I asked Mr. Tucker to buy me this for Winter Solstice & he did!
It’s hard to not think of spring and fall as seasons of transition. Spring still has elements of the winter such as the odd day of snow and fall still has days where the sun is out and it is warm and clear. Summer and winter tend to be more delineated – at least where I live – where winters are snow, darkness and blowing wind & summers are all humidity, long days, and blazing sun. We generally tend to follow the seasons here and mark each one as it transits through the year. I highly recommend books like Mrs. Sharpe’s Traditions for those of you who enjoy Victorian Americana celebrations that fall on the more Christian side of things. It’s full of crafts, poetry and information about the holidays and seasons. I read Winters in the World this year about the seasons in Anglo-Saxon England and it was also a lovely, enlightening read.
After a year of having a broken foot and two surgeries I am eager to get out and about and enjoy the fresh air. Mr. Tucker has fixed up my trike (#bless marrying a man who used to be a bike courier) and we have been going out on walks around the neighbourhood. I hate how much I miss going outside when I am forced to stay inside. Winter is an absolutely tragic season for me because when you have mobility issues it can mean getting stuck inside when it is really icy out. I actually enjoy winter and grew up in the 80s where your parents forced you outside no matter what the temperature was & I also clocked many years skiing. I am seriously thinking of investigating accessible skiing options but I am afraid that like most things for disabled people, it will be cripplingly* expensive.
But it’s spring now! As is our monthly habit, we have done a craft and games night, and because it was March, it was Easter-themed. It was, as usual, amazing. We emailed our orders into Holly’s Hot Chicken (which is great if you need a gluten-free option and/or just like delicious food!) which our friends picked up on their way over, we did some fun Easter crafts & egg decorating and then we played Telestrations. It’s sad to think that in a few short months the eldest two kids in our group are off to university! Until then, we will try and squeeze in as many games nights and pool parties as possible.
Other than that it has been just watching PWHL games, the Women’s World Hockey & I even got sucked into March Madness, rather unexpectedly when it came on right after a WWH game! I got suckered into buying a subscription to The Sports Network to watch the WWH and so I figured, why not? Well OF COURSE I was hooked and watched the final on Sunday (like almost 19m other people). It was just so fascinating! I don’t know if that means I will end up loving the WNBA but I did enjoy it!
I have such a love/hate relationship with sports, namely, hockey. I grew up loving hockey and watching it. Like many other Canadian families, my brother played it and I went to a few of his games as well. In University I lived in an apartment on top of a pub and my friends & I would regularly win tickets to hockey games as prizes on Trivia Nights. When you are a poor student you enjoy any free entertainment that comes your way! But over the years, my love for the NHL lessened. Size-wise, it is an absolute BEAST with 82 games per season for each of the 32 teams – not including the Stanley Cup. But on top of that, the last game we attended we saw them switch out the ads along the boards on the commercial breaks. That was just wild to me. I had grown up with stories of my uncle remembering when tickets were cheap and you could bring a boxed lunch into Maple Leaf gardens. Don’t get me wrong – I grasp the enormity of putting together a pro sports league it is just a shame when the cheap seats for an NHL game (standing room only) are $50 in the nosebleeds. That is just out of range for many families.
Watching the PWHL play, fill arenas and get more sponsorships is a bit of a bittersweet experience: I want this league to succeed so badly, I want them to get advertising dollars! But it also weirds me out to see a paper towel company sponsor a power play. It’s conflicting to simultaneously want them to succeed but hate the price it will take to make it work. I am not an idiot – we live in a capitalistic society, for better or for worse – and the league can’t run just on Mark Walter’s big bucks alone, in perpetuity**. That said, we’re renewing our tickets for next year.
WELP. The condo still hasn’t sold. Lots of great feedback from the viewings but it’s been up for 2 months. I know that it’s been an average of 90 days for sales of condos lately and I am sure everyone is waiting for the Bank of Canada’s rate cuts*** but I am still impatient. It feels like the path forward for us is riding on this one deadweight to be out of our hands. I’m crossing my fingers that I have a better update soon!
