The Month Of California: April 2023 Recap

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A third of 2023 is over and I must politely ask: What the fuck 🙂 ? Time is barreling forward because (I assume?) I’m having too much fun. So let’s see what I got up to in the fourth month of the year.

I Moved To Sacramento, CA

After trying out ‘real’ winter for the first time in several years by staying in New Hampshire from January to March, I saw the sun again! We moved to Sacramento, California and I have a full Slow Travel Review coming which will detail this shockingly amazing city, but in the meantime, here’s a preview of my experience:

I also found that I have a weird, random and useless skill that works even cross-country:

I also had a fantastic time exploring Sacramento thanks to your recommendations! Thank you so much to those of you that sent me great places to visit and eat. My time there was immensely improved because of your suggestions. To tide you over until that Slow Travel review, here are some of my favorites:

I will also be doing a full post about breweries in Sacramento because there was a shocking number of them with a wildly high quality, so look out for that as well and in the meantime, this is my Untappd profile if you’d like a preview.

I Rode A Sleeper Train

I wrote a full post about the experience, but I took a 20 hour train ride from Sacramento, CA to Seattle, WA with my partner in a roomette. He loves trains so we did that and paid several times what a plane ticket would have cost and obviously it took a lot more time, but it was an interesting experience with gorgeous views. I’m happy we had the extra money and time to have that experience together.

I Learned Spanish

I continue to try and maintain my Spanish and once again, it’s more effort than I expected 🙂 . Hats off to y’all multi-lingual people. My bi-lingual-ness is taking a lot of time just to keep up.

Activities

This month I watched these things in Spanish:

Tropic Thunder (Una guerra de película aka A Film War)
Ted Lasso (I re-watched season 1 and 2 for the millionth time to prepare for season 3)

I also had a great time accidentally eavesdropping on people speaking in Spanish in Sacramento (my bad..) and as always, my phone is still in Spanish (which helps a lot with real world vocabulary). In addition to that, my Mom and I text all day mostly in Spanish, speak on the phone in Spanish and I also watch Spanish FilmTube.

Progress

I thought I wasn’t continuing to improve my Spanish, since I’ve been trying to maintain it instead, but some real world interactions imply otherwise. I watched Wakanda Forever and part of it took place in my beloved Mérida, México and they spoke Spanish, which I understood without the subtitles!

In the past, my friend told me that I was a parrot because she said something in Mandarin (which I don’t know) and I said it back with apparently the correct intonation. Well, this month, another friend mentioned that this might be why I’m good at singing (matching tone and preferring to do so without music sheets Drumline style) and Spanish – because I’m a good parrot! That makes sense, but I never connected those things before.

This month I also read 2 books that contained a lot of French without translation, and I understood the gist of all of it. I definitely can’t speak French anymore, but those brain muscles are working enough that I can recognize the root romance language word from Spanish, which is more than I could have dreamed of!

Some people said in the reviews that these books weren’t accessible because they had to look up everything that was in French, but since I could figure it out I never did and felt like I was in a weird limbo because I no longer speak French, but I got the gist, which is the feeling I think the author was going for. I thought it enhanced the book instead of detracting from it.

I Hung Out With People

This month involved some of my usual virtual meetups, such as that weekly Spanish call with my Mom and Movie Nights where we watched the below. If you’re curious about my ratings of movies, I have a Letterboxd account here.

I also attended a wedding in the middle of California that involved an interesting road trip experience, and living in the middle of nowhere for a weekend while also trying to find vineyards by coordinates (because the vineyard doesn’t have an address 🙂 ). And to be honest, I’m still recovering from that amount of human interaction.

However, I still found the energy to meet up with 2 readers and 1 blogger in Sacramento. It was a lovely time! The blogger was GoCurryCracker who was one of the first bloggers that made me realize early retirement might actually be possible with posts like this:

I like when things are full circle like that 🙂 .

