Tag: middle age

Who Was that Masked Friday?

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The above meme is literally “official information” from the CDC. I’m not convinced that they meant for it to be funny. Happy Friday, friends!! Happy Favorite Things Friday! On Fridays, I stay on the material plane of life, and I list three favorite things, movies, TV shows, songs, food stuff, beauty products, etc. that have made my life fun. I strongly encourage you to list your favorites in my Comments section and please see previous Friday listings for more favorites. Here are today’s favorites:

The Gardener – My friend recommended this film and it was so enjoyable to watch. This is a documentary of sorts, based on the true life of a very wealthy man, Francis Cabot, who devoted most of his life to creating his own fabulous garden and also to support the preservation of other amazing gardens, all over the world. The movie is peaceful. It’s like watching a beautiful meditation. It slows you down enough to make your recognize the true miracles of the natural world. This is one of the most pleasant viewing experiences I have had in quite a while. It is beautiful, calming and comforting, which are rare qualities in films these days.

CoolCabanas – One of my closest friends has to be a mermaid. She loves the beach like no one I know. Any time that she isn’t working, she is at the beach. We had a beach meet up the other night, and she, of course, was the first one to get there, texting us a picture of our “set up”. She had a beautiful CoolCabana tent which kept us shaded and socially distanced, perfectly. My friend was able to put up her CoolCabana easily all by herself (which is the purpose of the invention) and it is the sand which keeps the four corners of the tent firmly rooted in place. If you are planning to be at the beach any time soon, go to this website and check out these wonderful shelters: coolcabanas.com

Motherland Essentials Lotion Bars – Earlier this year, my best friends from college and I, took a weekend reunion trip together to the ever lovely, Charleston, SC. (before all of this Covid mess). We came across these Motherland Essentials products in a really cute, little, girly gift shop. As you know, I am all about good smelling stuff. These lotion sticks smell divine!! I layer my other perfumes on top of these scents and I believe that it makes my perfume last longer. These lotion bars are like aromatherapy in a stick. Motherland Essentials is a minority owned business, as well. Please see their website here: www.motherlandessentials.com

I didn’t do it intentionally, but I just noticed that all of today’s favorites came from my friendships. Friends will always be my favorite. Friends and Friday are the best f-words, ever invented.

Happy Friday Quotes | Good Morning Friday Messages & Wishes

Mood Meter

A few weeks ago, I downloaded the app, Mood Meter, on to my phone. I had read an article about it, and I was curious to experience it myself. The Mood Meter app was created to help people develop better self awareness and emotional intelligence. Basically, how it works, is that you log into the app, and you map your mood, on a four quadrant graph, as shown above. Each color quadrant is divided into smaller squares, so you can better pinpoint, your exact mood. Then, if you would like to try to shift your mood, into an even better feeling place, the app gives you tips on how to do it. (I noticed that “smile”, is a prevalent suggestion.) You also have the option on the app, to type a few words about what is going on in your life and current situations, which very well might be contributing to your current mood.

Last week, was a really cruddy week for me. A lot of things happened that kept my mood in the blue quadrant. (or if I am going to be emotionally intelligent and brutally honest with myself, I should say that I allowed a lot of my life’s circumstances to keep me in the blues) To give you an idea about how tough last week was for me emotionally, according to the mood meter, 64% of the time, I was in the blue quadrant, as opposed to 6% of the time, during the three weeks previous to last week.

