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Sometimes I think I have too high of expectations for myself, particularly when I’m planning. I think I can do twenty things in a day, even when it’s impossible. But it seems possible.

Then in the day-to-day decisions, I don’t always choose the right thing. I get lazy or distracted. I don’t meet my goals.

Do I need to change my own expectations of myself?

I want to push myself to work hard and make good choices. I don’t want to compromise that.

But the difference between my plans and my reality is very large sometimes. And I get discouraged.

Should I change my plans?

Should I keep my lofty goals and somehow figure out how not to get discouraged when I fail to achieve what I want?

Or should I just make better choices throughout my day so I’m not disappointing myself so much?

My son made a toy duck today from a toilet paper roll. He wanted it before he went to bed, but he couldn’t find it. I told him to look for it and ask his siblings. No one knew where it was. He went to bed without it.

And later, after he was asleep, I found out that I had accidentally been sitting on it the whole time.

I was with a fifth grader and we were doing some fluency reading at school. One minute timer and he just had to read as much as the passage as he could.

He kept insisting that he wasn’t good at reading.

But he read just fine–the only problem was that when he came to hard words, he would sigh and say something like, “I’m not good at this,” or, “This is hard.” He was taking a lot of time in reinforcing his bad attitude.

I wouldn’t let my daughter say she wasn’t good at math or she didn’t like it. Math is math, and you can’t really hate it–because it’s the one non-subjective subject that is founded on basic logic. There is no nuance in learning the right answers. You just learn it, step by step, and the only problems come when you skip steps.

The other day, I asked her what subject she liked. And she, a little sheepishly, admitted that she liked math. Memorizing multiplication tables was not her favorite thing, but she was liking doing things like decimals and long division.

Attitude means so much in learning. If you think you can’t learn something, you never will. If you think you are bad at something, you waste so much mental energy that could be spent learning and growing.

Having the right attitude opens up your mind and makes it receptive to learning new things. It’s sort half of learning–just believing you can learn.

I wish we would never label kids as struggling, or give them grades that tell them they can’t do something well. Just because they aren’t on the same level as someone else their own age does not mean they can’t become good at something. If we help to instill belief in themselves, that they can learn and grow, then they have such a bigger chance of succeeding.

In many areas, there aren’t enough homes to meet supply. In my community, a house that goes up for rent is rented out within a few days with nothing more than a sign posted out front.

I have considered at times that I could use my mountain home as a cabin or short-term rental and then live somewhere closer to the city. Many people do this. My county is so full of second homes that they literally have two different property tax rates: if your home is a primary residence, you get a huge discount.

There are so many homes sitting vacant while people struggle to figure out where to live. There are people overwhelmed with rent and mortgage payments while a few wealthy people enjoy having a second home just for fun.

I want this home I live in to remain a primary residence. I feel like this is the only responsible thing to do.

No one needs a second home. It’s a huge luxury, and it feels like one we can’t afford in our society right now. If all the rich people and all the investors would take those empty homes and open them up to people that need them, so many lives would be blessed and it would start to solve the affordable housing crisis.

It’s daylight saving time soon, and that means the evenings will be even more cold and dark than they are right now.

And it’s hard. Sometimes we turn on the TV a lot because we don’t know what else to do. And watching some TV is fine, but I don’t really want to spend most of my evenings.

So what else can we do?

• Board and card games
• Going somewhere: shopping, eating, library, visiting others
• Looking at stars
• Reading–alone and together
• Cooking and baking
• Sign up for sports/classes/etc.
• Starting a new hobby
• Carpentry/building/housework
• Cleaning/organizing
• Listen to music
• Serving and thinking about someone else
• Creating something new: writing and drawing and arts and crafts
• Go to bed early
• Family home evening
• Singing and playing instruments
• Video calls with other people
• Jackbox games or other video games together
• Extra homework, learning, math, etc.
• Science experiments, engineering projects, learning boxes
• Swimming at an indoor pool
• Playing with toys
• Playing with paper, tape, cardboard, etc. (my kids make their own card games and houses and everything).
• Getting other craft supplies and playing with those
• Stations (like they do in preschool)

Any other ideas?

I don’t love to cook every day. I like cooking sometimes. But I have to eat three times a day without a break (except for fast Sunday), and sometimes I get tired of trying to figure out what I want to eat and what to feed my family.

On occasion, I want to follow a specific recipes, but more often, I just have fall backs that I go to.

Default Meals

These are meals that easy, I usually have the ingredients for, and don’t take much time or effort.

• Spaghetti
• Grilled cheese & tomato soup
• Sandwiches
• Quesadillas
• Tuna noodle casserole
• Nachos
• Macaroni and cheese
• Instant mashed potatoes (or stuffing) with ham/frozen veggies
• Egg tortilla rolls (like this)
• Pancakes
• Cereal
• Muffins
• Ramen noodles
• Stir fry

No Cooking Meals

For days when I don’t want to cook very much at all.

