Lessons learned in 2014

Well dear ones, it's been a while since I've posted but since it's the Eve of 2015 I think it's time. Right?

Right. Because if ever there was a time to do some reflection it's now - the old year is over and a fresh start awaits...but you can't properly wipe the slate clean and start anew unless you take a moment to reflect, to internalize the lessons learned in the past year, and to figure out what action to take in order to be better and make the world better in the coming year. And also to wipe your feet at the door in order to not track any of 2014's shit into the nice clean new year!

Now, the fitness industry gods may strike me dead for saying this, but I am not a New Year's Resolutionary; my thought is that if there's a change to be made then why wait? And if someone tries to sell you a detox or a cleanse just because it's January 1, RUN. Run away as fast as you can and keep your wallet firmly closed. What the New Year IS good for though, is recognizing life's ups and downs and charting your course based on what you want. Ready for me to wax all self-indulgent? Don't say I didn't warn you...

If I were to attach some words to my experiences over the past year, they would be turbulence. Upheaval. Crushing disappointment. Anger and frustration. And in the very last month of the year: hope. Cautious optimism. I'm not saying that 2014 was all bad - far from it. But I made some, well, interesting and impulsive business decisions. I was forced to take a really long look at why I chose my career...and at this point I don't mind telling you that I came VERY close to packing it in and finding something else to do. My physical health and fitness tanked. I watched my oldest daughter - my little clone, so like me in temperament that it freaks me out a bit - turn 11 and go into grade six, which to my total surprise, ripped open all the old wounds from my own experience at that age and brought all sorts of old anger and resentment to the surface. Relationships fell on their butts and needed to be rebuilt and re-defined. I learned a lot about why I am who I am, but I tell you it was not easy. Still, reality had to be faced and I am firm in my belief that no experience is wasted as long as you learn from it.

So what do I want from 2015? My greatest desire for this year is for some smooth sailing. I mean, I know that the one constant in life is change - that's inevitable - but I am 100% done with things coming crashing down around me. So to that end, I am committing to holding the wheel steady this year while I get back to basics.  I'm going back to school to finish what I started ten years ago, I'm playing music again (how on earth did I live without that for so long? How did I forget how much fun it is?), and I'm letting go of all the drama and shit that got stirred up in 2014.

Two big themes stick out in my mind as I take stock of the past year, and this is what I will carry forward into 2015:

1. Shame sucks. I spent lots of time being ashamed of myself in 2014 - ashamed of how I look, ashamed of how I feel about things, ashamed of how I deal (or don't deal) with adversity. Well, fuck shame. I will not be ashamed of myself anymore. There, I said it. And...

2. I am responsible for only one person's happiness: mine. This is something that I have fought with for my whole life, and it isn't over...but here's the thing: I spent lots of time and energy over the past twelve months feeling angry for two reasons. One, that others had expectations of me that I couldn't meet, and two, that I had expectations of others that they didn't live up to. All the time I spent steaming and stewing over those feelings wasn't wasted; I needed to work through them and deal with them...and what I ended up with is this: I own my feelings. I don't own anyone else's.

2014 was a rough year, full of crises and emotional wreckage and personal and professional rebuilding. It also had moments of sheer beauty and wonder and awesomeness that can only be truly appreciated when surrounded with adversity. I don't regret a second of it...but I'm glad it's over and looking forward to charting some new territory. Oh, and 2014? Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

Whoohoo, cooking!

Now there's something that hasn't come out of my mouth in a very, very long time. Don't get me wrong; as a general rule I truly do enjoy putzing around in my kitchen, trying new things (cricket flour, anyone?) and preparing healthy meals...but lately I've been feeling, well, you could say uninspired but that doesn't really cover it. Bitter and twisted is actually closer - and the words 'fed up' come to mind but the cutesy pun it invokes makes me want to punch somebody. See, I enjoy cooking but what I do not enjoy is when, at the end of the day when everyone's tired and crabby, I say "how about stew for supper?" and everyone makes gagging noises. So I say "okay, how about sandwiches?" And they all go "meh" and I get mad and say "fine then, what DO you want?" and am met with a chorus of "food!" or "dunno" or (if you're nine) "olives!"

