Wow it’s been a while since my last post. I blame 2020 being 2020 for that. I honestly needed a break from being so present for others and get back to doing what builds me up. Of course that meant reading some of my favourite books again (Significance) and re-watching shows and videos that just keep me calm and happy while the crazy world around me kept doing it’s crazy thing. Since my last post in August I made the conscious effort to just pull back a bit from everything. I stopped looking to Twitter every half an hour to know what was happening in the world, (Twitter got extremely toxic when people stopped listening to each other and just attacked everyone at every chance), I stopped trying to think of posts for Instagram that didn’t have any meaning at the time (hardly anything feels super important during a pandemic), and I made the decision to give my blog here a bit of a break. I just felt a bit drained. So here’s what I’ve been up to during all this time off.
For the remainder of August I honestly just got back into reading books that made me feel good and watching TV shows and movies that I was meaning to watch for a while, like All Together Now on Netflix, Emily in Paris, and Cursed. I also started over watching Shadowhunters and Hawaii Five-0. Watching over these was simply just to feel good watching them again. I guess it’s the same feeling as reading over my favourite books. We tried new recipes, watched shows together and reorganized some things in the apartment that we were putting off, like our office.
September brought back work interviews thankfully. This was around the time some restrictions were being lifted around Southern Ontario so it felt good to get back to that. Things got a bit crazy where I had 3 or 4 interviews in one week so that was stressful but I was still grateful to have all of them. Interviews continued through October with some call backs at some promising places. By the end of October I was also starting to plan a bit for Christmas. I think this was when we came to terms that Christmas was going to be different and we need to start planning for that. That meant that Claire was coming to visit again and I probably wasn’t going to be working again during Christmas. I was also considering stopping with the job applications for a bit and take a break for the rest of the year. We found creative ways to celebrate my birthday which I really enjoyed and I made a trip to Toronto to get my hair done. I was really enjoying planning out things to do with Claire when she got here (all those plans got cancelled with lockdown) and we booked her trip for her to stay for an entire month!! Literally the day after we booked her flight and make plans, I got a job offer!! YAAAAYYYYY!!!
There was a really quick turn around between getting the offer and starting, a bit more than a week so things got a bit crazy for a while. With all of this going on, from the gauntlet of interviews, to preparing to work (another trip to Toronto) I really fell off the wagon of studying. During my break from everything I really got a lot of studying done and was planning to take my exam in early January at the rate I was studying at. Luckily I procrastinate and didn’t book the exam because once work started I barely studied. I’m still working on creating some kind of schedule for working and studying that works for me but I’ve found a couple hours here and there to get some work in. Getting back into working had it’s own frustrations of starting a job remotely in a global pandemic, trying to prove myself, and for some reason I thought I would start back at the same place I was when I stopped working over a year before. Once I accepted that I needed to give myself a break it was quite amazing how much easier things got.
December brought a bit of normalcy as I got used to working and got excited for Christmas. As usual, working in finance meant some longer hours close to the end of the year and further into January but overall I think it’s going well. It feels good to be busy and to get good feedback even when I have minor freak outs behind the scenes. Christmas itself was a lot of fun. We made far too much food as usual and really had a relaxing couple of days off.
January honestly flew by. We got through our list of things to do together which unsurprisingly revolved around food and then Claire left and we slowly went back to normal life with just the two of us.
And that’s about everything. We’re hopefully coming out of our 2nd lockdown soon so I’ll finally be able to get my hair done and then we have to deal with moving to Toronto! For now I’ll be looking back at all the good that happened in 2020 and make some goals for each month for me to work on to keep myself on track. 🙂
Carla Jones 
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