What’s the definition of a good life?

What’s the definition of a good life?


A thrift store haul from last year

My Dad loves to shop sales. He gets up at the crack of dawn on the days of the week the various grocery sales flyers come out. He is also generally the first person at the store when they open the doors. My Dad brings coffee for cashiers, knows about their lives and will remember if they need something picked up when he is on his weekly bargain-hunting trips.
He has done this all of my life. I remember being 7-years-old and him handing me cash to buy cases of sale pop because there was a per person limit. I hated that as a kid but I did love pop so I dutifully went through the cash knowing I wouldn’t even get pop if I didn’t help buy it on sale.

I suspect that he got it from his mother who was fastidious and organized but by all measures, she was a hoarder. She grew up super poor during the depression and was absolutely terrified that we would go through another one, so she had shelves full of soaps, canned food and other household goods. She also had multiple freezers full of butter, milk and meat that could probably have carried all of her 3 kids, their spouses and the 9 grandchildren through another depression. She wasn’t cheap though, the gifts flowed. One of my favourite times of year was when her and my grandfather would come back in the spring from their condo in Florida bearing gifts for all the grandkids. People express their relationship with money in the wildest of ways. For my grandmother it was to hoard the necessities of life and THEN spend lavishly on those she loved.

After my parents divorced, my father didn’t have a lot of stable places to live. He lived with my grandparents for a bit, a couple of girlfriends on-and-off, a trailer with another couple, a house full of bachelors at one point and then when I was 17 got remarried (and divorced, and remarried…and divorced*). He is now retired, in a stable relationship for over 17 years and just living his life meeting up with other retired colleagues for coffee, playing pool and grabbing beers with friends or visiting us. When he visits he ALWAYS brings food and treats for the kids because he is “just trying to help” us out. This is his idea of a good life.

It used to perplex me for a long time that a man who had a good pension and didn’t owe a dime was so obsessed with saving money via grocery sales. My Dad could probably eat out every night of the week and never ever run out of money. Instead, he rarely eats a meal out and he won’t pay full price for anything! It also makes no logical sense to drive to 8 different stores on 2-3 days of the week only to save the same amount in food dollars. It took me a long time to figure it out, but I did figure it out:

He enjoys it.

He enjoys shopping for sales.

IT’S HIS HOBBY!

Sure, when I was a kid it was probably a necessity but eventually he managed to build a career, get promoted and save a bunch of money. So even when he didn’t need to shop for sales, at that point it was so ingrained in his character and such a big part of his weekly routine (especially when he retired) that he kept at it. He brings the woman at Tim Hortons her favourite meats when they go on sale because he loves to share his finds. He brings us food because it makes him feel good to bring his grandkids cases of pop, some chips and cookies because he knows that we never buy it (although, in recent years I’ve pushed him into searching for avocadoes and peppers, too!). Every week, and I mean EVERY WEEK the day before the flyers come out he calls me and asks, “Is there anything you need?” (spoiler: there is never anything we need)

Figuring out my Dad’s motivation got me to thinking. Why have we associated a good life with spending money? There is this unspoken rule that you have to enjoy travel, eating out at fancy restaurants, the occasional luxury good – and god forbid you don’t think a $7 coffee is worth the money! Why, you are just depriving yourself! I would call it a problem if my Dad was so cheap that it was making himself and others miserable but it isn’t. My Dad is a very generous person. He just enjoys living his simple life and hanging out with friends and family and his hobby just happens to be shopping for sale food. Sure, it’s not an exotic life of adventure but he’s happy, and really isn’t that what it is all about? In telling people what is generally considered a “good life” are we inadvertently pushing our values on them?

I try to think of it like this: I love thrifting. The idea of sifting through shelves and shelves of housewares, reading the titles of books that are in no order whatsoever, and trying to find the diamond in the rough in a pile of florescent 80s stirrup pants fills me with absolute joy. I will happily spend a day hitting bunch of thrift stores (in my neighbourhood there are 3 within spitting distance) trying to find buried treasure, and to me, that is a banger of a day! Sure, I love the environmental and financial aspects of thrifting but the real pleasure is in the hunt. I pop a Claritin, charge my scooter, grab a bottle of water and off I go on the search for deals. Heck, I have friends who will also thrift with me** and The Americans*** and I often share our best thrift finds in the group chat to the OOOOHs and AHHHHs of the others. If there was competitive thrifting, my friends and I would all medal in the sport.

But I would be hard pressed to argue that thrifting actually saves me a ton money and it definitely doesn’t save time. But I enjoy it much more than popping into a store and buying whatever I need off the rack. Don’t get me wrong – there is a time and a place for shopping for new goods – but it’s not something I actually enjoy. I look forward to it like I look forward to blood work: sure, I recognize that it needs to get done but I won’t be happy about it. Don’t think that I also am rejecting branded goods, either: I have a fairly decent collection of Fluevogs that I love dearly. I just dread the concept of hitting the mall and trying on a bunch of clothes at stores all day long – the kind of day, I should add, that my kids find RIVETING.

