These Unprecedented Times

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Convening a Meeting of the (Virtual) Party Planning Committee: Treat Yo’Self Birthday Plans

Hello! I’m so glad to see you! Please, allow me to take your hats and mittens. Head right on into the kitchen and I will get you a hot drink.

Can you believe we haven’t gotten together like this since two years ago March? I know! Time is a wild wolverine, full of teeth and impossible to trap. In today’s session, I would be so grateful for your advice on pandemic birthday plans – mine, in particular – so please put your party planning hats on. 

But before we get to that urgent agenda item, it seems critical that I fill you in on what an exterminator emergency is. Or at least, was, in the case of my particular exterminator postponement. (Carla speculated that it was bees! in the walls! which would indeed be an emergency, holy hot honey, but it was not that.) I asked our exterminator during his visit (after I determined that he and his loved ones are all okay, phew, may he live a long and healthy life) if he could satisfy my curiosity. Turns out it was a Live Mouse Issue. My mind, as you might imagine, went immediately to a room teeming with mice. But alas (for my imagination, not for him or his client), it was a single mouse that was alive and in his client’s kitchen. His poor client was, how shall we say?, dealing poorly with the appearance of the mouse. (My exterminator, in his low gentle drawl, “Lady was hysterical. What’d she think I can do? I am not a house cat.”) He was able to – 

LOOK AWAY to the next ALL CAPS paragraph if you don’t care to learn about the (non-graphic, I promise) demise of a mouse…

— Have you looked away yet? 

— Here is some buffer space for that pesky peripheral vision. 

– trap it on a glue trap because it was already clearly very sick from ingesting poison and did not want to move much at all. And then he… disposed of the mouse. May it ascend to a cheese filled heaven. 

— Buffer space for the lookers away —

— More buffer space in case your eyes are more curious than your brain —

YOU CAN LOOK NOW.

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch on Pexels.com

All right, Party Planning Committee. On to the topic at hand, which is my birthday. I turn 40 later this month and I am feeling pre-mopeful about a) turning 40 and b) not being able to make A Big Deal about it. 

This is ridiculous for many reasons, the top being: We are in a pandemic, and no one who is not a Kardashian is getting the birthday celebration they want. PLUS, even if we were not in a pandemic, I am not A Big Deal kind of a person, and would feel stressed and anxious about any sort of Big Deal being made over me, so why I am wistful over the lack of A Big Deal is a mystery for the stars to solve. 

And yet I am full of self-pity because I am Fun. 

So! I think what I need to do is, you know, buck up. And then plan some fun things so that I can look forward to the day if not the event. And that’s where you come in! Because we are in a pandemic! And many of my ideas will not fly! 

Let’s establish a pre-pandemic celebratory baseline here.

Normally, for my birthday, I prefer to have a day off. I like to go get a massage, maybe a facial, maybe a pedicure. I like to do absolutely nothing at home – no cooking, no dishwashing, no anything. And I like to go out to a favorite restaurant, drink some yummy wine or champagne or cocktails, and stuff myself with something delicious and decadent. But of course I am not going to places for a massage these days nor am I going to restaurants. 

For me, A Big Deal would look something like the above, but maybe with a babysitter for Carla and maybe another couple or two would join us for dinner, and then maybe we’d all go bowling afterward or head to a bar for margaritas or come back to my house to play board games. I remember one birthday when my husband and I went on a brewery tour with couple friends of ours; something like that would be an awesome way to spend my fortieth.

Of course, once again, we are not hanging out indoors with other people nor are we going on indoor tours of places, especially those involving taking off your mask to drink things, nor are we hiring babysitters, or going into bars or bowling alleys, or inviting not-my-exterminator other humans into our house. 

In the Before Times, my husband (who turned 40 last fall with MUCH LESS WOE-IS-ME) and I had talked about the two of us, plus Carla, going to Europe as a joint birthday hurrah. That would have been delightful, but I have zero desire to get on a plane anytime soon. 

So. Those are the things that are NOT happening. 

What can I do instead? 

Here are the very minimal plans I have already made:

  1. I have requested that my husband make me lemon pudding cake, which is delicious. 
  2. I ordered two cute tops from StitchFix that I have had in my cart for awhile PLUS I ordered myself a Fix, to arrive on my birthday, which I haven’t done in ages because a) I have nowhere to wear Real Clothes and b) I have gained so much weight during the pandemic that I haven’t wanted to buy any new clothes. 

