Musings

I think routines are the topic I’ve written about more than any over, over the course of my life as a blogger online. I am borderline obsessed with finding the best way to accomplish my goals – with balance.

For example, I am not interested in the “rise and grind” mentality unless we’re talking about coffee beans. But I do love to see how I can incorporate an afternoon swim in the stock tank pool now that the weather resembles hell’s front porch.

Here are a few new things I’ve added into my routine that I love:

Lofi & Chill

I think I stumbled across this during the 24-hour Writer’s Sprint in the Spring. Normally if I’m writing for several hours I’ll listen to video game music compilations on YouTube because they’re designed to keep you engaged for long periods of time without becoming repetitive. But now I switch that up with lofi music, think coffee house vibes on a hot summer afternoon when you just want to sink into that overstuffed chair and sip at your frappe.

The music, which I’m listening to right now, is mellow and chill and helps me get through difficult tasks or boring ones. Like updating 400+ contacts in a database and checking them off, one at a time.

Hydration Station

I drink water like it’s my job.

The problem is, my city’s water is not that great. So I’ve come up with a system to keeping good water at hand and it begins with a dozen or so plastic bottles (I’m planning to upgrade to glass some day) that get filled with filtered water from the Brita. Most of them live on the top of my fridge, within reach but out of the way, while 2-3 are always in the fridge.

I like cold water and those who try to convince me to switch to lukewarm or hot are wasting their time. Cold water + ice = perfect. Since the bottles are easily interchangeable, I can pop it back in the fridge if it gets warm and I usually end my night by refilling a couple bottles, plus my water pitcher.

In the event that we have (another) boil water advisory, I know that I have a few gallons of usable water right away. Which makes a big difference.

Fanning Out

It’s summer here and my 120 yo house does not have central heat or air conditioning. Which means it gets hot and then I get cranky. To resolve this, I have strategically placed fans all over my house and I will look for a few more when the season is over and they’re on sale.

Currently I have one in my kitchen, which gets very warm when I’m cooking, one in the bathroom, which has no other way to have moving air, there’s two in the bedroom, one for me + one for the dog, one in the office and one in the living room. I will usually also have the ceiling fans on in the office and living room.

No one wants to move that one good fan from room to room when it’s hot so fanning them out all over the house is ideal.

Weed Battle

In the Spring, I found my yard absolutely covered in weeds and I wanted to pull them out before mowing them down. So I spent hours squatting and pulling out weeds by the hundreds before I got them under control.

Now I have just a few every day to deal with and it was almost easier when I needed to pull 1,000. To keep on top of the new weeds, I place my tools right in the middle of the yard so I always know where to find them and try to get to 10 weeds a day, when I’m outside. I love this chore right after it rains and the ground is soft and more willing to give up the roots.

At first I kept a series of trash cans and buckets around the yard to contain the pulled weeds but as the storms rolled through, I couldn’t always keep up with emptying them of standing water. So now there’s a 20 gallon black trash bag that gets filled up and tossed every couple of weeks. This keeps the gross weeds out of my garden and my trash can.

Laundry Multi Sort

We all hate doing laundry, don’t lie.

For me, what makes it easier is to continually sort sort sort until the piles are small enough to deal with.

When I get the clean clothes out of the dryer everything goes into one basket and gets dumped on the bed. Then I immediately put the linens and towels back in the basket, since these are usually the most bulky items, my pile is reduced by 50% or more.

From there I sort to where the clothing goes:

• hanging clothes
• dresser drawers
• baskets in the closet

Again, these make small piles so I will lay out the shirts and dresses to hang and count them for the hangers I need. Once I know that it’s only 5 hanging items, that becomes a lot less onerous. I also have a dresser drawer for unmatched socks so if I’m feeling especially tired all the loose socks go in there to be matched later.

Clothing items like pajama pants, workout tops, swim suits and shorts all go into baskets in my closet so I don’t even really need to do anything but gather them up and stuff them in. Jeans get rolled but that’s simple to do.