• Frozen pizza
• Frozen lasagna or other meals
• Chicken nuggets
• Meatballs
• Chili
• Bagged salad
• Corn dogs
• Macaroni salad/potato salad
• Rotisserie chicken
• Hot dogs

Category Meals

I don’t have specific recipes for a lot of these; I just take what I have and use it.

• Rice bowls: beans and rice, Hawaiian haystacks, and whatever other meat/veggie combo you have around.
• Stir fry: more complicated varieties with meat, fried rice, or lo mein. Often serve with wontons.
• Pasta salad: just add in whatever veggies and meat I have and coat it with mayo
• Soup: fry up onion and butter and build from there. You can do tomato based, potato based, or cream based
• Chili/taco soup/etc.
• Crock Pot meat: take meat and sauce and cook it in the slow cooker.
• Pan roast: I am still figuring this one out
• Salad: taco salad, Asian salad, cheeseburger salad–anything with lettuce/cabbage and other things piled on top
• Tacos: Navajo tacos with scones; normal tacos with fried shells; tostadas; etc.
• Burritos: breakfast burritos, chimichangas, black bean burritos, bean and cheese, chicken, etc.
• Pizza: bagel pizzas, taco pizza, fruit pizza, normal pizza

Chopped Meals

Sometimes it’s just a good idea to take the ingredients you have or need to be used, and try to come up with something that tastes okay. Get creative.

Specific Recipes

Sometimes I do use recipes to cook something specific.

And sometimes I eat string cheese and grapes:

When you combine two people from different backgrounds with different ways of living, it’s hard to build a good relationship.

Practically, marriage never works out perfectly. You are never fully compatible with someone else, and sometimes there is no way to adequately resolve differences. There are broken bits–small and large.

But we love. And the love can overwhelm the broken places and make it so that it doesn’t matter that things don’t always work out quite right.

I’ve had arguments and discussions without a resolution. We try to compromise and figure things out, but sometimes we just end up going to bed angry and upset.

And when we wake up, the problems are all still there, but in the mornings, we love each other more, and the problems don’t seem to matter as much.

Happy Halloween! Though I think we all agree that Halloween should never be on Sunday.

What am I afraid of? I get scared of advanced statistics, calling people on the telephone, talking to strangers, climbing ladders, cougars, and dark windows after watching scary movies.

I am not a thrill seeker. I don’t particularly like roller coasters or horror films or things like that.

But life would be boring if I wasn’t scared of anything. When I’m doing something I’m sort of scared of–venturing outside of my comfort zone–I feel more alive and excited.

So I do think I like being scared. But only sometimes.

Often, anecdotal evidence is dismissed as insignificant. Just because one thing happened to one person does not mean we can generalize it to the general population.

Anecdotal evidence can be unreliable because we often hear it from a distance: secondhand or thirdhand or even more distant than that, the stories get changed around as people draw the wrong conclusions. You heard from a friend who heard from another friend that this happened to their cousin–this is not a good way to draw general conclusions.

Larger data sets with statistical analysis can be so much better in so many aspects. It’s a better way to draw general conclusions about the population. If you want to establish causation, it’s good to have a randomized trial.

But there are also situations where anecdotes can be a lot better than statistical data.

Psychology is the study of the mind, and much of what we know about the mind is anecdote. Anecdotes can be incredibly important to understand people.

Anecdotes can lead to understanding the personal significance of problems. Anecdotes are important because individuals are important.

If I’m trying to change my behavior, I want anecdotes.

If I’m trying to figure out how to help individuals with specific problems, I want anecdotes.

Just because it is more probable that one outcome will occur doesn’t meant the other outcome won’t happen. We often need anecdotes to put the statistics in the right perspective, as our brains don’t deal with statistical data very well.

Anecdotal data is still valid, but it can be more or less useful depending on the situation. So sometimes we need data and sometimes we need anecdotes.

If I’m doing a medical study about the effectiveness of a drug, I need a randomized trial with lots of data. But if I’m trying to figure out how to fight social problems such as racism or addiction or illegal immigration, I need anecdotes to better understand why these things are happening.

I’m reading a book by an economist, and at one point, she says that more data is always better.

But is it?

More bad data is not better. You can look at methodology and sort out the bad data for the good data, but sometimes that’s hard. And good studies can lead to the wrong conclusions.

More data can also be more overwhelming. It takes time and energy to sort through all that data.

More data can lead to decision paralysis, as you are constantly looking for more data to try to figure out the best option, when it doesn’t really matter.

More data can be mean time wasted on studying things that don’t really matter. Or time wasted in reinforcing already establish conclusions.

Adding more and more data and details to a model can make it overly complicated and lead to incorrect conclusions.

So more data can be better sometimes, but not always.