Another year has gone by. For me, life goes back to what I call normal after that first day in January. Once the forty or so days of holiday madness come to an end (I measure by when Black Friday comes), the world enters a new kind of madness revolving around the weather. Day to day we worry about how cold it will be, will there be rain or snow, or even a polar vortex.
A few years ago, we had three of those. At my job, we (or rather, I and the administrative team) fed our workers for over two weeks while the powers of nature dogged our every waking hour. Now that we don’t go to the workplace anymore, I don’t need to worry about a shopping run, how many plates and forks we need (or how many excess knives we must deal with), or if the corporate credit card will accept another big bill and whether the old ones were already accounted for. When I shop, I shop for me.
January is when the bills from late November and December start to roll in, and the tax documents also remind us of where our money came from and went for a whole year. I took the time to amass a collection of receipts from food shopping this year: since we were blessed with the first regional Sprouts market in 2024, I began getting my daily produce and dairy there, and the many slips from that location show just how healthy I managed to eat. I didn’t save any stubs from eating out, which I kept to once weekly on average. Unfortunately I can’t say the healthy eating affected my weight.
In 2024 I managed to cut back on frivolous spending. I turned down nearly everything, and only indulged in one thing I still enjoy collecting. Instead of stuff, I channeled my spending to experiences, going to an occasional social event or a new production, and those served much better than finding storage space.
As for the home, I only did one improvement, taking the entrance to the side room back to where it began; with glass-paned doors. Originally my parents took down and discarded a pair of similar doors, opting instead for shuttered levered versions. The hardware gave out after decades of use, and the cooler temperatures in the room caused the air to escape through the slats and cool the bigger spaces down. Despite being part of the home and its heating system, the room is down about ten degrees. After getting new windows throughout the year before, I also opted for the old/new doors (which required custom fitting), and part of the problem was solved by doing so. Now I need to get to the bottom of the cold air, which may be due to no insulation in the roof. Eventually that space will become my office.
I gave up my original fashion choices when I left the building to work at home in 2020. Now I feel fashionable but comfortable, and still have a handful of brands whose clothing I trust to last and fit. My discovery of Duluth Trading is making winter easier to endure. Their outerwear is great. The other clothes are going into donations or rags. My clothing budget went down to practically nothing.
The other day, I ended the year by killing my shredder. It was an old one which was relegated to one sheet of thin paper only, one at a time, because it had reached the final moments of its lifespan. The new one was on standby for when the oldie cut its last. In my haste to get junk mail out of the way, I neglected to pay attention to my latest request from the March of Dimes. They glue a dime to your donation slip, hoping you will return its equivalent with your (much higher) donation, and I popped the entire thing into the old codger shredder, forgetting to remove the dime, which then got lost in the works and is probably mangled beyond the ability to recover its value. I’ll let you know if I can retrieve it before the deceased goes out to trash collection.
My resolutions will go into effect this coming week, and I’m not sure I will meet all of them, but I do know that such a tumultuous prediction of how 2025 may go will spur me to take better care of myself and do all I can to make things better, healthier, happier and balanced. My weekly posts should reflect some of this, and I hope you will join me.
Here’s to balance in 2025.
Susan's Scribblings the Blog 