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30 Before 30:
- Take vitamins every day for a month (7/30)
- Go to the gym 5 days a week for three months (0/60)
My goal every day is to take a multivitamin and calcium. So far, so good. I want to add fish oil into the routine, but that’s not as easy to throw into one’s purse in a pill organizer. I also finally made it to the gym yesterday, and did respectably for someone who has battled cold after flu after allergies for the last three months or so, but I’m nowhere near the point of being mistaken for a gym rat. I’m trying to get through the first few weeks of a couch-to-5K program before joining up with a training group that plans to run a race that happens, conveniently, right around my birthday every year, so I will have a good baseline to work from for the big “30 before 30 goal” of run a 5K in under 30 minutes.
- Go three months without caffeine
It’s officially been a month. I don’t particularly miss it.
- Read one book/fortnight (7/31)
I finally read Primary Colors. I’d worry that it makes me a bad Democrat because it took me fifteen years to get around to reading it, and then only because Klein beat me to the Robert Penn Warren homage, but the “good Democrat” bar is set so low in these parts only an ant can limbo under it.
- Attend 5 first-run films at the Belcourt (0/5)
- Go to 10 new-to-me local restaurants; review them for Yelp (0/10)
- Go to 5 live music shows (0/5)
- Go on an art crawl
I’m hoping to see Everything Must Go in the next few weeks and there’s an art crawl downtown every first Saturday. And finding live music is hardly a challenge in Nashville. For some reason, the stars haven’t aligned for me to feel extroverted and energetic enough when someone I’ve wanted to see live has had a gig … though the husband of one of Stephen’s former coworkers has a CD release party soon, so I’m considering dragging myself out to that.
The unexpected challenge is finding local restaurants to review! My neighborhood has so many great places, and I have been to so many of them. I may have to fudge a bit and go to a place or two I only went to for happy hour.
- Try 10 new types of wine/beer (3/10)
I enjoyed a Terrapin “Moo-Hoo” Chocolate Milk Stout at my friends’ reception a few weeks ago, and didn’t even bother to take note. It’s not the Yazoo Sly Rye I had hoped to order, but it’s pretty good in its own right—and the cacao nibs are sourced from local chocolatier Olive and Sinclair.
- Cook one new recipe/fortnight (3/31)
I was right: the CSA share is definitely forcing me to find ways to use food. I’d never seen bok choy in my life before pulling it out of the box on Sunday. (Stephen was just happy to see a quart of strawberries and no squash.)
Not a success: a salad of mixed greens (spinach, buttercrunch lettuce, and a few interspersed bok choy leaves) with chèvre, strawberries, rotisserie chicken and balsamic vinaigrette, inspired by the Club Med salad at Chef’s Market. (I’d intended to use a sesame dressing, but the lid of the bottle was cracked.) The temperatures were off, the salad was too soggy, etc. Stephen ate two servings, but I’m not sure if that’s because he liked it or to keep from discouraging me from making dinner.
Success: a stir-fry made from two chicken breasts, 2 cups of bok choy stems, a cup of green onions, a cup of sliced baby carrots, a can of light coconut milk and a bottled ginger-peanut sauce. The only thing I’d do differently (besides add another chicken breast, which I hadn’t thawed) would be to make sure I had some jasmine rice on hand to help sop up the perfect sauce.
- Visit three new churches (0/3)
I don’t know how much I’m going to document this. I talk about politics so much I feel better not discussing religion all that much, and I don’t particularly want suggestions as to where to consider attending. My husband and I were both baptized in SBC-affiliated churches and until recently have been attending a church in the Disciples of Christ (Christian Church), which we feel is the best fit for us as far as theology. But the church we’re attending doesn’t offer much to young childless couples (which, as Coble has touched on a few times, is hardly endemic to our church).
I don’t know. I guess when you consider that our God’s earthly form was a childless bachelor* in his thirties wandering ancient Palestine with twelve other men, it’s hard to understand why childless younger adults are held at arm’s length in the church (by which I mean Protestantism at large). Or if any attention is paid to us, it’s with flashy marketing and praise bands and small groups that talk about “doing life” together. Uh, no.
So, the challenge is to find somewhere that meets our needs until one way or another the “childless young adults” thing isn’t an issue.
* The joke with my single guy friends, when offering their unsolicited opinions about childrearing, is to offer the disclaimer, “I don’t have kids … that I know of.” So of course this popped into my head while writing that. Pretty sure the Lord doesn’t care, either, but I had a smidgen of residual Evangelical Guilt that prevented me from dropping that in that Very Serious Paragraph.