Change – Page 2

Tuesday February 09, 2016Change, Life, Live and LearnLeave a comment

Over the past few weeks, I have been on this crazy mission to clean and organize everything in my apartment. My roommate, God bless her, has tolerated my mania and even joined in to take care of her areas. I love me roommate. Well last night I finished . . . okay 95% is done. There are still a couple of little projects but those involve reorganizing something that is already in its proper place. Therefore, for all intents and purposes, I finished last night.

As I looked around my dusted, vacuumed, organized, color-coordinated, alphabetized – just kidding, I didn’t alphabetize anything . . . yet – this profound sense of peace settled over me. I even folded a fitted sheet neatly, that is how Zen I was.

I LOVE being in a neat and tidy space. It makes my heart happy. My grandmother would be so proud, I definitely get this from her. It’s not that it has to be sparse, it just has to be neat. A place for everything and everything in its place. I feel like I should cross-stitch that on a pillow or something.

My living space hasn’t looked this good since I was a kid. It’s always close, but there’s always something amuck. Some area that is a disaster area, and I have done this on purpose for years. Growing up I felt as if I had no control over my life. My mother was sick and our lives were ruled by her sickness. Therefore, I found myself something that I could control. Namely, my bedroom. It was pristine, at all times. Everything had a place, and I knew if someone had moved a tchotchke even half an inch. How did I know this? Because I kept such a tight rein on all of my belongings that I would be driven to distraction until it was returned to its correct place. It was the only thing I could control, so half an inch was that important. I can only assume that my friends picked up on this, because when they came over they either put things back exactly where they got it, or gave it to me to put away.

Sounds pretty OCD, right? That is because I had OCD, a mild case thankfully, but OCD nevertheless. I had to cope with mess and disorder everywhere else, but in my room, everything could be perfect. And there is the reason that I’ve always left something messy as an adult. After leaving college and getting my first place on my own, I discovered the downside in needing things to be perfect. Perfect is a dangerous word, because it is un-achievable and will only make you crazy. Over time, I broke the OCD cycle and have never let myself be completely organized since.

It was earlier this year that it occurred to me, that I’ve come a LONG way since I was that depressed, OCD kid looking for an outlet. A LONG WAY. I no longer need things to be organized, I like them to be organized. Therefore, I decided that it was high time that I love the space I live in. It was high time, for everything to have a place, and for everything to be in its place. A milestone had been reached. To celebrate, I cleaned and organized my entire apartment. I know how to party.

Tuesday October 13, 2015Change, Live and LearnLeave a comment

I seem to have picked up the habit of not only resisting technological advances, but complaining whenever I am forced to catch up with them. For example, I recently had to upgrade my phone, because not even an old priest and a young priest could fix my old one. Despite the obvious necessity and the fact that having a phone that actually worked was a bonus, I fought the change. I put it off. I complained on social media (yes, I realize the irony of that). And when I was complaining, I adopted the hashtag – #GetOffMyLawn. Because despite the fact that I am in my thirties, I totally feel like the old guy yelling at the neighborhood kids whenever I get all uppity about updating my tech.

Flash forward two weeks, and I absolutely adore my new phone. It’s faster, has a longer battery life and the swipe feature still blows my mind. How the heck does that thing work? I have also realized, that since I now have a phone that works I am using it a lot more. Not to call or text people, that has remained the same. The amount of time that I now spend on email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or searching the net has skyrocketed. To a certain degree that’s a good thing. I write historical fiction and historical biographies, that entails a lot of time on the net. I also have to keep myself present and engaged on social media. But I was doing that before, when my phone didn’t work. So clearly, this extra time that I am spending isn’t productive . . . and if it’s not productive . . . then it must be wasteful. Yes?

I mean, how many times does someone really need to check their email in one day? To check their Facebook account? How many times in a day do I get something that needs immediate attention? Ummm, never. I can’t think of a single time. Now I get things that need attention before the end of the day, but I can take care of that by checking my email 2-3 times a day. A couple of hours isn’t going to make a bit of difference. Let’s face it, most of the time I read an email and then ignore it for a couple of hours anyway. Facebook or Twitter? Same thing. I can’t think of a single time that I got something that couldn’t have waited a couple of hours. Therefore, what the hell am I doing checking these things sometimes 4-5 times per hour. Seriously, that’s ridiculous!

