Looking Forward, Looking Backward – June 2023 and a half-yearly check-in

I learned something new this week – July 2nd is the middle of the year. I usually do a check-in each month with my intentions but since we are over half-way through the year I thought I’d also look at how I’m going over the course of the year.

Daily Routines: my intention in this area was to try out new habits each month to see what I wanted to include going forward. This has not been going well over the last few months, and May’s intention to do foam rolling/mobility was an epic fail. I’m thinking that I’m not really buying into this intention so I’m going to scrap it for the rest of the year and go with the flow because that’s how I like to roll. I’ll probably start a logging process to see what I’m doing and how often.

Three times a week is a habit: I chose to concentrate on blogging, photography and gardening for this and I’ve been largely successful when I’ve been at home. Over our holidays, I probably only blogged a couple of times a week but that’s OK in my book.

Read 52 books. I read another three books in June, and I’m on track with this goal. I also had on my list for the year to join the theological library and I’m going to look into that this month. I’ve got a good pile of reservations ready at the library that need to be picked up.

Travel: Our trip to Wilson’s Prom was great. Fantastic weather and just a beautiful place. We’re just back from Queensland, and I want to finish off some trip reports here over the next few weeks. Our trip to Israel was postponed to next year. Our trip to the New York Marathon has expanded. I had listed in my intentions to start planning our son’s trip to Germany that had been cancelled due to COVID and that we were considering doing in October 2024. With his work leave blackouts, that wasn’t going to work, so we have now tacked it after New York. That trip has now ballooned to Washington DC, New York City, Itlay (Hubby visiting clients) and then Germany with our son. In June I wanted to finish booking all the accommodation for that trip which we have done.

Home: At the start of the year, I wanted to organise the kitchen and laundry cupboards, hang all the pictures, start a gallery of travel photos and finish planting the garden. I’ve finished all these. We have some joinery installed in the study on Tuesday, but other than that, I don’t expect to add anything else to the list. We are keeping an eye out for some artwork for a couple of blank walls, but it’s not something that needs to be done in a hurry.

Photography: I’ve been doing my In the Garden project each month. (Apart from June, when we weren’t home, I got out and practised a lot while we were away.) I’ve completed two of five photobooks, and I’ve sorted through the kid’s memorabilia. I still need to scan the items I want to include in their photo books, and then I’ll box them up and hand them over for them to deal with. I haven’t looked at the video from our trip to Tasmania. I did get out and about at Noosa to take some photos. I had also planned to finish our son’s primary school photobook and start our daughter’s, but I didn’t touch them while we were away, so I’ll make that a priority this month.

Round the Neighbourhood: I’ve learned the names of the staff at our local cafe, and I’m now over 50% finished running the streets of Brighton and Elwood. I haven’t done anything to learn more about our neighbourhood. I had hoped to get along the Open House Melbourne tours of the Brighton Cemetary, but it clashes with a cross-country race. If I can, I’ll try to make it work; otherwise, I’ll start looking at moving forward with this intention next month.

Sustainability: I haven’t got a bike, but I still want to do this. I’ve been using a grocery delivery service with returnable containers so that has been helpful in reducing our waste, I also make it to a local bulk store fairly regularly. I’m going to add to this to start a worm farm.

Run: 2500km for the year. I ran just over 1000 km in the first half of the year. I don’t think I’ll make it to 2500km, but I’ll try to run more than 1000 km for the year’s second half. I took over a minute off my previous PB at the Gold Coast marathon. I’m not sure whether I’ll run another half this year. I plan to finish the cross-country season and run the 15km DeCastella run, which is organised by our club. I want to get some solid mileage before our trip overseas, and doing Melbourne Half-Marathon will interfere with that. I’ll probably see how I’m going closer to the date.

Swim in the ocean five times over the summer, which I did. After my success with this, I decided to try again up north, and I managed four swims while I was away. I won’t be joining the diehard ocean swimmers down here. Current water temp 10.8C. This intention is done for the year, but it served me well.

Entertain more friends and family at our place. This has been going along well, and we have a plan to fire up our ethanol fire pit for the first time later this month with some friends and some mulled wine.

And lastly, I found a dentist I can walk to.

We had a couple of other end-of-financial-year tasks on our list last month, including topping up my super and finalising our giving, which we have done. We still need to look at our wills, but this task got overshadowed by some major work stresses. Hubby has a work trip this month, so I don’t think we will be tackling these in July. I do need to address my bra situation, which has entered crisis territory. I must tackle this in July.

How are you feeling about the middle of the year? Is time flying? Has it been a good one so far?