Filling Your Bucket!

The end of the semester is always a whirlwind and this one was no exception. On top of the usual rush-to-grade, a handful of other things needed my attention, making it a hurried sundae with a little extra mania on top. Summer classes start in about a week and I needed to make sure all of that was ready as well, since I took my own advice from March and planned a "girls' getaway" for this week.

Friends will be trickling in over the next day or two and then leaving at the end of the weekend. I'm not entirely sure what-all we'll get up to in that time and I'm eager to find out! The weather is supposed to be perfectly sunny and warm. I've got a stack of books (looking at you, Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology!) and a passel of magazines. Anyone using the computer for anything other than posting silly pictures runs the risk of being fined and us using the fine money for something silly, like buying tiaras. Sweets and snacks are already laid in to satisfy the munchies. I've got the dance schedule for Fat Harold's and plans have been made for a tea party and shopping trip this weekend. But there are plenty of hours to simply laze away napping, reading, playing Putt-Putt (watch out for that windmill shot - it's tricky!) and probably gossiping about nothing and no one. We're probably only half a step from braiding each other's hair!

I can't wait!

Sloth self-care!

Honestly, it's amazing to me how we put off self-care as if it's something to be ashamed of. (Blasted Puritans.) Let me say this again - IT IS A GOOD THING TO TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF! When we treat ourselves kindly, gently, and with respect, it becomes easier to (a) extend that care to others and (b) accept that we deserve to be treated respectfully. Imagine that - a world in which we treated each other with thoughtful kindness and expected the same from others.

Fancy that!

There are many, many ways to accomplish this and, while they certainly can be expensive and fussy (around-the-world trip on the Queen Mary 2), they don't have to be. (Seriously - check out this link for some ideas to get you started!) Let's examine this a bit.

This trip, for instance. We've planned it for two months and the expenses are actually quite low. It's a matter of deciding where I want to put my resources (which, in many ways, remain quite limited). For me, that tea party is going to be fantastic - lovely food, elegantly presented, eaten with good friends in silly hats. For you, it might be something totally different - and that's not only okay, it's fantastic! Just ask yourself What brings me joy? It's an odd thing, but I have discovered that most adults don't ask this question nearly often enough. By the way, expect the answer to take a while to reveal itself. Often, we've so disconnected ourselves from our own joy that we have to do some excavation work to find it again.

We knew once. Then we got busy Growing Up and got caught in the rushrush of Work and Status and Things, and we looked up in surprise to find that fifteen years or more had passed and we were quite confused about many things.

Filling your own bucket

Vacation is, for me, a time to indulge and I expect to make the most of it. (Oh, yeah, we're stopping at Krispy Kreme on the way back from the airport tomorrow!) For me, it tends to be sweets - from sugar in my coffee to an Original Glaze to movie candy. That may not be your thing (and I've been doing too much of it lately; however, that's another post), but I urge you to figure out what your indulgence is and carve out time to devote to it. Oh, and self-care isn't always bubble baths and manicures - sometimes it's getting up, squaring your shoulders and going off to do what needs doing. Just don't make the mistake of filling other peoples' buckets so much that you forget to tote water for yourself, too.

It really is about the most selfless thing you can do.

Look to the West!

After a few weeks that have been more hectic than I would really like (work deadlines to prep new classes for fall, combined with book deadlines make me into a Grumpagus sometimes), FryDaddy and I are about to leave it all behind for a few days.

It took some scheming and steely resolve to leave work behind (that was helped out by a very kind editor), but kind friends are opening their house to us out in the grand state of Utah for a badly-needed bout of R&R. Never having been to Utah, I wanted to discover what I might run into, especially after our host casually mentioned that we might be seeing something called "mutton busting" which seems to involve putting small children onto hyperactive sheep.

