run-up to the first long weekend of the year

[topaz119]

I’d planned to go in to the office this afternoon because it’s the last day we can get into our funky, historic little office building; we’re moving to a new corporate-chic building the week after next, so today was gonna be my day to say goodbye while I picked up my new parking pass. I even did my hair and make-up and found a cute outfit and I was just about to step out the door when the slack messages started about schools going into early dismissal because of severe weather, and yeah, no. Not driving in tornado weather.

So. Bye, office. I’ve heard they’re moving a lot of the art and the tiki room, but I’m guessing the yarn-bombed pillars and a lot of the murals aren’t portable. We’ll see. The project manager overseeing the buildout was publicly bemused that after 20 years in the business he was working with an art coordinator so maybe more than I expect will make the transfer.

As part of my wrap-up for 2023, I sat and thought about what did and didn’t work for me over the year, which I will put behind a cut so you can fly right by if you’re not interested (it’s really not terribly exciting but if I post them here, my brain will hopefully take it as a 'we’re done now' signal & move on …)



what worked

• Taking time every morning to play Wordle, Connections, Spelling Bee and the crossword from the NYT games app, and then sharing them with friends
  
• Best Hair Day Ever dry shampoo to give me that extra day of not looking greasy which has made it so that I could keep my hair long without having to deal with drying it every day.
  
• Condiments! There have been a lot of days where I just cannot with the kitchen and having 15 different kinds of sauces or five different kinds of oils and 10 kinds of vinegar has meant that the precooked rice and frozen cooked salmon from Whole Foods isn’t the same old thing every single night.
  
• Unf*ck Your Habitat’s 20/10 sprints, which somehow work 1000x better than a strict pomodoro 25/5 with my brain
  
• Aggressively curating my information intake, whether that be how I get my news, what newsletters to subscribe to, or the vetting I put TikTok/Insta accounts through so my feeds are less doomscrolling and more finding things that intrigue and happify my brain (in a perfect world, i’d say 'delight', but that gets used entirely too often by the C-suite execs that I work for. It might take a decade or so to scrub the blech off that poor word.)
  
• Relatedly, the Apple Notes girlies on TikTok + iOS 14. This has definitely filled the hole left by Evernote’s slide into enshittification. I have notes for everything: things I want to cook, new, recipes that I’ve tried, movies and TV shows I wanna watch, packing lists for trips, all my notes for possible destinations, independent bookstores all over the world so I’m prepared should I ever find myself in a random city, restaurants to try here at home and for traveling, etc, etc, etc. They’re all tagged and cross-referenced and linked and decorated with emojis and pictures graphics and I *love* them
  
• My library/Libby/reading situation — I finally remembered that even though the library might not have a book in electronic format, I could always (gasp), see if they had it in physical form. Fewer people seem to do this, because even if there’s only one physical copy the hold lines are much more reasonable. This has definitely led to much less book acquisition activity, which is good because OMG I have so many books already. I may never get all the boxes unpacked and shelved.

what didn’t work

• Hyper-fixating on games and on the scores of games—I waste so much time trying to get a decent score in Drop7 or in trying to finish a crossword puzzle because I don’t wanna break my streak, which kinda defeats the ‘let’s chill’ objective
  
• Money. Not because I don’t have enough because I do but because I’ve always had a thing about money. Mostly because it really was an issue growing up, and then I went to a college where I definitely was the poor relation. The pandemic brought it all back – – the sight of empty grocery store shelves at the very beginning really brought up some bad food insecurity memories. And having to restructure around losing D's income and the stress of dealing, so this past year I was kind of just ignoring it, which isn’t good
  
• Revenge procrastination. I’m getting better at getting enough good sleep, but when I stay up too late, it all turns into a vicious cycle of sleeping too late then not being able to go to sleep at a decent time in the next night and it’s just a mess.
  
• My pack rat tendencies. I mean, I come by it honestly (you don’t want to know how much stuff we took out of my grandmother's house), but I take so long to go through all boxes that I packed out as we were doing the renovations. I don’t need this stuff; I know I don’t, but it’s so exhausting to remind myself of that over and over and over again.
  
• My outstanding ability to ignore what I don’t want to see, aka, I really need to follow up with some doctors and lawyers and accountants, ‘nuff said.
  
  
  Thanks for reading, have a lovely weekend