Houseplant History and Satisfying Plant Update

One of my gentle aspirations for the year was to repot my house plants and I am pleased to report that I have (halfway) accomplished that goal.

It seems irresponsible that I, a known plant murderer, should persist in owning houseplants. And yet I LOVE them, and I have strong feelings of affection for them. 

I still remember the jade plant my mother bought me when I was a freshman in college. My mother, who is excellent at keeping things alive, has always had a jade plant in her home, and I have fond memories of the enormous jade plant in the room in my childhood home we referred to as The Library. It sat in a massive pot on a plant stand and its leaves cascaded nearly to the floor like the glorious mane of a beautiful woman. It was extraordinary. So it felt almost like I had a little piece of home with me, setting that jade plant in my dorm window and mostly neglecting it.

Each summer, I would take the jade plant to the dean’s office and they would look after it for me. Each fall, I would reclaim the jade plant – which always seemed to have grown and flourished in someone else’s care – and it would live in my room. After we graduated, my then-boyfriend and I drove to his home town where we lived and worked for the summer; the jade plant came with us. My housing situation was, in retrospect, a little precarious. My then-boyfriend’s parents had arranged for me to house sit for a family friend. But the friends had moved out of their house and were actively looking for a buyer. WHY was this a good idea? WHAT did I think I would do if they sold the house??? HOW did the realtor explain to potential buyers the evidence that a squatter was inhabiting the house??? Anyway, I think my furniture included a mattress on the floor of one of the bedrooms – not the primary bedroom, because the realtor or maybe the homeowner discouraged me from staying there – and maybe they had left a couch in the living room? Or did my then-boyfriend bring over a couple of lawn chairs? I can’t remember. But I had my jade plant there, too. 

Once summer ended, my then-boyfriend and I drove across several states to move into the apartment we’d rented, sight-unseen, while I attended grad school. We had driven all day, with a U-Haul attached to my then-boyfriend’s car, and I had my jade plant in my car with me on the passenger side floor. We did get slightly lost in the worst part of the unfamiliar city – this was the age of MapQuest and printed directions, folks – but we eventually found our way to our apartment without being robbed or murdered. Only to discover that there had been a massive ceiling leak, which had a) filled up a ceiling light until it was so heavy it collapsed part of the ceiling and shattered onto the floor and b) created a mold field on the carpet and in the walls of the tiny closet that counted as a laundry room. CLEARLY the apartment had not been cleaned or prepped for new occupants – the bathroom in particular was a filthy disaster – which was not the best introduction to the city or to our scandalous life of premarital cohabitation. 

We ended up staying in a hotel while the leasing company remediated the problem, and we had to stay in the hotel so long that we ended up unloading our U-Haul into a storage unit and then having to reload it into a different U-Haul when we were finally able to move in to the apartment. I remember our parents being extremely helpful about the whole thing, even though they were all strenuously against us living together. (It worked out okay.) 

But our new city was very hot, and in all the chaos I forgot about my poor jade plant and it died in my overheated car. 

Perhaps this incident has instilled in me a crawling anxiety about plant care, as well as an intense internal pressure to never kill a plant again. And yet, despite the emotional intent to be a good plant owner, I am not, in fact, a good plant owner. I try, I really do. I try not to be overbearing, and I try not to be neglectful. But I fear that I overcompensate in both areas.

Currently, I have five houseplants. 

This is the whole sad crew, including the jade plant in the red pot whose health has since declined precipitously, and the very already dead cactus in the light green pot.

One is a small, spindly palm tree that has survived for nearly twelve years, which is when my mother gave it to me as a housewarming present. The African violet that was also part of the original basket succumbed to my black thumb several years ago. The long drapey plant that I think may be a philodendron persists. The palm tree looks increasing full of despair. (Although it recently sprouted a new head/branch/limb? So perhaps it is preparing for a second wind?) 

I also have a jade plant that is really circling the drain. I have tried a lot of things, and I am coming to the sad conclusion that perhaps I am just not meant to be a jade plant owner. I can’t even bring myself to take a photo of it for you; I am too embarrassed. Consider the state of the little palm tree and then ask yourself what a plant must look like for me NOT to post it.

My orchid was a thank-you gift I received for being Carla’s room parent in kindergarten, so I have a strong sentimental attachment to it because it represents both a moment in time and time’s unrelenting passage. It has flowered several times since I brought it home, in November of 2021, April of 2022, and most recently in December of 2022, which is reassuring unless flowering is a distress signal. But it got to the point where it appeared to be attempting to crawl out of its pot and far, far away from me.

The orchid, listing violently to the right and readying itself for ambulation.

The anthurium is one in a long line of anthurium I have had and killed since I moved to this house. This is the first one I’ve kept alive long enough for it to re-bloom. Based on pictures, I think I have had this since at least July of 2021.

Anthurium in a too-small pot; orchid limb photo bomb.

The fifth plant is really Carla’s. It is a replacement cactus; replacement because we bought her a cactus last summer and promptly killed it. I didn’t even know you could kill a cactus? Well, we managed. But we saw this orchid cactus at the plant store and couldn’t resist buying it. Carla is in charge of its care even though it lives in my office; perhaps she will turn out to have a greener thumb than I do. 

Orchid cactus. It can only sit in that little plant stand in that exact position because the plant stand is stupid.

One of the problems with my poor plants is that they need repotting. And yet I am so terrified of killing them that I cannot bring myself to do it. So when this adorable plant store opened just down the street, and I discovered that they will repot the plants FOR YOU, for the extremely reasonable price of five dollars, I knew that was my solution. 

After a couple of false starts – for instance, Carla was off school on a random Monday, so we loaded the plants into my car and drove the plant store only to discover it wasn’t open on Mondays – we finally made it to the plant store and they REPOTTED MY PLANTS.

Well, they repotted the two I brought in – the orchid and the anthurium. It was such an easy process and such a relief that I am trying to get up enough nerve to bring in the palm tree/possible-philodendron and my ailing jade plant. I am a teeny bit afraid that one they see the jade plant, they will send someone to repossess all my plants.

Here are the plants immediately after the repotting:

I undertook this repotting exercise at the very end of March. And the plants continue to thrive (except for the jade plant, my god the state of that poor jade plant).

My orchid and anthurium are SO pleased. The anthurium is in bloom and has sprouted a bunch of new leaves. The orchid looks fuller and prouder of its situation, and much less like it wants to escape. And the cactus is cactusing along nicely. I am looking forward to the time when it decides to bloom. 

So happy!

Not quite as stunning a transformation as the anthurium, but trust me that this plant is MUCH happier.

Orchid cactus; anthurium in the background, trying to pretend it doesn’t want all the attention.

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Five for Friday

Friday already, and looking down the barrel of another long weekend! So here are five topics I’ve been thinking about, beginning with MORE CAKE TALK!

A No-Cake Defense (TL/DR: This Is a Me Issue): I loved everyone’s comments on yesterday’s post about choosing my birthday dessert. One thing I additionally loved was how some readers took issue with my husband’s anti-cake stance. I just want to say: I love you. Thank you for defending my cakely honor. You are a treasure and a joy and I feel so cozy and loved. 

While not knowing his exact reasons for not wanting to bake a cake, I can speculate. And so I do want to defend my husband a teeny bit. You do not have to accept these reasons! You can still glare in his general direction! 

If I am understanding correctly, his first objection is the time. He fears it will take all day to bake a cake, and he doesn’t want to waste a big chunk of my birthday in the kitchen, when we could be doing something else. While perhaps baking a cake should not take several hours, it does always seem to work out that way. At least, it does for me. But then again, I always end up making some silly mistake that requires me remaking some aspect of the recipe.

Also, and this may be projecting, but he might be a little nervous about making a cake. He is not the cake baker in the family; I am. And I am in no way a good role model for The Ease of Cake Baking, in large part because I am always doing something that makes the whole process more difficult (cough cough leopard spots, cough cough rainbow layers). But my husband has never made a cake. I have no doubt he COULD make a cake (he is generally a better direction follower than I am), but for your first cake to be the Replacement Cake for your wife’s birthday, after her previous birthday cake was such a disappointing experience… well. That seems like a recipe (see what I did there) for failure.

