And the Rest...

And now we come to what would normally be the end of year wrap up blog, but I've been wrapping it up for a week. Today I'll look at the rest of the stuff I wanted to do. And give some final tallies on what I did.

One of the things I wanted to work on was maintaining my lists. Doing my daily stuff and checking it off. Brent set up the daily chore lists when he was on Sabbatical in 2024. I knew what I did every day but he didn't, and since he wanted to help me do stuff while he was at home he needed to know the stuff that needed to be done. Thus the lists. I used them for the majority of the year until the end of the year when I got bored with them. But they were really helpful and I kept with them most of the year and even when I stopped opening them every day when I would spot check a day I was still doing all of those things so I am counting that as a win.

Another was having my phone in my hand less. Paying less attention to social media. Add in things I enjoy and take away things that were stressing me out. I was hit and miss with that. As you all know I did drop Facebook and Instagram completely. That was the big one and the hard one. I miss seeing people I am friends with on those sites but from what I've heard I wouldn't be seeing as much of them even if I were still on. I don't post on Bluesky like I did on Facebook. I can go a few days between updates, can you imagine? I read more than I post. I comment on a few posts here and there but since most of my friends either aren't on Bluesky or aren't active on Bluesky most of my commenting is on "celebrity" posts and my best friend's bench has grown quite large because of that.

I still haven't really worked in offline things that I enjoy. Which is so stupid. I love doing some of those things but I just talk myself out of doing them over and over. I'll be adding that into next years list again. But I did add in some things I enjoy on the phone. Word puzzles and a geography puzzle that I am fairly terrible at but have a good time with. I don't do any of the NYT puzzles because fuck those guys but Merriam-Webster has a good collection of word puzzles that I enjoy.

I'm counting the whole less phone, less social media as a mostly positive gain. I did do less of the things that stress me out. I cut back a lot of the news I was consuming. I tend to nope out of most opinion pieces that are designed not to give me a perspective but to make me angry. I have fun with my word puzzles and feel like they are doing my brain some good as well. As I cut back more and more from Bluesky I find that it's a fun game/information tool, but I don't feel as tied to it as I did Facebook and Insta so that's a good thing.

I'm still doing Duolingo. Now, I'll be honest, I'm not kidding myself that it's making me a decent Spanish speaker, but what it is doing is challenging my brain in a different way than any of the other games I play. I did have to turn off some of the "competition" aspects of it but that made it better for what I want it to be.

I also did my On This Day Shit Went Down history reading all year. That was fun. And I did my daily positive devotional. That was a good reminder.

It's been, overall, a good year for hitting most of my benchmarks. The main one being I wanted to protect my wellbeing and that of my family. I would remind myself of that overarching goal every month. Be the best me I can be so I can be the best for Brent and be there for Katie. It was my mantra. Was I always successful? No. But I didn't end up crying in a corner every day and with the shit show our country is, and the turmoil that Intel is going through I think any day I laughed out loud, and more importantly made someone else laugh out loud was a banner day. And as I'm a funny bitch that was a lot of days.

Final numbers:

Books read: 73. I thought I'd hit 74 but that last one was longer than I realized. It actually worked out because I like the idea of my first book of 2026 being Soul Boom Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution much better than the next book on my list; The End of the World as We Know It. I am all about the symbology sometimes. I also hit the mix of fiction and nonfiction I wanted.

Blogs written: 228 with 39 of those being fiction. Plus the 24 fiction pieces to Dana. So yeah, wrote more days than I didn't.

Weight: I actually was wrong yesterday. I didn't end up the year exactly where I started, I was down exactly one pound. Ha! Totally counts as losing some weight! I increased my lifts, I'm stronger than I was at that start of the year plus my ankle is healthy and that's outstanding.

Tomorrow I'll start the year with a sum up of what I set out in these blogs as future areas I want to focus on. It's not padding my numbers, it's making sure I have a record in one convenient place for when I want to spot check progress. Or maybe a little of both.

For now I'm calling 2025. I did what I set out to do. Protect my heart, my head, my safe space for my family, my joy and my sanity. It wasn't easy. I wish that it had been. I wish that I had been totally wrong about what the (at the time) incoming administration was going to do. I wish that it hadn't been a dumpster fire of a year, but it was. And the best that we can do is work to keep the sparks from spreading. It's not going to get better in 2026, I'm afraid, and in some ways it will be worse, but that's a blog for another day. For today I'm grateful we all made it through. I hope you had more days where you smiled than you cried. I hope that the fear didn't paralyze you.

And I hope you know you are loved.

Happy end of 2025, may she leave in peace.