Read from the Beginning

Oh, The Inconvenience Of Being Protected From Unknown Nocturnal Threats (Repost)

Harry and Dash, Review

July is a free review month! This post would normally be for Patreon subscribers, but is being reposted for free. If you’re not a Patreon subscriber, this is what the Patreon posts are like. If you are a Patreon subscriber and have been wanting to share this post, now you can! (please do).

Would it help you, when our so-called “zoomies” disturb your sleep, to know that they serve a purpose? And I don’t mean the derisive “practice hunting.” We aren’t practicing. We are hunting something. The only issue is, we don’t yet know what.

 I don’t know how to best describe it. There is nothing to see, smell, or touch. Only a feeling. When it passes through you, there is a shiver, but no chill. When it is near, it raises the hackles. I know you have felt it too. I’ve seen you react to it, although you always invent some other explanation. Harry did not understand it at first either. He thought it was just a cold spot or a draft. But it moves. Sometimes with us, sometimes against us. We do our best to keep it away from you, at least until we understand it better.

I know my argument that an unseen entity has taken up residence here is shaky at best, but I hope for two outcomes. One, that you have a satisfactory explanation for our behavior. Two, that we do our best to protect you, whether you appreciate it or not. Hopefully the following evidence as to where encounters most often occur, which you can correlate with your own observation, will strengthen my case.

Harry checks the bathtub before Erica showers

The entity can most often be found in the bathroom, particularly the bathtub. You have noticed that we often zip in and out of the tub just before you turn on the shower and will stand (or sit) guard on the counter while you use the shower. I know you notice this because you always laugh when we do. We are making sure it doesn’t come back, that you get to shower in privacy.

Harry (on shelf) and Dash (standing) have chased the entity to a high corner of the kitchen.

It likes high places, too. It will often be up in the corners of the room, next to the ceiling. Sometimes it stays near the water damage in the living room. Usually we try to chase it there, standing on the shelf by your door, pawing at the wall until we are satisfied that it will not disturb you for the rest of the evening. If we do not chase it up by the paint bubble, it will hover over you all evening, whether you’re reading, crafting, or just watching TV. We are cats. We know this hovering means it is ready to pounce.

It also follows you into the kitchen. You wonder why Harry is always at your feet while you are cooking or washing dishes. He has developed the hunting instinct, too. His favorite place to trap it is in the tiny gap under your kitchen cabinets. When you see him sitting there, staring at it all day, that is what he is doing.

Our most important job, however, is to guard you at night. We don’t know what this thing could do while you sleep. You will notice that one of us is nearly always in bed with you throughout the night. Yes, there are times when we leave you alone, but we always remain close by. I prefer to stay right by your head, just to be sure. Harry stays at your feet, on alert in case it comes too close.

Those nights when we race through the apartment, jumping from dresser to bed to floor, waking you up in the process, those are the nights we can feel it. I know you don’t like to be woken up in the middle of the night to the sound of us chasing whatever it is back to the ceiling bubble or the cabinet under the sink. I know that sometimes it takes too long for you to fall back asleep, leaving you groggy and grumpy the next day. I can only imagine the alternative is much worse.

-Dash

The Scarce and Ephemeral Joy of Novelty (Repost)

Carolyn, Free

There are some things I was never meant to enjoy for very long. First, of course there was my life. Now, there are all these cute things you make and take into the office. I understand why. Work spaces can be so bleak and a little personal touch can go a long way.

I suppose for me, it is my craving for novelty that conflicts with your desire to make pretty things and take them away. You can follow your things to the office. And you can go anywhere you like and see new things that others have created. I have only these three rooms (I don’t count the bathroom).

You have lived here for what, three or four years? And that is already long for this building. I have been stuck in this apartment going on 30 years. Sure, a new tenant brings a little bit of excitement, different furniture and decorations, different lifestyles and personalities to observe. And while I must say, Erica, I like you the best of all, at times I do still chase that quick burst of excitement. I can’t help myself I have lived with you for 10% of my afterlife and in reality if you have done very little to change the decoration of this apartment.

