Planning away.....

What I'm currently doing

1. Menu planning. As boring as it sounds,it's not really that soul-destroying. I hope i still have friends after they read this. My working hours are from 3 to 9pm weekdays, which means our dinnertime is very late. It means I've had to seriously think about how I manage my time in the mornings. So here's what I do. I drop my baby off at the nanny around an hour earlier than I used to (I used to drop him off on my way to work which was a mad circus act that usually involved me running out with an apple in my mouth as a means of preventing hunger, and a baby who's hanging off my leg)On Sundays, I try to figure out what I'm going to cook for the week with what we have in our fridge. So far so good. I'll be really boring and write more about my menu planning parade in future posts.
2. Saving money. With my husbands imminent plans to quit smoking, we both decided to put €3.50-the price of a pack of Marlborough lights here in Portugal, in a jar, every single day. We hope to have around €500 by next summer.
3. Getting back into reading again. I have a colleague at work who lent me a book by Hugh Laurie-pre Dr House. One of the advantages of public transport is that you can actually read. You couldn't do that in a car. Especially if your driving. Obviously. Good job many people are aware of this. The book is hilarious by the way. Thoroughly recommend it.
4. Learning to respect my sensitivity. I can't change who I am. May as well take care of myself by not having to tolerate things that I can't tolerate. Like large crowds of strangers. Like loud music. Like chit chat. Like bright lights. Like shopping malls.Like being away from home for too long. Be around my element instead. Like tea. Like my closest friends. Like books. Like blogs. Like my family. Like the great outdoors.
5. Back in the pre-internet I used to write letters to my best friend all the time. It was this little ritual we had. It started at 13, back in 1993, when I lived in Bangladesh for a year. During that time I would regularly write letters to her. Like 8-page letters! I would decorate the envelope and include little drawings. What teenager does that these days! Noone! When I returned from Bangladesh to my hometown in London, we still kept on writing letters to each other. Even though we lived nearby. At that time, growing up in an asian community was tough. We didn't have the freedom that a lot of our English friends had. No jeans. No going out at all. And definately no boyfriends. Including boys as friends. So our letters and sleepovers (which was the only privelage given to us) was our way of feeling normal. I love Yasmine to bits. She's like a sister to me. And we speak on the phone to each other regularly despite living in different countries with very different lives. We rarely use email or Facebook to keep in touch, because we don't have a problem keeping in touch the old fashioned way. Everybody should know what its like to have a friendship pre-Facebook!

That's it for now. Hope some of these have given you something to think about.