Tag: fun

Olympic Friday

Hi friends!!! Happy Friday!! Happy Best Day of the Week!!! I just took a quiz asking, “How many gold medals has the United States won in the history of the Olympics?” Like any true, proud, optimistic, ethnocentric American I picked B. 3012, which was the largest number out of the three choices. It turns out a majority of us true, proud, optimistic, ethnocentric Americans also chose the same answer. We chose wrong. The true answer is 1179 gold medals (still, not too shabby).

My regular readers know that Fridays on the blog are devoted to my favorite things. What’s not to love about our stuff? We wouldn’t be true, proud, optimistic, ethnocentric Americans if we didn’t love our stuff. But before I get to my favorite for today, I wanted to give you a bonus mental health trick. We are in sticky, political times. These times tend to bring up edgy, political conversations. We’ve learned with certain people in our lives, who hold different views than us, it is best to just say, “Let’s drop the conversation.” And deep down, if you are both reasonable people who care about the health of your relationship above all else, you take this wise direction. Did you know that you can use that statement with yourself? Say you are in a mental tizzy, beating yourself up for something that you did, or something that you forgot to do, or you are just worked up about your life in general, and your mind is going over and over and over it, like a broken record, you can use the same line on yourself. “Let’s drop the conversation.” And then once you do that, force yourself to be mindful by counting your breaths, or noticing one of your senses, like what you are currently hearing. Treat your monkey mind like your annoying acquaintance who won’t let something go. Train yourself to use, “Let’s drop the conversation.” Your wisest self knows this is for the best for the overall health of your relationship with yourself.

Okay back to stuff: Earlier this summer, when I was in London, I went to the Lush flagship store. Now, not being a big fan of shopping malls, I erroneously assumed that this Lush store was the only one in existence. I excitedly texted my daughter to meet me in this amazing, interesting, one-of-a-kind store, to which she answered, “Mom, we have Lush at the mall.” (This world has gotten so global.) That turned out to be a good thing, because you probably have Lush at your own mall and if not, you can get their products online. The product which I am in love with from Lush is BIG Shampoo. Having fine hair can be such a curse, but this BIG shampoo adds volume to my hair like no other product that I have tried before it. The secret of this shampoo is big chunks of sea salt that give it an interesting, admittedly “hard to get used to” texture, but the results are worth the adjustment. You can buy it in all different sizes and even get free samples at the store, so give it a try. Let’s bring Big Hair Back, 80s Ladies!!

Have a great weekend, friends!!! See you tomorrow!!

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

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

2940. Are you holding a grudge against someone or something? If so, what?

Foraging Friday

Hello friends and readers!! Happy Friday!! I hope that everyone is doing alright in this heat. I spoke to my aunt in Pennsylvania yesterday and she said that the temperatures have been hovering in the 90s there (not typical PA temps), and our poor son (who lives in Miami) has had a broken air conditioner for five days. Aye yai yai! Fridays are reserved for my favorite things on the blog, and admittedly high heat is NOT, at all, one of my favorite things.

But getting back to the good stuff . . . my favorite for today is something that I found while shopping for my “grand-dog”, Otis. It’s a snuffle mat. It’s made from fleece and it has hundreds of little fleece tabs that you hide treats and whatnot under. Snuffle mats appeal to dogs’ natural foraging instincts (think like when you are stuck on a walk, because your dog won’t remove their nose from a certain spot on the grass), and they help with relieving boredom in dogs. These mats are washable, and they come in so many cute, interesting varieties. (Amazon sells quite a few of them.) I have yet to purchase a snuffle mat for our three dogs, out of concerns that the snuffle mat could turn into “fight club mat”, but I haven’t ruled out buying one just yet. They’re just too cute!

Have a great weekend, friends. Stay cool, if you can!! See you tomorrow.

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

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

770. Do you have any music on vinyl or cassettes?

Elegant Solutions

+ Yesterday I had a dentist appointment, I had dinner plans with a friend, dry cleaning to pick up, I had things to put away from the weekend, and I had groceries to get in for the week. Yesterday, I had structure in my day, and I got a lot accomplished. Today, my day is rather unstructured and I’m a mess. I’m flitting from one thing to another, leaving a trail of half-done chores and projects. I just spent 15 minutes looking for where I last put my coffee cup, and I’m just getting to writing the blog now. Sigh.