I Read 15 Books

This month I read:

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell
The Serpent and the Wings of Night by Carissa Broadbent
American Royalty by Tracey Livesay
Wicked Beauty by Katee Robert
Go Hex Yourself by Jessica Clare
Deceived by the Gargoyles by Lillian Lark
Entranced by the Basilisks by Lillian Lark
Succubus Bargain by L.L. Frost
Wicked Things by Nyla K
The Sea Witch by Rebecca F. Kenney
That Time I Got Drunk And Saved A Demon by Kimberly Lemming
That Time I Got Drunk And Threw A Love Potion At A Werewolf by Kimberly Lemming
Mistlefoe by Kimberly Lemming
A Bump in Boohail by Kimberly Lemming
Two Scoops Of Hellfire by Kimberly Lemming

Three of the above were novellas, but this month still involved a bunch of reading. Several of these books were so good that I read them in one day, and the rest of them took about 48 hours each. After finishing my 2 month Kindle Unlimited subscription that they gave me at a discounted $5, I looked at the KU site again the next day and it offered me 3 months for free…that makes no sense, but ok!

I took that free offer and immediately canceled it so they won’t charge me automatically while still allowing me to read the KU books. I also discovered that despite never having used TikTok, that BookTok has infiltrated Instagram and my feed. As a result, I read a few books that were recommended and found them…very not great 🙂 .

In fact, reading some of the comments of the books included things like,”BookTok is a liar” Good to know! Apparently promoting certain books on BookTok leads to thousands of people positively rating a book on Goodreads, but when I go to the top comments of that same book, they say not to read it. So now I have an extra step when deciding if I want to read a book since the number rating system might be misleading. I now also read the top comments to see if it’s a BookTok bait and switch.

This seems like a bit of a cynical approach, but I think it’s worth it since I very rarely don’t finish a book. Even if I don’t like it, I stick it out because I refuse to have an opinion on a book (or film) unless I’ve finished it. If you’re curious about what I’m reading and my ratings of these books, I have a Goodreads account you can check out here.

Something else I noticed this month is that more authors are including epilogues or additional content, not in their book, but in their newsletter. They’re using it as an incentive to sign up for them and they got me 🙂 . I immediately unsubscribed from a few after reading the extra stories, but I’ve stayed on a few as well. I didn’t know newsletters were still a big thing and it’s cool to have updates about authors I love.

I Wrote 4 Posts

In case you missed it, this month I published the below posts:

In addition to those posts, I also wrote a guest post for Women’s Personal Finance, which you can check out here:

The Case For Separate Finances

Last month I mentioned that a scammy company similar to Masterworks reached out to work with me, which I’m obviously not going to do. But this month ACTUALLY Masterworks reached out, which I found hilarious. Obviously that’s also a no.

On a more interesting front, I was asked to be a speaker at a FI Retreat in Bali. I’ve previously always said no to speaker requests that require me to get on a stage and give a presentation, but I must admit I was tempted by this one simply because of the location – I’ve never been to Bali. However, they didn’t offer any travel compensation or anything like that and I’m not paying thousands to do one of the greatest human fears (speech giving 🙂 ). If business class travel had been comped, I would have been tempted though 😉 .

I was also asked to provide a quote for a travel article, but they wanted it within 48 hours…and I was too busy sampling the food and brews in Sacramento so I told them that timing didn’t work for me. I’ve got my priorities you know 😉 . I was also offered a discount to a house booking platform and asked to be a part of a suspicious looking investment community – both of which I passed on. The things that hit my inbox continue to fascinate me 🙂 .

I Watched Party Down And Reminisced

I’m not sure I’ve mentioned this before, but when I was looking for my first job, it was still the aftermath of the Great Recession. I was hearing from older alums that there were still no jobs available, so I started asking alums for information interviews with anyone who worked in anything vaguely similar to the marketing field 2 years before I graduated. After talking to maybe 100 people, I lined up 2 interviews with companies in New York City.

One of those turned into a job offer. While I went to these multi-day interviews for entry level jobs, my RA’s boyfriend let me stay in his apartment and his apartment had Hulu and that’s when I watched Party Down for the first time.

I had nothing to do but prep for interviews and freak out alone in the Big Apple as a terrified new adult awaiting my appointments, so I fed myself (barely – you’ll know what I mean if you’ve read the rest of this series *sigh*).

