i've been alternatively on the job and frittering my time away.  Frittering - discovering new things to read, making my way through four Tanya Huff books in as many days, goofing around online for hours and hours and hours.  Yet on the job hasn't been so bad - doing all those mundane things I'm supposed to have accomplished during the break - laundry, packing up the christmas decorations, updating the address book.  And then the vaguely scholastic stuff - all those pesky academic details (like making sure my last recommender actually send her letters at some point before the colleges send out their acceptance letters), making sending check ins to my advisor, cleaning up my school email.

I still have a to do list that's three miles long, but I have hope and faith I may actually get through it someday.  And as it stands I'm taking each lazy day as an opportunity to be mildly productive and partially lazy. 

Probably watching entirely too much TV of the very worst kind.  It's there, it's luminous, and it's frightfully easy to turn it on and let it chatter.  I'm afraid to establish too many habits for fear that I'll retain them when school starts again, so I'll watch and rewatch any movie I've already seen, and we've been catching an inordinant amout of wife-swap (which really is the sign that the Western world has gone over the deep end, it really is.  I honestly know little bits of my soul are burned away every time I watch it).

I managed to chip a tooth sometime over the holiday (noticed it in full on New Year's Day), and I'm headed to the dentist to fix it tomorrow.  It doesn't hurt, which is good.  It's not insured, which is very very bad and could quite possibly be terribly expensive.  My fingers are crossed.

I sprained my knee walking the dog the other night, derailing my new year's resolution to work a little harder at walks.  I've tried to make it up to her with training, but we can only do so much inside the house. 

Speaking of resolutions, I'm actually going to write them out this year - it's worth living in hope, right?

• To work up to the point where I'm not walking the dog, I'm taking the dog for a run, by summer.
• To do pushups before I go to bed at night (starting with 5... and adding in when I can)
• To do at least an hour's worth of academic reading a day*
• To do at least an hour's worth of Japanese a day*
• To eat smaller portions, to eat healthier, every day
• To drink at least one 12 oz bottle of water a day (refillable water bottle, of course)
  

* This comes from a news/talk program I saw while at my father's that discussed the "secrets" to "talent".  Apparantly all of the most successful people in the world (sports stars, businessmen, academics and the like) aren't born with some native "talent" for things.  It's actually that they achieved 10,000 hours worth of work earlier than the rest of us, and so they had enough "practice" at their particular skill, so much so that they "mastered" it in one sense or another.  And basically that many hours is 10 years worth of work.  So, for me to become a better theorist, a better academic, a better Japanese speaker, I need to work at least an hour a day on each.

So, despite the fact that I've not kept any of my resolutions completely so far, and despite the fact that the couple of other things under the cut aren't exactly good, I'm in a good mood.  The laundry's two loads away from being done, the living room doesn't have a tinder-box-christmas-tree in it, and tomorrow after my dental appointment I don't have any "to dos" that I absolutely have to do.