Browsed by
Author: Tucker

Make your own veggie boullion (aka Souper Mix)

Make your own veggie boullion (aka Souper Mix)


Mr. Tucker whipped up a bunch of this veggie bouillon for the freezer last weekend and it reminded me to share it here. It’s pretty versatile and while the original recipe is below, you could add any savoury vegetables or herbs and it’s pretty forgiving. I feel like dry mushrooms would be a fantastic addition.

Souper Mix

Makes about four cups:
9oz (250 g) leek
7oz (200 g) fennel
7oz (200g) carrot
9oz (250g) celery root
2oz (50g) sun-dried tomatoes
2 or 3 garlic cloves
3 ½ (50g) parsley
3 ½ (50g) cilantro
¾ c fine sea salt

Put all the ingredients into the food processor and blend until you have a fairly thick paste. To use: combine 1 tsp of souper mix to 1 cup of water.

This recipe is from the River Cottage: Preserves book. I highly recommend both the series & the cookbooks!

Financial zooms!

Financial zooms!

Today I totally spent the entire day watching Biden’s inauguration and getting nothing done but chatting with friends in group chats & commenting on facebook posts. It was a big day for my USian friends (and indeed for democracy) so I am giving myself a pass on writing a lot.

Still, my friend K and I have started an interesting project! Following two comment-laden conversations on our respective facebook feeds, K and I thought people may benefit from a casual personal finance (PF) chat amongst friends. It’s hard to figure out where to start with PF if you aren’t a nerd about it so we sent out an email asking for people to let us know if they are interested in a group like this. Here is what we wrote,

Hey friends,

If you are receiving this invitation it is because you have been a part of one of the conversations on Personal Finance on either K’s or T’s facebook posts. From those conversations people expressed an interest in having a personal finance chat over zoom. Our primary goal with this group is to de-mystify money for people & learn together. Personal Finance tends to be so wrapped up in our self-esteem and personal identities in a culture where discussing it is taboo. When something is taboo it creates shame and that shame controls us and prevents us from seeking out information that could possibly unstick us from where we are stuck. So we are offering a stress-free environment where we can lay our questions and concerns on the table and get some ideas from other people.

Our idea was to have a preliminary group discussion to figure out what topics people would like to tackle in subsequent zoom calls where we could get a feel for what people want to discuss and then tailor subsequent calls. This could range from the psychology of money down to the various investment products — the sky is the limit! We aren’t positioning anyone as an “expert” so much as we are crowdsourcing ideas, tips, and tricks from everyone. Don’t worry if you don’t feel like you have much to contribute as with any group there will be people who know more than others and people who know less. Everyone who receives this email is invited to join us and don’t stress about where you are on your journey. Also, there is also no obligation to share the details of your personal situation with the group, so don’t feel like this will be looking at your life under the microscope. You are invited to share as much or as little as you want to.

Please note, that while we can discuss various types of investments, if you want detailed investing advice, this is not the place. Please seek out a fee-only, fiduciary (legally-obligated to act in your best interest) financial planner. If they aren’t fiduciary advisors, they are salespeople who get kickbacks from selling you high-fee products…but this is also something we can discuss!

If you don’t want to join us – that’s ok, too! No pressure at all. We would ask that you let us know as we have really had to scale down the invite list to make it manageable for online discussion so it would help us with planning.

NO OBLIGATION! NO MONEY DOWN! YOU CAN CANCEL AT ANYTIME!

I do hope you will join us,

K & T

It looks like we have quite a bit of interest but I hope to hear from a few other people before we settle on a time & date for our preliminary meeting. I am crossing my fingers that this turns into a positive, stress-free PF group that people find helpful.

The Three Year Plan

The Three Year Plan

When I was diagnosed everything became about LIVING FOR THE MOMENT. We wanted to do as much as possible while I was still mobile. Since we had not traveled as much as we would have liked we started there. Two years in a row we took whirlwind trips with the kids making sure they had these memories to fall back on should my decline be rapid. I don’t regret the decisions we made & we had the money to cover it so it was a net positive for our family. Two years later and my mobility has only slightly decreased, we are less panicked, and in the midst of the pandemic the smoke has cleared on a lot of our previous behaviours.

