Category: Everything Else

#AtoZChallenge | Y is for Yuletide and always having room for one more tree.

21 Comments

As you enter our house, there is a small mudroom. The floor is raised slightly above the adjoining living room and, on the left, there is an alcove with one large, single window that opens onto the road leading up to our house. It’s the first thing visitors see as they arrive.

If you come in December, it will also smell like pine. It’s the first place in our house where you’ll find a Christmas tree. It’s not the only one.

I’ve collected Christmas ornaments since I was a girl. It’s my tactile memory keeping project where each ornament connects back to a memory or significant event from my past. Each tree lets me explore those memories further.

This entryway tree used to be the one my girls decorated when they were younger. It wasn’t an attempt to engage them and allow them personal expression. It was far more selfish. I didn’t want them touching my tree. I invested fully in the ruse, picking out ornaments that matched their passions at the time. I still have two bins worth of ornaments hoping to find a new home some day with the grandchildren.

Continue reading →

#AtoZChallenge | X is for Xylitol and other sugars that are off the table.

25 Comments

I would make the long walk to the barn, located on the outskirts of campus, from my college dorm every day. I had no choice. I had to feed my chickens. There were four assigned to me that I embarrassingly had named after various school girl crushes. Probably not the best choice, as I also had to document their symptoms as they got progressively more ill. I had to determine which nutrient was missing in their diet. Welcome to my undergraduate world where, at the time, I was studying Human Nutrition.

I’ve always had an interest in food. While I enjoyed much of my undergraduate program, I realized after graduating and working in a hospital that the career paths aligned with my newly bestowed degree weren’t the right fit for me. I moved on career wise, but have always maintained a strong interest in food and diet.

Lately, I’ve been focused on getting to know how my body reacts to certain foods. My primary goal is to reduce overall inflammation. I feel great, but know that inflammation has long term negative effects on your body and that the symptoms can be subtle but pervasive. I’d like to understand better how it might be impacting me and how I can eliminate or reduce inflammation.

Continue reading →

#AtoZChallenge | W is for Warmth and why I can’t give up my chair.

26 Comments

I recently took up meditation, which I wrote about in my previous A to Z Challenge Post: J is for Juggling thoughts and learning to stay in the moment. In addition to the meditation practice, there were mindfulness challenges each week.

For the first week, we worked on being more aware of habits by changing the chair we typically sit in each day. When I went into our weekly work meeting that Monday, I glanced around at the small oval table, where I typically sit facing the entrance door, and paused. I had arrived early, so my options were open. I mixed things up and grabbed a chair opposite where I usually sit, with my back to the door. My coworker noticed and even commented on the fact that I wasn’t in my usual spot. Habit busted.

That night with my husband traveling and girls away at school, I was alone for dinner. After I finished cooking, I started to head into the living room with my plate of food but stopped. Instead, I sat down on one of the bar stools that line our kitchen island. I slowly and deliberately ate my dinner there instead of in front of the television. Habit busted.

Continue reading →

AtoZChallenge | V is for Vacation and obsessively planning our Scottish adventure.

38 Comments

When my alarm went off at 4:00 am, I was immediately awake and hit off rather than snooze. An unusual move for me. I grabbed my phone, turning on the flashlight feature so I could see my way downstairs without waking up my sleeping family members. When I reached our home office, I sat in front of our desktop computer hitting the escape key to wake it up. I navigated quickly to the website I needed and got into the virtual queue to buy tickets. Even though I’d logged in within five minutes of tickets going on sale, the covered grandstand was already sold out. I grabbed two for the uncovered section and felt a sense of relief once I finished entering my credit card information through paypal and saw the pop up message that everything had been processed successfully. On a whim, I also emailed them to ask if there was a wait list for the covered section and quickly got a reply that they would put me on it. We had our tickets to the Braemar Gathering for the Highland Games this coming September.

I have spent so much time planning our upcoming trip to Scotland that we will actually spend less time in the country than the time I’ve invested in mapping out our adventures. The Braemar games also weren’t the only time I got up during the night to buy tickets for a planned vacation. I’m sure it won’t be my last.

Continue reading →

#AtoZChallenge | U is for Uncluttering, organizing and moving my To Do List to the cloud.

34 Comments

We have a deep kitchen sink, but as our family eats meals throughout the day, it starts to get piled up with dishes. Once we add a few of our taller Calphalon® pots into the mix it gets too crowded. The endless supply of dirty dishes starts to encroach onto the surrounding counter. The clean side is no different. Our drying rack is no match for the shear volume so we have to lay drying towels along the back of the counter to hold the overflow of clean dishes and the endless supply of empty seltzer cans that my youngest and I produce in a given day. Between the dirty and the clean, this area of the kitchen is often the messiest and most cluttered. I hate it.

I am physically uncomfortable in a cluttered space. I’m happiest when my house is clean. Fortunately, at least when it comes to the kitchen sink, my husband feels the same so we can usually keep ahead of the onslaught.

The same need for uncluttered spaces applies to my to do list. I like a nice, organized list.

If I searched my hard drive right now, I’d probably find old excel files dating back almost twenty years with titles like “house projects”, “gardening plan” and “renovation”. I use to have Doctor Who sticky notes with barely legible instructions scribbled across them hanging from my computer in multiples. My refrigerator mirrored the messiness of the sink with hand written lists and reminders organized on scrap paper and hung by magnetic clips at eye level helping to remind me of what I needed to do that day or that week.

Continue reading →