So clearly it's time to inject some life into my kitchen time. To that end,I have treated myself to two new cookbooks in the last week, and I promised you the verdict on one of them...but you're in for a treat 'cause you're getting the debriefing on them both!

Thug Kitchen Cookbook

Eat like you give a fuck is the tag line to this foul-mouthed tome, and if you've been around these parts for any length of time (or if we've ever hung out together) you will understand why I immediately decided that I needed to add this volume to my library after I saw the trailer on youtube....

This is a vegan cookbook, which under normal circumstances I would consider a deal breaker - I'm not vegan and do not aspire to veganism even a little bit. But inspiration is what I was after, and in order to achieve that, I needed to step out of my comfort zone. Also I kind of figured that it would be entertaining reading. I was wrong on that count.

Open up Thug Kitchen to any old page at all and you will find wholesome recipes, beautifully photographed, with delightfully foul descriptions and narrative asides. I admit it made me laugh out loud a few times, but here's the thing.

When I was in music college, one of my favorite teachers used to talk about using dissonance in composition and arranging as "the oregano on the eggs". Too much is too much, he used to say, and it makes the eggs taste worse. A little bit makes everything taste amazing. I know lots of musicians who will be sprinkling oregano on their eggs for their entire lives because of him!

Too bad the thugs will never be able to truly understand that analogy because they don't eat eggs. But I digress. What I'm really trying to say here is that the liberal use of bad language in Thug Kitchen is a little much, and very little creativity goes into the delivery so that it gets very old very quickly. A well-delivered f-bomb here and there is just enough to be shocking and funny. Five on one page, used in the same way, is just boring and speaks to the writers' poor vocabulary.

The recipes, on the other hand, are lots of fun! They combine some cool unexpected flavours and offer new ways to use ingredients that I keep in my cupboards anyway. Besides a few losers (sorry, chickpeas just don't go in sandwiches) the recipes are great. And if I can add an aside here that I've never heard anyone point out before? Eating more beans, unrefined grains, and legumes is the fastest way, bar none, to put a gargantuan dent in your grocery bill. A week's worth of apple-baked beans cost me about three dollars to make. And it was delicious. Served with BBQ pulled chicken thighs. Fuck veganism! (See what I did there?)

I'm sure that eventually our house will stop smelling like a litter box due to the sudden increase of beans in our diets. But it definitely served the purpose of shaking me out of my rut and getting me excited about cooking again.

Will it Waffle?

I picked up Will it Waffle? at my kids' Scholastic book fair. It looked like fun - a whole book full of ways to cook unexpected things in a waffle iron? Hell yes! The children were particularly excited about chocolate-filled waffle-ironed French toast, and in our excitement we ran home from the book fair, assembled the raw ingredients, and...

...then I realized that the waffle iron that Joel and I got as a wedding present (16 years ago) had finally given up the fight and was ready for the garbage.

So I'll admit that I haven't actually prepared enough of the recipes in the book to judge properly, although I did grill chicken breasts on the (new) waffle iron tonight, with delicious results. I am not, however, particularly impressed with the clean-up it's going to require. Still, this is a book that is ridiculously exuberant solely based on its subject matter and I will love it forever just because of that - and I will keep you posted on the results of red velvet cake waffles, waffled truffle omelets, and waffled mac and cheese.

Guilt and Tooth Sweaters

Whoa, it's November already - how did that happen?

Good Monday Morning all! So Halloween is over - thank goodness - and it's time to get back to life...and also take stock of the damage that happened this past weekend. If you're like me, the rain on Friday night meant waaaay fewer trick or treaters than usual, so on top of  a nauseating amout of refined sugar in heaps on the floor of my kids' bedrooms, we also have copious amounts of leftover candy. This year, I made the impulsive decision to buy mini chocolate bars instead of the usual craptastic mix of colorful rubbery chalky sugar shapes, which may have been unwise. I mean, few trick-or-treaters plus a ton of extra mini chocolate bars ended up being a somewhat lethal combination, at least as far as my health and fitness goals are concerned. But you know what?