But often thrifting and sale shopping for groceries gets categorized as something people associate with a poverty mindset. When we talk about saving money these are some of the more popular things that get thrown into the ring as examples of ways to save and it’s become du rigeur to tell people they don’t have to be shamed into doing those things (that they may not enjoy) just to save money. I get it – unlike the 90s and 00s, shame doesn’t sell as well as it used to. A kinder, gentler approach works better. So, it’s one of the things that “money experts” looooooove to shit all over. “I am not saying you have to use coupons and save $2 on a case of pop,” they sputter. But let’s discuss the elephant in the room: when I was a kid that $2 meant getting pop vs. not getting pop. If you don’t have to make those kinds of decisions and have never had to – congratulations! But there is a reason that most of these gurus focus on upper/middle-class individuals – those are the people who will buy books and courses on how to fix their money problems, which is how these money experts make their money. But even if people could probably benefit from some of these frugal skills they don’t want to, because it would challenge their identity as upper/middle-class individuals; it would make them feel poor. They want to buy a book or a course that tells them that they can have everything without deprivation. But for the most indebted, that is rarely the case. Conversely, truly poor people are too busy deciding whether or not to pay the electricity or the phone bill than to even consider taking a $300 course on how to live a “good life.” For them, every single dollar needs to be accounted for. In all fairness to these money experts as well, they probably feel unqualified to tackle the realities of the super poor – you can reduce your costs but you can’t eliminate them. You can’t budget if you have no money left to budget with.

As for me, I don’t like waste, and considering we have enough clothes to clothe the planet for the next 100 years, so every time I buy something from the thrift store I get giddy about how it’s one less thing going to the landfill. Is it making a HUGE difference? Probably not. But I enjoy it. I suspect my Dad gets the same excitement when he finds a 50% off roast to share with one of his friends – less food waste & people get to enjoy a hearty meal. While I will spend lavishly on the most incredible vacation imaginable (I never count my pennies when I travel – I do whatever the heck I want to!) I still can’t bring myself to pay full price for an LL Bean sweater knowing full well there will be piles of them filling the thrift stores once spring hits.

Entertainment, savings and saving things from the landfill? Sign me up for those hobbies. There are worse ones to have.


*His most expensive hobby, tbqh
**The best kind of friends
***These are my Americans, get your own

5 interesting things

5 interesting things


Skaters on the Rideau Canal

I have been focusing on reading a lot to catch up on all of my library books and subscriptions. Of course, there is also family time and playing the Witcher II and a good amount of time drinking tea and having conversations with Mr. Tucker. I don’t plan to keep to any schedule here but I do enjoy sharing what I’ve read and a variety of thoughts I have had on certain things. For example, I realized that I have been online for THIRTY YEARS and it’s funny that my original optimism has reversed-course and I find myself divesting from the online world. Perhaps that is a conversation for another time. Here are some things I read this weekend:

1 – The Prestige Recession, “The decline of the critic mirrors the decline of the mediums they cover. Music and film are industries whose relative cultural value has dipped, thus their critics’s cultural influence has plummeted. In realms like politics and the culture wars, however, critics are thriving. Where there’s power and money, critics can have influence and get paid. When the money and power dry up, the beat does too…Cultural criticism and contextualization aren’t going away. They’re being de-professionalized. They’re switching mediums. What was a grand(ish) vocation has been demoted to a hobby and another form of “content.” It feels inevitable. We’ve gotten so used to it by now.”

2 – I first heard about Neal’s Yard Dairy in the book, The Lost Supper by Montreal writer, Taras Gresco. I didn’t realize how firmly planted the place was in the counterculture of the past few decades, nor how important of a piece it played in bringing back a British food culture. Nicholas Saunders: the forgotten genius who changed British food. “The central question of Saunders’ life is what happens when you try to create an alternative and it becomes so successful that it is co-opted by other people into the dominant culture. It was a tension he was never quite able to resolve, except in a few small projects… The compulsion that made him treat the question of yoghurt production in the same way as the chemical composition of an ecstasy pill found its purest expression in things that were done solely for the fun of it.”

3 – Great, as soon as I build a gaming computer and get back into it I read, The Tremendous Yet Troubled State of Gaming in 2024. This is really for econ and gaming nerds. “There are several reasons behind the many layoffs detailed above, but the first may be the most important. It’s also the most overlooked and most counter-narrative: video game revenues are falling… A lot of the challenge here is economical. In addition to the aforementioned increases in costs per developer, the number of people needed to produce a AAA game have grown as publishers expand the scale and scope of their games —more and higher-fidelity cinematics with professional motion capture and vocal performances, greater environmental and enemy diversity, more thoughtful NPCs and side quests. The enormity of this effort is easy to measure, as is the output.” Clearly, this piece goes on to describe all of the likely challenges facing the industry.

Adjacent, but as for myself, I was shocked to learn that even though it’s been 15 years or so since I played a game, the prices for top-of-the-line games were still hovering around the $80 mark – which hasn’t really changed since the 90s. Moreover, I could play older games that I had missed over the years for a measly $1-$20 – and I am not a multi-player kind of gal. I get that people who have gamed over that period of time have probably finished all of the games they want to play, but even today I get *flash sales* for brand new games with great worlds, stories and graphics. I also recognize the sheer amount of titles being released probably dilutes potential customers in ways that were impossible in the 80s-00s.