I don’t say this to convince you to redecorate at a rate that would satisfy me. That would not be sustainable on any budget. And I understand the amount of effort you have put into this apartment and environment. I say this only so that you will understand how delighted I was watching you plan and create these delicate little trays with match jars. It was a side of you I had never seen. Measuring out the dimensions of the items you wish to keep there, squirrelling away cardboard cereal boxes as you finished them, carefully measuring out the dimensions of each separate piece and of cardboard and peace of paper, cutting them all out and assembling the final product.

I was there with you the whole time. I delighted in your success and the thought that every time I looked at the tray would be a pleasant reminder of those evenings we shared watching television and me watching you create something.

So you can understand my disappointment when this little tray was soon sequestered away to your office. It is selfish, I know, to want something of yours to fuel my happy memories. But it is difficult when new good memories are so few and far between. I am not saying that you should have done anything different. I just hope that the next time you make something pretty, it sticks around for a while.

-Carolyn

A Set of Journals

Self-Care Strategies that Don’t Work for Me (Repost)

Erica, Review

July is a free review month! This post would normally be for Patreon subscribers, but is being reposted for free. If you’re not a Patreon subscriber, this is what the Patreon posts are like. If you are a Patreon subscriber and have been wanting to share this post, now you can! (please do).

Self-care and self-improvement have always been tricky topics for me. As someone who has struggled with both anxiety and depression since childhood, I feel like I could always be taking better care of myself. And as a member of that special cohort of high-achieving children who become average to less-than-average achieving adults, I feel like I could always just be doing better. This toxic combination of nature and nurture let me to spend much of my early 20s searching in vain for a way to live my life that would make me both happy and productive.

Suffice it to say, many of these strategies and methods simply did not work for me. And every time I tried implementing one of these methods and failed, I felt the doom and gloom set in. It took me too long to learn that not everything is for everybody, and just because something worked for someone else does not mean that it would work for me.

It can be really hard to read about how a certain organizational method or habit-forming strategy worked out wonderfully for someone else while it is simultaneously failing you. It’s also difficult when the methods described require amounts of time or other resources you just don’t have. And yet another layer of pressure is added when you’re not just reading about self-improvement from a book you can stop reading at any time, but you have unsolicited advice coming from everyone in your life. I want to detail some of the self-help and self-improvement strategies that did not work for me, so that if anyone else out there find some selves in a similar situation they know they are not alone.

“Just do” or “Just don’t do” [Insert Good or Bad Thing Here]: My contention with pronouncements like these goes all the way back to when people, including my parents, would tell me as a depressed 10-year-old to “just be happy.” Now, as an adult who does not easily establish or keep routines, I simply ignore any piece of advice that begins with those words. The key to happiness may very well be exercising every single day without fail or never looking at my phone at work again. But I know that I can’t “just do” anything. I need instruction on how to start a routine and, when I inevitably break it, how to restart a routine without shaming myself out of trying all together. Included in this category are things like “just let it go,” “just don’t take it personally,” “just stop looking at distracting websites,” etc.

Many Workplace Self-Care Initiatives I want to be clear, I’m not talking about EAPs here. Those can be a great resource. I’m talking about the “do this three minute desk yoga video and don’t say we don’t look out for you!” kind of thing. Taking care of yourself should not come with any outside expectations. You are the most qualified to evaluate your own needs and establish your own goals for yourself, whether your goal is to be more active, better rested, something else. This is not to say you cannot take advantage of an employer sponsored program if it aligns with your personal goals, just throw out any messaging about how it will help your productivity. Remember you are doing this for you, not them. Don’t do anything that would put more of a burden on you than your employer already has.

Self-Help Books I tried reading books like Gretchen Rubin’s Better than Before, which breaks people down into four basic personality types and provides tips and tricks for each of these for forming healthy habits. She begins the book with the caveat that those suffering from a variety of mental illnesses or mental health issues would likely not be able to follow her strategies. I soldiered on anyway, and found that she had the least amount of helpful advice for my personality type, often following her advice for the other three types by saying “well this probably won’t work for you.” If things change to later in the book I don’t know I stopped reading.