Here are some additional things I am considering:

  • Good food. I am tossing around dinner ideas: would it be nice to make tacos at home, because I love tacos? Or maybe we could order takeout from our favorite Mexican restaurant? Or maybe we could try one of my other favorite restaurants that we haven’t visited since before the pandemic – and order steak or a burger or something that seems really risky (to me) as a takeout option. Probably best not to wing it on my birthday; nothing adds to the self-pity like a lukewarm soggy-bunned hamburger in a Styrofoam container.

  • Perhaps we could find a movie we haven’t watched yet and watch it. I have no idea what this would be; the new Amy Poehler movie doesn’t drop until March, so that one’s out of the running and I haven’t heard of anything else.
  • A game night? My brother got us The Deadbolt Mystery Society for Christmas. Maybe I will request that my husband and I start that as a birthday treat. 
  • Near-birthday happy hour with friends. I haven’t had a virtual happy hour with my back-home friends for awhile. Maybe we could set one up on or near my birthday. Probably not ON; I wouldn’t want it to be about me, just about our normal catching up and chitting chat. But doing it the day before or day after my birthday might add to the fun anticipation. 
  • Special sweets. Perhaps I will buy some Reese’s peanut butter hearts and snack on those all day. Ooohhh or order myself some Shari’s Berries, which I haven’t had in years.

Beyond these things – which are surely more than adequate in and of themselves – what can I do to make the day feel More Special? What would YOU Do?

I know for sure that I don’t want to request that my husband set up some sort of birthday parade; I can see how those would be so fun and bolstering for some people, but I would find one for ME to be stressful. I also know for sure that I do not want a big family Zoom session, which Carla had for her birthday and which she recommended with great enthusiasm for my birthday. 

A dear friend of mine, who also turned 40 this year, said she and her family did a virtual beer tasting together. Something like that would be really fun, but I am guessing it is too late to plan it and even if not I would feel weird planning it for myself.

For my husband’s fortieth, our little family went on a long-weekend trip to a nearby state. We stayed in an Air BnB and ordered takeout and did outdoor activities and it was a lovely little getaway… but that seems less fun/doable in February, and I’m guessing we would have had to plan it in advance.

If you have had a birthday during the pandemic (most of us have, by now, gloom gloom gloom), what did you/someone else do to make it more special? Or was there something, in retrospect, you wish you had done instead/also? Have you thrown any virtual celebrations for anyone this year that went particularly well? – or badly, I would want to know if something went badly. Or do you have a birthday coming up – yours or someone else’s – for which you are already tossing around plans? If so, I would like to hear all about it. No plan is too simple or too extravagant or too specific to you that I don’t want to hear about it!

And, of course, if you just want to complain about birthdays I am always here for that.

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch on Pexels.com

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Friday Randomosity: Feeling Chatty Edition

The exterminator just called and told me one of his other clients has an emergency and would I mind please changing our appointment to next week. Um, no, of course not?! I don’t even want to THINK what might constitute an extermination emergency, so please, go help the poor people who need you. We can live with our silverfish for another few days. Anyway, now that I don’t have to flit fretfully around the exterminator while he does his work, I have an extra free hour or so in which I should be writing to kill, so let’s chat a bit, shall we?

It’s ironic that I should use the word “chat,” because I just left a lengthy complaint on Swistle’s latest post about how my wonderful, beloved child has been extra chatty in the mornings lately. To counteract the bad karma of complaining about my cherished daughter, I will effuse to you a bit because she is just SO FUN to talk to these days. (When it is not six-forty-five in the morning and when we are not trying to get out of the house to be somewhere on time.) She has so many questions and it’s fun to a) discover what’s going through her brain and b) see if I have a reasonable answer, or will have to leave her with the unsatisfying-for-all-of-us response of “we’ll have to look it up.” (My favorite chats take place in the car, so we cannot look it up just then.) She likes to ask about word origins, which can be fun to discuss, especially if I have a little insight into the etymology of whatever she’s got in mind. For instance, she might say that “rhinoceros” is a funny word, and I can point out that “rhin” is from the Greek word for nose and we can marvel over how appropriate a name it is for that particular animal. The other day, she asked me why singers use curse words in their music, I assume because she has been listening to some Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber songs that have lots of bleeped-out words. So I got to teach her a new word (“profanity”) and talk about why some people choose to use profanity, and why it’s not always a good choice, and then she got to say some curse words in the guise of asking me questions about them which is always fun for a seven-year-old to get away with. Our conversations are a delight. And fill me with confidence in her curiosity and intellect that I hold up as a talisman when I overhear her and her friends changing “Old Town Road” to “Old Town Butt” and then every other word of the lyrics is “butt.”

