The Subtle Art of Friday

Happy Friday, readers! Happy Favorite Things Friday!! What a great Friday we have here, with anticipating Thanksgiving right around the corner. Fortunately, our two older sons will be coming home, so all six of us will be enjoying our holiday together. This makes me feel extremely grateful. In other good news, Ralphie, our Labrador-who-is-quite-unhappily-and-totally-against-his-will-on-a-diet lost 11 pounds in two months. (much better than I did) His diet is clearly working! Ralphie still has about 10 pounds to go, and he still tries sneaking the other fur babies’ food every chance that he gets, but he is looking healthier and trimmer every single day. We are so proud of our Ralphie! While not trimming much off of any of my own body fat, I did trim 17,000 emails out of my inbox yesterday (and that is honestly, an understatement). I never bothered to delete emails for quite some time and then I started getting warnings from Google that I was running out of storage. I hemmed and I hawed but I finally just hit the delete button and I trashed 17,000 emails. Honestly, once I got past my nervousness, it felt incredible liberating and freeing. If only cleaning out my closets and drawers could be this easy!

Yes, I notice that I am quite chatty today. What can I say? It’s my favorite day of the week. Here is what you really came for, my three favorites for this Friday. Please check out more favorites in my previous Friday posts and please share some of your own favorites in my Comments section:

LitezAll COB LED magnifier – I’ve reached the age where magnifiers are easily in my top ten favorite things category, all of the time, and this is the best magnifying glass which I have ever owned. Why is this one so great, you ask? Because it is huge, lightweight, and because it has three bright LED lights that shine on whatever you are trying to see. And what’s even better, it’s cheap. I got mine at Ace Hardware but you can order one from Walmart or Amazon, as well.

n:p beautiful volumizing dry shampoo – Even when my hair is perfectly clean, I use this stuff. I love how full it makes my (honestly, kind of thin and fine) hair seem to be. In the words of my mentee (5th grader), “I want fluffy hair, like yours.” (What can I say? I grew up in the eighties.) Seriously, when you apply this dry shampoo, it sounds like you are taking a blow torch to your head, but the results are terrific (if you like fluffy hair, like mine). And even better, it doesn’t flake, like a lot of dry shampoos have the tendency to do.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson – This book is really good, but it is not for the person who blanches at the f-word. The f-bomb is used in this book, as often as the word “the” is used in my blog. It’s a fun, light read with the key message “to lighten the F%ck up!”. The book was honestly recommended to me by my 17-year-old daughter, who had the book recommended to her, by one of her best friends, who was given the book to read, from her own father. (We love this friend and her family. I think that my daughter’s friend’s father knows that our girls are a tad high-strung and a little over-achieving at times, to the point that it crosses over to slightly unhealthy. At first when my daughter told me about this, I was like, WTF?!?, but after starting to read the book, I was like, “F@ck yeah!”) Here is an excerpt:

“Then, as we grow older and enter middle age, something else begins to change. Our energy level drops. Our identity solidifies. We know who we are and we accept ourselves, including some of the parts we aren’t thrilled about. And in a strange way this is liberating. We no longer need to give a f@ck about everything.”

Happy Friday Friends!! Only give a f@ck about the stuff that matters! Thanksgiving is great time to ponder what really matters to you. See you tomorrow!

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.