I’m eating healthier snacks and a smaller dinner, keeping breakfast and lunch portions about the same because I am So Very Hungry in the morning. We buy as much organic and/or unprocessed food as is practical and practicable and ohmygawd, our grocery tab! It buuuuuuurns. And this is without buying any meat, as D and I are currently wrapping up two months of vegetarianism. Side note: I don’t believe we’ll be going back to eating much meat, but that’s another story currently incubating in my drafts folder. We are not terribly unhealthy eaters and we like vegetables and cooking and trying new foods, so I feel like that gives me a leg up on eating better. I have not and will not give up my several-evenings-a-week glass of wine, empty calories be damned.

What brought all this on? A couple of things. I’m a petite girl who’s never had a problem with her weight; I don’t want to start. I’m in the “thin but not fit” category. I’ll turn 30 this year. I took a fall and injured my back when I was rather young (12? 13?) and while it has been better in the past ~5 years or so than it was for awhile, I want to take better care of my poor back. Osteoporosis runs in the family. Finally, whilst in the midst of pondering all of that, I stepped on my doctor’s scale and got a slap in the face from my winter weight.

So. Exercise: check! Better food choices: check! Motivation: out the wazoo.

Sunday afternoon, usually so hasty, looms.

I read my book, make some cocoa, peel the hardboiled eggs, read more, eat a pb&j, finish my book, check in with the internet, feed the cats, shower, talk to him on the road, feel the house get bigger and quieter around me. Turn on the radio, make a salad for my lunch tomorrow, fill the coffeepot for the morning, heat up leftover soup and biscuits for dinner. Check the clock. D sends me a picture of the storm he is about to drive into and he could be anywhere, it is grey and stormy and the trees are bare. We instant message with each other, we both get sleepy, I contemplate the bedtime routine of filling humidifiers, scooping the catbox, gathering books-computer-phone and the cats follow me down the hall. We pile in but of course the bed is too roomy and unbalanced somehow.

I wonder why it feels so different when I would do the same things if he were here.

What I said last year: If I were to make a New Year’s resolution (I won’t) it would be to exercise. Make healthy food choices. Eat fewer meat/animal products, which would require some degree of cooperation from D. Not buy leather. Continue switching as many of the products I use (personal care, cleaning, etc) as possible to ones that are more environmentally friendly and/or not tested on animals.

Exercise has been hit and miss. Same for food choices and eating less meat. No leather and product changeover was a success.

This year I want to learn: to crochet, to bake bread, maybe to belly dance. I want to send care packages to family members who are far away, because it is so fun to get something unexpected in the mail just because someone  loves you and was thinking of you.  I want to get the house organized, toss some of the “what-ifs.” I want to entertain more and cook delicious fancy meals for more than ourselves. I want to get serious about exercising.

I want to remember to review this periodically and see how I am doing or if my goals have changed.

Before, the direction my thoughts lay was: eat less meat. Now, my thought direction is: eat significantly less meat, and when I do choose to eat meat, to know where it came from and how it was treated when it was alive and whether it was humanely killed and how it was handled from that moment until it arrived here, at the store where I am buying it. The same standards apply for animal products: milk, eggs, cheese, ice cream, butter, etc etc. At restaurants I will mostly choose vegetarian fare. At home, we will cook a lot more vegetarian fare. My grey area is at other people’s houses: I’m not comfortable lecturing people, nor do I want to be lectured. I believe this will be a “feel it out” area. Skip the meat if possible without making a fuss over it. Discuss it if someone seems curious and open to discussion.

This is a health decision; the descriptions of the animals (both dead and alive) are sickening, the ways they are handled are sickening, and the amount of drugs that are uselessly pumped into the animals to try to prevent their illnesses and conditions are boggling. It is also a moral decision. What makes us think that we have the right to treat living beings this way? Stuffing them in tiny cages and crates, crowded into feedlots, beaten with metal pipes and hammers, starved, kept awake, and killed cruelly and slowly? What is wrong with us? These are not the actions of superior beings. When we treat living beings like this, we are lower than animals. I cannot support factory farms through my own willful ignorance anymore. I will speak against them, with my words and my actions and my dollars.