Happy Thankgiving!

Farm Sanctuary sent the profile of my sponsored turkey! Meet Harley!  He lives at Farm Sanctuary's California shelter, he was rescued from a factory farm, he's spirited and playful, and his favorite foods are pumpkins and yams!

Happy Thanksgiving Harley!





And Happy Thanksgiving to all of you! :)


Love,

Hope and Harley

10 In the Rest of 2010 Update: I Adopted a Turkey!

I can cross the first thing off my Ten (in the Rest of) 2010 List! I adopted a Turkey through Farm Sanctuary's Adopt-A-Turkey Project. The below turkey is Daphne, but I don't know which turkey my sponsorship will go towards. You can choose your turkey, but I wanted my sponsorship to go toward the turkey who needs it most (maybe one of them didn't get as much love, and I can't have a turkey feeling sad and not as loved!) so chose the "pick for me option". I'll let you know which turkey I got when I get the e-certificate from Farm Sanctuary.

I do think Daphne's the cutest though. Shhhhh, don't tell the other turkeys...

Ten Things to Do In (The Rest Of) 2010

There are some things I want to do before the close of 2010, so instead of letting the end of the year just zoom by like it usually does, I thought I'd put them into a list and blog on them as they occur.  This gives me something to blog about as well as helps me complete my list. WIN WIN!

So here's the list (brought to you by my friend here, Mr. Guinness Guy In A Kilt):

• Send (and actually mail) ALL the Christmas Cards I intended to in the first place
• Adopt a Turkey from Farm Sanctuary
• Read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
• Make a Victorian Christmas...something
• Write one post a week to finish up the year at The Queen's Scullery
• Make a pillow for my mom
• Help Cameron make a Christmas present for his godmother and my aunt
• Bring my plants inside before they freeze to death
• Finish reading Black Beauty 
 

And last but certainly not least...

• STAY AWAKE TO WELCOME 2011!!!

I know, I know! I'm a party a minute! Try to contain your excitement while waiting for the posts on my list completion!

Update: Month O' Yoga

The Month of Yoga is going well. I've practiced six days a week for the last two weeks, and it's definitely helping me both mentally and physically. Physically, it's making me feel more balanced in my body. I can already see a tremendous difference in my strength and flexibility from when I started November 1st. It's also made me feel more comfortable in my skin. I feel happy that I'm doing something good for me, and the feeling of strength and relaxation stays with me through the day.

To help nurture the positive body-friendly feelings and to not give negative thoughts room to grow, I have made a conscious decision not to weigh myself during this time. (Sorry, boring weight discussion is about to follow, I apologize in advance.)

Usually I weigh myself every few days (I know, I know...), but it's not so much to see if I'm losing weight (I'm for the most part good where I am), but to make sure I'm not gaining anything significant.  Catch problems before they occur and make changes when only small ones are necessary, that kind of thing.

I feel that's a relatively healthy mindset and one that usually works for me. Until this the other day.  After making solid progress into my Month of Yoga,  I weighed myself as usual, but this time I found myself getting discouraged by what I saw (which was essentially, nothing). 

Hmmmm...now why would this be I wonder...?

So to find out, I had a brief conversation with Myself. It went as follows:

Me: "Self, why the discouragement?"

Self: "Well, since I'm doing yoga (which is exercise dontcha know) six days a week, I figured I could at the same time, lose those last ten pounds of baby weight still sticking around. You know, kill two birds with one stone, if you will."

Me: "Well, Self, first of all, we don't want to kill birds- we want to improve the health of our Body Mind. Losing weight isn't the point and if stepping on the scale minimizes the good feelings gained by our yoga practice, then we need to step off the scale and let it collect dust until the end of the month. Capiche?"

Self: "Eh, ok. I don't really like that scale anyhow. It's sort of a bummer."

So yes, no scale for me and Self this month. I'm doing the Month of Yoga for its holistic benefits. Losing weight, although it would be welcome (those last ten pounds are pesky), is not why I'm doing this- and if numbers on the scale lessen the joy of accomplishing my goal for the month, then they ain't worth knowing about.

So there. 

