At the end of the summer in 2023 after my best friend/love interest left for a 5 month long work trip of sorts, the loneliness started to set in, I started consistently getting flowers for myself. Just the 5 or 10 cut tulips from the grocery store mostly, sometimes I would branch out, usually not. For awhile I was getting cut Lily's, also at the grocery store, but then realized how toxic they are for cats. I had two at the time, so I decided to give those up. I love tulips now, they've been my favorites for a couple months now. I never hated them, I've always thought of them as pretty but I rarely spent time looking them or really appreciating them. Now I really can't help myself when I see them in the store, especially if there is a new color, or type, that I haven't seen and had in my house before. I found some pink ones with curly ends, and more recently some orange and yellow ones with many sets of petals on one flower, making it look sort of like it was just pretending to be another flower. Anyhow, they have become my absolute favorite. I was keeping track of the accumulated price of all of these non-essential purchases, but eventually gave up for a mixture of two reasons, I didn't want to know how much it all was in the end, and I was getting tired of hand stamping the prices by hand with single letter stamps. Stupid reasons honestly, the hand stamping was easily avoidable. Either way, having flowers consistently in my space I think was overall beneficial for my mental health. I have no real proof of this, and it honestly probably is much more correlated with not drinking. Whatever it is it's working.
Although flowers are a beautiful edition to my home and I love looking at them, one step further to something even more fulfilling and exciting for me is growing my own starts, vegetables and flowers. I have been keeping a "garden diary" to keep track of what I am starting and when to hopefully use as future reference. The garden is a work in progress and last year I grew starts and planted them but didn't get much of any harvest at all because my soil was very infertile. It kept things alive, but did not help them thrive or produce at all. This year after never actually following through with the soil test, I am just going to use chicken manure, my new worm farm's "black gold", and some natural fertilizers and hope that caring more about all of it will pay off this year. I have not harvested any "black gold" from my worm bin yet but it's in the works. I am still getting the hang of it, I have heard that harvesting the worm bin is the hardest part, making sure you don't get all the worms in with the soil and making sure all the food is well broken down... I'm not entirely sure, I guess I will figure that out sometime soon. The weather has been fucking with us a bit it seems, there was snow around my birthday, which has happened before, but not recently. I had pea starts that had been waiting for the perfect time to go outside and right when it seemed like a great time, their first night outside it froze over, surprisingly they lived. I am about ready to put in my next set of starts. I may use this as another way to keep track of that process and progress. I should have enough time for it to be a main focus for awhile, at least for the first 3 months in order to get everything ready to plant, and planted... after that it's easy sailing.
If the days start getting nice enough I might even be able to convince myself to get out there in the mornings, and never being hungover anymore makes a huge difference in that. That brings me to another thing I am really loving right now, sobriety. Something I never really thought would be something I would do and enjoy. As of 2024 I have not had a drink. It feels good to say, and it feels good in general. Mentally and physically it has been a game changer, for other people close to me it has changed our relationship for the better. 71 days today, I haven't not drank for that long since I was about 16 or so. I don't think I'll go back. Once I go a year without it I will probably feel like I might as well just continue not drinking, maybe it will be only for big occasions, I am trying not to make any promises to myself that far out because my mind may change by then. All I know for sure is that not drinking feels awesome. I am not usually one to keep up with new years resolutions, this is the first one that has made it out of the first month. I think new years resolutions are stupid and I always have, I just feel like most of them never make it all the way, maybe that's just me.
Anyway Kevin returned from his trip in mid January, I was committed to not drinking already but I think to other people around me it was still in the beginning stage I had been at before before failing and going right back to drinking. Our relationship was immediately different, some of it being me not drinking, some of it because he had been gone for so long and it was so nice to see him again, but all of it was positive. I think about it often, how much I care for him and how special he is, therefore he is most certainly on my "everything I love" list. I won't go into it much, I don't really need to, and I am not that type of person online but as I got made fun of for saying so often when we first started dating, "Kevin is awesome", and it was true then and it's still true now and that's really all there is to it.
(This is an old draft that I thought may be worth posting!)
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