The cold winds are blowing in. Also the sick season.
Stuffy sinuses and no more shorts.
I wanted to post a REALLY easy hot beverage recipe.

Pour boiling water (12 -14oz) in giant mug or bowl.
Add
1 chicken boullion cube
1 Knorr Cilantro boullion cube
1 nice round slice o' lime.

Voila!

Stuff

Morning :)

What's it like where you are? I'm in an upstairs room, listening to the happy sounds of a little munchkin popping bubble wrap somewhere below. The desk is covered in random jiblets of paper, scrawlie ragged paper. A camera. An Albert Einstein mug one third full of this morning's old coffee. A Star Wars episode I mousepad.
Sometimes when I think of Albert Einstein
I think about this book I read as a child about him walking into another body,
alive again and jet-skiing. It was supposed to be true.
We took the Buick back for roach evacuation. & random little broken vents, light covers, knobs, etc. But mainly roach evacuation. It came back with roaches. Hmmm.
God, if this is the first time you ever read my blog...Not a good place to start. (I'd go back to maybe 2008 if I were you. Good times!)
But I think I may have to start painting again. I'm seeing a painting of a roach driving a beige Buick. Waving & Smiling. Maybe a roach baby strapped in a carseat in the back. Sucks.
But it will make for good memories years down the road when the Buick is a memory. & the roaches.
Incidentally, I still really like my new car, I'm just afraid of it. Sorta like inheriting a giant old antebellum home, "Woo Hoo!" then the chandelier starts shaking, you see bloody faces in a mirror, and they all say, "GET OUT!"
Ah. What else is new.
New Products?
Oh! If you own a cell phone (maybe some of you own a cell phone) you must have Pandora, which is this awesome free radio thing where you enter the name of an artist & it plays music that's similar and awesome and you end up discovered all this other music, then adding more stations, etc etc..
Anyway, So if you have a cell phone, and you have Pandora, there's this other thing you need to get. My husband just bought me a gadget that plugs into my phone, you set your car radio on the same station as the thing, and your Pandora plays through your car speakers. Twelve bucks at Walmart.
There is probably a name for this thing & some sort of technical stuff but who knows what it is. Let's run with the Einstein theme & have a 'redeeming quote' break-

Imagination is more important than knowledge. :)

But you should get the thing. Just don't try to skip songs while driving, that would be dangerous.

Ha, another thing I saw recently? Today I was watching T.V. and this commercial comes on for Vagisil Individually wrapped 'Freshday' Wipes. (Daytime television is notorious for feminine ads, but this one was interesting). Like the little wipes they give you at the wing place but with the word VAGISIL in large print across the top. Will they be successful? Probably not. But if the company had any sort of vision or sense of humor, they could have been. My suggestion to you, folks at Vagisil? (I am telling you, I'd be great in Marketing!) Take your big tacky name off the packets. I know, you are proud of it, but you can still put the name on the box. On the wipe packet? 'ASS-Wipes.' I believe 'ASS-Wipes' would sell. & it could be marketed to men as well.
It's a name that would bring joy, and they'd even be sharable at that point.
"Gosh Judy, I've been sitting on these bleachers for five hours in this heat, I feel like I've wet my pants from all this ass sweat!"
"Well, here, Gloria, have an ASS-Wipe!" (You gonna give Gloria a Vagisil packet? No. But ASS-wipes would come in handy in a variety of situations. Grandmothers would put them in Christmas stockings).
I guess I should be done with that subject.

I'm sorry if I'm occasionally gross. I wish I were more graceful. :)

much love, yt

i don't feel too well today. :(

thought for the day...

You never plough a field by turning it over in your mind.

--Irish Proverb

'Mean to' don't pick no cotton.

--Anonymous

Where've Ya Been? ;)

So, um, I haven't heard from you in awhile.
Isn't that like someone to place blame on someone else for their own misconduct;
I've been out & left you with nothing to come back to.
In my defense, I was physically ill & just not able to maintain a coherent thought..
But I had a moment of clarity,
& something funny happened this morning,
So I thought I'd drop in.

