Books Read: 4 (and midway through two more, A Marriage At Sea and The Mattering Instinct). This is right around my usual reading pace, which is fine with me (I have no specific # of books in mind, I just want to keep reading steadily and enjoying this hobby).
Favorite book of the month: I know everyone loved Heart the Lover (and I did enjoy it!) but I liked Fredrik Backman’s My Friends even more.
Date nights: 2! One super low key dinner out while I was on call (still was a nice restorative break) and one night out to a rum-themed sports bar to watch UM football. Both fun. Nothing was elaborate, but also neither would have just ‘happened’ if I hadn’t thought about where they fit.
Habits: I did my Headspace 21 times, Duolingo 30 times (accidentally missed yesterday!), read at least something (from a book) every single day, listened to some music 26/31 days, and went outside for a walk 26/31 days. I also did a bunch of walk ‘n’ talks (love these). I also did Morning Pages 24/31 days.
I hadn’t written about it, but for music I started a little listening project of this NPR Top 25 Albums of 2025 list, and I went through the first 10! (There was also plenty of Taylor Swift, Green Day, and Tate McRae.) Favorites – Wednesday Bleeds and Dave The Boy Who Played the Harp.
Fitness: 7 Club Pilates sessions (missed one because I was sick and did not feel I belonged in a public workout environment), 16 Caroline Girvan iron workouts (Iron Series #1 – 16), and 26 walks of at least 20 min.
I also did a good job with my nutrition goal of eating more protein (and just generally being intentional with my choices, including my choice to eat the nachos above which were delicious).
TV/Movies/Performances: ALL of season 1 of Members Only: Palm Beach (um . . . I can’t even say I recommend this, but I did watch it, mostly with A) and 4 episodes of Season #2 of The Pitt. (OMG the gunner med student character is so . . . weirdly accurate, and I find Dr. Al-Hashimi kind of . . . triggering. But I really like the show.)
Monthly Goals:
Successes: finishing up with BLP at Home / kicking of Season, staying much more on top of email after dealing with a nasty backlog, tracked time for a week, essentially finished with book launch (I mean there’s really no clear ‘end’ here, but the bulk of my appearances/interviews are complete!), 2 date nights, nailed down college friends trip for the fall (yay!), moved Hawaii to July, and I did play my Taylor Swift piano pretty frequently! I am pretty satisfied with my renditions of Ophelia, Elizabeth Taylor, Cancelled, Eldest Daughter, and Actually Romantic, and others are coming along (a few of you reading this have even been recipients of some little snippets of these renditions). I might have to even eventually order some more songbooks . . .
Good starts: I set up a Zoom (for Feb) with a Kon-Mari certified organizer in my area, and I decluttered G’s books with her.
Did not happen: Manicures! To be fair (to myself?), I did keep my nails presentable, no chipped polish in sight, and I tried buffing/polishing which did add a nice shine. But I was more thinking I would try to have consistent manis, some professional, some home, and that just didn’t happen. I will have to schedule for February (hot pink for V day would be appropriate I feel).
Also did not happen: Youtube video (was aiming for one BLP/month to be in video format or to have a video companion), business credit card sub, baking anything, and ZERO steps made towards bathroom renovation. ZERO!
Fun Things that Happened: beautiful cool/sunny weather, hung out with my good friend visiting from Baltimore, Book Club (Heart the Lover discussion), Friendsgiving dinner, getting to work in a new office, A’s first gym meet of the season, G started tennis, C played in a 5:5 soccer tournament + flag football, and . . the current trip I am on to Philadelphia (AA has free Wifi now, which I have a tiny bit of sadness about — but mostly I see it as a positive). We had some good restaurant experiences (one fam brunch out, we tried Filipino takeout, the aforementoined nachos). PLUS there was lots of anticipatory fun in booking things slated to occur throughout the year.
Meh Things: A was sick (strep), I was sick, I ‘dinged’ my car (though best case scenario with no one/nothing else harmed, getting it fixed next month), my call weekend was one of the more challenging in recent memory (just some clinically challenging scenarios, though everyone was very nice and looking back things went pretty smoothly), and I had some serious #MOODS mid-month (and I think midcycle).
Will I do a recap post like this every month? Who knows, but it was fun to write and look back.
All right!! Off to close the 2 charts I left open in clinic yesterday (I rarely do that, but I was donnnne).
5 Comments
Have the best time at your niece’s birthday! I bet she is so excited to have you there for her special day!
January was a weird, heavy month. But I feel good about how it went overall. I will go to my 10th OTF class today. I just activated the unlimited membership this past week so that number should increase next week. I also did a good number of CG iron series workouts. I finish the 12th one yesterday. So I think I will about 8 this month? Hopefully I can keep up this solid amount of OTF + CG now that my work travel is resuming. When possible, I’m going to stay close to an OTF so I can take a class while traveling.
Good Dirt (fiction) and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (NF) were for favorite books of the month!
I too have have mixed feelings about the AA free Wifi. Was on flight home last week and did not turn on until the very end – love the time to focus fully on reading book.
Looks like a good month overall! I am a little bummed about the free Wifi too–AA is our primary airline and I love the fact that I currently don’t work while I’m on planes and just read. I will try to still discipline myself to do that! I am glad that I did goal setting for January because looking back I can see I actually accomplished a lot this month despite the fact that it FELT like a truly bummer of a month. The ICE raids and general terrible news (I’m an immigration lawyer so this is also consuming my professional life), a few canceled fun activities, the freezing cold weather (much worse than usual for us in Jan), capped off by a week of FIVE snow days for my kids due to a winter storm that our city was unequipped to handle! But I can still see the good parts of the month, including success on the food/fitness front (except for my running goal because I will NOT be running outside in 0 degree weather lol…but I shifted to more strength for the month), consistently washing my face again, finishing an article for work that I’m submitting on Monday, booking a spring break trip with a friend, successfully completing the first room of my declutter project, and teaching my kids to do laundry.
I really like this format! It’s fun to see what got done and didn’t and normalize that not everything always gets done. I am inspired to try to figure out my website today and finally make my first post!!! I’ll let you know if it happens!!
Delta has had free wi-fi for awhile. I find it quite useful. I think about it this way, if it let’s me get some work out the way before I arrive that I otherwise would have needed to do while I was there I would rather do it on the plane. I have written a lot of newsletters on planes.