Happy new year!

Happy new year! It was a nice 2024 – I traveled a lot which was both nice and tiring, Vince graduated from college – a big deal, I was very itchy with two cases of poison ivy. I really excused myself from social media and scrolling the news as a hobby as well, that feel really good to not know instantaneously what is happening in the world. I try to check in once a day, usually a 10 min audio catch up from NPR or NYT – ten minutes is enough. I had to replace all that scrolling with something, so I read more books and I’ve really hit my stride with practicing guitar (I think I’ve reached the advanced beginner level – woo hoo! working on hammer ons, pull offs, slides – it’s a lot of fun, very challenging, but doable). I’m going to start watching more movies.

I’ve cut back on running and added strength training to the mix. My body takes longer to recover and bounce back, but that’s ok and often I wake up tight and sore. I’ve cut way back on eating carbs in the house, though I try to not limit out of the house.

New year’s day, I took down Christmas in the house. Our tree keeps losing needles, how many more years can it keep going?

I’d like to add gardening to the things I do next year, the most important to me is to start small trees in the backyard – I’m looking at you white oak and red bud. And in order to do that, I need to protect the little trees from the deer. This dogwood is like 10 years old and every year, it gets demolished by the deer and each year, we try to protect it. Granted, the first 7 years I was busy with other things – it had a flimsy little fence around it and then for the last 2 years, I first covered it with netting (deer ate through it), next I covered it with finer, heavier duty netting (deer ate through it, though not as much) and yesterday, I did what I should have done in the beginning, I cattle wire fence, four heavy landscaping poles and eight landscaping staples into the ground. Fingers crossed this will work and if it survives the hungry deer foraging in the winter, I know I can protect a bunch of new trees. Fingers crossed.

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