How much time to I waste everyday by obsessively checking in on all of my accounts? Let’s do the math. I have two email accounts, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Let’s say that I spend one minute on each, each time I check, which is realistic if there’s nothing new to see. So five accounts times one minute, times four times per hour. That’s twenty minutes per hour minimum. If I sleep eight hours a day (ha!), that’s 16 hours awake, which is a little over five and a half hours per day checking to see if there is anything new on social media. That is almost an entire work day! What is wrong with me?

And that doesn’t count the time that I spend playing Mahjong, Yahtzee and Scrabble. No wonder, I’m not as productive as I’d like to be! Therefore, I have new goal. Hence forth, I will be embracing the grumpy-old-man-get-off-my-lawn side of my personality. No one needs to be on their phone that much, so my phone is going to get real cozy with the phone pocket in my purse. At home, it is no longer going to live right by my side. I survived growing up having to get up to answer the phone, so I can as an adult too. I’m tired of feeling chained to the damn thing. Therefore, get off my lawn, and don’t expect to get an immediate response from me. I’m disconnecting.

Thursday August 27, 2015Change, Happiness, LifeLeave a comment

For a long time I believed that happiness was a destination. If I could accomplish X, then I would be happy. If I could get A, B and C, then I would be happy. I was on this road and happiness was always just slightly out of reach. I always had to finish one more thing, climb over one more obstacle, obtain one more prize. In all honesty, it was a bit like playing Super Mario Brothers. I would get through all the levels and battle my way past Bowser only to discover that I’ve simply leveled up and there’s a whole new world of levels to get through. Only this one’s a frickin water world!

Seriously! WTF?

Happiness was also just out of reach. No matter what I did, I never got there. I saw other people that were happy. I guess I assumed they knew the super-secret-ninja-short-cut to by-pass all of the rigmarole. And they weren’t sharing the secret either! Then I realized that they weren’t sharing the secret, because there was no secret. Happiness is not a destination, just like life isn’t a destination (but that’s a whole other blog post). As it turns out, happiness is a choice. It’s that simple. There’s no secret handshake and no levels to clear. It is a choice. A choice of how we react to our surroundings. A choice of what we say to ourselves in our inner monologues. A choice of how we adapt to set-backs.

I’m trying to remember this right now in order to make the right choices. The choices that leave me happy, instead of the choices that leave me miserable. I’ve been sick, in one way or another, for almost two years now. I’ve seen my regular doctor and I’ve seen specialists, and they’ve all treated the symptoms that were in front of them. Without fail, those symptoms have either come back, or been replaced with new symptoms. I can’t seem to catch a break, or rise above the level of feeling “okay.” For the better part of this year, my weekends have consisted of me sleeping for the majority of at least one of my days off, if not both. It’s put a major damper in my productivity, and thus my mood.

However, I have been choosing to focus on the positive. I’ve been choosing happiness, for no other reason than I can. I have some truly wonderful people in my life, and despite everything else going on, that is reason enough to choose happiness. That being said, I’ve been having a lot of problems making that choice this week. Last week I saw a functional medicine doctor, and she is running more tests then I can count unless I take my shoes off. However, after getting my entire history and looking over my extensive list of foods that I can’t eat, she had an immediate gut reaction of a diagnosis – I’m allergic, or at least highly sensitive, to sulfites.

If she’s correct that sucks BIG TIME! (For the record, I think she is. One of the biggest sulfite culprits is wine, and drinking wine is a habit I took up about two years ago. Coincidence?) If I am allergic to sulfites it will not only take my already extremely limited list of foods I can eat and make it significantly smaller, but it will also take away the one social device I have. When I go out places with friends, I often can’t eat the food, but I CAN share a bottle of wine. Or raise a toast. Now I will be able to eat even less, and I’ll be the one drinking water at happy hour. Not to mention, I’m an introvert with anxiety issues. Sometimes it takes a glass of wine just so I can relax enough to enjoy myself.

