Category — Uncategorized

Pre-pandemic, Josh and I plotted out things we would start doing/learning about to build new hobbies to get us through the early months of an empty nest. We gave ourselves three years to find meaningful volunteer work, hobbies that would translate into travel ideas, and projects that would fill the hours normally filled with school events and homework help and hanging out with the twins.

And then the pandemic hit, and pretty much everything we set up before the pandemic is gone.

I mean, not gone-gone. Birding is not gone because birds are still around. And we can go back to that one once we can travel again. But my two volunteer projects are gone—one may return, the other will not and needs to be replaced. Part of me thinks I should get on that. The other part of me feels like maybe I need to accept that I will not be able to buffer myself from my feelings with volunteer work and hobbies.

One of the things we keep looping back to is wine. I know nothing about wine because I do not drink wine. And Josh does not drink wine. But we came up with wine as a hobby while we were in France—looking at grapevines!—because it gives us a lot to learn AND we can build travel into the hobby (visit vineyards around the world), but there are also nearby vineyards AND grapevines are pretty. It’s pretty much perfect, except that we don’t like wine.

It’s not as if I don’t like a type of wine. I don’t like any alcohol. So… that’s probably a problem with this idea.

I’ve looped back to other ideas: what about tea? What about becoming a tea enthusiast and learning all about tea and taking trips to tea farms? Or coffee? What about learning everything there is to know about coffee roasting and visiting coffee roasters and coffeehouses around the world? Both of those sound like a much better fit as a current tea or coffee drinker.

But there’s something about making wine fit that I keep coming back to. As if trying to convince myself that I like wine and will drink wine is more about trying to convince myself that I am okay with this era of our life wrapping up in a couple of years. That if I can swallow wine—something I don’t enjoy and turn it into something I can live with—that I can swallow an empty nest, too.

Nick Cave wrote a beautiful letter to a fan about grieving the loss of his son, Arthur. And it starts with a profound thought:

It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable.

You can also listen to the letter.

I just thought this was such a stunning thought, perfectly capturing why we feel loss so deeply. It’s the inverse of that love.

I am intrigued by this timeblocking method. I tend to have two categories of work: shallow work and deep work. Shallow work is made up of small tasks I can fit around a meeting. Or it doesn’t matter if I’m interrupted by a phone call. Deep work is stuff like big reports or deep dives into data. I want to work for hours on the same thing without interruption.

But this is giving each task you have to do a label: Must is everything that has to get done that day. Should is the stuff that you should do that day but it’s not critical if it gets pushed back a day. Could is the stuff that you could do that day or you could do it another day. Won’t is the stuff you’re not going to do, but you’re tracking it so you don’t forget that you considered it. There’s always a chance you’ll loop back to your won’ts in the future.

I was trying to figure out how this fits with shallow and deep work because there are shallow musts and deep coulds. But it made me start thinking about my week as a whole: could I create Must blocks and Should blocks and Could blocks, and scatter those through the week?

Food for thought.

My new job has a self-care perk—$100 per quarter to spend on something that makes you happy. Anything? Yes, anything that helps you relax and enjoy life outside of work.

It’s use it or lose it, but the problem with the word “anything” is that it makes it hard to narrow down what would bring the most happiness. But the clear winner right now is putting mystery-related content into my eye holes. So I bought myself a subscription to AcornTV.

There is nothing that stopped me from doing this prior to the self care perk. But the fact that someone else treated me to it made me all the more giddy as I flipped through the mystery show list. I have so many Veras to get me through winter. It affected my mood the rest of the day. I kept thinking about curling up in bed at night with everyone, watching UK (and Canadian, Irish, Australians, and New Zealand) mysteries.

And then the ChickieNob and I tried to plug my phone into the television to watch a documentary that night. And it didn’t work. We could see the show on the phone, but it wouldn’t transfer to the television so we both could watch it. We tried numerous tricks and enlisted the Wolvog to help, who finally informed us that the only way we could get this to work is to get a Roku or similar device and log into my new account on this new piece of hardware.

And suddenly my totally awesome self care thing didn’t feel like self care at all. It felt like one more thing I had to deal with after being super excited about it all day.

I wanted it to be easy, but moreover, I just wanted something for myself. Something I didn’t think about anyone else while getting or using. It was just my thing to make me happy. No waiting-for-hardware-so-everyone-else-could-enjoy-it-too necessary.

So I’m starting to watch my mysteries by myself, which feels weird. I don’t know why it feels weird because I read books by myself. But I never watch television by myself. But this is the solution I’m going with until we get hardware and other people can join in because I don’t want to wait to start watching the mysteries. I just want to watch them when I want to watch them.

Now if only they’d get the Great Canadian Baking Show, I’d be set.

1000 internet years ago (which is like 18 years in human years), my greatest internet pain and joy was reading “Bringing Up Ben and Birdy.” The author blogged for Babycenter—remember when websites had in-house blogging columns because blogging was the next! big! thing?

It felt so intimate to read something akin to a person’s diary on the web. And it was so incredibly painful because she was clearly successful in building her family, and I was not. Reading it was like picking at a scab on my heart.

After Babycenter shuttered the column—around the same time I started this blog in 2006, I think—she moved over to a blogspot site that I’ve read ever since. Birdy was a few years older than the twins at that point. Last week, Catherine (the author) wrote about Birdy leaving for college, posting about back when she dropped off Ben.

Picking at the scab on my heart again.

She writes:

He came into our lives two weeks late, but now he’s leaving right on time, and we’re supposed to graciously show him the door. We’ve been running alongside his bike for 18 years and we’re supposed to wave cheerfully as he turns into a pedaling speck in the distance.

Cue tears.