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A very wintery life update about 2025 goals

A very wintery life update about 2025 goals

It’s Sunday morning in winter so naturally I am alone. The Eldest teaches skiing and The Youngest still takes Snowboarding lessons which leaves me in the house my myself. Mr. Tucker is up-and-at-‘em at O’dark early to get The Eldest to her bus and then has a brief respite before dragging The Youngest up to a mountain for her lesson. It’s a super busy time of year but if you don’t keep yourself busy and active, you will just languish in the dark and cold.

The condo and work

I remembered recently that I hadn’t really updated since July’s big drama. The TL;DR of it all is: we did lower the interest rate and we managed to rent out the condo to a lovely young couple. So that is going well at least. Rest assured we are making zero profit from this & I know that makes me shitty at being a landlord but I am ok with that. Mr. Tucker continues to be employed by the same company and his workload is more manageable than he originally thought. Because they cut so deep though, he did toss in his hat to do some on call for another colleague who was managing on her own 24/7. Thankfully, there are rarely after hours issues that need to be actioned.

Mr. Tucker has made the decision to just stay put for the foreseeable future and let the chips fall where they may. Part of it is sheer curiosity of what will happen in 2025 and part of it is that work is more manageable than he originally thought it would be when it all went down last July. Some of the people who were laid off have discovered that a lot of tech work – especially work-from-home tech work – has dried up and pays a lot less than it did previously. He realizes that he has it good with his well-paying WFH gig and a job he is great at, so he will ride it out until the bitter end.

Also, the future all seems so uncertain right now (does it ever feel certain?) and for context, I am writing this a week after Trump’s inauguration, and he is currently scatter gunning commentary and threatening takeovers and tariffs all over the place. I suspect that at some point Mr. Tucker’s job will get caught up in the crossfire as we live in Canada and his company is in the US. There are already rumblings about profitability and if another layer of complications comes down the pipe, we may see them just throw in the towel on international hires.

Personal Renaissance (formerly known as the mid-life crisis)

Last year when I had my hysterectomy I had to have a blood transfusion. After years and years of being severely anemic, a transfusion was like being on uppers for the first time! Despite the fact I was recovering from an intense abdominal surgery that went a bit sideways, I had a lot more energy than I had experienced in a decade. It was incredible! Then, in the summer, we quit drinking alcohol and my quality of life increased dramatically. Gone were the lethargic days, heartburn and fuzzy-headedness.

Given these things, I decided to change up my meds at the end of Rocktober and WOWEE I am not kidding when I say it changed my life. I suddenly had a lot more energy, my PLS symptoms got better and I wanted to do more things for myself such as work out and have a decent skin care routine. So I did!

I learned how to make my skin feel and look better with budget products (thank you to the budget videos by Dr. Idress!). I signed myself back up for physiotherapy and massage[1] in an attempt to build strength and decrease spasticity and so far it is working really well. I also started spending a little extra money on getting my hair and nails done professionally. For someone who has NEVER really spent much money on beauty products it has been a super large leap for me to actually care about those things[2] ! So far I have zero regrets: I look better, I feel better and I am generally more confident and feel less frumpy.

We have added a few extras back into our budget and it feels good to splurge a bit more. We don’t eat out at all but instead have a lovely fancy dinner once every couple of months. It’s really worked out in terms of value because there is a lot of space around these splurgy events so they stand out and are truly enjoyed.

I also am currently taking an art class through the city. It reaffirms that I am definitely not an artist but it’s been a great, soothing way to spend Mondays during the indoor months. It’s lovely to be in a room of folks all similarly concentrated on their small art projects and most of them on my level: enjoying the process but aren’t lying to themselves about their artistic abilities. I think doing things is fun even when you aren’t good at them. Maybe even ESPECIALLY if you aren’t good at them because the pressure to perform is off.

Budgety 2025

I mentioned previously that we had met all of our financial goals. The house is paid off. We have a solid income via my disability to support our family (and life insurance should the worst happen). Mr. Tucker’s retirement accounts are definitely coasting – and by that I mean that when my disability income replacement ends in 16 years, it will have increased enough via compound interest to support a pretty darn good lifestyle when combined with CPP/OAS – even if we never put another cent in.

Still, our cash savings is lower than I’d like it to be given that should Mr. Tucker lose his job AND we lose our renters, it would just kill our budget. So this year is about getting those cash reserves up in 2025 so that we can carry everything we need to in an emergency. I think we will be laser focused on getting cash into our TFSAs this year.

