Last night, after dark but not terribly late, someone knocked on the front door. Loudly. Repeatedly. Not crazily — not like pounding on the door, or anything — but definitely very decisively. Like maybe six or seven hard knocks, not a gentle two or three taps. I was sitting on my bed, already in my pajamas, but Jamie answered the door and began interacting with the person who had knocked. I mildly eavesdropped, and then began more seriously eavesdropping, because Jamie was being… well, overly helpful.

The person at the door was looking for the guy who lived in my room before me, who, therefore, moved out well over a year ago. It seemed to me that the right answer to that was a simple, “Oh, he’s been gone for a long time, and no, I don’t know how to get in touch with him,” and then you close the door, right? (The guy did not leave a forwarding address of any sort, so I spent a solid few months writing, “Moved, no forwarding address” on his mail. Dude is gone.) Instead, Jamie was offering to call the landlord, to see if she knew his new address, and to look in his phone, to see if he still had the guy’s number. Sophie, meanwhile, was being a good girl (aka no barking) — but a bit of an active girl — running back and forth between the front door and my room, seeming unsure of herself.

Eventually I got curious enough to get up and look, as much to reassure Sophie and calm her down as anything else. The guy at the door was in uniform. A green uniform. Um…

I could tell from the tone in Jamie’s voice that this was not, say, a sanitation worker uniform, or an air-conditioning repair uniform, but I couldn’t actually tell what kind of uniform it was from my quick glance. Meanwhile, the guy at the door was saying, “Do you mind if we come in and look around, just to, you know, say we’ve done our jobs?”

I was already moving toward the front door (yes, in my pajamas!), as Jamie was saying, “Uh, let me just check with my –” to say, “Yeah, of course, come on in.” And automatically as the three (3!) sheriff’s deputies started entering the house, I added, “This is Sophie, she’s friendly.”

Two of the deputies stayed pretty close to the door, while one did a quick pass through of the house, checking out the bedroom at the back and then glancing into all the rest of the rooms. I asked one of them if we were allowed to know why they were looking for the former housemate, and he told me a moderately confusing story about his car leaving the scene of an accident and winding up in a ditch, and them wanting to know who was driving the car and what had happened. I felt like he was being interestingly careful not to allege that the former housemate had committed a crime, but I don’t know whether that was because he thought I might immediately call said former housemate to tell him the police were looking for him, or what.

Anyway, the searching deputy was almost finished when he noticed a closed door. Oops. The landlord keeps a room in the house and it’s locked. We don’t have access. Fortunately, I think, for all purposes, we’ve also blocked off that door with a shoe rack on which clutter accumulates and which can probably be seen pretty clearly from the front door. It made it sort of obvious that no one was using that door regularly. It also would have been almost impossible to have blocked it off while they were at the door,  so the idea that former housemate had been quickly hidden was improbable, I think.

Meanwhile, the oldest and most serious of the deputies had looked at Sophie, no touching, but the youngest hadn’t been able to resist her cuteness, and the searcher — while contemplating the locked door — also had to bend down and rub her ears and say, “Good girl, Sophie.” She was facing the dilemma of which stranger she most wanted to make friends with, and sort of bouncing back and forth between them, inviting them to give her pets. Obviously curious, but also just such a love. 

At any rate, I’m not sure which of them made the decision — I feel like there was sort of a mutual shrug between Searching Deputy and Oldest Deputy — but they left without needing to go into the locked room, and all went back to normal.

And it was only then — only after they were gone! — that it occurred to me that ICE is doing immigration raids in Florida right now and that I would absolutely not have wanted to assist ICE, not even to the extent of letting them look in my house without a search warrant. I’m not exactly mad at myself — in the grand scheme of things, I think letting sheriff’s deputies glance through the house to make sure a hit-and-run driver wasn’t hiding out is fine — but I’m a little mad at myself. It was instinct to let them in. No one here had done anything wrong, we had no reason to make the deputies’ lives more difficult, so why drag out an encounter and turn it into something hostile when it could be quickly over? It was a reasonable choice. But I wish I had asked why they were looking for him and made sure it was not an immigration issue before being helpful.

Many, many years ago, but post 2001, when I was living in Santa Cruz and we were at war in Iraq, (back when I went to demonstrations for peace and donated money to anti-war organizations), my phone would often make weird clicking noises and then sound echo-y, sort of like it was on speaker. One day, on a call with my brother, we were speculating about whether it was bugged, and whether the government was listening to my calls, and I said something like, “I wouldn’t really care if it was. What is anyone going to hear? Well, I guess I would care a little, because it would mean that they were wasting time on me when there are actually real threats out there.” I would think nothing about this, except that soon after that conversation, my phone stopped making weird noises. Maybe the phone company fixed the line. But I have wondered over the years whether the government was actually listening to my calls. It isn’t a thought that makes me angry, it just makes me think that I might lack proper wariness about obtrusive government.

