Ten years ago today, I was inspired to start writing this blog as I prepared to change my life forever. I was packing up all of my belongings and getting ready to move from my home state of California to Washington – a place I had only visited twice in my life on vacation. Looking back, I’m a little surprised that my then-timid self was actually brave enough to make such a drastic move, but I think I knew something had to change. I was working a job I hated and my life felt stalled. And so, I took a huge leap of faith and left behind everything and everyone I knew to start over.
At first, it was hard. I desperately missed my family and friends back in California, and I was sort of in shock trying to adjust to the dreary and rainy Seattle weather. That year, summer came particularly late and I remember driving to work one day in early July, wearing jeans and a sweater, wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into and feeling convinced that I’d never be truly warm again. But, things quickly improved – I began making friends, and I started being offered opportunities at work that never would have been possible for me had I stayed in California. I began to see that the decision to move had been a good one, even if it took some getting used to.
Even though so much has happened, it feels like the last ten years have flown by. Very little of my life is the same, but that’s okay because I’m in such a better place now. Of course life isn’t perfect but it feels pretty close, and I am grateful for all of the people that have come into my life and made it better, for all the experiences I’ve had, for all that I’ve learned. I have no idea what the next ten years will hold and honestly it would be nice if time would slow down just a bit, but that’s not usually the way it goes.
Thank you to everyone who has supported me and read my little blog and left comments over the years, it means so much to me. And to my friends I have met in the blogging universe, I love you and I’m so very grateful we have each other!
And as the world is currently very weird and a little anxiety-inducing, I will close this post by encouraging you to go to this link and watch the quarantined couple who recreated a horseback ride because it is hilarious and we all need a laugh right about now.
 
 

Lately it seems like the only thing on any of our minds is COVID-19, the pandemic that has been rapidly spreading around the world. The first case of it identified in the United States happened to be in the same county I live in, and the majority of deaths in Washington state were in a facility not too far from the office where I work.
The company Bill and I work for announced that it would require any employees who could do so to work from home for the rest of the month starting on March 5th. At the time, I was simply proud to work for a place that cared so much about its employees that it would take such an extreme precaution. Now, although I’m still very proud of my company, I understand that the precaution of keeping us home wasn’t extreme at all, and was a foreshadowing of things to come. Today the work from home policy was extended through the month of April, and I don’t know that I even believe we’ll be going back to the office in May.
All of the schools in Washington are closed for six weeks. Restaurants and bars are now closed too, with the exception of those that are able to convert to takeout-only. It makes me feel a little better to see the state taking things so seriously, but it also makes my heart hurt for people whose jobs can’t be done remotely and who are now suffering financially because of this crisis. It makes me very thankful for my own job and that I’m able to do my work here at home without worrying about how I’m going to pay my bills. Not everyone is so fortunate and I think at this point I have absolutely nothing to complain about.
Bill and I have been getting into the new routine of working at home full-time. Although social gatherings are strongly discouraged, going outside is still okay and we’ve had some nice sunny weather here in Edmonds in the last couple of weeks. We’ve been taking advantage of it and getting outside to take long walks every evening. Our gym is closed indefinitely, so instead we’re taking advantage of streaming workouts that we can do in our living room and making sure we work out before we log on to work for the day. We’re trying to stick to our normal weekday meal routine, although I will admit that this is where I’ve struggled a bit because it’s just so easy to grab a snack when I’m home all day!
A couple of weeks ago people were hoarding bottled water and toilet paper; now they’re hoarding food. I usually love our weekly trip to the grocery store but now it makes me frustrated and anxious. I can’t plan any meals beforehand because I have to see what the store actually has before I can decide what to make. I’m hoping that the initial rush to stock up will be over soon and things will be more readily available, but at this point I just don’t know what’s going to happen.
Last week was our third wedding anniversary, and we still wanted to celebrate while also following the strong recommendations to practice social distancing. We ultimately decided to take a drive over to the Olympic Peninsula and visit Ruby Beach, the place where we got engaged in 2015. It was a cold, clear day, and we were able to enjoy a road trip together. I think it turned out to be one of the nicest days we’ve spent together in awhile, and we’re hoping to take another day drive somewhere else next weekend. It helps to get out of the house while safely staying quarantined in our car.
Things seem to change daily so it’s hard to predict what will happen next, but we’re trying to make the best of things. Until all of this quiets down, I’ll be hanging out at home, enjoying my stash of pizza rolls, diligently washing my hands, and avoiding looking at the balance of my 401(k).