Another win for us is that we have fully funded The Eldest’s RESP! By that I mean, we have caught up to the point where we no longer get the 20% matching (up to $7200) from the feds. So now we only have 2025-2026 to get the full matching for The Youngest.

RDSP contributions are also done. The Disability Savings Program is so strange in the fact that you can only get grant matching until December 31st of the year you turn 49. Whomp whomp: I turned 49 in December. I can’t be mad at the 100% return on the RDSP grant though.

This brings me to another finale in our childrearing years: now that The Eldest is 16, the last big thing we will pay for is her driving classes and her driver’s license. I am signing up for her classes this week so that she can take her G2 exit exam as soon as possible & then next year she can get her full G. Combined with the money we have invested to help her get her jobs (ski instructor in winter, wading pool attendant in the summer), her driver’s license, and money for education, she is all ready to be an adult out in the world! Two more years and her sister will follow suit!

This is The Youngest’s last year of snowboarding lessons and next year she will take her snowboarding instructor course. This summer will be her last year of sailing lessons where she will hopefully be able to get her CanSail 4. We will get her CPR/SFA and her motorboat license and hope that next year she can come back to be a sailing camp instructor. The we will get her driving lessons and pay for her license and she is off as well!

It is crazy to think that we are almost out of summer camps and kid activities. It’s been a long and expensive road but I truly believe it is worth it. I have zero regrets about having kids and the expense of children generally. My kids are amazing and while I recognize that parenting isn’t for everyone, it has definitely been a worthwhile wonderful adventure for us and I genuinely like my children as people[3].

You have to kick at the darkness…

I have been trying not to mainline news but the news is still mainlining me. Even Youtube feels like a game of whack-a-mole and chicken all at the same time. I click “not interested” and like a Hydra, a new political video pops up in its place. It seems that everywhere I go it’s just one crappy headline after another. The fact that we are in the coldest and darkest days here in Canada definitely doesn’t help. Then of course, tax season is coming down the pipe so it is almost time to round up all of our paperwork for that. Until then, we are trying to stuff our tax-advantaged accounts as much as possible to reduce our taxable income (because I *always* owe because they don’t tax CPP-D at the source).

But there are still glimmers of light! Since divesting from social media many friends have reached out via Signal, email or text. The evenings have been spent sitting in front of the fireplace with tea and books. Mr. Tucker and I start our days with coffee in the dining room where we have fresh flowers to remind us that spring does eventually come (it never feels like that in January and February). I even paid our veggie CSA this week, so that is also a harbinger of a new year. In the mornings, we light a beeswax candle and start our days softly chatting instead of picking up our phones. Mr. Tucker has even spent some of his down time picking oil painting back up again.

I guess that is just it, when it comes down to it: you have to just keep focusing on the little joys day-to-day & trudging forward with your goals and dreams.

[1] Our benefits partially cover some of these expenses
[2] I know some people will feel that vain but so be it: we all have different splurges and that’s ok
[3] So far! I hope it stays that way!

Resolution, dream, goal or plan? Maybe all of the above

Resolution, dream, goal or plan? Maybe all of the above

In 2020 we had found ourselves suddenly homeschooling and stuck at home. Like most people, we also found ourselves drinking a wee bit more alcohol than we usually did. By October it was clear that not only were we spending scads of coin on booze, we also felt like shit and the consumption of alcohol was severely affecting our mood. So on October 31, 2020 the last alcoholic beverage for the next 365 days was consumed.

I won’t lie and say that it was an easy year, there were many times where one or both of us wanted to celebrate with a glass of something stronger than club soda. But we stuck to it and found that not only did we lose some weight, we also saved a pile of cash. In October 31st, 2021 we went to a friend’s outdoor (belated) birthday party and toasted her with some spiked punch.

Since then, we haven’t really consumed alcohol like we used to. Aside from the fact that we are old and more prone to hangovers, alcohol also makes me incredibly spastic the next day. More and more we found that we don’t like losing the next day to recuperating so while we drank often we didn’t find ourselves going too crazy. We also discovered that we prefer more higher-end brands as well, so when we did drink alcohol it could often get really expensive. So when we mulled it over, alcohol consumption – while fun in the moment – was incongruent with our long term health and financial goals. So we decided that 2023 would be an alcohol-free year for us.

When I mentioned our sober year goals to a friend, I mentioned that one of the reasons was to help us pay off our house in 2023. She replied with, “It’s can’t make that much of a difference, can it?” So I ran the numbers and in Beer and Liquor store purchases alone (not cash, not bars/restaurants, not gifts) we spent $5500 on our credit card*. Of course, alcohol in this province is super expensive but actually running the numbers was pretty shocking to me because looking back it didn’t even seem like we drank that much last year. What an eye-opener!

