Category — Uncategorized

There was a Wall Street Journal article making its way around the internet about a group of friends who started something they called “admin night.” Once a month, they got together and committed to taking things off their to-do list. Filling out forms, balancing their checking account, or dealing with the insurance company. The tasks everyone puts off because they’re unpleasant to do. She writes:

Right away we marveled at how productive we were. Having friends hammer away beside you, faces lighted by the same bureaucratic glow, somehow makes dreaded tasks manageable. Little projects postponed for years—closing a checking account, updating a will—become approachable when you’ve got a squad. We even start sharing wisdom: how to roll over a 401(k), how to get that refund. (Guessing a CEO’s email address, we’ve found, can be surprisingly effective.)

It’s a brilliant idea, and it clearly works for this group, but I think it would only work if everyone committed to the night — whether or not they have any tasks to do. It’s something I’ve noticed a lot on group calls. There are the people who show up every time (or almost every time), and the ones who only show up when they need the call. Life happens, of course, but group calls or group gatherings don’t work unless people prioritize them.

What do you think?

The local school system put out a video for “67 Day” (of course, they did), with children doing the hand gesture and then jumping into activities centered on the number 67.

And there was one question I loved:

Would you rather read 67 pages of your favourite book or 67 pages of a new book?

Meaning, you don’t have to commit to the whole story, but you can have 67 pages you know will be enjoyable (favourite book), or bet on 67 pages that could become your new favourite book because they are mind-blowingly good. Or maybe terrible?

I would opt for 67 pages of my favourite book because I’m not big into gambling. I’d rather know what I’m going to get. What about you?

This sounds like the ideal retreat (for me). Manor house. Check. Everyone is on board with silent reading time. Check. Talking about books. Check. Lack of pressure to do anything more than read? Check. Check. Check.

Actually, it sounds like they took walks, listened to stories, and played games. So minimal pressure to do anything else, but those other things all sound like things I’d like to do, too.

I would want to do it with people I know, but I could also be happy doing it with a group of strangers in an awesome space. There’s a part of me that would feel a bit guilty — I traveled so far to do something I could do by myself at home? But I think it would make me happy.

Would you want to go?

I liked this article about things deemed “old people hobbies” mostly because it is a strange phenomenon that some (most?) people don’t focus on connection until later in life, even though there are plenty of older people out there writing articles outlining how to have a meaningful life.

So… if you want to know, you can technically know.

Birdwatching has been “having a moment” for many moments. If you put that phrase into Google, it spits out over 3 million results. Though interestingly, if you look it up on Google Trends, birdwatching had many many more searches in 2004 than now. Just saying.

But they’re going by users on Merlin or people who purchase birdwatching guides. So, yes, there are likely more birdwatchers, which is a good thing.

Anyway, this is the point that I liked, and it feels fitting for the season:

The reason birdwatching is stereotyped as “for old people” is because our culture is so dysfunctional it takes most people 50 years or more to figure out what makes for a meaningful life. The answer is genuine connection to other people and nature.

Watching birds becomes a little like blogging itself. It’s about standing still, watching, noticing, commenting, and letting the thought — or bird — fly away while the memories remain.

Josh and I have been doing some major adulting, organizing our estate, which is just a fancy way of checking that we have everything set up properly and people know what to do after we’re gone. We’ve been filling out the worksheets and making a to-do list (and sometimes even taking tasks off the to-do list!). I like feeling organized.

But one thing I realized in the middle of all this was that I had savings bonds I needed to cash. We had been about to cash them many years ago to put towards a cycle, but when we stopped treatments, I put them in a drawer, and over the years, they had grown in emotional size to be the equivalent of my old sharps box.

But they were also under my maiden name, so I knew it would be an enormous headache down the road for someone else to cash them. And maybe completely impossible. So I went down to the bank, and my favourite teller carefully cashed them out and deposited the total into my account.

I wrote down the number in my notebook because I didn’t want it to go toward something like my mortgage or college tuition. It was supposed to be something big: adding to our family. And if we weren’t doing that, I wanted it to fulfill a childhood wish.

I think we’re going to go hiking in Cornwall. It feels like a good use of the money. Though a little bittersweet.