Weekly Goals, Week 52: Moving Forward

The holiday week has been a blur, and as a result I didn't get this posted on Monday, but it's been very much on my mind.

This year has seen a lot of changes.  Last year I lost my last freelance client when the platform I was writing for started paying late; I demanded payment and got paid, but that was the end of my relationship with them.  At the time I was feeling very burnt out on freelancing, so I took it as a sign to spend some time on my own projects.

Ever since, I have been focusing on two main things: working on my doll business, and working on writing projects that I hope to eventually self-publish.  Splitting my attention between the two has perhaps meant that not as much got done on either, though.  And I feel like I haven't been taking either goal as seriously as I should have been.

Then Izzy got sick, and that was all I could think about.

Now that Izzy is gone and I have more time to work, I've been thinking about what I want to spend that time on.  And I realized I want to be more focused on both goals than I have been, but especially on the goal of publishing my work.

This will be the last weekly post of 2024, even though there's still another partial week left.  I feel like it's been a boring year of posts, but at the same time, it has helped me more than I expected.  Now, at the end of the year, I'm realizing how much I get dragged into the minutia of every week.  In 2025, I want to be more focused on the big picture.

More on that to come!

Weekly Goals, Week 51: Grieving

I'm not expecting too much of myself right now.  Izzy passed away Wednesday morning last week, so I took the rest of the week to grieve and recover.  As a result, I didn't accomplish all of my goals for the week.

It's easier now, but I still don't feel back to normal.  My motivation is completely shot.

We've done a few things we hadn't been able to in the last couple of months while we were taking care of Izzy, like going to a movie, or having a drink in the evening.  (We didn't dare drink much while we were taking care of Izzy because we had to feed her late at night, and we couldn't afford to be tipsy while feeding her.)  It's been nice, but also sad, because I never wanted those things enough that I would have chosen to lose her.

The one thing I have been more or less successful at is writing nearly every day.  In some ways it's become my retreat from reality.

I'm going to still go easy on myself, but I'm also going to try to start getting back into a schedule again.

1. Write every day
2. Get caught up on cleaning

I don't think I'm going to try to accomplish more than that.  I think that's enough.

In Memory of Izzy

My cat Izzy, whom I've been taking care of for the last couple months, died suddenly and unexpectedly yesterday morning.  She'd been at the vet the previous afternoon, where we found her kidney values had remained fairly stable since her last visit three weeks previous.  The vet was having us change up some medications to help keep her more comfortable, and overall, she seemed to be doing better than she had over the weekend.  She was fine yesterday morning a little after 6am after I gave her fluids, and at 8:30am Zac found her gasping for breath.  He woke me up and I made it in time for her to die in my lap.

I don't think I'll be very productive for the rest of the week.

Next week I'm going to try to return to my old schedule and try to get some things done.  After I deleted all of Izzy's feedings, fluids, and other meds reminders from my calendar, I realized how much time I spent taking care of her.  I'll have a lot more time now, not to mention a lot more sleep.

Not that I ever second guessed giving up all of that to take care of her.

Izzy was such an integral part of our lives, it's hard to imagine what life will be like without her in it.  I brought her home just over 12 years ago; she'd been dumped at the barn with another littermate.  After her sibling was stepped on by a horse and had to be put to sleep (I took him to the vet to see if he could be saved), I decided I was not going to watch another kitten die.  I trapped Izzy and took her home.

She was a feisty little thing from the very beginning.  I don't know if it was "tortitude" (she was a tortie tabby), or the fact that she'd spent three formative weeks of her kittenhood at the barn, but she was a troublemaker.  She broke a lot of things that I cared about, chased my old lady kitty, and attacked our feet under the bedsheets until she was a good four years old.  She also absolutely adored our other young cat, Ivan, who was three when we brought her home.  I nearly lost them both when I separated from my husband in 2014, but ultimately he decided he didn't want the cats (I think he'd been using them to try to make me come back), and I got them back in late 2015, a year and a half after I'd left.

It will always make me sad that Ivan never came around to Izzy after she came back from the hospital.  He'd always hissed at her when she came back from the vet, and it would take him days to be willing to snuggle again.  She loved him all of her life, and would often sleep with him or go to him for snuggles and grooming, and I know she wanted that so much when she came back from the hospital.  The closest they got was about a month ago, when he let her sleep on the couch near him for a little while (she kept inching closer, and was right next to him by the time he got fed up and left), and about a week before she died, when he looked in the bathroom at her (he might have been wanting to steal her food, but it was the closest he'd come to her without hissing in a long time).