Meanwhile, Mr. Tucker are working on a plan for our lives while we wait for the condo to sell. There is no point sitting around wallowing about things not going according to plan when there is so much living to do. Since spring is here and April is a wee break in-between our children’s birthdays I have asked them to not make a ton of weekend plans so that we can sort some things around the house.
Mt Tucker and I are planning some outdoor chores this month but spring is also a good time to tackle things like going through all of the rooms of your house and making a master plan on what to fix, clean, organize and decorate. We also want to plot out our garden bunkies to take advantage of what may be a very hot, dry summer. The plan is to stay home and have myriad pool parties and friend drop-in days!
We also did manage to catch the solar eclipse yesterday! It was 99% totality here which had to be good enough because we didn’t want to drive an hour south. The kids had the day off so they cleaned the house and watched the eclipse. It was a good day!
*I didn’t intend that pun but I am leaving it because it fits nicely
**I mean, he probably COULD afford it but every parent wants their child to leave the nest
***Kept at at 5% at the announcement this morning. Whomp whomp.
Sometimes Mr. Tucker has a frustrating work week and that always makes me run* to my spreadsheet. I like to double-check that the numbers are still on track. We are so lucky to have a permanent form of income right now that could carry the house should he lose his job. It’s better he doesn’t lose it – and it’s not in danger of being lost – but we could manage.
The one thing it can’t do though is cover the condo expenses (at least not without significantly reducing our lifestyle). We have been ->this close<- to getting everything done in there for weeks now but every time Mr. Tucker makes a plan to go and finish off some of the details, he gets derailed. Sure, it’s been a never-ending deluge of work incidents but it’s also been random, uncontrollable stuff, which makes it worse! For example, he got caught up in a protest downtown for so long that he ran out of time and then had to double back to pick up a kid in time. It feels sometimes like all forces are against us.
But the good news is that the Bank of Canada hasn’t raised the rate and people smarter than me suspect they will start lowering in a cycle or two. That may help the housing market a bit.
The worst part is that our chequing account is lower than it’s ever been. I can’t believe that at one point in my life it was normal to have under $5 in a chequing account because today if it dips under $1500 I panic. In all fairness, everything will get paid, and things are fine but it’s amazing what you get used to.
It’s been such a heck of a time for bleeding money – and right before the holiday season**, too! Part of the reason why it has dipped so low is that we had to buy all new appliances for the condo and since we abhor carrying debt, it got paid as soon as the credit card balance was due. We anticipated that expense but then came a series of unexpected expenses:
• Mr. Tucker’s glasses broke, so that was an eye exam and some new glasses (thank you benefits for paying a lot of that!).
• Our car randomly died downtown so Mr. Tucker had to have it towed to the dealership. They couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t start but still charged us a couple of hundred to look at it (but hey, free car wash***?)! There were three Lyfts on top of that to get back and forth. We got a battery jumper kit for the car in case it happened again because even with the free tow, we still need the car to go vroom.
• We went to the dentist this week and learned that Mr. Tucker’s benefits have run out, so that is more out-of-pocket money we hadn’t anticipated (and I can only snail mail his portion to my benefit company like it is the freaking 90s).
• Then, the piece de resistance: yesterday we had our first major snowfall…and the snowblower stopped working. We have given in for this year and just paid for a snow removal service. In all honesty, the snowblower came with the house and was probably old when we moved in. We’ve lived here for 6 years now so it was probably time. We will look into fixing it when we have less on our plates****.
Everything is just so incredibly frustrating right now for sure. But the one thing I am glad of is that we have the money to cover the above expenses because we keep money aside just for situations like these. Every month I slide some cash away into accounts labeled: car, health, and house expenses. It hurts me to actually use the money in there but I am glad it is there for us to not have to panic about unexpected expenses. I use the word “unanticipated” loosely because most of us should know that random expenses will pop up when we least expect them to.