I haven’t even begun to truly dive into what that will mean to my diet, because quite frankly I started to do the research it made me want to cry. You wanna know what they spray all over bacon to preserve it? You guessed it, sulfites! Needless to say, I’ve been having a hard time this week choosing happy. True, I don’t have the definitive diagnosis back, but from the research I’ve done, a sulfite allergy explains a lot of my issues. So I’m also having trouble choosing hope at this point. However, I am well aware of what life is like when you choose miserable. So no matter how hard it is, I’m going to choose happy. I might need some reminders though.

Thursday July 23, 2015Change, Live and LearnView all 2 comments

For the majority of my life, I operated under the assumption that I would always feel, to some extent, that I didn’t belong. That there would always be something that was off, that was not quite right. I grew up in a tiny mountain town in Colorado, yet I’m not really the biggest fan of being outdoors. Not to mention that I most definitely do not have a small town mindset. There are some people who do, and they love living in small, rural towns. To a small degree I envy them. There is a certain relaxation and simplicity that comes from a small community. Alas, it’s not for me. I go stir crazy.

I moved to Boulder, CO for college and when I graduated I moved to Denver, because even Boulder wasn’t big enough for me. Despite the drastic change in culture that I was yearning for, I didn’t feel like I belonged in either of these places either. I had friends, made some amazing memories, and generally enjoyed myself. Yet something was always off. I didn’t fit into the party culture at CU – I was a VERY serious 18 year old. I hated winters. The cold, the snow, the ice, the layers of clothing that were necessary. I was always turning down invitations because I didn’t want to go camping, mountain biking, hiking, skiing, etc. Essentially all of the amazing and wonderful things that people move to Colorado for, I had no interest in doing. I didn’t fit in.

Then I moved to LA, and after a couple of rough years of getting on my feet, I find that I LOVE it! The things that people always bitch about LA for – the insane traffic, the higher cost of living, the rude people, the earthquakes, etc. – don’t bother me. I don’t care. Do I still get annoyed from time to time with the traffic, yes? I think you would have to be dead to avoid getting annoyed with the traffic. But oddly enough, it isn’t a huge detractor for me. None of the negatives are, because there are so many positives. I love the anonymity that I have in this city. I can go out and run errands for half the day and never once run into somebody that I know. Or I can meet up with friends and the possibilities of what we can do are endless. I wanna go see a play, there are dozens to choose from every weekend. We want to go out to dinner, pick your poison. You feel like Chinese food and donuts? I know a joint. It’s amazing, and to be honest I still don’t think that my awe at what this city has to offer has waned.

And did I mention no winters? Oh yeah, no snow. At all. Ever. I finally found my city! Yet, I will be talking with friends out here, and some of them have attitudes that are so completely different. They yearn for aspects from wherever they came from, and have trouble calling LA home. It is simply where they live right now. I get the same feeling from them that I had when I lived in Colorado. So I’ve come up with a theory. I believe that there is a place for everyone. Some place on this globe where you feel at home. Where you feel that people get you and your environment nourishes your soul. Some people are lucky enough to be born in that place, while others have to travel around the world to find it. I truly believe this, and when I was chatting with a friend a couple of days ago, I got my first confirmation of this belief. She moved to New Zealand almost a year ago, and when I asked her if she was going to try to renew her Visa, or come back to the States, her answer was immediate and resounding: Stay in New Zealand. She has found her place, and the thought of going anywhere else seems absurd.

I don’t really know how to conduct research on this, science never being a strong subject for me, but I definitely have a hypothesis – there is a place for everyone. Have you found your place? Let me know!

Thursday July 16, 2015Change, Live and Learn, WritingView all 2 comments

Since the beginning of the year, I have been trying to write a motivational book based off of the lives of the women that I study for my Heroines of History biographies. As you can probably guess by the way that I phrased that, I have not made much headway. I have an outline. Most of an outline. It’s been on my To-Do list, don’t get me wrong. It just happens to have been playing hopscotch down my list for months. Instead of actually working on it, I simply move it to another day. I figured I’d get to it later. Then later, turned into later, which turned into later, which turned into, “I am never going to work on this am I?”