Exhibit A:

So - what have I learned about Utah? Well, according to this site, Utah -

1. Has coal as the state rock. Seriously.
2. Has the highest literacy rate in the country.
3. Also has the highest rate of online porn subscriptions in the country. (Look, I just report the news.)
4. Is home to the nation's leading manufacturer of rubber chickens.
5. About 2/3 of Utah's land is Federally-owned.
6. Polygamy is definitely not legal. "Sister-wives" were outlawed as a condition of statehood back in 1890.
7. Is nicknamed "the Crossroads of the West."
8. Residents of Utah get married younger overall than residents anywhere else in the US (it's not child marriage, either - 24.1 for brides, 26.2 for grooms).
9. It's illegal to hire trombone players to play in the public streets for the purpose of advertising an auction, so don't try it.
10. It's also illegal to hunt whales, although you'd think that wouldn't be necessary, being a landlocked state.

And perhaps most importantly, it ain't here, which makes it wonderful for a break! I hope to see some of the rugged beauty of the state and spend the majority of one day just nosing around a bookstore or two.

See you soon!

Checking In - September!

What an interesting month it's been! (Such a useful word, "Interesting.")I've had the opportunity to learn a lot about "over-goaling" this month and I'm actually spending a few days re-assessing. Far from being a sign of failure, I've learned this year that those times are crucial to success. I took on too many goals and put too much pressure on myself to excel at all of them all the time, and it's okay to acknowledge that and correct it. Forward motion is progress and sometimes that forward motion is pitching a fit and declaring that there's just no way that all of this can get done right now and, if fact, declaring Bill the Cat to be my spirit animal!! (Pant, pant, sigh, gasp.)

True.

But where's that leave me?

Well, the "good books" and "good movies" challenges are back-burnered right now. With work on the Babylon 5 book heating up already, I found myself overwhelmed and teary at the prospect of doing those things to mark a title off an arbitrary list. I'll get to them, but right now isn't the season for that. I've seen plenty of movies and read plenty of books, but not the ones on "the list" and that's just dandy.

Zone cleaning is sort of in the same boat - it's not a struggle to keep up with my morning and evening routines, but much of anything beyond that is proving to be monumental. I keep the book with the zones out and I read my daily challenge each day and sometimes it gets done and sometimes something else gets done. You know what? The house is still standing and remains in better order than it used to be.

The budgeting challenge hits full-force this month. As I wrote over Labor Day weekend, we had car repair bills that turned into "we can't resurrect her this time," which meant a certain amount of yike! We're mobile again and just fine, but those were not expenses were were prepared for. It's going to be a tough end of the year on that score, no doubt about it, but it'll all work out and hey - we're doing all of this so that soon (on the cosmic scale, anyway), money won't be the issue that it is now. Delayed gratification. Can't say as I like it too much.

Now to report of the 5K challenge, which I've folded into the first-stage-of-wrapping-up "You Gonna Finish That?" Challenge. This was designed to make me hard-core accountable for a number of habits, including diet, exercise, and self-care. (Remember what I said about too many goals?) I used SparkPeople as my diet and exercise tracker which I liked since it had exercise videos and recipes that linked directly to the tracker. I don't like tracking, although I'll admit it's useful to see patterns (I eat too many carbs, for example. Mostly "good" carbs, like whole grains and the carbs found in fruit, but still - that was eye-opening). I made sacrifices in terms of sweets, made sure to drink at least two liters of water per day (yep, I know where every bathroom is throughout my college campus), aimed for hard exercise at least three times a week, and have tried to get more sleep. 

Right at a month in, I can report that, while I still don't like tracking, knowing that I have to do it has made it easier to say "no" to some bad choices. While I'm trying to not give the scale too much authority (I still stink at that, by the way), I'm down four pounds. I've also logged 13 run/walk workouts this month for a total of 31-and-a-touch miles, with 22 of those miles being at a jobble or better. For someone who was staggering around a church parking lot seven months ago, that ain't too shabby! So I'm going to keep this challenge going another month and let's see what we see.

What I really want to add in now is more attention spent on taking better care of me - teaching is not a job that lends itself to being left at the office and researching and writing a book isn't exactly a side job, so my twin goals here are to (a) make the office more pleasant and (b) not be so hard on myself with deadlines that I set and that I know to be ridiculous. I had a small writing project that nearly drove me around the bend that I should have been able to handle with ease, but when added to the several other regular gigs I've got going on (which includes two blogs, a weekly movie show that involves watching and research before the cameras begin rolling, and a regular column over at the pop culture site BiffBamPop), I was perilously close to the non-whimsical version of "crazy." So I reached the conclusion that normal people would've gotten to a long time ago and I'm not taking on more work during this time. Let me keep working on spinning the plates I've already got up on sticks!

