I have a tendency to make mental timelines for my day, especially when I’m left to my own devices. If Andy happens to be out of town on a weekend, I’ll have my day all mapped out in my head, even though I’m not answering to anyone but myself.

In some ways this is good, because it helps me make sure I do everything I want and need to do. Actually, more often than not, my timeline is really of fun stuff, not necessary stuff. The necessary stuff I write down or type onto a physical list. It’s the fun stuff that just stays in my head.

An example of a lazy Saturday timeline:

• Wake up
• Make a cup of tea and get back in bed to read
• I’ve been reading for about half an hour, so it’s time to get up and move on to the next thing.
• Hmmm, I think I’ll go to the pool at 11:30 and stay for an hour.
• Now I will watch 2 and only 2 episodes of this show I’m enjoying.
• I’d better start cooking dinner at 6:30.

I do something similar on weekday mornings. My work is fairly casual, and unless I have something on the calendar, it is mostly up to me as to what time I need to arrive. And yet, I still give myself a timeline.

Again, mostly a good thing: it keeps me accountable and makes sure I don’t put work on the backburner.

But where I run into trouble with it is when my personally-imposed, arbitrary timelines start stressing me out! If I have nothing else to do on a given Saturday, why do I have to stop myself from reading after half an hour? If I’m having a good time at the pool, why should I feel like I have to leave after an hour (as long as I have more sunscreen to apply)? If no one is waiting to meet with me at work, why shouldn’t I spend ten extra minutes at home to wash two dishes that are in the sink and pet my new cat?

Another arena where my timeline gets me into trouble is when I’m imposing it onto myself and I’m not home alone. Apparently I am not the only partner who does this! We were talking with some new friends who had us over a drink about one of their tendencies to have planned out a day and not communicated it to the other. Whoops! Guilty as charged. If I’ve mentally decided that at 5:30 I’m going to drink a beer and watch an episode of The Little Couple, but haven’t told Andy that, and then get irked when he suggests we go for a walk at that time, that’s silly! I should either communicate it (and perhaps he’d want to join) or be flexible enough to realize that I can relinquish my weird control over my leisure to enjoy a different leisure activity with a person I love!

I think I’m mellowing a lot as I get older and as I spend more time in the real world, and I’m glad. I think it makes me more pleasant to be around, an easier person to get along with, and more relaxed. There’s no reason to be so uptight that I plan my own days to the hour when it’s not necessary.

This morning I dawdled juuuust a little at home, washing the aformentioned dishes and petting my cat. I got to work about 20 minutes later than I was “supposed to” (in my own mind). The world didn’t end. The office building didn’t burn down. And I was in a great mood.

Case in point.

This is probably the most precious wedding gift that we got:

May He give thee thy hearts desire and fulfill all thy plans.

My friend’s mom cross-stitched this for us and had it framed, and she taped a note to the back that she had prayed for us with every stitch.

Y’all, there are a lot of little stitches in that pattern!

I remember being overwhelmed with all the feels when I unwrapped it, and now it’s hanging on the wall by the stairs in our bedroom so that I see it every morning as I’m getting up. It still makes me feel incredibly loved that someone would spend that kind of time to make something for me. And no matter what I believe or don’t believe right now, it’s awfully special.

Well, here we are, another Sunday. It seems like lately each week goes by incredibly quickly for me! Sometimes I think, “Wait! It was just Monday! How is it already Sunday evening and time to get back to work?!” But I don’t know how to slow it down, and I don’t know if I need to.

Have a lazy, relaxing Sunday, y’all. Here are some links I’ve loved this week to help you chill:

The thing about a beautifully wrought hymn, that age-old lyric poem, is that there is nothing like it — and it would be wrong to say the best ones don’t go at the heart head-on. Again, no matter where you stand on heaven and hell, there is power in a hymn. And if we’re blessed enough to be able to sit quietly with one, we might see that hymns contain everything: death, laughter, loss. They tell a story about our relationship to the divine. A brute truth: No other form of expression can so richly translate the depth and breadth of authentic religious experience like a well-conceived song of praise.

I do love hymns. In fact, I did my senior honors thesis in college on the role of hymns in the Baptist church. I love how serious they are, the big words they use, the way they tackle theology in a richly musical way. This article hits the nail on the head.

It is hard to overstate how drastic a change is required of basketball players, most of them barely old enough to drink, when they go pro. One day they’re students who live and breathe the sport; the next, they’re multimillionaires who are expected not only to be exceptional athletes but also exceptional role models, media personalities and holders of that elusive thing, that golden ticket: the personal brand.

A really interesting piece about the NBA’s Rookie Transition Program. I hadn’t known this existed! Seems like a version of this for everyone could be really useful when you graduate from college…

“If-then” planning is very effective; by deciding in advance how to behave, we make it easy when the time comes.

Y’all know I love Gretchen Rubin (though sometimes her earnest self-reflection is exhausting). I used to think I was a moderator, but my strug life with sugar lately has been making me think I might be more of an abstainer than I’ve been willing to admit. This article about breaking a good habit just once had some great tips on how to make sure you still enjoy a special experience without ruining your hard work to date.

Our homes and offices can have everything in place and still be cluttered because some of those well organized things are actually things we could do without. We may not even notice the organized clutter because we’ve often lived with those things for quite some time.

A post about the clutter we rarely notice and some tips on how to see it. I’ve noticed that looking down on our main living area from our lofted bedroom tends to make me notice things like that. It’s useful but also frustrated for someone like me who wants things to be perfectly organized!

