January 30

I've dropped my work hours down for the time being, to concentrate on an industrial campaign. Hypothetically this means more time to focus on eating well and regular exercise, but the past week has been ridiculous and irritatingly sleep-deprived, albeit fun and well worth it.
Last Saturday I slept only a couple of hours after finishing work, as I had to get to a campaign meeting in the city - I set my alarm for the wrong time, which resulted in a frantic rush, but was fortunately not too hideously late. The resulting drama of it all, though left me hyped up and not able to get much sleep for the rest of the day before returning to night shift, and very little done in the way of useful exercise.
I worked as usual on Sunday night, and swam for almost an hour in Monday morning, then slept for a few hours before heading in to work for campaign-related walk arounds to lay the ground work for a couple of meetings on Tuesday - between going in early on Tuesday to roust the troops, a special guest speaker who I spent time with between the meetings, and follow up on the ground after the second meeting, that took up most of the day.
On Wednesday I had lunch with a friend. Well, it was just supposed to be lunch, but when I made noises about heading off at two she asked me to stay longer and before I knew it the whole day had gone - though, thanks to her not-very-good directions, the walk to the train station turned into a forty minute hike through scrub, which was at least a good workout.
Thursday was Australia Day, and I celebrated by going to the Australian Open with friends and colleagues. I also celebrated with three daiquiris, but thanks to a rather restrained intake managed not to burst my calorie count for the day. I sadly missed a bit of excitement, as I had to leave early for Federation Square campaigning activism, but the day was very productive.
Another early start on Friday, as a small group of us headed for country Victoria, which meant several hours each way on a bus - and a pub lunch. I made a sensible choice, of grilled fish (unfortunately crumbed nonetheless) and salad, though the Strongbow I washed it down with was not as good an option but quite delicious.
I popped in to work with some campaign paraphenalia, and on my way home got a text from a freind reminding me I was supposed to meet her and some freinds to talk about my research - a little more accidental walking (related, again, to being geographically challenged), and I was greeted with a delicious ginger mojito. That was fairly rapidly joined by a couple of very delicious black forest cocktails, bringing my usually moderate alcohol intake to quite a spike for this week.
I spent most of the weekend recovering and sleeping, so my exercise participation has been really poor and on several consecutive days I've fallen well short of the 10,000 steps per day mark.
Fortunately my diet's been quite good, particularly considering that this was a pre-menstrual week. Apart from the alcohol I had one small bag of fizzing dust (or popping candy), and a couple of small pieces of 70% chocolate, and that's it. I've even had other chocolate in the house but, though I came close to eating it, I refrained.
Now it's time to get back on track. I'm not nearly sufficiently prepared to take on the vegan month as planned, so will be putting that back until at least March, but I will be cutting back on the animal products, and getting back to the exercise. Weigh in's only a couple of days away! - Alex