This has been a good week for writing. I was feeling, last week and over the weekend, Extreme Self-Pity (the book is terrible, I’m never going to finish, I’ve wasted my life, I’m a failure and everyone knows it, etc. etc.). Maybe indulging in my own personal pity party spurred an overcorrection because I’ve been writing my little fingers to the bone all week. (This round of revisions still isn’t finished.) (But it’s eking ever closer.) Or maybe it was written in the stars…

Astro Poets is the one true source of all my cosmic guidance.

While this is nearly a decade too late to be an “update,” yes, we still have silverfish. Usually they pop out once or twice a year, springish and fallish, but we’re having a little burst of them right now. Four sightings in the past week, plus a Very Unpleasant Incident in which I went to squish a silverfish that was chillin’ above my daughter’s bed right where the wall meets the ceiling, and instead of squishing obediently, the silverfish JUMPED OUT of my Kleenex and disappeared into my daughter’s bedding. And then, after my husband and I jointly and confidently assured Carla that no self-respecting silverfish – especially one that had recently been the victim of a near-squishing – would stay on the bed near the sight of said squishing, and if by chance it WAS on her bed, it was assuredly DEAD… and after we carefully took apart her bedding, piece by piece, examining each stuffed animal to ensure no silverfish, it was of course under her pillow, very much alive… and then after I attempted to re-squish it, it AGAIN leapt from my Kleenex, causing me – the person trying to be calm and unperturbed about something as harmless as a silverfish – to shriek in front of my daughter. (I did get it, in the end, and squished it and flushed it so it is doubly dead.) Don’t get me wrong – I’d MUCH rather have silverfish than many other creepy crawlies (or whatever constitutes an exterminator emergency; I really can’t stop thinking about what that may be). But I can’t say that we co-exist peacefully: they are so wiggly and have so very many legs. The exterminator – who is the same lovely sixtyish/seventyish-something gentleman who has been coming out to our house two to three times a year for a decade now – blames the silverfish on the number of books we have. I guess they like paper? But I have lived in homes full of books all my life, and this is the only house that has ever featured silverfish, so I’m skeptical and have not done anything to pare down our home library. I am looking forward to seeing the exterminator, for the reason of the silverfish, of course, but also because he is older and has been visiting people’s homes in a pandemic and I’d like to put eyes on him and make sure he’s okay. Aside from the microwave installation people, he is the only non-immediate-family-member who has been inside my house since last March. Which is weird. 

In bragging news, I went to the grocery store today and scored ANOTHER bottle of bleach spray. My supplies were depleted a little because I scrubbed the grout last weekend and used up most of a bottle of bleach. (I also gave myself pretty serious chemical burns on two of my fingers, though they are mostly healed now.) I also picked up (we are back at the grocery store now) a bottle of different new-to-me Lysol (I still can’t find the lemon scent I prefer). This one has more of a typical antiseptic scent to it, with maybe a slight hint of orange, and I bought it because I need an occasional break from the  mango-and-hibiscus Lysol I bought last time. I’m still going to use the tropical one of course; in a pandemic, one shouldn’t look a cleanser horse in the mouth, even if it is very sickly-sweet and gives me a headache. The grocery store seemed to be almost entirely back to pre-pandemic stocking levels. The only aisle that had anything resembling bare shelves was the cleaning products aisle; even the paper products aisle had shelves bursting with paper towels and toilet paper. Of course, no Grape Nuts or bucatini, but we will survive without.

This one gives off real no-nonsense cleaning-expert vibes. Unlike its frivolous, perfume-loving counterpart who would totally blow off work to go get daiquiris.

Most days, I am okay with our pandemic way of life. I mean, I don’t LIKE it, and obviously I would prefer that everyone would wear a mask and vaccines were abundant and distributed quickly and efficiently so we could return to a pre-pandemic way of life. But mostly, I am getting used to it. About time, since it’s been going on for nearly an entire year.

