Now what?

It's been 10 days since I defended the dissertation and I think it has finally sunk in that I'm done. For some reason, I haven't been that less busy- getting final paperwork done, running errands that were long overdue, and replying to non-urgent, non-dissertation related emails managed to occupy all my time these last week or so. And now with at least two months ahead of doing not much (I have a fellowship that runs through to the end of the calendar year so I'll still be getting a monthly stipend), I find myself having to think of (productive) ways to occupy myself. Some things I've already done, want to do, or should do:

1) Watch TV guiltlessly.
Check. Thanks to online streaming video and the good people at Hulu, I've caught up on all the past episodes of my now favorite comedy, Modern Family. Wednesday nights are Top Chef nights again, and I no longer feel remorse or shame saying that I watch Say Yes to the Dress on TLC at 11am almost everyday... :)

2) Start working out again.
I haven't been to the gym in 19 months. Since I was 4 months pregnant with Sophie. Now that's a long time for the body to turn into mush. The half-marathon seems like a lifetime away and the thought of returning to the gym terrifies me. I go back on Monday. It's going to be painful.

3) Yoga
The gym I haven't missed as much, but yoga, oh old friend, I've missed so much. I've been telling myself to go back to it for the longest time. But between Sophie, the research project I was on, and the dissertation, I really had no time. Thankfully, I still have 4 sessions left to my pass at A2 Yoga and I'm going to redeem them starting next week. I don't think my body can remember how to do a downward dog anymore but if I managed to train it into submission after never having done yoga for 31 years, I can re-teach it after a 15 month hiatus.

4) Cook
Since we came back from California and the dissertation-writing kicked into high-gear, I stopped cooking as much and we ate out quite a bit. It got expensive but we really didn't have a choice in terms of time. But I'm back in the kitchen again and it's been fun. I finally got round to making Momofuku's famed Crack Pie just for the fun of it, and while it was painstaking (15 hours in total, folks!), I really enjoyed just taking my time in the kitchen and not have to worry about whether it's eating into my writing time. The weather's also turning cooler and I'm looking forward to re-visiting the stews and soups I love to make this time of year. More importantly, now that we're slowly trying to expand Sophie's diet, I really want to take the time to explore recipes for her that are tasty, age-appropriate, but that also take into account her dairy, egg, and nut allergies.

5) Get Sophie's photo album in order
Over the past 14.5 months, we have taken more photos than we ever had in our entire lifetimes until the day Sophie was born. We're talking into the thousands, people, and only a fraction make it onto Flickr. And of those, we've made a couple hundred prints that I haven't had time to properly organize and label. I know, in this day and age of digital photography, why still keep physical photo albums? For the same reason I will always love proper books even though we've started to buy e-books. One day soon, we'll sit Sophie on our laps and go through the photo albums like storybooks, telling her about the different stories of her life and what happened when. As much as I love Flickr, I think some of that storytelling gets lost between the clicking and the scrolling...

6) Find a job
Oh, right.

Having said all that though, maybe I should just give myself a couple of weeks to be magnificently unproductive as a reward- to just veg out on the couch, watch copious amounts of mind-mushingly bad-for-you TV, read things that have no intellectual merit whatsoever, and indulge in guilt-free middle-of-the-day naps.

[Crawls off to do just that...]