I feel behind at everything right now. This blog again feels uninspired to me. But I’m determined to keep plugging away at it and chronicling our journey. With our recent job changes, it feels like we are somewhat adrift as we work towards a relocation. It is a relocation we feel somewhat conflicted about, even more so due to the pandemic.
July at once raced by and felt like it went on forever. A lot happened, yet nothing happened. During this month, I very much felt like a hamster on a wheel–running furiously but getting nowhere.
Even this monthly update that seemed to sustain my writing for the last few months seems unusually brief. The pandemic and political situation in the United States continues to distress me. For now, I think it is enough to survive and keep placing one foot in front of the next. There will be time to run in the future.
As for spending, July was another month of higher than normal spending. We had a few large vet bills thanks to an unexpected illness in one of our cats. The aforementioned relocation also has some costs associated with it.
Due to the pandemic and associated bad economic news, I have not been frequently checking our investment balances. I was pleasantly surprised to see where we ended the month of July. With the crazy volatility and continued high unemployment, who knows what’s to come. For now, we stick to what’s automated, trust our planner and focus on forward progress.
Here is a look at our spending and investments chart:
Here are my July goals:
- Maintain run streak
- Done!
- Make progress in search for housing in new city
- Done! More to come on this.
- Maintain current journal progress
- I missed a few weekend days, especially over the Independence Day holiday, but caught up on the missed days. I’m counting this as done!
- Cross one item off 101 tasks list
- Done! I laundered our comforter in our compact front loading washer at home. It went surprisingly well, even if it did take several cycles to dry (which was expected).
Let’s set some goals for August:
- Run 5km a day
- Meet AppleWatch activity challenge
- Cross one item off 101 tasks list
- Weekly Instagram post