Goals Check-in: July

Here's my end-of-the-month wrap-up regarding my 2013 goals:


Self-Care
I did not wear my work hoodie to work at all in July. It meant choosing different outfits with more variety.

When the local manicure place once again grated on my nerves (and cut my cuticle down far enough to really hurt!), I told them I wouldn't be coming back and took my business around the corner.

I went to the first birthday party of a young friend, and ended up surrounded by families with young children (10 kids total). They were fun and relaxed and it was good social food for me.


Minimize
1 garbage bag of trash (aside from our usual household output)

Eating down the freezer was a focus this month. An inventory of the freezer contents and ongoing menu planning sessions helped me keep it organized.


Spend Time and Money Wisely
Had less stressful weekends with both housework and downtime, mixed in with minimal social commitments outside the home. 

Notable transactions:

• $5 for an enormous yellow squash and a basket of plums from an urban farmstand
• $72 for our marriage license and $14 for our certified copy (less than at SF City Hall)
• $8 for a beautiful second-hand dress I couldn't let my wife pass up
• stocked up on 88-cent boxed cake and brownie mixes (normally $3.25)

Keep Learning
I have been reading (unfortunately not really in a position to practice hands-on yet) about urban homesteading techniques like how to make laundry soap and salves, building a drip irrigation system for the garden, worm composting, and keeping chickens. I think it is unlikely that I will be able to bring myself to kill a pet for food, or eat an animal that I have raised and lived with, so if I give in to my wife's desire for a chicken coop we'll probably have to explore other options than slaughtering our own.

Sex and gender can be plotted on a continuum. So can understanding, acceptance, and allyship. This article breaks down some of the common tropes and stages of internalized transphobia. Also, there a lot of different ways/things to "test" when trying to conclusively establish sex/gender... and they don't always line up. Because it's complicated.

I learned about a material called FORMETAL... and stopped calling it "fashion chickenwire".

Selected things I Googled: chard with hard ch, date telescope invented, dragonfruit without scales, enormous yellow squash, gilroy county, gilbert gottfried real voice, hercules we are worms, how to make gravy in a slow cooker, imaginary-geraldo, jonah hill sea otter, king james jacobean, language of flowers camellia, mildred loving about prop 8, manly stories waffles, percent chance of dying of cancer, plural of fiance, royal baby news, sawing off florida, toddler accidentally buys 1962 Austin Healey car, "the oatmeal" pig bacon, vaughn walker ruling, yeoldegangster


Try New Things
I went bowling. For work. And it was not awful. (I bowled a 77 in the one game we scored, but I also threw a handful of strikes as practice.)

Got my first shellac manicure (it was a gift certificate); it stood up to bowling and dish-washing and was going strong a week later. At a week and a half, I couldn't resist peeling it off around the edges. Although I saw a few whitish patches on a couple of my nails, a swipe of coconut oil seemed to settle that. No acetone this time; no filing; no lasting damage.

In the office, I'm working on a new project that has the potential to use my skills I honed in my MLIS program. It involves scaling a tiny customer support system (think one human and an email address) into a much larger, streamlined, efficient, functional, and transferable system that will support many more customers and more staff. I'll be finding pain points for usability improvement, and identifying customer concerns that can be deflected into help articles, FAQs, and user-to-user guidance (rather than being answered by a paid staff member). We'll be using the existing tools from a larger support system to automate the flows and measure the categories where most help is needed.

Crossed off 3 things on my 101 List

• 2. Get LEGALLY married in California
• 61. Spend an afternoon reading at the park
• 93. Explore my family tree [Marking this done because I've gone back as far as I feel necessary. A few branches could be embellished.]

Track Accomplishments
January
February
March

April
May
June