Contingent upon Avoidance

So it’s December now. Today’s my personal New Year’s Eve. Tomorrow’s also the twelve-month anniversary of my finally acknowledging that the 2025 family math wasn’t going to work with both my husband and me having weekdaily 120 minute commutes (on good days).¹ Fortunately, he’s still right about our being okay.

For now.

See, the last time I had to take a break like this was in late 2006. He wound up unemployed at the start of the 2007 Recession. I took this break in late 2024, and here we are in late 2025 … so, uhm, nothing’s happened yet this time, and okay, we did get through that experience, but I don’t need a repeat to remind me of how resilient we can be, thanks. We are better prepared than we were in 2007, but still!

So, we’re okay, though that’s still contingent on avoiding disasters.

In the spirit of that, and in light of my having another (albeit milder) poison ivy incident while doing the handweeding, we hired professionals to do the landscape cleanup. They discovered that the ivy infestation problem was worse than it appeared on the surface of the rock beds, so the next step is to strip them down to bare dirt and re-do them. I considered just reverting to mulch before I remembered why we replaced the original mulch beds to begin with: never ending fights with saplings, thorn vines and, you guessed it, poison ivy.

We also have a new snowblower. It wasn’t presented as a belated romantic Valentine’s Day or anniversary gift, unless you think not dying from shoveling packed snow-cone like wet ice off the driveway is romantic. I do!

I also have a new planner. One for 2026. I did not discard my 2025 Moleskine XL mid-year and switch to another planner (or two), or re-opt into a digital planning eco-system. I am weirdly proud of myself for this. I did more stuff this year than make lists about stuff that needed to be done and develop strategies for getting everything on the list done before I had to make the list for the next day or week or month or season.

I didn’t get away from lists entirely, though. I just resumed the pandemic-era practice of making short (< 10 item) daily checklists for my son, so he doesn’t fall into the habit of thinking that every day’s a weekend day when he’s not doing training or volunteering, and I don’t get into the habit of nagging him to do stuff. He likes lists and being micromanaged makes him twitchy. I like lists and having to micromanage makes me twitchy. He also likes having a body double while doing work, and apparently so do I, because when he works through his chores, I get mine done without wandering off to do anything else but those chores. ²

I’ll lay off with the daily lists if (ideally when) he ramps up to more than a few hours of outside work a month, though then I don’t know what I’ll do. While the dog’s great about following a routine, I can’t ever see him cleaning a bathroom or vacuuming up the drifts of his shed fur. If he did, now, I’d look into getting seed money to have him cloned. Why spend a fortune for a Doofusdoodle when you could have a ScrubbaMutt?

While I have a new planner for 2026, I don’t yet have more than a chirpy sketch of a personal plan for 2026, and I’m feeling weirdly proud of myself for that too. A work plan will just have to be developed on the fly, if necessary — though I really should take down or update the Website that I literally have not touched since 2014.

So far the personal plan is:

• Try not to kill any more house plants now that you have salvaged and refreshed them all.
• Try growing more outdoor things. If you get cucumbers working again, then you can think about chickens.
• Try doing more reading. You’ve been doing a lot for grownup you — 39 books so far this year, when you only planned for 25. Plan to read 26 next year?
• Keep writing. Yes, it’s terrible, but you don’t hate what you’re writing yet. When you do, it’ll be done enough for you to try to make it someone else’s headache. Tadaa!
• Keep learning. Sadly, yes, not just fun stuff.
• Keep making things. Now that you’ve gotten over their having to be perfect, you’re getting way better at it!
• Don’t overthink fitness so much. You have all the gear you need already. You know how you need to eat and you know what you need to do. Just do that.

1. I’m celebrating by getting a pneumonia vaccine shot. Then there will be cake. Yes, I do know how to party. ↩︎
2. Neither of us have been diagnosed with ADHD. I think we both might have undiagnosed AD&D: we need small party quests and the satisfaction of having cleared a zone while grinding levels for a boss fight. ↩︎