That’s when it occurred to me. Maybe the reason that I kept putting off working on it, is because I didn’t actually want to work on it. Maybe part two of my Heroines of History plan (books geared toward juveniles) should have actually been part one. Ah-ha! I don’t want to scrap the motivational book completely, but I don’t want to do it first.

It was also around this time that I was bemoaning the fact that I can’t draw. Well, let’s say that my skill is not good enough to illustrate a children’s book. I have the text for my next book done, but as my illustrator is currently engaged, I can’t move that project forward. Which was making me REALLY frustrated. Not at my illustrator, but at myself. That I was unable to do it on my own and was reliant upon somebody else. I know, *gasp* having to rely on somebody else is the worst thing ever! I bet you can guess which answer I choose on personality tests when they ask if I prefer to work by myself or in a team.

I was seriously working myself up over this. Then, once more, a realization hit. I don’t need to publish two children’s books in the same year. This one can wait until next year. The world will not end and all of my plans will not go up in smoke. 2016 is a lovely publication year for Monsters in the Night. So, that project can be shelved for a bit and I can focus on other things . . . like finishing my novel and working on step two (which is now step one) of my Heroines of History plan.

Amazingly enough, since switching up these priorities I have been a lot more excited about working on my projects. I have gotten more done in the past two weeks with my juvenile Heroines of History books, then I got done with my motivational book all year. I can’t stop thinking about it. I had to take a break from doing the dishes last night so that I could write out some notes. I wish that I had more time to work, and I can so clearly see the path that this project needs to take. I had none of that with the motivational book. In fact, I was trying to figure out how to motivate myself to write the motivational book.

As for my novel, I have rewrites and things to do piled up to my eyeballs, but instead of getting stressed out about it, I’m excited for where it is going, and how close I am to being done. Seriously, so close! I can almost taste it! Once again, I’m excited about my work. Go figure, I started focusing on what I wanted to do and on what I can do instead of what I thought I should do, and what I couldn’t do and things got so much better. I am of course saying all of this, so that in a month and a half when I start freaking out about things that are completely out of my control and I don’t want to see another word about the Civil War, you all can remind me of the way that I feel right now. And then tell me to get back to work.

Tuesday June 16, 2015Change, LifeView all 2 comments

Calm – (noun) freedom from agitation, excitement, or passion; tranquillity; serenity

I do many things well. Some better than average and I’m not too modest to say so. It has come to my attention though, that the art of being calm, is not on that list. It isn’t even on a list that is anywhere near the list of things that I do well. It really isn’t even on the list of things that I do poorly. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s on the list of things that I have not done for years, and don’t think about anymore. Which would explain the anxiety issues that I have been having.

So I did a yoga class this weekend, in an attempt to bring some calm to my life. Or at the very least some deep breathing and stretching. Holy crap that was the longest hour of my life! Seriously, how do people do yoga on a regular basis without losing their minds? At one point, I actually think I was becoming more anxious because I wasn’t yoga-ing properly. And this was supposed to calm me down! So I focused harder on the breathing, and on making sure that I was doing the moves correctly and eventually the panic subsided. I still wasn’t yoga-ing properly – based upon the sheer volume of crap flowing through my brain – but at least I looked like I was yoga-ing properly. (And yes, I am well aware that isn’t a word, but I don’t know what else to call it, and by this point it’s making me smile. So yoga-ing is here to stay.)

We ended the class laying down with our eyes closed, which I totally thought that I could be down with, after all when have I ever passed up the opportunity for a nap? It wasn’t long enough though, so that part was foiled as well. Essentially, I had just spent an hour getting limber and annoyed. That’s when I realized that for all of the agitation in my brain, my body actually felt pretty dang good. My shoulders weren’t up around my ears, and I felt like I wasn’t wound up like a top. Cool! Which of course means that I’m going to be going back, because it obviously worked at least to a small degree. So now I feel like my body is at war with my brain. My body is excited to go back to yoga, and my brain is trying to convince it that there’s no need. In truth, I’m starting to feel like I’m going a little crazy. Thankfully they know me there.