Then I can turn back to the linens and pull out any sheets or duvet covers to fold, pillow cases to put away, etc. I have to look at these because they’re usually the culprit when a sock goes missing and my blankets love to get stuck together with microfiber towels.

Speaking of towels, I do another quick sort for bathroom vs kitchen towels. Some are for hand and face washing and others are for cleaning and kitchen use. Again, this is about reducing the piles into more manageable things to tackle and making it more efficient.

I can put all the kitchen towels into one basket and move that to the kitchen. Cleaning towels get thrown into a basket atop the fridge, dish towels get folded into a drawer. I can do this easily knowing that I have all the towels and won’t need to keep going back and forth as I unearth more.

These are just some simple ways that I’ve added onto my routines over time. If there’s one constant for my routines it’s that they’re always changing to shift my needs and what I want.

I get wild ideas all the time. Most of the time I’ll come to some senses and stop before I actually enroll in the course or book a flight or buy that land but sometimes I go through with the thing I never thought I’d do.

Example: One day I decided that in 2024 I should do 10,000 squats.

For a short backstory, I started in mid-October to do 10 squats per day and then added 10 more in mid-November. I needed some different movement types besides my bike and I figured that squats were free, portable and rarely lead to injury so why not?

But 20 squats per day is a very different goal than 10,000 in a year.

Or is it?

What sold me on trying this wild hair of an idea is the math. If you divide 10,000 squats by 366 (2024 is a leap year) then you will get 28 squats rounded up.

Which is… not many more than I’m doing right now. And if I keep going with 20 per day in December and then increase to 30 per day, I’ll make my goal by November. There might be a few days that I don’t get to 30, but that gives me a buffer.

What’s incredible to me is that 10,000 feels massive. 28 feels doable.

So maybe it feels out of reach to read 50 books next year, until you consider that the average book is 250 pages and that’s just 35 pages a day to get through 50 books in a year.

My cycling goal is another one that I chose randomly, to always match the year to the goal. 2,023 miles in 2023 is just 5.5 miles a day. But if you consider when I travelled (away from a bike), getting the flu, then COVID and just the days when I needed to rest, averaging 7 miles a ride is enough to get me to that goal.

Maybe you want to earn more in the next year, could you make a $27 sale every day to add $10,000 to your revenue?

Or you’d like to organize your home so you pick one room per month and try to reduce 10 items per day. There are so many way to take a big goal, one that feels impossible and break it down into possible pieces.

And, as a bonus, you’re creating the habits that enable you to continue such a practice long term. If you told me I was physically able to cycle 1,000 miles in a few days to hit my annual goal faster and check it off a list, I wouldn’t do it. Not only is that a lot of pressure but the consistency matters more to me than the end goal.

Now, if you start off January 1st with a $10,000 sale, that’s fantastic! But don’t stop the habit of seeking a sale every day. Because some days will be $0 and others will be $27 and others may be $10,000. It all adds up – the money and the habit.

(P.s. This is the kind of math and metrics I love because if you tell me, what’s the point? my product is $400 and I can’t do much then I’ll run some numbers. What if you made offers every day and over a year you made a sale, on average, every 5 days? That’s 73 sales throughout the year. If your average product is $400, that’s $29,200 in a year!)

Anyway, I look forward to looking back after completing 10,000 squats and deciding if I was fully delusional or happy that I set this goal for myself. The nearly 1,000 squats I’ve done since mid-October are just the warm up act.

I never really understood those folks who would take off the last half of December and skip out on all the amazing quiet time at work. I used to love working in my offices during this timeframe because I could get so much done.

Well, I’m joining the crew of being offline and largely unavailable until early January and I have a good list of things I want to do with my break at home.

I suppose I could just lie around in pajamas, do puzzles, watch movies and read books but that’s not really my personality. I mean, I’ll do those things anyway because I love movies and books and puzzles but I also love the practice of habits and pushing myself.

