Twenty years from now, you would give anything to have the energy and health you have right now. What are you waiting for? It’s time to take the trip, go back to school, get in shape, start over, and follow your dreams.
Time waits for no one and neither should you. Go do all the things that you’re afraid to say out loud.
With the new year officially here, I’m still seeing a lot of folks talk about their resolutions. As I said earlier this week, I have monthly goals but no real resolutions.
I was thinking about this last night and decided to come up with a list I might be able to work with in 2025. Here it is! And yes, some of it is kind of ridiculous.
Fold clothes as soon as they come out of the dryer (and remove them from the dryer as soon as they’re done).
Take a lunch break of some kind. Every day.
Breathe fresh air for as long as possible. Every day.
Stop buying new pajamas because I promise I don’t really need more.
Read at bedtime.
Stop watching news that is designed to inflame rather than inform.
Come up with a better last minute dinner than breakfast. Really, how many eggs can I eat just because I’m too lazy to microwave a vegetable?
Always, always, always keep a book handy.
Convince my shamrock plant to survive this winter.
Stop stuffing pots and pans into a small cupboard like it’s a magic portal to another land where there’s space for all the crap I don’t use.
Leave rooms where I do not belong.
Talk to every cat, chipmunk, squirrel, bird, deer, lizard, toad, frog, opossum, mole, vole, raccoon, groundhog, bat, and cow that I see. And not feel foolish doing it.
These seem like manageable resolutions!
Have a great Sunday, friends! We are expecting some actual winter weather today so I’m happy to spend today relaxing and maybe even working on one or two of these resolutions. Enjoy!
Today we turn the calendar to January 2025. For many of us, it’s the end of our holiday vacation and we’re headed back to work tomorrow. I’ve had a nice, long, not at all fun vacation but the pain from my dental surgery is mostly gone and I’m grateful.
Today, I start my January No Spend Challenge and couldn’t be more excited for the personal growth and good things that will come from this. I have referred to this a lot lately and will talk about it in depth tomorrow if you’re interested.
This month I will also begin planning my 2025 adventures. After all, having something to look forward to is a key to happiness and having adventures to anticipate is one of the happiest things in my world. Some of those adventures will be close to home and others a little further flung. I did less than normal in 2024 and I’m sure that’s partly due to a lack of planning. I won’t make that mistake again.
Today I will start working on my January goals. I set new goals every month and they tend to be related to a theme. Mine are mostly connected to my No Spend Month and help to support that endeavor.
But first, I will spend much of today relaxing and reading. I struggled to read last year but seem to have gotten my groove back in the last few days. Here’s hoping that can translate to lots of reading for all of 2025! I have a backlog of good books collected last year so I need to get busy.
Friends, today is the first day of the rest of your life. Whether you spend it reading or adventuring or just muddling through, I hope you make it a good one. You get just one life to live. For some, that’s almost too much to endure while it’s not nearly enough for others. Let’s pack our days with the things that bring us the most joy, peace and fulfillment. Let’s not waste a single moment on things that don’t matter. No one arrives at the Pearly Gates complaining that they should have worked more or spent more time arguing with their family over what they heard on the news that day.
This life, this day, this moment – it’s your adventure. Make it fun. Make it a great year.
Life has felt very full for the last year so I recently have begun setting a theme for each month and building some goals around that theme. The idea is to focus on a few related projects and actually get something done rather than have a long to-do list with little actually finished.
It started in August when the theme was built around whether or not to keep or trade in my old car. After weighing the evidence, I ultimately traded in the nerdmobile and have been happily zipping around, living with that decision in a new car I’m calling White Lightning.
The September theme has been far more complex as it has dealt with getting my health in order. The most important part of this has been some doctor appointments as well as researching what a new and improved anti inflammatory diet needs to look like. My sluggish thyroid is chugging along with help from a prescription medicine but I think a holistic approach to health and wellness will be the only route to actually feeling good since I’m feeling cruddy even though the labs are fine.
The thyroid is a notorious pain to adjust. I know people who say they have felt great for twenty years and others who say they’ve spent twenty years struggling with exhaustion and weight gain. These last three years have been pretty awful and I hope to not continue struggling forever.
