So I didn't stick with meditating
It's one of those things (like doing pushups at home) that's really hard to establish as a habit. I still feel like I gained some insight from it, so I can sometimes stop up and reflect on the thoughts I'm having. Seeing this journal was a good reminder of doing meditation - I guess that's why people do journals in real life. I should try to get in some short meditation sessions in the coming month.
I've just read Paul Wheaton's Building a Better World in Your Backyard (shout out to jennypenny for gifting me that). I swallowed it in two days. It's quite a short and easy read on the surface - it goes over a lot of material in a brief and practical manner, but with lots of references for further information, so it's easy to dig in to. I can't do much permaculture from my apartment, but setting up something like that in the future is something I've been intrigued by for a long time (for the Danes: I just finished all 12 seasons of Bonderøven in 2-3 years time).
What I can do is clean up my personal care and cleaning products. I thought I was doing okay with perfume and allergy certified products and occasionally cleaning with vinegar, but it seems better, easier, and cheaper to go all out on the baking soda/vinegar/real soap route - good thing I have made soap! Wheaton writes about the documentary Chemerical in his book, which I ended up seeing (it's $1 on Vimeo). It was a good motivator, especially for my girlfriend, although it seems that she has caught on to me trying to influence me with documentaries now.
DIY
Shortened the chain on my bike, since it was very loose. Surprisingly easy - glad to have that figured out.
Started up the balcony garden: I've planted eight tomato plants (third generation seeds now), radish, basil, thyme (store bought), rosemary (store bought). I've also tried to plant some lemon seeds. I'm excited about planting trees. They should start sprouting within the next week. Also went to the local forest to get some ramsons (for pesto, spiciness) and nettles (which I used in a foccacia).
We made oatmilk. I'm not a huge fan. It tastes more like oats than whole milk - maybe I should've seen that coming. GF is using it to replace milk in the breakfast she's doing, so it has reduced our milk intake somewhat.
Moneys
I'm feeling okay about the influence Corona has had on my investments. Now, I'm just a little surprised it went up again so quickly. I have a little bit of money on the sideline from selling AbbVie, and I had some candidates (American arisocrats) eyed out just around March 23, and since then it's already up ~20%.
Apart from that, it made me realize that my investment strategy was a little haphazard, so now I've written down some simple rules for allocation, stock analysis requirements, and how much I should invest every month. Now, my main problem is that I'm not too good at buying after I've made the decision to do so. I'll set an order a little below the current price, hoping to save 0.5%, but then sometimes it doesn't go there and the next day it's up 2%! I should be better at just buying instead of fooling around with the order - apparently I'm not very good at it.
I've also upped the payments on the expensive part of the apartment loan, so that should be out of the way in a year from now. Before I was planning on doing a few large payments every ~6 months to get it done, but that didn't go as fast as I'd hoped, because it was too easy to convince myself that I should have more cash or invest it in the next stock on my watchlist. Now that it's forced I feel a little poorer because it goes out of the paycheck as the first thing, and I think that'll encourage me to save more overall. It feels good to have the investment and loan payoff amounts fixed.
67% trailing 12 months savings rate
4.1 years of expenses saved
). Next time I'll try with less water and heat the oil some more to see if that makes it doable with the power drill.