I feel very fortunate that the isolated nature of our lives these days suits my personality and lifestyle. I already worked from home; I’m socially awkward; I’m an introvert. Once in awhile, though, I so start feeling lonely. And I want to figure out some way, any way, to interact with other non-immediate-family humans. I used to go through that cycle in The Before Times, too, where I’d go for long stretches without seeing anyone… and then I’d overcorrect by setting up a coffee date AND a dinner date AND a family get together all in the same week… which would completely exhaust and overwhelm me into swearing off human interaction ever again. Still happens, even now that there is really no such thing as having a social life. Carla and I are going to our outdoor sport tomorrow and will see a bunch of her friends and their parents, which will be good. And then on Sunday, my little family will be doing another outdoor activity with friends we haven’t seen since Halloween. Which will ALSO be good. But I am pre-exhausted and pre-overwhelmed by the thought of all this socializing. At least I’m not the only one.

My husband just got his second-round vaccine. This is such a HUGE relief; in a few weeks, he should be (mostly) protected from Covid-19 and I will worry about him MUCH LESS. Plus, my parents’ state has opened up vaccine registration to their age group, so they are on a list and should get their first round soon. Woo hoo! My brother and sister-in-law already got vaccinated because they are both front-line workers. Which leaves only six near-immediate family members to continue worrying about. I mean, I always worry about ALL my family members, but I can downgrade the threat level for a few of them now.

The asparagus is gone. But not eaten. It looked fine, but at some point I started to notice a faint garbage-y smell emanating from our fridge so I threw them away. Sorry asparagus. Wasn’t meant to be. 

Speaking of vegetables, I am continuing to work on increasing Carla’s vegetable consumption. In the car after school yesterday, she announced, with great conviction, that she HATES vegetables. (She is discouraged from using the word “hate” except in cases where she feels most strongly.) I had to remind her that she likes lettuce and sugar snap peas and green beans and red peppers and tomatoes. (“I only EAT green beans and red peppers, Mommy, I don’t LIKE them,” she informed me. “And bell peppers and tomatoes are FRUIT, not vegetables.”) Getting her to eat veggies, especially NEW ones, requires creative thinking. The other day, I decided to renew my efforts to get her to like broccoli. She only likes the broccoli “floof” (relatable) but claims not to like broccoli at all. (When she was younger, she would eat it frozen OR cooked with cheese sauce! I don’t know when she stopped liking it!) “You just haven’t found a preparation you like,” I said. So we did a taste test. One floret of raw broccoli; one floret of raw broccoli dipped in ranch; one piece of roasted broccoli with salt and olive oil; one piece of roasted broccoli with lemon juice; one piece of roasted broccoli with parmesan. To increase the Fun Factor (wood board my life is sad), I made a survey for her to fill out as she tried each candidate. The results were not promising. 

Carla has her own food priorities.

I think I am in a bit of a book slump. After my gloomy post the other day, I decided the best remedy for Feeling Down was to pick up a good book. I finally, after many, many months, downloaded The Heir Affair to my kindle and read it. I knew it would be exactly what I needed – funny, fast-paced, engrossing, well-written, totally removed from the real world – and indeed it was. Everything I hoped it would be and more! I LOVED IT. But I finished it in two days and am now casting about for what to read next. See? Book slump. And it’s not for want of books! (See above re: silverfish vacation destination.) I have SO MANY books both on my kindle and on my bookshelves/nightstand just waiting for me to read them! I am, in fact, in the middle of three separate books (a trait I get from my mother, apparently), each of which is very good, and each of which is completely not what I’m looking for at this particular moment. Which is The Heir Affair again. Or its prequel, The Royal We. Or The Holdout, which was another book I could not put down. That’s what I want: something completely absorbing and unputdownable. But it also shouldn’t be sad. Or… deal with anything too heavy. What is the most unputdownable, semi-light-subject-wise book you’ve read? Or, if that’s too specific, what is the most absorbing book you’ve read recently? 

A mix of books I have and have not yet read.

Well, it’s not actually SUNNY outside right now, but the clouds are high/thin enough that there is something approximating light streaming through the windows. And I can’t tell you how cheering it is, in all its diffuse dimness. I will take what I can get!

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Goals Report: Revisiting My Aspirations for 2020

Frankly, Internet, I revisited my 2020 goals primarily for a laugh. I mean, whomst among us hasn’t, at some point in the past year, thrown up their hands about ever having a goal again? Plus, even in the best of years, I am not much of a goal-setter or goal-sticker-to-er.