Like a lot of people though, we’ve really been able to reflect on things during the pandemic. If there is one thing we’ve become good at seeing, it’s our own patterns of behaviour. Because things have slowed down so significantly we’ve been able to finally see what needs to be changed. One of the things that has really stood out is our feast-or-famine spending style.

When things are going really well at Mr. Tucker’s work his attitude is, “Jeez, I could work here forever!” We tend to let the good times roll & spend a lot more money on extras. Then when he goes through a particularly difficult time at work we remember that if we saved more, he wouldn’t have to work forever. It’s our pattern and it’s been like that for a long time. This feast-or-famine way of managing money has worked because we never overspend but it still has left us spinning our wheels with long-term goals.

So in November we decided to sit down and plan out what we’d like to do & then we came up with a 3-year plan to achieve our goals. Here is what our list looked like:

– Finally do a will and get our estate affairs in order
– Fully fund the kid’s RESPs (Registered Education Savings Program) & buy back the missing years in order to receive the $1000 grant
– Start & catch up with the RDSP (Registered Disability Savings Plan) so to get the full $1000 grant

…and the biggest one of all:

– Live off of my income for everything and put all of Mr. Tucker’s income into his RRSPs (Registered Retirement Savings Plan)

That really is the biggest goal of them all: living on one salary for everything is a huge undertaking for us. It means we are budgeted really tightly down to the dollar with very little wiggle room. It still covers all of our needs (food, shelter, bills), many of our wants (camps, music lessons, entertainment), and all the other savings I mentioned above (and some I didn’t, such as emergency savings). We will still go to the cottage every year on vacation and still keep our hobbies but we will actually have to stop and think of spending now instead of living on autopilot. Spending in one area means that it will have to come from another place so it forces us to make decisions as to what we really want.

So why would we choose to do this? Because if things go well we can pay off our house & Mr. Tucker can retire from paid work if he wants in 3-3.5 years. That’s huge. It doesn’t mean he will retire from paid work, it just gives him the option.

One of the things about being disabled that is always on the forefront of your mind is what your trajectory will be 1, 3, 5 etc…years from now. I don’t know the future but the reality is that every day I have will probably the best day I ever will have. The other reality is that our parents aren’t getting any younger and will probably need more assistance as the years go on. Sure, we have siblings who can help as well but we really didn’t want Mr. Tucker working a high-stress job with long hours, parenting two teenagers, caring for a disabled wife, AND having to go check in on our elderly parents. We wanted to set ourselves up so that if he had to take a leave of absence, he could without having to worry about our finances.

Of course, we don’t expect that our plan won’t be without its hiccoughs but these hiccoughs will happen whether or not we are saving towards our goal. We also fully suspect that we may need to make changes down the line, which is also fine. We are totally flexible and can review how things are going a few months down the road & adjust where necessary. Still, we are both happy to have sorted a lot of our financial life out and are looking forward to seeing how well we can do on our current plan. I will keep you updated!

Take-out

Take-out

One of the things that’s been great about meal planning is that we haven’t purchased takeout since November 27th. I hadn’t even realized that it has been over a month since we had stopped. If you remember, one of our NY resolutions was to not eat out and we did well until the summer where we fell back into the habit of ordering take-out again.

We’ve made the “decision” to not eat out in the past but we’ve never had a plan to deal with what was making us eat out in the first place. For us, it was a lack of planning and tiredness. Everyone knows that you shouldn’t grocery shop on an empty stomach but I think you should also not plan a meal at the end of a long, tiring day. For us, it was this that made us just throw our hands up in the air and say, “let’s just order in!” Undone by our own lack of foresight, again.

I can even remember what we ordered last – KFC. The eldest loves KFC and so it was her turn to choose. So we ordered delivery without realizing that our meal was to go through a 3rd party food delivery app until after it was processed. I had already had issues with Skip the Dishes – in the Bay area of all places! Ground zero for delivery apps! – where it wouldn’t accept the address I put in and instead just assumed an address based on the postal code. No matter how many times you change it, it just reverts back to the address the computer serves up. I swore right there and then not to use delivery apps anymore. So here I was again at the mercy of two platforms that don’t speak to each other (both KFC nor STD knew how to fix an order from their end) and I had the exact same problem as before: the system served up an address and didn’t take the address I put in. In the end, we had to get our cold chicken order from our neighbour’s front step. The delivery driver didn’t even check to see if someone was home. Never again.

