
2. Move Mountains has a very useful and easy to understand way of entering your goals, plus great advice for making and managing your goals. I recommend checking this one out if you don’t care about adding the goal tracker to your blog or website.
3. MyProgress.com I didn’t get too far into setting goals with My Progress Log. It kind of creeped me out during the registration phase. It wanted to know exactly where I live and my occupation. I started to suspect that my info was going to be used by marketers in the near future. Once I registered, my front page encouraged me to input my earnings. After all, as it says on My Progress, “Your profitability is essential when it comes to figuring out what a person you are.” Not the one for me.
4. SuperViva I like the tone of the site. It seems fun, friendly and open. It seems like a fun way to list all of the things I want to do, places I want to travel, books and movies I want to see etc… It would work for all kinds of lists. You can add the list to your web page or social networking site. Looking at this site made me realize that I don’t really want a goal checklist as much as I want a habit tracker. I want a daily checklist kind of tracker. Still searching for the tool I want to use.

I found these goal tracking tools at Mashable, you can go there to see more tools, screen shots, and longer descriptions.

After looking at all these goal tracking tools, I realized that:

What I really need for my purposes is a HABIT tracker!

Tune in tomorrow as I rate and review online Habit Trackers.

-Phylicia Rashad

It’s the traditional time of year for goals and I seem to be in synch with the universe. I’m thinking about my future. Every day, ok, every hour, I think of something new I want to do. Watching the caucus results makes me want to go into politics.  It’s so exciting! (I must be a true grown up now because I find politics interesting and I talk about my health.)

Then I watched Phylicia Rashad on the Tavis Smiley show and was inspired by her story to think that maybe I want to move to Mexico City. I have a good friend from Mexico City, maybe I could go with her!

Whatever I do, whatever you are doing, I think Phylicia Rashad’s advice is good. I love that woman. Good luck to you in the new year. Set your sights on what you really want, study, and don’t pay too much attention to the obstacles.

With love,

B.

You can download and print out the goal workbook here: www.tonyrobbins.com/pdfs/Momentum2006.pdf

I went from being valued at work and getting good reviews (while my old boss was here) to being disapproved of, undervalued, and feeling bad enough about it to quit. At church, I went from feeling like a part of a loving community to leaving due to actions of our lead minister and staff. Many other young adults left as well, and I left, no one kicked me out, but I still feel rejected/ejected. Also, there has been some kind of shift in my social circle and I feel like I am on the edge in some ways instead of in the middle where I like to be.

Today on the bus I imagined how I would feel if everybody approved of me. It would be such a nice feeling- I could relax and just be myself. I really take how much/many people approve of me as a measure of how well I’m doing as a person sometimes. I thought about it as I was walking from the bus to work, and I couldn’t shake the idea that if more people approved of me, it would mean that I really am better, I really am more ok.

Then I thought of my aunt, who I am a lot alike, and how much I enjoy her, how fantastic I think she is. My other aunt, her sister, often disapproves of her. She thinks she is too messy, too soft, not together enough etc… And when my aunt is around her sister, she does suddenly seem kind of bumbling, somewhat simpering, and whiny. But when I’m with her, she is hilarious, exuberant, smart, interesting, funny, and gorgeous. She is messy, but she is glorious, who cares!

I love both my aunts, and from the outside it is easy to see that my aunt who disapproves is just that way and that her disapproval is all about her preferences and ways of looking at the world. She is cleaner, more direct, more of the things we think of as “together” in our society. So? That’s her deal. My roommate has a similar personality to that aunt and I don’t disapprove of her, but I think she disapproves of me. I’ve been trying to get her approval, and I’m going to try to stop trying. It’s easier to see, looking at the mirror of my aunts, how any disapproval she feels for me is her own deal. It doesn’t mean I’m bad, and if I got her approval, it wouldn’t mean I’d be any better.

I have been disapproving of me lately. Aye, maybe thar’s the rub. Goal for today: list a few things I would feel proud of myself for, and do them.

12/12/07 Update: I have been feeling guilty for writing that my aunt disaproves of my other aunt and that my roommate disaproves of me. Maybe they don’t! guilty, guilty, guilty…arggh… just remember, reality is multi-faceted and it changes, and… did I mention that I like my other aunt and my roommate, and it says more about my state of mind than any objective truth about them, but I think you got that.

Today for exercise I ran up and down an animal park. It counts! I was rained on!