7:00am Alarm goes off. Hit snooze.

7:07am Alarm goes off again. Stretch. Another not-great night of sleep. Beginning to wonder what’s going on with that. Turn on coffee-maker (are you sensing a pattern?). Get ready for work. Take my time, listen to NPR.

8:15am Pack up my laptop. Our IT department is going to install Atlas.ti, a qualitative analysis software, so that I can work on that qualitative project that I’m reading all the transcripts for from home.

8:30am Leave for the train. Am able to find a seat, and am happy to continue read-through number three of the transcript. I’m definitely starting to pick up on some key themes around the emotional and physical safety of the client in this interview. We’ll see if they become any clearer as I keep reading.

9:00am Drop off my laptop with someone in IT. Cross my fingers that nothing bad happens. Work work work.

9:30am Head down to the third floor for a meeting. Get informed that I don’t have to be at the meeting until 10am. Take the elevator back up to the 23rd floor.

10:00am Head down to the 3rd floor again. Give a little song and dance about logic models to our program directors and try to get them excited about building one for their program.

11:30am Pick up my laptop. Thank god everything seems to be working fine, including the newly installed program. Work work work.

2:00pm A coworker trains me on the ins and out of Atlas.ti in 20 minutes or less.

2:30pm Work work work.

5:00pm Talk to mein Schatz on the phone, about our upcoming February vacation in Mexico, and about how it is becoming trendy in America to be environmentally friendly. The Germans are light years ahead of Americans on this front, but I think (and hope) we’re getting there slowly but surely.

5:45pm Prep for two early morning meetings tomorrow, then catch the train home. Grab a seat, and complete read-through number three.

6:15pm Arrive home. Putz around for a bit. Enjoy the evergreen scent of our Christmas tree. Get ready to go to the gym.

6:45pm Make the five-minute walk to the gym, which is located in an old bank building. They left in the originally humongous bank vault door downstairs next to the showers and it is super cool looking. That might be one of the main reasons I joined the gym — just so I could try to resist the temptation of cranking the vault wheels every time I pass. I score a treadmill overlooking the busy street, and watch people coming and going as I run for about three miles. I am listening both to Prodigy and to my friend’s band, the New Rags. My usual running playlist was erased when my last laptop died, and I haven’t gotten around to creating a new one yet (although I was able to rip all my music off of my iPod and put it onto my new laptop, thank god), so I find a few albums that are consistently peppy enough so that I don’t have to keep fiddling with the iPod while running. When I’m running outdoors, I really don’t like to listen to music — for safety reasons, as much as for being able to pay attention to my body. But treadmills are SO boring, and I wouldn’t be able to do it without any music. After using a couple of the weight machines for my legs, I stretch, and then head home.

7:45pm Eat a couple of slices of peanut butter toast, drink my fizzy German magnesium drink, wash the dishes that have been sitting in the sink, read some blogs, and take a shower.

9:00pm Write the Tuesday blog post, since I was too wiped out yesterday to do it.

10:00pm Curl up in bed with your favorite and mine, Pippi Plündert den Weihnachtsbaum. Nothing relaxes you for a good night of sleep like the Christmas tale of Pippi Longstocking (or Langstrumpf, as the case may be). You may laugh, but I’m actually learning some vocab and testing my knowledge of präteritum, which a form of past-tense that is used mostly in writing and not so much in speaking. Exciting, no?