I refuse to feel guilty about it. I mean, how easy would it be to get all down, beat myself up over it, and then decide that the year is screwed and I'll just start again in January?

Pretty easy. In fact, me ten years ago would have done just that. Instead though, I'm going to embrace Monday as the fresh start that it is, and put a little extra effort into eating clean this week and pushing forward with the tough-ass workout program I'm working on. Oh, and push-ups! Gotta love push ups. Because to hell with food guilt! It doesn't get anyone anywhere, and there's no point in allowing yourself a weekend of debauchery (heh heh) and then feeling too guilty to enjoy it.

Gather 'round, kids, and we'll do a thought experiment. (Credit for this one goes to fantabulous nutrition coach Kate Kline).  Imagine for a moment that you're lying on the couch one Friday night after a long and productive week. You're bagged, but you're reading a really good book and you can't put it down until the end of the chapter at least...but it's getting hard to make your eyes focus.

And the next thing you know, the sun is shining in, you're still on the couch with your book on your face, and...your teeth feel like they're wearing little sweaters because you didn't drag your butt off the couch and brush them last night. Also your breath smells like you spent the night licking sweat off a bull's balls.

Too graphic? Sorry. Kind of.

Okay, so do you decide that screw it, there's no point in brushing your teeth until Monday now since you dropped the ball on Friday night? Or...do you go straight into the bathroom and brush your teeth - and pay some attention to doing an extra good job?

You know what I'm getting at. Stay tuned team, cause up next is gonna be a review of:

Death and Push Ups

So a little while back Shannon mentioned to me that she wants to work on getting healthier. "Great!" I said. "Skip the ice cream after supper today."

That didn't go over well. We all bandied suggestions around, and after some deliberation we decided as a family that we're all going to do 50 pushups a day, for a month. Today is day three.

I'd really rather not say how sore I am right now, and I haven't done my push ups yet today...in fact, I haven't done anything at all today except consume an inordinate amount of carbohydrates. I'm trying not to feel guilty about it but I must confess that the guilt is setting in. Which is a clear sign that it's time to open a bottle of wine.

Just kidding. Sort of.

See, in the dark hours of this morning, I got into the car to go to work like it was any old Tuesday. I pulled out of our driveway and onto the street, and I hadn't gone 50 feet before I drove past a cat on the road, lying dead in a pool of blood. It took about a second before I realized that it looked like our cat. My heart in my stomach, I did a crazy u-turn and parked the car amisdst irritated honks from the cars around me. I jumped out of the car to take a closer look at it, and sure enough it was our Sallah, who had been playfully head-butting me and tromping up and down my sleeping form only an hour before. The only coherent thought I've had all day is that a dead cat is oddly heavier than a live one...

Needless to say it's been a rough day. Every time I think about it I feel like I've been punched in the stomach. We were going to celebrate his birthday next week.

I gave myself permission to do some wallowing today, but tomorrow it's back to life as usual (except that no playful feline is going to come be a shithead at 5am just because he wants some company - sniff) which means that if I don't hit the deck and get some push ups done tonight I'm going to have a cool hundred to do tomorrow.  It also means that I'm going to have a hell of a food hangover and getting back on track will take some mental toughness, cause we all know what happens the day after we eat too much crap:

So you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to get my dratted push ups done, then I'm going to drink some wine while I get my meals prepared for tomorrow. Then I'm going to bed and tomorrow will be a better day. Gotta keep on truckin.

Fun things to do on a Friday night

It's 9:47pm on Friday night and you know what I'm doing? Scrubbing the feces of some unidentified large animal off the sides of my bathtub. But I'm getting ahead of myself here...

Today started with a lot of high school kids. I do a lot of work with our local high schools with health and phys ed programming for kids who otherwise wouldn't be caught dead getting exercise, so it seems like a lot of my days lately are spent with that demographic. I absolutely love those kids and would never complain about spending time with them. BUT: what is with their fashion sense? Anybody have any answers here? cause if I must continue to stand in line for coffee with a bunch of teenagers in high-waisted acid-washed Jordache mom-jeans that bunch up at the bottom and have to be cinched with a leopard-print belt around the wearer's navel, I swear something really weird is going to happen. Slouch socks are going to make a comeback and we'll have to start doing the 'fan bangs' thing again...

