The Influences

Another thing that has become more clear to me over the past month and a half is that my bad habits are not just there because of bad choices I make. No man is an island and apparently no woman is either. I am surrounded by people who have their input in my life in ways that make good choices hard to make sometimes. I'm not saying they are asking me to do evil things. They're not telling me to fail in my resolutions. Mostly, they have my good interests at heart, but they still are causing some problems with my resolutions.
The first influence is on the money issue. While my real resolution is to pay off my loans, I can't do that if I'm spending too much money and not earning enough money. Unfortunately, both areas of my life have run into some outside influences in the past 1 1/2 months. One source of income has been put on pause since the end of December and while I'm working on getting it back, not having that money means I have little or no money left at the end of the month. Then there are the influences on my spending. My family has very particular tastes with food and supplies. VERY particular tastes. And meeting their needs (I would actually call them wants, but they would call them needs) means I spend more money than I would if I was just buying stuff on my own. I'm relatively cheap, they are not. This is an area I'm not sure I can work around gracefully. Thankfully, I have a chance to teach an extra course in March and April and hopefully one or two over the summer that will bring in some more income, so as long as I'm smart and don't waste that money, I should be able to continue on with my goal.
The other influence is on my working out. My husband doesn't like me to be gone from the home when he's here. It's nice to know he likes to be with me, but that means either I upset him and go to the gym or I find time to work out when he's not here. My daughter needs to be home at the end of a school day to get her homework and chores done. Sometimes those take all night and if I leave her alone they definitely take longer than they should. I could get up earlier in the morning (yeah right) but then I would either get up REALLY early, or not be here while she was getting ready and she'd never get to school on time. On Friday, I had a whole plan laid out to work out after my class (because I goofed off before class and didn't have time - I can't blame it all on other people) and then go get J. That plan became null and void when I got a call from the nurse's office at her school telling me she had been throwing up for 5 minutes after lunch.This week I'm going to try again to get the Monday and Friday workouts in, and maybe take a walk over the weekend. When summer comes (which is the beginning of May for me) I'll have more time available to myself and can schedule that in more easily, and my schedule and J's will change next semester (she'll be starting class at the middle school about an hour earlier than the elementary school and I'm teaching later in the day on Tues/Thurs) which should leave me more time as well. We'll see how that works out.
The third resolution, I have nobody to blame but myself. I'm a time waster and nobody causes me to do that but myself. A guest speaker at church today was talking about living life purposefully and one thing he talked about was the time wasters that we get engaged in - specifically those that include a computer or television screen. He was absolutely right of course, and so I made a commitment to get rid of 2 more sites that I look at regularly, one of which is particularly time gobbling. So that's where I am right now. Working on my own issues and trying to work around other people's issues. We'll see how it all ends up.