On top of all of this we never even finished the leftovers, wasting a bunch of food after a terrible customer service experience. It left me questioning why we even bother. It takes just as long as cooking something, it’s way more expensive, it’s super unhealthy, and then we wasted a bunch of it.

This wasn’t anything new to me, though. I had often lamented that we were wasting money/health/food in the fridge on eating out but knowledge isn’t power without action. We had never done anything about it.

It was around this time that we had become serious about our 3-year plan (more on this coming soon). I knew that one of the easiest ways to save money was on those last-minute decisions to get takeout (and not drinking alcohol). So in order to change our current paradigm I needed to tackle the issue from a few angles in order to come up with a plan.

1- We inventoried our food: Mr. Tucker wrote down all we had stored in our freezers so that we could work from what we had. Since we buy our meat from local farmers having a list helps us get through to the next ordering period.
2- I made a list of all the meals we enjoy: having a document to refer to when I can’t remember what we can make with X, or when I am feeling uninspired helps so that we cycle through meals and not get bored.
3- I meal plan two weeks at a time: like the post I linked above says, we only shop every two weeks for fresh produce and I base our meals around what will go bad first. Using the inventory of things we already have on-hand allows me to buy only the produce we need. We also have stopped running out for ingredients we forgot to pick up.
4- I build easy meals into the plan: I usually plan a day or two of junkier food: those pizza and chicken nugget nights that are just heat-and-serve. I find by keeping these things in the freezer, it helps us on nights we can’t quite get it together.

Of course, it took some trial-and-error to get to where we are right now and I still anticipate the odd snag when I will cave and get Thai food. Still, here are a few other tips:

Pizza is cheaper than steak: if you find yourself exhausted at the end of a crazy week, try and order the cheapest take-out you can. Save the fancy food for when you have time to cook it at home. The more expensive the food, the quicker it will go soggy in the bag or overcook.

Frozen foods are your friends: there is a plethora of different take-out style options available in the frozen section of most grocery stores. A $3 frozen pizza is cheaper than a $10 takeout one.

Embrace the taco kit: honestly, the easiest meal in the world is a pound of ground meat (or ground round) and a taco kit. If you are feeling fancy, buy guac.

There are a million uses for rotisserie chicken: every grocery store sells them for under $10 and you can usually get 2 meals + out of them. You can use leftovers in wraps, casseroles, soups, chicken salad, pasta, in Caesar salads…it’s hard to find a better deal at the supermarket.

Don’t get me wrong – I love eating out – and there is nothing I love more than dropping mad cash on a really great meal experience (with wine pairing, natch. Man, I am going to miss that…). What I don’t want to do though is just order mediocre takeout (because let’s face it, a lot of it is mediocre) because I am being lazy. It’s been easier during the pandemic when we are all stuck at home anyway. I won’t lie: a lot of the changes we’ve made in the past little while we have made because the pandemic has given us a little boost. So in the same way that not traveling is easier when you can’t actually travel, not eating out is also easy when restaurants aren’t open. Still, even when the pandemic is over I hope that these habits will stick.

It’s Friday – beige dinner night. Also: vacations

It’s Friday – beige dinner night. Also: vacations

Well, not all beige. Some nights – like tonight – we’re doing pizza. My favourite recipe for pizza is this Ultimate Vegan Pizza recipe by The Buddhist Chef. Even if you don’t make the cheez (which you should try as it is delicious) it is an amazing recipe for the crust alone. If you oil a square baking sheet before spreading out the crust, it’s even crispier! We’re having it with salad – so again, not beige – but it’s a Caesar salad so the green is just for show.

It’s strange to think about now but we are setting up our plans for summer vacation. Typically we go somewhere in the winter but of course no one is going anywhere this year. As much as we love travel, it’s been nice to not have to have another rushed vacation with the kids. Mr. Tucker also really enjoyed his week at home doing nothing but a few house chores during the week at Christmas. So because of that, he is going to take two weeks off during the summer: one week for the cottage week with two other families, and one week to stay home, relax, and get a few odd jobs around the house.