So I gave up on cafeteria coffee and wandered out to my car, mulling this over this strange phenomenon as I went. I tried to justify it: high-waisted jeans actually are more comfortable if you can get used to the moose-knuckley feeling. But as far as I can tell, the onus for wearing hideous 80's knock-off clothing comes from the same place that made me love poofy peasant blouses, tie-dye, and embroidered freakin' everything. So I can't hold it against them.

Speaking of high school, the other freaky thing that happened today was that I got added to a Facebook group dedicated to tracking down people I went to high school with, because our 20-year REUNION is NEXT SPRING. I'm not sure how I feel about this. Would I go? I was kind of a reclusive band geek in high school and I'm still in contact with the people I really want to be in contact with. But I confess I have a strange voyeuristic urge to see where life has taken all my old classmates. Tricky.

I drove home with high-school-y thoughts whirling around in my brain-cave, and decided that I'd make my decision while I went out to our local off-leash area and mapped out a good 5km loop with some stairs and some hills to use for training. I got home, snarfed some food down, grabbed my favorite hoodie (which just happens to say, in large letters across the back "SHOW THE WORLD WHO THE FUCK YOU ARE") and my dog and off we went. The off-leash ravine is maybe a seven minute drive from our house.

Now, under normal circumstances, Valley is a stellar workout buddy. In spite of having way more steam than I do, she kindly hangs back while I drag my butt up and down the hills and stairs on our favorite trail. She amuses herself by chasing squirrels, sniffing and peeing on whatever gross stuff is lying around, and she knows where she should and shouldn't jump into the river for a drink and a romp in the water. So when we came across a ginormous #2 in the middle of the trail, I hardly gave it a second thought when Valley, who happened to be maybe ten feet ahead of me, paused to sniff it.

I have to pause here and stress that this was the grandaddy of all piles of shit. No little lavender-scented poop baggie was going to touch this; it had to have come from an animal that was 150lbs PLUS that had chugged its coffee in record speed so as to not even make it a safe distance from the trail. This was a wookiee-with-the-cold-sweats ass-blasting baby mountain.

So you can imagine my horror when instead of peeing on it and moving on, Valley mushed her pretty face into the massive heap and gleefully rolled over in it. I shouted "Valley, NO!" and ran past it so that she'd run to keep up with me. Which she did...for a minute. But the temptation was too great and a moment later she bolted back to Shit Mountain and this time, despite my protests, made good and sure that she was thoroughly coated in it.

Gaaaah. Well, there wasn't much to do but finish our trek, and according to my phone we had a good 3k to go, which was good because I needed to formulate a game plan to NOT get wookiee shit all over my vehicle when we got there. So on we pressed. We arrived presently at the opposite end of the trail, where it exits out onto perhaps THE MOST affluent road in the city, a candyland of privelege, exclusivity, and luxury 4x4's. I turned in the direction that I imagined would lead us back to our car, and eventually found a path that went between the backyards of these multi-million dollar estates and the top of the river bank. Perfect!

Except suddenly the path ended, and now I was a crazy woman with leaves in her hair and a hoodie with a big ol' F-bomb on the back, accompanied by a shit-coated mutt, bushwhacking creepily along the back fences of these gorgeous estates. We walked and walked and walked and walked. My phone's battery died. Finally we came out of the woods...

...at the exact spot where we'd left the street. We'd gone in a circle. Dammit! We turned and went the other way. The road twisted and turned and we walked and walked and walked, not really sure which way we were going. Eventually we came to a road I recognized, but we were a long way from the car. Like, easier to walk straight home than to double back for the car - and this also eliminated the need for a strategy to keep wookiee crap off the car seats.