And finally, Andy and I have been watching a show on Netflix lately called Air Disasters which is about, well, air disasters. We’re currently in season 2. It sound horrifying or morbid, but it’s really fascinating, and it’s been reminding me about how I used to eat this kind of stuff up when I was a kid. Who knows why, but I love E.R. and tornado shows on TV, and two books I read ad nauseum were both about a girl who lost a leg in a car accident. Another favorite that I’d been trying to remember and finally tracked down was this one about the 1989 Loma Prieto earthquake in California. I read this one a lot.

What weird things were you into as a kid?

Hacking has taken on a whole new meaning in the past few years. It no longer solely means doing something shady or illegal. According to Mark Zuckerburg, Facebook founder extraordinaire, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. My co-worker John has a good post about why being a hacker is a good thing.

The Iron Yard has been co-hosting a monthly civic hack night with an group called Code for Atlanta. CfA is a “brigade” of a larger organization, Code for America. They approached us about this partnership and have made it super easy to mostly just provide space for this meetup. I’ve gone every month but haven’t really thought much about what it meant; it was just something I did. The goal was to provide a space for groups that had worked on a project at a hackathon to have an outlet for continuing to build that product, or so I thought.

This past week the hack night was held at a different location, but I went anyway because I thought it would be good for us to be represented. Every month I’ve held back from actually jumping in with a team because I’m not a developer and for a slew of other unknown, unexamined reasons. This month, though, a representative from Code for America was there to do a presentation on what civic hacking is, and my mind was blown. The projects that other cities have done were so cool, addressing problems from not understanding the redistricting lines in a Chicago school system to wanting more transparency about campaign spending in Oakland. Some cities have even held “writeathons” to use citizens to re-write city or other local government websites in language that actually makes sense to the average person. I may not be able to code, but I can write!!

This slide of Code for America’s key capabilities spoke to me:

• Design for (and with) people
• Listen to the community
• Collaborate with others
• Default to open
• Leverage data for better decisions
• Create greater choice of tools
• Organize for outcomes

An over-arching point he made is that civic hacking is far from being only about writing code. It’s about collaborating as a community, about bringing together skills to solve problems, about changing the way we approach governance.

As it stated on another slide, “We make the road by walking.”

I was all fired up after he spoke, and next month I think I might dive in. I totally don’t feel like I have time to work on yet another project, but who really does?! If I have the opportunity to hack away at a compelling solution to a problem in my city, who am I to turn it down?

At the jobs I’ve had prior to this one, either the schedule, office policies, or location made it implausible to eat lunch out very often. In Huntsville, I made a sandwich just about every day, but when we moved to Atlanta somehow I started cooking a lot more and thus had leftovers for lunch. Yum. So that’s great and all, but on the other hand, I also really like eating lunch out. It’s one of my things. So fast forward to my job at The Iron Yard…we’re a pretty casual workplace and lots of people eat out, lots of the time. And I’m very easily convinced that I should leave my leftovers in the fridge for another day and tag along.

This was fine for awhile–I wasn’t going crazy over our monthly budget, and I usually ended up eating my original lunch at some point. I also have been busier in the evenings, so tending to cook less, so there were more days than there used to be where I actually needed to eat lunch out. Plus I work with with fun people, so camaraderie!

Last week, though, I hit a dead end on Eating Lunch Out Street. I found that I was really tired of all the restaurants within walking distance, I was eating like crap between that and free food at meetups, I drank a milkshake for dinner one night, for crying out loud! Plus I just felt like I was spending more of my disposable income on less-than-stellar food than I would like. Once you get in a rut it’s easier to keep going than to get out, so something had to give.

Labor Day gave me a nice opportunity for a hard reset, and I’m happy to report that I felt really good about my food-ing last week! I planned well for healthy, easy meals the created leftovers, AND I bit the bullet and said no sometimes.

That may be the hardest thing about trying to eat healthily or frugally, especially when it is not out of strict necessity. I could spend the money on lunch every day, but I’m choosing not to right now. I can drink a milkshake, but I’d rather not. It’s easy to feel like a dweeb or a killjoy. But hey, I gotta do me! I’m 26 years old and perfectly capable of not succumbing to peer pressure.

Bread and bread-like substances were kind of my downfall of late, so I tried to mostly cut those out. Somehow envisioning a dinner without a starch is always tough for me, and was one of the most difficult planning aspects of the Whole 30 for me. I’m not great at cooking very many different kinds of vegetables, and Andy, while not a picky eater per se, has opinions about vegetables being too mushy, so sometimes I’m wary of trying new things. So I got a little creative and included different starches! Last week’s dinners saw us eating quinoa, sweet potatoes, and polenta as sides/fillers. The polenta was a particularly great experiment for me! It was easy and inexpensive, because it literally included vegetable broth and cornmeal. Next time, I might whisk it into the liquid better, but I just pretended the lumps were corn dumplings and it was fiiiiine.

I had cabbage as a side with homemade beef and broccoli one night instead of rice: healthy choice and still yummy! I’m also really into one-pot recipes. They’re my jam. A lot of times they are pastas, but you can also do rice- or quinoa-based ones. You don’t need me to share a bunch of recipes here, though. Pinterest is your friend.

This week has been a little less stellar, but I’ve only eaten out once and it was a work thing, so totally justifiable. Once a week is fine–it’s when I start having justification for every. single. day. that I need to reign it in.