While these plans chose us this year, it is also nice to be able to save money by not going anywhere this year. Mr. Tucker and I have some fairly intense financial goals over the next three years and so we have actually nixed international travel for the foreseeable future (unless one of us gets an astronomical windfall or raise).

If I am perfectly honest, we’ve also seen a lot with the kids: we’ve been to Disney World twice, Universal Studios once, and we’ve seen most of the Caribbean and many countries in Central America – including a cruise through the Panama Canal. They’ve been on boat cruise in NYC on New Year’s Eve watching the fireworks behind the Statue of Liberty, and stayed in Venice Beach & walked around Hollywood. It’s enough for kids who are only 10 & 12! Besides, the Bean is in jr. high now and taking time off in winter is just not as do-able as it was when they were in primary school.

At the end of our three years of tight budgeting and saving, we can make decisions then. But until we reach the end of those 30 months, it’s going to be very lean: we will have enough to live a really good life but not a little wiggle room for anything outside that. Right now we are leveraging the fact that we can’t go out in the pandemic to kickstart our new habit to reach our goals. Nothing makes staying home easier than an emergency stay-at-home order.

So our rowdy weekend plans include homemade pizza and a movie on the big screen (the projector in our basement rec room). In fact, this pretty much looks like our rowdy weekend plans for the next 3 years – and I am ok with that. Besides, this idiot has 136 more books to read before the end of the year!

In praise of tea

In praise of tea

Despite being a “morning coffee” person today, when I was growing up all the adults around me drank tea. My earliest memories of my mom were of her sitting on the couch, reading books, smoking and drinking cup of tea after cup of tea. When my family got together I remember the adults sitting at the kitchen table in my grandmother’s home chain smoking cigarettes, drinking tea and talking. So my entire life tea (and quite frankly, cigarettes which is another story altogether) has been associated with my family, books, and hangouts. But even as an adult when I went home, my mom would make me a tea and it was automatically calming to me.

It wasn’t until high school that I started hanging out in cafés with friends as “going for a coffee” became the standard. Of course, this pre-dates Starbucks so we hit up a variety of local places that wouldn’t kick a bunch of teenagers out after they’ve nursed the same coffee for an hour. Some of my best memories are of sitting in Cafés, playing chess as my heart raced from all the caffeine I had consumed over the previous few hours. But as much as I love coffee, it doesn’t hold a special place in my heart like tea does.

Mr. Tucker has settled into an Earl-Grey-All-Day pattern whereby he drinks bucketloads of tea all afternoon and all evening. He used to switch to decaf in the evenings but has become so hardcore that he now drinks caffeinated and still falls asleep when his head hits the pillow. I definitely can’t do that. I am a much more varied tea drinker hitting up equal amounts of Yorkshire Gold & various herbal teas before switching to decaf Yorkshire* & Mint Green after dinner. The kids are also prolific tea drinkers with the Sprout enjoying Chocolate Chai, Pumpkin Chai and Faerie Blend (a fruity black from a local store). The Bean typically sticks to Earl Grey like her dad but drinks less tea overall than anyone else in the house. We like to make giant mugs of tea after dinner and play card or board games together.

Even though they both contain caffeine, coffee is about wakefulness and energy as tea is about soothing and calming. The two times I have needed tea – when I quit smoking and when I quit alcohol – it has been there for me, filling in the hole the previous thing left. Even now Mr. Tucker are astonished at how much tea we are drinking – but with no regrets. It’s the perfect pandemic beverage. We are getting a bargain: even a week’s worth of our fanciest favourite teas are still cheaper than one bottle of wine.

I’ll drink (tea) to that.

*The ONLY decaf worth drinking; it isn’t a watery mess.

Book goals

Book goals

For some (stupid?) reason I vowed to read 150 books this year. Honestly, I am a prolific and fast reader so I thought it would be completely possible for someone who doesn’t work to read that many books. Afterall, it’s about a book every day and a half.

Now we are 12 days into 2021 and I am facing down a large pile o’ books with only 4 completed so far and another two on the go. I am trying not to stress out about it because freaking out about it only takes something that brings me joy and turns it into work. Despite the fact that I do love reading a lot of non-fiction and learning new things, I don’t want it to become something I slog through.

