meaganmsanders

Some Challenges Unlock A Whole Chain Reaction of Challenges

May 25, 2026
by meaganmsanders

Do you ever go to do one task and end up unearthing about a hundred more tasks you have to do during the process?

I renewed my WordPress website for the next three years, so I spent most of my day today trying to get it set up so that it looks a bit more professional. I’ve been childishly ignoring the voice of my coach in the back of my head telling us, You don’t need a website to start.

But I think I have a number of things I can put into an online shop and content IS part of what we’re supposed to do so I feel like this is an okay first step. I know it’s best practice to have your own website to maximize the amount of money you retain from a sale and to build a subscriber list that you own since most social media sites heavily discourage that.

So this morning I started out trying to figure out how to get my new theme set up so that it looked the way I wanted it. I was working on it yesterday too actually. I chose to switch to the Shapely theme because it looked like it would allow me to make the types of pages I wanted to.

The first problem I encountered was the home page. I did not start by reading the welcome documentation–normally I would never, but WordPress is always a little bit of a labyrinth. So I spent a bunch of time trying to edit the page to resemble the Wix site I have that I like the layout of and then discovered it didn’t look like that on the live site.

So I dove into trying to figure out that, which took a bit, and during that process I realized I needed to get some of the art I needed onto my computer, create and make a gif to emulate this video on my Wix site (the video was not just autoplaying on a loop like I wanted it to, it was more like a video player):

So I had to figure out where the original video was, make it short enough and small enough to download and reupload to a site where I could convert the video to a gif (I ended up using Canva, both to convert it to a gif and to crop it because I couldn’t figure out how to crop the video in iMovie), and then got it finally uploaded into WordPress and looking vaguely similar:

But that was one whole side quest. Then I realized the email subscription form I had created should be changed out for my Kit subscriber form since I want to get started using that. That led to discovering I needed to set up a subdomain to connect Kit to WordPress, which led to an advanced level of Google searching (I finally resorted to AI, which I hate, but when trying to solve a how-to problem, especially with tech it is really useful) for how to create a subdomain. During that process, I realized I no longer remembered who my domain host was, so I had to figure that out (turns out it’s WordPress, which was part of what was complicating my Googling. Most of the help articles were for externally hosted domains.

But finally AI clued me in that I just had to add the DNS records from Kit and that was it! Hours of futzing and research to complete the task in under 5 minutes. God, the learning curve is a pain.

Anyway, after I got that connected, I also realized I needed to set up Kit the rest of the way and send my first email–my email subscribers will be 2 days behind since I only just remembered Kit exists and I should send my writing there as well. So I finished setting up Kit whilst also becoming aware that I needed to set up my Substack fully as well. So I did that.

I’m pretty sure there were several other mini side quests in there, but it’s late and I’m tired so I’m going to leave it at broad strokes. Have you ever gone to complete one task and ended up with 3508032 other new tasks?

Note to self: Write a how-to article on any or all of these things.

Thanks for reading!

Home Care

Today I Learned How to Reset My AirCon—Here’s How

May 24, 2026May 24, 2026
by meaganmsanders

I moved to Florida a few years ago and obviously, air conditioning is an essential part of a home here. It gets HEAVY use so it’s had problems way more frequently than I ever experienced in my previous living spaces. It seems like every 6-8 months there’s something going on with it. First it wasn’t working so we replaced the thermostat with a new one, then it wasn’t working so we sucked out the evaporator drain line, the next time it was another case of needing to clear out the drain line again, and when it started acting up in the last week I was expecting I’d have to have the servicer come out again.

It seemed weird to me that the same issue (the air still works, but it won’t run long enough to get to the set temperature) seemed to keep reoccurring, so I did some Googling. One of the suggestions was that it could be a dirty filter so I checked that—a little dirty but not nearly as dirty as shown in the video. So I banged it out and stuck it back in. Then I got suspicious about the orientation of the filter because everyone made sure to say it needed to be in there correctly, but when trying to replace it the way I had taken it out, it didn’t fit. So I realized there was a little bar blocking one side and a notch in the filter that I figured must match so I was like “oh no this has been in here wrong and that’s Bad”.