Resolution #1 – a sober 2023

As mentioned above, our mortgage is up for renewal later this year and we want to just pay the entire thing off completely. We had already planned to do that before the prime rate had climbed to dizzying heights but now I am doubly glad that we had it in the hopper for 2023! We don’t have much further to go so if we tighten our belts we will be mortgage free by the end of the year.

Resolution #2 – pay off the mortgage on the house

We are also aiming to have an ultra frugal year. Generally speaking my budget style is to make categories and just try and spend within the categories. I don’t typically budget down to the cent or make an effort to track every penny. As long as we stay in the green, meet our goals and don’t carry debt, I generally just have an idea of where everything is going.

But as inflation increases and a recession looms as workers are getting laid off, it seemed like a good time to experiment with living off of one salary – my disability income. With Mr. Tucker’s work salary we plan to save it for retirement, use it to pay off the house, save for our road trips next fall and put some away to purchase local food. When the house is paid off, these last two things will then come out of my disability income, freeing up every cent he makes to put towards early retirement.

This is the one goal for 2023 that I am apprehensive about. Since we’ve always had low expenses, a good savings rate and still have been able to do the things we’ve wanted to do, having to check ourselves may be a steep learning curve. Still, 10 years ago we had an incredibly tight budget because I was a SAHM and we had a large child support payment when Mr. Tucker made about half of what he makes today. Of course, prices have gone up and two t(w)eens in the house make everything more expensive. But I am 100% sure that this will be achievable with some work. Much like 10 years ago, I am going to track our spending carefully and look for ways we could be more efficient with our money.

Resolution #3 – Live off of one salary and track all of our spending

If there is one regret I had about 2022 it’s that Mr. Tucker and I didn’t get out for walks as much as we would have liked to. Sure, I spent a ton of time swimming in the pool during the summer months but we always had planned to walk while the kids were in school and with his new job it never seemed to happen.

Worse, we actually purchased some cardio equipment last year on sale and while we started off strong, eventually the machines sat unused as life got busy in the spring between Puerto Rico and school drama.

I have no crazy exercise goals except: move. Any sort of movement is better than no movement so I am just going to try and get outside, get some fresh air and walk/trike. On days where it is too dangerous to go outside due to snow & ice, I can use the equipment. Mr. Tucker and I really need to prioritize any exercise over the nothing we’re doing now. Once we’ve made it a habit again, we can increase and add to our routine. Hopefully by the summer we will have some weight training and flexibility training incorporated into our routine.

Resolution #4 – Move more

A part of these goals is to start living in a way that supports our health and get us used to habits that Mr. Tucker can take with him into early retirement. We need to make space for ourselves over the next year and live our life as less focused around his job as we can. Of course, he still has to work and there will often be challenges to being life-focused vs. work-focused but after a year into his new gig he has a better handle on the job and its expectations.

I think overall 2023 will be characterized as a year where we make conscious decisions and really focus on the life we want to lead. Not just this year but going forward as well. The world is constantly chaotic and these past couple of years have felt so heavy between the pandemic, economic changes and war. Hopefully 2023 will be a little calmer, the kids will continue to thrive, we’ll see our friends and family a lot more than we have these past few years and if all goes well, we’ll meet our goals.

Happy New Year!

*we get extra Aeroplan points for using the card, which makes it also easier to track our spending on alcohol because we tend to always use the card

**Mr. Tucker will need to listen for alerts on his phone due to work but there is no reason it needs to be right beside him

We never got to Jamaica & other updates

We never got to Jamaica & other updates

I realize that I posted a life update on September 21st, 2021 and haven’t followed up since. My goal to be a better blogger has not come to fruition. Besides, all the kids are on tiktok these days and I am going in the opposite direction and staying off of most social media. Here is a synopsis of the past year or so:

We ended up going to Puerto Rico: the direct flight we had booked to Jamaica changed so many times that it ended up becoming an over 24 hour flight with various stops. We discussed it with our friends and made the decision to pull the plug and instead planned a trip to Puerto Rico. Both families have been there before and we found a nice hotel on the southwest coast far from the maddening crowds. Covid made travel an absolute nightmare but we have stories for days and isn’t that what travel is all about?

Mr. Tucker started a new job: he heads up a new team now and with this new job came a small pay raise. So once again we have reversed course and are in super saver mode except the new raise covers our increases in spending money and groceries. That’s good because inflation has made it more expensive anyway.

