My 2024 and 2025 New Year's Resolutions

I can't believe how quickly another year has gone by, since it feels like we just moved to Dubai. My 2024 New Year's Resolution was mindfulness. I think this year more so than many of my previous years I've had mixed success with my resolution. I started practicing mindful eating and finally broke the bad habit of eating while watching Netflix. It's been really nice to reclaim mealtime for family bonding without devices (including phones) and to be able to chat with each other, especially now that S can talk more. The Headspace app helped me improve my meditation practice a lot, and applying books like Pete Greig's How to Pray: A Simple Guide for Normal People helped me make prayer more consistent and meaningful in my life. However, mindful sleeping is still a challenge for me. I recently started using a smartwatch that tracks my sleep patterns, and I discovered the time I actually spend in high quality sleep is much less than I thought. I'm still working on getting to bed at a reasonable hour, but it's hard between work, motherhood, exercise, religion, and maintaining my hobbies and friendships. On balance, I feel like I've changed some longstanding habits and made progress I'm happy with for now.

For 2025, I'd like to focus on two goals: embracing the joy of missing out (JOMO) and writing every day. I think these goals are related because making time to write every day involves necessary sacrifices in other aspects of life, but those sacrifices become less painful if I replace my innate fear of missing out (FOMO) with JOMO. I have a tendency to overbook my social calendar and sometimes commit to two or three engagements in a single evening, rapidly rushing from one to the other without enough time for full enjoyment of any one thing. This also leaves less time for other, more routine things that are important to me. 2025 is giving me a strong push in the right direction, as we're on a cruise that continues through the first part of January and I've been writing every day while letting go of the pressure I place on myself to find an elaborate tour or shore excursion in every port. (I took the sunset photo at the top of this post from the ship!)

Whether it's blogging, working on my latest novel manuscript, sharing microfiction on my new Bluesky account (since that's where most of the #WritingCommunity I used to interact with on Twitter seems to have gone), or writing short stories, this is an important creative outlet for me. I love the feeling of investing the time in improving my craft and telling stories. Luckily, I have two external deadlines to help motivate me for my novel manuscript in particular. I was accepted to an international speculative fiction workshop to refine the first part of my novel manuscript, and I received a backer reward of a manuscript critique by a renowned author in the genre for supporting the Kickstarter fundraising campaign of my favorite short speculative fiction publication, Uncanny Magazine. I hope 2025 will be a good year for my evolution as a writer while I learn to embrace JOMO.

I wish you a Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Blessed Kwanzaa, and Happy New Year wherever you are. And if you do New Year's Resolutions like I do, please feel free to share your goals and hopes in the comments. I'm rooting for you!

I Finally Went to Musandam, Oman!

I have literally dreamed of going to Musandam, Oman for many years including when I lived in Oman more than 10 years ago and when I found out I was going to live in the UAE. Musandam is a peninsula territory belonging to Oman but cut off from the rest of Oman by the UAE, so you drive through the UAE to get there. I've heard it described as the "Norway of Arabia" due to its geography. I've never been to Scandinavia, so I can't speak to how accurate the comparison is, but I did find Musandam stunning.

I went with a group of friends since M and I weren't sure if the boat would be safe for a kid as young as S. I asked the boat captain, though, and he said he'd given tours to families with babies as young as six months old! They usually just return to shore to overnight in a hotel instead of on the ship. That'll probably be what we do next time when we go as a family.

Thankfully, the tour operator we used took care of all the details once we got to Musandam. They had the boat, crew, food on board the ship, mats for us to sleep on underneath the stars, and even snorkeling equipment for us to use during the day all sorted. I love being out on the water, swimming, and snorkeling. In the shallower parts of where we stopped, the water was full of fish, sea urchins, anemones, coral formations, and oysters. It was such a beautiful sight; I could snorkel for hours!

On our way to and from different snorkeling spots, we saw multiple groups of wild dolphins. The ship captain and crew had a specific kind of whistle they would do to encourage the dolphins to come out and stay out as long as possible. The dolphins seemed to love swimming alongside the boat when it was moving faster, and I've never seen so many dolphins so close. They looked so playful swimming together.

At night, we went for a moonlit swim and were surrounded by bioluminescent plankton that activated around us as we paddled. The glowing was stunning, even though the water was way too cold for me. Once I got out of the sea and dried off again, I settled in to stargaze with friends. I can't remember the last time I saw so many stars, and it made me nostalgic for my childhood since I grew up on a flat-roofed house without much light pollution at all.

Although we didn't plan it this way, our Musandam trip also happened to coincide with the Geminids meteor shower and I saw the biggest shooting star I've ever seen in my life. It was so magical, I may have shed a tear or two.

Musandam has been on my bucket list for so long, I can't believe I finally got to experience it. Not only that, but I got to do it alongside some of my dearest friends in Dubai and plenty of new, delightful friends as well. I'll remember and cherish this trip forever.

Aw, Man! Our Long Weekend in Jordan is Over

It's been a long time since I put a pun in the title of a blog post! I'm probably feeling extra punny because we stayed with friends in Jordan for a long weekend and one half of the couple is a fellow punthusiast. (Our spouses may roll their eyes, but I'll never stop finding puns funny.) We decided last-minute to take a spontaneous trip to Jordan, somewhere we've been before but could go back again and again. This time, our main purpose was to visit friends and get away from Dubai for a little bit given I was off work and S's nursery was closed for a few days any way for Eid Al Etihad (the UAE's national day).

I love spontaneous travel and I'm glad we've still been able to do this sort of thing even after becoming a family of three. S is a seasoned traveling pro and loves flying on airplanes. We went to Jordan's capital, Amman, for a few days (and hence the title of this post). It was so literally and figuratively refreshing catching up with dear friends, spending time outside breathing the fresh, clear, cold (!) air, and eating delicious food at much more affordable prices than we have in notoriously expensive Dubai.

The other day, I had a conversation with M that I find my travel preferences definitely shifting as I get older. When I was younger, I always wanted something new that we'd never done before, with the focus on the freshness of the experience. Nowadays, I find myself wanting to travel to be with people we love whenever possible, even if that means returning to a place we've already been. With S's age, there are also certain things we just can't realistically do. (I was grateful M talked me out of trying to go to Petra not only because of a lack of time but because S would've probably asked us to carry him for hours and our arms would've fallen off. We'd much rather come back and do it later when he's older and can walk by himself for longer periods of time.)

I also didn't realize how many of my friends worked at U.S. Embassy Amman! We went to visit one group of friends, I caught up over lunch with more, and then I bumped into even more in the hallway at the embassy so we were able to meet up with them for dinner before we left. It was so nice, and we had an amazing, relaxing family trip. I went a little overboard purchasing plenty of scented soaps and dead sea mud products, so I'm sure I'll keep thinking about our time in Jordan every time I use them for a while yet!