Turns out that some of my aspirations from last year ARE quite hilarious. But somehow I managed to achieve a few of them??? Perhaps I am getting better at setting achievable goals. 

As always, my overarching goal – “I am not going to put a huge amount of pressure on accomplishing anything outside of keeping myself and my child alive. Even my husband is ON HIS OWN, for keeping-alive purposes.” – was the most important. And I did manage to accomplish that one, at least.

Let’s take a look at the other aspirations I had when we sailed into 2020, not knowing what it had in store for us.

Personal

  • Aspiration: Read 30 books. Last year, I read 23 books. Reading just… falls by the wayside. And that’s ridiculous because I LOVE to read, and reading helps inspire and inform my own writing. So I want to really prioritize reading this year.
  • Result: Complete! I read 46 books in 2020! Woo!
  • Aspiration: Buy new sport bras. Like last year, I am borrowing this undergarment goal from Stephany. Thanks, Stephany! I have probably around a dozen sports bras. But they are all terrible. Half of them are from high school and college, which, you may recall, took place TWO DECADES AGO OMG. So these sports bras have put in their time and deserve to retire. The reason I keep them around is because they are so comfy when the sports bras I have purchased in the past few years are so horribly UNcomfy. They are too tight or pinch my armpits and at least one of them has created a skin tag on my back which I DO NOT LIKE. One of them has a decorative trim that has come loose and another has a piece of padding that continually folds over on itself and both of these things make me feel unkempt – not that I am at my most kempt while exercising, I understand this – and in general I just hate all of them. What has prevented me from just getting rid of these awful torture slings, you ask? Cheapness, I answer. Sports bras are EXPENSIVE. But I am committing to, if not replacing ALL of them, at least buying two or three new ones that I actually like. I wear a sports bra probably five days a week, so this is a reasonable thing on which to spend money, SELF, ARE YOU LISTENING TO THIS LOGICAL ARGUMENT?
  • Result: Semi-complete. I bought ONE (1) new sports bra and I also bought myself a handful of bralettes because this was The Year of No Bras. 
  • Aspiration: Exercise five days a week. My husband and I got each other a recumbent bike for Christmas, so now we have that and a treadmill AND I still have a package of barre classes I purchased when they went on sale at the end of last year. Plus I have an abundance of exercise videos and the whole entire internet at my disposal. There is no reason for me to not exercise daily. It lulls the hamsters in my brain and elevates my mood and gives me more energy.
  • Result: I completed 217 workouts in 2020, which, if my math is correct which is questionable at best, works out to exercising about four days every week. So. Not complete, but not a total failure. The thing is, I am very good about exercising when I can do it on My Preferred Schedule, which is at about eight o’clock in the morning. This is not a schedule that is workable when Carla is doing remote learning, so I do not exercise during the week when she is learning remotely. Should I simply get up earlier and exercise then? Yes. But that does not work for me, either. Hopefully she will be back in school, in person, next week for a very long time and I can get back to exercising the way I like to.
  • Aspiration: Limit my phone usage to one hour per day. Hahahahahahahaha. This is probably the most wild and ambitious goal of all, but I am going to try it. I have set the timers on my phone which is the first step. The second step is to stop hitting “ignore time limit” every time I reach it.
  • Result: HAHAHAHAHA. I did the exact opposite of this. My screen time skyrocketed during the pandemic. Just copious, endless amounts of time on my phone. There were multiple days when I had to plug my phone in before the day was over, because I had run down the battery just through doomscrolling. 
  • Aspiration: Find a good balance of social/solitary time. It seems like I have this bad habit of swinging wildly between over-scheduling myself with social events and then reacting to all the over-stimulation by hiding away and doing absolutely nothing and then reacting to feeling isolated by over-scheduling myself with social events. Repeat. I am an introvert. I know this. I should limit my social activities to once – maybe twice – a week, which should help still the pendulum.
  • Result: HAHAHAHAHA. My social activities were VERY LIMITED this year.
  • Aspiration: Take better care of my skin. I have found a combination of facial oil and moisturizing lotion that I like. I have acquired some moisturizing spray. And now I just need to make sure I wash my face EVERY NIGHT.
  • Result: Semi-complete. It’s much easier to have quick, easy nighttime cleaning ritual when you hardly ever wear makeup anymore (pandemic). And yet I still sometimes managed to fail at this goal?
  • Aspiration: Practice the piano. I am stealing this one from Nicole, and, admittedly, it is a wild and ambitious goal that I am unlikely to accomplish. Who will even know, anyway, as I do not plan to track my playing on a spreadsheet or even mark it down on a sheet of paper I could leave handily on the piano. So why aspire to do something I have so little faith in doing, you ask? Well, we have a beautiful hand-me-down baby grand piano and I have thirteen years of piano lessons under my belt and I have a bunch of sheet music of songs I’d like to learn/re-learn. Plus, playing the piano is something that would definitely enhance my life, so I am going to give it the old half-hearted try. I will attempt to play the piano twice a week this year. No specific time requirement – just sit down at the piano and noodle around for a while.
  •  Result: Incomplete. I definitely noodled around on the piano a lot more than I have in years past. But I did not do it twice a week.