Thursday April 30, 2015Change, Characters, WritingView all 2 comments

I had a great conversation with a fellow writer last night and one of the things that we discussed was the difference between a character in distress and a damsel in distress, and how, as a feminist and I am sick and tired of women always being damsels in distress. I have no qualms with a female character being in distress, or any character for that matter, distress is the cornerstone of drama. My issue comes when the female characters turn into damsels.

The specific scene that we were discussing was of five characters, four men and one woman, who were surrounded with the enemy closing in. Characters in distress, awesome! One of the men gets singled out and beaten. He ineffectually tries to defend himself, and one of the other male characters tries to help him, but they both wind up injured. To subdue a third man, who is rather large, the enemy tazes him, and again one of the men ineffectually tries to go to his aid. A lot of distress, a lot of drama, perfect! But you notice, so far the woman has done nothing, until it is decided that the men will be killed on the spot and the main bad guy is going to take the woman home with him, you all know why. Finally, our woman does something . . . she screams out for the men to help her. She knows, can see, that all four of them are thoroughly subdued and injured and have no way of helping her, yet she cries out to them. Instant damsel.

Throughout all of the previous action, which includes all four of the men being struck and injured, not a single one of them calls out for help. They try to fight to back, and I’m sure would have gladly accepted help, but none of them expect someone to help them, much less call out for help. Whereas the second the woman is grabbed – not struck, not injured, grabbed – her first instinct is to call out to four wounded men to come save her. WHAT?!?!?!? No! She just went from the fifth member of an outlaw gang, where she is purportedly a contributing member, to a damsel in distress.

Yes, characters need to be in distress, but I am fed up with male characters in distress “taking it like a man” while the female characters transform into damsels. It is only after the woman has been successfully dragged away – it does say that she is “fighting back” – that we discover she had a switchblade on her the whole time! WHAT?!?!?!?! Long story short she isn’t able to do anything profound with the blade and winds up being saved by a man. Classic damsel in distress. I’m tired of seeing it, and I told my friend just that as it was her book that we were discussing.

Now I’m not expecting every woman to be Xena the Warrior Princess and take out every threat that comes around like a badass. Although that is fun to see. All I want to see is women who try to help themselves instead of immediately turning to men to save them. The four men mentioned above, had to be saved by somebody else. It happens, there’s nothing wrong with that. But fight back and fight dirty if necessary, and from my experience* ladies, it is always necessary to fight dirty when up against a man. Even if he is your size or smaller, the odds that his upper body is physically stronger than yours is practically guaranteed. It’s just the way we are built. But if some guy is intending to make me his sex slave I can guarantee you the only way that he’s going to be able to drag/carry me away is if I’m unconscious or completely bound. If he’s got a gun on me, I’m going to fight back even more viciously. It’s really hard to hit a moving target, especially one that just kicked your knee out and is attempting to gouge out your eye.

As authors and storytellers we need to show that women can do more than cry out for help. Women can help, or at least try, to help themselves. Will they get hurt? Most definitely. Will they still need to be saved sometimes anyway? Yes. Will some of them still wind up captured or dead? Yes. But it is about time that this notion of the damsel in distress went away. Literature and entertainment is completely saturated with this character. Let’s create a new one, shall we?

*My experience consists of several self-defense classes and hundreds of hours of stunt training in a variety of weapons. I have never encountered a man who couldn’t at least match my upper body strength. To come out on top, you have to fight dirty, but if you’re in a situation requiring you to fight, he deserves it!

Tuesday April 14, 2015Change, Inspiration, Live and LearnView all 2 comments

For years I was one of those people that would scoff at the thought of having a mantra. I guess to some extent I considered the practice to be too new-age, mumbo-jumbo-y for me. Or maybe I thought it was silly and felt embarrassed at the thought of repeating self-affirmations to myself. Who knows? Even after going through two different therapists and seeing great results, both of whom had me primarily focus on retraining my inner monologue, I still found myself looking down my nose at the thought of having a mantra. Perhaps I watched Stuart Smalley on SNL a little bit too much. At any rate, I was anti-mantra for no discernable good reason.