I am very happy to report that it appears Seattle’s 2019 Snowmaggedon is nearing its end. The snow has started to melt. By Wednesday, Bill and I were able to finally venture out and go to our offices to work instead of working from home, and I don’t think I’ve ever relished working in a cubicle quite so much as I did that day. I also took time to make my hair and outfit look nice, since I’d been living in my pajamas and forgetting to actually brush my hair most mornings since the snow began.
While we were housebound, one of the things we tackled was a thorough cleaning of our abode so that staying inside all the time would be more pleasant. In doing so, we used up a lot of our household cleaners, making a note along the way of each thing we would need to buy when we could again venture out. After our first day back in the office, we had enough daylight left to stop at Fred Meyer to restock.
Bill has a strategy for buying consumable products like toiletries and cleaning supplies: he buys multiple of each item, then typically buys more again when he opens the last new bottle/jar/tube of said thing. This way, he never finds himself in a position where he is totally out of something he needs. Maybe lots of people do this, I don’t know, but the idea of it was fairly foreign to me before I lived with him. It turns out that stocking up on things is one of my favorite adult things to do, which I think is likely because I’ve been so poor in my life that I couldn’t even afford to buy everything I need, much less to be able to buy multiples of any items so that I would have more for later. Now, being able to buy multiple sticks of deodorant at one time feels like the height of luxury, and I revel in it.
A few weeks ago comedian Bill Maher got flack for calling out people who refer to their grown-up activities as “adulting”, and for still liking the things from our childhoods like comic books and Lucky Charms (now, kids, I like Bill Maher even though I don’t always agree with everything he says, and I suppose he doesn’t do things like invent Eggos with chocolate shavings and powdered sugar on them when he has been snowed in at his house for over a week, which is something that I may have possibly done since the beginning of Snowmaggedon, so let’s not be too hard on him). The thing is, I agree with him on this but then again I don’t. I do adult things like pay my bills on time, and eat vegetables instead of Pop-Tarts for dinner, and hold down a steady job. I have a 401K and an IRA and more than the required $5 in my savings account. I can afford to buy more than one bottle of carpet cleaner at a time. So, I suppose I reasonably have my shit together.
The thing is though, that I don’t really feel like an adult, not a real one. Or, at least I don’t feel the way that I thought I would when I became an adult. When I was a kid, adults seemed so put-together and mature and confident and even though I’m in my thirties now I still feel like a kid playing house half the time. Maybe my parents’ generation wasn’t actually better at being grown-ups than mine is and maybe it’s all a big facade, but I somehow thought that when I got to this age I would have a different outlook on my own level of maturity. The truth is that all of the adulting things I do are because I have recognized that they contribute to my own comfort: I do laundry because I like having clean clothes (and clean sheets, there is not much in life that’s more wonderful than crawling into a bed that’s been freshly made up with sheets still warm from the dryer), I work because I like having money, and I buy things in bulk because the money I earn at my job allows me to and because I hate running out of shampoo and having to dig through the drawers and cabinets in my bathroom in hopes of finding a small hotel sample to hold me over until I can get to the store. I contribute to my retirement accounts because I know I want to retire before I’m a hundred years old and recognize that I need to be saving now for that.
I think we all have to find the things that make us feel fulfilled, and do them. Maybe for Bill Maher that’s putting on snappy suits and smoking lots of weed (not necessarily in that order). That’s the kind of adult he wants to be. I, on the other hand, want to be the kind of adult who can get shit done but who also still wears Vans as my go-to shoes and binge-listens to a podcast about the hit 90’s cartoon Gargoyles on my commute (it’s called Grotesques and it’s amazing).
But seriously, buy three bottles of Windex the next time you’re low on it. Trust me, it feels sooooo good.
 