So one night when I was hosting my good friend Insomnia, I started a list. If I could do these specific things by the end of the year, I would be extremely happy. Then, like a good writer, I determined I would need to edit “sober”, aka rested, and make sure I was being realistic.

This is a necessary step because I have the tendency to start a weekend to do list with “clean the windows” and end it, 53 items later, with “re-roof the house.” My brain does not always easily comprehend what I can do in 2 days or 2 weeks.

But the best part of a list like mine is that you can probably start ticking things off right away. For me that included a few accounts I needed to cancel, some emails to send and a couple of links I just needed to save. See, I tend to email myself articles and artists, books to check out or products to look into and then they sit in my inbox. Clearing those out takes very little time and is perfect when my mind is racing at… 2am.

So what happens to all those ideas I can’t get done in my time off? Well, they go into my bullet journal for 2024 to accomplish throughout the year.

Planned Rest

Of course, I do anticipate time to rest, if my body cooperates and allows me to sleep during normal sleeping hours. But I don’t know if you ever experienced those summers as a kid when you didn’t have anything to do and after a few days you were merging into the couch as your eyes glazed over watching reruns on tv… just me?

Well, I feel we all get that way a bit now. We’ve seen the funny memes or videos on TikTok or Instagram, there’s always new rage baiting on Twitter and Facebook, news stories keep on coming, YouTube recommends the same old stuff over and over again… it can be frustrating and actually take more energy away.

I have two books I want to finish by the end of the year, and a nice stack of books to kickoff 2024.

Also on my list is finishing up some quilting projects and when I get to the last part, it’s all done by hand and a little slow. So listening to music while I attach binding to a half dozen quilt projects feels a lot like relaxing (especially compared to days full of video calls and Asana projects and emails).

While I don’t plan to spend much time out shopping, when the weather is good I’ll take a walk around town and maybe stop in the local coffee shop for a drink.

I have the time, after all I won’t have calls to rush home for or appointments until January. And I’m beginning to get very excited about that reality.

When I was a kid and home sick from school, there was nothing better than a cold Sprite and turning myself into a burrito using blankets on the sofa to watch Unsolved Mysteries while your classmates were doing math.

There’s nothing like an older man in a trench coat tell you in a serious tone that maybe you can help solve a mystery.

Yes!, you think, let’s do this. The episode begins and that dramatic moment ramps up the excitement, even if you can’t breathe through your nose. The case begins in 1976, okay, I wasn’t born yet but I can do this! and takes place in Maine, well I’ve never been there… I’m still in this. Pretty soon you’re seeing that cheerful UPDATE! screen and seeing that the case was solved. Your hopes to solve a crime are dashed.

For the past week I’ve been revisiting those memories as I convalesce and stay indoors with my legs covered in ice. The weather has been nice enough that I wish I could be outside cleaning up the yard before Fall and Winter set in, so to distract myself I’ve been watching Unsolved Mysteries on YouTube. In doing so I’ve found there are a couple of common endings.

Solved and Reunited – it’s nice to see these cases of families reunited after being separated by circumstances but these too leave a little lacking. I’d love to see a 5 year follow up to find out if they still like each other. Side note: it is hilarious to see the fashion of the 80s and 90s and what people wear to see their long lost sister for the first time in 30 years.

Still Unsolved – some of these cases are tragic, the shop owner shot in San Francisco, the woman searching for her family. An update show that revisits evidence would be fantastic, there’s so much that can be done with DNA now. The ones that never get updates are the cases on UFOs, Bigfoot and psychic dreams.

Solved and Captured – it’s great when the criminal profiled is captured, convicted and the case closed. However there are a few other subsets.

   Died or in jail – since many of these cases were first profiled in the late 1980s, many of the convicted criminals have died in prison or remain there. Yay!