Anyway, in a first time for everything, the police searched my house last night and I was glad that my dog was cute and charming and completely non-threatening to them. But if it ever happens again, I hope I’ll ask my questions before I let them in.

Sophie, hoping that we will go outside.

Sophie, ears dropping, because I do not appear to be taking her outside.

Sophie and I were coming inside from the backyard, which is a thing we do every day, usually multiple times in a day, and I was babbling to her, as I do every day, multiple times in a day, when I saw that she had a little branch from one of the trees stuck in her fur, dragging on the ground behind her.

I said, “Come here,” and before I even had a chance to think “that’s not how I call the dog,” she’d turned around and rejoined me about ten paces behind her. I pulled the branch free and she returned to our previously scheduled house entry, without pause.

I was awed. In the midst of my literal babble — I’m sure I was telling her she was a pretty girl or a good girl or something like that, but I could have been commenting on the weather, because I often do — she managed to discern a command (or at least a request) and she chose to immediately obey it. She is SUCH a good dog.

The other day Jamie was eating in the living room and she wanted to join him, so I opened the bedroom door for her, and she immediately went out into the living room and assumed the proper begging posture: sitting next to his feet, head up, eyes alert on his food or maybe his face. Not obnoxious begging, as long as you can ignore the eyes — not trying to climb into his lap or stick her nose into his food or even putting a paw on his leg — just the attentive, “I am here and I would like a bite of that if you feel so inclined.”

Jamie laughed at her and called her a beggar, and from my bedroom, I said something like, “Sophie, are you being a pest?” She immediately went into complete hangdog mode, head down, tail between her legs, and retreated to her doggie bed under my bed. It was the lightest reprimand imaginable. Neither one of us used a harsh voice or a firm no, because neither one of us actually cares if she’s a beggar. I always give her the last bite of my food or let her lick the plate. But you would have thought we’d scolded her for mass destruction or something. I had to cajole her to get her to come out from under the bed and we both had to love her up with ear and tummy rubs so she would know she hadn’t done anything wrong. She’s really just ridiculously smart. I wouldn’t have thought either of us had used the words beggar or pest often enough for her to understand them as pejorative, but she clearly did.

Anyway, I didn’t intend to start this post with dog adoration — I was actually going to write about healthy food choices, ha. But dog adoration is always a fine sidetrack, IMO.

Yesterday I went to the Spellbound Writer’s Group and the creativity exercise was one about choosing a writing mantra for the year. Dani, the group’s leader, had a set of questions, as follows.

When I think about writing: 

1) I am most proud of… 

2) I’m ready to let go of…

3) I need to give myself permission to… 

4) In three years, I want to be… 

5) How can my calendar better reflect these priorities? 

6) What’s different about me and my writing is… 

7) When do I feel alive, enlightened, reminded of who I am? 

What word or words will I channel into my writing experience? How do you want to feel when you write? Use the word bank (a separate page) as inspiration. See if you can select 1-3 words for a mantra. 

I didn’t answer all the questions, but my favorite answer was to #3.

3) I need to give myself permission to — get things wrong, make mistakes, celebrate my own voice. 

I’m giving myself permission to do those things. Not sure how that will work out for me, but I’m at least going to try.

When it came time to pick my one to three words, I had some that I liked that had popped up for me along the way of thinking about my answers to those questions — relaxed, curious — but I started reading the word bank and nothing was really resonating. Nice words — abundance, accomplished, aware, etc. — but I wasn’t feeling them. What did I want from my writing? What did I want as a goal? What was going to be my message to myself?

I’ve been working on a blog post/introduction to Choosing Happiness for MONTHS. One of the things it features is a discussion of happiness and what goes into happiness. How we define it, how we’ll notice it when we see it, how we’ll recognize it. There are dozens of different definitions. Gretchen Rubin, in The Happiness Project, says “one positive psychology study identified fifteen different academic definitions of happiness.” In the end, the definition that I settled on is derived from Arthur Brooks’ definition, in Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier, which is “The macronutrients of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.” I quibble with “purpose,” (which would require a much longer post to explain than I’m willing to write this morning), so I modified it to “satisfaction, enjoyment, and engagement.” 

