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:
- limiting incidental spending to cash only,
- 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),
- 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,
- setting aside some savings using the 52 Week Money Challenge (click this link for a .pdf template), and
- 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:
