We opened the Puddle early this year hoping to avoid the most popular dates, which are often unavailable and leave us with a late opening. When we open it later on, we struggle to get the water clear in the warmer days. Then it’s a race against time for getting it up and running for the Youngest’s birthday, which coincides with the long weekend. So Mr. Tucker is out getting the chemicals balanced and cleaning filters on this gorgeous spring day. Since the backyard is essentially our only summer vacation plan it will be fun to get it cleaned up, the garden planted and the pool ready for family and friends.
Tax season was – once again – exhausting. We are lucky to have someone who prepares our taxes for us but as usual: I owed, Mr. Tucker got a refund. It worked out fine except that this year I have to pay quarterly tax instalments because I owed over $3000. Just a reminder for folks on CPP (including CPP-D and OAS) that taxes are *not* taken at the source, so if you have other forms of income during the tax year, you could end up owing. A lot of the complications of this tax year were from the condo rental. Even though I had a loss on the unit, it was still a lot of paper work.
The time in between the end of skiing/snowboarding to the middle of May is the calmest time in the school year. It’s basically the time the kids apply for summer jobs. The Eldest is going back to work for the city & the Youngest got herself a volunteer position with the library. Both positions had extensive interviews and so hopefully between camp/volunteering the Youngest will have a busy summer. We did apply for some jobs for her but we were a bit late and it doesn’t look like that will happen. The Eldest is working on her driver’s license as well, so hopefully she will get that this spring.
I continue to…not spend that much time online? My group chats are hopping and I am so grateful to have kept in contact with a bunch of folks. My brain is much calmer for it as well. Mr. Tucker has started doing Muay Thai twice a week and we are trying to head out for a walk every day (trike for me). I also started doing physiotherapy in January and it’s helped a lot. I am struggling to keep up with my home exercises but that is just plain laziness on my part. When I do them I find my mobility and strength increases exponentially but I still tend to drop the ball when things get busy. Dragon boat starts up in two weeks – along with the chaos of end-of-the-year school activities – and then we are right into summer.
Canada elected a new government & we will see how that goes over the coming months. It’s been a brutal start to 2025 around the world politically. Although I’ve calmed down since the drama of the winter, the world still feels a bit fragile and chaotic.
It’s Sunday morning in winter so naturally I am alone. The Eldest teaches skiing and The Youngest still takes Snowboarding lessons which leaves me in the house my myself. Mr. Tucker is up-and-at-‘em at O’dark early to get The Eldest to her bus and then has a brief respite before dragging The Youngest up to a mountain for her lesson. It’s a super busy time of year but if you don’t keep yourself busy and active, you will just languish in the dark and cold.
The condo and work
I remembered recently that I hadn’t really updated since July’s big drama. The TL;DR of it all is: we did lower the interest rate and we managed to rent out the condo to a lovely young couple. So that is going well at least. Rest assured we are making zero profit from this & I know that makes me shitty at being a landlord but I am ok with that. Mr. Tucker continues to be employed by the same company and his workload is more manageable than he originally thought. Because they cut so deep though, he did toss in his hat to do some on call for another colleague who was managing on her own 24/7. Thankfully, there are rarely after hours issues that need to be actioned.
Mr. Tucker has made the decision to just stay put for the foreseeable future and let the chips fall where they may. Part of it is sheer curiosity of what will happen in 2025 and part of it is that work is more manageable than he originally thought it would be when it all went down last July. Some of the people who were laid off have discovered that a lot of tech work – especially work-from-home tech work – has dried up and pays a lot less than it did previously. He realizes that he has it good with his well-paying WFH gig and a job he is great at, so he will ride it out until the bitter end.
Also, the future all seems so uncertain right now (does it ever feel certain?) and for context, I am writing this a week after Trump’s inauguration, and he is currently scatter gunning commentary and threatening takeovers and tariffs all over the place. I suspect that at some point Mr. Tucker’s job will get caught up in the crossfire as we live in Canada and his company is in the US. There are already rumblings about profitability and if another layer of complications comes down the pipe, we may see them just throw in the towel on international hires.
Personal Renaissance (formerly known as the mid-life crisis)
Last year when I had my hysterectomy I had to have a blood transfusion. After years and years of being severely anemic, a transfusion was like being on uppers for the first time! Despite the fact I was recovering from an intense abdominal surgery that went a bit sideways, I had a lot more energy than I had experienced in a decade. It was incredible! Then, in the summer, we quit drinking alcohol and my quality of life increased dramatically. Gone were the lethargic days, heartburn and fuzzy-headedness.
Given these things, I decided to change up my meds at the end of Rocktober and WOWEE I am not kidding when I say it changed my life. I suddenly had a lot more energy, my PLS symptoms got better and I wanted to do more things for myself such as work out and have a decent skin care routine. So I did!
I learned how to make my skin feel and look better with budget products (thank you to the budget videos by Dr. Idriss!). I signed myself back up for physiotherapy and massage[1] in an attempt to build strength and decrease spasticity and so far it is working really well. I also started spending a little extra money on getting my hair and nails done professionally. For someone who has NEVER really spent much money on beauty products it has been a super large leap for me to actually care about those things[2] ! So far I have zero regrets: I look better, I feel better and I am generally more confident and feel less frumpy.
We have added a few extras back into our budget and it feels good to splurge a bit more. We don’t eat out at all but instead have a lovely fancy dinner once every couple of months. It’s really worked out in terms of value because there is a lot of space around these splurgy events so they stand out and are truly enjoyed.
I also am currently taking an art class through the city. It reaffirms that I am definitely not an artist but it’s been a great, soothing way to spend Mondays during the indoor months. It’s lovely to be in a room of folks all similarly concentrated on their small art projects and most of them on my level: enjoying the process but aren’t lying to themselves about their artistic abilities. I think doing things is fun even when you aren’t good at them. Maybe even ESPECIALLY if you aren’t good at them because the pressure to perform is off.
Budgety 2025
I mentioned previously that we had met all of our financial goals. The house is paid off. We have a solid income via my disability to support our family (and life insurance should the worst happen). Mr. Tucker’s retirement accounts are definitely coasting – and by that I mean that when my disability income replacement ends in 16 years, it will have increased enough via compound interest to support a pretty darn good lifestyle when combined with CPP/OAS – even if we never put another cent in.
Still, our cash savings is lower than I’d like it to be given that should Mr. Tucker lose his job AND we lose our renters, it would just kill our budget. So this year is about getting those cash reserves up in 2025 so that we can carry everything we need to in an emergency. I think we will be laser focused on getting cash into our TFSAs this year.
Another win for us is that we have fully funded The Eldest’s RESP! By that I mean, we have caught up to the point where we no longer get the 20% matching (up to $7200) from the feds. So now we only have 2025-2026 to get the full matching for The Youngest.
RDSP contributions are also done. The Disability Savings Program is so strange in the fact that you can only get grant matching until December 31st of the year you turn 49. Whomp whomp: I turned 49 in December. I can’t be mad at the 100% return on the RDSP grant though.
This brings me to another finale in our childrearing years: now that The Eldest is 16, the last big thing we will pay for is her driving classes and her driver’s license. I am signing up for her classes this week so that she can take her G2 exit exam as soon as possible & then next year she can get her full G. Combined with the money we have invested to help her get her jobs (ski instructor in winter, wading pool attendant in the summer), her driver’s license, and money for education, she is all ready to be an adult out in the world! Two more years and her sister will follow suit!
This is The Youngest’s last year of snowboarding lessons and next year she will take her snowboarding instructor course. This summer will be her last year of sailing lessons where she will hopefully be able to get her CanSail 4. We will get her CPR/SFA and her motorboat license and hope that next year she can come back to be a sailing camp instructor. The we will get her driving lessons and pay for her license and she is off as well!
It is crazy to think that we are almost out of summer camps and kid activities. It’s been a long and expensive road but I truly believe it is worth it. I have zero regrets about having kids and the expense of children generally. My kids are amazing and while I recognize that parenting isn’t for everyone, it has definitely been a worthwhile wonderful adventure for us and I genuinely like my children as people[3].
You have to kick at the darkness…
I have been trying not to mainline news but the news is still mainlining me. Even Youtube feels like a game of whack-a-mole and chicken all at the same time. I click “not interested” and like a Hydra, a new political video pops up in its place. It seems that everywhere I go it’s just one crappy headline after another. The fact that we are in the coldest and darkest days here in Canada definitely doesn’t help. Then of course, tax season is coming down the pipe so it is almost time to round up all of our paperwork for that. Until then, we are trying to stuff our tax-advantaged accounts as much as possible to reduce our taxable income (because I *always* owe because they don’t tax CPP-D at the source).
But there are still glimmers of light! Since divesting from social media many friends have reached out via Signal, email or text. The evenings have been spent sitting in front of the fireplace with tea and books. Mr. Tucker and I start our days with coffee in the dining room where we have fresh flowers to remind us that spring does eventually come (it never feels like that in January and February). I even paid our veggie CSA this week, so that is also a harbinger of a new year. In the mornings, we light a beeswax candle and start our days softly chatting instead of picking up our phones. Mr. Tucker has even spent some of his down time picking oil painting back up again.
I guess that is just it, when it comes down to it: you have to just keep focusing on the little joys day-to-day & trudging forward with your goals and dreams.
[1] Our benefits partially cover some of these expenses
[2] I know some people will feel that vain but so be it: we all have different splurges and that’s ok
[3] So far! I hope it stays that way!
I asked Mr. Tucker to buy me this for Winter Solstice & he did!
It’s hard to not think of spring and fall as seasons of transition. Spring still has elements of the winter such as the odd day of snow and fall still has days where the sun is out and it is warm and clear. Summer and winter tend to be more delineated – at least where I live – where winters are snow, darkness and blowing wind & summers are all humidity, long days, and blazing sun. We generally tend to follow the seasons here and mark each one as it transits through the year. I highly recommend books like Mrs. Sharpe’s Traditions for those of you who enjoy Victorian Americana celebrations that fall on the more Christian side of things. It’s full of crafts, poetry and information about the holidays and seasons. I read Winters in the World this year about the seasons in Anglo-Saxon England and it was also a lovely, enlightening read.
After a year of having a broken foot and two surgeries I am eager to get out and about and enjoy the fresh air. Mr. Tucker has fixed up my trike (#bless marrying a man who used to be a bike courier) and we have been going out on walks around the neighbourhood. I hate how much I miss going outside when I am forced to stay inside. Winter is an absolutely tragic season for me because when you have mobility issues it can mean getting stuck inside when it is really icy out. I actually enjoy winter and grew up in the 80s where your parents forced you outside no matter what the temperature was & I also clocked many years skiing. I am seriously thinking of investigating accessible skiing options but I am afraid that like most things for disabled people, it will be cripplingly* expensive.
But it’s spring now! As is our monthly habit, we have done a craft and games night, and because it was March, it was Easter-themed. It was, as usual, amazing. We emailed our orders into Holly’s Hot Chicken (which is great if you need a gluten-free option and/or just like delicious food!) which our friends picked up on their way over, we did some fun Easter crafts & egg decorating and then we played Telestrations. It’s sad to think that in a few short months the eldest two kids in our group are off to university! Until then, we will try and squeeze in as many games nights and pool parties as possible.
Other than that it has been just watching PWHL games, the Women’s World Hockey & I even got sucked into March Madness, rather unexpectedly when it came on right after a WWH game! I got suckered into buying a subscription to The Sports Network to watch the WWH and so I figured, why not? Well OF COURSE I was hooked and watched the final on Sunday (like almost 19m other people). It was just so fascinating! I don’t know if that means I will end up loving the WNBA but I did enjoy it!
I have such a love/hate relationship with sports, namely, hockey. I grew up loving hockey and watching it. Like many other Canadian families, my brother played it and I went to a few of his games as well. In University I lived in an apartment on top of a pub and my friends & I would regularly win tickets to hockey games as prizes on Trivia Nights. When you are a poor student you enjoy any free entertainment that comes your way! But over the years, my love for the NHL lessened. Size-wise, it is an absolute BEAST with 82 games per season for each of the 32 teams – not including the Stanley Cup. But on top of that, the last game we attended we saw them switch out the ads along the boards on the commercial breaks. That was just wild to me. I had grown up with stories of my uncle remembering when tickets were cheap and you could bring a boxed lunch into Maple Leaf gardens. Don’t get me wrong – I grasp the enormity of putting together a pro sports league it is just a shame when the cheap seats for an NHL game (standing room only) are $50 in the nosebleeds. That is just out of range for many families.
Watching the PWHL play, fill arenas and get more sponsorships is a bit of a bittersweet experience: I want this league to succeed so badly, I want them to get advertising dollars! But it also weirds me out to see a paper towel company sponsor a power play. It’s conflicting to simultaneously want them to succeed but hate the price it will take to make it work. I am not an idiot – we live in a capitalistic society, for better or for worse – and the league can’t run just on Mark Walter’s big bucks alone, in perpetuity**. That said, we’re renewing our tickets for next year.
WELP. The condo still hasn’t sold. Lots of great feedback from the viewings but it’s been up for 2 months. I know that it’s been an average of 90 days for sales of condos lately and I am sure everyone is waiting for the Bank of Canada’s rate cuts*** but I am still impatient. It feels like the path forward for us is riding on this one deadweight to be out of our hands. I’m crossing my fingers that I have a better update soon!
Meanwhile, Mr. Tucker are working on a plan for our lives while we wait for the condo to sell. There is no point sitting around wallowing about things not going according to plan when there is so much living to do. Since spring is here and April is a wee break in-between our children’s birthdays I have asked them to not make a ton of weekend plans so that we can sort some things around the house.
Mt Tucker and I are planning some outdoor chores this month but spring is also a good time to tackle things like going through all of the rooms of your house and making a master plan on what to fix, clean, organize and decorate. We also want to plot out our garden bunkies to take advantage of what may be a very hot, dry summer. The plan is to stay home and have myriad pool parties and friend drop-in days!
We also did manage to catch the solar eclipse yesterday! It was 99% totality here which had to be good enough because we didn’t want to drive an hour south. The kids had the day off so they cleaned the house and watched the eclipse. It was a good day!
*I didn’t intend that pun but I am leaving it because it fits nicely
**I mean, he probably COULD afford it but every parent wants their child to leave the nest
***Kept at at 5% at the announcement this morning. Whomp whomp.
This year was dominated fully by the last half of the year. I tried going back to my (paper) journal to see what happened earlier on in 2023 but it was very low-key. I like low-key, in fact, as I get older all I want is my cozy little life with good food, good people, and fun hangouts. Still, here is a bit of a roundup of how 2023 went:
The shortlist of wins:
Financial:
– We paid off our house in July!
– We increased our retirement savings by 26%.
– We increased the kid’s RESPs by 29%.
Social:
– We managed to do book clubs inside again! I got to go out twice with them to restaurants/breweries.
– I went back to dragon boat this year!
– We did family games nights most months with a family we are friends with. It’s come to be one of my favourite parts of the month. We also did a play together and had dinner yesterday.
– We rented a cottage for Thanksgiving with other friends and had a lovely weekend together eating a lovely shared meal.
– One of my besties and I share a birthday so this year we took a pottery class together with another friend.
– We hosted a family birthday party for Mr. Tucker’s dad for the first time in years.
– I deleted discord and mostly stay off social media (Instagram seems to be my big hold out).
– I wrote more in this blog.
– We bought seasons tickets to the Professional Women’s Hockey League and plan many dinners and games with the kids!
– We finally (FINALLY) had a Winter Solstice party again!
Home:
– We moved The Eldest to basement where she has a bigger room and now Mr. Tucker and I share and office upstairs (I had previously carved out a section of the living room).
– We built gaming computers! I finished the first Witcher game!
– The garden did really well (also see: losses).
Sadly, the second half of the year was a lot worse than the first. I won’t break it up into categories and instead just BLAH them right on the page.
The longlist of losses:
– I tripped over a tree root at dragon boat and ended up with a broken foot that put me out of commission for 9 weeks. In case I haven’t mentioned it, when you have PLS it is imperative that you keep moving to keep up strength and balance. So I lost a lot of ability this year by not being weight-bearing and am just started to get it back.
– In the early summer it was determined that I had to have a hysterectomy after we exhausted all other options. So having to undergo a small surgery in July (cancer screening) followed by a huge abdominal surgery in September all while having limited mobility due to a broken foot sucked. It brought Mr. Tucker and I to the brink of despair at times because he was on the hook for everything while also trying to work a full-time job. That man is my hero.
– I was renting my condo to a relative who suddenly went no-contact in the spring and stopped paying completely. Mr. Tucker and my dad had to go in person to evict him. After he moved out we realized that he had caused thousands of dollars worth of damage that we now had to pay for. He hadn’t even been paying enough to cover the bills so the losses to our family were huge. It’s been 5 months and we still haven’t got it renovated (just one more thing!). No good deed goes unpunished.
– Mr. Tucker’s company was bought and as the kids say, “the vibes are off.” It’s a culture clash for sure between an established, mature company and a VC funded young company that is basically winging it. I don’t plan for him to be there long but it is frustrating to merge companies in the best of circumstances.
– We tried an art video project but couldn’t dedicate time to it so it’s been put on the backburner until Mr. Tucker retires.
– My uncle died on Christmas Eve.
– Mr. Tucker’s biological nephew died of an aggressive cancer at 24 years old, which is absolutely heartbreaking.
What’s in store for 2024?
Sell this damn condo: we have ONE MORE thing to accomplish before we can put it on the market and so hopefully this will be done next week.
It’s going to be a sober year: we have an all-inclusive trip planned this winter which will be exempt but 2024 will be alcohol-free. We had a sober year from Halloween 2020 to Halloween 2021 and it was amazing. I realize that so much of my health is affected by alcohol. I can’t even drink fermented alcohol anymore: it makes me violently ill. So it’s my body probably telling me just to…not drink alcohol.
It’s going to be a social year: I want to see people in person, outside of our homes, in different environments. Picnics, dinners, coffees, museums & galleries, events – you name it, I’m IN! I also would like to have more pool parties. If there is anything the pandemic has taught me it is that virtual interaction is no substitute for in-person hangouts. I will also be prioritizing people who prioritize me and shuffling people from friend to acquaintance relationships. If I am constantly doing the legwork with maintaining the friendship, if you need me to transport you all the time or if I feel that you are fitting me just around the edges of your life (when you have nothing better to do), we probably will not be friends in the upcoming years. OFC I will continue to maintain my daily group chats, which are lovely – especially with The Americans* and hopefully see a few of them this year!
It’s going to be an analog year: I realized when my uncle died that if I had to contact family and facebook disappeared, I’d be screwed. So I am rounding up people’s contact info into an address book so that I will have a hard copy of it all. It’s so funny that I spent years in the early 2000s until recently to digitize EVERYTHING for ease of use & now I am reversing course. I also want to log all the books I am going to read. Now I feel like there is value in physical things. I want to send more mail, do more art, and set up the record player in the living room and just…listen to an album from start to finish? Do nothing else but lay there and listen. Remember doing that?**
Health-SCHMELTH: I need to walk/bike, stretch and work on balance. I listened to a podcast recently and someone said, “Stop saying ‘oh when X day happens I will do Y health stuff’ when you should just start incorporating healthy behaviours now into your life. There is no moment where it’s suddenly going to be perfect.” UGH, I am so guilty of this. I need to stop saying If X, then Y because X never happens. I need to fit everything into my day-to-day somehow.
Organize: If there is ONE thing that I can say definitely contributes to a better home life, it’s having a meal plan. I know it makes our lives so much easier to plan everything in advance by shelf life but yet, I fall off the planning wagon all of the time. I think if I had one New Year’s Resolution, it would be “keep up with the meal plan!”
Have Mr. Tucker retire: this is a stretch goal it feels like (because it depends on us selling the condo) but we are in position to have him retire should he want to. We have enough a> savings, b> insurance, c> income to have him leave paid work as soon as we don’t have to pay for the condo anymore. That one feels really nice.
I am writing this on New Year’s Eve. The Eldest is at a sleepover and Mr. Tucker would like to stay up, so I took a nap. He’s making an elaborate dinner for us and our plans include sitting by the fire, having a few drinks and then ringing in the year with The Youngest.
Happy New Year to you and yours, friends.
*These are my Americans, get your own.
**WHERE MY OLD PEOPLE AT?
I realize that I posted a life update on September 21st, 2021 and haven’t followed up since. My goal to be a better blogger has not come to fruition. Besides, all the kids are on tiktok these days and I am going in the opposite direction and staying off of most social media. Here is a synopsis of the past year or so:
We ended up going to Puerto Rico: the direct flight we had booked to Jamaica changed so many times that it ended up becoming an over 24 hour flight with various stops. We discussed it with our friends and made the decision to pull the plug and instead planned a trip to Puerto Rico. Both families have been there before and we found a nice hotel on the southwest coast far from the maddening crowds. Covid made travel an absolute nightmare but we have stories for days and isn’t that what travel is all about?
Mr. Tucker started a new job: he heads up a new team now and with this new job came a small pay raise. So once again we have reversed course and are in super saver mode except the new raise covers our increases in spending money and groceries. That’s good because inflation has made it more expensive anyway.
We are still on track to pay off our mortgage in 2023: this is very exciting because we did manage to make our prepayment this year. It was looking dicey there for awhile because Mr. Tucker needed major dental surgery and…
We put in a walk-in bathtub: it was getting more and more dangerous for me to use a step-over tub and a bath chair so we bit the bullet and had a walk-in installed. It was incredibly expensive but we managed to not go into debt to do it.
We did more weekend roadtrips & didn’t rent a cottage: I have to be honest, I love staying home all summer. We bought a house with a pool for a reason and that reason is that I spend every great summer day swimming. Besides, we got to see a lot of friends for backyard hangouts.
We had a good run camping or renting cottages with friends when our kids were younger, it was more for the kids to run around with their friends than for us to enjoy. Now that they are older, they don’t enjoy it as much themselves. So it made sense to put this particular tradition to rest.
We did manage to get use out of our Canada’s Wonderland passes though! We went May 24 long weekend and Thanksgiving weekend – where we also went to Medieval Times. Is it absolutely cheesy? Yes. Did we all love it? Also, yes. We won’t renew them again as the deal isn’t as good as the pandemic restrictions let up but I am glad we did it. We still do have amazing plans for next year’s roadtrip.
I did rent a cottage in Prince Edward County with my friends from book club and had a wonderful weekend. Instead of booking an expensive wine tour a friend drove us to various wineries and it made for a fun, inexpensive weekend.
We had more local outings during the holidays: we did a lot more holiday-themed local events both last year and this year. During Halloween we went to various local farms to experience their haunted houses and we did a local Haunted Walk with friends as well. For Christmas last year we did a drive-thru light show and saw The Nutcracker. Of course, we kept up with our two traditions: October’s 13 Days of Halloween Movies and 12 Days of Christmas Movies in December. We had planned a small Winter Solstice event but was thwarted by Omicron.
We’re still gardening: we haven’t got better at it though. Still, it’s a fun hobby and I enjoy watching the garden change over the summer.
Health: I had a particularly awful fall in the late spring which took a long time to heal & made me make the decision to not paddle with my dragon boat team this year. I also have not kept up with a regular exercise routine outside of swimming in the summer. This is something I need to refocus on. I lost a lot of confidence with the fall but conversely I have added supplements to my routine that have reduced my spasticity & made my skin issues more manageable.
As 2022 comes to an end Mr. Tucker and I are working on some big goals to tackle in 2023. I feel like this deserves its own post, which I will tackle closer to the end of the month. Until then, we are gearing up to enjoy yet another Christmas season as a family and will hopefully be able to have a small Winter Solstice celebration with friends.
WELP. The idea of writing consistently here this year as a New Year’s resolution didn’t happen. Still, I’ve not really spent a lot of time on social media this year and I have definitely kicked my facebook habit (and replaced about 50% of it with an Instagram habit – oops!). Of course, the pandemic is still out there pandemicking but the kids are back in school so that is nice. We had a great summer of outdoor socially distanced hangouts, and now we are settling in to have a lovely autumn full of fun fall activities. But first, maybe a roundup of what has happened in the past 6 months since I last wrote:
Cottaging on Manitoulin island: we have probably shut the door on camping/cottaging with the two other families. Since Sprout was 2, we’ve either Glamped in Quebec parks or we’ve rented cottages. This year we had a lovely week in Dominion Bay where the kids could run around, play games and go for long walks. My friend S did her yearly craft camp for the kids & there was woodburning, leaf painting & other projects completed. I mostly read, and we even headed out to an outdoor farmer’s market (a pandemic first for me!) where I bought cozy wool socks for me, rings made out of antique spoons for the kids, and a pepper grinder from a woodworker for Mr. Tucker.
Unfortunately, during the pandemic there was a run on cottage rentals and even though we tried to book for next year early this summer, there was really nothing to be had that wasn’t $3000 a week – a bit steep. Also, our kids are much older now: Sprout is going to be 12 next year and the oldest kids will be 16 and will probably have jobs. It’s been a good run but it’s time to move on. Not all is lost though! More below!
Gardening: this was our garden’s second year & like the first year we kind of took the “set it and forget it” approach. Still, we got a lot out of it despite the chaos and have learned that we can probably sow an early spring garden, a summer garden & a fall garden. We did end up sowing a fall garden but a little later than I would have liked so who knows what will happen? Despite the cold, the tomatoes are still producing and the basil is going strong. Heck, some of our herbs – like lavender, coriander & dill – have re-seeded and are producing again. Since our goal is to bring those herbs inside for wintering under grow lights, I am happy to see it!
Hopefully we will get some cool weather crops before the snow flies! Then we will pull the dying plants, lay on our home made compost and let the beds winter. Otherwise, we have garlic to plant for next year before the winter sets in.
Canning, preserving & gleaning: we did most of the things we had done last year that we had enjoyed,
– Horseradish dill pickles
– Tomato sauce
– Spicy dilly beans
– Strawberry and raspberry jam
– Sundried tomatoes
Some new things,
– Both dill and sweet mustard relish (made when our cucumbers turned yellow)
– Red onion and beetroot chutney
– Marinated eggplant
Some boozy things,
– We made Nocino from friend’s black walnuts
– We made a bachelor’s jam for Winter Solstice/Yule
– We are now trying our hand at plum wine from our friend’s plums
I am going to do an entire post on all of the things we did & some recipes sometime soon. What’s notable though is what we didn’t do: salsa or tomatillo salsa. We really weren’t going through it as quickly as I thought we would, so we focused on tomato sauce instead.
Money Mondays: this is still going strong! We’ve done sessions on a bunch of things such as the Disability Tax Credit, had a guest speaker to do a presentation on wills, and next week I am doing one on budgets.
Health: the good news is that the ALS clinic told me that I am doing well enough that I only have to come in once every two years! The nurse told me that this was the first time she’s heard the doctor tell someone that so I am pretty proud. Still, I could be doing more work on my health to be quite honest.
– Mr. Tucker and I are taking long walks (I bought a yellow tricycle, which is what I usually take) weekdays. We grab the dogs in the morning, walk Sprout to the end of the street, then we walk the Bean to her bus stop & then we head down to the river for a longer walk (or just through the neighbourhood on busy mornings). It’s been really good for us both to be forced to get up, washed, dressed and out the door. Otherwise we just lounge around the house in our jammies.
– I plan to do #folktober next month to work on my fine motor skills with painting. I bought some nice watercolour paints and I need to encourage myself to use them. Wish me luck!
– I need to clean out my knitting basket to make it more user-friendly. The Sprout reminded me that I said I would teach them to knit and I still haven’t. So again, in the interest of my fine motor neuron skills (and keeping my promise) I should pull that out again.
– My vitamin regimen has made my cycle much better and that in turn has also helped my spasticity.
– I haven’t had alcohol since October 28th, 2020.
– My skin has been just awful so yesterday I was tested for a bunch of things (celiac, thyroid) and my GP is making me appointments with two dermatologists, so we will see how that will play out. I figure this may be an ongoing saga for awhile as appointments are sparse due to the pandemic.
Finances: shockingly, Mr. Tucker has made the decision to work longer in order to put more money into some house-related projects. This means we’ve eased up on our intense budget and instead we are buying more things that bring us joy. For example, we are trying to rehire our old housecleaner again as we’ve decided that our weekends are probably not best spent arguing with the kids over chores. They both know how to clean an entire house so we’ve done our job here. They’ll still have chores, just less of them.
I have also increased our a> grocery budget; and b> our pocket money. We are still saving at an amazing rate but we aren’t as intense as we were for most of this year. We hit our prepayment amount for our mortgage & will contribute to Mr. Tucker’s retirement accounts (but to a lesser degree).
Instead we are also going to…
Travel: both near and far. When we were on Manitoulin Island this summer we made the decision that if cottages were going to be $3000 a week that we would be better off booking a trip down south instead. So that is what we have done. We have tentatively booked a vacation to Jamaica next winter (covid willing!). We booked our flights & house rentals but we did manage to get good cancellation policies so we will see where the world is at come winter.
We also have decided to treat the kids & take them to Canada’s Wonderland for the Halloween Haunt. We ended up buying season passes with another family in the hopes of going back for a couple of days next summer as well.
I would like to also do more things close to home such as heading to various Halloween-themed (outdoor) events in our area. After a year and a half of being stuck at home, I am eager to spread my social wings!
So that is about it for changes around here. Mostly my days are spent reading and parenting & watching shows or playing games as a family. I think we’ve turned a corner on covid – at least in our area of the world – so I hope that stays steady. Overall, life is pretty good.
Last year I made the decision to take the kids to Universal for spring break. The Sprout is a huge Harry Potter fan and as they age out of theme parks (and as we hunker down for more savings), I thought it was best to plan a last hurrah of a vacation as a Christmas surprise. Of course, booking during Spring Break was way too expensive and we found we could tack on a weeklong cruise in February for almost the same price as Universal during Spring Break. So of course, we ended up booking in February.
We all know how this story ends. By the time Spring Break came around, the government was telling Canadians to come home as soon as they could and things started to slowly shut down. I had friends who got stuck in foreign countries scrambling to get home and then we all ended up in lockdown.
And here we are now.
Truth be told, nothing really changed for Mr. Tucker and I in terms of our day-to-day life. With winter raging outside I generally am housebound during the winter months. The only thing that changed was that the kids were home. Since the order that schools were closing happened on the eve of March break, all seemed normal to them as we allowed unfettered access to devices as well as played games, read books, and watched Netflix – like much of the world was doing. Come the end of March Break I stuck up a schedule (hope springs eternal), signed them up for Khan Academy and we went forward into quarantine.
Of course, it’s now almost 8 weeks since we’ve been home and so much has changed. We now have masks we ordered from http://Starkers.com. Almost all of our purchases are delivery or curbside pickup, aside from Mr. Tucker’s monthly Costco run for medication and supplies. We go for walks but mostly stay inside, and our social lives (like all of our social lives) have moved to online meetings. Still – and probably hilariously – one of our New Year’s Resolutions was to not eat out at all in 2020 and since Covid-19, that hasn’t even been an option for us.
The thing is, when you have a pre-existing condition or disability your life changes dramatically. When the pandemic started the first thing I knew right from the beginning was: there is no way I will ever be prioritized for a ventilator. Even though disability rights advocates were starting petitions at the callousness of denying disabled people the same rights as able-bodied people, I knew that it didn’t matter. Even if the rules changed, the decisions wouldn’t come from a bureaucrat. Fates would be decided by overworked doctors and nurses facing down the difficult decision of who gets to live and who gets to die. We had already seen this play out in Italy and I knew that it was a real possibility that if things got bad enough here it would happen in much the same way.
So we hunkered down, found all our travel size bottles of sanitizer. Mr. Tucker wiped down every surface after he shopped, and we had a stringent protocol when he came home. Life just changed. Life changed for all of us.
I am grateful that we’re both not working full time right now. Mr. Tucker works for a company that hosts online meeting software and so you can imagine his workload right now. But the kids are home and need some guidance to complete the online work that’s assigned to them. Still, we’ve chilled out a lot more since the beginning. While we still limit access to devices to the weekends, they do their homework, classroom meetings, and Khan Academy online & we don’t restrict access to those things. There are books, art supplies, puzzles, and games for anyone to access at anytime so we’re trying to keep things as calm and laid back as possible.
We’re all exhausted and burnt out about being on top of each other all the time. While Mr. Tucker has his basement office & the girls had their rooms, I felt constantly like I had no where to go. So I found a recliner on a second-hand website which Mr. Tucker picked up for me for a song (whilst respecting social distancing rules), a friend gave me a reading light, and I carved out a corner of our bedroom where I could go and relax when the kids were in the common areas & I needed some peace. So things are working out.
As for us, we are happy spring is here and that this didn’t all begin in the fall, when the dark winter starts to close in. We’ve made sourdough for a couple of years now so I’ve happily become the purveyor of starter & I’ve have sent a long many an email of tips and tricks. We made the decision last year to buy as much of our food as locally as possible, so we’ve been lucky to weather all the hoarding (aside from toilet paper & sanitizer). We have freezers full of local meat, buckets full of flour and oatmeal, we get our eggs from the farmer up the street, and we have a weekly vegetable delivery. We had always talked about doing raised bed gardening so we’ve built beds and are looking forward to gardening with the kids all summer. As well, our pool will be open over the next couple of weeks so we won’t feel as confined to the house. So there are some things to look forward to over the next little while.
Of course, there are a million and one places you can go to hear the worst of the worst news and I am no stranger to the anxiety that comes from deep-diving into that quagmire. But now, I’ve resigned myself to just reading the headlines of major newspapers – informed but not too informed – and keeping busy at home. But I am not going to go into that here, preferring to focus on the positive. I love that so many people are taking up old-timey crafts now that they have the time, space, and boredom to tackle new projects such as baking, knitting, and gardening. I love that neighbours are helping each other with groceries, sourdough starter, and seed sharing. People are starting to see the value in supporting local farms and buying from local businesses that it looks like independent book stores are poised to take over market share from amazon. Even in the worst of times, the best of humanity shines through, and if the research is to believed, this is typical of humans when chaos hits. It may be a little while until things relax again but I’d like to think we’ll keep some of the good bits that came out of all this. One can hope.