Family

  • Aspiration: Find a new regular babysitter. I don’t really know how to go about doing this, but our current list of sitters has kind of fizzled out. By that I mean the three young women who regularly sit for Carla are more likely to a) be busy or b) not respond at all when I ask if they are available… and I feel like three in a row of those things really means I should stop bother them.
  • Result: NOPE. 
  • Aspiration: Go on more date nights. My husband and I really enjoy each other’s company. We need to spend more time alone. And I would like to try to see some movies together, like, in an actual theater. Sounds very adventuresome.
  • Result: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
  • Aspiration: Undertake more weekend adventures. This is a carryover from last year. It was fun to go on little weekend trips, which I hope we can do again. And for the remaining weekends… Well, maybe we can try to dedicate one weekend day to loafing at home – which we all prefer to do – and the other day to adventuring. I know my husband is on board with this, so maybe together we can make it happen.
  • Result: Semi-complete? Let’s count this as a semi-win, because – despite the global pandemic – we managed to do a bunch more weekends of hiking and walking together. Plus, we did a long weekend driving trip to a secluded AirBnB.
  • Aspiration: Plan a trip to visit my niece. We just need to make this happen.
  • Result: Incomplete. Pandemic.
  • Aspiration: Read/skim one parenting book a quarter. That seems like a VERY achievable goal, right? I have a ton of parenting books on my to-read list, but I have SUCH a hard time getting through them. So I need to make it a clearer goal, to read them and then share what I’ve learned with my husband. And then, I suppose, implement the useful ideas.
  • Result: Incomplete. Did I finish even ONE this year? I don’t think so.
  • Aspiration: Emphasize/encourage more adventurous eating. Carla eats enough of a variety of foods that I feel like she’s getting adequate nutrition. For instance, when I make her dinner, I can be sure there is something from each category – protein, carb, dairy, vegetable, and fruit – on her plate that she will actually eat. But when it comes down to it, the list of foods she eats is very, very short. Which means that her meals look very similar, from day to day and week to week. (Right now, the only vegetables she will eat are sugar snap peas, tomatoes, and frozen green beans. That’s IT.) Lately, I have been applying a Pick Your Battles philosophy to this aspect of parenting — there are other battles more worthy of picking — but I really do want to help encourage her to eat beyond that list. I’m not sure how to do it, but I think one of the aforementioned parenting books could help.
  •  Result: Semi-complete. We try. Carla will now eat couscous, (plain) lettuce, and (raw) mushrooms, which I count as a win. And she will (usually) at least try something new. I will take what I can get.

Work/Finance

  • Aspiration: Revise my manuscript. Now that I have all (most) of the words, I need to go through and put everything in a readable order and fill out the places where I just wrote in filler words and basically transform it from a rough draft into something I can send to beta readers.
  • Result: Incomplete. I did not write/revise a single word between March and September. I just didn’t. I got serious about it later in the year, but am still only halfway done with revisions.
  • Aspiration: Invest every single month. I am in charge of funding several investments we have. It’s a very simple process, done completely online. And yet I get freaked out by the wild movements of the market and the prospect of losing all our money and sometimes just… don’t invest.
  • Result: Incomplete. When the pandemic hit and the market got volatile, I chickened out. I know you aren’t supposed to time the market, but man. I am not good at putting money into a sinkhole. Even though the market turned around later, as it is usually wont to do. I think a goal this year is to get serious about finding a financial advisor to do this stuff for me.
  • Aspiration: Put money into a personal 401(k). Since I am earning money, even if it’s a tiny bit, I can put it into a retirement account. My dad helped me set up an individual 401(k) and I need to put what I earned last year into it before April.
  •  Result: Incomplete. I am really disappointed in myself about this. But I did have some income this past year, before the pandemic hit. So I will add that to my i401(k).

