sweet dreams

Last week at yoga, I was talking with my instructor about her life right now and whether or not she was overwhelmed. And she said, well, for the average person, my life would not be overwhelming. But I'm not a busy person. I do best when I am unbusy. So this feels like a lot.

Oh. How her words resonated with me. I wish being unbusy appealed to me. I wish that busyness wasn't so fulfilling.

Since June, I have been working my tail off on slowing down. It's undoubtedly been more work saying no and keeping my schedule open than it ever was to run around like a wild woman. It's just not in my nature. But, in this time, I have felt more reflective than ever, have had time to connect with friends in more meaningful ways and have learned a lot about myself.

I have found that I am happiest, and the best version of myself:

• When I get enough sleep. This is the first time that I can remember since middle school that I am consistently getting more than seven hours of sleep each night. And I feel like the king.
• When I eat well. Clean.
• When I work out every day. (not a revelation)
• When I take time to connect with people. In person. On the phone. From afar.
• When I laugh. A lot.

Before I started this process, though, and actually oftentimes still, I get scared that I will lose my ability to be wildly busy. That I might soon forget how to multi-task or get a million things done at once. That someday I might be overwhelmed by basic tasks like getting my kids to school, like my yoga instructor. And most of the time, I can talk myself out of this thought process, but yesterday I stumbled upon this post by Sarah Tucker and it made me feel one million times better. When we are more reflective, and spend more time figuring out who we are and what we want, we make much more productive decisions to advance our futures.

Sarah also led me to Lara Casey's Get Fired Up post, which you should read. I now have a solid list of: what I am afraid of (who knew!?), what I want, who should be by my side to make it happen and how it's going to happen. 

All because I decided I needed to sleep more than 5.5 hours each night. These really are sweet dreams.

PS: If you're feeling equally as inspired as I am, you should enter to win a scholarship to Making Things Happen. I hope we both win :)

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on luck and unluck

I'm not sure if this is bragging or not - it doesn't feel like it, because it's just a fact of my life: I am very lucky. I win things all the time, get upgraded to first class regularly, have never met a giveaway I haven't won...

OK it might be bragging. But it's not an exaggerated brag, at least.

However, at times, I have tried to decide if I also go through periods of unluck. I'm not sure if I've found a pattern yet, but this weekend, it felt a little bit like an apocalypse of my life.

I was not fully honest yesterday, by omission. I didn't explain that the reason why I was standing on our kitchen counter was because our house has rats. Yes. Our sweet little VaHi abode is infested. Like they're owning us.

So I was standing on the counter in an effort to escape the rats in our kitchen.

And I obviously didn't share this because rats are disgusting, and by the transitive property, I didn't want you to think I'm disgusting.

So, rats are unlucky. Breaking my foot because of the rats? Pretty unlucky. And then, on yesterday's rainy Monday morning, I woke up to find that the rats were no longer contained to the communal living spaces in our home, but - oh yes - were in my room. Not only that, but it turns out that their *entryway* into our house is via my bedroom.

Rats. in. my. room.

I obviously cried.

And then I scooted out of our house ASAP, only to find that my beloved Jeep had died. Seven years of uninterrupted love, service and devotion from the Liberty, and it decides to let me down when I'm running from the rats. When I called Progressive to come fix it, she said "Progressive roadside service, are you in a safe place?" and I debated saying no. Though that would have been hard to explain since the next question was, "Are you at home?"

So that's kind of a lot of unluck for one 48 hour span. I'm hoping that will be all of the woes for a while.

The good news was that because I was carless, I got to spend the day working from San Fransisco Coffee, sipping lattes and enjoying life among the work from homers. Not a bad way to spend a rainy Monday! It also makes my "lame" foot breaking story a little bit funnier. Who needs water skiing when you're running from human-sized rats.

(That was an exaggeration. They're not human sized. More like bear sized.)

risky counters

This is how the weekend was supposed to go down:

An Atlanta reunion with Katie G., Emily and Katie Z.

But instead, this is how it went down:

Broken foot. Womp womp. (I meant it literally when I said "went down.")

I broke it Thursday night, which led to a slightly less exciting weekend than we had planned. I jumped off of our kitchen counter and managed to land just wrong enough to break my 5th metatarsal. The biggest issue, at this point, is that the story is pretty lame. I need to make something up about surfing, or skiing or skydiving - or something that makes it sound thrilling.

I thought six weeks of just biking and swimming was hard, so now I'm in for a real challenge of doing absolutely nothing for six to eight weeks. It's going to be mentally trying, but I'm going to try to follow the rules this time around. No point in delaying the healing, here.

And, luckily, Katie and Emily still came to my rescue and took me out of the house for a few hours of Highland loving Saturday afternoon.

I hope your weekend was slightly less risky, and stuck to your plan more than mine did! Be careful out there, my friends!

eating meat? // local eats

Going vegan hasn't exactly produced the results I'd hoped for. And for weeks, I've been "about to quit". Though I can't bring myself to give up on the dream just yet.

However, when I do get back on the meat, cheese and eggs bandwagon, I am undoubtedly going to be using Real Time Farms. It allows you to track everything you're eating - whether in a restaurant or at your house - back to a farm. Guaranteeing you're finding antibiotic-free meat and produce.

Through crowd sourcing, it generates a mapped food guide. It just launched this summer, so there are still quite a few gaps. You should submit your favorite restaurants. I obviously submitted a few million.

This means I can finally get an answer to my question as to how one local restaurant can't stock avocado because it's not grown anywhere nearby, and another local restaurant, just up the road, has a surplus. Who's defining local, here? And can't we just all agree on avocados for all?

Happy Friday farming to ya!

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