Cal Newport’s Deep Work is another book I gave up on about halfway through. I started it hoping that it would help me focus at work, but the his advice does not work for someone who’s job is almost entirely distractions.

I think it’s great that these people have figured out what works for them. And I’m not writing off the above books. They might work for you, they just didn’t work for me. So, if you’re also in some kind of slump, whether it’s depression, a dead-end job, or anything else, take care of yourself. Don’t expect one meditation or one candle-lit bath to solve everything. And don’t give into the sunk cost fallacy. If you’re trying something that’s supposed to make you feel better, and it’s just making you miserable, stop. Try something else. There are so many ways to get the same result, and you need to find the one that works for you. Don’t waste valuable time on the ones that don’t.

-Erica

A picture of some wildflowers

Self-Care Strategies that Do Work for Me (Repost)

Erica, Review

July is a free review month! This post would normally be for Patreon subscribers, but is being reposted for free. If you’re not a Patreon subscriber, this is what the Patreon posts are like. If you are a Patreon subscriber and have been wanting to share this post, now you can! (please do).

In an effort to balance out my rant about self-care tactics that don’t work for me, I thought I would share some that do. While I will be sharing specific things that I do, I don’t want to present this as a list of things that work for me and should also work for you. I intend to focus more on how I settled on these methods, how they have helped me, and how I handle my own expectations for them.

1) Meditation: I will admit, my journey with mindfulness meditation began through a workplace wellness program. At first, I saw it as a great way to take an extra little three-minute break during the day. That led to many more three minute breaks, and eventually to me downloading a mindfulness app, but not really establishing any sort of routine. I had difficulty making time to meditate on the weekends, mostly because I did not want to be alone with my thoughts. After a long break during the pandemic, I downloaded a different app and started my journey over again. Most days I meditated very much in earnest, although some days I just put the timer on while I brushed my teeth to keep my streak. Eventually I noticed that I felt better on days when I meditated, and every once in a while I noticed myself dismissing troublesome thoughts.

But the results were not immediate. I was 200 days into my second meditation journey before I was able to put my phone in the drawer at work for even one day, and it was another hundred days before I was able to do so with any sort of consistency. For me, meditation hit that sweet spot of short term and long term benefits. Every day, whether I felt It was having an effect on the rest of my life or not I got some peace a few moments of peace and quiet.

2) Exercise: I’m not here to proselytize the benefits of exercise, which may not be accessible to everyone, or extol the benefits of a specific exercise routine. Everyone’s body is unique and the right exercise for you is a personal matter, so I wont to get into specifics. I want to use exercise as an example of something that takes much more time out of the day, and something that I have had an on-again-off-again relationship with for pretty much my entire life. My early dabbling for the exercise were largely tied to my teenage body image issues. After college, armed with a more thorough knowledge of how bodies work and a different set of expectations, I began to exercise again. This time my motivation was much healthier. I knew the more I moved, the better I felt, especially in contrast to a highly sedentary job.

Over the past few years I have tried, for varying amounts of time: yoga videos, which were the quickest and easiest; swimming, which was the most time-consuming, but also when I can say I was physically at my strongest; cycling during the beginning of quarantine when I was furloughed and itching to get outside, and now I do low-impact aerobics routines, which are much easier on my joints, but at least get my heart rate up.

In between each of these, there were long periods where I got little or no exercise. Sometimes I was just too busy, and sometimes my previous form of exercise no longer fit with my schedule. Every time I found something new I would have to start again from the beginning. I still struggle with having to backtrack so that I don’t over exert myself after I take a week off for whatever reason. My current routine works for me now and that’s great but I’ve learned enough from the past not to be disappointed when it doesn’t work forever and I have to find something new.