It’s been almost two months since I went back to school, and today I submitted my final paper for a class. If the paper scores highly enough, I’ll have completed my third class since going back to school.
When I first enrolled, I set myself a goal of earning my Bachelor’s degree by December 2018. It seemed like a manageable goal when I was first starting out, but after completing three classes in two months I really want to finish by next June. It’s a very aggressive timeline for completion, but my student mentor agrees that it’s obtainable if I keep working hard.
In a lot of ways, the course work is a lot easier than I was anticipating. I love that all my classes are directly geared toward my course of study, and each one builds on the concepts learned in the previous one. So far, I’ve taken Intro to HR, Employment Law, and Workforce Planning. I can easily apply the concepts I’m learning in school to things that are done where I work. There’s a LOT of reading, but I can do it while sipping my coffee in the morning before work or lounging in the living room on a Sunday. And while the final exams require at least a score of 80% to pass, I haven’t really struggled with any of them. The first time I took one, it did throw me a bit – the exam consists of situational questions rather than memorizing definitions of terms or anything like that, which was not a format I was expecting – but now that I know what to expect, I get through them pretty easily.
I was VERY nervous about submitting my first paper, because I had read about other students’ experiences and it sounded as if it was going to be a somewhat nightmarish process where I had to rewrite my paper dozens of times before earning a passing grade. My first two classes only required a final exam, so I was rather intimidated when my Workforce Planning test had a final exam and two assigned papers to complete. To my surprise and relief, I got the paper back with a passing grade on the first try!
I’m going to give myself a little break from school after this class, but I’ll start back up again with my next one the weekend after Labor Day. I’m especially excited to take the next one, as it’s a Project Management class and I’ll be able to directly use the new information I’ll be learning at work. I recently realized that I had a gap in my resume when it comes to Project Management, so taking an entire class on the subject came at the perfect time!
Overall, I really like the course structure at WGU and school is fitting into my life a lot more seamlessly than I was expecting. It’s really true that with this program, you’ll get out of it what you put into it. I’m really happy that I made the choice to go back and even happier that I decided to study at WGU.
 

Ahhh, Saturday morning. I love weekends, especially when they start off with me sleeping in (or, me getting up at 5am, feeding the cats, and immediately going back to bed – those spoiled animals do NOT wait for their meals).
This past Saturday, I woke up around nine feeling incredibly refreshed. It’s been awhile since I’ve gotten to sleep in like that and it was amazing. I got up and set about making a pitcher of iced tea for the weekend, thinking that it would be nice to have tea for the warm days. It’s been a minute since I’ve pulled out my iced tea maker, and I had to fish around in the pantry to find the tea bags. When I opened the cupboard, I found that there was water on the shelf. Not a lot, just enough for me to say, “Huh, there’s water in here” and look down at the floor to see if there was water anywhere else.
There was no water, but there were ants on the floor.
ANTS.
I have not had ants in my kitchen since moving to the Northwest and had (falsely, I now know) believed that ants don’t attempt to take up residence in kitchens around here. In California, they’d make their way in every summer, usually dining on cat food before drowning in the water bowl. I would wake up to a little trail of them going across my living room more often than I care to think about, and I got very good at being careful not to leave anything out that would attract the little bastards. Here in Edmonds, I never worried about it, and to be fair there wasn’t much around that ants would like besides the cats’ breakfast.
My zen totally shattered, I set about removing the ants from the kitchen by way of spraying everything down with Windex and then cleaning up the carnage. Sorry, creatures, we have enough freeloading animals in this house already – we have no room for more. I will not go out of my way to kill bugs and things when I’m outside, but they come in my kitchen and they’re toast.
Once I finished de-bugging my kitchen, I went about my day, forgetting about the water in the cabinet that started the whole debacle. Well, forgetting for a couple more hours anyway, until I heard something dripping in the kitchen. I went to investigate, and found water dripping out of the wall and down the pantry. Although it undeniably created an ambiance, water definitely should NOT have been cascading down my pantry door.
As much as I yearn to be a homeowner again, I cannot deny the luxury of calling property management as a renter when things in my home are broken. We are incredibly spoiled where we live, as our manager and maintenance are beyond kind and responsive whenever we need anything. As the developing situation in my kitchen was one of the more immediate problems we’ve had, maintenance was out within the hour to investigate.
The maintenance fellow was very nice and jumped right in to attempt to locate the source of the leak. He went upstairs to the apartment above ours and turned on the bathtub faucet, but couldn’t duplicate the problem (we did take a video of the dripping water when we noticed it, which came in very handy since by the time maintenance arrived, the leak had stopped for a time). Apologetically, he turned to me and said, “I’m going to have to cut open your wall.” Since I was not going to be paying for the creation or subsequent patching of said hole, I was not too concerned, and set to leaning on my counter and watching this unfold.