We are still on track to pay off our mortgage in 2023: this is very exciting because we did manage to make our prepayment this year. It was looking dicey there for awhile because Mr. Tucker needed major dental surgery and…

We put in a walk-in bathtub: it was getting more and more dangerous for me to use a step-over tub and a bath chair so we bit the bullet and had a walk-in installed. It was incredibly expensive but we managed to not go into debt to do it.

We did more weekend roadtrips & didn’t rent a cottage: I have to be honest, I love staying home all summer. We bought a house with a pool for a reason and that reason is that I spend every great summer day swimming. Besides, we got to see a lot of friends for backyard hangouts.

We had a good run camping or renting cottages with friends when our kids were younger, it was more for the kids to run around with their friends than for us to enjoy. Now that they are older, they don’t enjoy it as much themselves. So it made sense to put this particular tradition to rest.

We did manage to get use out of our Canada’s Wonderland passes though! We went May 24 long weekend and Thanksgiving weekend – where we also went to Medieval Times. Is it absolutely cheesy? Yes. Did we all love it? Also, yes. We won’t renew them again as the deal isn’t as good as the pandemic restrictions let up but I am glad we did it. We still do have amazing plans for next year’s roadtrip.

I did rent a cottage in Prince Edward County with my friends from book club and had a wonderful weekend. Instead of booking an expensive wine tour a friend drove us to various wineries and it made for a fun, inexpensive weekend.

We had more local outings during the holidays: we did a lot more holiday-themed local events both last year and this year. During Halloween we went to various local farms to experience their haunted houses and we did a local Haunted Walk with friends as well. For Christmas last year we did a drive-thru light show and saw The Nutcracker. Of course, we kept up with our two traditions: October’s 13 Days of Halloween Movies and 12 Days of Christmas Movies in December. We had planned a small Winter Solstice event but was thwarted by Omicron.

We’re still gardening: we haven’t got better at it though. Still, it’s a fun hobby and I enjoy watching the garden change over the summer.

Health: I had a particularly awful fall in the late spring which took a long time to heal & made me make the decision to not paddle with my dragon boat team this year. I also have not kept up with a regular exercise routine outside of swimming in the summer. This is something I need to refocus on. I lost a lot of confidence with the fall but conversely I have added supplements to my routine that have reduced my spasticity & made my skin issues more manageable.

As 2022 comes to an end Mr. Tucker and I are working on some big goals to tackle in 2023. I feel like this deserves its own post, which I will tackle closer to the end of the month. Until then, we are gearing up to enjoy yet another Christmas season as a family and will hopefully be able to have a small Winter Solstice celebration with friends.

It’s been a hot minute – what I am up to

It’s been a hot minute – what I am up to

WELP. The idea of writing consistently here this year as a New Year’s resolution didn’t happen. Still, I’ve not really spent a lot of time on social media this year and I have definitely kicked my facebook habit (and replaced about 50% of it with an Instagram habit – oops!). Of course, the pandemic is still out there pandemicking but the kids are back in school so that is nice. We had a great summer of outdoor socially distanced hangouts, and now we are settling in to have a lovely autumn full of fun fall activities. But first, maybe a roundup of what has happened in the past 6 months since I last wrote:

Cottaging on Manitoulin island: we have probably shut the door on camping/cottaging with the two other families. Since Sprout was 2, we’ve either Glamped in Quebec parks or we’ve rented cottages. This year we had a lovely week in Dominion Bay where the kids could run around, play games and go for long walks. My friend S did her yearly craft camp for the kids & there was woodburning, leaf painting & other projects completed. I mostly read, and we even headed out to an outdoor farmer’s market (a pandemic first for me!) where I bought cozy wool socks for me, rings made out of antique spoons for the kids, and a pepper grinder from a woodworker for Mr. Tucker.

Unfortunately, during the pandemic there was a run on cottage rentals and even though we tried to book for next year early this summer, there was really nothing to be had that wasn’t $3000 a week – a bit steep. Also, our kids are much older now: Sprout is going to be 12 next year and the oldest kids will be 16 and will probably have jobs. It’s been a good run but it’s time to move on. Not all is lost though! More below!

Gardening: this was our garden’s second year & like the first year we kind of took the “set it and forget it” approach. Still, we got a lot out of it despite the chaos and have learned that we can probably sow an early spring garden, a summer garden & a fall garden. We did end up sowing a fall garden but a little later than I would have liked so who knows what will happen? Despite the cold, the tomatoes are still producing and the basil is going strong. Heck, some of our herbs – like lavender, coriander & dill – have re-seeded and are producing again. Since our goal is to bring those herbs inside for wintering under grow lights, I am happy to see it!