However, these perfectly reasonable reasons aside, after I read the umpteenth comment suggesting that maybe my husband should just suck it up and make me the cake I want (I am paraphrasing; everyone reading this is much more tactful), I started to agree. If he has volunteered to make me a birthday dessert, why shouldn’t I ask for the dessert I really want? And I am sure that if I said, “honey, this is what I REALLY want,” he might grumble a bit, but he would make it for me.

So I spent some time looking online for The Perfect Cake Recipe to send him.  But the process looking for a recipe to send him made me realize that there is a secret third reason he may be unwilling to make me a cake.

As you may already know, from reading all my food and cake related posts, lo these many years, I am one of those annoying people who doesn’t necessarily stick to a recipe. I might pair a cake from one recipe with a frosting from another recipe. Or I might make a smaller cake than the recipe recommended. Or I might take a cupcake recipe and turn it into a cake. Or I might choose a recipe that calls for poppy seeds in the icing, but I would exclude the poppy seeds. I am comfortable with this, both because I now have some experience in messing around with recipes and because I am comfortable with the idea that it might not turn out. My husband is NOT comfortable with either of these things. He doesn’t have the cake baking experience to draw on, for one thing. But he is also a Supreme Instruction Follower and would find it blasphemous to deviate from a recipe’s explicit directions. 

And the thing is, when I search for My Perfect Cake… I can’t find it. It doesn’t exist. Okay, it DOES exist, and Kate found it (thank you!) but it is too large and too expensive for just the three of us. BUT, it’s very nice to know it’s there, if I need it! What I’m saying is the recipe for My Perfect Cake doesn’t exist. There is this perfectly lovely sounding cake, but it calls for lemon extract and I am a lemon purist. But I can’t ask my husband to just… exclude the extract. I mean, you probably can’t just DO that anyway, you’d need to track down other lemon cake recipes and compare various amounts of lemon juice and lemon zest and choose an amount that seems appropriately lemony for this specific cake. I can imagine how overwhelming it would feel if I suggested my husband do that. Even if I did the research, and wrote on top of the recipe, “omit lemon extract; use X tbsp of lemon juice,” he would feel worried that it wouldn’t turn out, and that if it didn’t, it would be HIS fault. 

This recipe looks very close to my ideal… but there are so few reviews, and of the reviewers who seem to have actually tried the recipe, it sounds like the cake comes out too dense for what I would prefer. 

I do love Sally’s Baking Addiction, and this recipe sounds similar to what I’m looking for and I trust her recipes, although sometimes the cake is a bit more dense than I prefer. But… there’s no lemon curd in this recipe. I want lemon curd. But I don’t think I could just say, “spread some lemon curd in between the layers” to my husband without him feeling like he needed additional, very specific directions to follow. (I actually used this recipe to make my daughter’s seventh birthday cake, and did put lemon curd between the layers.)

Are you beginning to understand that this is not really a problem with my husband trying to deny me the cake of my heart? That it is, instead, an issue of me being too picky?

Like I said, feel free to continue to feel irritated with my husband. But perhaps you can also spare some irritation for me, as well. I am hard to please. 

***UPDATE***: I wrote all of the above last night, before my husband got home from work. After sending him the link to Kate’s cake, and deciding that it was really too expensive, and explaining to him that I have been thinking about this particular cake for more than a year, I thought we finally settled on him making me cupcakes. That would be great! Lemon curd filled cupcakes. I explained how to do the filling part, and my husband listened attentively and asked if I would object to him putting pink food coloring in the frosting which strikes me as very adorable. And then thirty or so minutes later, cake clearly on the brain, my husband asked me, “Should I just make you the cake you want?” and I said, “but I thought making a cake was too much?” and he said, “but if I’m going to make cupcakes, I might as well make a cake,” and I said, “yes, please.” And then there was some discussion about my favorite cream cheese frosting and whether I would be amenable to him adding some lemon zest to the frosting (yes) and whether I need homemade curd (no). So I think it is happening????? If there is cake in the offing, I will certainly share all the details with you. (Although cupcakes would also be excellent.)

Surely This Is Not Right: I went to the dentist and noticed this poster hanging prominently on the wall. I do not object to the sentiment, which is lovely. But it raises the question: how do you pronounce “hygienist”? 

After spending far too much time listening to online pronunciations of the word, I believe that in British English, the pronunciation is “hy-JEEN-ist.” But in American English, it’s “hy-JEN-ist,” is it not? 

In no way is the first syllable “hahy.” Not that I would even know how to pronounce “hahy.” Hah-hee? Hah-high? (My husband thinks this is a way of representing the diphthong of “hy,” but I think there are better ways to represent it than “hahy.”

I suppose this could be one of those words that you have only ever experienced in print and have not yet heard aloud, and when you do finally hear it spoken, the pronunciation is a shock. (Do you have a word like this? Mine is ravine.) But I don’t think that this is one of those cases. 

Okay, I still apparently have more to say about this. If you were the person buying wall art for a dental office, a dental office in the United States specifically, wouldn’t you be uniquely aware of the correct pronunciation of dental terms? And wouldn’t you find this EXTREMELY ODD?

Freelance Does Not Mean Free: One of the most… shall we say interesting aspects of freelancing is the money aspect. Some clients are very on top of it, saying things from the get go like, “This is our budget,” or “We typically pay this for this type of project.” Other clients seemingly would never raise the topic if I didn’t broach it first. When it comes to invoicing, some clients are very clear to say, “This looks good, send me your invoice” while others drag out projects for months and would probably never even consider that I should be paid for work completed until I finally say something like, “Great, I’ve included an invoice.” (And I realize that I have a unique privilege of allowing projects to sometimes drag on without pay – and do so only with clients I have had for years and whom I know will pay eventually; it’s not something I would advocate when you are just starting out. And also, for big projects, it is important to ask for a portion [I do half] up front before you begin.) It’s just so fascinating to me that some clients seem completely oblivious to the fact that the work a freelancer does has a price tag.

Aspirations Mini-Update: I have been working toward all my aspirations. Well maybe not all, but many. (I have made progress on all but one of my Personal/Self Improvement aspirations, for instance.) One thing I did was start a very simplistic Excel spreadsheet where I could track the things I wanted to do regularly, if not necessarily daily. Playing the piano and writing and exercising and walking outside. That kind of thing. And what I have noticed is that I cannot do every single thing I want to do daily in a single day. There are just not enough hours in the day. I mean, I suppose I could break up my day in such a way that I could get to everything… but that seems overly rigid and also, to be honest, exhausting. There needs to be some flexibility. For one thing, if I walk outside for 30 minutes then it seems like overkill to also walk on the treadmill. For another thing, if I am really on a roll with, say, writing, I don’t want to STOP just because it’s time to play the piano for fifteen minutes, you know? So I am still trying to feel my way through what is a reasonable way to achieve these goals without achieving them simply for the sake of putting a check mark in my spreadsheet. Perhaps I do need to find a way to create some sort of a schedule, though. 

Unusual Snack Foods: One of my all-time favorite snacks is a half a green bell pepper filled with cottage cheese and sprinkled with Lawry’s Seasoned Salt. (We called it “carrot salt” when I was growing up, probably because my mother also sprinkled it on carrots.) (Carrots are also delicious dipped in carrot-salted cottage cheese.) 

Neither my husband nor my daughter would touch this snack with a ten-foot pole, but it is delicious and crunchy and full of protein and SO GOOD. I cannot be the only person in the universe (besides my mother) who enjoys it. Have you ever tried this amazing combo? If not, would you be willing to try it? (You won’t hurt my feelings if you say no; I am still very iffy on the chicken thighs situation, so I fully understand New Food Resistance.)

