Gratitude

Starting the Year with a Rest

Simple, cozy tasks and a snowy walk

I’m grateful to have celebrated New Year’s Eve at home, watching a comedy my girlfriend chose and having a homemade dinner that I cooked. Then on New Year’s Day, we had a nice time walking to a park in the neighborhood and later going to the store and getting coffee/hot chocolate.

It was an easy NYE dinner, just toasted sandwiches on sourdough with fries and coleslaw. It’s been cold and snowy here, and sometimes simple, filling food tastes best in that weather.

The movie was The Other Woman with Cameron Diaz, and it was funnier than I thought it would be. It’s a comedy about infidelity and revenge, and not very original, but Leslie Mann is really funny in this movie, and the dynamic between her character and Cameron Diaz’s creates a light kind of screwball physical comedy that I didn’t expect.

On New Year’s Day, the weather started to warm up, and it was just above freezing as we went for a walk. We could feel the packed snow on the sidewalks starting to melt. The photo in this post is from our walk, looking across Puget Sound (part of the Salish Sea).

We walked to a park that I’ve visited since I was a kid, and it was quiet and pretty — lots of snow on the ground though most of it had been blown from the tree branches by the wind. Some snow clung to tree trunks.

Later in the day we went to the store and bought ingredients for a warming noodle soup. We ended up buying tofu dumplings to have in the soup instead of noodles, though we also bought noodles for some pasta we wanted to make on Monday. We bought Pasta Zero noodles, which are made from mushrooms and are a nice alternative to heavier carbs.

I’ve been wanting a peppermint hot chocolate on and off since Thanksgiving, but we kept getting thwarted — the Starbucks would have closed earlier than we thought, or one time they were open but had run out of chocolate syrup. Finally, on New Year’s Day, I had the treat I’d wanted, and it, too, was better than I expected as Starbucks now has oat milk, which I find creamier than almond milk and extra nice for hot chocolate.

On New Year’s Day, I talked with my girlfriend about the recent post in Thank You Notes in which Trista asks: “What wondrous words will help you create a beautiful life all around you in 2022?” I’d been thinking about the post but hadn’t come up with my words yet, and it helped to talk.

For my words for 2022, I chose calm and health.

I came up with calm because I’d been feeling some overwhelm in 2021, and as we brainstormed, calm seemed like the clearest opposite of overwhelm, or perhaps not its opposite but a helpful response to it.

As for health, I’ve been working on some chronic health issues over the last year, such as low back pain and high triglycerides. Health stuff for me is a longer story than I want to detail in this post, but I’ll say that I want to focus on improved and abiding health not just for me but for people in my life, too.

On January 2 and 3, my restful weekend continued as my girlfriend helped me clean and reorganize my kitchen and dining room. It’s so much more open now. We also went shopping and found a cool new rug for my hallway.

Of course, we watched some TV on our extra-long weekend, too, getting caught up in streaming the show FBI on Amazon Prime. It’s produced by Dick Wolf from Law & Order, and Sela Ward plays a uniquely compassionate supervisor on the show. It’s kind of a 21st-century twist on the old style of cop show.

Last but not least, I taught my girlfriend how to play the card game Skip-Bo, and we played a bunch of rounds of it. I grew up playing cards with my family, and my girlfriend likes card games, too, yet we’d never sat down and played cards together. I’m so glad we did, and I look forward to more fun, low-key, and unplugged activities like this.

How have you been spending the first few days of the new year? Please do share in the comments if you feel like it!