So I am grateful for past me for looking out for today me but man, it’s only the first full week in December and I am still staring down a bunch of social events this month (it’s also my birthday a week before Christmas). While they aren’t all events that will cost money, some are and I am ok with that. Because instead of griping about the cost, I am grateful that I have friends I can spend time with and that I have access to a variety of different places where I can be social.
On that note, I recently finished The Good Life and I highly recommend it! It isn’t heavy with data but more about the stories of people who have happy lives vs. people who have unhappy lives. I’ll give you the crux of it: having high quality, close, positive relationships throughout your life is the key.
* LOL metaphorically. I can’t run.
** I save for that all year round so it doesn’t really affect me but I have upped our budget because the social aspect of this time of year has become more expensive but I would rather keep those events in our lives especially post-pandemic.
*** I’ll let you decide if $237 is a fair price for a car wash (spoiler: nope).
**** No, we are not going to shovel it ourselves. The last thing we need is the only able-bodied adult to have a massive coronary.
What I am reading
• A truly sweet story about the author’s frugal aunt: Everything she needed.
• BIG OOF: 1-in-10 people in Toronto rely on food banks.
• Baby Boomers are buying up all of the houses.
• I learned the hard way that I couldn’t shop my way to a new self. “But if you’re constantly taking that break when you feel unsatisfied and insecure, you are letting the muscle that deals with the negative parts of your life atrophy.”
What I need to do
I have been lucky enough to have friends who are either a little bit older than me or who had kids when they were really young – sometimes both. My friends have raised these deeply thoughtful, intelligent and amazing people and I am so grateful to have these adult kids in my life.
One of them – who we all call Miss A – reached out recently and asked me to help her with some money stuff. While she is good with her money in the day-to-day sense (no debt, has some extra etc.), she wants to learn more about investing and the various tax-advantaged accounts. Could I possibly take some time to run her through some of it?
COULD I EVER!
Luckily, I have put together some presentations already from our Money Mondays group and I just need to add the new First Home Savings Account (FHSA) to the deck but I am super excited to meet with her!
Of course – like most people – her first experience buying any investment products happened because she walked into her bank and asked to speak with a “Financial Advisor.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “They made you fill out a little quiz that determined what level of risk you were and then recommended one of their risk profile mutual funds.”
“That’s exactly what happened!” she exclaimed.
I guess I have to give them credit for steering her towards a TFSA but it frustrates me that this is generally where most people get their financial advice – from salespeople. I guess that is also why banks in Canada are able to pay out huge dividends (because, oligarchies!). Full disclosure: I own bank stocks (because, oligarchies!).
The thing is that it is SUPER hard to find decent financial advice unless you take an interest in it. Sure, the internet is teeming with advice but while some of it can be good (pay off debt! Save for a rainy day!) some of it is horrible and could ruin your life (use leverage to buy AirBnBs!). Schools don’t generally teach it, we are raised in families that rarely speak of it, and how do we even know what advice is right for us? There are a million and one finance books on the market and while there are some core similarities some deviate wildly or the information gets outdated quickly.
I was thinking of re-creating the path of books that changed my life but one of these has to be The Tightwad Gazette and while the core philosophy is great, the info is old. The Wealthy Barber is also a fantastic summation of the core tenets about managing an adult life but some of the content may grate on a modern audience. Most of the books about getting out of debt are definitely helpful but rely on shame – sometimes bordering on abuse – to get their point across. I wouldn’t feel comfortable recommending many of them. I also haven’t had any debt for so long that I couldn’t even tell you if there are any decent & recent reads on how to get out of it.
I could go on – and indeed I have a (wildly out-of-date) bibliography on this site – but I think I will stick with some core summations in our talk. It’s a good prompt because I want to start introducing my teenagers a variety of personal finance skills outside of just basic money management. So that is my plan for the rest of the week!
In other news, I may continue to update here weekdays but I grapple with it. I do love to write something daily and have indeed been a life-long lover of journaling, a practice I have maintained more or less since I was a teenager. Writing here daily has been fun but I don’t know what real value it has & it does consume a lot of time. I do know that I want to keep a writing practice because I enjoy it, I just don’t know if it will be here or in another format. Until I decide, I guess I will keep on keeping on!
