I totally forgot to add the Music Oracle card for February to my last post. This one pretty much jumped out of the deck. Channeling Shakira seems oddly fitting in some ways for the times. Stay in the present. Know your rights. Be compassionate. In the past, she was invited to speak at the World Economic Forum, so she’s got a lot more going on outside of her fame as a pop star.

The world is too insane and scary right now, so I suppose having a kitchen renovation to focus on is fortunate for my mental health. Each step takes me to a better future where I will have a nicer, more functional kitchen. I’m thinking of the day when it’s all there and I can put art up. I began tearing up the flooring this week. I stopped quickly once I figured out what kind of flooring it was. I decided to leave what I can and use cement to even out the floor for health and safety reasons. I’ve never used this, but I recall it was a piece of a long ago reno in a semi I once co-owned. Once that is complete, I’ll be tiling over the cement and the old tile. No matter how much planning goes into a reno, it seems to veer off into a direction I didn’t expect. Life is like that.

A kitchen renovation was not something I wanted to be doing at all, so it’s been hard getting started on it. It’s just such a big job even in a small kitchen. There are so many steps and I just wanted to be finishing the clean up of my home and doing all the fun things I planned for this year instead! That being said, it was time to stop whining and get on with it. The sooner I sucked it up, the sooner I would be getting to do the fun stuff instead. I was able to get the moldy drywall removed from the bottom of my walls on Saturday. There was a lot of mess from all the dust made using a power cutter, but that made the task so much faster. I had a fall after I dumped the destruction remnants. My right hand, foot, and triceps weren’t happy about it. I decided to rest and heal on Sunday.

I have so many crafts and things I want to be doing like drawing, but there isn’t enough time for it all right now. I’m just getting a bit of knitting done during meetings and at game night for the most part. I should really finish the Macrame Fox project because it wouldn’t take much and then it would be on the wall and not lying about unfinished.

That’s part of decluttering, right? Yes, I know they say to just purge unfinished projects, but I only do that when I know I don’t want the thing anymore. And I have other unfinished projects like my fairy cross-stitch that just take a lot of time to complete. Speaking of that one, I’m going to pause on it for now. It takes too much mental bandwidth to focus on it right now.

In family news, I will soon need to go to my hometown for a bit. There’s a lot up in the air, but I have an ill family member and I need to go there to help out for a couple of weeks. Not ideal timing and not ideal circumstances for a trip to my hometown, but it is what it is. I’ve begun packing a bag.

Generally, it’s the time of year where it is hectic at work. I’m not sure how that’s going to go with everything else, but I’ll get through it. It’s another thing to keep my mind off world events, though I do regularly check out what’s going on.

I was raring to go on kickboxing Monday morning, but the app wasn’t working right for me. It saw my subscription, but wouldn’t let me do more than preview a workout instead of actually watching it. I contacted Apple support, who got back to me right away and suggested an update on my iPad. That seemed to correct whatever bug I was getting. Demolition has been a good upper body workout anyway. I’ll bring it with me when I travel to get workouts in when I can.

Choir was a hopeful thing for me this week. I know I should probably forgo this session, but we’ll be performing with the main choir this time and it’s something that helps my mental health a lot, so it’s worth keeping it despite how much else is going on.

Game night was fun on Sunday. We had a guest for the evening, so we paused the Pathfinder campaign for the evening and played Betrayal. It was a strange storyline involving Krampus. I know the story of Krampus, so I had a good idea of what was going on, but others didn’t and were terribly confused about the sack and such. Good times though.

I got no writing or reading done this week due to being exhausted with everything else.

Goals

• Arts and Crafts: Knit Table Runner❎, Fairy Cross-Stitch⏸️, Knit Vest✅, and Macrame Fox❎
• Decluttering and Minimalism: Set up a dishes station.✅
• DIY and Projects: Finish demolition.👌
• Gaming and Videos: Game night. ✅
• General and Miscellaneous (now with 2 Ls): Survive the week. ✅
• Health and Fitness: Walking✅ and kitchen renovation✅.
• Music and Songwriting: Ukulele and choir.