It was bright(ish) this evening driving home from work! I thought the brightness in the evenings wasn’t noticeable until much later in the month. It was dusk, but definitely no need for headlights and to my left along the mountains you could see the fading sunset, beautiful messy daubs of dark ruby red and burnt oranges. I smiled when I saw it, wasn’t too far off with my feeling of spring being near, eh?
Usually at this time of the year you wouldn’t be able to see something like that because it’s normally raining and cloudy, but this clear, frosty, -5 shenanigans left the whole sky open for me to see the fading light. Very beautiful. Benny passed a father and his children yesterday and overheard one of the children say ‘it smells like summer’, to which the father said, ‘aye, better that than the smell of rain ay?’. Even the kids think we’ve rounded a corner!
I’ve started using sparkpeople.com since yesterday to track a few meals, have a rummage through their exercises and so on. I’m not a big fan of calorie counting, but I do like to track what nutrients I’m falling down on and also, I’m trying to get a handle on just how much I can/should eat to fuel my weight lifting work and continue to lose weight. I also want to track the nutritional content of my foods because I’m avoiding wheat and soy (whilst trying to incorporate some ayurvedic principles and trying to curb the acidity in my stomach, Jesus, I’m giving myself a headache writing this!) and with doing the muscle building work in the gym I want more protein/carbs and between these 90 million things, that means a pretty big shift in what I consider okay for breakfast lunch and snacks. I want to make sure, basically, that these new meals are providing enough calories and nutrients and similarly, that I’m not overdoing it on anything at the same time. I probably made that all sound more complicated than it actually is 
One of the nutrients I’m watching is iron, which I’m generally okay with but I think I might fall down on sometimes (I think my fortified foods and supplements make up the shortfalls, but I prefer to get everything I can from an a natural food source), so I’ve started to try to take a tablespoon of blackstrap molasses everyday (good info on it here). Eating it neat makes me gag pretty violently (I’d imagine it’s pretty funny looking, it took me ten minutes to get through a tbsp of it the other morning and I felt assaulted after it) so I went googling and saw that some people take it in chai, so today, for the first time in many years (how did that happen, I loved chai!), I had a delicious mug of chai with a tablespoon of black, sweet, irony goodness and some rice milk and it was delicious! Strange how something I dislike so much straight can be so transformed by the spices and the rice milk. I’m looking forward to having it tomorrow evening now
I bought my chai in my favourite shop in Sligo, Tír na Nóg (google street view). It’s a health food shop and I get most of my toiletries, essential oils, herbs, stock, flours, grains etc. there. It’s quite small and very sweet and I love all the ladies who work there, they are just the soundest. I feel like I’m home every time I come in the door. I always drop in on Friday morning on our way back from our main supermarket shop to pick up my rice milk, maybe some organic greens or whatever I’ve run out of. This morning I dropped in with a HUGE smile on my face because I got a gift card for there off my Godmother for Christmas…I spent a good half hour pouring over everything I wanted, the kind of stuff I usually think, ‘oh! I’d love that’, but can’t afford I bought too much normal stuff that I needed as well, so I’ll have to remember the next time I’m in that I have about a tenner of gift money still available for splurging (I don’t think I’ll have much trouble remembering that).
Anyway, that’s enough waffle, I’m wrecked.
And so now you know why I haven’t posted on my blog either for a long time, eh? I’m always tired!
Love your hardwood floors, Lou. And the kitty!
You know, for some reason it’s still a bit light here (even with the snowstorm) right now. The dark December days didn’t seem to last as long this year (although going through them it did), but really, at 5 o’clock in the evening it always seemed to be pitch dark forever, but there’s light here now, too.
good! I’m glad to hear I’m not alone
And I can picture the view that you’re talking about now too, isn’t that lovely 
Off too bed with me…so tired tonight, dying for my bed. Enjoy ur evening luv, huggies, x
It was strangely bright here this morning, even through the snow, as well. Hmm. I wouldn’t have thought that a little more than two weeks after the solstice that much would have changed in the amount of daylight to notice. (Just checked: you’re gaining 5 sec/day in daylight. 2:37 since Dec 21) You must be more sensitive than I.
lol, that means it’s not even a minute and a half that we’ve gained by that reckoning, it feels more like 10 minutes, even though I know it can’t be. Perhaps it’s just that the other signs on the wind are getting me to look at the light at 5pm again, I had made a conscious effort this winter to not think too much about the darkness and then, come the end of January, start enjoying the beginning of the bright evenings. Probably more likely is that my drive home had a few weeks of a gap and it’s the difference between leaving before Christmas and leaving now that I’m noticing, although, again, that’s still only a minute and a halfs worth by your calculation! I dunno
I think we are a few weeks away from seeing advance signs of spring around here.
Usually sometime in February there will come a beautiful mild and sunny day with blue skies and a temperature that feels almost warm and people will take off their coats and look around in wonderment and say “It’s like a beautiful spring day!” — and the next day brings freezing temperatures, a bitter strong wind, and twelve inches of snow…
However, I have already received two seed catalogs in the mail.
sorry Jim, I only just saw this comment now! Gord was telling me the other day about the seed catalogue tradition in his house too, it’s not something I remember from over here, though I did always follow my dad around the garden when he was growing things. Spring wont *really *have sprung here until late Feb, probably, but it’s just ‘different’ now than it was before December, my mam noticed it too. Our seasons have gotten a bit flexible here these last few years so, perhaps that has something to do with it too.