So I binged the only 2 seasons of Party Down that existed during that time in a matter of days and now during Year 3 of retirement, I’m watching season 3 – it seems fitting 🙂 . Watching this with my retirement mindset is wildly weird and so different.

Physical

Sleep

After living in quiet New Hampshire for 2 months, it was a transition to move back to a city! Luckily I quickly got used to the weird sounds again and slept really well!

Food

I went off keto to explore new areas of California and it was lovely! I originally continued calorie counting, but after a few days, stopped that as well and just ate when I was hungry. It’s nice to switch it up sometimes 🙂 .

Exercise

Our Sacramento Airbnb was by a gorgeous park, but I rarely went to it. My number of runs definitely decreased because I was walking all over the place and tired from walking, the sun or the beer, but I think this is balancing out from me running almost every day last month.

I also have continued my emphasis on stretching, which seems to be working! I’m much more flexible and can touch my head to my feet, which is NEW!

Mental

Learning

So it’s time for my favorite segment: Fun Facts Nobody Asked For! Here’s what I learned and explored this month:

Sacramento, CA

Sacramento is the capital of California, which my partner didn’t know until I mentioned it a week into our stay
Sacramento has a population of over 500,000
There are more than 50 breweries in Sacramento, which I was surprised by. Apparently Sacramento has a long history as a beer town and many local breweries source their ingredients locally, which creates unique flavors and truly local beers
There is an underground tour of the original Sacramento, which is actually below the current streets
The film Lady Bird was filmed in Sacramento and there was a tour about that too

Astronomy

Being in California wine country was also amazing because it was a fantastically dark backdrop to see a shitton of stars! I saw Venus, Mars and Saturn along with the usual constellations. It was magical 🙂 .

Flora

Sacramento was so green I couldn’t keep up! I saw these plants (and more) :

Gunnera tinctoria, Oenocarpus bataua, East Redbud Tree, Japanese camellia, African flag, Azaleas, Anemone, Jacuzzi tulips, Canary Island date palm, Ribes sanguineum, Garden roses, Narcissus, Safari Rose Aloe, Salvia leucantha, Garcinia

Fauna

I kept seeing different looking squirrels in California so I did some research. It turns out that there are over 200 species of squirrels! Two of the most common species in Sacramento are the Eastern Fox Squirrel and Gray Squirrel. Also, apparently Gray Squirrels and Fox Squirrels can interbreed, potentially creating rare Black Squirrels and I saw all 3 types while living there! I also saw a Grey Fox in the middle of nowhere California, a California Mule Deer and an enormous Garden Snail.

Birds

Everyone keeps sending me bird memes and I love them 🙂 . This was a favorite this month featuring my beloved Titmouse 🙂 :

In Sacramento I saw these lovelies:

Nuttall’s Woodpecker, American Robin, White-crowned Sparrow, Anna’s Hummingbird, California Scrub-Jay, Oak Titmouse, Black Phoebe, Red-winged Blackbird, California Gull, Cedar Waxwing, Barn Swallow, Hammond’s Flycatcher, Western Bluebird, Northern Mockingbird, Bushtit, House Finch, Canada Goose, Lesser Goldfinch, Green Heron, Mallard, Wood Duck, American Goldfinch, Little Blue Hero and Yellow-Rumped Warbler

FYI Wood Ducks looks like this – HOW?! (Source)

I also learned Peacocks can fly! I saw some giant ones hanging in and then flying out of a tree at a wedding. Wild times. They were very loud guests 🙂 .

Random

You know the company Ore-Ida that seems to be all over potatoes? Well I already surmised that the Ida was for Idaho because they grow a shitton of potatoes, but our neighbor on our train ride told me that the Ore is for Oregon – and that they also grow a wild amount of potatoes. I had no idea. This was fun to hear as we were going through the Oregon countryside near Idaho.