4 – Advice from people who really started living when they found out they were dying (H/T to The New Escapologist). I have a love/hate with these sorts of articles. On the one hand: yes! Please go out and live your one wild and precious life! On the other hand, it’s much easier to explain your erratic behaviour of skydiving and mountaineering if you have a terminal diagnosis. Otherwise, people just think you are shirking your responsibilities as an adult. It would be amazing if we could reconcile the two things. Wouldn’t it be amazing if people could sell everything and travel for a year without getting the side eye and tsk tsks from their friends and family? Either way, this is good advice for the perfectly healthy as well: don’t delay, do what you love, enjoy every moment you can (except the painful ones, like the time in the dentist chair and the like).

“You get caught up in that world of work: pay your bills, eat dinner, sleep, repeat. But now I truly feel very different about money. What’s the point of earning, earning, earning if there’s no joy in your life? When I watch really power-driven people who want more and more, I want to tell them it’s the small things in life that are beautiful. We live in quite a toxic world, but it’s your choice what you expose yourself to. I get up, I walk my dog, I listen to every single bird that chirps. I’m grateful for that.”

5 – I came across this recently (at least, the short Instagram post that inspired it) and it has really resonated. I have stepped away from some social media lately in an effort to reduce my exposure to things that make me upset but that I have no control over. Instead, I am focusing on doing a daily photo (#DITL) on the Post Morbus Instagram. If people want to throw hands in their own comments sections, Imma LET THEM.

Anyway, she has three parts to this theory that I find is so profoundly helpful to me, especially as I revisit my investment into family, friends, acquaintances AND online interactions:

A – Detachment: just let people do what they are going to do & detach yourself from an emotional response.
B – Let people fail: let them learn and grow by not rescuing them.
C – Let them be themselves: don’t try and change people.

That is all for this Monday. I cannot believe that we are heading into February this week. I did end up cancelling my Globe and Mail Saturday paper subscription (ugh. They made me call on a telephone and speak with a real human and everything!) but I kept the digital version. Naturally, this concluded with them charging me for both. Modern life is rubbish, indeed.

It’s beginning to look a lot like…tax season

It’s beginning to look a lot like…tax season

It’s winter sports season here at The Mullet*. Our front hall is jam-packed with snowboard and skiing gear plus my scooter for when we go and see the PWHL games. Mitts, and hats, and a variety of winter and waterproof gear…oh my! If you are going to stay in Canada for the winter, you really have to embrace Canadian winters.

I had to print out a physical schedule because between the hockey games, the Eldest’s two jobs, and the activities for the youngest, we had way too much to remember off the top of our heads. The actual ice and snow sport season only really runs from January – March (until March break), so 8-10 weeks. But the season feels long because we are super busy with the regular lessons and sports of the year as well. At least, the pure chaos is interspersed with books and a roaring fireplace.

Speaking of books, I have been reading non-stop lately. I finished What we Knew (mentioned in Morgan Housel’s book, Same as Ever) in less than 24 hours. While I generally avoid WWII stuff unless it’s a Ken Burns offering (and I certainly avoid fiction based in that era) I do love stories and storytelling from a first person perspective. WWK is based on a study that spanned ten years in which they interviewed survivors from Germany – both Jews and non-Jews as well as officers who were in the German army. It’s a fascinating book of detailed – and varied – experiences and I highly recommend it. I am now onto The Great Depression (also mentioned in that book). It’s a series of journal entries by a lawyer who lived through the Great Depression and who tried to make sense of the economy while it was happening. Both are Interlibrary Loans so I needed to finish them up before they are due. So I spent yesterday just reading and avoiding the internet entirely. I’m not mad about it.

Link (yes, singular)
One article today due to the doubling-down on book reading recently: Judging by the people around me, chances are they won’t have even close to the “recommended” amounts of retirement savings suggested by the financial industry. I just don’t see the majority of people sitting on millions when they have started late, feel more comfortable working with FAs who take a percentage, and prefer low-risk investments. Still, looking at history they may be ok, anyway. Boomers: the retirement crisis that wasn’t.

We’ve achieved our goals 6 months early!
In January 2021 I wrote a post called The Three Year Plan. I went back today and realized that it was really the 2.5 year plan! We managed to do all of the things on the list: pay off our mortgage, max my RDSP, fully fund the kids RESPs (ongoing because there is a yearly max for matched contributions), and we met our goal of how much we decided to invest in Mr. Tucker’s RRSP before he could retire. We met these goals last July.

I suppose the only addition here is that we are selling the condo. We hadn’t foreseen the drama there (you can’t anticipate everything). We only really kept it because a relative needed a place to go (…and no good deed goes unpunished). Until it sells though, we can’t have Mr. Tucker retire as the mortgage/condo fees come out of his pay while it is on the market. Otherwise, we are pretty set up & we won’t need to touch our investments for 15ish years. We will also have a good amount tucked away for emergencies, travel and future spending.

Drawdown plan
While I adore people who get down into the nitty gritty of the numbers, I am more of a lacklustre financial traveler: I aim my boat in the direction it needs to go in and adjust periodically. I don’t obsess about market timing, watching my investments like a hawk or the minutiae of planning my taxes perfectly. Should I? Maybe. But I just don’t want to be that person.

TFSAs vs. RRSPs**? We all know that the answer is, “ideally, both.” But for us the answer has been RRSPs. Why? Because Mr. Tucker’s plan is to retire early and so he will go from a high salary to no salary (the year after). So reducing that up front was the best case scenario, in my opinion.

