Less in 2025: September

Dear friends, can you believe that we are almost finished with the wonderful month that is September? It's usually one of my favorite months because of the weather, the holidays, the start of the school year, and all that. It was a busy September this year, but I'm not letting it pass by without checking in on my One Little Word. Thank you to Kat for hosting our link-ups this year.

Less has shown up in a few different ways this month, but the biggest is that there has been a lot less in my checking account -- it's been a very expensive month! First, there was Ruthie's spay surgery, which was planned for and expected but still a big bill. Then, I did something I'd never done before: I dropped my cell phone and smashed the glass. Molly said it was the universe's way of telling me that it was time for a new phone; I'd actually been thinking about getting a new one soon anyway, because my old one was an iPhone 11 from 2020, but this decided it. There was the cost of the new phone plus a new case and new charger (because of course none of the accessories I had for the old phone would work with the new one). Then, about three days after the phone arrived, it flew out of my hand while I was out on a walk and the glass broke in the exact same place. Never before had I broken the glass on a phone and I managed to do it twice in a week! Fortunately, with Apple Care, I was able to get the glass replaced and paid only a reasonable service fee. And that was not the end: The Mister celebrated his birthday last week, and he is notoriously hard to buy gifts for (mainly because when there's something he wants, he just buys it for himself), so when he said he'd found a piece of luggage he really wanted, how could I say no? All of this is to say that my expenses have exceeded my income this month and it's a good thing I'm a saver -- and that I've been knitting from stash this year!

There has also been less running this month. I started having some pain in my left knee several weeks ago, so I pulled out my trusty knee brace. It helped, but the discomfort was still there, so I figured the best thing to do was rest. I've only run once a week for the past couple of weeks and it's helped a lot; I would have stopped altogether were it not for the race this past weekend -- I didn't want to go into it having not run at all recently. I've noticed it's been feeling better, and clearly my reduced running time did not impact me in the least, because I had a new PR in the 5K:

I finished 13th (out of 183) in my age group, 95th (out of 1,318) among women, and 321st (out of 2,399) overall. My previous record for this race was last year's 27:14, so I really blew it out of the water. And I was not at all expecting it! I was hoping to be around 26 minutes, but I guess the adrenaline really gave me an extra boost this time. Now that the race is over, however, I'm going to give my knee more time to heel and probably will be sticking to walking for a while. And here's hoping that translates to Less knee pain in October!