Hello everyone! Welcome to BirthMay 2020! Let’s grab a coffee and catch up, shall we?

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Since the stay-at-home order was extended through May (well, May 30th to be specific) in my lovely state of Illinois, I’m making coffee at home! I don’t use kcups anymore but I do have a reusable one for the Keurig as well as almond milk that I’ve recently decided I love so I’m making my own coffee!

In case you’re new, BirthMay is my annual birthday celebration where I blog every day for the month of May. This is the fourth annual BirthMay and no matter how many BirthMays you’ve been here for, thank you for your support!

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If we were having coffee I’d tell you, how excited I am about BirthMay! I kicked off the month yesterday and while I didn’t prewrite as many posts as I normally would have liked, I figured it’d be fine because of the quarantine. After all, I’m literally just at home on my electronics so hopefully doing more posts a week will work out! Well, it’s a lot more posts a week but I wanted to increase my posts anyway!

If we were having coffee I’d tell you, how unemployment is going for me! Honestly, it’s fine, not the best and not the worst. Even though I was extremely bored at my job (because there was no work), it was at least a dreaded part of the routine. Now, every day sort of feels like a weekend day, even if I try to have some sort of routine anyway. I do think that part of the reason is that there just isn’t an “end of day” signal for me now so I feel like there’s an endless amount of time to get something done. That’s also why I think writing more posts during BirthMay will help because i’ll have actual deadlines for each post and have tasks to get done!

If we were having coffee I’d tell you, it’s weird to think about how my birthday will be in quarantine. It’s on a Tuesday this year, so I wasn’t going to do anything anyway but I at least would like the option! Ah well, I do want to make brownies or something at least for a nice birthday treat. And maybe some cookies! Since I don’t have a job (I know, I’m making everything about that but I can’t help it!) I don’t think it would make sense to get myself any gifts like I normally do so I want to stick to a lower budget this year and maybe do something fun next year or when I have a steady income again. I mean, I know I never go wild with it or anything, normally only a couple hundred bucks worth of gifts to myself but that just seems silly since you never know what might happen later, you know?

If we were having coffee I’d tell you, that the job hunt is going fairly well! I haven’t really found anything I’m super interested in since I think most places are holding off on hiring right now but I have applied to a few places. I’m just happy that I really ramped up my savings in the past few months, completely by coincidence. Now I have a good amount saved which I hope can get me through for a few months until everything starts stabilizing. After that I hope I can find something soon!

If we were having coffee I’d tell you, how I recently went to the grocery stores for the first time since this all started and wow, what an experience. So before this my mom and dad would go during the day, since it was less crowded and didn’t want to wait for me to get off work or go on weekends, which I thought was fair. Since my dad started working again (he works landscape so he was off work for the winter) and I stopped working (I know, I need to stop mentioning it…) then I have had the time during the day to go! One week my mom just needed a couple things so off we went to Walmart, and yikes! There weren’t big shortages but shelves were pretty bare. I found one medium bag of flour for example but there were some small bags and a good amount of really large bags (like 10 pound bags). So stuff was available but maybe not the most common sizes or brands basically. The aisles are marked as “one way” aisles now so that hopefully people will stay 6 feet apart going down the aisle. That doesn’t always work because some people take awhile to pick something out so you have to go past them anyway within 6 feet (which, makes sense), but also some people just don’t care and go the opposite way (which, rude, unless they didn’t notice which is fine because honestly sometimes you just forget). Also some people didn’t have a mask or weren’t wearing it properly??? Even employees would have masks but have it completely under their chin or not covering their nose which confused me. Illinois just got a mandatory mask order though, so if you’re in an indoor, public place you have to wear a mask. Makes sense to me!

