I've wanted to write for a bit. Finally made it back here today. I guess I'm gunshy about today's crazy climate. Do I take my journals down? But these have been a part of my life for many years. Maybe not today. Today I paid for another year of Dreamwidth.

It's about 4:20pm. At 5pm is a Dungeons & Dragons game. John ran a game for 12 years. We switched to Zoom during the pandemic and then added friends in Indiana and Missouri, so we had to stay in Zoom. When that long-duration game ended, we started a new game. This is that new game, which has been running for a couple of years now. It's every other Sunday. Right now I'm feeling a bit stressed because the weekend was too tightly packed with stuff and now I have this game when I'd rather be preparing for the week. But - I told myself that one of my themes for the year was "play". So I am doing that. I get a lot of fun out of work, but I really need to get a lot of fun out of not-work.

We also have an in-person Dungeons & Dragons game that runs every other Saturday, on different weekends from the Sunday game (because I told John absolutely not in the same weekend).

I only have forty minutes before tonight's game, so I am going to post this and head off. I have groceries waiting on the deck and I've got to take some curtains down to get them into the washer. There are new tiny kittens with accidents that have hit the bottom of the curtains.

I have this vision of myself as a person who cooks. Pancakes on Sundays; dried beans come to life; roast chicken in the oven and fresh cookies always on the counter. Much of this vision comes from years of the Food network and various forms of social media that tell me this is who I should be. Plus, I'm a fairly grounded Taurus who loves this idea of the farmhouse with kitchen garden.

Toward that end, I have a well-stocked kitchen. Appliances of all sorts, stopping just short of a pizza oven. Staples of all sorts: a variety of lentils, rices, dried peas, flours, sugars, herbs, and spices. Pots, pans, etc. Many cookbooks, because I love to read cookbooks. (I recently gave away ~20 cookbooks and that hardly made a dent.)

The kitchen is overflowing. There's not enough room. It's the kitchen of the person I think I should be.

The thing is, while I do cook every now and again, I mostly don't cook. I mostly work and read. My life is full, but it's not full of cooking. My life doesn't resemble Mark Bittman's, in which I come home and "relax by cooking". On Saturday mornings, I relax by loading up a spreadsheet. John and I - with low community transmission - go out to eat. I certainly do not have a garden.

It occurred to me last night: do I need a kitchen full of staples? Am I really ever going to make homemade pizza? Am I going to be a person who makes bread? Will I really stop buying canned beans?

Note that I live in New England, where weather could keep me trapped at home. (But somehow, that has never gotten me to use my collection of staples. Instead, I stock up with new groceries against the weather.)

If I separate the Food Network/Farmhouse version of myself from the real version of myself, it's likely that I could pare down a lot. That scares me, though - scarcity thinking, I think. It's always smart to plan against a rainy day. But my kitchen makes me feel guilty.

First world problems. I am incredibly lucky.

Anyway, the bigger picture is: how many of my perceptions about who I should be are formed from external influences? What am I doing because the world tells me I should be doing it?

Strange to say it, but yesterday I noted an internal sense of calm. Two weeks of vacation has done wonders for my mental state.

I got an email from work today and my innards didn't immediately erupt into nausea. That's a great sign.

I did have an intense dream this morning in which two houses in my charge were both badly infested with roaches, due to my neglect of the problem. This is either related to stress or to my realization, upon coming home yesterday, that my house mouse problem is worse than I had realized. In my dream, I did deal with the problems, but it was quite difficult and disgusting. The bottom line, however, is that I need to get my act together with respect to this house - more than then topical work I've been doing.

Toward that end, the dishwasher is running.

Post-vacation, the two thoughts in my head are:

1) I must create. #2022repeat
2) Discipline means freedom. #stoicism

For the second, I am tired of two things:

- Mount Clothing in the bedroom (aka the four foot pile of clothing on my bureau)
- The Mad Scrambles to neaten up the house before guests arrive (as in, clear off the dining room table, make it so that the kitchen isn't a near-total disaster, throw out all of the garbage, etc.)

I don't want perfect, but I'm tired of Mount Clothing & Mad Scrambles. Acknowledge: these are first world problems.

