Change up your routine!

image by Marco Bellucci

You find yourself overwhelmed? Just stuck doing the same old, same old all the time? Find a way to change it up, do something different, have some fun with the ordinary and make it extraordinary.

I love to cook but given the choice, I prefer more unusual cooking than usual. My sons are sometimes willing participants but their schedules don’t always match my free time.

My husband eats most of his meals with his dad because that is his job for the past five or six years. He spends about 12 hours per day either doing Bob’s errands, taking him to doctors, overseeing his investment properties, or helping him around the house. This leaves me alone a lot. And spending so much time with his dad has made him less experimental than he was in the past.

Not really alone

Since my business is people, I am really not alone that much because I interface with clients and deliver most of my services as an interactive session with the client. This last week, despite having major technology issues all week, I had 10 one to two hour sessions with clients which hardly qualifies as being alone all the time.

Still, I miss the years we had normal family dinners at least part of the week. Normal probably doesn’t qualify either because once my sons hit the preteen age, we spent about 8 years with the “Guess who’s coming to dinner?” plan and routinely set for one or more of their friends. Bonus was that two or three of their friends and one of my sons also liked to cook and all of us loved to try new things.

Changing it up a bit

My friend, Linda, wants to try new things but her adult son and husband are not as willing to try creative things as she is so we have decided to team up and do a lunch or dinner here once a week or so.Last week we made salmon on the grill with a fruit and veggie salsa, grilled beets, cucumbers in sour cream sauce, and sautéed peas and mushrooms.

Since we both love seafood, we already have plans to make halibut, sea bass, and sea scallops at some point. We went out for coffee on Saturday and pored over my Bobby Flay cookbook for ideas and inspiration. We also looked at soups and a wide range of more cost-effective but fun recipes. This will change my routine and give me a chance to try things that I might not.

How do you feel about routine?

I think routines clearly have a place. I need them to stay organized but at the same time we all need change in our lifestyle to stop from being stuck. When your employment disappears or is no longer fun for you, you need to find a way to make life in general fun again. When you are looking for a new job, it is easy to get stuck and unable to move forward.

Perhaps that means taking a short trip or trips to recharge your batteries and give you another point of view. Or perhaps it means you need to be out there trying new things that don’t challenge your budget so much. I find that I can splurge here and there if I budget carefully with everything else.