3) Setting Boundaries: This may seem like a departure from the previous methods in that it is not visibly advertised. After all, it would be difficult to sell you a boundary-setting app and no workplace wants to be on the receiving end of such boundaries. Learning to set healthy boundaries took a lot of therapy, which I know not everyone has access to, and a lot of lived experience. One simple boundary I set was not going out on weeknights. I decided it was more important for me to get enough rest before work the next day. None of my friendships have suffered. There are other, more personal boundaries that have been more difficult to set and I won’t get into details here. I had to go through the difficult task of parsing out what was reasonable to protect myself and what would put an undue burden on someone else. At the root of it all, though, I had to come to the realization that I was worthy of respect. And that is a conclusion I hope everyone is able to come to on their self-care journey.

 4) Journaling: My other on-again-off-again relationship. If you were to flip through the journals I have accumulated throughout my life, which I hope only Carolyn ever has or will, you would probably be very concerned for me. I tend to journal when I need it most, often in a time of crisis. I’ve tried at various times to create an “every single day” journaling habit to no avail. Journaling is where I exercise my self-imposed principle that nothing is self-care if it really stresses me out more than it helps. And often if I set a standard of journaling every single day, finding time to journal is more stressful than the stress it relieves. But I know that if I ever need to process something out on paper, the blank page is there for me.

5) Scheduling Me Time: I don’t do this terribly often, maybe once every couple of months or so, but sometimes if my calendar is looking either to empty or too full, I like to schedule out a little time for myself. Whether it’s taking a bath, watching a movie, or sometimes even something I just never do like cleaning my baseboards, it feels good to officially allow myself the time.

-Erica

Pillows on a recently made bed

A Smattering of Past Projects (Since I Have Nothing New to Share)

Erica, Free

In the absence of new projects to share, I figured I would share some old ones. These will be brief descriptions, rather than step-by-step reflections because honestly I just want a list of all the things that I’ve done all in one place. Hopefully the reminder that I used to do interesting things will motivate me to start something new. So here is a non-exhaustive list of the crafting and DIY projects I’ve completed in the past couple of years.

My Birdcages: I love my house plants. I had them even before I got my cats. And I was shocked that both my cats have an insatiable appetite for foliage. I figured birdcages would be the perfect solution, keeping my plants safe from sharp teeth and claws, but still allowing sunlight to reach them. I purchased two birdcages from Facebook Marketplace. One came with a wooden stand, which I lugged all the way to my basement to sand down and repaint a green that fits in my living room. Because my apartment, especially my living room, is a bit of a cave, I needed grow lights. I tried a couple set-ups before settling on 60-watt grow light bulbs in utility clamp lights. The set-up is not as cute as I originally imagined but still presentable enough to be in the living room.

My Small Dresser: I thrifted a low, white, three-drawer dresser for my apartment my senior year of college. It suited its purpose, but the paint job wasn’t great, and after painting my birdcage stand I figured I might as well paint my dresser. I still had leftover green paint, although not enough for the whole dresser, so I purchased a complementary dark blue color as well as new knobs for the drawers. This was another project that need to be carried all the way down to the basement before being sanded down and painted in multiple stages. I thought about alternating colors every change in profile that would be too busy. I settled on painting the center of the drawers as well as a green, rectangular outline along the top and then painted the rest blue. The rectangle on top is not exactly straight into the blue is not not as dark as I first imagine, but it certainly fits my decor better than a plain white for the painted dresser.

My Utility Shelves: I sometimes surprise myself when I remember that before I had my large set of shelves, I kept my TV on a small end table and I don’t even know where I kept my crafting supplies. When the end table proved inadequate, I decided to get some larger shelves. I liked the look of the black and wood IKEA shelves utility shelves, but I wanted to make them a little more formal for the living room, and also a little more exciting. I borrowed a staple gun from a coworker and purchased 3 or 4 yards of upholstery fabric from IKEA. I spent the night watching Grace and Frankie and stapling the fabric to the shelves. I love them, even though they are a pain to vacuum.

