So today is July 1. This will post on July 2, of course, because I’m posting stuff at 12:30. I don’t actually know why I decided on 12:30. It might be because I didn’t want to take the risk of accidentally launching at noon. I wanted to post overnight in my time zone, so I guess I decided, “okay let’s make it half past midnight.” But that was you know six years ago? Seven years ago? Dear God, have I been working on this blog that long?
Sigh so it’s July 1 and I decided what kind of figure out a way to get all of my goals in during this month. My goals, such as they are, are let’s see: writing, reading, exercise, learning, and savings I think. I think that’s it the maybe more. But I’m going to just… Chug forward on those five.
My reading goals are easy. I read before bed every night, if not more often. I have a t-shirt that has Belle on it saying, “My Weekend is All Booked” and yes, yes it is.
My writing goals kind, kind of obvious, I’m going to write. I have, of course, this blog, and I have a couple of novels in mind. I also need to get back to Pep Talks for Writers (Germane Amazon Link!). (A) They’re pep talks. For writers. and (B) my reactions and things about them gives me something to write about.
My first novel is my flipped Beauty and the Beast. Beauty goes looking for the Beast, rather than being kidnapped by him. I’m afraid it’ll read like a teen romance, and I don’t know if I want them to end up together.
I also have another couple novels that I’ve been kind of toying with. One actually started as an alternate history version of what might’ve happened if Zheng He had, actually, traversed the Pacific Ocean and landed in North America and set up a colony. This was my female dominated culture story, because in this version, the European colonists just don’t know that they’re outclassed by the Chinese people who were already here and they end up in a multigenerational war. Eventually, the girls have to be raised to have careers and the boys are trained for the army. However, this would end up working so that I, a white girl so pale I disappear when I stand against a blank wall, would be telling brown people’s stories.
I think I’m going to maybe make it a fantasy novel, but I don’t really have room for magic in it. I may have to put some kind of subconscious magic thing in there to make it fantasy. I may be onto something here. I wonder if healing magic would work. The boys coming home from the war will definitely have different levels of PTSD and I could invent psychotherapy using magic. Not “and your PTSD is gone. Poof!” But more “next week we’ll work on healing the trauma of killing a person for the first time.” I don’t think that’d interfere with the plot I have in mind.
Let’s see, next is learning goals. This is mostly foreign language learning, I need to work on my Spanish this month because June and July were Spanish, my Italian for my book, and my Chinese because I’m getting somewhere with it, actually. I spoke Chinese to one of my patients. She was having trouble understanding the problems she was having with her bank card and so I ended up telling her to call her bank. I don’t know if I was perfect, but she understood. And now when she comes in, I say hello to her in Chinese. I also have The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan in in Spanish both as an audiobook and a hard copy book, so I may do something with that during the course of July.
Exercise goals. I play Pikmin Bloom and the game has a weekly challenge. I go back and forth between the too-easy goal of 20,000 steps in a week, and the too-hard goal of 100,000 steps in a week. I’m also doing the Samsung Health Global Challenge which is 200,000 steps in a month. My record for finishing early is on the 14th of the month, which is around 14,000 steps per day (brief interlude where I count up by basically counting to 200 by 14s using birth control pill packs to double-check my math (most packs are 28 pills, so two is 56, 3 is 84, etc.)). I also would like to go start going back to the gym. I hesitate to go back there when the manager’s there because I don’t want to attract any attention by coming back. So I guess I’ll time it to be there when he isn’t for awhile.
Savings goals. I’ve lost a bit of money in the last year. My house had a major repair, and I chipped in half of it plus I had to take the whole mortgage onto myself for the rest of 2022 to pay my dad back for his half which of course means that I should’ve just cashed out and paid the whole repair off and we should just kept going with the mortgage payments. We were both stressed out and not thinking clearly. So now I need to recover from this. I have an account with Acorns, which I’m saving up around $100 per month by rounding up my purchases. I’m also putting aside $10 per week, so once I can buy a share of stock with that, I will do so. I’m going to get a bit of a raise soon. According to my boss’s boss, the raises will be every six months “until a certain point,” and then every year “until a certain point,” but what that raise will be or what that point is? Who knows. I think that maybe I’ll bump up my stock purchase plan a bit and increase my savings that way. Depending on what the raise is, I maybe will increase it by a couple of hours per week (so if it’s $0.50, I’ll increase it by a dollar or two) and I won’t even notice the change. Also, I’m still paying myself to study my foreign languages, so that works out to a couple of bucks a day. Unfortunately that’s not going into the deficit from the house repair, that’s just the tuition and stuff for getting the modern languages degree I should’ve gotten in the first place. But at least as long as I have those, I’ll never run completely out of money.
In future months, I might add cleaning goals, photography goals, or music goals, or other goals. I need to get back to practicing the piano. For July, though, I’m just going to hope that doing a bit a day will chip away at these four. And once I do a bit, it’ll follow to do a bit more. One blog post will lead to two. One page in a book will lead to another. One Duolingo lesson will lead to more. And so on.