October 4 2018

Potential (Five Minute Friday)

Here I am again waiting until the last minute to write last Friday’s Five Minute Friday post. Some would say I am squandering my potential. I might just agree with them on days like today. On other days I ask myself why I bother to write blog posts at all, it seems my audience of maybe 10 people is pretty well set and even they don’t read my posts regularly, but only occasionally when they remember. Then I remind myself that when I first started blogging the only way I could get myself to post at all was to tell myself that nobody was ever going to see what I wrote and it was basically anonymous. I didn’t tell anyone what I was up to for the first couple of years except my hubby and kids and they only seemed marginally interested at best.

I read multiple articles about choosing a niche to blog about, and I’d tell myself I’ve done that. My niche is sharing all the wisdom I have gained through experience as a member of the 50 and over club. But in the back of my mind, I know that is not what the articles meant. “They” (yes, the infamous they) think I should choose just one thing to write about on a regular schedule for the rest of my life, or at least the rest of my blogging life. How monotonous! I can’t, I know myself that well, at least. Then, defiant me comes rearing its ugly head saying it is MY blog and I can write what I want to. I think we are at an impasse.

I found myself posting willy-nilly, whatever struck my fancy or a nerve each week. So, a while back, I came up with a schedule to help me know what to write each Thursday and not post similar things back to back. I even made myself a printable and hung it up in my office to remind me I had a schedule to keep now. Then I made it the background on my laptop’s desktop so it was there as a ready reference because I rarely write the Thursday posts in my office at home. Do you want to see it here? I guess I could show you.

So, now you know my secret schedule. You can go back over the last few months of posts and see how closely I have followed it. It actually helps me to focus on any given week to know what I am supposed to be writing about that week. It also keeps me from bombarding you with all the posts at once when I write in batches as I seem to do sometimes. (Gotta write when the muse nudges you, right?)

The potential to be consistent and organized in my posts is all contained in that one graphic that I created on a Thursday when I was procrastinating on actually writing and squandering my potential yet again. How do you decide on your blogging niche? Where do you get your ideas? I just consider the Five Minute Friday posts to be a bonus for all of us, because sometimes this ends up being my best writing and seems to be the one way that new readers find me.

This post is part of the weekly Five Minute Friday link-up!
The prompt this week is: Potential
The assignment: Write for five minutes on the word of the week. This is meant to be a free write, which means: no editing, no over-thinking, no worrying about perfect grammar or punctuation. Just write.

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October 2 2018

31 Days of 5 Minute Free Writes Challenge

This post is part of the 31 Days of 5 Minute Free Writes Challenge. Scroll down for the links and the graphic showing the prompts for the month.

It will be pinned to the top of the page until the end of the month. Check back for updates on the prompts. I may write several at a time and update just a couple of times a week. I seriously considered not posting any at all until all 31 were written. But that seemed like a long time to let myself possibly get behind. So I will post at least once a week. Five Minute Friday posts will be posted separately as they have been and linked to this post. I may not write them in order and I might add to some after I have posted if something else comes to me.

1 [story] Tell me a story, we would say to our Mom. She knew what we meant. We wanted her to read us a story. We wanted the close interaction where we knew we had her attention even if we had to share it between the four of us. Sometimes when we were still small enough one of us would get to climb in her lap and see the pictures in the book while she read to us, assuming the book had pictures anyway.
I suppose my love of reading and even writing can be traced back to those early stories Mom read to us. It helped us understand that words had the power to transport you into worlds you might never get to see otherwise and meet people from other countries or even planets. Nothing was impossible in a story. The author could tell you something from their own life or make something up. It didn’t matter if it was true or not, only that it was interesting to hear or read.
Words build stories and stories build imagination and imagination can take you anywhere! Read to the children in your life, because doing so could completely change their life forever for the better.

2 [afraid] In 2017, I chose my first ever word of the year. I chose the word FEARLESS to guide me through the year. To read more about my year of being fearless, please see the post from January 11, 2018. Don’t be afraid to choose a word of the year to guide you, often the word chooses you. Just give it some thought, there is plenty of time to select one before the new year begins.

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Category: Five Minute Friday, Writing | 2 Comments on 31 Days of 5 Minute Free Writes Challenge
September 27 2018

Review: Invested

A couple of months ago, Hubby got a free ebook with his subscription to the Wall Street Journal and the book he chose was Invested: how Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger taught me to master my mind, my emotions, and my money (with a little help from my dad) (2018) by Danielle Town and her father, Phil Town. He was really enjoying reading it and shared some of the things he was learning as he read it. I looked it up on my local library’s website and discovered it actually sounded like something I might also enjoy reading, so I requested the paper copy and the audiobook and waited for them to show up in my account. It didn’t take me long to catch up to him because while he was stopping at the end of each chapter to complete the homework exercises, I was thinking about them but moving forward with the book. I had also gotten copies of Phil Town’s books Rule #1 (2006) and Payback Time (2010) and had read through Rule #1 also.