& if you've just dropped in,
Thanks for showing up. :)

So yesterday I had a good feeling about the day.
I felt somewhat light and glad, and that's the normal me,
light & glad, but sometimes it's hard to find her under the odds & ends.
So I'm sitting, and my husband calls me.
Do you want to go test drive a car? he says.
We hadn't really discussed cars in a while, probably because our budget is too tight,
and I just don't randomly think of things like that too much.
But the new school year started, and I'd found myself driving Steven's big truck
because the jeep had no air conditioning, and everything,
groceries and children included, would melt in the Georgia heat.
I'm not complaining about the truck,
I just couldn't park the thing;
Though everybody has said that parking further away from where you're aiming to be
is a healthy habit, so that's okay. But then there was the thing about not having a spot to stick the borrowed European double French horn, & the daily toting of it.
I'd be swapping for my jeep and the truck would go back to Steven,
as soon as Fall brought the weather down.

So I put my cleanest shirt on & some eyeshadow, and Steven came & emptied
the truck. We rode out to a used car lot and decided to test drive a Buick.
The air was cold, and it looked new & clean. All of the sudden, my husband had a spontaneous thought, and we traded the truck in. We just did it. Because why not? We gave our old truck and two thousand dollars, and rode home happy.

Though it did have a couple minor transgressions.
1. The cd player doesn't work. but the car lot guy said he'd fix it on Monday, and we figured that was okay.
2. We're sitting in the back back seat (or what you call the third row) and a roach crawls out from the seat belt hole. Now, my husband has never lived with roaches. Ever. But growing up, I'd lived in many an apartment where the roaches would scatter and scamper across the counters and walls, where they'd leave their crunchy egg sacs and dead kin in the silverware drawer, and where never ever would I invite a schoolmate to my home.
So while he's laughing, I'm recalling days of old, and it's a scary thing. Ah, it's just one bug, he says. But then another crawls out...and when we're looking in the little compartments in the side, yet another. I'm feeling apprehensive, but he tells me it's just a bug & they'll be all dead soon enough if there are any others.
Hmmm. So I picked up my children, first not knowing who I was, then flooding their little faces with joy at our new car. Our New Car (How cool is that? Okay, so it's a 2003 Buick with about 99,500 miles, but to us, we feel cool & lucky).
This morning, the girls were waving at friends in the car rider line. Roll your window down! My oldest says. So they are hanging out, waving, excited and so proud to be in a new car; a drastic difference from the jeep days, where it would die while in the car line, and they'd slink down in their seat.
We're giddy and the car (the New car!) is full of laughter, and then it happened. A giant roach crawled out of the cd player, and we went from saying our hellos to squealing little girl cries,

"GET IT! AHHH! GET IT OUT!"

And my daughter realizes we're screaming 'Roach' & suggests we roll up the windows again.

Which is probably smart.

So with no prior thought, no planning, I ended up with a new car & some Mexican lunch,

which makes for a pretty cool day. Aside from the roaches. & I'm staying away from any labeling of our beauty being referred to as 'Roach-mobile'...Perhaps there's some sort of hidden benefit in it that we're not aware of. Theft deterent? Hmmm.

thanks again for hanging round my blog. i'm grateful.

Experience Your Good Now! Louise Hay & Puerto Rico

"I want beef jerky," I leaned in to tell my husband, one row in front of me.
"They didn't say anything about beef jerky," he tells me. Here we are, mid-air on the way home, and I'm staring at Sky Magazine, pg. 154. "It shows a picture here..."

"Don't get your hopes up," he tells me. But that's been my problem all along.

Reading Louise Hay's new book, Experience Your Good Now, Learning to Use Affirmations,
has probably been the hardest to read yet. I'd been ill- physically ill. How I felt was not in line with uttering things like, "I am grateful for my perfect health. " Nor could I imagine feeling any other way, or being any other way. My recent mantra's ran more along the lines of, "Well, Hey, at least I'm alive!"

And it's not that I don't understand the concept of affirmations, or even that I doubt their effectiveness. It's that without the Belief to back them up, I could only cynically utter one. My mentality was one of deprivation disguised as practicality. 'I couldn't do this because I couldn't afford it.' or 'There are too many more qualified writers with actual educations.' I'd allowed not going to college to become my fall-back excuse for anything that I wanted to do but didn't. That excuse turned easily in my mind to 'I'm not smart enough.' Like Anthony Bourdain taking his maiden trip to the Greek Isles, I held the small shiny book in my hands with one thought- I'll try.