Are there unusual combinations of foods that you like to snack on? 

That’s all I have for you today, Internet! I hope you have a fabulous weekend full of cake and weird snacks and reasonable pronunciations!

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Some Gentle Aspirations for 2023

As has become my start-of-year habit, I am going to list out some gentle aspirations that Today Me believes are important to pursue in the new year. I recognize that Today Me and End of December 2023 Me may have different priorities, so I am not forcing anything on either of us. This may sound wishy-washy, and it is. I do like to strive to make improvements in my life, where possible. But sometimes, my best guesses at what will make my life seem better or easier or more fulfilling don’t result in improving anything, in which case they were fun experiments. Sometimes, they become real upgrades in my life, a source of happiness or pride or relief. I wonder which of the following will turn out to be which?

I broke these aspirations into categories, and there are quite a lot of them. That doesn’t daunt me; I’m guessing a few of them will naturally drop off as I complete them or forget about them completely. 

Personal / Self Improvement

• Aspiration: Read 70 books. I read 86 books in 2022 and 74 in 2021, so I think this is doable. I don’t see my reading habits changing a whole lot, although there are of course the unplanned and agonizing reading slumps that happen every now and again. If I only read 50, I will be fine with that. 
• Aspiration: Get a massage. My mother-in-law got me a massage gift certificate for my birthday in 2020 that I have not yet used for, I hope, obvious reasons. But I love a massage and it would be a fun treat to have one this year.
• Aspiration: Give my line-a-day journal another go. I started tackling this aspiration early in the morning of January 1, and immediately made a mistake. I wrote a few little lines about the last day of 2022, but I did so – in pen – on the first day of 2023. Also, I wrote “Saturday” (IN PEN) above the date, and then had to cross it out and write Sunday above it. So I have already made a huge, indelible (totally unimportant in the grand scheme, I realize this) mistake and I am going to have to fight so hard against my impulse to never open the journal again. Maybe I should just buy a new one. My husband thinks I am ridiculous, and suggested I just skip a day and then start again as though I hadn’t made the mistake. So I am trying that. But I can feel the mistake, infecting the entire journal. (He also suggested copying the text into the correct day, then using whiteout on the mistake, and starting fresh, which – just so you understand completely my particular brand of irrational – does not erase the mistake. It just buries it there under white goop.) So we’ll see whether I buy a new one or continue with line-a-day journaling at all or somehow resist all my innate tendencies and forge on with the inalterably ruined journal.
• Aspiration: Read more poetry. I burnt out early on poetry last year, but I still find it holds enormous value in my life. Maybe I just shouldn’t put so much pressure on reading it daily.
• Aspiration: Master two Chopin songs on the piano. I have been working on relearning the Raindrop Prelude, which I could play flawlessly in high school, and my dad has been learning Waltz in A Minor and I love listening to him play it, so I want to learn that one too.
• Aspiration: Buy some cute date-night-appropriate shirts. This means not falling into the trap of finding nothing appealing so instead buying yet another long-sleeved T-shirt/sweatshirt/sweater that is fine for hanging out at home but not great for Feeling Cute and Dressy and then feeling like I did buy the shirts I am looking for when really I didn’t.
• Reach Aspiration: Try to keep a spreadsheet of these goals, for tracking purposes and also purposes of not forgetting them until December 31. 

Health 

• Aspiration: Do a sweets revamp. This is a family goal. The three of us have developed some very bad habits and I really don’t like how they are affecting Carla. She chooses sweets first, always, and I think this is because we always have cookies and candy lying around. A sweets revamp does not mean No Sweets Ever. We can even set a weekly family goal to go get ice cream or buy a candy bar or whatever. On Valentine’s Day and Easter, I will probably lift the restriction for a day or two of unbridled sweets eating. It just means getting them out of our immediate orbit so that they are available when we could be eating other things. Yesterday I collected all of the sweet things I could find and threw them away or put them in a “to donate” bin. (I did leave three – why do we have three???? – unopened bags of chocolate chips in the pantry, but I could choose to donate them at any time.) So that’s Step 1. Now I just need to complete Step 2, which is to keep sweets out of the house for the rest of the year.
• Aspiration: Do what is necessary to make my feet feel as good as they can. The combination that has had the best results in terms of limiting pain has been stretching my feet morning and night, religiously, combined with walking. Not-walking seems to result in more pain than walking. I haven’t figured out the ideal amount of walking yet, but getting at least 10,000 steps seems to help. 
• Aspiration: Spend ten minutes outside every day. This seems outlandish considering I haven’t set foot outside in days, but it’s something I really want to prioritize.
• Aspiration: Buy some winter boots I can walk in.
• Aspiration: Eat more vegetables. I am doing this for myself, and by extension influencing my family to eat more vegetables (the benefit of being the family meal planner, grocery shopper, and chef).
• Aspiration: Figure out a skincare routine that doesn’t make me want to claw my face off. My face is driving me out of my mind. It is simultaneously excruciatingly itchy, to the point that I need to take Benadryl regularly to curb it, and constantly broken out. Every day there is a new pimple or five on my face. At the risk of oversharing (I would never), I am currently on Day 5 of enduring a cystic zit that is so enormous and so painful I feel embarrassed when even my husband looks at me. I DO NOT LIKE THIS. I have an appointment with my dermatologist for early February (sob) and I don’t think I can get anything earlier, and honestly don’t have high hopes that he will help. But I need to figure out some way through this. I am kind of attached to my face.
• Reach Aspiration: If I am reading/writing blog posts, I am walking on the treadmill. I have gotten pretty adept at this, over the break. I’m not sure if I can keep it up (right now, I am typing this while waiting for my tea to brew, and then I don’t want to drink tea while walking on the treadmill because that seems like a disaster waiting to happen), but if I can pair the two activities in my mind, just think how much more of both I will do! 

Connection

• Aspiration: Get a pedicure with Carla. She’s at the age where I think this would feel like a fun treat. Although I’m guessing she’ll enjoy the foot-sanding portion of the pedicure as much as I do. (Carla, however wants to do a mani-pedi, mainly, I think, because she likes the term “mani-pedi.” She is working on not biting her nails this year, so I am hopeful that she will succeed and we will get a mani-pedi together. Or a pedicure and then a mani-pedi some other time!) 
• Aspiration: Put my phone away when Carla and I are together. Why it is so hard to choose chatting with my lovely, fascinating daughter over knowing exactly what’s happening on Twitter/Instagram/Wordle right that second is beyond my powers of comprehension. But the days when she wants me to pay attention to her are surely numbered, and also I want her to remember me as an engaged mother not as someone addicted irrepressibly to her phone, so this is something I really, really want to work on. 
• Aspiration: Find a way to see my grad school friend in-person. We have A Plan, we just need to implement it. 
• Aspiration: Go on ten dates with my husband. During the early days of the pandemic, we got out of the habit. But now we have two great babysitter options and both feel more comfortable about being in restaurants, so there’s nothing stopping us from going out more often.
• Aspiration: Get together with two friends a month. This one makes me nervous, because I have a tendency to feel lonely and isolated and then overschedule myself and then get overwhelmed and become a hermit for several weeks and then feel lonely and isolated etc. etc. etc. But maybe if I plan, in advance, to get together with two friends a month, it will feel more intentional? Also, a couple of friends like to go for walks together so that’s a good way to meet two goals at once. Efficiency in action. 

• Reach Aspiration: Invite neighbors over for coffee/wine/snacks. We have the sweetest, kindest, most generous-with-their-time-and-dogs neighbors. I would love to get know them better, and I think I can (maybe) invite them over, one household at a time, for a few minutes of connection. Maybe. I hope. (I can already feel my socially anxious soul straining away from this idea. And also how do I convey that I would like them to come over without their dogs?)