If we were having coffee I’d tell you, I think there are two things that really bug me about all this. Well, there’s a few things, but two main things. One, it’s weird how much uncertainty there is. I’m such a planner and so I typically try to make plans months in advance or immediately reschedule them if possible. But everything is just up in the air right now so I’m holding off on all of that for now, especially since that leads to the next thing. Two, it’s extra weird how suspicious or untrustworthy everyone out in public seems? For example, when I was at the store and someone came too close it surprised me how immediately worried I was that they might have the virus or not taking it seriously or something! Before this, I never worried about being in a store with lots of people or checking how many others are in a certain aisle. I remember many Christmas seasons stuffed in the seasonal section of Target and never thought twice about it. But now, I wonder how long it’ll take for everyone to be comfortable in crowds or just walking down the aisles at stores again. It’s honestly the strangest feeling!

If we were having coffee I’d tell you, the theme for Self Care Sundays this month! (Is this a spoiler? It might be a spoiler.) So every year I try to do Self Care Sundays and while at first it was more random self care tips, now it’s more themed per month. Last year I believe it was self care ideas by location (i.e. home, out and about, etc.). The theme this month will be about decluttering at home. Why? Well because I’m still stuck at home so there’s no point in pretending I can go anywhere and also because I need to do it, so this is a great motivation! I’ve been getting better at not being a low-key hoarder so it’s been getting easier for me to declutter and I’m hoping that I can share tips for each “category” or items. I think this might be similar to Marie Kondo’s method because I categorized the type of items that were similar together. Honestly hers is better, but I found that her method was just too extreme for me right now, so I’d rather do my own smaller version and share what I found was helpful. I also don’t do it all at once like she does because I think that would just be so overwhelming. Basically, if you really want to declutter follow her method but also please read mine if you kinda want to declutter.

If we were having coffee I’d tell you, how my resolution is going! I wanted to stop procrastinating as much as I had been doing and well, it’s going fairly well. I still put stuff off, I’m not going to lie, but overall I think I’ve been doing well. I have to admit, since I just have so much time on my hands there is really no motivation to do things as quickly as I would like. For instance, I’ve been wanting to vacuum for about a week and a half now but I keep forgetting about it until the end of the day because I just don’t think about what I meant to do and there’s always “tomorrow”. Also, I’ve used the excuse that I can’t find the vacuum for a few days (although literally, I can’t find it and I need to ask my mom where she put it because she never has a specific place for anything). But for things like unemployment I have a specific deadline (every Tuesday) where I have to go in and “certify” that I am still unemployed. I can do it any day but Tuesday is my assigned day so I do that right away on Tuesdays when I get up. It’s just weird right now but I think all things considered, I’m doing well enough.

If we were having coffee I’d tell you, I do think that my balance is off slightly. I think this is because of that weird time thing, where there’s just endless time so more of my time is put towards down time instead of productive time. However, I’ve been working towards increasing my productive time or just adding more structure again. I have to say, TikTok has been the WORST because I keep going on the app and then suddenly I’ve spent an hour and a half just scrolling. Instead I’ve been doing longer ballet or yoga activities, reading or playing video games (which is still down time but I feel it’s better than scrolling through TikTok), cleaning (the goal is to clean up at least a few small things a day and do a big area complete clean a week), and now blogging more. I just want more productivity and less aimless scrolling in my life.

If we were having coffee I’d tell you, that overall, I think I’ve been really positive! Back when I was furloughed everyone I talked to kept commenting on that because I would honestly tell them that I wasn’t upset or worried and would let them know not to worry for a multitude of reasons. Then there’s also the fact that I know that I could be annoyed or mad about having to stay home but honestly I’m perfectly fine with it if I’m helping stop the spread of the virus. Plus, even though I wanted to get into embroidery, I reminded myself that I have plenty of other craft stuff that I could work on and even non-crafting activities to keep busy because embroidery is not essential. Instead of focusing on the fact that I can’t do something I’m focusing on what I can do, so I’m happy with that!

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And that’s what I’d share with you if we were having coffee! Hopefully it wasn’t too annoying that it was all quarantine stuff basically, but is there really anything else going on that we could talk about? Well, you let me know in the comments, quarantine related or not! What would you tell me if we were having coffee?

Thanks for reading!

Pamela

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