The goal is to draw down the Basic Personal Amount (BPA) – which is the amount of money that you can make (or withdraw from an RRSP) without paying taxes – and then flip it into our TFSAs in the 20 years between when he stops working and when the government forces him to transfer his RRSP to a RRIF (Registered Retirement Income Fund) where he is forced to draw out a percentage every year. Because we didn’t have enough money to contribute to both the RRSP and the TFSA at the same time, we prioritized today’s tax burden.

Yes, we may take a hit on our investments (but we may gain as well) by doing this and the government will hold back 10% on the first $5000 and 20% on the next $10000 but we will see that as a tax refund the following year. Yes, I know refunds are not ideal but the goal is to drawdown the RRSP and then load up the TFSA so that when we are 71, we won’t have much left in the RRSPs for them to tax at 20%+. The money will keep growing in our TFSAs tax free over the years, and when we go to get our CPP/OAS at 65+ the withdrawals from our TFSAs will also be tax-free.

My opinion is that the TFSA is a much better savings vehicle in general unless you are a high-income earner. If I made under the $111,733 I would definitely prioritize the TFSA followed by the FHSA (the First Time Homebuyers Savings Account) – regardless of whether or not you want to purchase a home. Why? Because you get a tax credit for money you put into a FHSA so it reduces your taxes today. On top of that, then it can sit in investments for 15 years making money. If you go to buy a home with it you get to withdraw all the deposits and interest tax free but if you don’t end up buying a home, you can transfer the money to an RRSP without affecting your RRSP contribution room.

The other fun game would be to mix it up. If you make $65000 you may want to contribute $9133 to an RRSP to bring your taxable income down to the lower tax bracket of $55867 netting yourself a cool $1872.27 back on your tax return, as you don’t have to pay the marginal tax rate of 20.5% on that $9133. Then you can toss that into your TFSA, getting you the best of both worlds.

It’s always fun to play with the numbers and see what the best option would be for your own particular situation. Since it is the beginning of the year AND we are about to head into Tax Season, maybe it’s time to plan for the upcoming year? Here are the tax brackets for 2024:


*To see the front and to see the back of my house is to know why we call our house The Mullet
** I am going to assume that everyone is familiar with both Tax Free Savings Accounts and the Registered Retirement Savings Program

A few things I have been reading

A few things I have been reading

My neck has been hurting a lot because I type on my laptop on a 100-year-old desk so I am constantly looking down. I could switch to writing on my gaming computer which is more ergonomically inclined but I am trying to compartmentalize my activities so everything doesn’t just bleed into a giant category called “time I have wasted today.”

I haven’t done a link post in a hot minute and so here are some things I have enjoyed reading in the last little while. Please note that I post interesting things that I may not completely agree with and that you may not, either. But we shouldn’t just read things we always agree with – that’s what algorithms are for!

The economy

Kyla Scanlon mentioned this tweet* in a recent video and to paraphrase, “we’ve gotten accustomed to servants bringing us things all of the time.” But all good things come to an end, and gone is the era of VC cash propping up unprofitable businesses in an attempt to be the last business standing when the smoke cleared. Workers have gained in the last year and a bit whether it’s by unionizing or in court cases designating them as employees, not as contractors. That means prices are going to rise.

Also, it absolutely FLOORS me that this only cost this man $125. Most of the world hasn’t eaten a meal like that in their lifetimes let alone on a random weekday. ZOMG “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” already!

– Americans are better off than you think. I know it’s difficult to parse but we got 10 years of inflation in a short period of time. I think people would have managed better if we had a small increase every year vs. what happened last year.

– You don’t need everything you want: our expectations around money are all out of whack “Just because something doesn’t feel great doesn’t mean it’s fundamentally unfair. (Sometimes, the most unfair things are the ones that feel really great — as long as you’re on the right side of the trade.)” This is one of the better pieces out there discussing the vibesession.

I think it is important to remember that anyone under the median income is going to feel the squeeze of inflation more than those above it. For those who were struggling before, they’re absolutely tanked now. But people who have money and who saved money during the pandemic are spending like wildfire (although it’s slowing) and that’s why we are seeing a supply (low) and demand (high) scenario moving prices upwards.

Personal Finance

It’s funny because I have never not had a roommate. When I was a teenager I lived with 2 or more roommates and when I was in my twenties, 1 or more. Now I have a family and our useable living space is about 1500 square feet for four people and two dogs. In our old house, we had 1200sq ft, the kids shared a room and it was fine. We didn’t even use the backyard at the old place much: we went to the park every day instead and met up with other families in the neighbourhood.

I find most people I know who are younger than me and who don’t live with their parents do have 1 or 2 bedroom apartments just for themselves. Is it expectation or culture? Both? I feel like pre-WWII most people lived in small spaces with many family members and in the post-war era we have increasingly become accustomed to larger square footage per person. This has led to an increase in cars and urban sprawl (and 4000sq ft McMansions an hour away from where people work). I don’t have to answer to what can be done here but better public transit, more community stores vs big box stores, getting used to smaller spaces and more working from home are ideas off the top of my head.

– My mortgage payments are going up $2000 a month, “We feel helpless and angry. If we lived way beyond our means, that would be one thing. But it’s not like we did something radical. We wanted a family home, we made some sacrifices and we got a decent-sized place in a decent neighbourhood. Hard-working, middle-class people should be able to buy homes in their own country without cutting back their lifestyles to the bone.

