Ruth Sadelle Alderson

This was a weird year for me. Between whatever physical trauma there was from breathing in the smoke from the fire, the emotional trauma of the fire, and my worrying about what it was going to mean for me, I caught two back-to-back colds and was sick from the middle of January until the middle of February. I had gum graft surgery on one side of my mouth in the middle of July, and spent four solid days zoning out on the couch and another three weeks or so until I started feeling more normal. At the end of September, I went on two back-to-back vacations, then went right back to work, which was clearly not okay with my body because I caught a third cold at the beginning of October. October is our busiest month of the year at work. Then at the end of October, I had gum graft surgery on the other side of my mouth. I feel like that one took a lot longer to recover from, probably because I was already a little run down and then the first anniversary of the fire was just a week after I had the surgery. Between all of that, I estimate I had about three months total out of this year that I was in some sort of illness and recovery mode, and maybe a few more weeks that I felt like I was still recovering mentally. I also had an interesting year in that I realized while 38 was arguably the uppermost limit of mid-30s, 39 was definitely almost 40, so I spent a lot of time thinking about what I want my life to be like in my 40s and making changes toward that end.

Write. I'm not sure how much I really achieved what I wanted with this this year. I did have some times when I really felt my way into the experience of writing. I also spent a lot of this year feeling somewhat fuzzy and unfocused. I am leaning into the idea that some times are like that, and that's just what I needed to do this year. It was a fallow year; next year will be different.

Strengthen connections. I did so much of this! It still makes me really happy to put all these things down in my tracking spreadsheets. I sent a lot of emails, texted, started sending mail to my niece, hung out with people from my yoga class, went on vacations and to local cultural events with my mom, went to the movies with friends, enjoyed both my book clubs, and got to see some of my best friends who live far away. One of the real highlights is that I have a better relationship with my brother now, which I think is mostly because he's changed, but my getting a cell phone so we can text each other now probably helped. I also met a potential new friend right at the end of the year (the joke I've been telling myself is that the post-work holiday party mood is: I'm in ur Facebook befriending ur partner), so I'll see if she wants to hang out earlyish this year.

Connect to God/the divine. It turns out I wrote down a lot more things on my tracking spreadsheet than I thought I did. I have the sense that I'm still really struggling with how to do this in an ongoing way. I think part of what I need to start doing is noticing the divine element of times when I'm not specifically trying to make that connection. For example, the day after we did Thanksgiving Friday at my house, I was singing along to Kesha's Rainbow while washing dishes from having hosted my family, and I thought, "This is a devotional practice."

Get more sleep. I think I did much better on this one. I still wrote down that I was tired more weeks than is ideal on my check-ins, but I have the sense that I wasn't as exhausted this year due to not getting enough sleep reasons.

Cut out the mindless internetting. Hoo boy. I did okay with this. I definitely spent less time doing mindless internetting and more time reading books this year. However, I also spent a lot of time doing mindless internetting during all of the rest and recovery from illness and dental surgeries time. I think this is something I need to keep being mindful of.

Take a vacation. I did a lot of vacationing this year! In fact, this week is my only staycation all year. My mom and I went to San Francisco in February to go to the ballet and in May to see Hamilton and go to the SFMOMA. In August we went to Ashland to see five plays in three days. In September, I went to Wisconsin to visit lakeeffectgirl and we went to see the JoBros with one of our other best friends. Right after that, I went with my mom and a handful of other women from my yoga class to Asilomar for a weekend yoga retreat with our yoga teacher. This does not need to be on my list for next year because I already have two out of town cultural events with my mom and a two Louis Tomlinson concert dates trip planned with lakeeffectgirl.

Prepare to move. I didn't have to move! I did clean out some things from my cabinets and have a few things fixed by the apartment people.

Volunteer/get involved in a cause. This did not happen at all. I think partially it turns out it's not really a high priority for me and partially being sick so much put me off doing anything that took more work.

Address problems earlier. I did okay on this. I have a lot of things on the fixed problems row of my tracking spreadsheet for the beginning of the year. I'm not sure if I slacked on this or if there just weren't a huge number of problems left in the later part of the year.