+ Oprah’s best friend, Gayle King, celebrated the wedding of her son and his new bride recently. Oprah asked her readers to pass on advice to the happy couple. I skimmed through a lot of the same advice: healthy communication, being kind and thoughtful to each other, honoring commitment, don’t go to bed angry, etc. One piece of advice that stood out to me though was a reader who said, in the middle of a heated argument, to think or to even say out loud, “I love you more than this argument.”

+ I went to a flea market over the weekend and I saw this delightful sign: “Mind your own biscuits and life will be gravy.” I also purchased this ceramic cork jar that had the words, “Elegant Solutions” engraved on it. I honestly bought the jar for the sentiment “Elegant Solutions”. I love the idea of elegant solutions to problems. “An elegant solution refers to a technical or scientific approach that efficiently addresses a problem while being both simple and effective. It often maximizes available resources or consolidates multiple steps, minimizing the complexity of the solution.” (DevX.com) In my life’s experience, when I have a problem, and I’ve done everything that I can do about it, and I finally “let go and let God”, things tend to turn out in the most unbelievably synchronistic, perfect, easy, simple, miraculous way. The Universe has the whole “Elegant Solutions” thing down pat.

+ My daughter is studying in England this summer. She and her friends, (background: all pretty much “type A” kids taking challenging classes, at a challenging university. For instance, while they are studying abroad, their new thing is to run three miles a day in Hyde Park. Fun. Whose kid is this? I won’t run to my mailbox.), they traveled to Barcelona, Spain last weekend and they loved it. They were incredibly impressed with the amazing architecture and the divine food and drink. However, they all agreed on one thing: “It was just too laid back there.” (Huh? Is that really an issue?) They all agreed that they were happy to get back to London and a faster pace. Moving right along . . . .

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

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

1818. What technology advancement is overrated?

Sweet, Sweet Friday

Credit: @contradiction70, X

Happy Friday!! Happy National Girl Scout Cookie Weekend!! (it’s a real thing – look it up) Happy Favorite Things Friday!! On Fridays, I try to shut my brain off, and stay with enjoying the sensuous stuff in life. Life is meant to be experienced, right? Nowhere ever is it said that life is meant to be overthought. Today’s favorite of mine is a food. I realize that my Friday favorites have mostly been good things to eat lately. This is because this is what happens when you tell yourself that you should finally get serious about losing a few pounds. The Universe says, “Ha!! Have you tried this amazing delicacy?”

My wonderful aunt and uncle gave us a tin of the absolute best chocolate covered peanuts that I have eaten in my life. (and I have eaten A LOT of chocolate covered peanuts in my lifetime. Just call me “Mrs. Goodbar”) Hubs (Hubbard Peanut Company) offers these delectables and now, unfortunately, I have a new addiction. I have not tried any of their other offerings (yet), but I promise you, if you purchase their chocolate covered peanuts, the enormous tin won’t last you a week. Here is their website:

https://www.hubspeanuts.com/

Have a delicious weekend, friends. Savor it. Savor your life. I’ll see you tomorrow.

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

Here is the question of the day from 3000 Questions About Me:

2078. Do you like hot or cold food better?

Park It

I’m sorry for the late post today. We were at a major amusement park all day yesterday. I’m out of practice with amusement parks. The last time I was at this particular park I was a chaperone for a school trip – middle schoolers. Ugh. It was quite stressful back then, trying to keep track of hormone-filled tweens with all different interests (and/or lack of interests) in rides, and who also had especially keen abilities to disappear. I remember being on the bus on the way home from that trip, smiling to myself, as 12 Rod’s “Glad That It’s Over” played loudly in my headphones.

Yesterday was truly wonderful though. My husband and I smiled at each other, thrilled that we were still able to handle some of the major rides (without getting sick), but also able to be the human coat racks for our kids who were going on some of the major, major rides. My husband commented that the marvelous thing about theme parks is that they make it so that many generations can be together, and still have great fun together. There is usually something there for everyone in theme parks, even if it is just to vicariously see, and to feel the joy that occurs in a day of “escape” for everyone together in the park. We left the park (at closing time), exhausted but in a good way. I looked at all of the other people leaving the park with us, and everyone looked weary, but also utterly satiated. All of our muscles were clearly rubbery and spent from walking all day, and from holding tenseness on the rides, but our smile muscles couldn’t stop working for all of us, as we peacefully made our way to our cars, knowing that we were all headed to a good night’s sleep.