I don’t understand how a heart is a spade but somehow the vital connection is made* OR On Nostalgia (3 of 3)
They say there’s a snake that can shed it’s skin
when the good old days are wearing thin, but
the good old days have all withered and died
some go on livin’ on the sentimental side
– Spirit of the West
In the 90s and 2000s I was way too poor to have cable tv so I missed out on the FRIENDS phenomena. What I did see I thought was funny, so during the pandemic the Youngest and I binged the series. We both very much enjoyed it but I had to explain that, yes, before smartphones and computers you basically just dropped by people’s houses or went to the café or bar where people hung out. You knew that someone you recognized would show up eventually. I really miss those years where my friends all lived close by and we just all knew to get up and get dressed because dollars to donuts someone would pop in almost every day. Those days of, “we were in the neighbourhood and thought we would pop in” are long, long gone. Now if people randomly show up at my door I am HORRIFIED. Why didn’t you text first?
So I simultaneously romanticize the past & have changed enough that I wouldn’t appreciate a lot of the same things now. I think the difference is that smartphones have enabled us to have our social lives in our back pockets so the excitement of someone popping in for coffee has been replaced by the excitement of a notification of a new message. I think in some ways the past is the past and we need to live in the here and now but also, I feel like we could steer the present in ways where we get the benefits of the past with the tools of the future. But as studies have shown, Facetime™ doesn’t really give us the benefits of face time. It feels like real social interaction but it doesn’t hold a candle to the benefits we get from IRL hangouts. That isn’t to say it has no benefit – like I have mentioned before, I spend most of my days chatting with my friends who are spread out across the continent but it doesn’t replace getting together in the real world. Contrary to the meme, human interaction is important to well being no matter how you define your particular personality quirks.
And now for another segue…
When I was 20, I went through a phase where I had one breakup which turned my life upside-down. I moved out of the downtown core and in with my dad, started dating someone new and was enrolled in university. By virtue of this life overhaul, I suddenly found myself without friends. I am not going to lie: that first year was rough. Sure, I had a few friends but with my schedule and by virtue of being far away from the downtown core, I didn’t get out enough to maintain strong connections. It was a pretty lonely first year of university where most of my interaction was virtual.
I also lost my grandmother that year. I was really close to her but the last years of her life were punctuated by extreme agoraphobia and she hadn’t had friends in 20+ years. She would sometimes walk to the end of the driveway but otherwise she stayed inside and relied on my mother to do all of the outside-world stuff such as groceries and going to the bank. My grandmother had been raised in Lowertown surrounded by friends and her large extended French-Canadian family who all lived either in the same apartment or nearby. When she married my Irish grandfather it was after the war and he was eager to finish university, start a career in finance and buy himself a house in the suburbs. On the day they moved, my great-grandmother apparently wept because in those days the new house seemed so far she thought she wouldn’t ever see her daughter (hilariously, it’s now considered part of the core part of the city).
So my grandmother stayed home raising her kids in this new, suburban island, far away from everything she knew, adrift from those tight social connections & the boisterous French-Canadian family she was used to. I don’t get the impression that she had a lot of friends in this new, anglo-based suburb. Then tragically in the early 70s, her mother passed away and within that same year, my grandfather also died (at 54!), leaving her a widow with a teenager, my uncle. She dutifully took care of my uncle until he was married in the 80s and also babysat my brother and I after school. But as we got older and didn’t need her, she didn’t have people to take care of, which is really all she had known. With nothing to do, she slowly slipped inside of herself, basically staying home and watching tv. We did end up moving in with her in the early 90s but at that point she had no friends and relied on us to be her contact with the outside world.
Having that as an example, I was terrified of not having friends. So when I decided to move back downtown during my second year of university, I also made the resolution that I would go out of my way to make friends. I did manage to do that and have maintained many of those friendships over the years. I have to say even for someone who is outgoing, it was harder to try and build new friendships in my 20s after it coming so easy in my teens. I hear from friends who have moved a lot in their 30s and 40s that making friends is even harder the older you get: most people have solidified their relationships at that point and it’s really difficult to break through into social groups.
