gailmom77: (Default)
Things have been busy, but I've also been napping constantly. A trip to the doctor's and several tests later we have an action plan to see if we can fix some of that.

Meanwhile I continue to try to find ways to get things done with limited motivation (other than the voice in my head saying I suck) that don't overwhelm. So far one of the biggest things that has helped is to break things down into super small chunks. The dining table, for example, is almost always a catchall for stuff I just don't feel like putting away, or thattake more than one step to put away. It's just so conveniently located, and has lots of room. Putting "empty dining table" on my to do list just gets it forwarded through my bullet journal for weeks. BUt I've been trying "pick up x things from dining table" where x is 2-5 depending on how good a day it is. That doesn't always mean I make progress; sometimes things pile up faster than I pick up, but it is a more helpful to do list item than "all the things!".

I've been trying the same thing with the floor, and utility room, bedroom surfaces, etc. All the hot spots.
So far the hardest spot to make progress is the guest room, which at this point is the opposite of welcoming. I"m well aware than having everything under the sun in there piling up is both a bad habit for a recovering hoarder, it's a slow slide, but also is sending the wrong message about how eager I am to have visitors.

…..

The attempt to put into practice a breeding zone to raise food for the two baby snakes is proving far more complex than it should. Turns out that neither Petco nor PetSmart carry female anything any more. Pet Supplies Plus does, but they are small feeder mice, mixed in together in the bin. Only one person there can reliably sex mice. Also,since they are straight up feeder mice, they aren't the healthiest. I brought home several females and just lost one today while they were in quarantine. I believe it was a respiratory infection, based on the sound of her breathing before we lost her, so I'm very concerned we'll lose the other two as well. All I hope right now is that if that does happen, our attempts to quarantine them from our little boy mouse, Tribble, and from the ratto girls have been successful and it won't spread beyond their tank.

She was too big to feed our baby snake, and too small to feed a large one...so I gave her to the chickens after she passed. At least she wasn't wasted, but it was still sad and now I'm going to be nervous about the others for weeks.

…..

I'm behind on tracking mymoney and so things keep being a mess, so that's frustrating too. I've also been binge eating,a nd failing to get any real exercise, so I'm steadily gaining weight. Most in my belly, which makes tying shoes etc an interesting exercise in discomfort and an inability to breathe.


It feels, lately, as if for every tiny step forward I take three giant steps back and it's frustrating.

Yule

Dec. 26th, 2019 01:57 pm
gailmom77: (Default)
Yule was lovely this year. Everyone liked all their gifts, there was a lot of laughter, and I found that the significantly reduced number of decorations still felt festive. I brought in the tiny tree from the dining table after we'd brought in all the presents, so that it was in the room with us, and that's was enough to make it "feel right".

I knew what most of my presents were this year, which I thought would be super disappointing, but it turned out fine because no one else knew and they outsourced my surprise for me.

So now it's time to shut it down, and I find myself already refocusing on changes to make now that the energy of the new year is starting to float around.

I'd like to ramp up my decluttering and sales. This would help repay the personal loans I took out repeatedly this year. Because mania sucks. I'm seriously considering putting a middle man between me and the account I'm allowed to borrow from so that I have to clear it with someone first. Maybe if it was a little more difficult and I had to fess up to the thing I wanted it would help me do that less frivolously. Getting back into the habit of tracking my finances, including scheduled upcoming expenses, would also help a whole lot I think. It's embarrassing how often I've had to lean on friends this year.

The guest room is a priority; it's not feng shui for guests right now and so it comes as no surprise people who want to come visit keep having things crop up in their way.
It's not a restful welcoming space right now.

I could go on but I think it's important not to overwhelm with a big list of things to work on. Three most important ones seem right.
gailmom77: (Default)
I'm not sure what it is but recording money stuff goes well for a while, then it just...falls by the wayside. Inevitably this leads to an error that either overdraws my account (thank goodness for a credit union that doesn't charge me the first time that happens) and then I "need to catch up". And catching up on a month or more worth of missed quicken entries is a nightmare.

I know in my head that if I just do it once a week it's easy. Somehow that just doesn't seem to consistently translate to doing the thing.

Now I have 94 emails in my unread inbox, and 91 of them are receipts for orders that haven't been recorded in my Quicken file yet.

I'm not sure why I *can* be great with money; I have been in the past good enough at it to have a rep for being able to stretch a budget within an inch of its life, but somehow I just...don't now.

This is a thing to work on with a lot more focus in the coming year. I suspect that I could "downsize my stress" quite a bit if I can put effort into getting back to the place I KNOW I can be if I just can get back into the frugal penny-squeezer habit that I had when I was married and our money was shared and scarce.

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gailmom77

February 2020

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