We arrived home nearly three hours after we left, and just in time to be home for the children to arrive home from school. Valley went straight into the bathtub where I spent the next half hour shampooing the poop out of her fur...which is why I am spending my Friday night washing mystery excrement off my bathroom walls.
And I still haven't decided on the high school reunion.

It's EYFOH Season!

 Is it terrible of me to say, on Thanksgiving Monday, that I can't really get behind holidays that seem to be about eating your face off? I mean, Thanksgiving is one, but Christmas and Easter are pretty much the same: at their epicentre is a ginormous meal where the tradition is to eat until you have to undo your pants. Now, I know lots of people would argue that these holidays are wonderful times where one should surround oneself with family and friends and enjoy the abundance of good company and good food. I wouldn't profess to knock that tradition if it's something you look forward to and thoroughly enjoy...

My family and I elected to stay home and have a quiet little Thanksgiving this year. One reason for that is because we are all reclusive trolls in our hearts, but that's for another post. What I want to take a closer look at today is the anxiety that surrounds the food aspect of the Eat Your Face Off Holidays. For anyone who has struggled with their weight, the EYFOH's are about success or failure, and as such there is a lot of anxiety: you're going to war with yourself and a lot of careful planning and preparation and strategizing has to happen in order to come out on the other side without needing therapy.

Ok, you think, how am I going to approach the EYFOH? What will I eat the day before? How will I prepare myself on the day? Maybe I should just starve myself beforehand. No, that won't work because I'll have no willpower and I'll eat a hole in the fabric of the universe when I see all the food. I'll just have a light breakfast. I won't go too hungry. I'll have a snack beforehand too. I won't obsess about it. I won't feel guilty. I'll skip the bread. I'll load up my plate with salad. I'll just have a little bit of the things I really love. And then I won't feel bad about myself later. I'll work out beforehand. I'll work out after. I'll do an extra hour of cardio for the next week. And how will I get around the (insert aging female relative) who will tell me to eat more? I won't feel guilty when I tell her no. I'll just take it and leave it on my plate. I won't pour more wine when (insert whatever offensive person) comments on my weight, lifestyle, parenting, etc. I will eat and I will enjoy it and I will not feel bad and I will not let all the other garbage affect me. I will not FAIL AND EAT TOO MUCH.

 Anyone else ever felt like that? I've been fighting with weight problems long enough that the anxiety over EYFOH's starts weeks or even months in advance. Talk to me in July about Christmas dinner and my blood pressure will go up and I'll start wondering how I'm going to get out of it. And I'll tell you one thing: it's a piss-poor way to celebrate the abundance and beauty and love in our lives! Because honestly: I am not a Gratitude Grinch, really I'm not. I try to cultivate gratitude on a daily basis. I love that we have a special long weekend for it just before the snow flies and it's all gorgeous and colourful outside. I'd just totally rather go for a hike or something than spend three days preparing the approach, the strategy, the fail-safes, and finally the battle.

So I'm not playing that game anymore. I prepared a delicious but simple and healthy meal for my immediate family, and we talked about the things we are grateful for over dinner...and it was wonderful. Best Thanksgiving ever.

Also, incidentally, my family is still speaking to me after I made the cheesecake crust out of cricket flour.

Okay team, I haven't done a crazy nutrition experiment in a while and I think it's time. Lately there has been a lot of research bubbling to the surface about artificial sweeteners and gut health. I have been a staunch defender of artificial sweeteners (in moderation of course! FFS) for a good long while now so believe me when I say it hurts a little bit to say this: it looks like they really aren't very good for us. Now, before you laugh at me and run to the store for some Coke, allow me to just stress for a moment that too much sugar isn't good either. When I first started hearing and reading this new information, my first thought was "well, I hardly get any of that stuff so it doesn't affect me much." I drink maybe one or two cans of coke zero a week and I've never had cause to feel too guilty about it...but then I started thinking: I have a Quest bar for breakfast every day. There is sucralose in greens powder and protein powder, pre-workout, intra-workout, and post-workout drinks (not that I use any of those on a regular basis but, you know, sometimes). Maybe my guts could stand to improve if I ditched that stuff! So I waited until my last box of Quest bars was empty (had my last Quest bar yesterday - and you know what I found in it? Like, actually IN the bar? A big-ass chunk of cardboard. Made it not so hard to say goodbye and good riddance to them!) and starting today I will be artificial sweetener-free for thirty days. Should be interesting.

