I’m now one full week into my new stress management process and while I do not care for how much time I have to spend thinking about and planning things (despite loving to do both of those activities), I really love being done with dinner and evening chores by nine every night. Prior to this week, I’d sometimes not get home and through with dinner until ten or even eleven. It was rough, to feel like I needed to cram at least some amount of relaxing into my evenings after dinner when I’d still be finishing up at the time I should be starting to prepare for bed, but this past week has been free of that. Which isn’t to say that I’ve gone to bed at a good time every night this week. I’ve had two nights this week where I was just too stressed and anxious to relax enough to even think about going to bed at my normal time, but I think those have more to do with some emotional stuff going on in the background rather than anything to do with my new routine. What I have gotten every single night is the realization that I have enough time for at least two activities before I should start getting ready for bed, even after doing some extra chores around my apartment. It makes it a lot easier to sign off for the night when you don’t feel like you’re desperately trying to cram something into the tail end of your day so you didn’t spend the whole thing dreading work, going to work, working, and then being so exhausted from work that it took you an hour to make dinner. It’s really nice to be able to just walk into my kitchen, spend five to thirty minutes sorting out my dinner, eat it, and then get on with the rest of my evening, even on days when I had to work until eight.

It remains to be seen if I can keep this new pattern up long enough for it to become a habit, though. The newness of the thing was enough to keep my eye on the prize this week, as was using one of my favorite recipes as the base around which all but one of my weeknight meals was built. This upcoming week (between writing this post and this post going up) will be more difficult since my whole plan for the week is essentially “different types of sausage.” Which can be delicious, varied, and interesting! It just might also wind up being incredibly boring and difficult to convince myself to do [it was not, because I forgot how good a decent sausage in a bunch is]. I’ve got a pretty solid plan, though, and enough stuff set aside that I can deviate from the plan for a night or two if I feel the need, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to stick it out for a second week in a row. After that, it should be smoother sailing. Two weeks is about how long it takes me to adjust a habit or at least lay some solid groundwork down for a new one, and all of this work on changing my eating habits has a solid enough structure to work with that I think I can manage it.

Everything else, though, is still a bit up in the air. I’ve mostly stayed on top of my various daily chores, but only mostly. I’ve wound up skipping a few things here or there, usually because dinner was more work than I thought it would be or because I just plain forgot, but nothing that has really gotten in the way of feeling alright about the day I’ve had. I’ve been far more exhausted than I expected by work, as the heavy labor and general busyness have returned with a vengeance. Apparently three weeks away from said heavy labor and busyness was enough for me to lose enough of the strength and stamina I’d built up that I really struggled every single day this week. Took a lot of effort to keep hydrated and, most nights, all I wanted to do was collapse on my couch or into my computer chair rather than make dinner, do my chores, or clean up after myself in anyway. The fact that I did three out of five of my daily chore allotments, kept my kitchen decently clean, made dinner every night (except tonight, but tonight is my one takeout night this week), and even spent some time just being quiet without a podcast, book, or screen is a huge success. Something is better than nothing and even partial victories are worth celebrating.

I have my work cut out for me this weekend, between social commitments, my new chore list (now with two extra chores on it), and how worn out I am, it is going to be rough to get it all done. It does help that my meal prep plan is basically “cook sausages” since that’ll be relatively easy and won’t take too much active attention. I mean, half the sausages I plan to get only come in the “safe to eat immediately” variety, so it’s not like I really need to do much to prepare them each night other than turn the oven on and pop them in for a bit, or toss them in a pan on the stove with a little water to boil away as I cook them. It’s all very easy and I’m genuinely relying on what will hopefully be a wider variety of sausage types to make it interesting to my palette. That, plus the fact that I can add on a variety of chips and frozen vegetables as sides, should keep things interesting enough that I’m not tempted to stray into takeout or too much junk food. I mean, it’s not like pan-frying or oven-baking sausages is any more difficult than making a frozen pizza. Easier, even, since I can just pop them in and take them out after a bit. There’s no temptation to soup things up a bit by adding extra stuff to a sausage before it goes in the oven, like I always wind up doing for a pizza. Almost all the stuff you use to alter a sausage is added AFTER it has been cooked. Toppings, sauces, delivery methods, and all that. Which means I don’t have to think about cooking much beyond deciding what vegetable to prepare and even that is an easy decision since I’ll have one fresh vegetable that gets made on the first day and then multiple bags of frozen corn since I could eat that stuff every day if I had to. It’s a great, tasty delivery mechanism for some butter and salt, so what’s not to love?

Anyway, you can probably tell that I’m writing this at the end of the day and am incredibly hungry right now, given the food tangent, but the point I’m trying to make is that a week of this new habit went better than I expected it to, even if it didn’t go perfectly, and I’m hopeful that next week will go just as well if not better. Assuming I don’t wind up getting stuck at work super late any night. There’s not much I can do about improving my week night routine in that case. I just gotta roll with the punches. I just hope it doesn’t happen too often any time soon. I need a couple smooth, calm weeks to get this change in habits under my belt and then I should be able to take whatever punches life throws my way. At least in terms of my daily routine, anyway. No idea what else might happen in the coming months and weeks that could knock me off my habits and I’m more than a little worried that something might crop up. “Unprecedented Times” and all that, you know?