Onward!

Summer's Waning

August has been a strange month here at the Nest. It's a month that tends to be syrupy hot-and-humid, so it starts by slowly crawling by, then suddenly, everything goes into turbo speed and it's the end of the month and I'm left wondering what the heck just happened. It's been a good month so far - a few days at the beach (FryDaddy and I swear we're going to get a solid week in next year) served as a break from start-of-school madness. (But not totally.  Seriously, this semester has gotten off to a rocky, weird start punctuated with all manner of schedule changes and curve balls. It'll settle and a rhythm will be found; it always does, but it's been a wee bit odder than most.) So I'm off my routines, but still wanted to check in once before the very end of the month.

Oh, and that's the lesson I learned this month - the term "routine" has a different meaning than "straitjacket." The idea behind routines is that I do those things way more often than I don't do them, and it helps keep the house running more smoothly as a result, but you just can't do everything every day. Sometimes work needs you a little extra, sometimes you have houseguests, and sometimes you need ice cream more than you need a fruit smoothie (it's true) - half a hundred things can happen and that's all okay. You just get back on it as soon as you can and, if you've been basically keeping up, it's not a big deal to get caught up. So zone cleaning (and healthy eating choices) are both ongoing goals, but there's progress.

So let's see -

I've signed up for my next official 5K race - I had the Color Run back in April (click here for details!) and I've done two "virtual" 5K races over the summer (you run your own race and post your time and other people in other parts of the country do the same thing), but this next race is local, so I figured it was time to run against the clock and see how I do. Today FryDaddy and I drove over the course and wow! are there hills! I won't be especially fast and I'm pretty sure there will be some walking involved, but I'll finish and that's way more than I could've said in January.

I'm working my way through Faulkner's Light in August for the book challenge and quite liking it. I'd been tearing through it - the language is so compelling and it's a great story - but I put it down to read this month's book club book (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler - fantastic read!) so I'm not done with Faulkner quite yet.

Speaking of which, Faulkner worked as a Hollywood screenwriter for a bit in the 40s and he co-wrote the script of Howard Hawks' To Have and Have Not which was (very loosely) adapted from Hemingway's novel of the same name. This month, FryDaddy and I started writing a twice-a-month column for the pop culture website BiffBamPop.com. My first contribution was on that very movie and Lauren Bacall, who made her stunning screen debut in it. Check out the column here! Not exactly part of my film challenge (I'd seen To Have and Have Not before; it gets better with subsequent viewings), but hey - that's where I am for now.

Budgeting is going pretty well, actually. We're both working on that and working off a single budget instead of two separate ones is much easier! Sure, we still have work to do (groceries are always more than we seem to think they will be), but again - progress.

So here I am, at the very end of summer - a season which beats you into submission with heat, humidity, and the siren call of hammocks and shade trees. I hope you'll understand if I remove myself from the Internet to go enjoy a few of those last golden hours. Just tell me, and I'll write a note for you to do the same!

The Proper Use of Downtime

Following the lovely madness that was the Joss in June conference (and we're still in the "wrapping up" stage of that project as we collect comments from attendees and make some decisions about ongoing "best practices" for convening a conference) and the end of my two summer school classes, FryDaddy and I had decided to take some time off in July.  Some of that time is going to be devoted to a couple of home improvement projects that we've wanted to do for two years (funny how that works, isn't it?), but we also knew we needed a getaway to have a chunk of time that was devoted just to us.

