These are a few of my favorite things (at home) in 2020

This month I’m joining Kim and Tanya of Girlxoxo.com for their annual event A Month of Faves, at least for a few topics. Earlier this month, I posted “My End of Year Bookish Plans” and yesterday, I posted “These are a few of my favorite moments in 2020.” To learn more about the event, visit Kim and Tanya’s introductory post on the event.

Today’s topic is “Favorite Things [At Home Edition]⁠
(Room in the house, reading spot, time of day, daily habit, etc).”

Room in the house: Office. Over the summer, I moved my computer desk, which was in our living room to our office. While it’s not perfect (one of the cat’s litter boxes is behind my chair, for example), it still gives me a place on the other side of our living room and our bedroom, where Kim sleeps during the day since she works night shift four days. Also during the few Zoom calls I’ve had and therapy (biweekly now) via Zoom, I felt crowded with our recliners right behind us, so it’s nice to have the privacy now. I also can play music on one of our Nest minis, one of the many Google devices in our house…which leads me to another one of my favorite things at home:

Google Home: We started first with a Google Home Mini, then got a Google Home, a Nest Mini, and now a Nest Audio and another Nest Mini. It might be is overkill for our small house, but I like that we have speakers for music in almost every room in the house, except for the bathroom. We had Google Play Music, which we loved but they killed it off in favor of YouTube Music, which I’m not a fan of and now am trying Spotify Premium, which I am enjoying. I’ve also had fun moving the speakers around and renaming them as I go along with super exciting names like “Desk,” “Dresser,” “Kitchen”, etc.

Reading Spot Device & Time of Day: These actually are connected. In mid-May during the Spring lockdown, I began what I called “my own personal Sabbath,” where I put my phone away on Sundays. I didn’t read news, only books, listened to chill music and watched fun TV. Initially I allowed myself to read on a Kindle Fire but I still would see notifications there so I switched to a simple old Kindle with less bells and whistles. It was, and still is, just what I needed.

(Almost) Daily Habit: Meditation and journaling. My year, appropriately it now seems, began with my reading slowly through Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Later in the year I uploaded an app to my phone called Insight Timer and then at the invitation of Deb Nance of the blog Readerbuzz, I joined an online meditation group in the Houston, TX area for a six-week course. The group is part of the World Community for Christian Meditation, whose founder was John Main, a Benedictine monk. His main teaching is to meditate for 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes at night, reciting a mantra, preferably “Maranatha” which means “Come, Lord.” I have been trying this, but usually only doing in the morning and not every morning to be honest, but I want to be more diligent in 2021 than I have been this year.

As for journaling, I began doing that, again like the meditation, intermittently as an extension of therapy (via Zoom) that I started earlier in the year and am continuing now. It has been helpful and like meditation, I want to be more disciplined with it in the coming year.

Sleep aids: Primarily a new mattress, a base for it, and a weighted blanket. The mattress technically was used (once by one of Kim’s supervisors, who sold it to us cheap). It has been a godsend, even more so when we bought a new base that sets on the floor and then Kim got me a weighted blanket. The only thing we didn’t know since we never had one when we got the blanket which is with a duvet is that it needed to be tied in so that the beads were evenly distributed. For the first couple of weeks, all the beads were at the bottom or to the side and it didn’t feel comfortable.

So what are some of your favorite things at home? Share in the comments or with your own post, if you like. You can link up to the event at the introductory post mentioned above.