Despite my best laid plans for a road to better health, I managed to pick up bronchitis somewhere along the way. I wrote this missive from what feels like my death bed even though I’m sure the sack full of medicine I brought home will pull me out of it soon.
I tell you all of this, not for pity, but to use myself as an example.
An example of what, I’m not yet sure! Ha!
We plan and work so hard to do the right thing, to take care of ourselves and to accomplish our goals but there are times that it feels like we just can’t get ahead. It sucks, it really does.
But imagine how bad things would be if we didn’t try at all. We must keep trying to do what’s right and to fight the good fight.
The bronchitis will pass. The body aches will be a memory in a few days. This discouraging period will build character and make me better appreciate the good days.
In a two hour span yesterday I was diagnosed with bronchitis, hit a squirrel, ran my new white car through fresh tar (for about the 39th time in a month) and had such a coughing fit in the local grocery store, I had to leave without the oranges I needed. This was particularly demoralizing as everyone in the store and people in the parking lot turned to stare.
And then, at some point I looked in the mirror to notice a little patch of something that looked like dried blood at the corner of my mouth. It was not blood. It was a little bit of dried blueberry juice from the pancake I had for breakfast. How many people did I see before noticing this? I really don’t know.
For the mishaps, there were good things too. My parents picked up my oranges. My boss told me to take care and get some rest. A woman at the doctors’ office recognized how bad I felt and had me go first in line to check out. I don’t know who she was but I was beyond grateful. Plus, I got to sleep away the afternoon in a cozy bed.
See? Things aren’t so bad. I’ll be better again soon and back to adventuring and unlocking the mysteries of my thyroid. And someday, I’ll be brave enough to return to the grocery store where I made such a scene!! Meanwhile, I’ll check the mirror before going out in public after eating blueberry pancakes!
By the way, next month’s goal will revolve around Autumn activities – both adventures and work around the yard! Stay tuned!
“Affirm it, visualize it, believe it, and it will actualize itself.”
It’s great advice and it was found inside a fortune cookie!
Happy Saturday, friends. We’ve waited all week to get here so let’s enjoy this day. First, I’ll visualize myself having a good day and then will believe it to be true!
It’s adventure day so that means anything is possible.
Each month I sit down and make a list of goals for the next thirty days. It’s usually seven to ten things ranging from easy to nearly unattainable and a few are even fun.
For example, January’s list included my reading goal (fun), packing up the Christmas decorations from the back porch (easy) and taming my craft room into something both presentable and functional (not in a million years).
I unearthed the January list on February 7, while cleaning out my work bag. That was the same day I realized that I hadn’t accomplished a darn thing out of the ten goals except my reading goal. I would like to say that I don’t know how I spent my time in January but it clearly involved books.
What’s worse is that I didn’t even try. I didn’t even look at the list or know where it was.
I also realized I was a week into a new month and hadn’t even thought to set new goals.
Some of that stuff got transferred to the February list. My current goal is to pack up the porch Christmas and put it away by Saturday. Note that it’s now Friday and still not done. Never fear, there’s time.
There was a time I was organized, energetic and motivated. I had lists to keep track of all my lists and getting things done wasn’t really a problem. The last few years have more or less beaten that out of me. My thyroid has left me tired, my brain in a fog and my attention span short. Whatever energy exists within me gets allocated to my workday right now. I mostly keep with with this blog, look after the cat and try to do whatever else I can.
For the last few nights I have been playing beat the clock. Last night I set a timer for fifteen minutes and did a quick clean of the kitchen. When it went off, I hit repeat and kept going. Once I was satisfied with that room, I repeated the process in my craft room and actually made some progress.
You can do anything for fifteen minutes. The trick is continuing when the alarm buzzes. The vitamin commercial tells us that a body in motion stays in motion and that is absolutely true. Getting started is the hard part but, once you do, it’s relatively easy to keep going.
If you don’t like the idea of alarms, try saying you have to stay busy during a podcast or a favorite album. Just set some parameters to signal that your job isn’t done until there’s an alarm or the end of an episode.
Tonight’s plan is to not sit down after work. Instead, I would like to tackle some of those goals and maybe a little regular cleaning – working in fifteen minute intervals, of course!