Share my interests/enthusiasm/excitement. I sent a lot of emails to friends, and talked about some of the things I was interested in at family dinner, plus there were my two book clubs. I also talked more about my interests on Facebook this year.

Be more weird. It's really hard to be weird when you're out of the habit! I did some singing and dancing in my car at stoplights, had post-lunch one-song kitchen dance parties for a few months in the summer, and was much more willing to be weird in terms of what I posted on Facebook. I'm still not sure how to be more weird.

I again found this Danielle LaPorte year in review exercise really helpful for looking back on the last year and deciding what I want to do in the new year. My two basic themes for 2019 are: focus on the things that are most important and find solutions to problems. Some of my specific things are trackable goals and some of them are general intentions of things I want to remember.

Write. Like last year, I don't have any specific goals around this. I again want to write in a way that is fun and that lets me feel inside the experience.

Strengthen connections. Keeping track of this last year made me so happy, so I'm keeping this goal the same: Continue to prioritize relationships and time with friends and family, and be open to new people. Do this with someone every week, and with local people at least twice a month.

Connect to God/the divine. Like last year, I don't have a specific way of going about this. It's still important and still something I want to do. I am going to be more liberal about what "counts" for purposes of my goals tracking spreadsheet.

Get more sleep. I wrote down tired under the didn't work section of so many of my weekly check-ins for 2018. I think a lot of that might be that I let myself have fifteen minutes of wiggle room to count as going to bed on time, and I tended to push that so that I didn't go to bed until 9:15 a lot of days. For 2019, I'm going to be stricter about my bedtime: turn everything off at 8:15 and be in bed by 9, with only five minutes of wiggle room to count as going to bed on time. I also adjusted the thermostat so the heater/air conditioner doesn't come on quite so much before my alarm. (This is my primary trick for waking up without my alarm: the click of the the thermostat usually wakes me up so I'm up in time to turn off the alarm before it goes off.)

Cut out the mindless internetting. I spend a lot of time reading random Twitters and Tumblrs. Sure, a lot of times it makes me laugh, but also I know that I'm less happy on days when I read a lot of Twitter, and I know that it's time for a periodic cutting down of my social media time in favor of the things that make me happier and that I want to do more. In practical terms, this means that I spent some time telling Firefox to forget a lot of things (so they won't be in my address bar suggestions) and my new rule is that I can only regularly read people's social media things if I follow them. I'm making exceptions for one Tumblr and one Twitter that I want to keep up with but don't want to follow for reasons.

Take a vacation. In addition to just taking time off work at least once a quarter, this year I need a real vacation. I do have two cultural event overnights with my mom scheduled. Ideally Louis Tomlinson will go on tour and lakeeffectgirl and I will go see him somewhere interesting for my real vacation. If that doesn't happen, I'll go visit her and our other friends near her.

Prepare to move. There's a good chance I'm going to have to move at the end of the summer. I'm going to work on cleaning out my closet and cabinets and having the maintenance people fix any things that need to be fixed before then. If I end up not having to move, then things will just be nicer for me anyway.

Volunteer/get involved in a cause. I think I should get involved in something and I feel guilty for not volunteering my time for a cause, so in the spirit of finding solutions, I would like to make this the year I volunteer. Part of what makes me nervous about it is that I have a tendency to stick with things long past the time I should have stopped, so I need to go into this reminding myself that it's okay to quit if it doesn't work for me.

Address problems earlier. This is one of those lessons I have to learn over and over again. There were a handful of things on my highlights from last year list that were problems I found solutions for, and it reminded me that really a lot of problem solving is a lot easier than I think it will be. One of the problems to deal with this year is getting gum grafts done.

Share my interests/enthusiasm/excitement. So many of my highlights from last year were things like going to dance performances with my mom, sharing a fandom with my bff again, and book club discussions. This intention is to remind me that this is great, and I should do it as much as possible.

Be more weird. Honestly, I don't know what this looks like. One of the great things about watching older One Direction things is that Louis used to be really weird in a way he isn't in later things. I was thinking, "I wonder if that's because he was trained out of being publicly weird, or just a side effect of getting older, because I've gotten less weird over time." Then I stopped and thought about what I was thinking, and while some of it is just that I'm a calmer person now, I think some of it is less weirdness in a more tamping down on any weirdness way. At a minimum, I will continue to sing and dance in my car at stop lights.

