January 2022

Highlights from January 2022 | Omaha & Lincoln, NE

January was a pretty good month for us this year, despite the fact that we felt like we were living in limbo waiting to hear back on some career-related news that would determine how this year (and beyond) would play out. That made it difficult to make goals and plan out our year, but instead of letting that consume us too much we focused on making small improvements to our lifestyle and implementing healthier routines. The month as a whole was pretty mild winter-wise by Midwest standards — we only had one snow storm (aside from the one on New Year’s Day in Iowa) and were able to get outside every day.

Here’s some of our highlights from the month, aside from hiking 18 miles on the Wabash Trace Trail:

• We finished watching all of Seinfeld on Netflix — after years of seeing parts of episodes here or there, usually on TV while staying at hotels, we finally decided to watch it all from beginning to end. It was fun to branch out and watch something different than usual, but it was even more fun to resume our continuous binging of Arrested Development when we were finished.
• I realize the irony of mentioning that we implemented healthier routines this month and then kicked off a recap post with talking about binge watching TV shows, so I feel the need to follow that up by saying that we have become more disciplined about being screen-free for an hour before bed, and I personally have made a goal to read more this year, and I managed to finish 3 books this month.
• We made several trips over to Glenwood to the Maker’s Space, where Curtis made a lot of progress on his wood topographic map of the US.
• After a long time of scouring Craigslist for backpacking gear, Curtis finally found a great deal on like-new things we’ve been wanting to upgrade. I guess that means more backpacking is in our future!
• We walked around our lakes multiple times a week, including Walnut Creek, Shadow Lake, sections of the Papio Trail, across the Bob Kerrey Pedestrian bridge over the Missouri, and around the neighborhood daily.
• Another goal for this year for me was to make salads more often, and find ways to make them interesting and with more variety. This was a major success and “big salads” (spoken like Elaine from Seinfeld) are now part of our regular favorite meal rotation.
• In an attempt to combat rising inflation, we’ve been utilizing different apps to make shopping trips more enjoyable (though to be honest, Aldi is my favorite store ever and grocery trips there are always enjoyable). The main ones we’ve been using are Ibotta and Fetch Rewards for groceries, and GetUpside for gas. (If you want to check any of these out, here are our referral codes that will give you & us a reward when used: Ibotta: bdwkxgq Fetch Rewards: V5JDAE GetUpside: JESSICA23386)

On one weekend, we took a day trip to Lincoln to visit the University of Nebraska State Museum. This was something we’ve wanted to do since visiting Agate Fossil Beds National Monument last spring, and the Ashfall Fossil Beds when we first moved here, and it made for an enjoyable couple hours spent perusing the exhibits. We were initially interested in it because of the fossils that had been taken from Agate and brought to the museum, but the real highlight of the day was in the mammoth/elephant exhibit, where we learned that elephant fossils have been found not just in the Western part of the state, but in 90 out of 93 counties in Nebraska!! Not only that, less than 1% of the state has been carefully explored for fossils, meaning there are so many more out there, and there is a 1 in 10 chance that any Nebraskan has a mammoth fossil buried under their house! These fun facts and mammoth skeletons that had been found here were worth the price of admission on their own. The only downside was that this exhibit was the first one we visited, and nothing else in the museum could live up to that (I jest — the whole thing was enjoyable, I’ve just always loved elephants). After our time in the museum, we walked around the campus and ended up walking all the way to the state capitol before returning to our car and heading home.