Jailed until – early on there were episodes where the criminal was captured and the narrator cheerfully said “he won’t be eligible for parole until 2003!” Oh shit.

Released – the absolute worst are the cases where criminals are sentenced to 40 years, serve 4 and are out on parole. These seem like a failure because there was more time searching for a criminal than holding them responsible.

I realize that this show was unique to its time, when families sat down at 8pm to watch the newest episode live together. It’s a core memory for so many kids watching reruns at home, sick on the couch and I appreciate it for the nostalgia alone.

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A lifetime ago I was a college debate student, traveling all over the US for my school to compete in tournaments. One of the schools that we regularly competed against had an interesting strategy — instead of discussing the policy topic adopted by all the schools for the year they would debate racism in academia and the world. 

Note: this is not the space to debate racism, I am sharing this background to give context. While I did not agree with their approach to the debate, I absolutely know racism is horrific and prevent in our society still.

Competing against this school was a challenge, you don’t want to assert the opposite position (that racism doesn’t exist or matter) but the only ground they wanted to give an opponent was to concede the round because your opponent is a race that is more oppressed. Their belief was that it is a waste of time to discuss policies because the real world impact of racism was more important than a theoretical law we were discussing.

I’m not exaggerating, while their Varsity team members had more advanced arguments, at the novice level the debate typically became “vote for us as we are black” and as a whiter-than-white-bread 18-yo college student it was difficult to navigate the debate round without creating harm.

The argument that won us the most rounds was simple: 

Debate is not real life. It is a place to learn, try on positions and find out what you believe and your opponents believe so you can be a better advocate in real life.

We talked more about personal stories than policy in those rounds. About the overwhelming number of men in debate at the higher levels and how our school supported, scholarshipped and advanced women in debate. About the arguments we would have in the cafeteria back at school and with our roommates about the issues, terrifying anyone close enough to hear us talk about nuclear war over pizza. 

Personally, I talked about how I’d come to college a naive 17-year-old and within a few weeks I was talking to strangers about how the death penalty had deeply problematic and racist roots and how it would better serve justice to abolish it.

Debating for the death penalty in an equal amount of rounds didn’t make me a hypocrite, it won me tournaments and in doing so it taught me to clarify my stance. Since that time I have continued to understand and believe that people commit the most heinous crimes and depraved acts, the death penalty is not the answer. 

It’s my personal belief, one that was forged in the practice of debate. 

The second part of that argument that won us debates was real life. We spoke about the team raising money for young kids in our community who needed school supplies and clothes, serving at the soup kitchen and advocating for change — not at the political level — with individuals we could influence. 

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A personal shift

I realized something, after competing in those debates on racism, the real world, and how debate shapes our reality. 

No one has a mindset shift thanks to a new law or policy.

Do you think millions of Americans said “oh wow, a woman’s autonomy over her body isn’t something I have control over!” post Roe v Wade or did they simply dig their heels in further and decide that pro-life meant they could kill some abortion doctors? And did anyone change their mind that abortion shouldn’t be a protected right after the Dobbs decision last June? Hint: no.

While I am all for the alignment of laws and policy with our beliefs and values as a nation, we do not change hearts with House Resolutions and omnibus bills. 

That work is personal. 

Maybe the only thing I still respect Rev. Jerry Falwell for doing is really hearing dissent when he spoke against abortion in the 1980s. Someone at a rally asked him, “don’t you think more women would choose not to get an abortion if more Christians would adopt their babies?” 

To his credit, Falwell saw that he could be part of a solution and created a place for women to live through their pregnancies, get medical, emotional and financial support, and work with lawyers to place their children for adoption in good homes. He took his talking point “don’t get an abortion,” saw the larger picture, and created a solution that addressed the needs of women seeking abortion.

Our work is also personal.

It’s talking to the neighbor who screamed, “the media can’t call SHIT about the election!” back on November 9th, she who was in deep denial. And maybe passive-aggressively making Happy Inauguration cupcakes.