Nothing Holds a Candle to the Texas Panhandle

I am still reading The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl, which gets even better as I read. It's full of phrases like "the height of sloth", which I love. Since I'm still reading that and don't have more to write about it at the moment, I wanted to talk about a book I read before I started my Read Through the Centuries Project. I loved it (and think you should read it too). 

That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx.

This is not a book I would pick up on my own. The only reason I started reading it at all is that I had read most of the books on the shelves and wasn't in the mood for the others- and it was the only one left.  I'm almost positive that I didn't up pick this book and bring it home, it was most likely a free book picked up by my husband at The Book Thing in Baltimore (which is the best idea ever by the way, every city should have one of these!). I don't think I would ever look twice at this book if conditions weren't completely perfect for me to do so- conditions like having nothing else to read.

Well.

Was I wrong. I loved this book. I even used the word delicious to describe it and I don't throw that word around willy nilly when it comes to books. A book can't just be 'good' or even 'really good' to be called delicious. I have to relish reading it and not want it to end. This was one of those books. I won't do a plot summary, I don't do them well and I find them boring to write- it's easier and less painful for both of us for you to find the summary online- but briefly:

That Old Ace in the Hole is about young man named Bob Dollar who travels from Colorado to take up residence and scout for hog farm sites in the Texas panhandle town of Woolybucket. (Woolybucket!)

That doesn't sound like a book that would be called delicious, I know!  but the characters that fill the pages and the quietly witty observations made by the main character make it so. I would read 50 pages and feel that both nothing and everything had happened. Proulx did her research and beyond the plot and quirky characters, there is an obvious appreciation of an under appreciated area and the people living there. There is also a subtle environmental message I enjoyed, but mostly it's the characters.  I will definitely read this book again. There are very few books I reread, but this is one of them.

Namaste

I did yoga today. I haven't done yoga in what feels like forever. It's probably only been months, but in yoga time, that might as well be forever. It felt great. I have not been feeling so great. It helped.

I don't know why I haven't done yoga in so long, when it really does benefit me a ton. It seems like the more I need to do something- yoga, eating better, doing something creative- the more apathetic and the more excuses I develop. I need to clean the counters, I need to check my email, I need to pack my lunch, I need to make dinner, I need to take a shower before I make dinner. All things that are necessary at one time or another, but usually not necessary for me to do right then. Instead of yoga or art or writing, which help my sanity so much in times of stress, I choose counter cleaning and dishwasher loading.

I need to do that less. I need to paint, write, and do yoga more. I'll try to get those scales balanced.

And sometimes...there's a puddle of Cat Pee

Today was one of those days.

It all started with a puddle of cat pee. That puddle of cat pee taught me a lesson. A lesson that I'm going to share with you. Because YOU are one of my lucky readers. You may be my only reader. So listen up.

It started with my husband waking up and heading to work at 6:45. Since it's my day off, I hoped that I had some more time to sleep before the Sweet Baboo woke up. (Last week he was getting back teeth and he was waking up at 5:50am, crying bloody murder, and then refusing to go back to sleep.) This particular morning he slept until 7:20 or so, which was good, but he woke up crying, which was bad. He usually wakes up with contented babbling, which means I have time to go downstairs, let the dogs out, fix my coffee, and basically do things that are easier to do with two hands. However, if he's crying, I just go downstairs, let the dogs out, grab his morning bottle (he takes cups during the day, but he's not a morning person and is too grouchy to deal with them in the morning- which as a non-morning person myself, I totally get) and take it upstairs for him.

Well, looking back, he was probably my first indication of how this day was going to go- because by the time I got his bottle...he had stopped crying and started sounding a lot more content. Hmmm. Ok. He doesn't EVER do that. He's either crying until you get him, or happy, or happy and then crying if you don't get him in a timely enough manner (which, isn't saying that he's impatient, its saying that I'm really slow). He's rarely, I dare say never, crying to happy again with no outside intervention.

Well ok, that was good. Taking that as a good sign and a welcome reprieve, I took the 'happy time' to make coffee, straighten up downstairs, and get dressed. I even put make up on. I function much better for the rest of the day if I at least get my hair and face presentable first thing in the morning. I don't know why. It makes the rest of the day much less of an ordeal. I don't know. I'm weird.

