Hey Canada, our birthdays are in the same month!

Happy Canada Day!  It's July 1, formerly Dominion Day, now Canada Day, celebrating the birth of the country now known as Canada (from the Iroquois word "Kanata", meaning: village).  Though I need another year of residency and good (pro forma) citizenship before I qualify to apply, I spent a good part of today's day off from work reading "Discover Canada", the official guidebook for persons hoping to become Canadian citizens.  All questions on the recently-revised citizenship test are based on information in this book.

Here at home in E.L., other than it being Canada Day, it is also the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the city.  Various days since last weekend have been earmarked for activities relating to the history of the city, including the Uranium Festival (uranium mining was the whole reason for the first birth of the town), now named the Homecoming parade, since the mines closed more than a decade ago and took with them the boom and bust cycle of resource mining.  The big celebration will happen this weekend, with a street dance showcasing Canadian artists as the main attraction.  I am hoping to swing the budget in favour of G and I attending, The Roadhammers will be performing and my first Canadian concert was watching their front man Jason McCoy in concert around Christmas 2013.

June was a significant month, marking as it did the half of the year.  It also marked our fifth wedding anniversary.  Wow, five years.  When we were getting married and watching a lot of wedding shows on The Learning Channel together, we joked that for our fifth anniversary we wanted to go to Hoboken, New Jersey, to meet Buddy of "The Cake Boss" fame and challenge him to make a cake that used the colours of our national flags: red and white for G, black, green, and gold for me.  We didn't make it to Hoboken, but in secret we both made plans to do something along the same lines: I commissioned a wreath from his sister's shop Wreathamania by Aiesha that would incorporate those colours and themed items significant to our relationship.  He ordered a beautiful bouquet with red roses, white and yellow carnations, ferns, and a black bow.  We both laughed at ourselves, being so secretive and doing the same thing.

In June, I only managed 75% of the $98 I needed to save for the 52 Week Money Challenge.  The fault lies entirely with my planning: I based it off the expected income from my seasonal job, completely forgetting that I would be working only 3 weeks there, not 4, so I needed to have split the required amount into thirds and not quarters.  Salient lesson there.

I completed my goal of 180 days straight meditating with Headspace.  In essence, the roughly 30 minutes each morning when I do a short yoga  session (less than 10 minutes), then sit in silence for 15 minutes with Headspace, is now inseparable from my morning ritual.  It's how I begin my days, and I can't have it any other way.

During the month, I also entertained friends I met through the immigration forum G and I went to for information and advice when we planned my emigration to Canada.  By the time the Canadian wife and I first communicated, I was already gaining a reputation for having some answers when it came to Family Class issues, which is why she reached out to me.  Eventually, what started as a plea for help became a friendship, we met in Toronto when I first came to Canada and G took me there, and since then have communicated through a successful appeal of the denial of her husband's visa.  He landed last year after a 4-year process, and finally I got to meet him in person as well.

We shared the joys and tribulations of settling in for the long haul, and introduced each other to our cultures, mostly via food.  I cooked a full Jamaican lunch of ackee and saltfish (Jamaica's national dish), fried plantain, callaloo (Jamaican leafy green, resembles spinach and prepared in a similar fashion), and fried dumplings.  Nearly all the ingredients were had thanks to my friends' living in Scarborough, with its Jamaican and Jamaican-descent population, having access to grocery stores carrying these items.  In turn, they prepared a Sri Lankan dinner for us of dahl, puri, and coconut sambal.  On the second day of their visit, G prepared a Canadian dinner of barbequed chicken, salad with a homemade vinaigrette, and I fried a breadfruit he roasted in a fire outside.  (Yes, my Caucasian husband knows how to roast a breadfruit, he paid attention when he lived in Jamaica!)

The moon is full and high as I type this up, and I can hear the fireworks starting as dusk deepens outside.  I am due at work tomorrow, so I will call it a night for now.  Later this month, around my birthday, I will try to look back on the half year that has gone by, and see how far I have come with the goals I set and where I am going for the last half of 2015, and the beginning of the 40th year of my life.

180 days of Headspace

With my friend's help, I wore a saree for the first time

All the coconut on hand called for coconut drops!

My friends brought me a gift of tea

Changes, challenges, and choices

Just like that, March is gone, and the first quarter of 2015 is over.  Looking back, I'd like to say it was successful, this first quarter of another year.

According to my Day Book, I made it to my goal of 90 days straight meditating with Headspace.  I'm really happy, and very pleased with myself for sticking to this particular goal.  Meditation is a real challenge for me, I have quite the "monkey mind" going on, and can mentally leap and veer from issue to issue with seeming abandon.  Sitting still and observing this behaviour, without judging and with gentle compassion, is very hard for me.

