My latest reinvention.

It’s been over a year since we started empty nesting. I have spent the better part of that year resisting the urge to ‘blow it all up’ – I’m not really even sure what I mean by that to be honest. It just seemed that if menopause was going to kick into high gear as our one and only child went off to college, shifting the dynamic of everything at home, in the midst of a global pandemic that
has reshuffled numerous norms in the world, why not change as many things as I possibly could?

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Jumping off a cliff and landing on my feet.

I quit my job last month without a plan. In the time since, there have been some changes, with a number of realizations and some self discovery along the way.

Last March, I had four, no five jobs, three email accounts, too many social media accounts to keep track of, worked at least several hours every day, seven days a week. I was almost never not working and I definitely wasn’t making enough money to justify all the work.

And then Covid shut everything down.

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Hot Feet in February.

I woke up several nights in a row recently with inspiration to write something brilliant and swore I didn’t need to write it down, but come the next morning, all I could remember was the theme of “hot feet” and a vague gist of the direction that theme needed to go. The more I fleshed it out, the more I realized it was just shaping up to be similar to this time last year’s middle aged woman’s rant about becoming invisible and was quite obviously related to what had actually woken me up – a case of hot feet. Clearly, February is a lot in a good year – My Aunt Loretta used to throw a “Fabulous February Festival” because she firmly believed February needs a good party to get through it. And if there was ever a year that needed a huge blowout party to get us through the slog of February, it’s this year, the year in which we cannot have parties. Certainly not indoor parties, in February.

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Handmade for the Holidays.

I aspire to Becky made gifts for most everyone on my Christmas list annually, but this year felt like the first in a while that I actually succeeded in doing that, beyond handing out jars of pepper jelly and pickles and jam. Although this year, I outsourced most of the jam to my friend Daniel the jam god. Between the great canning jar shortage of 2020 and the dire straights of most small businesses this year, it was a no brainer way to support one of my favorite local purveyors while also handing out handmade gifts. Not only is he able to source things like Damson plums, he may be one of the only people I know who is at least as picky about where his food comes from than I am. I know, right? I honestly don’t know why I haven’t outsourced to him before, but I’m totally doing it from here on out.

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A Shawl for 2020.

I have this thing about being productive – at the end of the day, every day, I like having something to show for myself. I’m not sure if this is related to how I have a hard time sitting still, although I’m sure people that have known me for a long time who have complained for years about my need to be productive/inability to sit still /certain level of constant energy would probably say these things are in fact, entwined.

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