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!

Twenty Fifteen, and 2014 Resolutions in Review

Happy New Year!  Yes, it is 2015.  I managed to stay awake until about 11:45 p.m. but alas, not until midnight and the passing of the old year into the new.  Oh, well.

Yesterday, I looked back at my goals and resolutions for 2014, as written out in my Day Book, and found that I accomplished not a few of my goals, partly accomplished some others, and came not even close on a few more.

I'll share a few of the ones that went well.  The others remain Work-in-Progress, so they will stay unmentioned for now.  What went well in 2014:

• Reading 50 books for the year, including at least 5 related to self or career development.  In actual fact, I read 10 related to self and/or career development, and even took notes of "Take Away" points from several in my Day Book because I found them to be especially relevant to myself.
• At my current job (we'll call it the year-round job henceforth, for reasons soon to become apparent), I made goals to stay up-to-date with my assigned targets, to inform myself of procedures and processes as much as time allowed.  I did well, receiving commendation from my supervisor at year-end.
• I applied for a seasonal job, and was successful in being accepted into the training programme for it.  I participated in the training between September and November, and got stellar grades.  I have been invited to start working when the season opens in mid-January 2015.
• I set workout goals to: deadlift my bodyweight, and scored a personal record of 195 pounds, or approximately 1.8 times my bodyweight; bench press 60 pounds, and scored a personal record of 65 pounds; and learn to squat up to 45 pounds, and scored a personal record of 135 pounds for reps.

Going into 2015, I have decided that I will record my goals on a shorter time-frame, rather than under broad headings applying to the entire year.  In order to make the process more mindful, and to acknowledge the fact that, rather being a discrete event in time, my process involves revisiting, revising, and reviewing my goals several times throughout the year, I will focus on smaller goals for each month, which will add up to what I accomplish throughout the year.

So, January, what am I going to do with you?  Well, I already got one thing out of the way: I created a new spreadsheet for our household expenses, added in the bills under categories, assessed or input what needs to be paid for the month, and started planning what will be paid when and by whom.

I also need a new workout schedule from the Bodbot app, I took a month off from working out in December following a severe bout of the flu, but now that I feel recovered, I am ready to workout with weights again, and need a new starting point.

One final one I will mention:  I see from Blogger that I managed all of 5 blog posts here last year.  One more than I managed for 2013, so that is some improvement, but not much, really.  Having started this month with an entry, I will add it to my monthly goals hereafter.  I have a few ideas how the Evernote app can help me there, and that will go on January's plan in my Day Book.

I hope, whatever your plans for 2015, that you find them as exciting as I do mine.  Walk good, and all the best for 2015!

Farewell, Summer, I hardly knew ye

It's Labour Day today in Canada, same in the United States.  As surely as May 24 Weekend/Victoria Day (Canada) and Memorial Day (US) mark the "beginning" of summer, so does this day mark its "end" in both countries.  Mind you, there's another three or so weeks left in the actual season as it relates to the Earth's settings, the autumnal equinox falls on September 23rd this year.

Children are either heading back to school this week, or are already there in some cases.  Back-to-school shopping is the major expense for parents around this time, and children contemplate whether they are happy or sad that their holidays are over.  In Jamaica, it is time for adults to throw around the particularly odious phrase (or, at least, it was to me when I was a student), "Free paypa bun!" (Your free papers are burnt).  It used to imply to me that school was some sort of prison your parents sent you to, one of which you were particularly deserving, if for no other reason than you were under-aged and someone else was in charge of your life.  Well, joke was on them.  I loved school, and looked forward to returning.

This particular summer was less than halcyon, though.  Aside from the two weeks we spent in Jamaica, the temperature never rose above 30 *C on consecutive days.  I found it particularly offensive this year to hear people complain about how "hot" it was.  I might have thought that two years into living in northern ON I would be immune to such statements by now, but indeed my resentment was much worse this year.  "Honestly, we have seven months of winter/cold weather, is that not enough for you?", I wonder.  I guess some people would complain no matter what kind of weather we have.  I find it alarming to realise that several days found me wearing layers, long sleeves, and even sweaters, with temperatures averaging around 10 *C below seasonal averages.