Then a couple of years ago, a friend and I started to get together for “Goal Nights.” We each came up with our own list of goals (both personal and professional), then got together for dinner and discussed the goals and how they could be achieved. It was empowering, liberating and scary all at the same time to see what I wanted to achieve written down in black and white. Okay, truth be told it wasn’t black and white, I used colorful markers, but you get the idea. Then every month or two we would get together to discuss how we were doing, and after about a year we reevaluated. Lo and behold, we had each achieved a goal or two, made strides toward achieving others and come to realize that some weren’t important to us after all.

So the goals were revamped, using our new found knowledge of what we wanted. This is when I stalled out. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what needed to be done, that was right there in front of me. My problem stemmed from the fact that I was getting in my own way. My self-doubts and emotional hook-ups were preventing me from taking the strides forward that I wanted to take. After much soul-searching I came to realize that I had three main issues that were holding me back.

I had no faith in my writing ability. Every time I wrote something and worked up the courage to share it, I just KNEW that it was horrible and whoever was reading it would say so. If I happened to get a compliment back, I assumed that they were simply being nice. It’s really hard to achieve goals that involve large amounts of writing when you believe that you suck at writing.
I believed that the only reason anybody would want me around is because I could provide them with something. Some skill, some service, some knowledge, something more than the pleasure of my company.
Then to compound the above belief, I felt the need to prove myself. It wasn’t just that I had to be able to provide something for a person, I also had to prove to them that I could be helpful. Prove that I was good enough.

I realized that until I got over this, I would remain stalled out on my goals. I then did the heretofore unthinkable; I turned each of those hurdles into a mantra.

I am a brilliant writer.
People love me for me.
I have nothing to prove.

Now, I would be lying if I said that I felt like anything but an utter and complete fraud when I wrote down those three sentences. There were laughable and egotistical and so far from the way I felt I was writing pure fiction. But I wrote them down anyway. I wrote them down on 5” x 7” cards in bright, impossible to ignore, colored markers. I made three of these cards then posted them all in my bedroom. At first I made a concerted effort to read through them at least twice a day – morning and night. Then that slacked off to once a day, then only whenever I found myself standing in front of one. However, as my room is not that big and I had made three cards, it was impossible to enter my room without seeing and at least subconsciously recalling what they said. “I am a brilliant writer. People love me for me. I have nothing to prove,” became as much a daily part of my brain as saying, “Zoey don’t eat that!” (For those of you who don’t know my dogs, I say that particular phrase a lot.)

I have had those cards up for probably close to two years now, I don’t know for sure, and I realized this morning, as I stood in front of my vanity and read them, that I don’t need them anymore. I believe what they say. They worked. Don’t get me wrong, there was a whole lot more work involved than simply repeating a mantra over and over again, but I feel that by repeating the mantras I tricked myself into believing that they were true. By believing that they were true, I started to act as if they were true, and by acting as if they were true, they actually became true.

Which I guess means that I am now a believer in the power of mantras and I would like to apologize to anybody that I openly, or secretly, scoffed at or made fun of for having mantras. I was an idiot, and failed to recognize the profound wisdom of your ways. But I see the light now, and find myself in need of some new mantras. I’ll have to do some soul-searching.

What’s your mantra?

Thursday January 22, 2015Change, LifeView all 5 comments

I have a sweet tooth, a REALLY big sweet tooth. For just about any and all things, the sweeter the better. Candy, pastries, cake, ice cream, dessert wine, sign me up and bring me seconds! I’m really kind of amazed that I’m not diabetic. That being said, I know that eating refined sugar is super bad for you, especially in large quantities. I’ve read enough articles and know enough about nasty diseases, like cancer, to know that a diet revolving around sweets can only end in catastrophe. So I’ve tried to cut out refined sugar before. Trust me when I say, that you do not want to be around me when I’m on a no sugar diet. It’s not pretty. In fact the only thing uglier is when I try to cut coffee out – think Godzilla films, the fire-breathing ones.

Therefore, I have embraced the coffee addiction and contended myself with trying to cut back on sugar, instead of eliminating, so that I don’t wind up in county jail for strangling someone with a red vine. Instead, I have been focusing on eating anti-inflammatory foods. When I did a recap of last year, it occurred to me that I have a major inflammation problem: sinusitis, otitis, costochondritis, gastritis, tendonitis, everything ends in ‘itis.’ My body is pretty much systemically inflamed. So, falling back on my old stand-by, I did a bunch of research to figure out how to alleviate this issue. Go figure, the answer is to change your diet, and address/fix any of the chronic inflammation injuries. So I’m seeing a specialist for the chronic tendonitis in my ankle and I’ve started taking a liquid supplement geared toward anti-inflammation.