So I am trying to ease up on the pressure and just read things at my own pace and in my own time. I am also trying not to cheat and only read novellas. I want my list to be representative of what I would read normally

There is a silver lining though: over Christmas I tackled most of the library books I had out. I am now down to only having 5 books out – a typical pile was often 20+ – so I am calling that a win. Unfortunately, the library waiting lists are a bit of a crapshoot. One week no books come in, and then the next week I find myself with 20 ready for pickup. A smarter person would pause their holds on things when it looks like a tsunami of literature will come down but I have not quite reached that level of organization.

Still, I am grateful that the library remains open for pickups and drop-offs during the pandemic. Our province is going into full lockdown, we can still pick up and drop off books. It’s been a real lifesaver for me to be able to at least have something stay normal.

Meal Planning

Meal Planning

A interesting video series on inflation from PolicyEd The Numbers Game.

Since reading the Tightwad Gazette books starting when I was 18, I have been a huge fan of Amy Dacyczyn. Most of my financial and housekeeping skills have come from her books and I have read and re-read my copies so often that they are yellowed and falling apart. For the most part, she hasn’t steered me wrong (although, she was wrong about computers not becoming a big deal. No one is perfect!).

Because of this, I have been using “The Pantry Principal” my entire life: buying groceries to replenish my pantry as opposed to making a list of meals and then going out to buy the items on the list. The idea is that you only plan dinner for the next day the night before using anything in your fridge that may go bad. It’s sound logic. The problem is that we ultimately would forget to plan the day before and find ourselves staring at the fridge at 5pm wondering what we could possibly make. Inevitably this led to more take-out or crappy beige food. Food waste became an issue and naturally we were bleeding money.

Conversely, I have a friend who meal plans weekly. She uses the stuff they have on hand and then fills in around the edges with a grocery store run every week. All her take-out is planned and she rarely finds herself at 5pm digging for a frozen pizza. Pre-Covid, this worked especially well because she could see what the activity schedule was for the family and plan easier meals; sometimes it was even PB&J and carrot sticks in the back of the car on the way to hockey practice. But it still wasn’t fast food. She also seems to have a lot less food waste.

Of course, with the pandemic we are trying to limit trips to the store which means having to be better planners. Since we can’t just run out whenever we want, we’ve really tried to reduce our trips to one Costco run (medications & bulk), two produce store runs (fresh fruit and veg), one grocery store run (sauces/grains/milk etc), and one pharmacy run a month. This meant that I needed to work around our shopping schedule.

This past year we started buying local meat in bulk. We also started our first garden and canned a lot of food for the winter. This reminded me that The Tightwad Gazette had a really good inventory system to track garden produce so they wouldn’t eat too much of something and run out before garden season ramped back up again. Using that as a guide, I started tracking all of our freezer & canned goods to make sure we would spread their use to get through until the next bulk order was coming through.

So guided by my freezer and pantry inventory I came up with a plan. Every second Saturday I go through the inventory and plan our meals for the following two weeks. Mr. Tucker hits the produce store and buys all the veggies and fruits we need for that time. It may sound like two weeks is a long time and that food would go bad but not if you plan it right.

The key is to organize meals based on the life of the produce. So the first week may have a lot more salads, bean sprouts, green beans, as well as bananas and berries for snacks. The second week will see more apples, oranges, brassicas and root vegetables on the menu because they don’t go bad as quickly. Planning this way allows you a variety of foods in your diets but without the extra grocery trips.

Of course, the best laid plans means that sometimes we have way too many leftovers that not even lunch the next day will take care of. In that case, we just skip a meal. In fact, we didn’t have a Christmas dinner this year because we had too much food leftover from Réveillon! Every Christmas eve our family does small food (hors d’oeuvres such as mini quiches, sausage rolls etc) and a tourtière. Well, this year we miscalculated and ended up with way more food than we could eat in a night. So the next day Mr. Tucker and I decided to skip the ham dinner we had planned and just eat leftovers. We ended up making our huge meal on the 26th instead. So when that happens, you can just push meals off to the next day. At the end of the two weeks you will end up with a> a brassica which will either keep or that you can freeze, b> a root vegetable which keeps a long time, c> or you just move the last meal from this two week period to the first meal of the next two week period.