Mount Clothing
So, last week I sifted through the closet and brought out a bunch of clothing to either to go upstairs (to wait for warm weather) or get tossed (old and worn, etc.). That made enough room for me to deconstruct Mount Clothing and I have now managed to keep clothes off of the bureau for almost a week.

Mad Scrambles
Mad Scrambles are tougher.

One key element is that I have (once again) accumulated a massive overabundance of Tupperware, despite giving it away at holidays & birthdays. I need to cull.

I have a slight logistical problem. If I throw out a worn Tupperware bowl, I want to also throw out the matching seal. So until I find the matching seal, I keep the bowl. I don't want to end up with a bunch of seals-without-bowls. So it is taking longer to cull than it would if I simply tossed everything.

Another element is that I don't have enough room in my kitchen for staples-that-I-rarely-cook (e.g. rice, lentils, beans, millet, oats, etc.) and all of the other food I buy to avoid cooking the staples. I have room for an array of small appliances (e.g. rice cooker, Instant Pot, Air Fryer, Crock Pot, Vita Mix, etc.) because of a shelving unit acquired in 2021, but the shelving unit is stuffed with grocery items, which makes it hard to get to the small appliances.

My kitchen island is covered in a great pile of grocery items. I have four bags of groceries that I can't put away because I have nowhere to put them.

My dining room table has still more grocery items.

During Mad Scrambles, things get put into bags, which end up piled in my bedroom and on one of the living room couches.

Again, REALLY TIRED of Mad Scrambles, because they always result in more mad scrambling and clearing off of the bed to sleep.

No, I'm not a hoarder.

The kitchen has very little storage. The primary storage for this kitchen (as designed in the 1960s) was an 8-foot countertop-height cabinet which my parents removed and took with them when we moved to Glastonbury. That left this kitchen with very little storage space, so I am struggling to keep a well-stocked kitchen that's not covering every surface.

Bonus, I dislike doing dishes, so the disarray compounds during weeks when I don't fill the dishwasher.

I do like to cook, but it's an uphill battle when the kitchen is in disarray.

Long story short: discipline in the kitchen will go a long way toward freedom from mad scrambles.

Back to it, then.

Let's see if this works!

[image: lewy-body-dementia-2965713_1920.jpg]

The siren call of work is very strong this morning, but I am stopping for a moment to ground myself by writing for a few minutes, before I dive in.

I love blankets. I have lots of lap blankets, although I am not organized enough to use them effectively. The critters sleep on them quite a bit, because I have a few folded up on the backs of the couches. Some lap blankets were gifts and I feel either awkward/resentful or ambivalent about those particular blankets, but not so much that I find new homes for them. Frequently, because I want to keep the blankets I love in good shape, I end up using the blankets that I'm not crazy about or that bring up bad memories.

A childhood friend posted a handmade granny-square afghan on my town's free-for-the-taking site last night. She selected me as the giftee. I think it's a great sign that I shift to using blankets I love rather than blankets that make me feel either bad or empty. (I really didn't need it, but I wanted it!) Marie Kondo to the rescue!

Off to work, then!

Back in 2016 and 2017, I developed a good habit of drinking herbal tea for most of the day, rather than 7-8 cups of coffee. Key to this was skullcap tea for its calming effects and raspberry leaf tea, which seems to mitigate the effects of the new ways my body creates hardcore depression-level emotions after the ovarian cyst surgery.

My tea drinking dropped off when I got the new job in 2018 - I tried to continue for a while but it was much harder to maintain in the new office. The cafe had coffee, so I went back to the all coffee all day channel.

Come pandemic2020 and working from home, I haven't done much better with the much easier access to the coffeemaker. I eventually got a hot/cold water dispenser to help encourage me to drink more tea. I bought fancy tea, boxed tea, tea accessories, and even a special tea mug, but I haven't really gotten it together.

Last night I turned a corner. I could feel it within. Something about this year is new - and the feeling hasn't faded. Last night, during the D&D game, I started making tea. I rediscovered the special tea mug yesterday afternoon, although I don't know what I did with the cover, and brought it out during the game. I went and dug through a bag in the bedroom where my Tay Tea stash was and brought the tea out. I drank four cups of tea last night. It was somehow easier than it has been.