If you are a total newbie to the investing world, like me, you will love Invested. I really appreciated Danielle’s willingness to share her reluctance to take charge of investing her own money. She also shared her extreme dislike of all things numbers. I found I related to her style of writing much more than Hubby did. He found Phil’s style more to his liking, so maybe it is just a guy thing. If you want to learn how to get started investing for absolute scratch, this is the book for you. It explains how to find great companies that share your values and how to determine their value and what price to buy them at so they are “on sale”. This is called value or values investing and is generally considered to be the style of investing that Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have used since the 1960s to amass their fortunes.

This book is an excellent read and has given me the confidence to tackle investing on my own. I highly recommend reading or listening to it if you are considering taking over managing your own retirement accounts. The book is meant to be read over the course of a year and is broken down into months with homework assigned each month to help you build the confidence to begin investing your own money. Don’t worry about having real money to invest because at first, you will be practicing by using paper money or paper trading until you get confident enough with your ability to use real money.

If you plan to purchase any of the books mentioned in this post, please consider using the affiliate links provided below by clicking on the book covers. It won’t cost you any extra, I could potentially earn a penny or two and that would really help me out.

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September 23 2018

Complete (Five Minute Friday)

This Friday was a travel day for me. We were up early to gather or things and get to the airport. We flew on a small plane with only 3 seats per row for the first flight and all was remarkably quiet. Then we got on the larger plane for the pond-jumping part of our trip. The international flight was on a larger plane with 6 seats per row. For that flight, I was stuck in a middle seat. The flight was uncomfortably long, over six hours and with the five hour time difference we lost a night of sleep. We arrived early on Saturday morning.

No overly long flight across an ocean would be complete without a constantly crying baby. I didn’t mind too much, the baby was probably as ready to be off that airplane as I was. Then with all the popping of ears with cabin pressure, it was probably scary and uncomfortable for the baby. I was just grateful that the baby was way up in the front of the plane and we were much nearer to the back of the plane which allowed the screams to be muted somewhat by the distance. I can only imagine how rough it would have been to be stuck in any seat near the little screamer.

I had to admire the parents or whoever was responsible for the little screamer because the mere fact that they had the guts to even think of traveling by plane such a distance with an infant makes them much braver than I. We took our kids to Disney in 2000 so they would have been almost seven and barely nine at that time. I couldn’t imagine trying such a trip with younger kids who didn’t have a concept of time or the ability to entertain themselves for hours. It was the kids’ first plane ride and the first I could actually remember as well. I am told I was about two years old the only time I flew on a plane before that and I have no memory of it at all.

Flying gets easier each time I do it. I’m still not crazy about the closeness we are confined to with so many other people. As an introvert, this is not an ideal situation to put myself into on a regular basis. Never knowing if THIS trip will be the last I get to take to such a destination, I try to make the most of any trip I get to take.

This post is part of the weekly Five Minute Friday link-up!
The prompt this week is: Complete
The assignment: Write for five minutes on the word of the week. This is meant to be a free write, which means: no editing, no over-thinking, no worrying about perfect grammar or punctuation. Just write.

Category: Five Minute Friday, Travel | 2 Comments on Complete (Five Minute Friday)
September 20 2018

Kitchen Cabinet Organizing

When we bought our house December 2000, the kitchen was still in the half-finished state it had been in for the previous nine years since my in-laws stopped working on remodeling it for health reasons. The floor was exposed wood because the previous flooring was no longer visible, having long since worn away. Some of the walls had wallpaper and some were still bare drywall. The wooden paneling, that was meant to cover ALL the walls on the lower half, was only installed behind the cabinets on one side of the room. The cabinets used to be new on the outside wall, but they were never quite the right fit for the wall, so there has always been a three-inch gap between the stove and the cabinet next to it on one side or the other. My in-laws also chose a lovely country blue colored countertop, but the blue has worn away in many places on the countertop that gets the most use. I wish I could say those issues have all been dealt with over the almost eighteen years we have lived here, but that just isn’t the case.

There is one wall of built-in cabinets that my in-laws lovingly refinished and those are the ones we will focus on for this decluttering session.

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Category: Organizing, Reclaiming Our Home | Comments Off on Kitchen Cabinet Organizing