But having witnessed what can happen when you don’t have a few solid social connections I have really forced myself to hold onto the ones I do have. When we had kids, no other people in our extended social groups had school aged or younger children. Most were childfree. So we tried to attend as many house parties as we could without kids, and forewent the more expensive hangouts. It also forced me into making new friends amongst people who did have children and now I have a pretty solid group of people in book club and in dragon boat that I am lucky to count on for amazing hangouts. I think Gen X women maybe saw their grandmothers and decided quite rightly that we should try and stave off the effects of loneliness.
/segue
Now, as a retired woman in her 40s I have enough money to live and not worry about whether the bills are paid but I also have TIME because I am not working (what I don’t have is energy or as much mobility). Sure, some things have changed: the days of lounging around at friend’s houses all day are over. Many of us have responsibilities now that we didn’t have when we were young and carefree. We aren’t called the squeeze generation for nothing: we typically work full time while simultaneously looking after our children AND our aging parents. I’ve witnessed a lot of stress, exhaustion, and loss in these past few years as many friends have juggled so many things – all high priorities. But the point is: social connections are paramount and in the middle of your life when chaos is reining, it is hard to maintain those connections.
What if not working could bring back some of that nostalgia and connection in a way that is in-step with the realities of modern life? How many times have you genuinely said, “Gosh, this has been so fun! We really must do it more often!” knowing full well that you won’t? It’s money, it’s time, it’s work, it’s responsibility.
I’ve been thinking what *IF* we do it more often? And by we, I mean Mr. Tucker and I since most of our friends are still working. As we head into the home stretch of what hopefully will be his permanent retirement I am thinking of the things we haven’t been able to prioritize due to raising kids, having two jobs, maintaining a house etc. and re-prioritizing them – and the first one on the list is seeing friends more often. While the days of late nights in bars and cafes are over, I am sure we could meet them where they are.
A not-so-complete list of things we could do (or things we or friends are already doing) that are free or cheap:
– Bring lunch to friends at work and enjoy a lunch hour with them. No time for lunch? (problematic, but ok) bring them a coffee and have a quick chat.
– Host a Sunday night dinner for friends where they only have to bring themselves and any beverages they may want.
– Afternoon pool parties and BBQs. My friends typically bring something to share with everyone and then something to grill for themselves.
– Bring dinner to friends who are under a lot of stress.
– Put together a picnic for some friends and go to them. I have friends who live on the other side of the city who don’t have cars so this would be us heading to the east end.
– A friend of mine hosts movie nights in their backyard with a projector, which is a lovely thing to do and low stakes for everyone.
– Bike rides where you meet in the middle at a beach or park.
– Because we are a Halloween-crazy household, last year I organized two group outings in the city: one was a Haunted Walk and one was going to a local orchard that had haunted houses and hayrides.
– Meet for movies at a locally-run theatre: I love that one local theatre does a fairly-priced Saturday Morning Cartoon Party where you watch retro cartoons and they have an AYCE cereal bar.
– A local bar has retro pinball machines and all-day Saturday and Sunday they have FREE PLAY from noon-8pm for $10. They also have amazing perogies.
– I usually do a Winter Solstice party as a continuation from my Pharm days. Snacks and mulled cider for everyone! Covid canceled almost all of my plans for the last 3 years but I hope this year will be the charm!
– Our book club usually does a weekend away in November. Pre-Covid it was a cottage one year within driving distance and then away another year. We went to New Orleans in 2019. They’re going to New York City this year but I won’t be joining them because we have tight financial goals.
– Go rollerskating! The local volunteer group does these fun, themed events and they usually have both family and adult-only sessions. While I have yet to go, 4-Wheelies looks fun.
– We do a games and/or craft night with friends once a month. This month Mr. Tucker and I are going to whip up burgers and they can bring a side.
