I’m sitting here at work, clocked out, eating cold spaghetti and whiling away the last few minutes before I’m due to meet my friend so we can carpool to the writing class tonight. I’m very excited (The instructor is baking brownies! I can be bought with food!) but a tad nervous because this falls so far away from my daily routine.

Normally, I leave work and go straight home so I can write a blog post, take care of the puppy, make dinner, and then socialize with my husband. I come home at the same time, I have dinner ready around the same time, we watch roughly the same amount of TV every night, we go to sleep at around the same time. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I like our routine, it’s a good one. We get lots of sleep, we have healthy meals every night, we get lots of time to spend chatting about this, that, and the other. I’m really very comfortable in that little routine we’ve grooved for ourselves into the road of our lives.

Which is exactly why it’s good that I’m throwing a wrench in the whole thing for a short while.

I’m too young to get crotchety and stuck in my ways, so I’m going to shake things up just a bit. The class may only be for five weeks, but I’ll be meeting new people, learning new things, and varying our routine just ever so slightly.

It feels good, but also a tad uncomfortable. I don’t know exactly how this evening is going to go and that gives me a thrill that’s part fear and part curiosity. Trying new things is fun, but for me small doses are preferable to huge heaping ones. As the great Bilbo Baggins once said, “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, walking out your front door…”