New habits!

Hello, friends! Once again I have been slacking on my blogging duties because once again I am traveling - DC, Lexington, and Tennessee again. In DC I spent a great day with my mother visiting the Newseum. If you haven't been, I highly recommend it. Just plan on spending a couple of days. You have to pay to get in, but your admission is good for two days, and there is definitely two days' worth of stuff in there.

I can tell you more on that later, but right now, I wanted to write a quick post about a website one of my friends told me about yesterday.

Did you know that it takes 21 days to form a new habit? I learned that statistic from HabitForge.com, a website designed to help you do just that. You register for the site and then create a new habit you want to form. (Mine is to write creatively for at least 10 minutes a day. It's ok to start small.) Then everyday the site sends you an email asking if you were successful at accomplishing your goal the day before. You click yes or no and then go on with your day. For each day you answer yes, you get one day added toward your 21. However, when you answer no, the timer resets. It will keep resetting until you can do that thing for 21 days in a row. And then voila! You've got a spiffy new habit.

With the free version of the site you can only have one active habit at a time, but you can pay $10 for a year's subscription. If this first habit gets formed okay, I might sign up. I'll keep you posted on that.

Anyway, it seems like a worthwhile endeavor, and I hope some of you will reap positive life benefits from it.

Here are some more habit ideas to get you started:

Exercise at least 20 minutes each day
Study for standardized test at least 30 minutes each day
Write one page of thesis each day
Read at least 2 chapters of a book each day
Study a new language for an hour each day
Walk a mile each day
Stop biting your nails (this works for breaking habits too)

The possibilities are endless. Just decide what you keep meaning to do and try it out. I'd be interested to hear the results of other people's attempts.

The Beauty of Nature

So if you've seen me in person in the past week, I've probably shown you the following picture. But as most of you do not live anywhere near me, chances are you haven't seen it yet, so I will present it to you now.

I was sitting at Starbucks of an evening, and it had just rained, so water droplets were pooling on the outside tables. I was absently looking at these droplets when I noticed that one had formed into a shape. An awesome shape. Let me emphasize that this formed naturally and I just captured it on my camera phone. Check it out:

I'm considering doing some cool Photoshop-y things to it, like increasing the contrast and changing the colors, but I think it's pretty cool as-is.