Winter is….Already Here!

It’s hard to believe it’s already December 10 — time has been flying. As you may have noticed, I am bad at this blogging thing. I still have posts I meant to write about things I did in October. Hah! Maybe I’ll finally finish those by January. 😛

But back to November….

November highlights included: first official snowfall, first paycheck (finallyyy), taking a trip to Innsbruck, celebrating Thanksgiving, ice skating, ordering Ikea stuff (which hasn’t arrived yet, boo 😛 ), the opening of Christmas markets (yay!), lots of Glühwein, and the great adventure of finding affordable ski gear. Here’s some photos from the month!

 

​

​As you can see, I’ve been having a lot of fun partaking in winter sports (ice skating!) and holiday festivities. I’ve had to restrain myself from going to the Christmas market everyday — really tempting when you walk past and smell all the delicious goodies (roasted chestnuts!) and warm drinks. 😉 (All I have to say is: the US is really missing out on these traditions!)

Not pictured from the month: ridiculous photos from a couple really fun nights out, photos of me listening to the Harry Potter audiobooks (that was about 40+ hrs of my month), photos of me at work, photos of me dancing awkwardly and singing my heart out alone in my bedroom (happens on a daily basis), and photos of being lost in windy neighborhoods (I do not understand the layout of neighborhood streets here…there are a lot of dead ends and secret paths), and photos of all the interesting people I’ve talked to on the buses. I also resolved not to eat meat on November 8, after I walked past a frozen raw and bloodied lamb being delivered to a kebab shop….traumatizing.

One thing that I’ve been doing this year (since April) is making a detailed goals list for each month (I’d highly recommend it). It’s really made a difference in my life, and I might write more about it in a year-recap post. (It’s definitely fun to look back and see how much I’ve been accomplishing!) For November, I also made a calendar to keep track of how often I do the things that I consider vital parts of my daily routine (morning pages, doing yoga, going for a walk or swim). I was pleasantly surprised looking back over November — I did a lot more than I thought. I went swimming 10 times (down a little from my goal of 12 because I was sick and low on energy one week). On average, I did yoga every other day (or about 15 days) — my crow pose is getting so much better! And I did my morning pages (see the book The Artist’s Way for explanation) every day except for two — pretty fantastic. (For comparison, this is definitely up from last year when I was always thinking about doing these things but not doing any of it). November has also involved a lot of “behind the scenes” creative stuff, which I don’t want to share too much about here, but I have a 50 page word doc of scribbles of things that are shaping into projects. That’s fun and none of it’s finished, but it’s part of the creative process….and I’m excited to see where it leads me.  🙂

At any rate, November has flown by, and it’s just another week and I’ll be heading home for Christmas!

Coming up next: the adventures of buying ski gear.

xo,

Sarah