Frugal in the Fruitlands

I won’t lie – this year has been a tough year for me and my husband. In May, I lost my job in market research, and I still have not found full-time employment. Many of our financial goals have fallen behind as a result, and we have unfortunately been reduced to living more or less paycheck-to-paycheck, something I deplore.

On the other hand, this year has brought me many joys. In not having full-time employment, I’ve found ways to fill my time productively. I spent most of this year free of addictive gaming. I picked up new hobbies. My various freelance jobs taught me much about web design – those much-needed ‘best practices’ that I’m ignorant of, since my way of learning everything web-related is just to jump in and make things work.

In measuring the success or failure of my goals this year, I’m using two things as a yardstick – both my 101 Goals in 1,000 Days list, as well as my more specific 2009 collage.

Goals Attained This Year

• I finished League of Extraordinary Hogwarts Students, the LARP I was writing, for Intercon I in March 2009, and ran it again at Festival of the LARPs in April 2009. (collage)
• In August 2009, I finished reading the last of H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction. “The Whisperer in Darkness” was the last story I read, and it became one of my favorites. (collage/101 goals list)
• In November 2009, I successfully completed NaNoWriMo, writing the first (very rough) 50,000 words of Viktory Empire, a new novel. (101 goals list)
• I successfully built my emergency fund up to my goal of $5,000. In fact, I had close to $10,000 in it before I lost my job in May. Sadly, it has since been diminished, but it did its part in getting us through some of the toughest months.  (101 goals list)
• I finally established a compost pile. You would think that creating a pile of rotting food waste wouldn’t be very difficult, but I was plagued by uncertainty about the best way to do it. I really didn’t want to build a structure to contain the pile, so I ended up repurposing a large plastic tote for the job. So far, it works great! (101 goals list)
• I completed a paid freelance web design/development project. Several, in fact. (101 goals list)
• In transitioning from full-time to contract employment for most of my income, I reduced my work week to less than 30 hours. It’s a bittersweet accomplishment. (101 goals list)

Goals Attempted But Not Attained This Year

• My husband and I did not attend WorldCon, due to finances, and as a result we did not finish the costume we intended to make for it. (collage/101 goals list)
• The whole “losing my job” thing meant that I didn’t make an additional $10,000 this year, despite my best visualization attempts. (collage)
• My habit of daily exercise – and my “personal best” of 19 out of 30 days of a month with exercise – was not bettered during this year, despite getting a Wii Fit for Christmas 2008! I’ve found that I most enjoy outdoor activity – but I live in a place with frequent inclement weather, so I often use the weather as an excuse not to exercise. (collage/101 goals list)
• Biking around town is still a faraway goal. By a combination of walking and riding my bike, I managed to top the Hill o’ Doom (in October 2009), but doing so is still a major undertaking. (collage/101 goals list)

Goals of Questionable Status

• Do I have a new career? Here in the last days of the year, I’ve started another contract position which has the potential to turn into full-time. When I think back, a lot of the work I’ve done to pay the bills during this six months of semi-employment has been web development-related, rather than research related. So in some sense I have a new career, even if I don’t have a full-time job will all the benefits I want… yet. (collage/101 goal list)

I’m working on putting together a 2010 collage, and I’ll share that as soon as I finish it. In the meantime, how did your year-long goals or New Year’s resolutions turn out?

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I just upgraded WordPress to version 2.9. It’s a bit trickier than can be handled by Dreamhost’s one-click install – as I started this blog in one directory and moved it to another – so I had to do a manual install.

And yet, I seem not to have broken anything! Please poke around the site and confirm that this is true?

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