I find I tend to alternate between feeling like things are under control to feeling cranky and overwhelmed and stressed out. Possibly that’s just adult life…I am a major planner and when things go wrong, as they invariably do, my first impulse is to get annoyed and blame myself for failing to plan something properly rather than say, hey, you know what, things don’t always go according to plan.

This is where “same me” comes in. It’s not like this is new. I mean, really, I’m not getting younger, and my habits are becoming more and more set. It doesn’t mean I can’t change, and honestly, aren’t we supposed to be mellowing as we get older? One of my colleagues today told me one of her “secrets of adulthood” (Gretchen Rubin’s phrase, not my colleague’s) was to not stress out or worry about things that she can’t do anything about. I was worrying about scheduling some things and how I wasn’t hearing back from people I needed to hear back from…and right. It wasn’t my fault. I took some deep breaths, wrote a few kindly worded emails, and then I went ahead and made some scheduling decisions. Things will either work out or they won’t, and when they don’t work out, that’s certainly not the end of the world.

To be fair though, I don’t want to be one of those “oh, it’ll all work out” type of people, because my observation is that those people are the ones the rest of us are waiting on! And then yeah, it does work out, because the rest of us did all the hard work and scheduling. But there’s no reason to be constantly stressed out. At least that’s what I keep telling myself. The fact is that we are not talking about life and death here, only violin lessons.

Otherwise, life is good! We had a lovely weekend: breakfast at IKEA followed by shopping. I have many ideas for the house, if we decided to remodel. Bad ideas, but ideas nonetheless. I don’t have that “eye” for redecorating and am just really good at making do and having stacks of books and music. Then Saturday night we saw the Bad Plus at Jazz at the Bistro and it was a very fun show. I think I’ve seen that group for 4 years straight now and each show I enjoy more.

We sort of jumped on the bandwagon of prepared meals. My friends gave me a free week to Hello Fresh and we got three meals on Thursday. The meals ranged from ok to very good, but what they all shared was that they were quick enough and easy, and you didn’t have to shop and plan, which is fun sometimes but other times…so exhausting! I certainly would never plan for three new meals in a week! The portions were quite big and the meals seemed quite healthy and well balanced. We tried the vegetarian box, 3 meals for 2 people, and there wasn’t any choice, you just took what there was for the week. I thought there could have been more proteins (legumes, tofu, etc) but that was my only real complaint. I do think there was a lot of packaging, comparing to buying similar things at the grocery store though, but it wasn’t overwhelming. If you are interested I have a coupon code for $40 off one week so you’d get the week for about $20. It’s pretty easy to cancel, though I haven’t…I’ve only “paused”. But you can cancel your account online too.

Two of the meals. I’m quite the food photographer, I know. I loved that last one, with pumpkin seeds on it.

I’m dog-sitting for my friend April. Her dog, Olive is a total cutie. (So is Mackenzie of course, of course!)

Tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of my cat Oistrakh’s death. I still miss her, and sometimes I’ll see something out of the corner of my eye (a sweater on a bed for instance) and think it’s her. She was the best kitty!

Anyway, I better get a few more things checked off the ol’ to-do list before I teach. Hope your week is going well!