Work/Finance

• Aspiration: Finish my in-progress manuscripts (and don’t start another one!!!!). I can do this if I put my mind to it. I am good at writing lots of words. I can do this. 
• Aspiration: Revise my completed manuscript. I am so very tired of my completed manuscript. But it needs some revision and A LOT of trimming, so I need to tackle it again. 
• Aspiration: Query 100 agents. This sounds like a ton, but it is fewer than two agents a week. This is doable. 
• Aspiration: Make good use of the writing accountability team a friend and I set up last fall. We met twice, and only once did we write, but the intention is to meet every week and spend a short time walking together in nature and then devote two hours to writing or writing-related projects. If I complete this goal, it will mean I am making good progress toward my other writing goals. 
• Reach Aspiration: Take a class in short story writing. This is a Big Scary Goal, but one I would really like to attempt. Maybe when my writing partner returns from his six months abroad, so we could do it together?

Home/Property

• Aspiration: Repot my plants. A new very cute plant store opened up just down the street and they will repot your plants FOR YOU for FIVE AMERICAN DOLLARS apiece. I have resisted repotting my plants, even though they are all on death’s door, because I am so sure I will kill them. Now I can pay to have someone else do it! Someone who knows what they’re doing! This should be an easy goal to accomplish.
• Aspiration: Fix the freaking closet door. We have the materials necessary for fixing the door, because we bought them more than a year ago with the idea that we would use them to fix the door, we just need to FIX THE DOOR.
• Aspiration: Try, again, to find someone to repaint the trim. Why is it so infernally difficult to find a person to do a thing when that person’s job is to do the very thing you want to pay them to do?
• Reach Aspiration: Gallery wall. My eternal dream, always just out of reach.

Well, there you have it. Some gentle aspirations for the year. Looking at these aspirations, all together, I am wondering if my word of the year should be “consistent.” It’s a word I resist, because consistency is not my strong point; perhaps that is an even stronger reason for allowing it to exert whatever influence meditating on one theme for the year will exert.

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Revisiting My 2022 Aspirations

I reread my post about my aspirations for this year, and holy cats I crack myself up. Like, some of the things are just ludicrous and others I completely forgot about and others (GALLERY WALL) are just permanent ridiculous features on this list. This is why I do this, not necessarily because I am a goal-oriented person, but because it is so fun and funny to me to see what was important at the beginning of the year vs. at the end.

Personal

Aspiration: Read 50 books. Complete! In 2022, I read 86 books! Woo! 

Aspiration: Work out 5 days a week. Incomplete. 2022 was my worst year ever for exercise. My feet hurt and I felt very sorry for myself and just sat around like a grumpy lump. 

Aspiration: Read a poem every day. Incomplete. I was good about this for several months and then just… stopped. I am not a very consistent person. 

Aspiration: Buy some new shirts that make me feel cute and not like a slob. Incomplete. I returned the shirts I got before I wrote this post and once again find myself lamenting the lack of cute shirts – particularly shirts that are date-night worthy. I need to correct this. 

Aspiration: Come up with a workable weekly schedule. Incomplete. My schedule is even worse this year than it was last year, with the addition of all of Carla’s extracurriculars. 

Aspiration: Try baked oatmeal. Complete! I did try baked oatmeal and I did not like it.  

Reach Aspiration: Leave my phone upstairs unless I leave the house. Incomplete. Hahahahaha. I totally forgot about this one.

Family

Aspiration: Eat more vegetables. Incomplete. I don’t think I achieved this in any shape or form. Is it possible that we eat fewer vegetables than a year ago? Perhaps. 

Aspiration: Do more non-screen things together. Complete-ish, with room to improve. We played games, we went on a road trip, we did lots of skiing, we did a few bike rides, we visited a few museums. We can do more, though. 

Aspiration: Do less “forcing” of my will on the family. Incomplete. I had to laugh tenderly at this aspiration, because reading this goal, and absorbing the frustrated/resentful energy that emanated off of it, it was so clear that my lack of Christmas spirit and my annual holiday overwhelm coupled with yet another open-ended school closure had just pushed me right over the edge. 

Aspiration: Go on some dates with my husband. Complete-ish? I think my bar was “three,” and my husband and I have gone on… three, maybe? Or was it four? And one overnight trip to a local resort? 

Reach Aspiration: Have friends over for dinner. Complete! We had one set of family friends over for dinner in 2022! Now that our ceiling has been repaired and I am not so embarrassed by our kitchen, perhaps we will have friends over again! (Probably it will be the same family.)

Reach Aspiration: Stop treating Carla’s needs as if they are mine. Incomplete. I did not do very well on this.  In fact, I think I kind of forgot about it and even re-reading what I wrote last year, I’m having a little trouble understanding exactly what I meant. 

Work/Finance

Aspiration: Revise my manuscript and start querying agents. Complete! I revised the manuscript, started querying, and got one request for a full and one request for a partial and many, many nos. But it’s a start!

Aspiration: Finish my second manuscript. Incomplete. I did not do this. In fact, I did the opposite which was to start another manuscript and get completely distracted by that one. 

Aspiration: Get a financial advisor. Complete! We got a financial advisor, handed over a big chunk of our savings, and he is Doing Things. It’s been pretty much the absolute worst year in more than a decade for investing of all kinds though, so it’s been fun. (No.) Love reading that monthly statement and seeing our principle dwindle. (No.) 

Reach Aspiration: Take a writing class. Complete. I took a very short class about query writing that turned out to be kind of a dud. But I did it. I’d like to take a more structured, traditional class about writing short stories this year. Maybe.

Home/Property

Aspiration: Install a gallery wall in the living room. Incomplete. This item will be on the list forever and ever and ever. We were so busy with the craft room last year when my husband was off and could actually help that we did not do anything about the gallery wall then. While he was home for a week this winter break, I raised it to him as a possible project and he had forgotten that he’d ever agreed to do it. ARGH. Maybe I just need to give up on this one? Despite everyone’s very good and reasonable ideas every time I bring up the gallery wall project, I cannot do it without my husband. I just can’t; he must be a part of it. And if he’s not going to participate, then it’s not going to happen. 

Aspiration: Hire someone to redo our ceiling and paint our trim. Half complete! I did hire someone to come out and fix our ceiling! And he did indeed do that! The several handymen sorts of people I had over to quote us on painting the trim never called me back though, so that needs to be sorted at a later time.

Aspiration: Hire someone to fix our fridge. As complete as it can be! I did find someone to come out and look at our fridge. Turns out, he couldn’t fix it because our fridge is awful and cannot be fixed! Woo hoo! For reference, our fridge is a GE but made by Samsung. It has a GE logo on it, so when I made the appointment, I told the receptionist that it was a GE fridge. As soon as the service person arrived and realized that it is a Samsung fridge, he said, “I can’t fix this. I wouldn’t have come out here if I had known in advance that it is a Samsung, because I have experience with this kind of fridge and it is unfixable.” He did decline to charge me the service fee just for showing up, which was nice. And then he gave me a very detailed and maddening backstory about why our fridge is the way that it is. (Has to do with the type of cooling system Samsung uses in their fridges, which is very complicated but in a nutshell sucks and causes all sorts of issues including but not limited to the ones we have been having. There has been at least one class action lawsuit against Samsung for the issue, according to the service person, but as I understand it, there have been no major consequences so Samsung continues to manufacture the exact same type of fridge and produce the exact same type of problems.) He also made a couple of suggestions about how to temporarily alleviate the issue (empty it completely, let it sit unplugged for three days), which we tried, and which worked, but was indeed very temporary. So. We still have the fridge, it’s still a piece of crap, but at the time of this writing – I realize anything could change at any time – it cools and holds a lot of food and is very beautiful so we haven’t shelled out the thousands of dollars that replacing it would require.

Aspiration: Clean our basement and finalize a craft space for Carla. Complete! This happened! Carla uses it on the regular! I promise I will post about it in more detail.

Reach Aspiration: PAINT THE BASEBOARDS MY GOD IT HAS BEEN 11 YEARS. Year Twelve, still green, baby! 