The last three days have been rainy, and grey.  I was unable to take Nipper for a long walk yesterday, as much of the day it poured with heavy rains.  Towards late afternoon the rain and clouds did clear and let in some sunshine, but this morning was heavily overcast, and the rain started again this afternoon.  We managed to get in our weekday half-hour walk this morning, but I spent a lot of it looking at the skies and hoping they wouldn't open up on us while we were still some way from home.

I am hoping that we get a late summer heatwave, the mythical "Indian summer", but I am not holding my breath.  All the signs are pointing to a swiftly-coming, long, cold winter.  Indeed, there were trees sporting fall colours by the end of July!

Fall is bringing with it new challenges for me, and I am very hopeful that meeting these challenges will take me in new directions.  I have been working on getting back into waking early, and will need this "ability" even more as the month of September progresses.  The daylight periods will continue shortening, but my "days" will be even longer, and I will need full energy and enthusiasm to take them on.

If summer was only about hot weather and wearing less clothing, I would say I didn't have much of one.  As it is also about a break from routine and getting ready for new things, then I will say I had quite the summer, short though it was.

Vacation and Anniversary 2014

For our anniversary this year, G surprised me with tickets to Jamaica...in February.  A little far ahead, but still, it was exciting to think of going home after two years, and celebrating our anniversary on the beach!

Well, it was exciting once we were finally on our way, but leading up to it, I was trying very hard not to be overwhelmed with planning and executing so we would have a smooth trip.  I like traveling by air, enjoy the experience for itself and not just that I get to a specific destination.  G is, of course, entirely about "Why aren't we there already?".

In the week leading up to leaving, I organized ruthlessly, planning and revising as I went along, to ensure that we left on time for the drive to Toronto (requesting a morning shift where I usually work afternoons), that I only had the necessities in my bags to avoid charges for extra luggage (extensive lists of what I needed, revised often), purchasing currency to ensure we had Jamaican funds on hand rather than relying on credit cards, and on, and on.

Underlying all this planning, though, was an anxiety that ratcheted higher and higher the closer we got to leaving.  I was trying to control it, by doing what I always do, trying to pin every detail down.  My fears came to nought, and our trip went as well as can be expected.

I was so happy to see my brothers again.  My younger brother collected us at the airport, and immediately drove us to Burger King on Gloucester Avenue, exactly where I wanted to go for lunch.  I have had a burger from BK exactly once in the last two years.  This one was everything I needed it to be.  I was home.

We spent the two weeks at my Mom's house in Sheffield.  This started off somewhat inauspiciously, as my Mom was in Florida visiting my older brother, and basically left her house looking as though she had left with no notice at all, and did not intend to return.  I spent 3 days cleaning and organizing her house to suit myself, and thought long and hard about whether the woman who raised me to believe that "Cleanliness is next to godliness" taught me that because she believed it or because she felt it was something she had to teach me as a good parent (something she became before she was probably ready for it) and had simply dropped the philosophy now that she had no-one living at home with her.

The rest of the time we spent on the beach at Alfred's.  Being known there means being able to get what you like to drink without needing to ask for it, and having some of the most incredible views up and down the beach a few steps away from the bar.

For our anniversary, we stayed overnight at Alfred's, and went to a restaurant a little further along the beach.  The meal did not live up to expectations, but we made the best of it.  I also got my hair cut short for our anniversary.  Finally, after 5 long years, G and I compromised and I was able to go short.  Not as short as I wanted, but at least I could get it cut, not just trimmed.  I had grown weary of long hair, and frustrated with how much time and attention it required to care for it, as I usually do after a few years of keeping it long.  Once again, I have hair I can wash without worrying about how long it takes to dry, and that needs no styling to get into bed so that I do not wake with a crick in my neck.

If the first week went by slowly in a daze of heat and sun and sand, the second week sped up and went by like any normal week.  Before I was quite ready for it, we were organizing and packing our things to return to Canada.  By focusing yet again on the small details involved (did I want to bring this large Jane Austen compendium back with me, what would it do to the weight of my suitcase, what about my other book collections, like my Tolkien paperbacks?), I was able to ignore the thoughts about homesickness and how I would feel once I was back on the plane and headed for Canada.

