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:

Marking Year 2

As of yesterday, I've been in Canada for two years.  I want to wonder at how quickly the time went, but that would be almost too cliche at this stage, right?  I mean, it's only been two years.  Of the sum total of my life, that's 1/19th of the whole.  I suppose it is how much has been packed into the last two years that makes it seem like such a long time that has somehow gone by really quickly.

It was a very normal day, my two-year anniversary.  Normal in the sense that mundane events of my life were represented: I got up, showered, ate breakfast, went to work, took a break for lunch, completed my shift, came home, made dinner, ate it, went to bed.

A few things here and there were out of the "normal": I had to be at work a few minutes earlier to participate in a 2 hour training session meant to prepare us for upcoming changes to operations in the fall.  Interesting stuff, I am looking forward to engaging fully with those changes.  More and more, I am coming to see this job as part and parcel of my life here, not just something to make money at until I find a job similar to what I used to do in Jamaica, because that is highly unlikely.  I do enjoy my work environment, the work I do is repetitive but the human element guarantees that it is never boring, and though chances for advancement are small to non-existent at this time, I think in the long-term there are possibilities.

Another not-so-normal occurrence is the inescapable conclusion that I have developed carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS).  I was familiar with this condition only in the vaguest possible way, a former manager was afflicted with it but I never cared enough to ask what the symptoms or treatments were.  Around two weeks ago, though, I began to be plagued by an annoying tingling pain sensation in my right thumb, fore and middle fingers.  At first I dismissed the sensation as possibly resulting from a minor infection of a puncture wound to my thumb caused by a sharp surface at work.  When it spread to my fingers, and remained concentrated in the tips of all three, I thought perhaps I had scalded them one evening while doing the dishes by running the water too hot.  When I noticed the sensation was actually especially bad in the wee hours when I would get up with Nipper to let him outside to toilet, I was baffled.  The last straw was going to a workout with my personal trainer and finding that my usually stronger right hand had a painfully weaker grip somehow.

I conferred with a friend who is a certified radiologist, asked Google what were possible causes, and they both agreed on CTS.  The more I read the symptoms described on WebMD, and the more my friend talked about the anatomy of the hand and why my wrist and fingers would feel as they did, the more convinced I was that they were perfectly correct.  As of yesterday, I am wearing a wrist brace, especially while sleeping or using the computer, to relieve the pressure on the median nerve and hopefully return my hand to unencumbered working order.

It's beautiful outside most days these days.  If you discount the blackflies and mosquitoes.  Last Saturday, G decided it was safe to refresh the garden for this year, so we drove out to the garden centre to get some new plants.  I chose to get a variety of herbs, as I have always wanted to have fresh herbs available.  I picked out the plants according to the refrain of a song, for some reason I can't remember the movie I heard it in, but I cannot forget the line, "Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme".  We could not get thyme as another customer bought all they had left at the time, but got the other three.  In addition, we bought lemongrass (which we call fever grass in Jamaica) and basil.  I barely managed to avoid being eaten alive by the mosquitoes, and complained to G the entire way home that mosquitoes in Jamaica did not attack during the daytime!  Over the course of last weekend, he weeded the garden, planted my herbs and his shrubs and flowers, and I zapped the dandelions and crab grass with Weed-B-Gon.  Between us we have dozens of insect bites, but we're quite happy with the garden and lawn.

In two weeks' time, it will officially be summer.  I suppose eventually I will get used to the abbreviated spring here, and hope that summer is not often abbreviated like it was last year when the leaves were turning to fall colours as early as the first week in August!  I suppose that should have been a warning about just how bad this past winter was going to be, but having not seen a winter that brutal in as much as a decade, even people like G who have lived in E.L. for longer than that were taken by surprise.  As much as I like the changing of the seasons and consider it one of the best features of living in Canada, last winter was just brutally cold for days on end, to the point where I teetered on the edge of losing my joy in the season.  As a consequence, I am consciously trying to revel in the spring (such as it is), summer and fall this year.

In leaving, I close with some of the beauties that sprung up in the garden this year:

"In Process"

Last night, sometime around the time I would be getting ready for bed on a Friday night, an email came into my mailbox from the eCAS (electronic client application status) tracker: It appears your application has been updated.

I am certain I couldn't click that email to open it fast enough.  Sure enough, it was the long-awaited "In Process" email, which announced that they received my application on May 19, 2011 (yes, we know!) and began processing said application on February 20, 2012.  Nine months to the day, CHC-Kingston got off their hands and began processing my application.  Hallelujah.

From here on out, the actual processing should go much faster than the sitting around.  Background check, criminality and security checks, and the medical check.  The last one is where I will be held up, as I no longer have a valid medical and cannot be issued a visa without one.

I have decided to wait for the embassy to issue the form requesting that I re-do my medical exam, although I do not strictly have to wait.  It's just that, at this stage, attempts to be pro-active may be counter-productive as some over-zealous and not very well-informed embassy staffer might feel that I should have waited, and proceed to waste my time and money by demanding I use the form issued to me and not accepting the results of the medical I initiated myself.  Nowhere in the Regulations, the Act, or the Operating Manual does it say I have to wait, but some people like to assert their one single iota of authority by insisting on not accepting results of a medical they did not order themselves.

Week before last was such a rough week.  I was greatly upset by the news that a friend had received an in process update.  Naturally, she had applied to sponsor her husband, and having done so in August 2011 (6 months after we filed, 3 months after CHC-Kingston received our file), her husband had gotten his in process update on February 12th, four months after his file was received.  I was stunned.  Here I had sat all this time, and with this kind of time lapse between our applications, and her husband's application was being processed before mine?  The arbitrariness and unfairness of the process hit me especially hard, and I could not be as happy for them as I wanted to be.  I did a lot of exercise in order to burn off the feelings of anger and depression.

To restore my equilibrium, I felt it was necessary to do something more.  So I decided to spring clean.  Yes, a month early.  I pulled out bags and bags of old papers I had been "hoarding" since I came to Kingston to live, and went through a suitcase full of clothing and found that only six pieces in it could still fit or be given away because everything else was hopelessly tight, or too dated.  I cleaned and I threw away things until the apartment felt lighter, and so did I.  I did suffer some mild discomfort at discarding these things, I do not like to throw things away I feel might be useful, but they needed to go.  As things stand now, I won't need to deal with these things when it comes time to make the big move.

And now, it's finally time to accept that I ought to be in a leaving frame of mind, and I need not suppress or question it.  I am hopeful that the embassy does not insist on mailing me my medical request when I live less than a kilometre (less than ten minutes' walk) from the embassy.  I would much prefer to go there and collect it, than to have it take two weeks to go through the mail in the circuitous manner of Jamaica Post.  Efficiency and common-sense are not, however, their bywords.

I am hopeful that everything left to be done will happen in good time, though.  I did not get my wish of a winter arrival, so I am hopeful that spring will not pass before we are together again.