Now with this supplement, you’re supposed to take it first thing in the morning, and to say that it is sweet is an understatement. It is so syrupy sweet that it is too much for me. This stuff is intense. However, it works, so I’m still taking it.

I’m going to pause for a tangent here because this stuff is AMAZING. Like I noticed a difference after taking it for a week, amazing. Like the pain in my ribs has gone down 95%, amazing. Like I might turn into their unofficial spokeswoman, amazing. Seriously, if you have inflammation problems get this stuff. It’s called Nopal Juice. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

In fact I’ve been taking it for two weeks now and I noticed something yesterday. While filling up my gas tank I ran inside to get some water and as usual perused the candy rack while waiting in line to pay. I decided against getting anything, paid for my water and went back out to my car. Now this in itself is not overly odd. I often choose not to get something because candy is bad for you and composed of completely pointless calories. I WANT candy, but chose to not eat any. This, however, was not the case. Sitting in my car I realized that I chose to pass because I DID NOT want any. WHAT?!?!?! Me not in the mood for something sweet? Who am I, and what happened to Kat?

Then I began to look over everything else that I had eaten during the week. None of it was sweet either, with the exception of a small handful of caramel corn that made me feel ill. Other than that, everything I had eaten had been composed of fruits, vegetables, grains, and meats. And all of it made from scratch so no added sugar lurking about to make it taste better. So I really thought about it, all of the sweet things that I love to eat, and none of them sounded good. Weird.

My conclusion is that there is something about that juice – which I think I will henceforth affectionately refer to as Kool-Aid – or I’ve been abducted by aliens and replaced with a healthier version of myself. It’s a toss-up really. Either way I’m going to keep drinking the Kool-Aid.

Tuesday January 06, 2015Change, Live and LearnView all 3 comments

As I very much feel that I spent most of last year injured/sick or both, I do not feel that 2014 was a very productive year. Yes, I did accomplish some things and some goals were met. But as far as my type A, over-achieving, go-getter personality is concerned, I slacked off big time. So I’ve decided that 2015 is going to be amazing! Things will be achieved, bridges will be built and crossed and puggle butts will be walked on a regular basis.

At the very least it will be better than 2014, which shouldn’t be very hard, as that bar is set pretty low.

So I have attacked my new year’s resolutions in fantastic type-A organization. First off, I really liked an article that I read where a girl set herself 21 things that she wanted to do before she was 21. Brilliant idea! I have completely stolen it and I came up with 34 things that I would like to do before I turn 34. I figured doing 33 before 33 would just set myself up for failure since my birthday is in March. So instead, I’m giving myself a couple of extra months and going with 34. Ambitious, yes I know. However, they’re not all life-changing things. I’ve got “Throw a Dinner Party” on there. Hard? No. Something I’ve been talking about doing for quite a while? Yes. On the list it goes! See an orthopedist to fix my ankle. Hard? No. Something I’ve put off for years? Yes. Not only ‘on the list it goes,’ but I’ve now made that call and have an appointment next week. Boom!

Other things are harder things, or at least more time-consuming things. Here’s where the type-A comes in. For those things, I sat down and broke the task into smaller manageable bits and then set them to a timeline. For example, I want to read the entire Shakespearean Canon. Which when looked at as one big task is incredibly daunting. However, if I read 4 acts every week for a year I will be done. That is totally doable. Other goals have a gradual implementation, adding a little something more every month or so. Some don’t even enter my timeline until July or August, but they’re all on the timeline and that’s what matters. Well they’re almost all on the timeline, I’m not quite done yet . . . it’s a lot of goals. But once I am done they’re all going on a calendar with checklists and color-coding and daily tasks. It’s. Gonna. Be. Epic. And no, I’m not drinking more coffee than usual. Why do you ask?

Kinda like this, but awesome!