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Posts Tagged ‘Health’

Sunday Seven

Posted in Books, Epic Meal Planning, Feast, Food, Friday Five, Fun, Getting It Together, Home, Resolutions, Seasons, What I'm Into, tagged , , , on September 21, 2025| 2 Comments »

This week holds more news than Friday Five. This week has been…whew. So I bring you the Sunday Seven.

First, my car has decided it is tired, so I have been shopping around for a new one, and I found it! Soon, a sweet little Nissan Versa will join the family. That’s a fun/nerve-wracking/expensive process, but as soon as the necessary paperwork is finalized, she’s mine!

Second, my friend Shadan, host of our cookbook club, now has a cookbook out! You can purchase Cookbook Club: Plant-Based Recipes for Entertaining by Shadan Kishi Price for your very own!

Here are five other things I read/watched/have been pondering this week:

  • Full co-sign on this article on letting your college kid decorate their own dorm. I have such great memories of working with my freshman roommate and suitemates to curate our own space. We had a collage of pictures in the bathroom that we created from magazines. It was epic and a great conversation piece. Remember that this is the first time a lot of new adults get to make all the decisions about what their home looks like. As a seasoned university housing professional, I beg of you – don’t rob your kids of this experience! Talk to them and follow their lead on how much (if any) help they want (PSA – advice not limited to housing. They’re grown. You did a good job raising them to be adults. Trust yourself and them, and let them do it!).
  • I’m rewatching Scandal these days. It’s one of my comfort shows. If I were still writing fanfiction when Scandal came out, I would have shipped Liv and Mellie so hard. I love Scandal in general, but if I were to list my top ten favorite scenes, their scenes together would make up more than half of them. 
  • Speaking of great TV, I love Somebody Somewhere so much and I love Jeff Hiller so much and I love that he won his first Emmy.
  • I agree with Brigid Misselhorn of MMD. I do enjoy seasonal reading. I usually try to sneak in a few seasonal reads every month. For the record, spooky season (which ranges from cozy fantasy to dark academia to horror) is August through January. I said what I said, and I will not be taking any questions on the matter. 
  • I also have seasonal to-do lists. I like this one from Joy Wilson (aka Joy the Baker). Since I rent, most of the maintenance is done by my property management, so I don’t have to worry about the specific seasonal things homeowners do (one thing off my to-do list – I’ll take it.). These are mostly things I do at the beginning of every season, but there are a few fall-specific things I like to complete each September:
    • Step 4 of my Epic Meal Planning process – Snowed-in Meals. Clean out pantry/fridge/freezer by making as many weird meals as I can with what I have to make room for groceries for the upcoming season (yay soup!).
    • Speaking of soup, chop/bag/freeze several rounds of the trinity (onion, carrots, celery) so that they are ready to go. I also would like to take a page out of JTB’s book and do this with cookie dough. Maybe I will be that person someday. That sounds perfect, especially for cozier months.
    • Clean off tables/surfaces. Piles accumulate so easily in my home, and this is where they land. Right now, I think my efforts have just resulted in different, more organized piles, but over the next few weeks, everything I actually keep will hopefully get to where it belongs.
    • Change my air filter.
    • Clean out closets and assess what needs to be donated/repaired/replaced.
    • Look at this year’s resolutions and assess progress. Tweak as needed. Specifically, start to organize next-ten-years bucket list into categories.
    • Find three fun fall things to enjoy. 
    • Start thinking about holiday plans, including travel, writing, cooking/baking. Looking forward to how my theme of wonder is going to show up this year!

I am looking forward to more fall(ish) weather that we’re supposed to have pretty soon. I hope you have had a good weekend and have a smooth week ahead!

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Summer To-Not-Do List

Posted in Alive, Beauty, Fun, Getting It Together, Home, Joy, Mental Health, Roots, Work, tagged , , , on May 21, 2025| 2 Comments »

I’ve had the draft document for this post open with nothing but a title for three days. That seems ominous.

Do I even have plans this summer? Or is it just something I have to get through until the weather is nice enough to wear my boots again?

I know why I’m hesitant. It makes sense. Summer is the busiest time at my job, so while everyone else is making plans to go on vacation, have fun outings, embrace all the summer programs that their community has to offer, and just generally live their best lives, I’m going to be super busy most days and, subsequently, too worn out by the time evening comes around to want to do any of those things. 