I worked through the rest of Danielle LaPorte's FREE and CLEAR exercises over the last week or so, and I used that, her year in review exercise from last year, and reviewing her what you want to do, have, and experience to feel your core desired feelings exercise from The Desire Map to figure out what I want to focus on this year. I'm still finding that the feelings I came up with before doing this last year really resonate with me: light, giddy, deeply present, connection. (Side note: if you want to try out The Desire Map, you can download the audiobook and ebook for free at the moment. You have to sign up for her email list, but you can then unsubscribe.) I have three sections: the big intentions, a small list of practical things I want to take care of, and the stop doing list I made doing the FREE and CLEAR exercise.


Big Goals/Intentions

Writing. I don't have a specific way I want to do this, and I'm going to stop specifically trying to do any specific kind of writing at any specific time. I just want to write in a way that I can feel inside the experience.

Connection. Continue to prioritize relationships and time with friends and family, and be open to new people. Do this with someone every week, and with local people at least twice a month.

God. I don't have a specific way of going about this one. I want to do something - learn to pray on a regular basis, go to services, remember to feel the light filling me up - that keeps me connected to God/the divine.

Singing/Chanting. I want to find a way to do this more! I love singing and chanting. Part of why I don't do it as much as I would like to is that I'm self-conscious about the fact that I live in an apartment with thin walls, so this year I want to stop feeling self-conscious about that. (A secret wish: I would love to take voice lessons. It's not in my budget at the moment, but maybe someday.)


Practical Things To Take Care Of

This is the boring part, but they're also the things that not doing makes me feel heavy/weighed down: keep up with weekly check-ins, take at least a few days off each quarter, really for real get the gum grafts done. I would love to go on a vacation that involves leaving my town, but I'm going to consider that more of a wish than a necessity for this year.


Stop Doing

I'm mostly putting this here for my reference. I have a stop doing section in my weekly check-ins, too; this is a bigger list I made doing the FREE and CLEAR stop doing exercise:

• Staying up too late.


• Worrying about not knowing enough to write about pop culture.


• Autopilot lying to people I'm close to about how I am.


• Complaining about money.


• Hiding from friends/people I love.


• Sinking too deeply into pain that isn't mine to hold.


• Resenting [life situation from the previous friends-locked post].


• Accepting a lack of care/steamrolling of my feelings.

DW only friends, lakeeffectgirl and I are going to rewatch Once a Thief in August, and you're invited to join us! Here is a Tumblr post with details, a schedule, and a link to sign up to join the email discussion thread.

Save money. This did not happen. On the bright side here, I pretty much broke even.

Take care of my car. I had the timing belt replaced, got the recall-based maintenance done, and had the check engine light looked at (repeatedly - it's mysterious and temperamental, but at least they were able to smog it).

Take care of my health. I saw a new doctor; did some things that made my summer depression better; and took time off once a quarter, including three non-consecutive weeks during the summer. I did not get the gum grafts done.

Local connections. Things I did to create and strengthen local connections: I joined a couple of meetups, and tried befriending some people I met at one of them. (They later moved two states away.) I joined my apartment complex book club. Two local friends and I have been doing coffee shop writing dates every few weeks. I also went to services a couple of times (one Friday night and one Saturday morning), which was nice and I will probably do again. Socially, it's kind of weird since we moved here when I was three. It's hard to feel like I can just be myself when half the people there know my mom and knew me when I was a kid and probably have some idea about me that may or may not have any relation to reality. I would take any advice anyone has about navigating that sort of social situation.

Today I'm thankful for fangirls. In general, fangirls always make my life better. In particular, I'm on vacation with lakeeffectgirl and we've gotten to spend good food + fannish discussion time with two other fangirls on this trip.

When this season's schedule came out and there was a Saturday night Habs at Sharks game, I decided I was going. (San Jose is only about a three- or four-hour drive, and by far the closest NHL city to me.) Then lakeeffectgirl decided she was coming to visit and going to the game with me, which made for an awesome week, even above and beyond the game. We went for the expensive tickets and ended up in the ninth row, so we had a pretty good view of things.