I highly recommend it.  In our case, it wasn't expensive - remember that I work for a public educational institution in a state that is at the bottom of the barrel in terms of pay scale and FryDaddy is a grad student, so luxury vacations for us are something quite different than they may be for others - and it was wonderful.  Since I was a little girl, my parents have had a beach place at the upper end of the Redneck Riviera.  It's a 1960s motel that was cut up into condos (complete with knotty pine ceilings!) and, with a little planning ahead, we can usually get some time down there in summer.  This time, my sister was down with her two youngest.  (Other members of the family come and go, but my niece is doing a gymnastics camp, so she and my sister are the constants in July.)  Our schedules don't usually permit much down time to visit - we live about two hours apart and we're both insanely busy, so our visits are usually the stuff of holidays.

This was nice.

I still have trouble unplugging as much as I want to (and as much as I should, to be honest), but I did all right.  I kept up with my newfound resolution to exercise thanks to YouTube videos and a willingness to look a little foolish in the living room.  We also took our youngest nephew to see Despicable Me 2 and got him totally sugared up on Slushies and Nerds.  I had a walk on the beach with my niece during which she explained the intricacies of her level of gymnastics.  All of us worked on a gigantic puzzle that was bigger than the table it was laid out on.  There was sand, and sun, and surf.  There was coffee savored in the porch swing.  There were days that started closer to lunchtime.  There were bookstores to explore when it rained torrentially.  And there was that most precious of commodities - time.

Don't overlook that.  Time.  You don't know how much of it you get and, to my knowledge, on their deathbed, no one has ever said, "If only I'd spent more time at the office."  Yes, work matters, but remembering why you bother in the first place - that ought to be at the top of the list every single day.

Six Month Check In!

.

This is a couple of days late and once you hear about June, I think you'll understand.  This was a wacky, crazybusy month - Joss in June took up any spare time that wasn't already devoted to my two summer school classes (which wrapped up two days before the conference; grades were turned in yesterday) and that's a schedule I hope to never have again!!  Yes, I know - I'm the one who set it up, but I don't always look out for my best interests.

For a conference report, go over to the main blog (linked above) and let me add one thing.  Ensley served as social media contact & guru and this conference simply would not have happened so smoothly and so well without his efforts. Communication is key and he kept things up to date, which is a much bigger task that you might initially think.

Looked at in the cold, hard light of day (okay, it's July in North Carolina, so it's more like the "hot, humid, languid light of day," but that doesn't sound as dramatic), June was rough.  All the hard work paid off - not just with the conference, which is garnering rave reviews and warm fuzzies by the bucketload (all of which are greatly, greatly appreciated!), but also with my classes.  Five-week summer sessions are intense and there's just not time to fool around, something a few students always unfortunately fail to realize.  But these were really good classes - students were engaged, interested, creative, and attentive.  Still - it takes work and a tremendous amount of energy, so I had days upon days in which I tended to conference details before class, did six-plus hours of song&dance for my classes, then dove back into conference "stuff."  By the time I was done, I was done.  There was far too much collapsing on the couch for a couple of hours, muttering "Love you" to my stalwart husband who kept things running, then dragging off to bed to toss and turn over what hadn't gotten done that day.

While some habits are becoming engrained - through this madness, I kept up with my basic routines, drank my water, ate fruits/vegetables, and added in one called "me time" (see my previous "Twenty Minutes" post) - my exercise often consisted of running around with my hair on fire and my eating habits - well, let's say that stress causes me to eat very badly and leave it at that.

So in a lot of ways, I'm starting over.  But in a lot of ways, I have good habits already in place; they're just a little dusty.  Also, in the last two weeks, I started playing with adding in half-hour interval workouts (amazing what you can find on YouTube) and I found a couple of online coaches who don't yell at me, but instead encourage, cheer, and in general, make me feel good about deciding to try something that's both new and hard.  (Really.  "In shape" does not describe me, unless the shape of that of cookie dough.)

We'll see.  I've been here before, of course, so what makes me think this is different?

I do.

I understand far better than I used to the importance of recharging and rest in the process of working.  Oh, I've talked about it, sure, but I never really "bought into" the concept.  I deserve to feel good in my own skin and to feel soothed when I come into my house.  So a little strength training today, sweep the front porch and water the plants, all followed by a luxurious massage, and next week - an "unplugged" vacation with my darling, a stack of fun books, and a beach.