I'm glad though that we were able to be with her when she died.  She took her last breath in my lap.  I am grateful that she died knowing she was home and we were there.

I'm going to take the rest of the week easy.  There will be plenty of time to get back to a schedule next week.

Weekly Goals, Week 50: The Cost of Caregiving

Last week definitely didn't go as I thought it would.  I was hoping to catch up on housecleaning and get back to work on organization projects and doll projects, but instead we ended up just doing the bare minimum of things to survive.  Izzy also took a turn for the worse later in the week, ramping up our stress as well as the amount of time we spent caring for her.

Today I've been thinking a lot about the cost of caregiving.  It claims a substantial chunk of your time to take care of an animal (or person), and the result ends up feeling like you're simply transferring some of your energy and health to them.  It's exhausting, physically and emotionally, to take care of them, plus the stress itself is exhausting as well.

Take today, for example.  I'm squeezing this blog post in between giving Izzy fluids and feeding her again.  Everything has been taking so long that there has been less time between Izzy-things to address me-things.

Somehow, in all of that, I've managed to work on my new novel almost every day.  I'm still in the planning stage but I think I'm about ready to start writing.  I'm not a big planner, so I'm just sketching out the basics such as main plot points and character information, and the rest will get filled in as I write.  This is more of the way I usually do things, unlike Amnesia, which I started with only an opening scene in mind and absolutely no idea of where I wanted to take it.

As for this week, I'm expecting poor productivity, just overall.  We have Izzy's vet appointment tomorrow, and I'm afraid we won't be getting good news, in which case I won't feel like doing much else.  I also have plans to ride Friday midday and babysit Friday evening.

I have my usual calendar mess of goals, but in general, this is what I want to accomplish this week:

1. Work on my new novel almost every day
2. Clean something
3. Organize something
4. Work on a doll

You'll notice my goals aren't super complex this week.  I don't care what I clean, as long as I do something.  I don't care what I organize, as long as I make some progress, somewhere.  I don't care how much work I do on a doll, as long as it's something.

I feel like lower standards for yourself are another thing that tends to happen when you're focusing on caregiving.

Wish me luck.  I have a feeling it's going to be a hard week.

Weekly Goals, Week 49: On to the Next Thing

It was a whirlwind ending, but NaNoWriMo FauxNoWriMo, our November novel writing challenge, is over.

I did not make it to 50,000 words in the month, but I knew I would not.  Early on in the month, in fact, I gave myself permission to fail, since I knew I would be spending a lot of my time taking care of Izzy.  My goal was to write every day, and while I didn't entirely succeed, I also was able to maintain a habit of writing at least five days a week throughout the month.

Perhaps even more importantly, I finished the novel I was working on, the sequel to Amnesia (that still does not have its own name).  The ending is flat and I know the novel (well, the entire story arc) needs a lot of replotting, rewriting, and fine tuning, but the first draft is done.

Without wasting any time, I'm moving on to my next project, an idea I had a week or so ago.  I'll work on this for a bit, maybe even finish it, and then go back to Amnesia to try and fix it.

I discovered TrackBear has a public profile feature that compiles my writing projects and statistics.  I've turned that on and you can see my FauxNoWriMo progress there, as well as my writing challenge for December: to write almost every day (or, in terms that I could quantify for a challenge, to update at least every two days).  I've also included my most recent project, Amnesia, as well as the new one I'm working on, The Year of the Horse.

Now that NaNoWriMo FauxNoWriMo is over, I'm going to try to get back to a schedule of getting things done.  It'll still be rather limited by Izzy needing something every few hours, but I'm going to see what I can accomplish around her care.  Last week didn't produce the results I wanted, but that was in the demanding last week of November, so hopefully this week will be more productive.

My goals for the week are, therefore:

1. Keep writing nearly every day
2. Clean up and organize in the kitchen and doll spaces
3. Get back to work on doll stuff

I have a bunch of doll projects that were put off when Izzy got sick and then again when November started, but now that that's over, I want to try to knock some of those out before the holidays.  Plus there is a lot of cleaning that hasn't been getting done while Izzy's been sick, in addition to the ongoing organization projects I was already working on, so I want to make some progress on that as well.  It doesn't have to be a lot; I'll settle for small amounts of progress, here and there.

Incidentally, one way I know I've been slowly settling into a schedule is the fact that I'm reading again.  For a long time after Izzy got sick, I was barely able to read (or eat, for that matter).  Finding time to read again has made me feel like my life is getting back to some sense of normalcy.

I am hopeful that the other areas of my life will follow suit.