– Our community has a wild amount of engagement by our neighbours. In particular, one fireman always does a HUGE fireworks display on Canada Day and they close the street off for it. Our neighbourhood has a roaming tiki bar that everyone stocks and shares as well. On Halloween the same fireman makes a HUGE Haunted House for the kids and it is really quite lovely. Every year they also do a street party that is planned and hosted by anyone turning 40 that year. It’s pretty fantastic. I have thought of getting more involved by maybe booking the community house in the park behind us and doing a winter themed party in December – if I can convince the eldest to learn some winter-themed harp songs. Hah.
– During Covid the kids and I baked cookies around Christmas and delivered them to friends around the city. We used to do a yearly cookie decorating party with other families in our neighbourhood but our children outgrew it.
– Also during Covid because the kids couldn’t Trick or Treat we started doing #13DaysOfHalloweenMovies and #12DaysOfChristmasMovies where we would watch a movie every night and then I would post their reviews to Instagram. Friends told me they loved following along and seeing the whackadoodle things the kids would notice about beloved classics.
– We really should volunteer more with the Community Association, even if it is minimal.
– There are a bunch of winter trails (run professionally and run by volunteers – there are more but these are examples) that you can snowshoe or ski on. Round it off with a hot chocolate at the Sailing Club if you do both.
To be honest, there is an absolute ton of things you can do to stay connected. Sometimes I will just text a friend out of the blue to tell them that I was thinking of them. I have been blessed with an amazing amount of great friends and I know life can get away from us but honestly, I want to head into my golden years with these folks so I want us to make sure we stay connected – off of social media.
So thus ends the rambling series of nostalgia posts. TL;DR: I want to reclaim my one wild life now that I don’t have to worry about money. I want to take up video games again, see friends and connect with them as much as possible even if I have to do more of the heavy lifting. I want to get back that feeling of freedom and that anything is possible in the future. The other day Mr. Tucker said to me, “I cannot wait for the second half of my life to begin!” I can’t either!
You may have come across the Canadian study this week that no amount of alcohol is safe. It’s been heavily reported everywhere and, naturally, there has been a lot of pushback and a myriad of opinion pieces have been writing either denouncing the study or lauding the study. But in the end I think that all the chatter about alcohol consumption is good, people are starting to review their own habits and question them and I think that is important.
My own relationship with alcohol is a strange one. I drank a bit as a young teen and then I drank rarely until I was about 22. If I am honest, by the time I met Mr. Tucker when I was a month shy of 27, drinking had become a huge part of my life. All of our friends went out a few nights a week to bars and we always binge drank. By the time I was 30 I felt that I had a problem with alcohol and felt that it had become an unstoppable force in my life.
Making the decision to get pregnant is what completely halted all alcohol in our lives (Mr. Tucker mostly quit with me). I didn’t drink during my pregnancies but I did continue to drink afterwards. For a lot of my kid’s younger years we still were pretty social drinkers hanging out with neighbours a lot and cracking beers. But never did I again reach the worrisome levels of drinking that I had in my late 20s. I think because our environment and priorities changed so much that over time we just drank less and less overall but weekends we did engage in a lot of binge drinking. Wine Mom culture was strong during those years.
When we moved into this house and had our first summer with the pool, we found ourselves hosting quite a few parties. Over time though, our desire to do this waned and the party atmosphere went with it. As our kids got older as well, we found ourselves driving to activities and hosting sleepovers so naturally drinking fell by the wayside. We were still drinking a lot the odd evening and weekend but it was way less than our previous habits and we found ourselves drinking higher quality alcohol.
Then the pandemic hit and like many people we soothed our anxiety with alcohol. In fact, during the pandemic alcohol sales shot up & increased by 2 million dollars a day in our province. Like many people, we also saw our alcohol consumption skyrocket. By the time October rolled around Mr. Tucker and I realized that our consumption had become a habit, that we didn’t really enjoy it as much anymore and that we felt crappy and lethargic. So on October 31, 2020 we made the decision to quit drinking for one year.
