2025 Year in Review: Goals and Intentions

[rsadelle]

I was 45 in the year 45 squared, which should have been good, but, alas, not so much. This was yet another rough year. The first half is kind of a blur, and life stuff ramped up in the second half. I went through several waves of tough work stuff. My mom had a hip replacement, which meant I worried a lot, ran some errands, did some respite caregiving, and made sure I checked in with my parents more frequently than I had been. I broke my ankle, which upended my fall and winter. Plus there was the ambient fascism ramping up. All of that really took up a lot of my time and physical/mental/emotional energy this year. I am very grateful I can afford to just throw money at some of my problems (takeout for dinner once or twice a week, Instacart for groceries and drug store things, ordering books and DVDs I just want online). I also appreciated that my job gives me lots of sick time. I didn't use that much of it due to the workload increase with the work stuff, but it was good to have it there for when I needed to go do stuff for my mom and my upcoming PT appointments for rehabbing my ankle.

Even in bad years, there are good things. My sci fi book club continued on for a second year, and that also meant I got to have monthly Zoom catch-ups with lakeeffectgirl after the book discussion. I started having semi-regular Zoom catch-ups with a friend who used to come to town regularly but doesn't now that his parents have moved away, and did one with another friend who lives far away. I continued to chat with another longtime friend on the phone at least a few times a month. My family had lunch every month, including one where we went to visit my brother (he lives about two hours away now) instead of him coming here. I had some regular TV show or movie hangouts with one pair of local friends at their house, and semi-regular bad movie nights with another local friend at my house. I took a couple of classes on things related to Judaism, including the first of a three-semester series on prayerbook and Torah Hebrew. I read a lot of books, including an enjoyable stint rereading some books I loved as a teenager. I had a relatively brief but highly enjoyable period of being solidly into a fandom (cut short not for any fandom reasons but by the real life stuff from above taking over my life). I made a couple of new recipes that were amazing. I took a restful trip to the beach and stayed in a beautiful place.


Create. I wrote at least a tiny bit and did at least a tiny drawing pretty much every day except on Shabbat.

Make a new dinner recipe at least once a month. I made six new recipes, and five of them turned out good. Two of them were things I made again multiple times.

Strengthen connections. You may notice that almost all of the highlights from my year above are these kinds of things.

Connect to God/engage in Jewish practice. It doesn't feel like I did a lot of this, but I did go to (virtual) services every Friday night, and on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and starting to learn Hebrew has been very fulfilling.

Improve/maintain my mental/physical health. I asked my doctor to increase my meds dose early this year, which helped a lot. I struggled most of the year with a regular sleep schedule to a degree I didn't realize until I was looking back at my weekly check-ins. I was finally starting to do better on going walking every day, and then I broke my ankle.

Care less about work. I had a couple of small stretches of doing much better about this, but it was a tough year for it.

Engage my brain. Eh. My Hebrew class was good for this, as was the fannish stretch, but I can see in my weekly check-ins where this completely fell off a cliff, and it was really just life stuff all happening and taking over.

Buy a new couch and new lamps. I did some shopping at the beginning of the year and didn't find what I wanted. Then, just as I was ready to take up the project again, I broke my ankle and that upended the rest of my year.