At that point I did some more Googling and came across something that suggested the evaporator coils might be dirty if the filter was in there wrong way. So I tried to follow a video and open it up. Unfortunately the bolts were stuck. I found some WD40 and sprayed them all and left it all for a few days because I was tired of fussing with it.

Yesterday I finally came back to it and the WD40 had helped with all but one of the bolts. I managed to be able to peer inside the handler but with the one stuck bolt I couldn’t get it all the way off enough to reach inside and actually clean anything so I gave up on that and closed it all back up, hoping that was not the fix. Next, I decided to try sucking out the drain line myself. I didn’t have a wet vac, so today I went and bought one and came home to try it out.

I did a quick search and found this video about how to do it: https://youtube.com/shorts/Gybcwy7Uo9c?si=QfVXhoWAAe0IG36L
So I flipped the breakers and tried it out. After a couple minutes, the vac started smelling burnt and I opened it up to see nothing was inside. I wasn’t sure if maybe the cap needed to be on on the inside where the line started (I had left it off worried it would burn out the vac if it was still on) or if there needed to be more liquid or maybe there was a clog or something. I decided to wash the back windows while I was waiting so I ended up being like, the instructions said to make sure hands and feet are dry and I just got water all over so I’ll wait until tomorrow to try again. In the meantime, I poured a kettleful of boiling water into the drain line, followed by a healthy pour of vinegar, just to try another method of cleaning out the drain line.

But when I tried to turn the AC back on (by flipping the breakers)….nothing happened. The thermostat came back on, but there was no sound. I waited a bit thinking maybe it just needed time to start up again, but after five minutes there was still nothing. I panicked a little thinking I might have turned them on in the wrong order or something and broken something. So after fussing with the app and the wall thermostat, I Googled it (again). I found a manual that didn’t help me, but that I realized had a page that showed what the codes on a little screen inside the handler meant.

I used my phone to take a picture of the code and discovered that it meant there was too much liquid in the drain line. So I got the wet vac back out, put it on the box it came in so it didn’t touch the wet ground, turned off the breakers again, and tried vaccuuming it out again. A little bit of water went into the vac tube, but not much. The vac tube fit pretty well over the drain line pipe but I thought maybe not tight enough, so I got a towel (suggested by one of the videos) and wrapped it around where they met and tried to create a little better seal. I also put the cap back on the inside end. This time I got some water out. Not a ton, maybe a half inch in the 3 gallon vac reservoir. But after a few minutes of that it was smelling burny again so I called it.

I tried flipping the breakers again. Nothing. Getting warm inside. 🥲 I did even more Googling. My findings suggested I needed to reset the AC unit. So I spent several minutes looking for reset buttons on all the units and found nothing, so I decided to follow another video which said that to reset the AC, I needed to turn the AC off on the thermostat, then turn the breakers off, then wait a few minutes, and then turn the breakers back on.

I followed the instructions anxiously and when I had followed them all, turned the AC back on (at the thermostat).

IT STARTED UP AGAIN.

And it just turned off after cooling all the way to the set temperature. I’m feeling very proud and satisfied. So if your Goodman AVPTC37C114BB air conditioner isn’t cooling all the way to temperature and turning on and off after short bursts (and the drain line isn’t clogged and the filter isn’t dirty)—try resetting it! There’s no button, you just turn off the thermostat on the wall, then turn it off via the breakers, wait a few minutes to clear it out fully, and then turn the breakers back on and turn the thermostat back on. I’m going to be very pleased if this is something I can do if (when) the issue occurs again. Apparently it’s normal to have to reset it if it’s being a little funny, so this is great to know.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

Personal Development

Self-Improvement Speedrun

May 23, 2026May 23, 2026
by meaganmsanders

I’ve been on a self-improvement tear for the last few years. This is what the stack of books next to my bed looks like.

But honestly I’ve kind of been on a self-improvement tear my whole adult life (minus college, I was mostly just going with the flow then—well, aside from my obsession with devouring books about how to write). In my mid-to-late twenties it was mostly what the hell do I do for a job, how do I pick a career, how do I manage my money because I knew that working part-time for minimum wage was not an “adult job/career” (note to self: write about that later, because I hate it. It SHOULD be an adult job/career option).