By my count, that’s half complete and half incomplete. Since these were aspirations and not set-in-stone goals, I am happy to celebrate the successes and shrug at the things that weren’t a big enough priority to address in 2022. But some of these may make an appearance on my 2023 list… we’ll see. 

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Some Gentle Aspirations for 2022

Time for some non-resolutions! As per tradition, I am setting some gentle aspirations, rather than goals. These are simply a testament to what seems important now, and when I review them at the end of the year, they will help me better understand my priorities over time. I refuse to feel bad about failing to accomplish any of them, except for the writing-related ones, which I already feel bad about not achieving years ago. 

In addition to the aspirations I may or may not complete, I would also like to state that I am making some resolutions that I am NEARLY CERTAIN of completing, either because I have already completed them prior to this writing, or because I am on the precipice of completing them in mere days. That is the power of posting one’s goals on the internet. I can decide which goals to post, and maybe I have already achieved them, and that is my business and I will be delighted to count them as complete. It is the equivalent of writing a to-do list where the first item is “wake up” and the second item is “write to-do list.” It feels good to cross things off the list and momentum is important! For instance, I encourage you to put “put away holiday décor” on your own list of resolutions, even if you stowed the last ornament days ago. Then you are already ahead of the game!

For sake of honesty, however, I will alert you to any of these goals that are already half complete. Because I don’t want to cheat anyone, not you, certainly, and not my future self, who will be super annoyed that I have halved her feeling of accomplishment at year’s end but who will also appreciate my sense of ethics. 

Personal

Aspiration: Read 50 books. In 2021, I read 74 books. That doesn’t seem replicable, but I think 50 is an achievable goal. 

Aspiration: Work out 5 days a week. This is an oldie but a goodie. I need to get back into regular exercise, and I know it can be done. 

Aspiration: Read a poem every day. I am semi-stealing this aspiration from Nicole, who read Rumi every day last year. Wow. That is A Feat. But it inspired me. However, I am not going to limit myself to Rumi, or to a single poet. I have an entire bookcase FULL of poetry and yet I rarely read poems! This must stop. Poetry is an essential part of life, and I can so easily grab a random book off my shelves each evening, and flip to a random poem each morning rather than reaching for my phone. 

Aspiration: Buy some new shirts that make me feel cute and not like a slob. Listen, you know I am All For stay-at-home clothes. But I have discovered over the past somethingish months that I would like to feel cute in clothes when I inevitably am forced to leave the house, and I do not feel cute in clothing that doesn’t fit me. This is one of those goals that I may have almost achieved even as I write this: I ordered two shirts from Nordstrom with a Christmas gift card. But I am cautious. The new shirts could look… not good. So I may still have this feat ahead of me. 

Aspiration: Come up with a workable weekly schedule. This stems from a middle-of-the-night attempt to come up with a schedule for myself, allowing for maximum writing and revising time, but also slotting in time for working out, eating, and blog stuff. Which led me to determine that there aren’t enough hours in the day and I need to “wake up at 5:00 and go to bed at 10:00 every day,” when I don’t know if that’s doable. Okay. I’m pretty sure it’s not. What I need to do instead is to come up with a few different versions of a schedule, try it out, and then figure out what combination of timings and tasks works for me. 

Aspiration: Try baked oatmeal. This is a late addition, because I somehow forgot about how badly I want to try baked oatmeal after our breakfast convo the other day (she says, as though it wasn’t in early November). For some reason, it intimidates me. Mainly because I really really don’t like oatmeal. But this sounds more like a cookie than like hot mush, and it gets such high praise, and I am going to try it. 

Reach Aspiration: Leave my phone upstairs unless I leave the house. This is laughable to even attempt, isn’t it. And yet I have done this, multiple times, and feel such a sense of freedom from the pull of email and social media when I do. If I could do this on a daily basis, just think of all the work I could get done! 

Family

Aspiration: Eat more vegetables. If you think this aspiration seems as though it should belong to the Personal category, you would be correct. But I am the meal planner and dinner maker in this house, so I have a certain amount of vegetable wielding power around here. We could all do with more veg on our plates. 

Aspiration: Do more non-screen things together. Listen, we have a good amount of Family Togetherness around here, which is a wonderful blessing. But a lot of our time together involves a PlayStation or a TV. We can do better than that. If we ever get snow, we will go skiing and sledding. Once the weather warms up and dries out, we can go biking. When the weather, as is typical, absolutely sucks, we can play the wide variety of board games we own. If we don’t want to play the ones we own, we can buy more of the murder mystery games we enjoy. This is doable. 

Aspiration: Do less “forcing” of my will on the family. This is semi-stolen from/inspired by Swistle. (Maybe the connection is only in my head, because her resolution is very different from mine.) I have noticed that a lot of things don’t happen unless I nag and badger and harp. That’s not fun for anyone, INCLUDING ME. For instance, we were supposed to make sticky toffee pudding for New Year’s Eve dinner. Dessert. You know what I mean. But even though I washed the potatoes and broccoli well in advance of dinnertime, no movement was made by anybody else to prepare anything for the dessert. Then my husband decided at a very late moment – like 4:00 or 5:00 pm – that he wanted to work out. Which is great! Exercise! I am fine with that! But then when he was done, it was much too late to do anything, including make the fancy dinner we had planned, and especially making sticky toffee pudding. We did end up making the steak and potatoes and broccoli, which were delicious, but we didn’t make the pudding. And we didn’t make it yesterday, either, even though we were Going To Make It, because once again he got caught up playing video games with Carla and then at 5:00 pm wanted to work out and lost track of the time. This is fine! It’s prioritization at work! It is not enough of a priority for him to note the time and stop playing video games. It is not enough of a priority for me to do all the work of making sticky toffee pudding by myself. So it didn’t happen. It could have happened, if I had called down to him that we needed to get started if we wanted to have sticky toffee pudding for dinner. But the thing is, it is not my job to be Ultimate Time Monitor. It just isn’t. So I wrote a blog post and drank a cocktail while he worked out, and we did not make sticky toffee pudding, and maybe we won’t do it today either, who knows? There are three of us in this family, and it is not my sole responsibility to keep everything on track. That’s not fair, and it’s not fun, and no one likes the Time Badger, least of all the Time Badger herself. Some things are going to fall by the wayside. And sometimes that will cause some pain. And maybe that pain will inspire a change in behavior, though I am not optimistic. 

Aspiration: Go on some dates with my husband. We went on three (outdoor, rainy) dates in 2021. We now have a good babysitter to call on, should we need her, and one of these days we may decide to brave a restaurant. But even if all our dates take place in the summer, outside, that is fine! I just want to spend some time ALONE with my husband, AWAY from our house.

Reach Aspiration: Have friends over for dinner. We have been to two friends’ homes this past year, and if nothing else, etiquette requires that we return the favor. But also I would like to entertain again. A little bit. Maybe.

Reach Aspiration: Stop treating Carla’s needs as if they are mine.  Brought to you by Girl Scout Cookie Selling Season, which is my own personal hell and yet which is somehow My Thing instead of my husband’s. But that’s only one example of many. This is a two-fold aspiration. First, Carla is eight-and-a-half and can do with more responsibility. Second, just because I am The Mom doesn’t mean that I am automatically responsible for Carla’s laundry in addition to my own, for Carla’s meals in addition to my own, for Carla’s whatever-whatever. We are so fortunate to have two parents in this household, and I should allow/enable the other parent to do just as much as I do. Sure, some things will always fall to me because of my husband’s job (making and attending appointments, for instance). I think, for awhile, this will involve things like answering questions about “what does Carla normally eat with her chicken nuggets?” but perhaps that will be a worthwhile endeavor. See also the related issue of Putting Away Rags and Hand Towels Is Not My Sole Responsibility. 

Work/Finance

Aspiration: Revise my manuscript and start querying agents. Everything I read says that the agent-seeking stage is soul destroying. I am going to do it anyway. Check back at year’s end to see if I have fragments of soul remaining.

