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Tag: life lessons

New Year’s Plans

Pretty sure I say every year I’m not doing resolutions, but…and I’m still not. But. I have been thinking lately about how I want to make some changes in my life, and what better time than the new year to give me a bump in the backside about getting moving on them? One thing that, I think, really changed things for me this year was getting furloughed back in March. I spent six weeks at home, happily puttering. I (belatedly, it turns out) decided to do a little gardening. I say belatedly because I was not the first to come up with the idea, so I waited forever for my seeds… One tomato plant is still out there, struggling to turn some tomatoes red for me. I also started writing every day, twice a day. Morning and evening, my friends and I would gather online and write through the pandemic. It drew us closer, it got us words, and it got me more in the habit of looking at myself and my life, because even though I was attempting to write fiction, when the story-words wouldn’t come in the middle of a sprint (coordinated timed writing time, after which you report your word count) I would just journal instead. Enough of that and, I’ll tell you what, you end up writing fiction just to stop the navel-gazing. Anyway. Another thing that came along, was a “wellness” app that comes with my insurance. Normally I wouldn’t be interested–I have enough apps…

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Fail and Fail and Try Again

So…every six months like clockwork, except not, because I’m just not that regular about anything at all, I decide I want to get my stuff together. I do! I have seen the improvement in my life with every infinitesimal mote of progress I make in that direction. So I try. And I try some more. And I fail. And I fail some more, but maybe not completely… You may remember my efforts from such hits as On A Higher Level (2014), Happy New Year! Or Something (2016), Standard Operating Procedure (2016), New Year, New Filing System (2018), Organization is Good (2019), Chasing Productivity (2019)… I thought sure I had a 2020 one too, but that’s on my own blog. Just One Resolution (2020) (spoiler: I did not continue looking at my bullet journal every day.) My thinking, it seems to me, is very chaotic. Last night I went to brush my teeth and somehow ended up starting the dishwasher, and didn’t realize I hadn’t brushed my teeth until I’d been in bed for ten minutes. UGH. I guess that’s why it’s so hard to corral my brain. But whatever. I’m being kind to myself, and trying again. Here is my newest attempt at a bullet journal. Well, the start of it. I’m considering what else I want to do with it besides a weekly planner. Probably chore tracking? Habit tracking? Do I want to do that? I mean, I want to build good habits, but tracking doesn’t seem to have…

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The Dread is a Lie

I didn’t want to get up yesterday. I woke up at 5:30, when my alarm wasn’t going off till 6, and thought about not getting out of bed for a while. Only I had to go to the bathroom, so that didn’t work for long. But I tried. One thing I thought while I lay there? I didn’t want to go outside and deal with my plants. Too much effort, I thought. Couldn’t they just take care of themselves? Well no. Clearly they can’t. They’ll reach the point where they don’t need watered every day, but not for a while yet—at the very least, they need bigger pots to hold water for more than a day! Not all of them need watering every day, though. Surely the bigger ones would rather NOT be watered every day? So, I promised myself. No dealing with the irrigation (which STILL isn’t all put together.) No repotting anything. All I had to do was water the plants that wouldn’t last the day without it, and then I could be done. Once I got out there, that’s not how it went. I watered the plants that needed it. Then I saw the rosemary that’s been under attack by spider mites, and remembered treating it three times a week meant it was time to do that. So I did. Then I realized that if I repotted the tomatoes I’d accidentally planted three together in a pot (my hand slipped or something, I don’t know) separately while…

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If You Feed Them, They Will Come

Friends, I am tired. I was up late and also up early, dealing with teenager crises. Today after a (false alarm) freakout the roomie had over a potentially pet-harming bug in the kitchen, I promised her we didn’t have an infestation of cat-eating centipedes. I also jokingly apologized for the recent infestation of teenagers, but promised they fell into the mostly-harmless household pest category. The more I think about it, the more I think I was only a little off. They do have some similarities to many household pests. Where there’s one, there’s more. The kid’s room is like a clown car–just when you think there can’t possibly be one more human being in there, out pops another. And that one is probably a young’un you’ve never seen before. They’re nocturnal. Turn the light on late at night and they scurry for dark corners. They leave messes everywhere. Sometimes you only know they exist in your space because of the mess. If you feed them, they will come. They eat like–well, like a plague of locusts. Grocery budgets cower before them! But while I sometimes want to knock some sense into them, I never want to step on them. So…more like puppies. I’ve been known to swat them with rolled up newspapers (teenagers, not puppies, I’m aware we have better ways to train dogs now.) Yes. Like puppies. So cute when they’re asleep in little piles of adorable (how do teenagers sleep 3-5 to a bed? How?) So destructive when…

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7 Lessons from the Garden

What I have learned about life gardening this year: 1. Some things take a lot longer than you think; be patient. Other things happen so quickly they’ll surprise you; be ready. We planted radishes for the first time this spring. They were ready to harvest within a month, and went to flower (meaning no good for eating) just a few short weeks after that. Conversely, we waited and waited for last year’s snapdragons and this year’s wildflower seed mix. After we’d given up, both kinds of flowers emerged and were blooming by mid-June. 2. Novelty is always more exciting, but reliability is invaluable. Every year we try a few new vegetables. This year: parsnips (very few came up), beets (yum), red onions (they stopped growing while still small), snap peas (double yum), and cucumber (it died in the summer drought). Every year we also fall back on our favourites: three sizes of tomatoes, hot peppers, herbs. (And every year we keep hoping for better luck with the carrots and sweet peppers.) 3. Some things just aren’t meant to be. We’ve tried growing bell peppers several times. What we end up with are stunted, squashed bells that don’t ripen past green. (Climate? Nutrients? Dunno.) We do have luck growing hot peppers, but everything we’ve planted turns out to be VERY hot and I can’t handle more than a sliver of it. This year we bought a sweet banana pepper plant and I was excited. Turns out? Either it was wrongly labelled or…

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