Now, of course, I have just been checking into my Mood Meter app randomly, whenever it struck me to do it, without any real rhyme or reason. I have been trying to post my moods at various times of the day, in order to give me clues about what times of day that I tend to feel better. For 23 days in a row, I never missed a day of at least checking into my Mood Meter, at least once or twice. Yesterday, though, I didn’t check into the Mood Meter. I broke my streak. 🙁

I reflected on this fact of missing my check in yesterday, and even without graphing my mood on the Mood Meter app, I came around to some pretty good self awareness. This week has been a much better week for me, emotionally and materially, than last week. Yesterday, was a wonderful day, connecting with my family throughout the day, enjoying a nice lunchtime walk with my husband and our dogs in some comforting, cooler fall weather, and then capping the day off, by meeting some of my closest friends to watch the sunset on the beach. It occurred to me that the proverb “It’s Better to Lose Count While Naming Your Blessings, Than to Lose Your Mind Counting Your Troubles!” (Rev. Run Simmons) totally applied. I sheepishly admitted to myself that I have a tendency to take all of my blessings, and all of the bounty in my life, for granted. It seems that I am quick to question, “Why me?” when troubles come around (and then quick to dot my Mood Meter with a lot of blue dots), but I never seem to question “Why me?” for everything in life which I have been gifted. Overall, my blessings have always, always outweighed my pains. And often, my so-called “pains” have turned out to be blessings in disguise, in the long run. I just took a pause, right now, right before writing this sentence, and I made a point of logging into my Mood Meter and logging my mood, in the far right, of the bright yellow quadrant. I am beaming thinking of one of my wonderful daily blessings that makes me so happy and excited and content- communing with you, my dear readers. I am grateful for you. Thank you for being a constant yellow dot, in each of my days.

Pause and Ponder

I live in Florida and my friend sent me this meme. Only we Floridians are allowed to share it. Happy Autumn, friends!!! Fall is so many people’s favorite season. The cooler (but not too cold) weather, the beautiful changing leaves (in most parts of the country), the comfy sweaters and sweatshirts, getting back to a little more structure, the pumpkin breads, and pumpkin lattes, and pumpkin pies and pumpkin cookies, basically the pumpkin everythings, wearing boots again, Halloween and Thanksgiving, football, the crispness in the air and the coziness of blankets . . . . . Fall/Autumn (I wonder which name she prefers?), no matter what you want to call this season, it is nothing short of sublime.

It’s not lost on me that I am in the autumn ripeness of my own life. Will I one day look back on my own life and say to myself, “The autumn season of my life was definitely my favorite.”? I don’t know. I do feel a deep richness in this stage of my life, like no other. I have shed a lot of things that no longer serve me, much like a tree sheds its leaves, and yet I still feel rooted and solid. I am experiencing the bounty of everything which I have worked towards creating in life. My family has grown up nicely and still remains quite close at heart. My relationships have matured and deepened. My writing fulfills my need for purpose. My spirituality feels naturally a part of my every day experience, like never before. I wonder if with each season, we get closer to God? Perhaps it is in that little sliver of eternity, within the holy meridian that divides winter from the start of spring – perhaps that is when we are One with God completely? Is this perhaps, what is meant by the circle of life? That’s what I like about this autumnal time in my life. I have the time and the energy and the physical health, in order to be able to ponder these ideas and many other things. Autumn gives us time to pause and to ponder. What a beautiful, glorious, colorful gift!!

Monday Musings

+ I hate songs that have police sirens featured in them. They always catch me off guard. A song came on the radio the other day with a police siren, and I desperately looked for a place to pull off of the road, convinced that a high speed chase was happening, despite the fact I was waiting in line at a bank’s ATM.

+I love the Fresh Market’s almond pillow cookies. The almond filling in the cookies tastes exactly like the way sweet almond oil smells. That’s a rare feat. Very few things smell and taste exactly the same. I can’t find the words to describe it, but it is amazing. I think sweet almond oil is one of the most alluring and beautiful smells ever created. I have purchased almond scented shampoos before, only for one reason, the shampoo’s lovely scent. Still, when you think of eating almond shampoo, that sounds absolutely gross, but yet these cookies taste divine, and their taste is totally idiosyncratic with the smell of sweet almond oil. Try them, and tell me that I am not right about this.

+We have been picking up a lot of take-out food lately. I have started taking pictures of the crazy long car lines which I have waited in, in order to get our food. My husband says that waiting in long car lines for take-out at restaurants, has become the new waiting in line for an available table.

