Image – The Next 38

Post-consumerism

February 19, 2025Posted in travelTagged America, economy, life plansLeave a comment

Back in 2020, we sold our house and moved to Washington State temporarily. We got rid of a lot of things in that move, including all of our debt. We bought a van and traveled around the west coast. We went to Europe for long adventures including walking the Camino de Santiago. And doing all that had a big impact on how I see life. It impacted my thoughts on work and relationships. But it also impacted how I view the buying of stuff.

I have always been a thrifty person, wanting to find deals and spend less to get whatever it is I want. This is the result of growing up poor. Another result of growing up poor was that I often thought I’d be happier once I got XYZ thing. The house, the car, the income, the thing that would finally make everything better. I’m not saying I was miserable, in fact I did have a happier adult life than my childhood. But when we got rid of the things and the debt, I realized it wasn’t the stuff that made my life happier. It was the people.

In this current version of my life, I still have stuff. We had things in storage while we travelled and we have them all back. But I don’t feel as attached to a lot of it. I’ve been buying my clothes from thrift stores. Getting things free so times from Buy nothing groups. But I’m still find myself wanting. Specifically wanting to have a house with a backyard. Wanting to grow things. Make things. A lot less of wanting to buy things (although, I’ll admit making things takes some buying).

I don’t shop on Amazon anymore and I have been to Target in months. And now with everything happening around us, I find myself less and less enamored with things and more critical of the idea of being a consumer. I find myself annoyed by advertising and irritated about being seen as someone to buy things. And things aren’t even good quality often. They break quickly and then you need more things. There have been times our government has told us to “go shopping” for the economy. But is there something different we could be doing for each other? What does an economy look like that doesn’t rely on us shopping all of the time?

Anyways, I spend my time often dreaming about a house with rain catchment and solar and a garden with gray water use and chickens and all kinds of ways to reuse resources. I think Will views it as an impossible feat to have a home like that. But to me it seems more and more like a necessity.

Ich wandere im Frühling

February 15, 2025Posted in travelTagged german, hiking, WashingtonLeave a comment

I’ve been practicing my Duolingo German and I am currently on a 23 day streak. I know most of the words in this level because of previous German lessons or because they are easy to figure out. Elefant is elephant. But one of the new words introduced this week was wandere. That’s how you say hike in German. Ich wandere. Du wanderst. I hike. You hike.

And I love that in German hiking sounds less like a specific action with boots and trails and gear and a map. Instead it looks like wander because of course, wander is probably originally a German word. And wander is such a better way to describe spending 2 hours on a trail in the mountains. Honestly, I’d like my hiking to be more wandering than hiking. Less going from point a to b and more, hey what’s over there? When I go hiking I tend to be much more of a stop and look at trees or plants kind of person. It is good exercise but exercise seems less the point. The point is to be outside but outside where there are no sounds of traffic or the smell of exhaust. To be outside with the dirt and the trees and the birds and squirrels.

Here in Western Washington, we’re leaving the freezing temps and headed back to rainy days. Which means that days of wandering on trails looking at mushrooms and ferns are not too far off. Moss covered trees and wet days ahead. Spring is a little over a month away. And then…. Ich wandere.

New Year, New Me?? Probably not

February 14, 2025Posted in travelTagged art, creativity, writingLeave a comment

Ok, it’s not the new year. It’s February. mid-February specifically. And once again I’m trying to work on making some practices a regular habit. I’m not really trying to do a new year, new me thing complete with 10 goals to accomplish. Instead I’m continuing to add in more reading, writing, and being creative. I was actually very successful at making reading a habit the last few years. I ended 2024 with 45 books read, I think. Forty something for sure. This year I made a goal of 40, just to leave some leeway. And I am already on book 5 for the year.

Writing hasn’t exactly been a strong habit in quite a few years. But last fall I joined a group doing the Artist’s Way-which is kind of atypical for me. A group activity? No, I tend to spend more time doing things alone. The Artist’s Way, written by Julia Cameron, encourages practices to get back to creativity. In the book The Artist’s Way, the author encourages writing morning pages. It’s supposed to be first thing in the morning and about 3 pages in a stream of consciousness fashion. I started doing that, and with the exception of days I work, I have been pretty good at sticking to it. But doesn’t usually end up being 3 pages and often is a review of what I need to get done for the day. But it is a pretty regular writing habit.

Being creative is another aspect of the Artist’s Way. Every week, you’re supposed to make an artist’s date for yourself and do something creative. Maybe you go to a museum or paint or sew or take a dance class. That’s been an activity I really needed more of in my every day. Sometimes I make a little craft like a holiday wreath. I often make it an actual date between my husband and I where we go to an art centered thing.