Question for the Day from 3000 Questions About Me:

1119. What keeps you optimistic?

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

Monday – Funday

Credit: @woofknight, X

Happy New Year!! Happy 2024!! I have really good feelings about this upcoming year. It’s going to be a good one! (We even get an extra day – leap year!) May all of your dreams come true for this year. And remember to dream BIG!

I already have our lucky New Year’s Day meal simmering in the kitchen. Pork, kielbasa, brats, sauerkraut, collards, black-eyed peas. It smells good in here!

I’m going to add a new daily addition to the blog. One of our sons got me a book for Christmas, called 3000 Questions About Me. He thought that they would make great writing prompts. I think that I will share a question each day that might work as a good writing prompt to any of my readers who also like to write and/or like to keep journals. Keeping with the theme of luck, here is today’s question from the book:

704. What have you been very lucky at?

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

Friday Fire

On Thanksgiving evening, a few friends and I were texting and it turns out that we were all doing the same thing in different places, from all of the way up in Massachusetts, down to Virginia, and finally all the way down to here in Florida. We were all outside, sitting around fires with our families and we sent each other pictures of our families, with everyone’s faces glowing in the beautiful, flickering firelight. I love beautiful, intriguing fires. I am a Sagittarius, which is a fire sign. My husband is a fire sign. Five out of six of our immediate family members are fire signs. (Yes, things can get really loud and bold and igniting at our house, really quick. I do sometimes feel sorry for our poor little less combustible Cancer son, who does his best to put the fires out.)

So with firelight in mind, my two favorites for Favorite Things Friday on the blog, involve fire. My husband reads the paper version of the Wall Street Journal every day, so he decided he would make use of the paper, by making newspaper briquettes to burn in fires. So every once in a while he sits with a pile of newspapers and a bucket of water and he uses his heavy steel newspaper briquette maker/newspaper log maker, to make bricks/logs to help fuel our mini-bonfires. You can find different models of these ” newspaper brick makers” on Amazon. Ours is made by a company called “Bits and Pieces.” To get the fire started, I like to use Maxwell’s Mystic Matches. These matches are admittedly a bit of a splurge. They are wide, thick sticks of Palo Santo wood that when struck, make an enormous, immediate flame. I love the smell of the Palo Santo as it burns. To start the fire with flames from these matches, makes the fire seem extra special and almost “sacred” in a way.

I hope that you enjoy a warm, passionate weekend, with the homefires burning! Happy Friday! Have a great weekend! See you tomorrow, fireflies!!

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

Splatter

Yesterday, was my “get splattered” day. It started out with our refrigerator breaking and ended up with me supporting and soothing some big highs and lows from some of the people whom I love the most in my life. I call it the “get splattered” day because I also literally did get splattered in my art class.

One of the fellow students, who is particularly creative and enthusiastic decided that her artwork needed some “splattering” and so she loaded up her paintbrush with dark green ink and then she swung the brush back, thus inadvertently splattering my artwork as well as hers. Honestly, I wasn’t upset about this. She was apologetic and it helped that I wasn’t particularly excited about this particular painting which I was working on. (On an aside, it is so fascinating to me to notice that all of us students are handed the exact same picture of a fall tree as our template, and to see the many, many different interpretations of the same picture come from this one prompt. All of the interpretative paintings of the same fall tree were lovely in their own ways, and yet so unique and distinct from one another. Without looking at the duplicated template which all of us students used as our “model”, I doubt that you would believe that we all had the exact same original to “copy.” If you don’t believe in incredibly distinctive, individual perspectives and interpretations and nuances on anything and everything, take a painting class sometime. It is truly eye-opening, mind-opening and a big jolt to your own creativity.) But back to the “splattering” event – as I noted, my fellow student was immediately apologetic, and we actually got a big laugh out of the whole ordeal. I told her that my artwork had now become our “collab.” It made me remember a time when I was a kid and I accidentally dropped a snow cone on a poster that my babysitter was just finishing up for one of her school’s clubs. I distinctly remember that my babysitter didn’t see that particular incident as a fun, accidental collaboration. I remember keeping out of my babysitter’s hair for the rest of that day. The event clearly made a mark on me. I am still writing about it here today, in my fifties.