I had never been to a professional hockey game before and there are so many things that were fascinating to me about it as an experience. People dress in team gear, and by "people," I mean nearly every person we saw. Most of them were in Sharks gear, a few of them (including us) in bright red Habs gear, and one in an LA Kings Kopitar jersey. (No, we don't know either.) I'm wearing a scarf, so you can't quite see my red Habs shirt, but here we are:

( Picture! )

The guys behind us kept up running commentary on the game, and there was a guy next to us explaining who the Habs players were to his girlfriend. On power plays, the crowd does a shark chomp motion with their arms. During the first fight, everyone stood up. I appreciated it because it made it easier for me not to watch and I was disturbed by the crowd's enthusiasm for violence. I'm going to have to track down some sort of readings on sociological thought about game attendance as ritual. The San Jose police directed traffic outside the arena, which means I'm also curious about the economic costs to municipalities of having an arena. (I'm sure both those things exist; I just have to go looking for them.)

And then there was the game itself. The Habs lost 4-0, but I don't care as much as I care about the fact that I got to watch Danny play hockey. We didn't really realize it was his 900th game until I was reading my Google Alerts the next day, but I was happy to see him play anyway. And by happy, I mean that when he was on the ice, I just watched him instead of the game as a whole. As lakeeffectgirl reported on Twitter, "Danny checks/gets checked, @rsadelle says, 'This is good for me.'" Which, yes, please, Danny getting slammed into boards or walls (without hurting him in a bad way). He also took a quite a few face-offs, including a number on our end of the rink.

Here's one of lakeeffectgirl's pictures of Danny's ass as he prepared to take one of those face-offs:

( Picture! )

My favorite thing about watching Danny play in person is that every time he was near the puck during a stoppage in play, he picked it up with his stick and bounced it around until the refs/linesmen were ready to take it back. I've caught glimpses of him doing that on TV, but the cameras usually cut away or they go to commercial, so I had no idea it was a regular thing he does. I couldn't figure out if he was showing off or if he's like a little kid who can't resist playing with any puck in his vicinity. He was also one of the last people off the ice at the end of warm-ups because he was still shooting pucks at the net.

Other game note: BGally kept taking face-offs against Joe Thornton. We don't know whose plan that was, but we would both also be into BGally getting pushed up against walls. Or Danny and BGally shoving each other into walls. Either of those things. (Did you know? According to their official stats, Danny and BGally are the same height and BGally only weighs six pounds more than Danny.)

We're thinking about seeing the Kings play next year. Maybe the Kings and the Stars if they play each other at a convenient time and place.

Today I'm thankful for fandom. Fandom is, in many ways, my home. It's a place where I fit in. It's a place where I met some of my very closest friends. It's a place where I get to tell stories about existing characters or people. It's a place where people enjoy those stories. It's a place where I get to read an ever-expanding collection of stories that are exactly the kind of story I want to read. It's a place where I don't have to ever mention that I have this whole life that can be hard to explain to outsiders because you're all in that life with me. ♥

Today I'm thankful for my local and locally-grown friends. I had lunch with Brad, who is in town for the week, and Stevie, who lives here, and then went to the movies and dinner with norwich36, all of which was an absolute delight. I'm also looking forward to seeing allegram and her husband when they come to visit later this week.

Today I'm thankful ninja_orange ran across Ninja Cheerleaders on Netflix. According to Wikipedia, this is a remake of Cheerleader Ninjas, which I have actually seen. Cheerleader Ninjas is an abysmally bad movie I wouldn't recommend to anyone for any reason (you can watch the trailer here to get a sense of just how bad it is), but I have a very clear memory of renting it. There are a lot of things from earlier years that I just don't remember, but for some reason, I vividly remember standing in Hollywood Video with a group of friends I have mostly drifted from over the years looking at Cheerleader Ninjas and deciding that it was what we were going to watch. So while the movie itself was terrible, the reminder of its existence from ninja_orange prompted me to think back fondly on that time and that group of friends.