July is happening, and I’m still here, still at home, doing the at homey things. I am now the proud owner of a full sized carpet shampooer. I would call that exciting for the same reason I used to find new snow tires exciting, except…
…so we’ll probably be replacing all of the carpet upstairs unless we can convince the dog to stop being afraid of summer.
On the outside of the house front, I’ve had some screening and first-round interviews (these are picking up since we’re getting into Federal IT contract hiring season), but none of them were for roles that I wanted to pursue, so I yeeted myself from consideration before the process went any further. I am ridiculously fortunate right now, except for still having the same complications that led to my stepping off the tech merry-go-round in late 2024.
I receive daily reminders that ridiculous fortune can flip to unfortunate ridiculousness without any warning. They’re not quite automated, but unfortunately, they seem to be getting to that point without any technical intervention. Friends who I have helped find jobs also throw posting notices at me, along with reminders that I need to be regularly applying to jobs even if the ones that come up in search are ones I wouldn’t take unless my family would otherwise be forced to camp out behind a dumpster that we couldn’t afford to set on fire.
Besides that, there’s:
Try not to kill any more house plants.
Two of the three new plants I’ve bought this year are now dead: both after I moved their thriving but root bound selves to larger pots. The new snake plant’s fine, as is the weird little succulent I rescued from a clearance rack last year, and the jade plant that I purchased from the IKEA in Conshohocken, PA, back in 2006.
Try growing more outdoor things.
Let us not speak of that continuing disaster, because the jury hasn’t yet decided that all of it is doomed, and there’s still the zucchini to consider.
Try doing more reading.
I’ve read 23 books so far, so I don’t think I’m in danger of not achieving my 26 book goal for the year. Knock on wood, and all that.
Keep writing.
My current project is still terrible, but I don’t hate it enough yet. I’m also still finding things that need to be fixed, such as, oh, yanking about 4,500 words from it last week because I discovered I had an incorrect assumption that a MC’s job would allow him to earn enough money to live on his own six years ago. Whoops, nope, time to yeet and adjust.
Keep learning.
I’ve fought myself back to keeping my Duolingo streak, alternating German lessons with Math. It’s still a struggle to keep my eyes open during my cybersecurity refresher: my scores on the section assessments have been solid enough to suggest that I do already have this material down, but I don’t trust those evaluations enough to want to skip the rest of the refresher and go take a certification exam. I’ll get through it, get the cert, then go off to study something technical-adjacent that hopefully I won’t try to avoid working on by doing something else educational, such as building game mods or a home ML/AI lab. I started building that lab with my husband last week, after he convinced me that having an on premise sandbox could encourage me to get back to playing with machine learning and make me feel more comfortable with adopting some home automation.
Don’t overthink fitness so much.
I’m still underthinking fitness. I’ve taken on (as if I really had a choice) doing my son’s PT exercises along with him, so I’m getting a little bit more movement in during the day. I also gave up resisting buying a new Apple Watch and during a moment of weakness while I was setting it up, I agreed to let it track my sleep. The dark circles under my eyes that I thought were permanent are now gone, so surely my sleep is fantastic…
…it isn’t?
So how bad WAS it? Do I even want to know?
Something tells me no, I truly don’t. My watch’s been telling me that I still wake up at 3:00 am every single night, even though I haven’t had a reason to stumble downstairs, log into work and check a system’s operational health for years.
Keep making things.
The cross stitch sign for the downstairs bathroom is now framed and on the wall, and the flower wreath is still proving that it’s a much slower project. I should finish it this month, unless I have a complete breakdown at my inability to do decent French Knots, oh, how I hate them, yes, I do. While I struggle with relearning embroidery, I keep seeing ads for gorgeous sweaters that are supposedly easy to knit. I have never knitted anything in my life, and the one time I tried making a crochet sweater, it turned out to be a hybrid crop-top tunic with sleeves that could have doubled as scarves, or convenient weapons with the addition of a few chunky rocks. I thought about fixing the thing until a house move justified my getting rid of the evidence.
We aren’t moving soon enough to cover up any knitting disaster. That is, unless we are. Our kitchen faucet doesn’t need replacing, though! I kid you not, we have a history of moving within six months after we’ve replaced any. I still have fond memories of the Kohler beauty that I got as a Valentine’s Day present, and regret not taking it with us when we moved from that house.
