A few weeks ago now, I published a post called “Send Love” and I gave myself the challenge of getting in touch with every person on my friends & family list that I made to keep track of one of my personal goals for 2017: to visit more with friends & family each month. I said I would get back to you, my readers, in a week with the results…
Well, it has now been over 3 weeks, and so I figure I should make good on that promise and let you know how it has gone…
I read this article last week: The Only One
It was a link in an email from Cait Flanders…
It immediately made me want to do something. I flipped to my email and sent a note to a friend that I’d been meaning to get in touch with for months… She’d had a pretty bad car accident, and I’d hung out with her husband since the accident, but not her… But then I remembered that I hadn’t actually been in touch with her husband in a while either, so I quickly typed up another email to him… It felt good… and bad… I felt guilt that I hadn’t done it sooner. It took reading an article by some random person on the internet I don’t know to encourage me to actually spend the 2 minutes it takes to write an email… I had spent longer reading the article!
The worst part of the whole thing, was that when I got a response from her husband, it wasn’t all that positive… And it made me feel even more guilt for not reaching out sooner.
I’ve had a goal all year in an effort to do better at keeping in touch with people, but I’ve expressed recently that I didn’t really think I was doing a good enough job of actually putting an effort in to it… But that didn’t actually get me off my butt to change anything… And I need to… So… for the next week, I’m going to challenge myself to go through the list of people on the page in my bullet journal, and contact each and every one of them. Even if it is just a quick text or email. I’m going to do that. Got it? And, yes… I will be back in a week with the results…
In the meantime, I highly recommend that you give that article a quick read and reach out to anyone that you have been meaning to get in touch with, but just haven’t found the time. It’ll be worth it, I promise!
Photo by Freddy Castro on Unsplash
A couple weeks ago, I posted my personal goals for 2017. The first of these goals was to visit or spend time with family and friends at least 2 times a month. The intention of this goal is to be a better friend and a more active participant in these relationships. It does sort of go back to the post that was the inspiration to my first goal like this for 2016. I have less and less time to spend with these people who are so important to me, so I want to make sure to take advantage of any time I have. And I know that my friends make me a better person, so if I can be a good friend and add value to their life, they will add value to mine.
Anyway, so far in January I have definitely been successful with this goal, but I wanted a way to keep track of what I’ve been doing and also to see the holes where I need to improve. The solution came, as it tends to do these days, with my bullet journal. Continue reading
I started writing this post almost three weeks ago now, when I had finally arrived home after about 3 weeks away for various reasons. Amazingly, the day I started writing this post, Cait Flanders published a post that was so fitting to what I was trying to convey, I wondered if somehow we had some psychic connection (side note – I don’t really think that we do, it was just a strange coincidence).
Anyway, after reading that post, I was pretty much ready to abandon this post because Cait is such a great writer, there was no way that I could convey my thoughts in a way that was any better. I’m also not sure this post will fit in to any of the existing categories on my blog, but since I haven’t really been home lately, I don’t have any of the typical things to post about… And on my 3 hour drive alone the other night, I got to thinking… That can be dangerous when you are alone sometimes, but after an amazing fun weekend with 3 of my good girl friends, it was all very positive.
I think I’ve posted now that I am an engineer. Being a female engineer is still not super common, and during my time at university, there were only a few girls in my year. Of those girls, for some reason, 4 of us seemed to stick together after graduation. It’s not to say that we weren’t friends with other girls in the program, but for whatever reason, now that we have been out of school for 10 years, the 4 of us still manage to stay in touch and be good friends. Continue reading
In January, I posted my goals for 2016. Included in those goals were two goals relating to my personal relationships with family and friends:
Goal #7: Plan 1 visit with family (outside the usual special occasions) per month.
Goal #8: Make an effort to reconnect, visit or stay connected with at least 1 longtime friend per month.
This all stemmed from an article I read over the Christmas holidays and how I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t missing out on limited time with my family and friends.
So, now that we are mid-way through the year, I figured I should probably take a look at these goals and see how I am doing…
My fiance and I have been living together for a couple years now, we now own a house together and we are getting married in August, but we haven’t really combined finances much yet.
This fall we started our first joint savings account to start saving for our wedding. And with the introduction of our first monthly budget, and with my fiance going back to school in the near future, I think it is time that we figure out how best to share our money. I’ve read quite a few blog posts about the subject. Some couples share everything in one account, some have separate “fun” accounts that are each given a certain amount each month to pay for personal expenses and fun stuff, or can be saved for bigger personal purchases, and some just have a shared account that shared bills come out of, and each person just contributes a certain amount to this account. I’m not exactly sure what will be best for us because our situation is a bit complicated.
All-Round Better Me 