Hopefully we will get some cool weather crops before the snow flies! Then we will pull the dying plants, lay on our home made compost and let the beds winter. Otherwise, we have garlic to plant for next year before the winter sets in.

    Canning, preserving & gleaning: we did most of the things we had done last year that we had enjoyed,

– Horseradish dill pickles
– Tomato sauce
– Spicy dilly beans
– Strawberry and raspberry jam
– Sundried tomatoes

    Some new things,

– Both dill and sweet mustard relish (made when our cucumbers turned yellow)
– Red onion and beetroot chutney
– Marinated eggplant

    Some boozy things,

– We made Nocino from friend’s black walnuts
– We made a bachelor’s jam for Winter Solstice/Yule
– We are now trying our hand at plum wine from our friend’s plums

I am going to do an entire post on all of the things we did & some recipes sometime soon. What’s notable though is what we didn’t do: salsa or tomatillo salsa. We really weren’t going through it as quickly as I thought we would, so we focused on tomato sauce instead.

Money Mondays: this is still going strong! We’ve done sessions on a bunch of things such as the Disability Tax Credit, had a guest speaker to do a presentation on wills, and next week I am doing one on budgets.

Health: the good news is that the ALS clinic told me that I am doing well enough that I only have to come in once every two years! The nurse told me that this was the first time she’s heard the doctor tell someone that so I am pretty proud. Still, I could be doing more work on my health to be quite honest.

– Mr. Tucker and I are taking long walks (I bought a yellow tricycle, which is what I usually take) weekdays. We grab the dogs in the morning, walk Sprout to the end of the street, then we walk the Bean to her bus stop & then we head down to the river for a longer walk (or just through the neighbourhood on busy mornings). It’s been really good for us both to be forced to get up, washed, dressed and out the door. Otherwise we just lounge around the house in our jammies.
– I plan to do #folktober next month to work on my fine motor skills with painting. I bought some nice watercolour paints and I need to encourage myself to use them. Wish me luck!
– I need to clean out my knitting basket to make it more user-friendly. The Sprout reminded me that I said I would teach them to knit and I still haven’t. So again, in the interest of my fine motor neuron skills (and keeping my promise) I should pull that out again.
– My vitamin regimen has made my cycle much better and that in turn has also helped my spasticity.
– I haven’t had alcohol since October 28th, 2020.
– My skin has been just awful so yesterday I was tested for a bunch of things (celiac, thyroid) and my GP is making me appointments with two dermatologists, so we will see how that will play out. I figure this may be an ongoing saga for awhile as appointments are sparse due to the pandemic.

Finances: shockingly, Mr. Tucker has made the decision to work longer in order to put more money into some house-related projects. This means we’ve eased up on our intense budget and instead we are buying more things that bring us joy. For example, we are trying to rehire our old housecleaner again as we’ve decided that our weekends are probably not best spent arguing with the kids over chores. They both know how to clean an entire house so we’ve done our job here. They’ll still have chores, just less of them.

I have also increased our a> grocery budget; and b> our pocket money. We are still saving at an amazing rate but we aren’t as intense as we were for most of this year. We hit our prepayment amount for our mortgage & will contribute to Mr. Tucker’s retirement accounts (but to a lesser degree).

Instead we are also going to…

Travel: both near and far. When we were on Manitoulin Island this summer we made the decision that if cottages were going to be $3000 a week that we would be better off booking a trip down south instead. So that is what we have done. We have tentatively booked a vacation to Jamaica next winter (covid willing!). We booked our flights & house rentals but we did manage to get good cancellation policies so we will see where the world is at come winter.

We also have decided to treat the kids & take them to Canada’s Wonderland for the Halloween Haunt. We ended up buying season passes with another family in the hopes of going back for a couple of days next summer as well.

I would like to also do more things close to home such as heading to various Halloween-themed (outdoor) events in our area. After a year and a half of being stuck at home, I am eager to spread my social wings!

So that is about it for changes around here. Mostly my days are spent reading and parenting & watching shows or playing games as a family. I think we’ve turned a corner on covid – at least in our area of the world – so I hope that stays steady. Overall, life is pretty good.

The Three Year Plan

The Three Year Plan

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

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

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

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

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

…and the biggest one of all:

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

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

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

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

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

Sobriety

Sobriety

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daily writing practice

Daily writing practice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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