Aspiration: Finish my second manuscript. This second manuscript is a thriller, and I think it will be quicker and simpler than the first one. I just need to figure out the ending and WRITE IT. That is in the wrong order. I need to WRITE IT and figure out the ending.

Aspiration: Get a financial advisor. This is another one of those goals that I have already all but completed! My husband and I met with a financial advisor, and he is supposedly looking over our haphazard finances at the moment, and all we need to do is sign an agreement and let him HELP US make wise financial decisions! Side note: Carla asked us if he was a man. Her follow-up question was whether all financial advisors are men. Her follow-up to that was whether we knew any of these supposedly-existing women financial advisors. This line of questioning kind of made me wish that I had found a woman financial advisor. But it was hard enough to find THIS GUY and get up the nerve to meet with him, so I am moving forward as is.

Reach Aspiration: Take a writing class. I want to take a class about writing short stories (I am not good at writing things that are short) (you: YES WE ARE AWARE) or maybe about writing a personal essay. This terrifies me. 

Home/Property

Aspiration: Install a gallery wall in the living room. This one is BACK ON THE LIST, baby! You have kindly supported me and offered me reasonable suggestions for accomplishing this goal by myself many times, and still I have balked. You must first understand that I am incapable of making straight lines. “But use a ruler,” you say. No, even with a ruler, my lines somehow get distracted and wander off. So my husband MUST be involved in this project, because he is the yin to my yang, the meticulous to my slapdash. You must second understand that my husband was originally GUNG HO with this project, many years ago when it first appeared on my list of totally achievable desires. And that he then decided, at some point, unbeknownst to me, that it was MY project, and I should be in charge. That’s where things broke down. Because while I am willing to say “we should have a gallery wall in the living room,” I am unwilling to be the sole person dictating which items appear on said wall, which is co-owned and co-utilized and co-looked-at by other people in our family. And also, even if I could just go balls to the wall (unintentional pun) (but disturbing/perplexing imagery when I call out said pun and visualize it) (why is “balls to the wall” even a phrase? I have never thought deeply about it before and never want to do so again) full steam ahead and pick out a bunch of artwork, I simply cannot install it in a way that would look purposeful and not like a feeble earthquake had come through and jostled everything on the walls. My husband refused to care about the project. I refused to move forward. The project died. This is very long. This past fall, my husband and daughter and I went on a road trip, and found a little gallery that had lots of fun things, including a painting by a local artist of our state bird. We wanted very badly to buy the painting, but I said that I couldn’t in good conscience purchase it, knowing that I wanted it to be on the gallery wall, and knowing also that the gallery wall would not happen. This turned out to be a carrot, friends! A carrot! My husband said something like, “Well, if I promise to help you realize your gallery wall dreams, can we get the painting?” Marital compromise at work! And I agreed and we bought the painting and it has remained in its paper wrapping since August. But now, NOW, we are on the threshold of a gallery wall! Supposedly! Let’s refrain from holding our breaths. 

Aspiration: Hire someone to redo our ceiling and paint our trim. I am including this as one aspiration because a friend suggested a person who supposedly does both. 

Aspiration: Hire someone to fix our fridge. Our fridge leaks. It makes constant musical noises at us to alert us that Something Is Wrong. It has done this for… years, now. I have been afraid to have someone look at it because I fear that the only answer is to buy a new fridge. But it’s time. It’s time. 

Aspiration: Clean our basement and finalize a craft space for Carla. This is another aspiration that is all but complete. We spent the last week of December doing a DRASTIC CULL of our basement, and it looks as fabulous as a basement storage area can look. We also set up the craft-space items Carla received from Santa, and are in the process of finalizing it all. There is still much to be done (I need to cull THREE boxes of Precious Baby Items to ONE, for instance) (plus we need to buy a rug to go underneath the craft area), but it is well on the way. 

Reach Aspiration: PAINT THE BASEBOARDS MY GOD IT HAS BEEN 11 YEARS. Why is this a reach aspiration, you wonder? Well. My baseboards have been dark forest green for eleven years, that’s why. 

I think that’s PLENTY for this year, Internet. Wish me luck! 

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Revisiting My Loose Aspirations for 2021

While I continue to insist that I am NOT a resolutions type of person, I do like to look at the year ahead and consider some of the things I might want to accomplish before the planet makes its next turn around the sun. And I try very hard not to approach these intentions in black and white terms of success or failure. Setting goals and revisiting your progress toward those goals is a good way to calibrate your priorities, is all.

Last year, I made some extra gentle aspirations for 2021, and I think this year I will try to be even MORE gentle. Low expectations is the path to happiness, baby.

Here are the results of my 2021 aspirations. Having completed 10 of my 19 goals, I feel pretty good about what I ended up prioritizing. Especially because four were “reach” aspirations that I would have LIKED to have gotten to, but wasn’t really expecting to from the get-go.

Personal

Aspiration: Read 40 books. 

Result: Complete! This year, I read 74 books, which is so many more than I’ve ever read in a year before. I credit “joining” Bookstagram with inspiring me to read. I also really increased the number of audiobooks I listened to, which helped. It did mean that I listened to almost none of the Office Ladies podcast that I enjoy so much, but I guess you win some, you lose some.

Aspiration: Exercise five days a week. 

Result: Complete! I logged 280 workouts in 2021, which works out (unintentional pun) to a little more than 5 days per week. In reality, I logged the most workouts March through July, with my activity level tapering off beginning in August, until it was nearly non-existent by December. But I will get back into it.

Aspiration: Buy new towels. 

Result: Complete! I did this! I replaced my 10-year-old towels and my husband’s with… identical towels. Did I manage to purge my home of the old towels? No, I did not. But we take baby steps and the first step was the BUYING of the towels, and I did that.

Aspiration: Stop looking at my phone while in bed. 

Result: Incomplete. I did not succeed at this. Lately, I find myself unable to read anything but my phone, so I do look at it way more than I should. For a large portion of the year, though, I was choosing books instead. So I CAN survive with less of my phone, and I plan to make reducing my reliance on the iDistraction a goal for 2022.

Aspiration: Stop drinking anything after nine p.m. 

Result: Incomplete. I totally forgot about this. But I also had fewer issues with waking up multiple times per night to pee? Perhaps there is something to be said for making embarrassing admissions on one’s blog.

Aspiration: Make focaccia. 

Result: Complete? I did make focaccia but it was a dismal failure.

Reach Aspiration: Cut my own hair. 

Result: WHY WAS THIS A GOAL? Was I suffering from some sort of pandemic-induced delusion about my abilities??? I did not do this. I did not cut anyone’s hair, which is for the best. I waited until I could feel safe-ish going to the salon and I got my hair cut by a professional twice and it was GLORIOUS each time.

Family

Aspiration: Buy bikes for the adults and go on bike rides as a family. 

Result: Complete! We did this! All three of us have bikes and helmets! We have a bike rack for the car! And we took a very small number of family bike rides. We will do MORE this year!

Aspiration: Get out of the house, as a family, every single weekend to Do Something. 

Result: Incomplete. This did not happen. Even with my tiny family of three, it turns out I have very limited powers to motivate them to get outside when they want to play video games.

Reach Aspiration: Have a family game night once a month. 

Result: Incomplete. We did NOT do this, not that I even remembered it was something I aspired to. We had family game night… three times? But we bought one of those murder mystery games in December and plan to complete it together, so I’m hoping that we can have more game nights this year.

Reach Aspiration: Figure out how to see my parents this summer. 

Result: Complete! Carla and I flew out to see my parents during what turned out to be a lull in the pandemic, and it was wonderful. I am so glad we did it.

Work/Finance

Aspiration: Revise my manuscript and get it to beta readers. 