On page 30, Louise Hay writes,

As I've said many times, I belive that should is one of the most damaging words in our language. Every time we use it, we are, in effect, saying that we are wrong, or we were wrong, or we're going to be wrong. I would like to take the word should out of our vocabulary forever, and replace it with the word could. This word gives us a choice, and then we're never wrong.

Think of five things that you "should" do. Then replace should with could.

Louise's book also coincided with something odd that happened.
I got an email that quoted an outrageous price on Roundtrip airfare to Puerto Rico ($191!). I joked to Steven, and he quipped back, "Book it!" Ha ha, very funny. We had just gone to Barbados four months prior, our first vacation in 14 years. Though we'd always talked about seeing the world, it was always tacked on before or after 'One Day.' I'd been maids at hotels, and comfortable with that.
I was the one that cleaned to rooms, never the one who stayed in them.
What made me think any differently?

& then,

but Why not me?

& then,

we randomly reached into the magicians hat, and pulled out exactly what we wanted.

A little more of the World.

Puerto Rico? We jumped into a spontanaeous moment of being the little engine that could.

Oddly, there had never been any Puerto Rico discussion. Not in passing, not ever. We didn't even really know where it was.
In our little three day trip, kids in tow, We found that wherever you go, you can find a little piece of brilliance. We slept at The Gallery Inn, surrounded by Vintage charm, and heads...Concrete heads. Lots of them. We hiked a rainforest, got plopped down into a Bioluminescent Bay, Flew kites in front of El Morro, got stuck in an out of gas bus on a San Juan highway. We drank cold coconut water out of beheaded green nuts, and we filled our happy bladders full. Pigeons alit on our shoulders gracing us with their happy birdie vibrations- (birdie everything- as well as a need to shower).

We discovered that Puerto Rican coffee is without a doubt, the very best coffee on the planet- the closest adjective to even try to describe this stuff? It's alien coffee. It's just not from this Earth.

During the course of our little trip,

my little book tagged along,

the yellow letters glaring at me. Experience Your Good Now!

I was- and oddly, the 'Shift' (Yep, a W. Dyer reference) may well have occured without me even noticing.

My thoughts on others and my station (ha!) in life were sinking me. Only those other folks flew around on random vacations...I was the maid. I never minded that position- but it was where I stood. I took jobs that were somehow beneath others in my mind. But I liked those jobs. Perhaps the people I imagined that were better than me hated their jobs. (& why was it even necessary to imagine that they did?) Sometimes I'd swing in fast, my cart wheels spinning gravel, to bring a cooler of ice somewhere, and I liked it. I liked wind in my hair, the sight of golfers playing and waving as they went past, sitting in the restaurant kitchen with other housekeepers, after mopping the bathrooms, eating $10 slices of pie for free (because if they cut it they could not serve it the next day...) Maybe I applied at those jobs because I felt like I was less, but I can see now it was all pretty rediculous. You can mentally allow yourself to be less, but you can also just accept yourself as you are.

You can believe what you like & the world will morph around you accordingly.

Louise Hay- pg 103- Cursing is an affirmation, worrying is an affirmation, and hatred is an affirmation. All of these are attracting to you that which you're affirming. Love, appreciation, gratitude, and compliments are also affirmations and will similarly attract that which you are affirming.

Nelson Mandela said, "In order to build our Nation, we must first exceed our own expectations." (This one popped in front of my eyes during the in flight movie, Invictus. Oddly appropriate).

Not allowing yourself to be good enough is an affirmation.

Not getting your hopes up is an affirmation.

I unknowingly had already been using affirmations, but because I wasn't saying aloud something that was in a written statement form, I just wasn't aware. And I can see that repeating a positive statement could affect your energy and alter your belief in time. Am I ready for that? I don't know. At this time, let me just use this one .. "Why Not?"

I laughed with my oldest daughter, seated by the window.

"We need to make this a group effort," I tell her. "We need to collectively see the jerky." "Yes, I see it." We sat laughing at the idea of manifesting elusive jerky on a plane, let alone being on the plane.

I can tell you that we did indeed have jerky. & We will always have Puerto Rico.