Recently, the Bank of Canada announced that interest rates would stay at 4.5 per cent, the first time it has held steady in more than a year…which makes me wonder how long it will be before Canada does the same. That’s always in the back of my mind.”

This article was written in the spring of last year and then after that, The Bank of Canada raised the rates and they now sit at 5%.

OOF it would be so easy to tear apart every single decision this family made because there are some horrible ones. BUT I will not. Why? Because it’s easy to point fingers and point out all the issues but his problems are super common with many families. I put this squarely on the heads of the people who convinced this man to give up his reasonable apartment close to work in exchange for an hour-long commute and a $790000 mortgage on an $150000 income.

– I actually only follow one of these YouTubers and he is one of my least favourite of all the people I follow on this list of Canadian Personal Finance YouTubers. I actually follow a lot of people whose advice I find laughable but that’s because I don’t want to just follow people I agree with.

– I grew up with a similar quote in my house, which is “you have champagne tastes on a beer budget.” But I think everyone should read this piece Learning to like beer in a world full of champagne propaganda. “When you disconnect someone’s means from their lifestyle preferences, otherwise-befuddling choices begin to make sense. The rich person who drives the Accord? Well, their ability to make money is unrelated to their taste in automobiles. The person spending their meager paychecks on luxury travel and racking up credit card debt? Well, their choice of education and professional earning ability (or lack thereof) doesn’t really have anything to do with their preferences for First Class, does it? Credit cards are a little like steroids, in that way: They allow you entry to a world that you otherwise would be incapable of accessing on your own, which is why both are frowned upon but prevalent nonetheless.”

Health

– I quit therapy: As it turns out, you don’t have to always work on yourself.

– Truth be told: I have a natural light lamp AND I take vitamin D. I find it helps me exponentially in the winter but what if nobody has seasonal affective disorder? (if you’re anything like me, that got your back up but it is a good read)

Family and community

– I loved this piece: community and you can do your art? Yes, please! I quit a corporate job to become a crossing guard.

– “It feels like this capitalist trope. The idea that it’s better and more worthwhile to strip away any social or familial support and do it all on your own is a scam.” Why people struggle so much in the world’s richest country

– “From the outside, we are enacting the best practices of urban family resource management. With rising housing costs and changing demographics, multigenerational living has finally gained social acceptance. Advocates trumpet its economic and emotional benefits. Despite being so on trend, I don’t feel especially cool living with my mom. And even an hour from sunrise, I’m already exhausted.” Multigenerational living often makes sense but that doesn’t make it easy.

– I love thrifting and am a big proponent of Buy Nothing groups on facebook. It’s sad though that people still toss out fully functional things. I worked at a dump


*LOL what are they called now? Xposts? NAH. Xs? UGH.

Subscription cleanup

Subscription cleanup


The Amaryllis is finally blooming

Saturday was Epiphany or 12th Night. The kids cleaned the house and put away all of our Yule-related decorations for another year. The house is clean and looks a little empty now but it’s a tabula rasa as we get ramped up for school to start. The snow has decided to join us for winter, which is great because The Youngest started their snowboarding season yesterday and The Eldest starts her new job as a ski instructor tonight. Today is also the first day back at school and as I anticipated we all dragged our feet after two weeks of partying, over-indulgence and sleeping way too late. The season of merriment has come to an end.

Speaking of cleaning, around this time I do a bit of subscription clean up. I don’t necessarily DO ALL THE THINGS right on the first of January but as the hubbub of the holiday season starts to die down & I ease into the quiet blanket of winter, it’s easier to have a good, hard look at all of the things vying for my attention. I hate how much time it takes me to delete things I am no longer interested in, so I try and take stock of these things in January.

Email sign-ups
I tend to sign up for more email lists in the fall of every year as I sign up for discounts on gifts or to get free shipping. I am pretty good at unsubscribing quickly but there are always one or two I forget. Truth be told, I also subscribe to my old union’s mailing list and I should just say goodbye. I don’t know why I haven’t in the past few years…but it’s time to let go.

Newsletters
I have a few newsletters I enjoy reading but some have either a> gone paid-only & I don’t find the content relevant enough to pay for it; or b> it’s information I don’t really need or haven’t been reading. For example, I’ve signed up for newsletters from a major newspaper that I also subscribe to. I realized that these were just articles I had already read in the physical paper. I unbsubbed.

Paid subscriptions (digital)
This is where things get a little tougher. I have a few content creators that I like to support and I wonder if I should actually review and then maybe even add some new ones. Money is super tight right now (fixed income! *jazz hands*) but should ease up shortly when the condo sells, so I am making a list of creators to consider.

We have basic subs for the house, namely Netflix and Spotify. We get these for the kids. Mr. Tucker’s work also paid for a year of Disney+ so we have that until next fall as well. I’m happy with these.