If you'd like more info on the artificial sweetener/gut health correlation, here's some recommended
reading:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/artificial-sweeteners-linked-to-obesity-epidemic-scientists-say-1.2769196
http://www.prevention.com/health/diabetes/artificial-sweeteners-diet-soda-affect-gut-bacteria-and-weight-gain
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/09/140917-sweeteners-artificial-blood-sugar-diabetes-health-ngfood/
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140917131634.htm

Breaking up is hard to do...sometimes.

And sometimes breaking up is really easy. Remember the person you dated in, say, junior high or high school, before you really knew how to start a relationship, or how to end a relationship (or any of the stuff that comes in between that isn't driven by raging hormones)? So you putzed along without really liking that person but were too chicken to actually end it...until you HATED them?

 I've been reading a lot of break-up stories lately. Letters to old friends, stale romantic interests, etc., etc. where at the end of the letter or story the writer reveals to the audience that the dump-ee is actually a previous version of themselves that they no longer identify with, or a pair of skinny jeans, or whatever. Getting rid of stuff (trimming the fat, so to speak) has sort of been a theme in my corner lately so I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon and give it a try. Here goes:

Dear Bathroom Scale, 

Fuck you.

Most Sincerely,

Hannah

Whoa, that was a load off! Definitely very cathartic. Excuse me a moment while I actually go and throw the bathroom scale in the garbage.

 Yeah!! Alright buddies, I no longer have a bathroom scale in my house. It doesn't really matter all that much because I HATE weighing myself; it ALWAYS ruins my day. So I never do it. I keep reading articles though, that claim that people who weigh themselves daily are statistically happier and healthier and richer and have nicer teeth than people who don't (actually I made up some of those descriptors but not the healthier bit) and I end up thinking, "hmm, maybe instead of doing it LESS I should get on the scale every day and just grow a thicker skin" but you know what? For me that isn't going to work. So instead of trying to cram the square scale into my round life, I have elected to stick the square scale into the round garbage pail and that's that. If I need a metric with which to measure progress, I can use a measuring tape instead, which is a way better indicator and has the added bonus of not making me hate myself.

This is fun! I love getting rid of stuff. Where once upon another life I loved to shop and bring stuff home, now I get way more satisfaction from pitching stuff out the door. Sometimes I find it sad -I mean, ten years ago a good retail therapy session used to fix just about anything, and when the fire was cooling in that relationship (can I even call it a relationship if it was inside my head?) I'd go to the mall and wander around and wonder why it wasn't helping. And now? Now going to the mall just ticks me right off if I haven't actually spent time mentally preparing for the onslaught of bullshit that is the inevitable experience of shopping for anything except groceries. But I digress.

Sometimes though, in the pursuit of making life manageable, it's necessary to say goodbye to something that's not so easy to get rid of...and that happened this week too. It was a total bummer and I'm still wrestling with the aftermath of that decision, even though it really was the only logical choice under the circumstances. This week I officially put off testing for my taekwondo black belt and withdrew from classes. I have to keep telling myself that hey, there are only 24 hours in the day and with building a new clientele at a new workplace, finishing existing courses in time to go back to school in January, breathing some life into my music career, and the usual household management-type duties, there just isn't room for anything else. Which doesn't help it suck less, but unfortunately Oprah was right...

So for now my favorite sport has to go, but it'll make me appreciate it more when (not if) I go back.

TOO MUCH

Happy Monday morning my lovelies!

Got a pop quiz for y'all today, are you ready?

Q: How do you know when it's TOO MUCH?

The answer of course is, it depends on the situation, but generally speaking it's when the good feelings start to seep away and the bad feelings start to make their presence known - you know, not all at once or anything, but they just threaten at the sidelines. Ever gone too long without seeing your in-laws? And you know that you're going to have to do it pretty soon but you just can't make your hand grab the phone, even though you know that if you wait long enough for them to call YOU you'll never hear the end of it? And then the more you think about it the guiltier you feel? You've waited too long, 'cause at this point nothing's going to fix it now except squeezing your eyes shut and doing it.