Result: COMPLETE!!!!! I sent my manuscript to beta readers October 1, and have been receiving such wonderful, thoughtful, useful feedback. It makes me all teary to think of how these kind, wonderful people are taking specific time out of their lives to prioritize MY writing and to offer ideas and suggestions for making it better. Beta readers are angels, truly. This month, I am going to be revising based on some of the feedback I’ve already received, and hope to incorporate everyone’s thoughts and have a revised draft by March 1.

Aspiration: Look for a writing class or writing group. 

Result: Complete! I reached out to an author friend who serendipitously had an opening in a writing feedback group, and I joined it, and it has been lovely! We kind of paused over the holidays, but I’m hoping we’ll get back into it again soon. It is so wonderful to be part of a group of smart, talented writers who can give you to-the-minute comments on my work!

Aspiration: Put money into a personal 401(k). 

Result: Complete! I am still kicking myself for not doing this earlier. It was very easy.

Reach Aspiration: Get a first draft of manuscript #2. 

Result: Incomplete, but a good start. I am 50,000 words into Manuscript #2. I am going to finish it in 2022.

Home/Property

Aspiration: Touch up the outside of the house. 

Result: Incomplete. We did not do this, but it will be a goal in 2022. Our trim is starting to look Very Shabby, to the point that I am certain our neighbors are whispering about us.

Aspiration: Deal with the tree issues in our backyard. 

Result: Incomplete. I… don’t know what I meant by this goal. I mean, our trees still look kind of awful? But I have no idea what to do to fix them? I think I emailed the landscapers, asking their advice, and then maybe never responded to them? Whoops.

Aspiration: Get a fake Christmas tree. 

Result: Complete! We got an artificial Christmas tree and put it up this year and it was lovely and I don’t mind it as much as I anticipated I would. Plus, my husband now has to pretend for the rest of our days that he enjoys putting it together because it was his idea.

Reach Aspiration: Hire someone to repaint the interior of the house. 

Result: Incomplete. This did not happen. But I am really distressed by the state of our ceilings, so I am going to put this back on the list for 2022. 

If you care to share, was there something in 2021 that you were really excited to have accomplished? Or, conversely, some mild aspiration you spectacularly failed to achieve/remember?

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Extra Gentle Aspirations for 2021

Despite… everything… I want to continue with my now two-year-old tradition of coming up with a few aspirations for the year ahead.  I do. But these goals are VERY optimistic. And I am going to be especially gentle on myself, I think. 

Personal

Aspiration: Read 40 books. I read 46 books in 2020 – a personal record. Given that sometimes I can devour a book in a day and other times I read nothing at all for weeks on end, it’s hard to say whether I will ever meet this goal. But it’s fun to track.

Aspiration: Exercise five days a week. This is the same goal from last year and seems worthwhile to try for again.

Aspiration: Buy new towels. My bath towels are twelve years old. I use them daily and they refuse to be soft anymore and NO MATTER WHAT I do they have a very faint whiff of mildew.  It seems easy enough to just… buy new towels.  But no. It is not that straightforward. My husband is the first hurdle; they are not his so they don’t affect him, plus I do have other even older towels I could use (but they are blue and our bathroom color scheme is GREY). And then also I feel so wasteful and frivolous, because they still DRY. And I do have the blue backup towels. And some people don’t even have ANY towels. But they are uncomfortable and faintly smelly and I want new ones, so I’m putting it on the list.

Aspiration: Stop looking at my phone while in bed. There is absolutely ZERO benefit in scrolling through my news feed when I am trying to fall asleep. Reading a book is SO MUCH BETTER for my mental health. 

Aspiration: Stop drinking anything after nine p.m. This is kind of dumb, but I tend to drink a mug of tea late in the evening… and then I am up every hour to pee all night long and it is NOT restful. So perhaps I can just… not do that? 

Aspiration: Make focaccia. Listen, we have to have some FUN aspirations, right? I have long wanted to make focaccia. Every time I see a focaccia recipe, I ogle it. I have even headed into several weeks of the past ten months fully intending to make focaccia. But it has never come to pass. This is the year, Internet. The year of focaccia!

Reach Aspiration: Cut my own hair. This sounds bonkers, I know. I can’t cut a straight line to save my life; how can I possibly cut my own hair? But it is coming up on a year since I last had a haircut, and my hair is long enough that it could (probably) survive even a botched little trim; I could simply go get a professional haircut if I make a mess of it. I have watched extensive YouTube videos about how to do it, and it seems fairly straightforward. Perhaps I can persuade my husband to do it for me? He cuts his own hair and is very meticulous and steady-handed. Can I make “persuade my husband to cut my hair” a goal for the year ahead?

Family

Aspiration: Buy bikes for the adults and go on bike rides as a family. If the bikes my husband and I have been looking at since literally last April ever come back in stock, we can make this happen.

Aspiration: Get out of the house, as a family, every single weekend to Do Something. This obviously will depend heavily on the status of the pandemic, but even a walk around the neighborhood counts. I just need to inspire us to LEAVE THE HOUSE.

Reach Aspiration: Have a family game night once a month. We LOVE playing games together, but so rarely do during “normal” life. I think it would be really lovely to try to dedicate a day to doing it purposefully. Carla is at a great age for games now, which opens up a bunch of new options. This is a reach because a) my family might not buy in and b) it’s likely I will forget about this.

Reach Aspiration: Figure out how to see my parents this summer. Should the pandemic continue apace, we will obviously continue to stay home. But if it slackens a little, I would really, really like to visit my parents. They have a guest house where Carla and I could stay and quarantine, if that became necessary, so the real hurdle is getting there. Flying makes me Very Nervous. But perhaps we could get a private berth on a train? Then rent a car when we arrived in their state? A train ride would be A Big Fun Adventure for me and Carla to undertake together (my husband would not be able to join us because he wouldn’t be able to leave work for enough time to complete a quarantine), but when last I looked at train tickets, the price was too high to be worth it. Perhaps if we stayed with my parents long enough, it would be worthwhile?

Work/Finance

Aspiration: Revise my manuscript and get it to beta readers. This has to happen. It is my number one priority. 

Aspiration: Look for a writing class or writing group. Note that this is not an aspiration to JOIN a writing class or writing group; we are being extra gentle. But I am thinking it might be useful, at this stage of the writing process, to find an online group of writers who are working on fine-tuning their manuscripts or learning how to write query letters or are workshopping chapters together… I’m not sure what I WANT, but I want to look into it. That’s it, that’s the goal. THEN I can decide whether I actually want to sign up for whatever it is I’ve found.

Aspiration: Put money into a personal 401(k). Again, there is no excuse for not doing this. 

Reach Aspiration: Get a first draft of manuscript #2. This is ridiculous, when I haven’t gotten through a proper revision of the FIRST manuscript, but once I do, I want to jump right into the second novel, which already has about 40,000 words. 

Home/Property

Aspiration: Touch up the outside of the house. We need to repaint the trim.

Aspiration: Deal with the tree issues in our backyard. We have SO MANY issues. The first is that the large oak in the backyard has some sort of fungus. I want to figure out how to address it. The second is that the arborvitae that line three sides of our yard are in rough shape. Some have been devastated by heavy snow and harsh winds, others have been ravaged by hungry deer. It looks terrible and I need to figure out how to take care of it. I think it is going to cost a lot of money, yikes.

Aspiration: Get a fake Christmas tree. This is not really my aspiration; it’s my husband’s. But he gets so grouchy about buying a real tree and setting it up and putting the lights on it that it really harshes my happy Christmas buzz. So I have come around to thinking a pre-lit artificial tree would be a blessing. We have looked for trees in the past, but haven’t ever gone through with the purchase because the one we want is either too expensive or sold out. They haven’t gotten LESS expensive, but I think we’ve mainly gotten over the initial price resistance. Now all we need to do is find the one we want when it is available.

Reach Aspiration: Hire someone to repaint the interior of the house. My parents apparently had someone repaint the house every five years, which boggles my mind. But now it has been ten years since we’ve lived here, and I can see signs that the house needs repainting. The biggest problem areas are the ceilings, believe it or not: they are not popcorn ceilings, but they have a texture, and in the kitchen and bathrooms especially, paint is peeling off of some of the textured areas. 