Paid subscriptions (analog)
OOF. This one hurts. It’s hardest to consider my magazines and newspapers because I love them so much. The reality is though that I need to cut back:
– I am way behind on reading The New Yorker, Canadian Notes & Queries and The Canadian Literary Review. These I am giving up for sure. I just don’t have the time.
– I picked up Celtic Life International this year and it’s been lovely, so I will keep that.
-The Walrus is only a few times a year but it’s quality content, Canadian and I do get a partial tax rebate as a subscriber.
-The New Escapologist. I love this magazine. I will keep it. I would subscribe to The Idler as well if the price point for non-digital was reasonable. (Brexit man, boy howdy!)
– The Globe and Mail. This one is super hard for me. On the one hand, I do want to support legacy media because I feel like once it’s gone, there will be no more (mostly) neutral coverage of events and I do enjoy reading a paper front-to-back and not being spoon fed my own opinions back to me like an algorithm does. I don’t want news to just be what I want to hear rather than things I should consider outside of my own echo-chamber. I mean yes, there are different political slants to all legacy media but generally you will find conflicting viewpoints. The problem is the price: $32 a month for 4 skimpy papers is about what I pay for an entire year’s worth of The Walrus. For now I will keep it, if only because Andrew Coyne is one of the most infuriating opinion columnists…and mostly never wrong. Also: tax rebate.

Social media
I cleaned up a bunch of accounts that I follow that a> are dead/haven’t posted in a while, b> I am not longer interested in, c> deleted me from their followers. As for the last one, it’s mostly self-styled “influencers” who add an account and then delete them as soon as they follow back to fudge their numbers (to make it look like they have more followers than they do, ergo get more free stuff). I do still follow accounts that don’t follow me back if the content is great. What an age we live in!

The 8 weeks of the winter sport season is always just chaos here at The Mullet. Mr. Tucker does the bulk of the running around and getting the kids to places. The Eldest has two jobs this winter plus early morning band and harp lessons across town one night a week. The Youngest also has activities on Saturday and of course snowboarding on Sunday. The next 8 weeks are just pure survival for us but it does break up what would otherwise be a gloomy, cold, dark period of time. As for me, I will organize things the best I can, making sure dinners and lunches are planned and other than that I think I will sit by the fire, drink tea…and try and get through the backlog of magazine subscriptions!


The lemon tree has giant lemons. In the background, winter

2023 round up & looking ahead to 2024

2023 round up & looking ahead to 2024

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 (Gregorian calendar) New Year to you and yours, friends.

*These are my Americans, get your own.
**WHERE MY OLD PEOPLE AT?

Happy Tibb’s Eve

Happy Tibb’s Eve

A Newfoundland and Labrador tradition, Tibb’s Eve is really an old word that may be rooted from the word tipple. A Tibb’s Day is a day a day that doesn’t really ever come (an intercalary day, as it were). Since half of (or maybe more) of my dragon boat team is from The Rock I’ve become familiar with it as I’ve gotten older.

I really enjoyed the wikipedia history of Tibb’s Eve but I think it is interesting that it’s gained in popularity over the past 20+ years. Those years saw a dramatic outpouring of young people from NFLD & LAB to go make their fortunes in other parts of the country. It makes sense that they would have a day where everyone who was home for Christmas from other parts of the country would make space for a day of celebrating with friends.

Colin Howlett’s quote resonates, “Tibb’s Eve on December 23, when people drink and eat at kitchen parties and bars with all the people they want to celebrate with before spending time with those they have to. I have no idea how that isn’t huge everywhere else.”

Winter Solstice 2023

Winter Solstice 2023

In the mid-90s my friend D started our Solstice traditions. We would all gather at her 200 acre farm in eastern Ontario (lovingly nicknamed The Pharm) and celebrate the turning of the year from light to dark, dark to light.

The Summer Solstice began with what she had called The Freak Family picnic. She had intended to gather people she had befriended from various usenet groups to coming out and camping. The beginnings of the FFP were wildly chaotic and many people came from all over the world (and in pre-9/11, some people even flew their own planes in). It was the event of the summer for years and anyone could come and camp out for the Solstice.

Winter Solstice you could only attend if you had already come to the picnic and had become friends with D and the others. Because Canadian winters could be bitterly cold, there was limited space in the house for people to warm up so you had to get along. It was no time to make new friends. Those gatherings were more intimate and quiet, with most people spending time going back-and-forth from the giant bonfire outside to shaking off the chill inside. We stayed up all night, watched the sun come up on the ridge and it was very much like pushing the reset button on your life.

The Solstice celebrations worked because it gave us a way to celebrate but removing a lot of the religious aspects. Since our friend group is a multi-faith group, it only seemed right to create something that we could all celebrate together. We chose our own traditions and rituals around what people have celebrated since, well, since there were people: the movement of the sun and moon across the sky.

Of course, life moves on and D has moved away from The Pharm (the last celebration being summer 2009) and it has since (sadly) been sold off. D has lived in various places around Europe and North America in the past 12 years and is now settled in upstate New York. There was a lapse of in-person Winter Solstice celebrations for awhile but we still managed to do a lot of online video meetings. Then, in 2017 a rare confluence of factors found that many of us could make it to a Winter Solstice, and so we hosted one that year. 2018 and 2019 were more subdued but many Americans came and local folks joined and then, of course, 2020 happened…


The last Winter Solstice on the Pharm, 2009

This year I was determined to host one because I felt that since the Summer Solstice we had a rough go. Between a broken foot, two surgeries and the destroyed condo, I needed to welcome the light back into my life. What better way to do that than good food & drink, great friends and a roaring fire? I wasn’t sure that anyone could make it but I put it out there anyway, and figured at the very least I would celebrate.

