I have decided that life sometimes gets in the way of ideals.

Joshua and I probably fit pretty easily into the granola-crunching category of people who are a little preachy about things like recycling (our trunk is currently filled with EMPTY wine and beer bottles taken home from other peoples' houses which we, at some point, plan to recycle). We buy the majority of our groceries on Saturday mornings at the market. In fact at this very moment, I am currently baking a blue hubbard squash that was grown in Indiana on an organic sustainable farm. In approximately 45 minutes, that squash will become soup - a soup that also includes locally grown onions, garlic, fresh sage, and organic vegetable broth. I've been planning this soup all week, but I just had to wait for the temperature to get below 90 frickin degrees.

But my point is this - our fridge and cabinets and even the oven may be stuffed with fresh! local! organic! food, but where did we eat lunch today?

Target. Did you see a stressed-out couple chowing down on an all-beef hot dog and asian chicken pizza hut special? Because that's us.

And yesterday?

Charcoal Delights. Chicken gyros? Us again!

Besides the obvious fact that eating out blows through serious wads of cash, I hate that we do it because then we eat the crap we are trying to avoid in our Certified Organic lifestyle. It is a little incongruous to spend twenty minutes choosing the best beets and swiss chard when really I am consuming my weight in french fries every month.

But the reality is, I do not have the time to make every lunch and every dinner. Some days, I barely even have time to eat anything in between clinicals and internships and class and work. This week has been one of those incredibly overwhelming weeks where everything collided at once and the food we drooled over this weekend is currently sitting dejected in the fridge (not the squash! I cooked the one vegetable that could probably have hung out happy and healthy til Thanksgiving!) while we stuff ourselves with fast food.

I really hate it. And I want to change. But that would require planning ahead, probably one of my least favorite things to do and something I am certainly not good at in terms of food preparation.

And now I have to go, because my squash is almost done and if I even have a prayer of finishing this soup before Joshua gets home and needs to eat before his class starts at 6:30, I should be 10 steps ahead of where I am.

fall...

Somehow, months have slipped by since my last post, and the summer I mentioned last time? Totally gone, out of the picture. The temperatures are inching downward, I have officially worn a sweater twice, and I had my first pumpkin spice latte last week. Even if it hits 80 degrees again (I'm talking to you, Forecast for 9/18/07) it just doesn't feel like summer anymore. Next week will be the 4th week of school - which means that unbelievably, I'm (slacking off on) studying for midterm exams in my quad classes.

Life has not been all that lovely lately. I am balancing school and work and a sudden onslaught of babysitting jobs with full-time wifelihood (wifeness?) along with the upcoming stresses of writing advising and studying for NCLEX. Joshua started a full-time MBA program - he only has class twice a week, but he has hours upon hours of homework. Our weekends are full of studying and for me, shifts at the hospital. I knew it would happen, I was prepared for the structure and routine of fall. I was even excited about new binders and new pens (purple! to scribble all over my endless powerpoint handouts). But the actual day to day living of it is harder than I expected - I realized this when we sat down with the calendar and we had no unplanned days until the end of October. Sometimes I forget that the time between August and Christmas happens at twice the speed of the rest of the year.

I think that would be enough to fulfill my need for a crazy overwhelming lifestyle, but instead our activities are probably the least intense thing we are involved in right now. We both have friendships that are changing, and people who are coming in and out of our lives for purposes we don't really understand. I am feeling the effects of being "off-time", a little concept I picked up in Psychology 101 that has really become a light bulb experience for me . I've always done things at a different age than my peers - I didn't go to college right away, but I got engaged when I was 19. I worked full-time, then went to college, then got married at 21, and now I'm still in school while my friends graduated a year and a half ago. I don't know many other married people my age, and the ones I do know haven't celebrated their 1 year anniversaries yet. We will be married 3 years this spring. The idea behind being "off-time" is that no matter how positive your life events are, they are inherently stressful if you are not experiencing them at the same time as the people around you.

So I would just like to throw this out there - I Am Stressed.

Stressed emotionally, physically, spiritually. I have been feeling that intense, constant prodding in my spirit that always accompanies major changes in my life. I have been spending more time praying and reading scripture and suddenly I realize how much of a hassle and inconvenience it is to serve a living, breathing God. Just when we are feeling comfortable in our little lives, He shakes us out of that cocoon and asks us to do things that are difficult and painful. Just when life gets crazy, He asks us to deal with hard truths in our relationships and face things we don't like about ourselves. I have been avoiding this kind of growth for these exact reasons, but somehow the time has come and all my silly excuses have been swept away. God's timing is perfect, and I'm trusting that if He is saying NOW, then I do the hard slogging work NOW.

Hopefully I will post again before Christmas!