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  • 107. What is your favorite Thanksgiving food?

    107. What is your favorite Thanksgiving food?

    Did you know Thanksgiving will be in a week after tomorrow?

    My oldest son doesn’t really like anything about Thanksgiving. He endures it. My youngest son loves mashed potatoes, and so he loves Thanksgiving.

    I pretty much love Thanksgiving food. I like turkey and cranberries, rolls and mashed potatoes, stuffing and sweet potatoes. I like pies and whipped cream and even green beans and carrots.

    I am fine with the boxed and canned and cheap versions of everything. I don’t need it to be homemade and fancy, and sometimes it sort of ruins the dish when it is trying to be something different.

    Oh, and I really do like Jell-O.

    Growing up, my mom came up with a rainbow Jell-O recipe, which consists of 12 layers, in rainbow order, of Jell-O. It happened every year, and Thanksgiving just isn’t the same without it. Rainbow Jell-O is Thanksgiving for our family.

    Well, we all got older and married and went to to other family’s Thanksgiving celebrations, and now instead of sharing a large pan of rainbow Jell-O with each other, we often make our own and bringing it to lots of different celebrations.

    This year, I’ve found all my colors, and I’m traveling, and very much hoping that my Jell-O can endure some time in the cooler and uncertain if there will be space in a fridge for it. But I’m going to try.

    When I make my own Thanksgiving, the food is exactly how I like it. And then there are other years when the turkey is really overcooked, or the stuffing is rice pilaf instead of stuffing, or there aren’t enough mashed potatoes, or the sweet potatoes don’t have enough sugar, or dinner is two hours late and eaten on my lap on the front porch with a plastic fork.

    But I can just remember that I can come home, and cook my own meal, even pour some more rainbow Jell-O. Thanksgiving is about the food, but the people who make it are more important.

  • 106. How do I learn statistics?

    I took statistics for the first time just a few years ago, and it seemed quite difficult. There weren’t right answers; there were confidence intervals. Equations had to be memorized and I didn’t understand why they worked. And instead of just math, there was lots of information like designing experiments and what sort of data is better than other sorts.

    But the class was designed quite well, and I got through it. Then I took econometrics (which is statistics for economics), which turned out to be more of a coding class, since there is no reason to do statistics by hand if you can have a computer program figure it all out for you.

    Statistics is the backbone of science, really. (And whether or not that is a good thing is debatable.) It’s not entirely useful for everyday living, except to understand what scientists are doing. It is necessary to learn and understand if a person wants to complete graduate-level projects.

    I think one of the better ways of learning statistics is to learn about basic concepts and how they are useful (confidence intervals and P values and statistical significance). Then, you learn how to code (using R or similar), in order to avoid doing the math.

    But then the only way to really learn statistics is to do statistics: to have a data set and to want conclusions from that data set, and then to figure out how to wrangle those numbers.

    It’s a tiny bit like you can’t really learn how to parent until you are parenting. And you can’t really learn how to do statistics until you are doing statistics.

  • 105. What was your favorite toy growing up?

    105. What was your favorite toy growing up?

    My kids love Legos, tape, paper, boxes, Barbies, Pokemon cards, toy kitchen stuff, random building stuff, and a few action figures. They play boards and card games and jump on the trampoline.

    Growing up, I mostly remember playing with stuffed animals and in the playhouse in the backyard. Lots of pretending. I collected teddy bears and my twin sister collected cats. My older sister collected koalas/Popples, my older brother liked chipmunks, my younger sister still has a large panda collection, and one of my younger brothers collected tigers. The other younger brother like Barney and dinosaurs.

    So it was a thing in our household. My kids don’t quite get as attached and interested in stuffed animals. But they do have Barbies, and I wasn’t really allowed to have Barbies growing up. My mom didn’t like them being naked, which is fair, because almost all the Barbies I now own have built-in clothing.

    I am surprised though that I didn’t play with Legos more when I was young. My brothers played with Legos, but I didn’t get interested in them until I was an adult. I only really like Legos when I’m following the directions and building exactly what I’m supposed to. So I can’t really touch them, since my kids just always make a mess of things.

    What are your favorite toys?

  • 104. When do we need faith?

    104. When do we need faith?

    To this extent, it is quite correct to say that belief or faith is the element of all certainty

    Johann Gottlieb Fichte, On the Basis of Our Belief in a Divine Governance of the World

    We need faith for everything, and we use it a lot more often than we realize.

    If faith is believing without really knowing, then we put faith in all sorts of things.

    How often have you read something or heard something for a friend and accepted it without thought? Why are you so certain of the knowledge you have?

    Certainty is based in some degree of faith, in taking a leap and hoping that we’re right.

  • 103. What is one way to achieve my goals?

    103. What is one way to achieve my goals?

    Set more realistic goals.

    I’m working on writing a book, and I had a goal to get through my current draft and then complete another draft before the end of the year. In my head, I have all this time to write.

    In reality, there is a lot of my life that takes up more time than I realize: being a mother, renovating my home, and the simple fact that I am not capable of being productive for 16 hours a day. I need down time too, and I’m not a particularly high-energy person.

    So I changed my goal: I’ll finish one draft by the end of the year (I have 2.5 chapters left to edit), and then I’ll start on another draft in January. And my brain is telling me, “No, Heather! You can do more! You can work on this faster!”

    But right now, writing is down the priority list behind taking care of my family, renovating my home, volunteering at the school, and more. And that’s okay.

    So I’m trying to make my goal a little bit more manageable, with the hope that when it is more realistic, I’ll be more motivated to work on it more often, since I won’t be constantly behind.

    ,

  • 102. What do all successful people have in common?