Shockingly, people came to town from Pittsburg and Toronto and stayed the night, friends I hadn’t seen in a very long time decided to stop in and we ended up having three generations of people join us – all descended from the original crew of Freak Family Picnic people. It was the exact right amount of new and old people and while some people did crafts, many of us just talked and caught up on many years of post-pandemic information. There was food, laughter and light, just the way it is supposed to be.


My baby playing with the baby of a woman who I played with when she was a baby

I don’t know what the next six months holds for our family but it did feel good to shake off the stress of the last six months with a celebration of light. Like many people, we are heading into Christmas and all the stress it can bring but I feel more grounded and relaxed now that Winter Solstice has rejuvenated me. I wish love and light to your families no matter where they are in the world, no matter what you celebrate. I hope the final days of 2023 see you closing out the year with reflection and with calm before the world kicks back into gear in January.

For those of you interested, we did a Celtic Omen Days craft this year where we made bookmarks to represent the upcoming year. There is still time to do it as the days technically start on December 26th.

The end of #12DaysOfChristmasMovies

The end of #12DaysOfChristmasMovies

I suppose it started on Friday when The Youngest was not at all interested in going to get a family picture taken with Santa OR The Grinch. I sort of pushed back thinking it would be a fun Christmas activity & they said, “I don’t mind taking a family photo for Christmas, I am just not interested in the Santa/Grinch part.” Fair enough.

The entire scenario had a bit of “the beginning of the end” vibes.

We first started our #13DaysOfHalloweenMovies and #12DaysOfChristmas movies events in 2020 when it was the height of the pandemic. I was looking for ways we could celebrate the seasons in the face of no trick-or-treating and, big family dinners & visits to see Santa. The kids were 10 and 12 at this point & they had just had the rug pulled out from under them: no school, no friends, no family, no typical holiday celebrations.

It worked. We watched movies, shared our reviews with family and friends on social media and a new tradition was born. People told me that they looked forward to the kid’s weird reviews of things they had never noticed about movies they loved. It was fun…for awhile.

It’s 2023 now though and the kids are 13 and 15 and have mostly gone back to a normal existence. So instead of a fun activity we do as a family, it’s slowly morphed into a chore. We have slogged through a few movies in the past week and a bit and quite frankly I wasn’t enjoying it and I don’t get the impression Mr. Tucker and the kids were either. So after a busy weekend full of whirlwind activities I announced to the family that #12DaysOfChristmasMovies was coming to an end. We were all relieved.

The Eldest pointed out that we were more of a Halloween family and Mr. Tucker mentioned that there were way more movies for that time of year anyway. He said the Christmas movies seemed to have a couple of good releases a year but that the majority felt like a slog through a low-budget swamp. Fair enough. We still will watch new movies that pique our interest (and revisit some classics!) but not on such a rigid schedule.

What worked during the pandemic when we were all home with nothing to do didn’t transfer well to kids who were older and developing their own Christmas traditions with friends.

This lengthy preamble has a point and it is this: if a tradition doesn’t work for you, feel free to change it. I spent many years rolling the holiday rock uphill like some modern-day Sisyphean Santa and quite frankly, I resented it. My mother did it, my grandmother did it, my great-grandmother did it and I am stopping it. It’s too much work and the return on investment is low. If the point is to spend time with loved ones, then that is what we should focus on, not a rigid standard of how we spend time together. The pandemic gave me a perfect opportunity to switch more things up, which I happily did & continue to do. Here is a small list:

– We no longer get a fresh tree: as I became more disabled, the work fell more on Mr. Tucker’s head to drag a fresh tree home and decorate it. Last year we found a pre-lit tree on sale at Canadian Tire and we’ve never looked back. The Eldest was a bit disappointed because she loves the smell of a fresh tree, so I bought her an electric wax melt contraption and some melts that smell like evergreens. Mr. Tucker is happy, the smell of balsam fills the air and we’ve reduced our fire hazards. I do have fresh greenery in the form of a wreath that was bought from a local farm that was a fundraiser for The Youngest’s school. A little bit from column A, a little bit from column B.

– We no longer host a HUGE Christmas dinner: Mr. Tucker and I are a> the only people in the family with younger children; b> the main connection between both our families. For years we hosted 11-15 people for a large family dinner. It was exhausting, expensive and hugely unappreciated. While some people helped clean and people brought things, we were constantly inundated with the odd snarky comment and the occasional heated discussion. When the pandemic hit, we breathed a huge sigh of relief and stopped doing it. Now we order Chinese food on Christmas eve to hang out with my dad, Christmas day we eat leftover Chinese food, and Boxing day my stepson comes over and he and Mr. Tucker cook an elaborate dinner together (they both love cooking & my stepson is a sous chef). Christmas is now a relaxing, calm affair.

– We no longer do a children’s cookie decorating party: We used to do the Christmas cookie decorating party every year and other friends hosted the Easter egg decorating party, the Canada day party, and the Halloween potluck where we’d hangout and have dinner and drinks before heading out en masse to go trick-or-treating. Sadly, while these were great times, our kids got older and aged out and the parents also aged and didn’t want to do anymore hosting. I have some fantastic memories from those years though! We’ve instead replaced it with decorating cupcakes for The Mission’s Christmas dinner.

– I stopped doing Christmas cards: I really thought I would do some this year! I have had The Eldest draw our cards in recent years but you know what? She is too busy being a teenager to prioritize that anymore. Christmas cards are also super expensive to mail, averaging about $75-$100 a year to send out 50 cards (depending on if we used Santa photos we had to pay for and how many we sent out). Again, this feels like a relief now that I have made the decision.