My Slipcovers: This project was born more out of necessity. My cats kept puking on my chairs. I figured it was easier to wash a slipcover than entire chair, but the slipcover patterns at IKEA leave something to be desired. I purchased more upholstery fabric and worked in fits and starts to create slip covers for my living room and bedroom chairs. The finished project product is sloppy and beginning to fall apart, but as my first ever sewing project I am very proud of them.

My Crocheted Blankets: I was really into knitting and crocheting in high school, although I never really advanced past scarves. After bringing all of my yarn to college with me, I started to make granny squares with the scraps from my various high school projects. I worked on them intermittently throughout college and then once I graduated decided I needed to finish the blanket. I took a long time and did require some further yarn purchases, but I am the proud owner of a homemade granny square blanket that fits well over my queen-size bed. With the leftover scraps from there, because there are always more scraps, I also completed a ripple blanket, which is wonky and subscribes to no particular color scheme but it is cozy.

Countless Embroidery Projects: Countless is somewhat of a lie. I could count them for you, but I don’t feel like it. Embroidery is by far my favorite creative outlet and there is more embroidery than anything else. Before I inflicted this curtain project on myself, I worked mostly on smaller projects like decorative hoops, bookmarks, and occasionally pillowcases. Looking back on those projects, I think it might be a good time to take a break from my curtains and maybe start something a little more inspiring.

After going through this list of projects I’ve completed in the past few years I think a couple of them merit a longer reflection. Maybe that will inspire me to start a different project.

(If I do a further reflection of a project, there will be pictures in that post. I was too lazy to get pictures this time.)

-Erica

This isn't a picture of the garden, it's just a picture that I have.

Past Project Reflection: Worm Bin

Erica, Free

Not all of my past projects have met my minimal standards for success. Last year, during those beginning days of the pandemic when I was not even leaving my apartment, I decided to start a worm bin. I normally take my compost to a super-secret location, but I was trying to limit my trips out of the apartment. I thought this would be the perfect time to start composting in my own apartment.

I was inspired by my aunt who keeps a worm bin in her basement. The supplies and instructions were quite simple. I ordered some 5-gallon buckets and a drill from Home Depot and purchased some red wigglers from a bait shop. I won’t go through the particulars of constructing the worm bin because there are plenty of helpful tutorials all over the Internet. The whole process was quite simple and took under 30 minutes.

Keeping the worm bin operational was a different story. As a newbie to composting, I was unaware of the sheer volume of browns I would need to balance out all of the green waste I was creating. I did not have easy access to freshly raked leaves as an apartment dweller, and newspapers are becoming more and more difficult to come by. I also did not take into account that my worm population would need some time to reproduce to accommodate the amount of vegetable waste I produced. My bin quickly turned anaerobic and filled my apartment with a foul smell. I was able to briefly correct this by filling it with household cardboard and grocery store circulars and turning it often to get some oxygen into the parts that had become an anaerobic slime.

Everything seems to be going okay until it came time to sift out the finished compost. I had to drag my bin out to the roof of the parking garage, use my poor excuse for a homemade sifter, and pick composted bits of eggshell and onion skin out of the dirt that I hoped to use for my house plants. Once I had a sizable amount of finished compost I just covered something even worse. Despite my best efforts to get all of the worms out, my compost was full of bugs. I appreciate those little guys helping me break down my discarded vegetable matter but I did not want them in all of my house plants. I thought leaving the dirt outside in the sun to entice some of the bugs to leave, but really it just enticed one of my neighbors to use it as an ash tray.

I thought maybe I could continue to use the worm bin and gift my compost to friends who had outside gardens. I did have at least one taker who took about 3 gallons of dirt from me. But then my bin went anaerobic again and I decided it just wasn’t worth it. By then we knew it was no longer a Covid risk to be outside away from other people, so I donated my worms to my super-secret compost pile and started taking my compost there again. Maybe one day when I have my own basement, I will start another one. Or when I have a yard I will start my own compost pile. But for now I am just glad I have a way to compost at all.

-Erica