So anyhow, I was actually up, productive, and dressed by 8:30, which was so awesome to me. Plus after feeling most of the week like Bloaty MacFatpants, I was happy to find that I felt good in my clothes.

I'm going to fast forward a bit, since I feel I'm losing you over the mundane details of my morning, and as you may be my only reader, I don't wish to lose you.  Stay with me, man! Stay with me! 

Ok, so I had gotten the Baboo up, we were both sitting downstairs watching The Cat in the Hat. I with my coffee and laptop and he with his carrot muffin and banana.

That's when I smelled it.

Cat pee.

I tried to ignore it, to tell myself that my nose was making it up. Now, telling myself that my nose is making it up isn't totally off base, I have a Super Spidey sense of smell and when you pair that with overwhelming paranoia over having the House That Smells Like Pets, you get someone who frequently smells phantom pet odors.

This, alas, was no phantom.

Apparently I had left the basement door closed last night (which I am SO careful about leaving open for her) and poor Kitty had no where to do her thang. So she chose the carpet. Right in front of the couch.  Argh.

So I cleaned it up, went about my biz and then, right as I was about to leave the house, I saw another, much bigger puddle on the living room chair. Double Argh. (Please note, I was not arghing over poor kitty. I was 100% arghing over me forgetting to leave the door open for her.)

As I cleaned up the stinky puddle, it threatened to become The Thing That Wrecked The Day, which was utterly unnecessary. I mean, I had been given extra Happy Baby Time that I didn't think I was going to get at 7am, I was dressed (no small feat), I thought I looked relatively attractive, I was wearing my NEW super duper fun argyle hoodie, and I was on my way to have lunch with a favorite cousin. That does not a Sucky Day make. However, because I Am Who I Am, I was about to make it a sucky day over some cat pee.

But then I learned a lesson.

A Lesson From Cat Pee.

The lesson I learned is that there is always a puddle of cat pee some place if you look for it. Or smell for it (which I often do, because I'm That Guy). Its just how life goes. There might even be TWO puddles (which as it turned out today, there was). But, if you look in other directions, there are so many other things that are NOT cat pee and that are so much more worthy to base the quality of one's day on. (Yes, sentence ending with a preposition. Sue me.)

Things like:

A kid that makes you smile.
A beautiful fall day.
The nice cat that made the puddle who's been a good companion for 8 years.
The nice dogs that also make puddles but who have been good companions and sources of smiles for 9 and 8 years.
Having a house to keep us warm and dry.
Millions of other things that may not make our whole day, but that make up moments of it, over and and over and over.

As I'm rereading this, it is sounding really trite and cliche, but I'm not trying to be. I realize these things have been said a million times in a million different ways, and my lesson is not a new one; but how often do we actually put the lesson into practice? How often do we let the cat pee wreck all, or at least part, or our day?  Cat pee, in the grand scheme of this life, is not one of those things that matter. Not even a little. I constantly make it matter. Like when I am tired at the end of the day and have more still to do and then I go to put a dirty dish in the dishwasher and...gasp...its full! Of clean dishes! That have to be put away! Before I can put this dirty dish in there! OH NOOOOOOO!

Yup. That's usually how it goes for me. I'm trying to not be that way. I'm trying to be the kind of person that says "Oh, ok, the dishes are clean. Good. Clean dishes." How hard is that? Not very I guess, but it sure is hard for me!

I don't know if I'll ever be the "Good. Clean dishes." kind of person completely. I think there always might be an "OH NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!" before the "Good. Clean dishes." but I'm working on it. I think as long as I get to the "Good. Clean dishes." part eventually- before it ruins my day, that I'll be doing ok.

So. That was my lesson learned from Cat Pee. That there will always be puddles of cat pee in any given day, but that you just clean it up as best you can, flip the cushion over, and move on with the more happy aspects of daily living; which, much like cat pee, can be found if you look for them.

In other words...

Always Look On the Non-Cat Pee Side of Life.

The End.