– We focus more on Advent calendars than gifts: This is kind of a weird one because it saves us not much money or time but as a family we have decided that a small gift every day is much better than a bunch of gifts on Christmas morning. The Eldest loves a good makeup calendar, The Youngest loves a tea calendar and we all have used book calendars. I find it makes the entire month special for us.

If the holiday season is stressful and full of expectations, I heartily suggest you reject all of that (as best as possible) and concentrate on the parts of the season you enjoy and that makes you happy. I love the midwinter season: I love crafts, good food, friends & family, The Vinyl Café Christmas album and chilling out by the fire with a book and a cup of tea. So I focus on those things and spending time with my immediate family & good friends. Whether or not you do all the things or if you don’t do all of the things I guarantee someone will be disappointed, so you may as well just disappoint everyone and save yourself the work.

2023 holiday preparations and my birthday

2023 holiday preparations and my birthday

Yesterday was my birthday. So because the Wordle is my love language, I told myself that the Wordle of the day would guide my birthday:

So Mr. Tucker made me breakfast that featured bacon!

Last week was a whirlwind of activities with friends and I am constantly grateful for the amazing people I have in my life. I forgot to post tree decorating pics, which happened earlier in the month. Last year one of The Americans* put together all of the pie pieces from the various thrifted Trivial Pursuit games she has and sent all of us our colours to be used in ornaments! They remain – to this day – some of my favourite ornaments.



Also, our friends The Cohens invited us over to celebrate Hannukah with them, which meant a lot of delicious latkes and donuts that they made for the occasion. We also got to hang out with their amazing babies, which is also a pleasure. The Cohens have such a lovely, close-knit family that it is such a joy to be around them all. I am grateful for their continued friendship – especially since they also live in the neighbourhood!

It’s funny because my friend’s daughter** married into the Cohen family and we have always stayed relatively close/in touch. It’s strange and beautiful that my babies are now holding/babysitting her babies when I used to hold/babysit her when she was a baby. The circle of life, Simba.



My birthday weekend was pretty great, all told.

Mr. Tucker and I chatted on Thursday evening about how things were looking financially. That came on the heels of him trying to install the microwave above the stove in the condo with a friend of ours…and it not working out. So now we have to find someone who will install it for us. SIGH. Finding someone to do the complete condo renovation was hard enough as it was because it was such a small job, which is why Mr. Tucker just DIY’d it. So now we’ve tripped at the home stretch.

But instead of getting down about it all, we’ve just decided to roll with it, assume he will have to work longer than anticipated, and then we promptly decided to free up some money in our budget for more fun things with the kids this holiday season.

While I am not a person who enjoys receiving gifts, I do enjoy experiences a LOT. So with the stress of this season upon us we made the decision to eat out not once, but TWICE this weekend. We had already planned to go out for all-you-can-eat sushi on Sunday for my birthday but we also went out to a mid-range steakhouse for dinner on Friday before hitting the mall. The Eldest was having a Christmas gift exchange sleepover at a friend’s place the next night so she wanted to grab some gifts.

We had an amazing time Friday night just having a leisurely dinner, hanging out as a family and chatting about our respective weeks. Was it expensive? I think I physically cringed when I saw the bill (don’t tell teenagers that they can order “anything they want.” Especially if your teenagers love lobster). Do I regret it? Not at all. It was a fantastic night, The Eldest got a steal on her friend gifts, we bought the kids Christmas pajamas as well and it was an easy night all around.

Saturday found The Eldest baking cupcakes for our yearly Cupcakes 4 Christmas donation for The Mission’s Christmas dinner. The Youngest spent the evening decorating them, and Mr. Tucker dropped them off bright and early Sunday morning.



While the kitchen was turned into a cupcake factory, I snuck out for an intro pottery class! I share a birthday with one of my closest friends and so three of us decided that we would celebrate together by trying our hands at the pottery wheel. It was…an adventure! While I loved the class – and it flew by so quickly – I feel like I would like more instruction and more skillbuilding that a short one-off class can give. I may look into longer classes next fall.



Our pottery will be fired and glazed and in a few weeks we can pick them up from the store. I am looking forward to it!

Sunday – on my birthday proper – I basically spent the day playing video games, as I requested. For dinner we had AYCE sushi at a (surprisingly great) restaurant near us. The food is good and they have robot servers, which is just charming. It’s less of a relaxing hangout type of dinner and more of a HOW MUCH CAN I GET INTO MY FACEHOLE type of event. I have long learned to not overdo it but my sushi-loving children went overboard and suffered greatly for it. I am still surprised at how much the kids can shove in there, it feels almost like it defies physics.

Back at home, Mr. Tucker and I had a few celebratory birthday drinks while the kids readied themselves for the school week ahead. We haven’t had a lot of time to just sit and BE so it was a lovely way to end a whirlwind of a week and a really great birthday.

Today I am in full planning mode for our Winter Solstice party on the 21st. Since people of all ages and from various places will be joining us after a long hiatus, I want to make it the best one yet. We haven’t had one since 2019 so I am very excited to host one again.

I hope you are all well and I wish for a non-hectic week for all!


*These ones are my Americans. Get your own.
**The daughter is the child of the woman who used to live on the 200 acre farm mentioned in the Wordle link.