2025 has begun in a kind of depressing whirlwind of events. It’s been a lot. And pretty overwhelming. I think it’s just the right time to reach for the tools that help me which just so happen to be things I mentioned here.

So here’s to blogging occasionally, reading a lot and trying to enjoy my inner creativity.

3500 words

July 10, 2024Posted in travelTagged writingLeave a comment

I’ve been plugging away at a story idea that I don’t think is very good. I don’t think it’s very bad, but I decided I wasn’t going to wait for the very good to try and write. I decided I would pick an idea and just get to it.

I’ve read quite a number of books this year. 36 to be exact. And in the last few years I’ve been reading a lot more. And some of the books I read were really good. And some were mediocre. And there were even some that were not good. And I am not saying I want to write bad, but I don’t feel like I need to wait until I write like Edith Wharton or Brandon Taylor before I begin. With that logic I will never begin.

So I stead I’ve started. For a long time I felt like I needed to write so much about my own life. But this time I’m really going back to what I enjoyed when I was young. In high school and middle school I wrote a lot of fantasy. So I’ve abandoned my memoir writing, my contemporary fiction ideas, and embraced writing about fantasy again. In some ways, it can be easier to leave the ideas of the real world behind and choose to focus on the magical and the fantastical.

Camp NaNoWriMo has begun

July 3, 2024Posted in travelTagged writingLeave a comment

It’s day 3 actually. And I have been writing everyday so far. I’m up to 2380 words which is almost an average of 800 words a day. I’m hoping to keep things going. My biggest challenge will be the two trips I have planned for July. Writing while traveling is hard because you have all of these things you want to do and people you want to see, so it’s easy to skip out on writing. But also, I can’t take my laptop 💻 with me on account of a small break in the screen.

In the bottom right corner my laptop screen has slightly come apart. I can’t figure out how to fix it. It happened one day when I opened it. It had been sticking when I opened it and this time the screen started to come apart. The screen still works though. But now I am afraid to close and open it again. So I have it open on my desk until I figure out a repair plan.

I feel like the whole disposable, obsolete tech in a few years pattern with computers is a problem. How many computers or laptops have you had? How often do you buy one? I would rather get it repaired than have to buy a new one. But I also need to find someone to do it.

Anywho, I’m headed to Canada for a bit and I guess I will have to make plan to write things on my 📱 phone until I get back. If I keep this up, I’ll have close to 25,000 words.

Losing people

June 30, 2024June 30, 2024Posted in death, familyLeave a comment

In the past several years, I’ve had to say goodbye to people. In my previous life as a nurse, I had the experience of sitting with people at the end of their life. I always found it a humbling and loving and honorable experience. It’s sad, definitely, for the people who remain, and it was especially sad in the case of the pediatric patients. But it was also amazing to see how people loved each other. How their lives touched each other so much. How much they mean to each other. And it felt very privileged to be the other person in the room full of love.

I wish I could say in my own life, saying goodbye went the same way. But unlike in nursing, we who remain also remain with all of our feelings, experiences and paperwork. In the last eight years, both of my in-laws have passed away. And this experiences came with a lot of other stuff. They were each different situations. But the reality, of course, was that dealing with death included dealing with all of the stuff of their lives. More specifically, how they had lived, how they had treated others, how we had treated them-you know the unresolved stuff of relationships. Much harder.

I wish I could say I learned something here, but unresolved stuff in relationships are an issue for me even when death isn’t involved.

Well perhaps I did learn something. I learned unresolved stuff makes everything around death harder. I also learned you don’t control how things get resolved with that person. Some people leave you to resolve things alone. We’ve all experienced that in non-death ways. The friend that leaves your life with no explanation. The notion of closure or some final understanding doesn’t always happen in a tidy way. Sometimes you’re left wondering why they did what they did-and when death is involved-there is no hope of final conversation. Instead you have to resolve your own feelings independently. Perhaps you make up stories about what they thought or felt. Then perhaps you react to these imaginary stories. But the reality is you don’t know why they did what they did or maybe you don’t know what they felt. What can you do but accept the messy unanswered questions that you have?

I’ve also been thinking about the other end of relationships-the ones where they don’t die. The friendship ends that aren’t precipitated by a big upset, but rather a slow fade. In these ends, I often feel sad about what we once had while being faced with the reality that it doesn’t exist anymore. I often think perhaps we could still be friends if x happened. Or I wonder how they feel about the end and the distance.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m not usually good at addressing problems in relationships head on. And perhaps that is the lesson I’ve been learning. I want to talk about my feelings with the people in my life before things are so distant that there is no repair. I’ve been practicing with my family in the hopes that we will be better at listening to each other. That we won’t wait until it’s too late to say what we need to say.

