Getting Back Onto the Road

We're getting more and more settled into our apartment, but a short trip out to the old house to move my father-in-law's toolboxes to my dad's garage made me remember some of the good times there. Good times picking berries and watching my husband turn them into freezer jam, pushing my son in his swing, and on and on.

We left our house because the furnace broke at the end of last winter and we couldn't afford to buy a new one. We had so many car repairs that needed done during the summer and fall that we couldn't save dollar one to put toward heating. We talked about refinancing the place and getting extra money to buy the furnace, but we didn't had very little equity. We had talked about selling our house but knew we probably wouldn't get enough to cover the mortgage, so we'd been sticking it out to see what would happen. What happened was that the value of our home fell again and we owed more on it than it was worth. That's when my husband agreed that even though we'd put roots down here and we had planted many trees there, we needed to say goodbye.

We moved into an apartment to make sure our son would have a warm place to live this winter and to save money to try our dream again in a few years.

So this is where we start saving for the future. Here is one of our biggest problems though. Even at the house we said no to satellite, internet, and kept our heat at 66 degrees and we have continued that but we still feel we don't have anything left to cut. We're breaking even now, but how do we save money without depriving ourselves of current happiness?

I do not believe in delaying happiness until a future day when everything is perfect because I know the future might never come. But I would like to save some money just in case I am here longer than my job. Especially because I would like to retire while I can still hike to mountain tops.

So my first goal of 2012 is to find out how much money I need to save in order to retire from this life and embark on one where I am a farmer, reader, and writer instead of a library assistant.

Being Me

I've struggled my entire adult life with being myself. Why? I'm starting to boil all of that down. I do not believe what I want to do is important. I believe I should do what ANYONE else thinks I should do. I am deathly afraid of confrontation.

I'm strong when I'm alone. I cave when I'm in the company of others. I want to be strong in the face of anything that gets thrown at me. Instead, I let go of control and go along with the wishes of others so I don't have to risk getting yelled at by them. No one has yelled at me in years, but I'm still afraid I will be yelled at. Emotionally, I am a child. When it comes to dealing with money, I am a child. When does the fear stop and the living begin? How about today?

Today I am grateful for my life, not afraid of it. Today I will do something that I want to do, after all, it is what we do everyday that is more important than what we do once in a while.

Wordless Wednesday

Time for Gratitude

I read the book The Happiness Project by Gretchin Rubin at the end of last winter. I made plans to start my own happiness project and then made it impossible to get to the monthly lists that I spent so much time composing. Part of the lists were in a notebook buried in the piles of the computer room and the other parts were on the computer which was having troubles so I didn't dare turn it on. I decided there were more important things to worry about so I just went back to trudging through my life, most of the time on autopilot.

So when I read the July 30th post, Follow a Threshold Ritual, I thought, I can do that. This will not only make me appreciate all the wonderful things in my life more, but it'll increase the mindfulness I've been cultivating the past couple of years. Now I just need to make a list of trigger events/times, and actually keep the list out where I can read it, until I have a habit formed.

When I write, I will remember how fortunate I am to have gone to a good school with excellent English teachers.

Monday, Now with 10 Percent More Happiness

My morning started out pretty crappy. The bug took forever to go to sleep last night, then woke up crying twice, then it started raining so I had to close all the windows (which is terrible right now because our central air is broken and it was 92 yesterday.) All this before I woke up later than I planned and skipped practicing yoga and got to work just on time even though I'd left early.

I off kilter. I didn't want to be at work and I was on the verge of having one of those, "poor me, why do I have to work away from home" days, then at lunch I watched this on Wil Wheaton's blog:

• The Art of Being Furiously Happy

I am amazed. It makes me want to be silly like I was as a child. When I was kid I used to play music outside near our busy road and dance to it. Hoping to entertain the drivers, hoping Michael Jackson would drive by and I could tell him how big a fan I was, or maybe hoping someone would actually give me money so I could buy toys. I don't know, that was 30 years ago. Now I'm scared to say anything to anyone because they might think I'm being silly. I really need to work on letting my silly guard down. I have added the The Bloggess to my iGoogle page so there's my first baby step.

This is a blog I read regularly: The Happiness Project. I bought the book before discovering the blog. I even made my own happiness project, but I got off track nearly as soon as I started it. This afternoon I find myself wanting to draft a new happiness project and get to work on it ASAP. Maybe one month will just be finding ways to be silly.

Of course music is always a way to be silly and happy too. Crank up some crazy ABBA tune like "Dancing Queen" and go for it.