In general, the first couple of days of drying out were just boring and flat but we got over it quickly. In fact, my skin got better, my spasticity got better, I slept better and we weren’t exhausted and cranky all of the time. We also found ourselves more productive and we ended up reading more books and doing more creative things. Sure, there were times where it was difficult, such as when we rented cottages with friends (we quarantined beforehand) and Christmas was a bit strange but overall it was a really good year and we saved a ton of money and I shed quite a few pounds.
Halloween 2021 saw us consuming alcohol again but we never really got back to our previous levels of consumption. We had a small Christmas in 2021 which was drinks and cards with family, more outdoor social events over 2022 with friends that were punctuated with drinking and so most of 2021 was phases of drinking followed by weeks of non-drinking. By the fall the shine had worn off on our consumption just around the time we ran the numbers and discovered that we had spent $5500 on booze that year, or about $105 a week.
$105 a week doesn’t sound like much and indeed for what we drink, it really isn’t. It’s about 2 cases of 24 beers, or 4-6 bottles of wine, depending on what kind we buy. Given that we have also hosted a bunch of pool parties and dinners with family, that doesn’t seem like a ton. We also tend to be pickier in our old age and don’t want to drink cheaper alcohol so that adds a premium to the bill. That amount includes the wine I got on my wine tour in Prince Edward County (including Christmas gifts) but not the drinks we had when we ate out (which were few, due to cost).
The truth of it all though is that alcohol just doesn’t work for us anymore. In middle age the hangovers are brutal and long – sometimes even multiday. We also find it gives us low-grade depression, lethargy and crankiness if we drink multiple times a week. In my case as well it causes my muscles to seize & gives me horrible spasticity. In the end, we can find a ton of other ways to get value out of $5500 than to buy alcohol with it.
So are we planning to be teetotalers forever? No. While I don’t see us drinking regularly again I do plan to travel in the future and that travel will probably include some alcohol. It’s also nice to have a drink on holidays, birthdays and other celebrations. What I do realize every time we have chunks of time where we don’t drink alcohol is that I find myself less enamoured with it overall. I prefer feeling clear minded and doing other stuff with my time. Of course, the fact that it can cause even more health problems than the immediate ones should encourage everyone to drink as rarely as possible.
I am not the boss of anyone by all means but like everything else in your life such as consumption, budgeting and investment strategies it’s worth doing a periodic review of things to make sure that they are still serving you instead of just doing things out of habit.
By now we are four months into the lockdown that started in March & it looks like life as we knew it has changed forever. Of course, after September 11 life changed monumentally as well but because we have 19 years distance between that event and life today, most of the changes seem normal now. Life does change, sometimes slowly and sometimes drastically but not all of those changes are for the worse. While we are still managing the fallout from recent events, some people are saying that they appreciate things like being able to work from home, not rushing from activity-to-activity all the time, and spending more time together as a family (although, some people feel the opposite is true).
One of my favourite pandemic activities has been getting together once-a-week with friends to play Trivial Pursuit. Now, I am a HUGE trivia buff but I have terrible recall. My friends on the other hand are trivia masters & one of them has even been on Jeopardy. So while my chances of winning are low, that’s not the point. The point is that I get to virtually see my friends – in three different time zones & two different countries – and we get to laugh & joke and play games. For a very small window of time I get to connect with my friends & it feels almost normal.
We all know that online meetings lack the intimacy of in-person connection but it’s better than no connection at all. I’ve gone from seeing all of them in the past year to probably not seeing them at all for at least a year. That is the problem when some of your closest friends live far away. But we are no strangers to distance: our connection was brought together because of the internet and so we are used to most of our communication being digital. So our weekly TP game is just in addition to our interaction both online and via group chats.
Honestly though, our weekly game is one of my favourite nights of the week. It can be chaotic with dogs, kids, and people eating dinner (that pesky time zone issue) but for me, it’s become one of the best things to have come out of this pandemic. I really hope that when things get normalized and when we can do other things with our evenings that we really make the effort to continue our game night on some scale. It’s really nice to connect with your friends even if it is only virtually.
