I will not say Happy Spring yet. I will not say Happy Spring yet. I will not say Happy Spring yet. Every time I have wished someone “Happy Spring!” this year, Winter has said “oh, yeah, let’s see about that!”, and here we are, with tulip trees and forsythia starting to bloom while there are still piles of frozen debris left over from Snowcrete Fest 2026. So, not wishing that yet.
There’s also the general counter-happiness initiative going on in the world today, doing its miserymaking mayhem thing, but I don’t think my hoping for someone’s happiness even gets on its radar let alone makes its “Must Point and Laugh and Prove Her Wrong” list. I hope, anyway.
So, where am I, three months in?
Try not to kill any more house plants.
I have one plant that may be dead. It’s one of the two new ones I purchased and moved to a larger pot, which was probably my first mistake. The other new one is thriving, and the old ones still look like they’re in decent shape.
Try growing more outdoor things.
I can’t plant cucumbers or outdoor herbs yet, but I did start two varieties of tomato (Black Krim and Red Cherry) and some California Giant Peppers from seed. I decided to do this old school (plantable potting mix pot + hand watering) versus trying to revive the deep tray hydroponics setup my husband built during the pandemic. We wound up sticking it in storage not long after setting it up because we couldn’t keep mold out of the system.
Try doing more reading.
I set my yearly Goodreads goal to 26 books. I’m nine books in, the first four and a half being Adrian Tchaikovsky’s fantastic Tyrant Philosophers series from the beginning. I’ve started reading during breakfast instead of doomscrolling. I may start doing that during other meals. We’ve always read at the table while eating when we don’t have visitors: it used to be newspapers, magazines and books, but that shifted over time into, you guessed it, doomscrolling after checking in on work email. Do we talk? Yep, we do, and we drop everything if our son wants to join in on a conversation instead of just listen.
Keep writing.
It’s still terrible, but I don’t hate it enough yet to make it someone else’s problem.
Keep learning.
Ugh. It … I don’t know what’s happening in my brain, but it’s become a struggle recently for me to keep my Duolingo streak. Die Deutschstunden sind nicht schwer: I continue to make progress at around 90% accuracy. I think my accuracy score would be higher if the program would stop throwing new words at me that it insists are review ones, but I suspect I’d receive a comment about my accuracy also improving if I would do the AI “video chat” lessons. I haven’t done one since late last year when Lily went off on a hallucination tangent about (as best I could tell) my butchering my cat for a holiday meal after I mentioned that I didn’t have a pet cat.
I do not have a pet cat. When I did have pet cats, I did not butcher any of them, not even a little bit. That would have been stupid. There’s not enough meat on a domestic cat to feed my family. Yes, even a Maine Coon. I do not go hunt non-domestic felines. I have no problem with them eating poachers. Do Not Put Me On A List.
I have made zero forward progress on additional technical education, though I did bite the bullet and migrate back to LINUX. I still have a separate bootable Windows partition in case I need it for strategic Microsoft skills refresher purposes, but I haven’t touched it in weeks. I’m drafting in real plain text again, or Markdown when I feel like it, and I can use AI features when I want to, instead of being forced into a locked room scenario where AI is constantly trying to persuade me that I can offload even more of my tiny scary brain, or maybe just buy more crap.
Don’t overthink fitness so much.
I’m underthinking fitness so much that on the outside it looks like I’m not thinking about it at all. Since my GP of record is booked until 20-freaking-27, and his office partner doesn’t have appointment openings until late this year, I scheduled my annual physical with a different physician in their medical group. She read my chart before she saw me, and cross checked it against the labs she ordered, so I was spared the usual lecture I get from completely new medical professionals. I only got yelled at for not keeping an EpiPen with me at all times. My having developed coping strategies for my clove allergy that have enabled me to survive this long, nope, nada, didn’t want to hear it. So I now have an EpiPen.
I also bought a new headband for working out and a pair of workout sneakers from post-holiday clearance, so I think that counts as thinking about fitness. Chorework still happens, and being dragged down the road by the dog part of my daily active movement also continues.
Keep making things.
I finished a cross stitch sign for the downstairs bathroom by the end of football season. It’s now waiting for the “print second custom frame because the first one broke when it fell off the picture hook thirty minutes after Shai hung it up” stage in my husband’s hobby list. The in-laws got me a flower wreath embroidery kit for the holidays because I mentioned that I was considering getting back into embroidery, and, uhm, I neglected to tell them that I haven’t embroidered anything by hand since I was in high school. I had planned to start with a modern sampler or something like it, but — okay, sure, why not just jump right into the deep end? I’m not going to say that it’s been like getting back on a bike for me. It’s actually gone better than my getting back on a bike would be for anybody, but it’s going to be a very slow project.
Modus Dementi 