Notably, the artisanal tea was leagues better than the boxed tea, with the exception of the one boxed tea I really like - "Stress Ease" from Traditional Medicinals. The Tulsi tea from Organic India wasn't that great. The other two cups were a Tuk Tuk Chai and Soder tea (a black+fruit tea) from Tay Tea. I put milk in the chai. I put two packets of stevia into each of the cups.

I might have two cups of coffee this morning, but then I'm switching to tea. I actually feel as if I will continue this time. There is something much easier about working on the same floor as the kitchen.

Off to it, then.

You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life. - Jane Hirshfield

Hardly slept last night - insomnia has been a thing these past few nights. John left at 6:30am. I put some steel cut oats into the rice maker and went back to bed for an hour.

I told John last night that I don't want to let work and school make me forget my own life. I don't really believe in work/life balance, but I do believe in work/life alignment. If I am a creator/writer/teacher/connector, I need to do those things.

I'll get into it as soon as I turn on the work computer - I'll find my way this morning. But I really want to remind myself that I get to hit the reset button and run my day as I want it to be run. I want to foster independence on my team. I want to stay in proactive mode rather than allow myself to shift to the reactive pulled-in-every-direction mode. I already have an emergency meeting on my calendar this morning, but my job is to take care of those emergencies and ask the team to take care of the rest.

I told John last night that I want the team to take the training wheels off, but I'm having difficulty letting go of the handlebars on their bikes. I must let go much further past where my comfort level is, such that I can get back to myself.

I almost took the coffee cup directly to my work table, but I stopped and headed here to the "home" computer instead. I needed to set my intent for the day. So I have.

Off to it.

At the end of this year, I'll capture this line and attempt to draw meaning from it - this line starts the theme for the twentieth year of this journal.

Last year's theme was clearly "Work". I didn't actually set a theme - it simply happened upon me. This year end I was lucky on two counts: I had two weeks of vacation at the end of the year, and I didn't get assigned a massive year-long objective that I had to plan for during the break. (I got assigned something, to be sure, but it didn't require my working on it during the break.)

This year, I'm choosing a theme: Create.

But I didn't create anything new this year, other than some good PowerPoint slides at work and a new scarf that I crocheted to give away as a Christmas gift.

I am sufficiently freaked that my mother started to decline at age 52, and I am age 51 and a half. In other words, now or never, even if "now" means by the inch. That's how you grow a garden, according to the song.

I've long used it to pour out every bit of angst/struggle, such that I might release it. I've had good reason to need an outlet. But sometimes the outlet has been a reason for the angst/struggle to exist, which was never the intention. It's kinda like setting a metric and then the behavior changes to meet the metric.

I want to shift this journal to containing things I want to remember, starting today. I might not always succeed, but it's a good intent for the third decade here. I think it complements the drive I'm feeling to create for this world.

Off to it, then.

Last year, perhaps Sept or so, I bought a year's subscription to a service called TouchNote. I can easily send a postcard from their app. I can upload photos from my phone or use their library of images and artwork. It was $120 for six postcards per month. It's actually 6 credits per month and postcards use one credit. You can upgrade to greeting cards for a count of two credits, but to me this loses value.

I sent a thank you postcard to my brother and his girlfriend. Accidentally sent it to my own address. This had the benefit of me being able to see it. It came on what seems as if it's laminated paper, although perhaps it's just super-glossy heavy cardstock. The postcard is of a very nice quality, but I can't help but feeling that the lack of a handwritten note loses something of the specialness of the intent. It rather feels as if it's one of those advertisements from Stanley Steemer that comes on the same type of paper.

I'm glad that I subscribed, because I can take a spare few minutes at any point and send out a card. But I'm not sure I will subscribe again next year. I should get my act together and start mailing actual cards instead. That said, I really like being able to send customized cards so easily. A simple upload of the latest photo of Henry or Alice and it's done. That's pretty nice.

How much delight I've known
in navigating down the flow
by stepping stones, by sounding
stones, by words that are
stepping and sounding stones.

Going down stone by stone,
the song of the water changes,
changing the way I walk
which change my thought
as I go. Stone to stone
the stream flows. Stone to stone
the walker goes. The words
stand stone still until
the flow moves them, changing
the sound - a new word -
a new place to step or stand.

~ Wendell Berry ~