Hello…again

June 27, 2024Posted in travelLeave a comment

It almost July, which is camp NaNoWriMo, so I am thinking of taking up a month of writing. I want to get back in the habit and it seems like a good excuse. So I’ve set myself a goal of 30,000 words-just under 1000 a day. Next I just need to think about what I want to write about.

I used to write a lot. And I still write a little here and there. But it’s more like jotting down words in my notes app on my phone just before I fall asleep and then forgetting them. But recently, I’ve been wanting to write. I wrote a short story in Thailand. And then I met someone in my pottery class who likes to write. And then I heard my creative writing professor from college died.

Also, I’m up in Washington for a while, with a lot less travel in the near future. So it’s a good time to sit down and write when I am not working…

Well, let’s see what July brings.

And the Next Adventure is…

September 20, 2023Posted in teaching, travelTagged english, Teaching, travelLeave a comment

Thailand. 5 months in Thailand to be exact. It’s not a big secret to people who know me that I want to have an opportunity to live outside of the U.S. I’ve been wanting this. But it hasn’t ever seemed the right time. Lately, it has been the right time for travel. We’ve gone on quite a few adventures the last 2 years, including the Camino de Santiago, traveling around the west in a van, and 5 weeks hopping around Europe. But traveling doesn’t come without a cost. In the search for opportunities to travel without using up all of our savings, I began looking for net zero or net positive travel opportunities. Things like work exchange (working for accommodations and food) and credit card hacking to get flights. In fact, our European adventure was done with miles and points paying for all of the flights and hotels. We spent 5 weeks in 7 countries for about $6k. It’s still a good amount of money.

Moving completely to another country long-term just isn’t in the plan right now. The thing about living outside of the U.S., it’s often hard to do without a completely remote job, a huge amount of savings, retirement, or a job in another country. My work is remote but requires me to be on U.S. soil (medical records/privacy & stuff). My husband really enjoys his work as a nurse and isn’t looking to change careers. We’ve got 3 kids in the U.S. So financially our options for living abroad seem to be more of a retirement idea or looking for short-term travel opportunities. Additionally, my husband found himself a little worn from all of the travel. He wanted a home base, and a regular schedule (even if it wasn’t full-time). But he encouraged me to look for some travel ideas that I could do with little to no cost.

With a little research, I found a teaching program to teach English in Spain for one semester. It was 10 weeks with food and accommodations provided. No visa was needed because there was no salary. More of work exchange. But it was part-time, so I figured I could get spending money teaching online. I applied and was accepted, but the spots were all full and I wasn’t needed. They offered me their one-semester teaching in Thailand program. This was a little different because it did require a visa and it was 5 months. But I would also get paid.

But can I leave for 5 months? Ugh. I was on the fence. But my husband was very encouraging and said it’s a good time to go. You’ll be glad you tried it. We were already planning for me to be gone for that 10 weeks. So, after deliberating, I decided to go for it. He’s planning a 2 week trip to see me in Jan. But yeah, I am about to be all on my own for 5 whole months in Southeast Asia.

6th Month of Creativity

April 18, 2023Posted in creative, creativityLeave a comment

March was kind of a bust in terms of planned creativity. I was thinking of doing audio recordings and I even sketched out a plan but I wasn’t very inspired. But it wasn’t a complete bust. I went to the thrift store and found 4 skeins of yarn. I had one left over blue one, so I decided to make a small blanket.

I also made 2 videos. And I started working on a little embroidery.

For April, I am taking a watercolor painting class. It’s a little different because I am not working on it at home, only in class once a week. And as usual, the first class was hard. The water color class is a little different from embroidery and crochet in that I am not making a functional item to use. I really enjoyed making things that were items that were also functional. The paintings 🎨 are just art for arts sake.

As I reach the end of the 6 months I think I’ve learned to be more accepting of the difficulty that comes in the beginning of a new skill. I have also enjoyed making a variety of things and have thought about my creativity differently. This was a good experience overall through these six months of cold weather and uncertainty about the future.

Creative Inspiration: how making things makes me think of making more things

March 8, 2023Posted in creativityTagged 6 months of art, artLeave a comment

A little late but I finished my crochet blanket.

I was late in finishing because I ran out of yarn and was waiting for a delivery. But now-it’s done. This month, I’ve found myself thinking up ideas for embroidery projects while doing the crochet work. I have a few ideas for projects that I think would be fun to make.

This month is audio storytelling. I’m a bit behind because of the delay in finishing the blanket. I have some ideas sketched out, but I think I need to start with research. A few months ago, I thought I would make a multi episode series on a topic but I have realized over the last few months finishing is consistently a challenge. So I think I will do research and work on a particular story arc or story I want to tell. And from there I will begin with episode 1. It might be the only episode.

One thing that has been interesting is the moving from one creative project to the next, while still thinking about the last one. Or the one before. Hopefully I will come back to these other ideas. The experience has definitely generated creative thinking.