The real reason why I am spending so much time discussing “the splattering” event is that it makes an excellent analogy about how all of us inadvertently get splattered, all day long. We get splattered with news, and texts, and phone calls, and weather, and social media, and all of the various energy of all of the people whom we encounter all day long. Sometimes this splattering adds to our being, and it becomes a fun collaboration and growth moment for us, and other times this splattering just becomes muddling, messy and more of a destructive, icy snow cone spill, that just brings us down. Sometimes we have to become more protective of what we are allowing ourselves to be splattered with. Sometimes we need to sit with ourselves in our own private “studios” and clean some of the splattering off of ourselves, in order to get back to our own clean, clear slates.

I’m a spongy person. And I don’t say that proudly. It is something that I try to work on about myself, a lot. When I say that I am spongy, I mean that I tend to strongly sense and feel the moods and tones and the energy of the people around me, and the places that I am in, and then I have a tendency to soak it all in, and then I easily get overloaded. (I think this is a big reason why I love solitude and quiet places.) At the point when I feel overwhelmed, I get hypervigilant about “emotional monitoring” which isn’t a good thing. It drives other people crazy (because often my interpretations of why the energy is “off” can be wrong, and more importantly, it isn’t my job to fix or change anyone else’s moods for my own emotional comfort. When I emotionally monitor others, they can feel frustrated and smothered, and it actually blocks true intimacy between us because they start not wanting to trigger my anxiety with their problems.) When I get spongy, it depletes my own unprotected energy and I have little to give back to myself and to others. As I have said many times on the blog, you do not have to take on other people’s emotions in order to be empathetic. You can shield yourself from their splatter, but still admire their painting, and the subtle, interesting effects that the splatter has on the life of their evolving painting. If people ask for your input on their “splatter”, you can kindly give it to them, without soaking in their splatter, on to your own masterpiece. Your life’s painting is truly and uniquely your own to create and to evolve. Just as you honor your fellow creators’ right to their splatter choices, you get to decide how much splatter the masterpiece of your own life needs, and you alone get to decide what to create from that splatter.

******And here’s a fun, easy trick to dance off negative “splatter”. Just sing this song at the top of your lungs. The “splatter” just evaporates. Truly. Try it.

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

Monday – Funday

Here’s a good reminder from Dwayne Johnson (“The Rock”) to start the week out:

“When you focus on you, you grow. When you focus on sh*t, sh*t grows.”

Let that sh*t go! I was at a little arts and crafts festival over the weekend, and I purchased this little rock from one of the vendors:

I thought that it was a rock crystal carved into the shape of a little cone-shaped shell. I told the woman selling it that I didn’t know why, but this little piece seemed to be calling to me (in retrospect, I am sure that she got a giggle out of my statement). Upon closer inspection when I got home, I saw this:

My “shell” has a face. I didn’t buy a shell. I purchased a rock crystal poop emoji. I still love it though. I think that I am going to use this little guy as a visual reminder to “Let that sh*t go!!” Rocks know what they are talking about. They’ve been around a long time.

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

The Potato House

I was going through some writer’s block this morning and then I saw this meme above. Isn’t this a fun idea? It’s not like these people are only offering potatoes to trick-or-treaters. Kids get to choose between another piece of the same old/same old candy, or they get to brag and tell the crazy story at school about getting a potato for Halloween.

Don’t we all need a random potato in a pile of the usual candy? There is something wonderful about being oddly surprised. When something unusual happens (and not a “bad” unusual), it spawns a little bit of delight in us, doesn’t it? So much of our every days are made up of our rote habits and routines. Even our holidays become so “traditional” that we rarely shake things up. We put the wreath and the tree in the usual spots, barely even thinking about what we are doing.

Let’s all add a potato into today’s basket of candy. Got to a grocery store you never go to, to see what they are offering up. If you’re “doom scrolling”, try a different news website than you usually check out, to scare yourself silly. Make breakfast for dinner. (the last time I did this, my family thought it was the best meal they had eaten in a long while) Listen to a song in a foreign language. (I found this song the other day and I can’t stop playing it.) It’s wonderful!

I like to watch animals in nature, or even our own dogs. They never cease to surprise me. The other day, Trip, our Boykin spaniel was violently barking and snarling at some enterprising young men my husband had hired to wash our windows. We all wanted Trip to “hush up” in a big way but none of our scolding was stopping him from his angry rant. In fact, our scolding was giving his tantrum explosive fuel. Then, Ralphie, our Labrador retriever disappeared. He came back with Trip’s favorite blue spiky ball and he placed it at Trip’s feet. Trip can never resist this ball. He picked it up in his mouth. Problem solved! Hot potato! Our dog has more sense than we do.

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