I know this sounds like much ado about food but honestly, this has been a game-changer for us. We haven’t eaten out since November, we are never left staring at the fridge wondering what to make, we waste less food, we don’t make unnecessary trips and our grocery bill has gone down. In the end, I needed to realize that even the best ideas from people I trust may not be right for me and my family. I wish I had realized sooner that this was a better way to plan meals. I guess like many things we’ve learned over the past year, it only took a pandemic to make me realize that I needed to switch things up.

Sobriety

Sobriety

It happens as it usually does: a period of time where Mr. Tucker and I find ourselves drinking a lot of alcohol but enjoying it less and less. Our solution to that is usually a month of sobering up followed by some grandiose “falling off the wagon” as a holiday hits, friends come over, or it’s Friday. Rinse, repeat.

The pandemic has brought with it exploding alcohol sales. In the spring drinking just brought me anxiety but once the summer hit I was kicking back poolside, drink in hand. The seasons turned once again and by the fall I couldn’t get any sleep unless I had a drink or two. It wasn’t until October that Mr. Tucker and I realized that we were just drinking because it was habit and that neither of us was enjoying it all that much. So one day I turned to him and said, “Do you think we could quit drinking for an entire year?”

So on November 1st we completely stopped drinking alcohol for one entire year.

As creatures of habit I knew what our patterns were and I wanted to break them. I chose a year because it is probably the longest either of us has gone without a drink since we met (even pregnancy is only 9 months!). We also aren’t used to denying ourselves. Mr. Tucker and I are so incredibly compatible but that’s a bad thing if you are heading in the wrong direction. Also, Mr. Tucker is the worst at being the bad guy. Having a supportive partner is amazing but it also means that he sometimes enables my bad behaviour. For example, we will set a goal and say, try to not spend money because we are saving for something. Mr. Tucker will be great at not spending but as soon as I want to spend he takes it as his cue to go all-in and suddenly we are both spending and no closer to our shared goal.

With alcohol though, we have particular triggers. It’s as if you took the game of LIFE and made it into a drinking game. Rough day at work? DRINK! First day of spring? DRINK! Zoom call with friends? DRINK! But when you don’t have a plan aside from the very vague, “we’re not drinking right now,” cracking open a bottle of wine doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. So we crack open a bottle of wine and then a couple of days later we’re drinking two bottles…We’re stuck inside our old pattern again. So making a concrete goal and determining that we want to make it to a year made sense. It’s not open-ended so it’s harder to give in.

I will admit that quitting alcohol was not the only goal. Alcohol is also ridiculously expensive. In our youth we could drink whatever $5 special landed into our little hands but as you get older your tastes generally swing to more expensive brands. Our go-to wine was a regional wine that was on the low-end at $17 and even drinking one of these a night is a $119 a week. Where we live in Canada, there is no decent-tasting “two buck chuck” so you are looking at $400 a month. $400 that could be better spent somewhere else.

The other thing that really convinced me to give a long period of temperance a go is my health. I have often given up alcohol, done a lot of stretching, exercise & meditation, and made sure I my diet was well constructed. But I’ve never done all three at the same time. So I wanted to see if it would improve my mobility if I combined all of the healthy habits. As much as I never wanted to admit it: alcohol increases my spasticity & makes my balance worse. Not just in the “ha ha I am tipsy and can’t walk a straight line” way but in a way that lasts for days even after I’ve not had a drink for awhile. So that was my primary motivator.

Finally, I just didn’t want the kids seeing us drink everyday. Mr.Tucker and I have a saying and it’s, “we’re not moderation kind of people.” I can’t tell you how many times I have turned down “just one drink” at parties because I am driving. I know myself and I can’t just have one drink. It’s much easier for me to stay sober. So while I don’t want to make it sound like we were hammered every night (we weren’t) we did drink most nights of the week. Now that the kids are entering their tween years it seems even more pressing to model spending our evenings doing other things besides drinking (and spending time online but that’s another post).