Honestly?  It felt like coming home to be back.  Even Toronto and southern Ontario, which I see so seldom, felt familiar and welcoming.  Jamaica had been the same as I left it (roads slightly worse than ever, prices higher than ever), and Canada had become familiar enough in two years to feel as though I was also coming home.  Last January, returning from my uncle's funeral in New York, I had simply been coming back to G, this was where I lived now, and that was that.  This July, I was coming home, from being home.  It's an awesome and profound feeling, I imagine, to realise that you are at home in more than just the country you were born in.

In the week since we've been back, I have been focusing on my priorities for the rest of the year.  I need to schedule some time to look at what has been accomplished in the first 6 months of the year, and where I want to be at the end of the next 6 months, the first half of my 39th year of life.  I'll probably get that done on my birthday, a few days from now.  I usually like to reflect as I mark each year, and aim to make time for that once again.

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:

"Spring Ahead"

Had anyone told me, as I contemplated all the changes and adjustments that would be necessary to settle into life in Canada, that one of the hardest adjustments I would face would be Daylight Saving Time, I would have disbelieved them.

While I was in Jamaica, I would tease G about his "fake hour" and complain about the fact that him being an hour ahead meant that he was ready for bed when I was still wanting to be up and talking.  I enjoyed watching our favourite series (Showtime's Dexter) an hour before he did, but then had to wait for him to watch the episode so we could discuss it, and bite my tongue to not spoil it for him.

When I first landed in Canada, it was June, so Spring Ahead (the changing of the clocks forward) had already taken place.  I essentially "lost" that hour of time sitting in the airplane on the tarmac at Lester B Pearson International, waiting to de-plane and "land" as a permanent resident.  The pilot announced the local time, I changed my watch forward by an hour, and it was over.  I had so many things to deal with that day, that the loss of an hour in this arbitrary fashion was the least of my concerns.  Once fall rolled around and the time came to "Fall back", I was conscious only that we were on the same time as Jamaica once more.

2013 was a different story, however.  I was present for the change (back) to Daylight Saving Time, and it was traumatic, to say the least.  I got up at the usual time that Sunday to do my regular list of housework.  However, my usual time was no longer "9:00 a.m." or so, it was "10:00 a.m."  I was an hour late getting started.  It seemed to only snowball from there, as I fell further and further behind the usual times I would be through with certain tasks.  It was very nearly 9:00 p.m. that night before I was through, an unheard of time for me to complete the cleaning and laundry.  Until fall 2013, I felt the loss of that hour keenly, and suffered from a constant, creeping sensation that I was always late.  Anal as I am about time, this sensation unnerved me.

2014 spring ahead this year on March 9th was not much better.  I actually set an alarm to wake me on a Sunday morning, something I have not done in years.  I got up, set all the manual clocks forward, and started my housework at what was now 9:00 a.m.  Time seemed to RACE away from me.  Each time I looked at a clock, another hour had gone by, and I wasn't done with whatever I had started the hour before.  It was past 6:00 p.m. when I finished the housework and went for a run, it was nearly 9:00 p.m. when I was out of the shower and ready to collapse into bed.

Things did not improve during the first week.  My colleagues kept commiserating with me, saying it would be a week or so before I adjusted, that was how long it took them.  I pointed out that this is my second YEAR dealing with this phenomenon in twenty years, I saw no improvement.  When I forgot basic things like turning off a burner on the stove and what pieces of paper to give a customer, I realised I was seriously short on sleep and close to burning out.  All for the loss of one hour.

I finally decided that my workouts would no longer be scheduled for the morning unless I was working an afternoon shift, and therefore had plenty of time to wake up and sort myself out, taking my time to make my brunch and get myself ready for work.  I also set my alarm a half an hour later, for 7:00 a.m., as the darkness that persisted at what was now 6:30 a.m. simply added to my misery.

Speaking of it being dark at 6:30 a.m. following spring ahead: spring is ahead.  Tomorrow is the Vernal Equinox, the official start of spring in the northern hemisphere.  The earth's tilt towards the sun begins tomorrow, and a few more precious minutes of daylight will be added to each day.  I am still tired, still feel that DST is a rip-off, am still convinced Jamaica's politicians made quite possibly one of their best decisions ever when they ceased to inflict it on the population.  If only I could convince Canadians it is unnecessary!