So yesterday afternoon, while I was thinking about my writing and what I want my writing mantra to be, that definition of happiness popped into my head, and I realized that it was perfect. I want my process to be satisfying, engaging, and enjoyable, and I also want the end product of my writing process to be satisfying, engaging, and enjoyable. It’s like the ultimate goal: happiness in writing, happiness with writing, happiness in life, too. So my writing mantra for 2025 is satisfying, engaging, and enjoyable, and now I have to get on with doing some more of that sort of writing.

Possibly that means writing about Sophie a lot. Hopefully it also means finishing some of the projects that I have underway.

Oh, one last thing! I was asked about concrete monoliths. Technically, yes, I suppose that was an exaggeration. But not necessarily much of one?

These are the things that are being buried in the street outside the house. They’re big! And yes, that one on top is someday going to be completely underground, while the one on the bottom will be the new side and curb of the road. The former park across the street is supposedly going to become a retention pond, although it currently looks like a landfill. And as far as I can tell, the project is going to go on forever. They dig up the road every weekday morning, then fill it back in every afternoon. Actual signs of progress are minimal. I’m sure it’ll end someday. But it won’t be someday soon, as far as I can tell.

I am not going to use that as a metaphor for my own work. But it does make me wonder, how many projects can I finish before the road work does? I wonder if I made it a competition if it would improve my motivation?

Today is the day after my (more or less) weekly grocery store visit. Most of the time, that’s meaningless, really. Oh, most likely I will have fresh fruit in my yogurt, at least for a few days, and probably I will have some salad, but running out of fresh produce is generally the trigger for my next grocery store visit, so one way or another, I don’t think much about it.

Today, though, is different. I was away for a few days at the beginning of the year, on a fun little mini-vacation that included time with family & some delicious restaurant eating and when I came home on the 3rd, I was really tired. So I didn’t make it to the store on Saturday. On Sunday, I spent a big chunk of the day at Christina’s, playing games, eating her extremely delicious chili, and celebrating the new year with a fire in their fire pit, so I also didn’t make it to the store.

And then Monday through Wednesday, the construction project in front of my house meant that I couldn’t actually drive during the day. Yeah, that construction project — ugh. Every afternoon, they fill the holes back in, so people can drive on the roads during the night (and also maybe so they don’t kill themselves walking into big holes in the road in the dark?) And then in the morning, they dig the road up again and do more stuff with giant pipes and concrete monoliths.

People who don’t live here say, “When is it going to end?” People who do live here say, “OMG, is it ever going to end?”

Now, obviously, I could have gone out in the evening or in the early morning on any of those days, but I didn’t, because I still had food options. Some cabbage, canned beans, frozen chicken breast… I wasn’t starving by any means.

Yesterday, though, I went out early, over to Mount Dora to play with computers with my dad and stepmom, who are learning to use Macs. (In their 80s, and I really hope that should I make it to my 80s, I will still be enthusiastically learning the way they choose to.) On my way home, I stopped at the grocery store.

No big deal, nothing special, just… the grocery store.

But today has felt like a day of anticipation & abundance, with such potential for small pleasures. I bought a loaf of gluten-free bread ($8), some eggs ($6), some cheddar cheese ($5), and an avocado ($1), so now I’m getting to think about whether I want a) grilled cheese, b) French toast, c) avocado toast, 4) scrambled eggs with toast, 5) tea with toast and the cranberry-cinnamon jam I got at a Christmas market a few weeks ago. Such good choices! And it’s giving me so much pleasure to anticipate which of my delicious options I’ll be having for my lunch. For breakfast, I had yogurt with strawberries, supposedly in season now according to the sign, but definitely on sale; blueberries from a BOGO; and pistachios, also from a BOGO. Also delicious and I did my best to eat it mindfully, noticing how good it was with every bite.

But it really struck me what a perfect example of hedonic adaptation this is. How often do I take my groceries mostly for granted? How often do I spend more time worrying about prices and whether my choices are healthy than I do thinking about how delicious my meals are going to be? Honestly, most of the time. Anything familiar stops being a pleasure unless you really make an effort to break out of that hedonic adaptation — or unless something happens to break you out of it.

I’m not grateful for the construction project. But I’m grateful for the reminder that healthy food is not just fuel for our bodies, but an experience to savor & anticipate & appreciate.

I’m thinking grilled cheese.

Not a picture of my own grilled cheese sandwich, which is still in the imaginary stage. Just a random grilled cheese.