So how has it gone? Pretty well, actually. We are two months in and neither of us think about it too much. Christmas was a bit difficult because of old habits but it helped that we weren’t hosting a large dinner this year. Being in a pandemic year helped a bit in that respect. For me the difficulty will lie in when the first really warm day of spring happens and when we open the pool this summer. I also feel like it will be easier by that time as well with 6 months behind us.

It helps that we are doing this for myriad reasons: health, money, parenting and life goals. When you look at the choice objectively it makes a lot of sense for our life to make this one change. I will say though, both Mr. Tucker and I – while constant drinkers – aren’t alcoholics. Obviously I don’t want to suggest that quitting alcohol is in any way easy if you have an addiction. If you do, please seek out professional help instead of trying to quit on your own. I know one person who passed away from complications due to alcohol addiction and it is a real, dangerous way to quit. Call your doctor or check out aa.org for more info.

Daily writing practice

Daily writing practice

This TED series on How to be a Better Human looks good but there is a lot of information in there. I came across it when a friend posted 7 Types of Rest that Every Person Needs which is a good read.

It’s been a helluva week. Like most people I’ve spent a lot of time glued to the news and to my social media timelines wondering what the hell is going to happen. But the days of eyestrain, neck pain, and headaches finally came to a head today and I decided to step back from the rage machine and tackle my Goodreads goal (150 books!) instead. I’ve read 4 books so far.

Today I finished On Writing by Stephen King, which is why you see these words today. Mr. Tucker is also reading it and so our conversations naturally gravitate to interesting parts of the book, or information we find relevant to our own lives. Last night I turned to him and lamented that I used to write every day back when livejournal was huge and since I joined facebook in 2007 I don’t write with any length anymore.

To be fair, I gave birth to the Bean in early 2008 and writing was not as a high priority. Facebook had also started to take off and it had a more open and succinct style of communication that fit into my knew lifestyle as a stay-at-home-mom of a newborn. Of course, the snappy style of facebook led to its widespread adoption pretty quickly. I also became so adept at it that I made a career out of it – a successful one, in fact. So while it’s easy to blame social media for my lack of writing the reality is that it is a culmination of factors: mom of two kids, working (in communications a lot of the time. Nothing kills your own writing like writing all day on someone else’s agenda), and the ease in which social made keeping in touch with multiple people much easier.

I’ve also always kept a journal. For the majority of my job contracts through 2012-2015 I woke up early to be at work early so I could be home to take the kids to the park by 4pm. So 6am saw me belting out a couple of pages of notes on my life. I didn’t journal from 2016-2018 during my series of operations and the tests that led to my final diagnosis but at the time I was barely living at all. My diagnosis forced me to pick up the pen again to try and make sense of everything that had happened.

I did manage to keep a blog for awhile that I had started when I had gone back to work after being home with the kids for four years. I wrote during my lunch hours and on the weekends, mostly. At that point my goal was debt repayment and early retirement. So I wrote about the things that I found interesting from that perspective. The universe is a cosmic joker though, and when I found myself in January 2018 with a PLS diagnosis & my neurologist recommending I go off work, I found it deeply ironic. All those years spent worrying about early retirement goals only to get streamrolled by forced retirement. Like a petulant child I screamed in my head, “WHAT? BUT MAYBE I DON’T WANT TO BE RETIRED?!” I had been given what I had wanted but not in the way that I wanted it.

So I started this blog…and did nothing with it. I think I have been reluctant to write here because it feels like I should have a theme and stick to it. Put this blog into a little box labeled DISABILITY BLOG and only discuss topics relating to my disability. But when it comes down to it I just want to write about my life and how I am living it. Yes, Post Morbus means after diagnosis and this is my life after diagnosis but my diagnosis isn’t my life. Sure, it has an effect of every facet of my life but it’s larger than that.

So instead of getting caught up in the minutiae where I feel like I need to write some well-researched, perfectly written tome of helpful information I am just going to write. I am going to write something every day (or almost, everyone has bad days) and get back into the habit. Maybe it will just be a recipe. Maybe it will be about some silly thing I saw online. I can’t say. But the goal is to write something every day & to just get back into the habit of writing.

So here goes it: January 10, 2021 is day 1. Let’s see if I can do a year?