    102. What do all successful people have in common?

    Most people who ask this type of question is looking for some sort of pattern that they can replicate in order to be more successful.

    I don’t have that type of answer. But I do have an definite answer, even if it’s not that useful:

    Luck.

    All successful people are able to be successful because they were lucky at some point in some way. They were able to be on the fortunate side of statistical probability.

    So success is not all hard work and talent. Success always includes a bit of luck. Hard work can make it more probable that someone is successful, but you can’t guarantee a certain amount success without just being lucky.

  • 101. How do I keep a budget?

    For years, Dillon and I were saving up to buy a house. We never actually bought a house, but we did renovate one, and we’ve been able to spend over $90,000 on the renovation without going into debt. I’m sort of proud of that, but I also recognize the unique circumstances we’ve had to be able to do that: we literally had free housing for around seven years.

    I’ve tracked money spent and kept a monthly budget for my entire adult life. I use Microsoft Money to track expenses, and I have a spreadsheet to keep track of my budget and goals.

    I haven’t always been great about keeping in the budget that I set. I don’t love putting limits on each individual spending category, but I do try to have savings goals, forecast expenses, and set financial goals for myself.

    I try to live frugally, and ask myself whether I really need something or not. I don’t eat a ton of meat and I don’t eat out at restaurants very often. I don’t buy candy or soda very often either. I try to wear out clothes and only buy clothing that I really need, and to find it secondhand. I look for deals and discounts when I need to, but more often, I just try to limit buying things. And I really try to avoid the attitude that I deserve to buy things.

    Sometimes I do better than other times. Sometimes I spend too much money and I get a bit impulsive. I’m not perfect at all.

    So how do you make and keep a budget?

  • 100. What do you love to do?

    What do you love to do?

    I love to:

    • Read books
    • Take classes
    • Learn things, like economics and math and philosophy and science and random other things that seem interesting
    • Write blog posts
    • Write novels
    • Write about life and what I learn
    • Play with my kids
    • Spend time outside
    • Play board/card games
    • Talk to neighbors and friends
    • Visit family members
    • Assemble furniture
    • Watch television and YouTube videos
    • Eat something that I have baked/cooked
    • Help someone else
    • Design my home
    • Work on my home
    • Work on my yard
    • Play the piano and organ
    • Take/edit photographs

  • 99. Do I even like influencers?

    My two social media platforms of choice are YouTube and Instagram. I follow a lot of people who on those platforms to make content and get paid for it, usually through advertising.

    Now, I don’t actually know these people and I can’t judge them personally. I can, however, judge their content to decide it I want to follow it or not.

    Sometimes I learn a lot from following people. There are good educational videos on YouTube. And I’ve learned a lot about home renovation and DIY and design from Instagram.

    But I was on the social media today, and I just didn’t want to see other people live their lives and value things that I don’t value very much.

    Some people have their fancy homes and their fancy vacations. Some people have eyelash extensions and clothing brands. Some people have the best productivity hacks and seem to have everything figured out and are happy all the time. Some people live alternative lifestyles, milking cows or running through sparkling meadows. Most influencers obviously have a whole lot more money than I do.

    And my life is messy and sort of embarrassing sometimes. I am interested in obscure things that few people actually care about. I don’t have things figured out and I struggle with a lack of direction and insecurity. I like living in a really boring way.

    My best moments of living are with my children. My best conversations are with family members and neighbors. Sometimes I wonder if I would be happier if I just closed out of social media.

    This isn’t a new social media problem. Before social media, we had television and radio and magazines and books and newspapers that told us how to live. Influencer is a new name for something that has existed for ages: people who we don’t know telling us how to live our lives.

    And in some ways, social media is better, because I can always unfollow the voices that I don’t want to here. There are more options, meaning I can find and seek out voices that resonate more. But that also means that I can find myself in an echo chamber, without learning and growing and seeing new perspectives.

    I think my conclusion is I only like influencers on rare occasion, and mostly to educate me about something I didn’t know about.

    I don’t want to be told how to live, and I don’t want to live like anyone else. So most of the time, I’m just happier if I spend time with the people who are in front of me.

  • 98. What are useful categories to help set better goals?

    Most of us have heard of these four:

    1. Spiritual
    2. Physical
    3. Social
    4. Intellectual

    And those are awesome, but I wanted some more detail. So I came up with the following list:

    1. Spiritual
    2. Physical
    3. Emotional
    4. Marriage
    5. Family and kids
    6. Relationships and service
    7. Education and learning
    8. Career, contributing, creating
    9. Home and garden
    10. Finances
    11. Leisure

    I don’t think one category is necessarily more important than another category, but I did put them in a specific order. Starting with the spiritual gives you a good foundation and guidance for everything else. Then I need energy and physical health to be able to do everything I want to do, and putting my physical body in order helps with my emotions and focus. I have to take care of my mental health and make sure I’m functioning well inside before I can start looking outward.

    I feel like building up a better marriage is one of the most important relationships I have: having a good marriage enables me to be a better mother. And I need to take care of my kids and my own family before I can look outward.

    But then I do try to look outward and be a good friend and neighbor and help other people. And I want to learn and educate myself, both to be an example to my kids, and to be able to help other people. And because learning is just awesome. With everything I learn, I want to build up a career and create things that help contribute to the world and make it a better place.

    I also need to build up a good foundation in my home, keeping it clean and fixed up and functional for my family. And I need to make sure that my finances are in order so that I am prepared for whatever happens in life.

    Finally, I listed leisure time, because it’s good to be intentional about free time, and to spend time playing and doing things I enjoy.

    Sometimes I just write to-do lists. But I improve more when I use these categories to intentionally set goals and take care of myself.