Creativity

Based on my unusual amount of Instagram posting, I feel secure in saying that my creativity was flowing this month. I also found myself having to write more often than usual because my Editor (AKA my Mom 😉 ) is going on a vacation without Wifi (how dare she 🙂 ) so I had to prepare for that in advance. Luckily, all the sun and delicious eats inspired me to want to write about those experiences and life in general.

Emotional

My emotions this month were great. I think adding more sun to my life makes me even happier, which is surprising. My experiment in ‘real’ winter wasn’t a downer like I expected – probably because I got to enjoy the sea, winter running, and gorgeous over-water sunrises, even though they were cold. But now on the west coast, I’m basking in the sun’s glow and eating delicious new things so I can’t complain at all 🙂 .

Money

Here’s something that happened this month that drove home my current thoughts on money:

Strangely, I didn’t even seriously consider the offer – and simply because I didn’t feel like it. The ROI and money didn’t even factor into it. I had no where to be by a specific time and my travel wouldn’t have really been negatively impacted by the change, but I didn’t care. It was a wild moment that I think a friend summed up perfectly:

On a different note, I was excited to see that my habit of signing up for memberships on my phone while in checkout lines continues to pay off in a big way:

And finally, where I stand this month net worth wise:

Conclusion

And that’s what I got up to in April! Next I’m going to be spending about a month in my old stomping ground of Seattle. It’ll be interesting to see clouds again after my time in sunny California. Until next time!

If you’re interested in the other weekly and monthly retirement updates I’ve written, they’re all here:

Weekly (2020)

Monthly (2021)

Monthly (2022)

Monthly (2023)

How was your month?

10 thoughts on “The Month Of California: April 2023 Recap”

Claire says:

May 2, 2023 at 7:05 am

Another great summary! And it’s wild that your net worth has gone up that much just due to market movements. Turning down that 3k offer seems a definitive moment to me!

Birds are so mean to us poor humans, waking us up without a care 🙁 there are some pigeons near me that I need to have words with haha.

1. A Purple Life says:
  
  May 8, 2023 at 12:29 pm
  
  Thank you! And yeah it is wild especially while I haven’t been reinvesting my taxable dividends. Oh no – I’m sorry about your pigeons and hope they take your feedback seriously 🙂 .
  
Financial mechanic says:

May 2, 2023 at 9:54 am

What a lovely month! I hope you liked Wordslut, if you did you’d probably like her other book Cultish all about cults!

Love getting to see the Airbnbs and glad you had a good sunny month here in California!

1. A Purple Life says:
  
  May 8, 2023 at 12:30 pm
  
  Yeah it was nice 🙂 . I did indeed enjoy Wordslut and have added Cultish to my list! Thank you.
  
Financial Fives says:

May 2, 2023 at 10:19 am

Glad you enjoyed Sac! It’s certainly improved over the last 7-8 years, but the things that make it special, like the American River Trail and parks system, are still around. DOCO is new, but midtown is where the cool people hang. I would argue there are parts of the suburbs that are also very nice places to walk around…for next time you’re here!

1. A Purple Life says:
  
  May 8, 2023 at 12:31 pm
  
  I really enjoyed it. Interesting to know it’s changed recently and that the burbs can be worth checking out – thank you!
  
Emily Furukawa says:

May 2, 2023 at 11:22 am

Aw, hurrah! I’m so happy you enjoyed Sac, and the weather was perfect last month. I knew we had a lot of breweries, but I’m surprised at that 50 number. Turning down an airline offer is a landmark moment, for sure, and thanks for sharing it with us so we can dream, too. Can’t wait for the slow travel review!

1. A Purple Life says:
  
  May 8, 2023 at 12:32 pm
  
  Yeah it was gorgeous weather! I’m glad you’re looking forward to the review – also there might be more SAC content coming before that relating to the breweries…shhh 😉
  
cupofrice says:

May 7, 2023 at 6:23 am

Now I’ll have to keep an eye out for Booktok Bait and Switch too!

1. A Purple Life says:
  
  May 8, 2023 at 12:32 pm
  
  It’ll save you many hours of time and a lot of disappointment 🙂 .

The Month Of California: April 2023 Recap

I Moved To Sacramento, CA

I Rode A Sleeper Train