Agggghhhh, Noooo!!! But here we are. For us to go a month not drinking means trying to break an almost daily habit. Going dry for 30 days isn’t all that notable in the big scheme of life, but we hope to parley breaking the habit into drinking more moderately going forward. We weren’t getting tanked, but all the studies coming out essentially say that any drinking isn’t good for you, and the limits of how much is a problem keep shrinking. We want to be healthy, so we thought we’d start there. It really hasn’t been hard to do, maybe because we’re doing it together and not putting ourselves in ‘trigger’ situations (concerts, festivals & restaurants). We’ve also done all our year end checkups and long-range health tests like colonoscopies this month. Well, it’s now day 31, tomorrow it’s over, and neither of us had any kind of difficulty not drinking… Not eating (for 24 hrs pre-colonoscopies) was harder!

But we’re not only not drinking this month, we’ve also managed to set an all-time record for amount of time building healthy habits; all told, we are:

• Working out: a 30-40-minute, high-sweat daily rotating schedule of HIIT, Asana Rebel (an app) aerobic yoga (DownDog app), circuit training (push-ups/sit-ups/weights), or hiking up the very steep nearby mountains, and directly afterward:
• Daily yoga: a 20-30-minute yin/restorative, with lots of stretching, and directly afterward:
• Daily meditation: a 20-minute total relaxation body scan (Insight Timer app)

But that’s not all (said the Cat in the Hat): we’re also doing:

• Super hydration (super for us, anyway), trying to drink the recommended 8 sixteen oz glasses of water/day, which is a lot harder than it seems. Everyone say: “I have to pee!” at 3 am!

But wait, there’s more… We’re also:

• Journaling/doing creative writing daily right after the meditation
• Eating very healthily, with a daily spinach shake, salad for lunch, Mediterranean style dinners featuring lots of rice and beans, lean meats or fish, and vegetables
• Working/planning/organizing
• Trying to sleep 8 hours (not happening/utter failure)
• Walking the dogs twice a day for 1-2 miles each time

Winter in general and January in particular is a good time to hit the reset button: to try to replace unhealthy habits with healthy ones. We hope to accomplish this upgrade and integrate elements into our 2023 daily routines going forward. If I had to forecast our ability to do so: I only have about 80% confidence that we will keep several of these behaviors. We are on the road with long drives and short term stays when we drive between places, and it takes us awhile to settle in to a new routine once we get to our next long term stay. For example, from here (Agaete, Grand Canary Is.), we will be on a car ferry two days, then we have one night in Grenada, two nights in Barcelona, one night in Genoa, four days in Rome, and one night on a car ferry before we get to our next month-long stay in Tirana, Albania…and I’m guessing Albania will take some acclimation time. The behaviors I have most confidence in us maintaining: some scaled down form of exercise, an attempted healthy diet, maybe a short meditation, depending on where we are. But hey, we made it one month!

Pssst: when does Carnival start???