For the last 30 days of my 90 day count, I worked on Headspace's "Focus" pack (a pack is a meditation series designed to guide you through a particular mental challenge), and I came to the conclusion that I will need to repeat this pack several times before I will feel like I am comfortable with the techniques.  Although I find visualisation one of the easier techniques, my vivid imagination also proved to be my downfall.  I spent quite a bit of time bringing myself back to the visualisation that is part of the meditation from the tangents that I suddenly found myself wandering off on.

March was the second month in a row I chose not to spend unless I was using cash or debit, i.e. no credit card purchases.  I came to the realisation that it is quite useless to try to pay off a credit card while adding charges to the balance (the bank is doing so without my assistance!) , so I stuck to my decision to get off that particular treadmill.

Having to stare at my bank balance or rummage in my purse before every purchase made the decision to spend money that much less automatic and forced me to be more aware of what I was doing with my money, and it is working.  I am coming to like seeing my money sitting in my bank account, or resting in my purse, as opposed to vanishing into the ether to pay another credit card bill, or into someone else's till.  I have kept up with the 52-weeks savings plan to week 14, another March goal.  I aim to continue this theme into April, and will make some changes once I apply my tax refund to additional debt repayment.

It is most definitely spring, the snow is receding.  The sun's warmth is actually felt, it is not just bright on sunny days.  G has plans to begin raking the lawn and garden, and has started raking the backyard so that the accumulated leaves and other debris that got buried in the winter snow can be gathered easily as the backyard dries out.  There is still slush and ice in the backyard where the shadow of the house covers it, but if the weather continues the warming trend, that should also pass by the end of this month.

It will soon be time to put away my sweaters and pull out my not-winter wear.  To make life easier for myself this year, I have decided on a "uniform" for work, to minimise time wasted in contemplating/worrying/choosing what to wear.  After reading the same exhortation on several minimalist living websites, I have decided that a "uniform" is not a bad thing.  Several public figures, including President Obama, the late Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook CEO) are all pointed to as examples of this, as they are all known to wear more or less the same type/colour of clothing daily.

On the one hand, it is certainly easier for men to do this, but on the other hand, I am from a country where working people are used to wearing uniforms and I never had anything against the practice.  I found it convenient not to have worry about what I would wear to work, as there was no choice: most of my employers provided uniforms, and I wore them.  Certainly, it was cheaper: uniforms were either a deductible expense to the employer or a taxable benefit to employees, but it meant that the clothing I wore for most of the day was not an out-of-pocket expense.

Since coming to Canada, most of my spending (including many of the charges to said credit card I am now paying off) has been on clothing.  Quite often the first thing I asked myself before buying something was: "Can I wear this to work?" and if the answer was no, I was always conscious of a very tangible sense of guilt at spending money on something that wouldn't get worn very often.  Last year, I tried to buy spring and summer shirts that could be worn either for work or during leisure time, but found that I was still buying too much, as I am more often at work than anywhere else.  Indeed, whenever I am out and about, it is either work-related or just after work so I am wearing my work clothes.

To that end, I chose a "uniform" outfit from what I am most comfortable presenting myself in for work: long-sleeved Oxford shirts and dress pants or skirt.  Long-sleeved, because I work in air-conditioned surroundings in (largely) sedentary jobs and find that I feel cold quite easily.  23* Celsius, the normal temperature of the buildings I work in, is just a tad on the cool side for me if I am not moving around.  Having made the choice to stick with wearing this uniform outfit, all I need do now is ensure that the clothes are washed and ironed each week. (Yes, I still iron my clothes.  I have not adopted the Canadian habit of using the dryer or relying on "wrinkle-free" material.)

G and the pups are napping yet again, so I think I will do some reading while I have the peace and quiet.  Today, I finished reading "Smart Women Finish Rich" by David Bach (the Canadian version), and wrote some take-away points that I hope to include in my financial planning over the rest of this year.  I am going to take up again reading "The Simple Living Guide" by Janet Luhrs, which I bought for a toonie ($2, coin) at the last library sale.  I had to pause reading Simple Living Guide as I had Smart Women for two weeks only from the library at work, as it is very popular and I had to wait to get my turn to read it and want to ensure I have it back in time for the next person.

Until next time, enjoy these photos of the pups:

Nipper on the yoga mat

Nipper and Ariea

Ariea hogs the yoga mat too

 

Sleepy buddies

Spooning puppies!

Spring? Already?! (Also, the apps that keep my life organised)

I am late with this entry, but at the very least it's still March!

