Let’s try this again

Just to be clear about the Christmas comments in my earlier post, which I am having trouble doing, I wasn’t trying to make it all about the loot. I like giving things. I can’t help it. It isn’t about what I get. Mostly it’s about getting together with family and friends.

Every year we all agree not to spend too much, and we don’t. Because of my current circumstances, I was expecting it to be even less this year. It was, but not as much less as I expected. I gave little and I expected little. My family was generous and essentially gave me things that I needed (books are a necessity). I didn’t expect that – well, yeah, I did, but I was hoping that it would be even more toned down than it was.

I felt guilty, and embarrassed.

I can’t afford to give much. I can’t afford to give anything. Like I said, I couldn’t afford to give to charity last year. It hurts to admit all of this and that’s probably why I can’t get the words quite right.

I’m babbling. I guess I still need to let this marinate in my brain a little longer.

The start of a new year

Well, OK, it started almost a week ago, but I’m still getting up to speed. As I said before, I took New Year’s Day off and even made it a long weekend; though I did spend some time on Sunday going through my daily planner cleaning out the old stuff and putting in new pages for the next few months because I did need to get ready to start the year.

That’s when I found a card that showed that an appointment that I thought I had for Monday is actually on the 15^th. This was a good thing because on Friday I got a reminder call for an appointment for Monday that I had thought was on the 15^th. So it all works out. That meant that I only had one appointment on Monday, not two. But I did start out the first full week of the new year with a doctor appointment.

What a surprise.

My wife had one today. Between the two of us, my wife and I already have 11 appointments this month and my wife will need more physical therapy appointments and I need to schedule at least one more doctor appointment for myself. I think we’ll probably end up with 17, not counting non-doctor disability related appointments. We just don’t know when to quit, do we?

I am trying to make a good thing out of this, though. I am aiming to be more organized and I want to start with keeping track of all of this and working other things in with them. One of my problems is that there get to be so many things to get done they start to slip through the cracks. I want to set up a schedule so that I can keep track of things, plan my next steps and generally make orderly progress in the year ahead.

That sounds a lot like a resolution, but it’s more of a goal. I’m not looking to accomplish one singular thing, I am trying to use whatever strategies I can to achieve a goal. So, scheduling and organizing. With a month like I have ahead of me that will be a neat trick and I am not counting on it happening. I’ll be happy if January is just the Monday of this year – that time period when I get things started so that the rest of the year can run more smoothly.

We’ll see how that works out.

Six degrees of fail

Life has been hectic, maybe even more so than usual, in the past month or so. So of course I managed to fail at so many things. When it came to cards I didn’t mail out any. So I sent out e-cards for Christmas. I couldn’t find any suitable e-cards for Chanukah, so I totally failed there. My apologies. The house was decorated in a neo-minimalist style – meaning there are almost no decorations because I failed at getting them put up. There’s more, but…

OK, I don’t mean for this to be a dreary post. I learned something from this. I tried to learn things all year, and this all reinforces some points. Now I need to work on strategies to overcome these problems. So, let’s look on this as a major fail for this holiday season, one which I take full responsibility for, one which I deeply regret, and one which I will try to use to move forward and thus make a good thing out of – or at least something that I can use for good.

Overall, Christmas was good. The party earlier in the month was great. Christmas with the families was also good. I received far more than I expected. I am existing in gravely diminished circumstances, so giving was limited. My wife and I scaled back to the point where Scrooge would almost approve of our behavior. Of course, as in years past, everyone in our families said that spending would be limited. I don’t think that word means what they think it means. Well, yeah, I know they know, but they were being generous in as subtle a way as possible. I was overwhelmed. People were generous. I’m not saying that I got a ton of gifts, but there were books involved, and that is always a good thing.

We didn’t make it to a friend’s annual New Year’s Day event. Lately, by January 1^st we’re both too run down to manage anything. So, fail. I did, however, manage to take the day off. I tend to always worry about what needs to be done and I build up the stress and anxiety trying to do stuff and agonizing over what I can’t do and I do this every day. This year I actually just sat around and relaxed. I consider that a good thing.

I actually took the whole weekend off.

So I am behind and I need to catch up with my blogging, since I know you are all eagerly awaiting each post.

More to come.

Happy New Year!

I want to wish everyone a very Happy New Year!