Well, the shine is off 2015, it's already February 1. I could say something about how fast time is flying, but I sound cliche enough when I say that out loud.
Yesterday, to close out January, I participated in the Walk for Memories put on by the area chapter of the Alzheimer's Society. This is my third year participating in this Walk, so I have three yellow ribbons decorating a lanyard on my bedside lamp, one for each year. This is the last year I will be doing the Walk for Memories, though. Oh, I will still be supporting the fundraising efforts, but starting next year it will be the Walk for Alzheimer's, under the theme "Make Memories Matter".
My family was very briefly touched by dementia when my great-grandfather regressed to his youth shortly before his death at the age of 87 (almost). He was convinced my mother was his mother, and that she was upset with him because he wasn't at home, and he kept trying to leave the home he had lived in and raised children with my great-grandmother in for more than 30 years, including my mother. I loved him as the only grandfather I knew, and this period of his life intersected heavily with ours because my mother was his main caregiver, and I still remember how helpless she felt because there was nowhere she could go for help. It matters to me that others affected by dementia have support locally, so when I was asked to participate in the fundraising and walk, I had no trouble saying, "Sure!"
Looking at my January goals, I can say I did OK for the most part. Financially, I am still struggling to put a cap on the expense side of the equation. Balancing our household budget was made especially hard over the past three months by the Hydro (electricity) bills soaring past $400 because we were using the electric baseboards to heat the house, after the furnace stopped working.
G kept saying the furnace was essentially done for, and that it couldn't be fixed. When I raised the subject of getting a technician in to look into it, he flatly refused and would only provide reasons having to do with personal issues with prior technicians. To me, those reasons didn't wash against the need to know exactly what was wrong and exactly how much it would cost to rectify the situation, so on a day when he couldn't stop me (he had to go to the hospital for his treatment), I essentially defied him and got a technician to look at the furnace and fireplace. Mind you, this particular technician was not on his blacklist.
Less than $100 later, both the furnace and fireplace are up and running. The fireplace needed to be set up properly and restarted, it took the technician less than 10 minutes to get it roaring away. I was never so grateful to anyone in recent memory once I saw the blue flames burning away. The furnace needed a little longer, but within an hour he was dusting off his hands and leaving. As much as I cringe when I look at the Hydro bills for the last 3 months, I am blissfully happy to be warm again. Baseboard heaters are simply inefficient in a house with rooms this size, central forced air is the way to go if you're not in a small apartment.
On the accomplished side of the list are things like getting the bookkeeping to the end of the year done for G's business. For the most part, that is. There are still one or two things left to be done, but all "cosmetic" touches, really, they will not affect the bottom line very much. Essentially, we are waiting on my slips to do our taxes for 2014, unlike last year when I had to do his entire year's bookkeeping a month before the tax deadline. Starting this year, I will be spending some time each month to do the previous month's bookkeeping, much as I did for clients when I worked in an accounting firm.
Also accomplished was making time each day to meditate before 11 a.m. I am working on making mindfulness a daily habit, and want to get it done as part of the beginning of the day, rather than squeezing it in somewhere near the end, as I found myself doing on weekends and poorly-planned weekdays. The plan is to keep that going into February, as it is supposed to take as many as 84 days to make something habitual.
As is often the case these days, I find myself surrounded by sleeping husband and sleeping dogs. I think it's time I closed this retrospective on January 2015 and wind down to sleep. 5:45 a.m. comes quickly!
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