End of Year Reflections

 It’s been extremely busy at work. Kevin and I work for an inventory service, and everyone is doing year end inventories. The workload does seem to have lightened up a little- we are still working every single day, but we are getting home earlier than we were before Christmas. My last two checks were really nice!  Yesterday, we did inventories at warehouses that are wholesale companies that supply convenient stores. It was kind of intense. The last warehouse we went to had a manager that says he does sell to the public, but doesn’t “broadcast that.”  He says he sells to the public if it’s someone he knows, and he only charges a 5% markup. I wonder if he considers us “people he knows.”  I’d love to go in there and buy large quantities of stuff I like at wholesale prices. But I don’t want to rock the boat. 

I am setting goals for 2025. I haven’t set New Year goals since before I graduated college and started having panic attacks in 2014. I divided the goals into categories.  I may actually blog each category at the end of each week or month in 2025. Here are the categories:

Health and Fitness: I decided to set a goal of 10,000 steps a day for days that I am not working inventory. This is because a day off gives me time to go to the park and energy to do 10,000 steps. On days that I am working inventory, the step goal is only 7,500. This is because I would likely be too tired or not have time to go to the park. By the time I get home from inventory, my step count will already be between 2,000-5,000 steps depending on what I’m doing that day. I would just walk around the house or outside on the property I live on. 

I should also be more serious about tracking calories. I lost 20 pounds in 2024, and I used a calorie tracking app called “lose it” to do so. I learned that the only thing that “works” for weight loss is a calorie deficit. This can look like a million different things based on the individual, what that person likes and dislikes and does and doesn’t do. If a person says “that didn’t work for me” when it comes to losing weight, it’s because they did something else to make up for the calorie deficit. Tracking my calories on that app was more of a learning experience too- there are a lot of things that give the impression of being healthy that have a lot of calories, and vice versa. 

Financial: I would like to pay off my car in 2025, and this is definitely doable. I don’t know how much I owe on it exactly, but I’ll check my payoff quote in March or April after I make a few more payments. My car is a hybrid, and I am still on the original battery even though I’m 40,000 miles past what Google says the battery will last until. If I have to replace the battery this year, that will damper the plan to pay it off, but I could probably still do it in 2025 even if that’s the case. I have the place picked out that I want to purchase a battery from, even though I’ve never been there. They only let people come by appointment, and they won’t make an appointment unless your battery light is on. The guy I talked to said he drives the same car as me, but with 50,000 more miles on it than I have now- and he’s still on the same battery. Since I almost never drive to work anymore (I just ride with Kevin), I may not even have to replace it until 2030. 

The biggest event of 2025 will be my daughter’s graduation from high school and her 18th birthday on June 11!  I’m really looking forward to her being a legal adult so I can get rid of the custody order I have now with her dad and stepmom. When she’s 18, she can come and go as she pleases. That’s going to be so nice !  

And last but not least, the main goal of 2025 will be to keep unlearning and relearning. I have discovered in many ways lately how so many things I was taught about the world in general were simply wrong. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s a good thing. The education in calories that the lose it app gave me is just one minor example, even though that in and of itself was huge. Maybe later I’ll make a blog post about the unlearning.