And a couple of good quotes by other people:

“People who don’t enjoy food, it’s like I don’t want to work with them or be friends with them.” – John Turturro

“I usually play characters who smoke and drink box wines.” – Allison Janney

“Whenever I need to decompress now, I take my dogs for a walk. They are truly the ultimate therapy.” – Tory Burch

That’s all for a Monday. Keep looking up, better days are coming!!!

Power for the Future

RIP – Ruth Bader Ginsburg

We women so easily forget how hard the women older than us, and in the generations before us, had to work to get women the deserved respect, equalities, and opportunities that should have always been rightfully ours.

“Dissents speak to a future age. It’s not simply to say, ‘My colleagues are wrong and I would do it this way.’ But the greatest dissents do become court opinions and gradually over time their views become the dominant view. So that’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today, but for tomorrow.” – Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.” – Abigail Adams, in a letter to her father John Adams, in 1776

Isn’t that a beautiful thing, to stand up for something that will make a better tomorrow for people like you, even knowing that you may never see the fruits of your own labor? What if we looked at every single one of our own individual actions as our own personal gifts to the people of the future? What would we do differently? What would we do more?

Every once in a while, old blog posts of mine trend on my view stats, seemingly out of nowhere. This blog post from February 13, 2019, has been viewed often in the last couple of weeks, so I suppose it has words that bear repeating. Please find that blog post entitled Fragile Like a Bomb, here:

Fragile Like a Bomb

Friends, I’ve admittedly been a little fragile this past week. It has been a tough week for a lot of reasons. But don’t you ever worry about me. I am fragile like a bomb.

Phew, It’s Friday

Woohoo, It's Friday! Pictures, Photos, and Images for Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Twitter

Happy Friday!! I am so happy that today is Friday. So, so happy and relieved, I am. New readers, on Fridays, I stay at the shallow end of the pool. I don’t go deep on most Fridays. Fridays are “Favorite Things Friday” here at Adulting – Second Half. On Fridays, I list three favorite things, songs, websites, beauty products, etc. that make my material life fun. I strongly encourage you to share your favorites in my Comments section and please check out previous Friday posts for more of my favorites. Here are my favorites for today:

MDLIVE – I have a great general physician, but last Sunday, I was at the end of my rope with a lingering cough (don’t worry, I have tested negative for Covid), which has lasted for over a month. So, I got an appointment with a doctor, spoke to a doctor, got a prescription for antibiotics sent to my pharmacy, picked up my prescription and started taking my medicine, on a SUNDAY, all in a time span less than two hours. The doctor was very kind, empathetic and professional and MDLIVE accepts some insurance coverage. I would use this service again in a heartbeat, but I hope that I don’t have to for a while. I hope that you don’t need to utilize MDLIVE either, but keep it in your back pocket, just in case.

StriVectin Powerlift Instant Tightening Mask – I love StriVectin products. I have used their neck cream for a while now. However, this “Tighten and Lift” mask is my new favorite product from their line. The stress of all of this 2020 mess has been showing on my face, and this is the first product that I have ever used that I saw an immediate difference. If you need a lift, literally, try this product. Of course, there are no miracle anti-aging products that mimic a real facelift, but this product definitely helps fill in the lines, a little bit. It’s a picker upper in a tube and worth the price!

SWAD Coriander Chutney – I have been on a ramen soup kick these days. I start with the ramen and then I get creative by doctoring it up with leftovers, and salad about to wilt, and random single helpings of meat from the back of the freezer, and topping the hot, steamy soup with some crunchy cheese toast. Anyway, to give the soup some flavor and kick, I add a teaspoon of this delicacy to my concoctions and it makes all of the difference. If you are one that likes spice and tang, you must purchase a jar of this chutney. It is one of my go-to ingredients for a lot of my cooking. I purchase my jars of this wonderful flavor, on Amazon.

Enjoy the weekend, friends! Thank you, always, for coming by!!!