When I looked up last year’s end of the year blog post, it was with pessimism in my heart. I’ve been feeling like a failure, to be honest, waking up in the middle of the night and getting stuck in pointless ruminating and/or solving all my problems and then promptly forgetting those solutions the moment I actually get out of bed. I’ve spent more time trying to understand why I’m stuck (on ALL the things) then getting unstuck, and most of my solutions to getting unstuck just get me more stuck. I was prepared to discover that I’d completely failed to achieve my goals for the year. 

But when I read my blog post, I discovered that my words for 2024 had been “Focus” and “Fun,” and I felt a little burst of… call it forgiveness, maybe? Forgiveness for myself, for not fulfilling the ambitious project-oriented goals. Because I actually did quite a lot in 2024. I got certified as both a master life coach and a master wellness coach, I read a ton of books, I learned a lot, and while I didn’t produce much, I spent plenty of time working on my ideas. Thinking time matters. Yes, my perfectionism got in my way, but I also needed to take the time to shape what I’ve learned into something that made sense to me, that felt right. And yeah, that felt a lot like spinning my wheels — but I haven’t failed unless I give up. And I’m not giving up. 

Meanwhile, I did have fun. Lots of fun, actually. Beach trips and hanging out in downtown Sanford, thrift stores and flea markets, live music and Disney adventures. Writing group and writing with friends. A couple of good trips — Costa Rica, despite mostly being about the dentist, was a good experience, and my trip to South Carolina in the middle of summer was truly a delight. Plenty of good meals, and some excellent desserts. I read a ton, my favorite form of recreation (an almost embarrassing 463 books, according to the Kindle app) and played with my dog every single day.

2024 wasn’t a financially rewarding year. (Understatement.) Career-wise, it was close to a bust, although I do hope that I’ve been setting the stage for better years to come. But it wasn’t a bad year at all. I don’t feel good about what I failed to accomplish, but if I was on my deathbed looking back, I wouldn’t be saying, “I should have worked harder and had less fun.” It’s only because I’m not on my deathbed and hopefully have a lot of years to go that I feel badly about what I failed to do.

One thing that I did realize, though, as I looked back on my year, is that it started sliding downhill in August. Coincidentally — or not! — it was so hot in August that I stopped cooking complicated vegetable hashes for breakfast. I just didn’t want to stand over a hot stove stir-frying for fifteen minutes. Also coincidentally — or not! — it was too hot to want to exercise much. I walked less, gave up on riding the exercise bike and stopped even thinking about daily step counts. So of my three fundamental rules of happiness: (sleep 8 hours, no more, no less; eat plenty of vegetables, ideally seven to ten servings a day; move your body in ways that feel good as often as possible), I was breaking two. Possibly not coincidentally, I started struggling with the third, too, having a much harder time getting to sleep and sleeping through the night.

So 2025 is going to be a back to basics year for me. I’m not saying that sleeping 8 hours, eating plenty of vegetables, and moving more is going to magically make me accomplish more, but I’m pretty sure it will, actually. Because those things are the basis for feeling good and people who feel good also do more. Meanwhile, I’m going to stop beating myself up about what I failed to accomplish in 2024, and start appreciating what I did accomplish: it was a fun year with plenty of enjoyable moments in it, and lots and lots of learning. 

That said, I’ve been struggling to pick a word for 2025. None of the usual suspects feel quite right: I’ve already used Create, Appreciate, Learn, Gratitude, Grace, Focus, Play, Fun, Change, Kindness, and I’m not going to use Growth, Rebirth, Energize, Evolve, or any of the other words the Washington Post recommends. But I really have appreciated my focus words over the past five years — they’re a good way of checking in with myself, to see if I’m on track with where I want to go, who I want to be.

The word I keep coming back to, though, is forgiveness. I’m not sure why, not sure what I’m going to be forgiving, but what I get from the word is a feeling of letting go, a feeling of… the opposite of beating myself up, I guess? Of breathing out and breathing in, of healing, maybe a peace that is not hard fought, but simple. I’m not sure forgiveness will help me reach my financial goals (ha), but when I look back on 2025, twelve months from now, if its included plenty of forgiveness, I suspect it will have been a good year. The other word I like is resilience. I keep trying to tell myself to take one step at a time, and I think resilience is the word that best reflects that idea. I don’t have to achieve ALL the things — I just have to keep trying. So 2025: forgiveness and resilience and onward we go.

Happy New Year!

In a sign that might mean the Google AI is good at telling me what I want to hear, I asked google, “What is an armadillo a symbol of?” because I wanted to use this photo from the Japanese Lantern exhibit at the Sanford Zoo as my featured image. Google responded, “The armadillo is a symbol of protection, resilience, and connection to nature. Its unique characteristics have also been used to represent strength, perseverance, and the importance of boundaries.” Perfect!