It's been a month since I last posted, so a quick update:

At the beginning of the month, I went on the retreat that I had previously scheduled in the Texas Hill Country.  I was pretty scared about going the week before, but kept on telling myself that I would be glad that I went once it was over.  

Not only am I glad that I went, but I actually enjoyed the trip and made some new friends.  This was a retreat organized by a woman who runs several a year (except for this year, when she is onlyI running two as a result of an injury she suffered last year that led her to cancel most of her events), and there are Zoom calls for members of this group a couple of times a month, so I can maintain contact with those from the group who show up to the same events that I do.

While I did push myself out of my comfort zone, I did manage to stay out of the panic zone, especially thanks to one woman who hung back with me as I was the slowest hiker in the group.  I am very grateful to her--and more motivated to work on building up my leg strength for hiking up hills so that I can become a stronger and faster hiker.

Work has been busy since returning, but I've scheduled a 10-day "staycation" starting next Friday, when I hope to make some progress on decluttering.

My neighbor took care of getting estimates for replacing the front stairs and that project will come in less expensive than previously anticipated.  I'll still open a new HELOC since the "draw period" on my current HELOC expires in November, just as I get closer to retirement and can see actually having the time to pursue more projects.  But I'm already quite close to my stated debt goal for the end of the year of $35k total--the current total is about $37.2k (of which ~23k is the mortgage), so I should meet/exceed my EOY goal easily--knock on wood and praying there aren't other big unexpected expenses that pop up between now and then.

That's a good thing, since I recently learned that the company I work for is being acquired AGAIN.  We went through an acquisition last August, which moved us from being a 22-person, 2 office family-owned company to being part of a 110-person (at the time), 10 office firm, and the integration process has been an additional source of stress.  Now we're being acquired by a firm that has 11,000 employees and something like 700 branches.  They say that there should be less disruption from this acquisition than from the last, since we will be siloed from the rest of the firm as we have a different business model (RIA as opposed to B/D, if you know what those are), but, we'll see.  In any case, the closer I get to "financial independence" and feeling like I COULD step away if I wanted, the better.  Still targeting retirement for 2029, but, we'll see how things work out.  Just being able to feel like I COULD step away would be tremendously psychologically freeing.