House Projects

  • Aspiration: GALLERY WALL. My husband is on board. He has given me full control over the gallery wall, and just needs me to present him with my vision so that we can make it happen. THIS WILL HAPPEN. 
  • Result: This has not happened. Despite technically being on board with this project, my husband has ZERO interest in making it happen. And he is the only one of us who can create straight lines, so I kind of NEED him. 
  • Aspiration: Fix the freaking toilet. I have purchased and installed FIVE flappers in our toilet. Perhaps it is a much more finicky and complicated repair than it seems based on viewing YouTube videos of the process, and I am merely missing some crucial element. Perhaps there is something else wrong with the toilet that I am unable to diagnose. In any case, I have reached the outer limit of my flapper-installation/toilet-repair knowledge AND PATIENCE – if you have never had to adjust and readjust and readjust and readjust AGAIN the length of a flapper chain while crouched uncomfortably over your toilet tank you have lived a good life indeed – and need to call in a professional. For my sanity.
  • Result: Complete! Well, sort of, if you count the fact that I gave up and bought a whole new toilet. 
  • Aspiration: Sharpen our knives. A local knife sharpener sets up camp at the grocery store at various times throughout the year. I want to load up all our knives (how???) and have him sharpen them, because they are woefully dull and therefore dangerous.
  • Result: Complete! Except that I did NOT take our knives to the sharpener guy (pandemic). My husband sharpened them himself!
  • Aspiration: Purge old items. We have a bunch of stuff to get rid of. For one thing, I think it’s time to relieve our basement of Carla’s play kitchen. I can’t remember the last time she’s used it, and she’s had it since 2014, so it’s fulfilled its duties to our household. Plus, there are many other things that we just do not need in our basement – two giant duffels that my husband has owned since I’ve known him and has never once used in all those 19 years; the battered remains of our old footstool, which my husband cannot bear to throw out despite it being so gross we had to replace it, the pots and pans we replaced but are still holding onto for some reason, TWO coffee makers that we definitely do not need, tons of shoes I do not wear or Carla has outgrown, I could go on.  I need to decide if I am going to host another garage sale next summer (host? Is that the verb I am looking for? Do I mean “throw”? But that makes it sound like a party which it most certainly is NOT.) or if I am going to find somewhere to donate all the assorted items I need to get rid of. That requires calling places, which is unappealing. But a garage sale is a TON of work, which is also unappealing. MOST unappealing is playing hostess to a growing junk heap in my basement, though.
  •  Result: Semi-complete? I got rid of some shoes and some crafting supplies. And I thinned out some of Carla’s toys. But we still have big bags marked for Donation in the basement. Obviously we did NOT have a garage sale this past summer, and it’s SO much work that I am not sure I ever want to do another one. I just need to gear myself up to take the bags to Goodwill and allow THEM to do with our stuff what they will. 
  • Aspiration: Have a realtor come evaluate our house. My husband and I are really, seriously thinking about moving out of this house. But we will not do so for about three years. If there is work we absolutely need to do to make our house more buyer-friendly, I want to do it now, so we can enjoy it before we move out.
  • Result: Incomplete. My husband wasn’t up for this, and then the pandemic happened and I wasn’t interested in pushing him to agree to something that would involve having a stranger in our house.
  • Aspiration: Touch up the outside of the house. We have a stain on the siding above our front porch. The paint is starting to peel from the trim around the garage door. Our front door has seen better days. The front porch could use some fresh paint. I need to look into what it would take to make this happen.
  • Result: Semi-complete. We had a company come and power wash the exterior, which helped a ton. But we definitely need to take care of the trim. This year!

THREE completed aspirations this year, people. Out of 22 total. That is SAD. Good thing I don’t set Real Goals, right, or I might feel like an abject failure!

If anything, this year was certainly a good example of that old saying about life happening while we make other plans. Life certainly HAPPENED, that’s for sure, and my plans fell mostly by the wayside. 

Who knows what 2021 will bring.