We shall see how many of these aspirations come to fruition, Internet! I am hopeful and game… but we shall see!

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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. 

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Very Loose List of Assorted Aspirations for 2020

Now that I have revisited my assorted aspirations for 2019, I am ready to draw up a list – a Very Loose List, mind you – of aspirations for this year. It WAS sort of fun to revisit last year’s list and see what I’d prioritized and what I hadn’t. And I don’t feel particularly bad about any of the things I failed to do. In fact, I feel kind of pleased that I accomplished ANY of them.

I plan to take the same kind of approach to this year’s aspirations. On this day and time, they are important and worthy of attention. But 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.

Here we go!

Personal

• 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.

• 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?
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 – maybetwice – a week, which should help still the pendulum.
• 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.
• 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 andI 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.

 

Family

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Plan a trip to visit my niece. We just need to make this happen.

• 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.

• 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.

 

Work/Finance

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

 

House Projects

• 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. 

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

• 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.

 

(WHAT is WITH the spacing in this post??? Maybe I need to make Master WordPress Formatting Issues one of my goals.)

Well. That seems like a good, sturdy list. I fully expect some of these to fall by the wayside, and for other priorities to pop up. But from this vantage point, these seem like worthwhile and achievable goals.

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Goals Report: Revisiting My Aspirations for 2019

Making and tracking resolutions is not really my jam. But last year, for the first time I can remember, I made a big list of Very Loose Aspirations for the year. I wasn’t particularly worried about any of them (except the writing of my novel), and I made the list more for fun than anything else.

I thought it would be fun to revisit that list of aspirations and see which goals I prioritized and which ones I didn’t. (It was kind of fun.) Here are the results:

Habits 

Aspiration: Be in bed by 10:30 every night. 

Result: Incomplete. Actually, I have no idea! I would guess that I head up to bed at about 10:30 to 11:00 pm each night, on average. But there’s really no way to track this without TRACKING it, and I am unwilling to do that. I feel pretty happy about

 

Aspiration: Ignore my phone.

Result: Incomplete. If anything, I have grown MORE addicted to my phone. I installed an app that tracked my phone usage and eventually turned it off because it was so horrifying.

 

Aspiration: Do a practice German lesson every day. 

Result: Incomplete. I realized that I just don’t like learning languages and gave up on this one.

 

Aspiration: Exercise three days a week on average. 

Result: Complete! Although I don’t know for sure because I didn’t track it, I feel like I was pretty successful at this one. There were a few lulls throughout the year, but nothing that lasted more than a few weeks.

 

Aspiration: Eat better. 

Result: Incomplete. I really devolved into a whole lot of Eating My Feelings in September and wasn’t ever really able to get back on top of eating healthful foods in healthful amounts. I currently weigh more than I ever have, which doesn’t feel great. But I’m working on it.

 

Work

Aspiration: Finish the first draft of my manuscript. 

Result: Complete! It’s strange to me that I don’t feel more elated about achieving this goal. I’ve been working toward it for nearly FOUR YEARS. I think it’s because there is still so much work left to do.

 

Aspiration: Figure out what to do with the short story I’ve been working on for a few years. 

Result: Incomplete. Did not think about this once.

 

Aspiration: Set up an interview with a subject expert for my next novel. 

Result: Incomplete. I found that thinking about this project was distracting from my primary project, so I put it on hold.

 

House Projects

Aspiration: Finally get someone to come fix the ice maker. 

Result: Complete! Our ice machine is fully functional.

 

Aspiration: Find out what it takes to stretch the carpet in the upstairs hall. 

Result: Complete! I hired someone to come stretch the carpet, and he did, and it is SO MUCH better.

 

Aspiration: Look into the cost of new windows. 

Result: Complete! I now know far more than I ever wanted to know about windows. I had a BUNCH of window salespeople come over, assess our window situation, and offer estimates. It became very overwhelming – how do you decide between very slight differences in window quality and appearance??? how do you choose to spend $10,000-$20,000 on something that probably won’t increase your home value??? – so we did not replace any of our windows. But we COULD because now I know the options.

 

Aspiration: Revamp the living room in six parts.

• Put up a gallery wall. 
• Result: Incomplete. Started collecting artwork, but never got them on the walls.

 

• Replace the ottoman.
• Result: Complete! We got a new ottoman with inside-storage from Target. I love it.

 

• Replace the side table. 
• Result: Incomplete. I finally found the exact side table I want, but it is MUCH more than I want to spend. And my husband and I decided not to buy any new furniture until we move into a new house (several years down the road).

 

• Convert our wood-burning fireplace into a gas fireplace. 
• Result: Incomplete. We did not even look into what this would take. In fact, I don’t think we even mentioned it again until Christmastime, when my husband idly told my father we were thinking about it.

 

• Paint the baseboards.
• Result: Nope. I did look at them several times and THINK about painting them. But thinking is not quite the same as doing, when it comes to baseboard paint.

 

• As long as we’re dreaming, I’d also love to paint the fireplace, get some curtains for the sliding glass door, and stain our buffet. And get a new couch.
• Result: Nope to all.

 

Aspiration: Get additional craft storage for the kitchen. 

Result: Complete! We bought a set of these IKEA TRONES cabinets and installed them in the hallway between our pantry and laundry room. Yes, they are technically shoe cabinets, but, as I envisioned, they are perfect for storing construction paper and in-progress artwork.

 

Aspiration: Figure out what to do about our grill. 

Result:  Complete! My wonderful father fixed our grill while we were in Europe.

 

Family

Aspiration: Eat dinner together twice a week. 

Result: Complete??? Tentatively??? As with all the goals that actually require tracking to see if I accomplished them, I have no real idea. I THINK we ate together as a family more often – we were especially successful during the summer, when Carla could go to bed a bit later than she does during the school year. And we are definitely better about trying to make it happen when we can. We also started having family movie nights most Fridays, which I think counts. Even though we end up eating together in the basement in front of the TV, rather than at the table, it is a really nice tradition and I hope we keep it up.

 

Aspiration: Do more weekend adventures. 

Result: No idea. We did take family trips to Toronto and Kentucky. And I remember that, shortly after we got back from Europe, my husband and I took Carla downtown to see if we could have a European-style day-of-walking-and-enjoying-the-city-sites. We also took Carla to see a ballet performance of The Nutcracker. And, I mean, we attended SO MANY birthday parties. So maybe we were more successful at this than I think. Okay, I am going to count it as complete.

 

Aspiration: Go on a date night with my husband more often (every six weeks?). 

Result: Incomplete. I do NOT think this happened. In fact, I cannot remember the last date night I had with my husband… so that’s not a good sign.

 

Personal

Aspiration: Be more patient and less yell-y.

Result: Complete. While this is something that I will always continue to monitor/work on, I DO think I made big strides this year in being more patient and less yell-y. Especially with Carla. I have a hot temper that flares up quickly (and extinguishes quickly, as well), so this is something I definitely need to stay on top of.

 

Aspiration: Host friends for dinner. 

Result: Complete! We had friends over several times this past year – which includes the big dinner party we hosted. I was going to say that my enthusiasm for hosting fizzled out toward the end of the year, but we did  have people over for Halloween and then we hosted Thanksgiving and Christmas for our families, so I think I can give myself a pass.

 

Aspiration: Buy new underwear. 

Result: Complete! I bought myself between 8-10 new pairs of underwear, and also got rid of some of the underwear that was hole-y or otherwise cluttering up my underwear drawer.

 

Aspiration: Read 40 books. 

Result: Incomplete.  I read 23 books in 2019.

 

Well, if I did the math correctly, I have a 50% success rate. That sounds pretty dismal, except when you consider that a BUNCH of those incompletes came from my wildly ambitious living room plans.

I have to say, I accomplished more of these things than I thought I would. Still lots of room for improvement, but a pretty successful year.

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