Yeah.  A girl could get used to this.  And I hope I do.  Hard work is a good thing, but too much of it for too long is not.  Rest.  Recharge.  Renew.

About That Getaway . . .

In my last post, I listed "say 'yes' to something spontaneous and slightly crazy" as a way to pamper myself in my continuing quest to both enjoy life more and avoid burnout.  I said I'd go into more detail about that in this post.  Well, my idea of "spontaneous and slightly crazy" was put into motion by the incomparable FryDaddy, whose talent for knowing my moods and indulging my whims is nigh-uncanny.  He'd made a few plans and we'd tweaked them a bit, due to a prior commitment I had at school (New Student Orientation and Sushi Buffet Fish Fry Open House) and off we went for a whirlwind getaway to Durham, which was the only town in North Carolina to possess a theatre showing Joss Whedon's adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing. (Turns out we were wrong about that, but by the time we knew that, we were already having fun in Durham, so there it is.)

When I say "whirlwind," I mean it.  We got to Duke Tower around 7 pm on Thursday and left by 8 am Saturday (remember the Sushi Buffet Fish Fry Open House?), so it was a short getaway, but all hands agree - it was a successful, much-needed one.

Highlights include:

• Duke Tower itself.  This hotel/condo establishment was created from an old cotton mill - they kept one of the smokestacks and the old fire tower is now the site of a breakfast cafe.  (We slept in and missed it, but maybe next time.  And we hope there's a next time!)  The Tower caters to long-term guests - corporate execs, folks participating in various programs at Duke University Hospital, that sort of thing.  For the cost of a room, you get an apartment - good-sized living room, full kitchen and bath, and a nice-sized bedroom with plenty of closet space.  It's an older property and the shower head was low enough that I had to buckle my knees a bit and poor FryDaddy whacked his nose pretty well at least once.  All rooms overlook the central courtyard, which features a pool (very romantic on a warm summer's night), plenty of shaded sitting areas with comfy chairs, an oversized chess set (the pieces were about knee-high on an adult), shuffleboard, and even a nine-hole miniature golf course! FryDaddy had carefully packed provisions and equipment and we had a lovely flank steak dinner cooked "at home" that first night.
• Much Ado about Nothing.  I'm an unashamed Whedon fan and I was stoked for this movie!  Full review details are found here, but suffice it to say it was worth a three-hour drive.  If you think Shakespeare is not for you, I beseech you - give this one a try.  The language sounds natural and the comedy is full and rich.  Give yourself a break from the boomboomblowemup and try this screwball comedy.
• Seeing old friends - we got together with a dear friend who we don't get to see that often for dinner and the movie and (mostly) I managed to not talk about work.  Gotta continue to work on that.
• Dinner with said old friend.  The hotel recommended Pop's, an Italian-style trattoria close to both the hotel and the theatre (more on that in a moment).  It turned out to be an excellent suggestion!  Pop's is the sort of restaurant that is upscale-scrumptious without being snooty-snobbish.  They pride themselves on local ingredients and the difference is obvious.  It was so delicious that FryDaddy and I returned for dessert after the show, where we managed to convince the amused wait staff to let us talk with the chef/owner Chris Stinnett.  Our goal was not only to compliment the food and service (which richly deserved the "attaboy"), but also to ask if we could buy a couple of the heavy diner-style coffee mugs.  Duke Tower is great, but the coffee cups are smallish and we are full members of the Caffeinated Tribe.  Chef Chris was taken aback, but graciously acquiesced to our wackadoodle request.  Seriously.  Pop's.  Go there.
• The Carolina Theatre.  Much Ado was playing in a small screening room and it was marvelous to watch this movie with an audience of like-minded folk (who also understood that YOU TURN OFF YOUR PHONE DURING A MOVIE.  Sorry.  Pet peeve).  The Carolina is a theatre for movie fans.  They also have live shows, but just check out their movie offerings - and don't overlook their "special screenings."  Great stuff, picked by people who know their films.

Sure, I wish the trip had been longer - but boy-howdy! - am I glad we took what we could!

Thanks, FryDaddy.  I continue to maintain that you're the best decision I ever made.