That's too much time that has passed, my friends! And if that's never happened to you because you just can't get enough of your in-laws, well, good for you. But you know what I mean. (I should note here that really I love my in-law's too, but there has to be the right amount of space for the relationship to work.)

So that's kind of an extreme example. Let's bring it closer to home, shall we? Ever make a to-do list? I freakin' LOVE to-do lists, they calm me right down when I start feeling overwhelmed and panicky because I know there's stuff I'm supposed to be doing but I can't remember what it is.

And of course, there's an app for that: my favorite is called Clear and it is ALMOST as awesome as writing down your to-do list on the back of an old envelope...but there's a kind of beautiful tactility about violently scratching out tasks on your to-do lists with a stumpy old pencil. And then, when all you have left is an old envelope with a column of scratched-out stuff, taking that bitch and tearing it to bits and chucking it out feels GREAT. Ain't no app for that!

But today? Today that will not be happening. It didn't yesterday, either. Because, while Sunday is usually my peaceful day to get organized for the week, sometimes life puts a stick in your spokes and all you can do is roll on as best you can. Saturday evening while I was starting the preliminary stages of getting the kids to bed (which in my house invariably sounds like this: "Ok girlies, 5 minutes - finish up and turn the screens off!" "But Moooooooom, I'm in a battle!"), I started seeing squiggly lines around the periphery of my field of vision, which meant that an ocular migraine was coming and anything that I had planned to get done this weekend was going to damn well wait until my eyeballs were ready to work again.

So here we are, it's Monday morning (my absolute favorite time of the week), my head still hurts, and I have this to-do list that has TOO MUCH on it. I know it has TOO MUCH because I'm kind of afraid of it. I can't even start it. I can't even LOOK at it. If I'm not really careful I'll bumble around all day and get nothing done and then tomorrow will be even worse...but never fear - Tomorrow Girl can take care of anything!!

But instead of putting it all on Tomorrow Girl, even though she's pretty awesome, here are my strategies for getting at that TOO LONG to-do list...

1. Add some stuff to the list. I'm serious. First, add some stuff that you've ALREADY DONE. Next, add some stuff that you KNOW you can do, and do on a daily basis. Now go do some of that stuff.

2. Go back to your list and scratch that stuff out! Doesn't that feel great? Get out of bed? Check. Brush teeth? Check. Wake up kids? Feed'em breakfast? Boot their little tushies out the door to school? Check, check, check. Hell yes, you're a machine today! Work out? Check. Take the dog out for a run? Check. (See how the tasks are getting bigger? And you're a third of the way through the list already! Whoop whoop!)

3. Multi-task: my list always has phone calls to make on it...and I hate the phone. HATE IT. I will do just about anything to avoid calling people, because a) I'm actually super shy and b) I hate it when people call me because no matter what else I'm doing, I'm doing something else and don't care to be interrupted, and c) there's like a 1 in 3 chance that once I've dropped what I'm doing, found the ringing phone, and answered it, it'll actually be someone I care to talk to...which means that 2 out of three times it'll be some automated service informing me that I've won a free cruise and all I have to do is cut off my bottom lip and mail it to somewhere and thus claim my prize...anyway. Which is a long way of saying that usually, when the phone rings, I don't even bother searching for it. Where was I? Oh yeah, multitasking! So I make a deal with myself: I'll do something that involves a small time commitment and then I can leave, like a crock pot meal or laundry...THEN I'll tackle the phone calls and emails.

4. Now the big stuff. How many big projects are on your list? If there are more than two, pick two for today and put the rest on Tomorrow Girl's to-do list.

5. Take it easy. Is anyone going to die if you don't get the dishes done or your project doesn't get submitted today? If the answer is yes, better just get it done but if the answer is no, take a breather, pour a cup of coffee, and go outside and enjoy the sunshine for a little while.

Blog post: check.