Our Daily salad

I didn't get to Costco last Friday as planned.  But we went over the weekend.  It's a whole lot easier shopping during the Christmas season if you go during the workweek, preferably on a morning when the kids are in school.  The stores are SOOOO much easier!  And the traffic. 

Oh well, we did it the hard way.

But I was desperate.  In my quest to get healthier, we are eating salads every day if we can, and we were running out of our favorite lettuce.  Getting lettuce from Costco is a commitment.  It means you have to EAT that lettuce before it starts to go bad.  We will get a package of 6 romaine hearts and spend the week eating them, one a day, before dinner.  It's good to have some extra refrigerator space downstairs in the rec room! 

To make the salad something to look forward to, we also use mandarin orange sections... a product that would be unreasonably expensive if we weren't ALSO buying these at Costco.  And we add a sprinkle of slivered almonds.  Unfortunately, not available at Costco, but I can get them in bulk at Wegman's (we also put them on yogurt, so we keep lots of them around).  And a dollop of honey-mustard dressing.  I've not yet looked to see if we could get the dressing at Costco.  I fear that the bottle of dressing I'd get from there might be bigger than would fit the fridge, and to make a green, leafy salad a daily habit, it's got to be EASY.  Running up & down stairs for the salad dressing might be a step further than I'd be willing to do. 

There's a principle of management... these days it's called "process management", and they have various ways of enforcing it... you may have heard of "Lean Six Sigma"... which is the process of taking a manufacturing process that is working well, and slowly identifying issues that are causing variation (variation is considered inappropriate in a manufacturing situation, if they are creating widgets, they want every widget to match)... you spent your time nibbling away at the pieces of the process that cause the widgets to fall outside of the standard deviation (a statistics term, the standard deviation is considered "sigma"... and in any grouping of objects, nearly all of the objects fall within six "sigmas"...).  To reduce the size of the six sigmas that the grouping of objects falls within, to make that variation smaller, is the goal.

When I am trying to organize my life, I use the same principles.  I find something that works, and reduce the work needed to make it happen.  If I can cut down the number of times I have to go to the store to get the ingredients... if I can cut down the number of trips to the refrigerator in the rec room... if I can cut down the amount of product wasted because we don't eat it in time... then I am more likely to do the thing.  Cleaning the bathroom is easier if the products used to clean it are stored in the bathroom.  Sweeping the floor is easier (and more likely to get done), if the broom and dustpan are nearby.  My sewing project is more likely to get done if the sewing machine and equipment are someplace where I can use them easily and not stored away in a closet so that every time I use them is a project in cleaning my closet, just to get access to the equipment.  And I am more likely to eat my healthy salad if the ingredients are close at hand and easy to put together.

Wayne likes a variation in the salad.  He prefers Craisins or tomato chunks over mandarin orange slices.  And he prefers a spicy pepper vinaigrette over my honey mustard flavor... I make sure to keep lots of his favorite ingredients close at hand also.  Because if his favorite ingredients are nearby, I can often rely upon him to do the salad-making. 

With all the ingredients close at hand, inexpensive, and easy to manage, as well as flavorful... we eat a bowlful of salad every day. 

Someday, when we retire, we hope to be able to afford to travel, and we hope to have good enough health that we will not be forced into being one of those little old couples who hobbles on & off of a bus tour through Europe... no, we want to be healthy enough to go off the beaten path, to climb pyramids in Egypt, ride elephants through the jungles of Thailand, and hike up & down the hills & stairways of Assisi.

Our daily salad is one step in the right direction.