Once we had a good-sized hole in the wall, it was apparent that our pantry cabinet was totally waterlogged, and that there must have been a previous water leak in the pipe above the cabinet because there was putty that has now fallen away. The maintenance man was hopeful that the water we were experiencing in our kitchen had been trapped previously by the putty and that there was no current leak, but I was skeptical. After giving us instructions on what to do should water come gushing out of the newly-exposed pipes, our new friend left with the promise to follow up with our property manager.
Of course, on Sunday while we were sitting in the living room the pipe began leaking again, confirming our suspicions that the water from the day before was not from an old problem but from an existing one. We stuck a towel underneath to catch the water, knowing that nothing much more could be done until a plumber could be called on Monday. This morning I was assured that the problem would be fixed in a day or two, but I’m bracing myself to wait this one out for awhile until all repair efforts have been coordinated. In the meantime, I will be amusing myself by telling anyone unfortunate enough to come in contact with me that my kitchen is just a “little hole in the wall place” and laughing at my own joke.

I haven’t been doing much writing lately, mostly because over the last few weeks I have been in a funk of epic proportions. I suspect my mood was mostly due to the fact that the weather in the Northwest has pretty much sucked since November, and I am so sick of cold weather. I readily accept that winters are tough here: the days are very short, and very gray, and very gloomy. The weather is cold and damp. But usually, by mid-March we will have some hints of spring and a promise of warmer weather. As day after day passed without even breaking sixty degrees, I began to despair of ever enjoying being outside again.
Thankfully, the first week of May brought with it some warmer, sunnier days (and even a thunderstorm!), and it has started to feel like Seattle may have summer after all. My spirits rose with the temperatures, and I started feeling better. I also started feeling like I needed to rediscover things that keep me feeling optimistic and happy, so that I can hold onto feeling better even if the weather doesn’t hold.
One of the things I love the most about my office is that it’s located directly next to a trail that runs beside a little creek. I love walking that trail. There are frequently ducks and geese by the creek, and occasionally I’ll see a nutria or a little turtle who likes to sun himself on a tree branch that drops down into the water. I hate being cold and had all but abandoned my walking ritual, but last week I decided I needed to re-commit to it. Not only does fresh air make me feel cheery, but the breaks from my desk are a necessity.
Speaking of my desk, I got new photos printed to display at work. Looking at photos of my husband, our fur kids, and our families reminds me of why I work hard when I’m feeling stressed at the office. I hadn’t put out any new photos in quite awhile (a framed one of Bill and I was actually the first photo anyone took of us together!), so I swapped out some of the older ones with new ones from our wedding.

I also added some newer photos of the cats, including a really cute one of our newest baby, Ernie.

I also decided I needed to resume writing in my Gratitude Journal. What better way to brush off a lousy mood than to sit and think of things that make life good? My journal has evolved a bit since I started writing it; currently, I write down three things I’m grateful for that day and three wins. The wins can be anything from merely getting out of bed to a major accomplishment like completing a stressful project. The point is to remind myself daily that I have a lot in my life to be thankful for and that I am accomplishing things, even if those things are small.
Got any other tips for shaking free of the blahs? Feel free to leave them in the comments!