HAIR'S WHAT I THINK Or Monday, Monday… Can't Trust That Day…

Candy Corn and Soup

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I sent this meme recently to some of my family and friends. My middle son and I found it to be hilarious. My middle son said that eating candy corn is like eating candle wax. I’d honestly eat the candle wax first. Most of the responses to the meme that I got back were along the lines of, “Ha! Yes! Nobody likes candy corn.”

Well, it turns out that my daughter and a few of my friends DO like candy corn . . . quite a bit. They took offense. It seems to me that candy corn falls into the “you either LOVE it or HATE it” category. There is no in-between. You either love or hate broccoli, brussels sprouts, cilantro, sardines, mushrooms and . . . . candy corn.

On a food note, while moping in my bed yesterday, I received a phone call from a sweet young lady from Nordstrom Department Store. She wanted to know when I was going to pick up my package.

“What package?” I asked.

“It’s soup, under your son’s name,” she replied sweetly and patiently.

“Soup?!?” I exclaimed. Right away my mind was going into, “Why in the hell did my son order soup from Nordstrom?!? That’s got to be some expensive soup. I didn’t even know that Nordstrom sold soup, but then again I haven’t been to the mall in forever.”

“It’s a SUIT, ma’am,” she said, giggling.

My son and my husband had recently purchased my son a suit for his medical school interviews. The customer service person and I got a good laugh out of our exchange. It feels good to laugh. Laughter is good medicine.

Charlotte

We had another setback yesterday, with my youngest son’s epilepsy. My son is okay, thankfully, so that is what really matters the most. Lately, when I offer a gargantuan pile of advice, or pepper this particular son with questions (like I have a tendency to do with all of my children and loved ones – thank you for still loving me), he likes to sing his answers back to me. It is sort of like a warning sign, like a dog growling. And it’s hilarious. The very off-key, fervent singing usually breaks the tension, and while it annoys me and amuses me in equal parts, it also reminds me how much I love my children and each of their unique personalities and their ways of being, in my world and in the whole world, in general. That is why days like yesterday are so stomach pitting-ly tough. There is nothing stronger, yet at the same time more vulnerable, than a mother’s heart. When you have days that force you to confront the idea that your strong, vital heart could be instantly shattered, at any moment or at any time, the fear that you feel is overwhelmingly ferocious. I read something recently, which suggested that we women have a lot of our parts and our essence made out of silk. Like silk, we look feminine and delicate and fragile, but here are the real facts:

“Quantitatively, spider silk is five times stronger than steel of the same diameter. It has been suggested that a Boeing 747 could be stopped in flight by a single pencil-width strand and spider silk is almost as strong as Kevlar, the toughest man-made polymer.” (www.chm.bris.ac.uk)

It turns out that we women are really made of gorgeous, silky steel. Don’t we know it! Charlotte, the teeny, tiny “fragile” spider, really was the strongest character in all of our childhood tales. A tiny, knowing, beautiful, wise, feminine spider, spun her messages in silk. Her love and her gift to the world was her silken word, and her safe, silken nest, where her babies grew and came to life.

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Soul Sunday

Hello friends. I hope that this Sunday finds you in a state of peace. Sundays are reserved for the songs of the Soul, here at Adulting – Second Half. Sundays are devoted to poetry. Please share your poems in my Comments section. This is a “no judgment” zone. This is a safe place for release in the form of the written word. Here is my poem for today:

I Hear You

I’m listening, Body.

You are the one who always gets ignored.

The Middle Child, mediator of the Mind and the Soul.

You don’t have the voice, or the emotion of your siblings,

But you house the heart.

You make possible the breath.

You work overtime, trying to keep everyone and everything in balance.

You subtly ask for care, but your subtly is so easy to ignore,

Until your whispers turn to cries.

Don’t let my cries, turn to screams, you say.

I’m listening, Body.

Today, I care for you.

You are the precious vehicle for my travels in life,

And for the acuity of my Mind,

And for the sensories of my Soul.

Today, I honor you and I respect you,

For everything that you give, to the whole of me.