Making the Internet My Accountability Partner

Being able to track and recognize progress is a key component to sticking with my goals. This month I feel surprisingly proud of how much I’ve been able to use up. Holding onto these and revisiting how much 28 days can change things encourages me to recognize what I’m capable of for the next three months.

First you’ll notice I went through 3 candles. Two of them were smaller, while one was a 3 wick candle. While I enjoyed them well enough there ultimately was a reason they have sat for at least a year. The three wick was campfire scented which should have been nice but was incredible underwhelming. The small green one was pine scented. It made for nice Christmas decoration but I didn’t want to hold onto it another year. The black small candle came in a book subscription box. I can’t remember what it’s scent was but I wasn’t in love with it.

I am about halfway through a candle that I am loving I’ll tell you more about it in the March empties. However, before I started this candle I tried to use up two other candles. One was a three wick lavender and eucalyptus scented candle. For some reason even though its about 3/4 full the flames keep dying. The same thing was happening to a wood wick candle, it burned about a quarter of the wax and then the flame died. Unlike the three wick I was able to notice that repeatedly attempting to relight the wick created these pits around the wick, which may be impacting it. Unless you have other suggestions I may end up removing the wax of these candles for a wax warmer.

I’ve also used two of the nail press-ons. The long fake nails lasted all of three hours. They just kept falling off and I drew the line at the third re-glue. The stickers lasted 24 hours but weren’t sticking too well and I only had so much impulse control, so I picked them off. I do have two more sets of press-ons left. Part of me wants to try and have a reason to wear them, but I don’t have any upcoming events and I also don’t want them to continue to be in my collection.

I finished one tube of lip gloss. I really liked the holographic nature of this one, but it was a shade lighter than I typically prefer. This used to be the lip gloss I kept on my desk for when I wanted to wear just a touch of makeup for my zoom calls. I’m now working through the Estee Lauder lip gloss, but doubt I’ll finish it this month. I also finally pulled the plug on the mascara. I was still getting pigment from it, but it was irritating my eye and it’s not worth risking infection or vision problems. I waited a few days but ultimately decided I did want to have a replacement mascara instead of just relying on the lash primers that I have. I’ll likely need to discard this one at about the time of my move just to be proactive about it’s expiration.

I included a tube of toothpaste because I have a funny/scary story behind it. I’ll leave the ultimate judgement up to you. When I was living with my mom the upstairs bathroom was only being used by me and my youngest sibling. They used a very specific toothpaste brand. Everyone else in the downstairs bathrooms had their own tubes of toothpaste, so when I moved to Boston in June of 2022 I packed all of the excess toothpaste in the upstairs bathroom. I have not yet bought toothpaste in Boston. Since I finished the tube in the picture I am finally on the very last tube of toothpaste that I took from my mom’s house. I brush my teeth consistently once a day and only rarely do I brush twice a day so I will be working on this last tube for a while and it likely will move with me.

Also pictured is a tub of body scrub. I got this one from a store in Disney Springs when my roommate and I went last April. I didn’t start using it right away but it still took me months to finish it. I didn’t count the scrub in my body wash collection so it doesn’t impact those numbers. However, I choose not to replace the scrub until after I move so that I can focus on using all of the body washes I have.

The last category I’m tracking is my bath bombs. I have one individual bath bomb and three bath bars that will give me two baths each for a total of 7 baths I need to take before my move. I have a feeling it will be getting easier to use them in the coming months. Part of the issue was that the heat in my apartment is broken to be on full blast no matter what so it is routinely 80+ degrees. Being this hot really discourages baths in my opinion. Since we’ve been having some slightly balmier days my roommate and I have been opening the windows which makes the apartment a reasonable temp and makes baths rewarding again.

I hope this post was interesting. Let me know if you have any feedback for the next empties post.