So it’s been a common throughline in my life, but I think it’s been extra intense the last few years. Hence the paying for a coach. I’ve known for the last several years that as I’ve gotten older I’ve sort of clamped down on sharing the parts of me that I know will not be met with only joyful acceptance. The things that might be considered “cringe” or that I’m “too old for” or that might make people think there’s something wrong with me. Which is most of me.

When my little brother died in 2023, I learned a lot about him from various people who knew him in other areas of his life. Things that I think he might have had similar thoughts about. If there was someone who was more tightly locked down when it comes to revealing personal details, it was probably my brother. I don’t think he wanted people to know things about him because if they know things about you, they can hurt you. Or maybe that’s just my feelings about it.

But learning these little details of the life he lived and realizing how much he tried to hide or obscure that I would have been supportive of, that I would have been able to relate to or enjoy with him made me want to try to be more myself. To be unapologetically who I am and enjoy the things I enjoy knowing that nothing I enjoy is dangerous or harmful for others (except in the way that anything can be). If it doesn’t harm others, people should be able to love things even if they’re a bit weird. And people includes me.

I haven’t quite figured out how to do it yet. I might be overthinking it (extremely likely tbh). I always find it easier to talk about the things I enjoy online, which is probably why the vast majority of my friends have been made online. If I end up talking to someone online, odds are we’re both into the same stuff so it’s easy. But in person, they could be a Christian extremist that thinks enjoying fanfic is evil or someone who thinks reading is stupid or I don’t know. It’s just much scarier.

It’s hard to know what is and isn’t okay to share too—I’m not even on TikTok, but I worry about being a TikTok oversharer.

All this to say, I’ve been feeling an almost desperate, frantic need to improve myself the last few years. Figure out how to be more honestly me. Be better at managing people. Learn to work in a totally different work environment. Save more money. Stop being so hard on myself but not stop being so hard on myself that I’m a shitty person. I have to be better so I don’t hurt the people I care about and I can take care of myself and I can start my own business so I can take care of myself.

I think I’ve been trying to cram twenty years of personal growth into the last two and getting anxious and frustrated because it’s not working. But maybe it is working and I’m just so frenetic about it that I can’t even see it. I hope so.

Business

I’m starting

May 22, 2026May 22, 2026
by meaganmsanders

So I paid for coaching a little over a year and a half ago (I think). And one of the things she said that has stuck with me was about the advice that goes something like “act as though you already have what you want”. That advice always confused me because how am I supposed to act like I’m financially free when I’m very much not? But it clicked for me when she explained it in YouTube terms.

If your goal is to be a YouTuber who makes that their full time job, then you need to show up the way a full-time YouTuber would. Create a posting schedule, filming schedule, and develop a process for brainstorming content. Post every 2 days and talk to the audience (even if the audience is no one) as though you have the millions of followers.

That clicked for me in a way dozens of other explanations of the same concept haven’t. “act like it” isn’t referring to the side of your goal that’s a result, like a certain amount of money or a certain amount of followers or whatever. It’s referring to YOU doing the things you need to do to develop whatever it is you need to develop that naturally results in things like x amount of money or y amount of followers. If you want to be a painter you have to paint. Crazy!

It’s a simple concept but I struggled to get my mind around it until she described it that way. But it makes perfect sense. Now I just have to figure out what it is that I want aside from being financially free. 😂 The last few years especially have taught me that you can literally do anything (and I get regular reminders from Tim Denning in my email). There are people out there who just started calling themselves veneer techs and hyaluron pen techs and braces techs all based off of brief online “courses” and they were making money doing it! Not an insignificant amount of money! It’s a terrible idea and so harmful to the people who go to them and unethical and illegal but THEY DID IT. You can just DO CRIMES and sometimes it takes awhile for the consequences to catch up to you!

Anyway, my point is not that you can commit crimes, my point is that if someone can build all that for an illegal service, then SURELY I can build a real (legal!) business based on my skills and knowledge. I’m still not sure what exactly I can do that someone would be willing to exchange money for, but I’m sure there’s SOMETHING and I’m going to start throwing things at the wall until I figure out what I can do better than most and what I enjoy doing most.

This article is officially step one of that journey.

(Don’t fuck it up, Meagan, show up tomorrow and write something else.)

Author: meaganmsanders

Some Challenges Unlock A Whole Chain Reaction of Challenges

Today I Learned How to Reset My AirCon—Here’s How

Self-Improvement Speedrun

I’m starting