It would appear that spring is definitely going to happen sometime around the spring equinox (Friday March 20 this year)!  Last week temperatures began to warm up, and the amount of melting that has happened in that week is simply amazing.  Mind you, we have less snow this year, and the frost went deeper into the ground because there were very cold days as usual, but the snow has melted dramatically.  In just a single day, we went from small, random patches in the backyard to large swathes being completely uncovered.  Even the front lawn is giving up its snow cover quickly.  While being undeniably glad to see it go, I'm also hoping it doesn't go too quickly, because flooding of basements is always a concern at this time of year.

Flipping the page back to my February Goals and Notes, I see that I did well on several of my goals for the month.  Having hit a 30 day streak on the Headspace app, which I am using for my meditation and mindfulness training, I decided to go for the gusto and hit a 90 day run.  I decided to mark off each day in 15 day increments in my monthly planning book, and it kept me in good stead all through February.  February ended with me successfully two-thirds of the way to the 90 day mark.  If it takes at least 84 days to successfully make something a habit, I am on my way to meditating daily.

February also featured financial goals, including:

1.  limiting incidental spending to cash only, 
2. paying down the balance of one of our smaller credit cards while keeping the others current with just-above-minimum payments (the goal being to eliminate balances one at a time in this fashion), 
3. keeping my spending overview app Spendee up-to-date instead of waiting until weeks (or even months!) have gone by to look back at my income/outgoing comparison, 
4. setting aside some savings using the 52 Week Money Challenge (click this link for a .pdf template), and
5. bringing my own lunch for work daily, rather than buying it.

Aside from still being lax about updating Spendee (I only got to it twice in February), I managed all the other goals.

I started a "gratitude practice" in February.  This involves writing down three things from the past or current day that I feel grateful for.  This has become a sort of preliminary to my meditation practice, to set the frame of mind for a period of mindfulness.  At times I feel almost apologetic about the things I feel grateful for, they can seem so trivial, rather ordinary and mundane.  

Gratitude for the fact that I have a less rigorous workout on Friday mornings has been a recurring theme.  Lately, I have so little motivation to get up in the mornings (see last year's rant about daylight saving time) that knowing all I am required to do is twenty minutes of yoga and 3 sets of 5 reps of one-arm dumbbell rows is all that gets me out of bed at the end of the week.  For the rest of the week, Bodbot schedules my strength training workouts, and I have been learning the basics of yoga from Rodney Yee's excellent Beginner's Yoga DVD (link to his website here).

My work week right now includes Saturdays, as I am trying to get in as many hours as possible at my seasonal job.  There's about two weeks left in the "peak period", so my manager tells me, and then we will "coast" for the next four weeks to the end of the season.  On the one hand, I will have more time on my hands, on the other I will go back to a single income stream.  For now, I am making the most of things by paying down what I can, so that when we are back to the lower income level there will be less it is required to cover.  

I can now go to Trello, and move writing this blog from both "To Do" (last week's card) and "Doing" (card for the week before that).  I felt quite guilty as it sat undone on the Weekly Planning board, in two places, for two whole weeks, let me tell you.  I find that visual reminders work very well with me, so lately I have taken to putting things where I can't avoid seeing them.  I am learning to utilise Trello as a sort of "big picture" viewer, whereas when I want to plan a specific activity such as my housework day or a day of doing G's bookkeeping, I prefer to use Evernote, if only because it has a cleaner, more utilitarian feel, when compared to Trello's decidedly creative feel.

In spite of all this reliance on technology, I haven't given up pencil and paper.  I still carry an agenda: this year's is a smaller, pocket-sized Moleskine (I don't know how to pronounce it, either) Daily/Weekly agenda, complete with handy labels.  Looking back at last year's agenda, I see I used it mostly to record hours worked, and the odd event, so I didn't mind graduating to a smaller size this year.  There's a lined page across from each week where I can put a checklist of things I need to do or remember, and I update Trello from this list if necessary.  And, of course, I have my "day book", where I record my monthly goals and anything of note that comes up (registration keys for products, for example), and keep a copy of each month's calendar once past, so I can see how many days I worked out for the month.

G is awake, and out of the bed, taking the dogs with him, so I can finally fold the laundry.  Aside from accompanying him to the grocery store and doing some light tidying of our bedroom, that's all the housework I am doing today, so no list for that.  I hear a book calling my name, because it will be a while yet before dinner is ready.  I don't know which it will be, but I need some uninterrupted reading time before my rest day is done.  Here's what the bed looked like while I wrote this:

Three Yellow Ribbons, and hello, February!

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!