How two wrongs can make one right

I failed both yesterday and the day before yesterday, and I'm still calling it a success? Well, maybe not a success. Or even ok, but all-in-all things are moving forward. I got up at roughly 8:30 this morning and that's got to account for something, right :-) Many days the last few weeks/months I haven't been up until 11:00-12:00 some time, so compared to that it's great. According to my original plan I ought to "redo" a rule until I've succeeded, but since getting up in the morning and going to bed in the evening are so closely related I thought it would be better to let the failure of 22:00 remain until I've gotten my mornings sorted. Seeing as I'm still up and it's 22:30 it looks like I'll have to fight this battle a while longer :-P Getting up in a decent time in the mornings should get me tired enough to actually get to bed that early eventually though, so I hope it will work out automatically. Otherwise it's a rule I'll see again.

Exactly what is a success/failure?

As you might guess from the title (and the fact that I wrote yesterday that it was some minutes past 24:00) I'm not calling yesterday a huge success. However, I did go to bed before 24:30, so all in all it was not a huge failure either. Either way I've decided that it was good enough not to have to do yesterdays rule again today, but not good enough for me to get my reward... More on that later. That means I'm moving on to 23:30 today, and won't have to disturb my schedule altogether. That's one of the benefits of making your own rules though, not having to cheat to get around small obstacles like this. There's a reason I called them rules though, so too big deviations aren't going to be accepted. Then it's better to try again the next day. Especially since piling up a lot of things in one day isn't likely to improve things and I want to continue with this, perhaps I wasn't a complete failure before, but I want to accomplish more than what I've accomplished so far (I don't believe anyone is a complete failure, as long as we're alive we have an opportunity to improve. Some people have hardships to struggle with, I have myself and my dislike of routines ;-) ).

I mentioned "the reward", what I mean by this is that I think that punishment isn't likely to help me get more habits but rather just make me feel bad and give up (which would be a stupid thing since getting some solid habits is why I do this in the first place). Some kind of effect is probably helpful though, so I've decided that every day I get rewarded if I manage to follow the rule of the day before. And since I like chocolate and have the body for it my reward is a piece of chocolate. (What I mean by "having the body for it" is that I'm fairly skinny, I wouldn't recommend someone who's in the risk zone of getting/being overweight to eat too much chocolate.)

I would like to follow the rule today, so I'll soon stop writing, but I wrote yesterday that I'd explain why baking my own bread was among the things I'd like to get into the habit of doing so I'll do that first. The main reason is that I'm allergic to gluten, milk protein and soy protein (oh, and peanuts, but that's not too relevant when it comes to baking) and while there is bread to buy not all of it is very tasty, and it's not too much to choose from in any case. Thus it's nice to bake some on my own so I get some variation, and it's also nice to know what's in your bread and it's hopefully cheaper as well. A lot of benefits, but still I haven't gotten around to it in months. Now you know, I guess I'll write some more when I get to that day, and perhaps share some favorite recipe or tip or something. Or perhaps you know some?