I’m also checking in on my parents more, which means at least every other weekend will be spent working on things at the farm, hanging out with my new bird friends (see above), and helping Mom and Dad plan and navigate whatever the next phase will bring.

I’m not really looking for more plans. 

In fact, what would make my summer better is to find things to take off my plate. That seems unlikely, though.

I don’t want to suck at my job or abandon my family. I also don’t want to drop off the face of the earth with friends or miss out on the things that bring me the most joy.

But it’s just a lot, and I probably need to use some of that PTO I have stored up.

So my bucket list this summer is more of to-not-do list. And it’s just two things:

  1. Find 5-10 random days to take off. I’m leaning toward 5 right now, but if things start getting nuttier, it’s gonna need to be closer to 10.
  2. DON’T. TELL. ANYONE. As soon as I say, “I’m really looking forward to taking a couple of days off next week,” people like to respond with “Ooh, we could do something!”

    Which is great. Truly. I adore the place of love and excitement that comes from. I’m glad people still want to hang out with me even when I’m not my very best self, which seems to be all the time these days.

    But the moment I start making plans on my day off…I no longer have the day off. Sure, I may get to sleep in or have more leisure time, and I guess that’s better than nothing. But once I make a plan with someone else, that whole day is now centered around making sure I don’t get too involved in a project or task – or even a spontaneous outing, if that’s where the day’s whims take me – that I forget or show up late to the plans I made. And I’m very bad at turning down things that sound fun with people I love simply because I need to rest. While I strive to be better at this, I recognize that I’m not there yet, so I’m removing the temptation altogether by not letting anyone think I’m available when I’m not.

Whew.

Saying I’m not available when I have the day off is uncomfortable for me. I have struggled with being honest about what I need for most of my adult life. Peeling off the people-pleasing layers I clung to during childhood is hard, and this one is particularly thick. 

It’s work worth doing, though.

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Day 14 – Correct vs. Fun

Posted in 31 Days, Health, Mental Health, Music, Work, Writing, tagged , , on October 14, 2024| Leave a Comment »

“…because she didn’t know if it was better to be correct or fun, and why did it feel like she always had to choose between the two?”
Alison Espach, The Wedding People

Almost halfway through the month, and this is the quote that is resonating with me most this morning. I feel this way in several areas of my life.

It comes through in my art. There is a tension between my training and my enjoyment. I outline and then write a rough draft and then edit…except that is more focus and work than I can commit to right now. So I keep writing but in ways that are more fun. I blog, I write bad poetry (and let it stay bad…for now), and I experiment with stream-of-consciousness journaling. I am a classically trained pianist, but I have found so much freedom in just sitting at the keyboard and playing around with whatever sounds, chords, and melodies come forth. I stick to just enough of my dance basics to be safe (turns out, the basics of dance are mostly about avoiding injury) when I fling myself about in a haphazard way in my living room. I love the foundation that my training has given me but I also love breaking out of it when I need to.

It comes through at my job. I don’t think I’m a good manager. I want the job to be fun for my team, but I spend so much of my day harping on corrections – mostly about basic stuff they should already know – that I feel more like a nag. A nice nag, but a nag nonetheless. I also find it exhausting and dehumanizing to be held responsible for the actions (or lack thereof) of other people with precarious levels of give-a-damn. I know it’s not a unique problem – this is just management in a nutshell – but it’s still gross. I’m still waiting for the big bucks that are supposed to make it worthwhile to hit the bank account. I need to learn how to be inspiring, but I just don’t know that I’m that person.

It’s coming through in my life in general right now. Life isn’t super fun these days. Or, it can be, but there is a high price for anything that lasts longer than an hour or uses a lot of energy. The “correct” thing is to rest and not overdo it, but it takes so little to overdo it that I’m not sure that’s even a reasonable expectation. Overdoing it and the ridiculously over-the-top physical consequences of doing so seem inevitable. This would be a great time to be independently wealthy so that I could spend my precious energy only on fun things.

One of the ways I’m slowing my roll this month is not being super picky about writing a post every single day. It will happen most days – just not every day. It’s especially nice to take a break on the weekends.

Where do you get caught up in the struggle between being correct and being fun? Or do you? Is it just me?

Reflecting on my reading this month…

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