Checking In - February!

My 5K team - the Dancing Sloths!

Another month has gone by, so let's see where I am with my five challenges for 2014.  To recap those challenge:

1. To give myself some "soul calm," I decided to work "zone cleaning" into my housekeeping.  An ordered house is calmer and less "hair on fire!" for me.
2. To further contribute to some "soul calm," I decided (with FryDaddy) to keep a stringent budget to lower our household debt.
3. To strengthen my body, I decided to train to participate in a 5K race sometime this year.
4. To improve my mind, I decided to read six "good books" that had slipped past me.
5. Also to improve my mind, I decided to watch 24 "good movies" that had slipped past me.

Zone cleaning, while not quite a natural part of my everyday routine, is showing signs of having staying power.  Every week, a different room is the focus and I have a checklist of things to do to give that room, if not a true "deep clean," at least a mid-range clean.  I don't hit every item on every checklist (my wooden living room floor could really stand a cleaning instead of just a thorough sweeping), but it's better than it was. Further, I spent a chunk of this past month decluttering the attic.  The trick there is (of course) Babysteps.  One box at a time and one 15-minute session at a time.  I laughed and cried and pitched and tossed.  It's not totally done yet, but I have to say, I'm really pleased with how much I did manage to accomplish.  I even got some digital photos organized - another long-term goal.

The budget continues to be a challenge.  We're doing okay in that regard, but need to get serious, especially about eating out.  We do that too frequently and almost always wind up eating food that isn't good for us, because, you know - eating out.  We can do better and we both want to do better, so we WILL do better!  Having car repairs this month didn't help, either - but what can you do?  Neither of us has a car payment to make and with the commuter marriage, travel is a necessity, so repairs just have to be dealt with.

The 5K training - well, here's the fun part for this month!  I've continued to train three times a week and am now up to three 12-minute "jobble" (that's a cross between a jog and a wobble) sessions with very brief walking recovery sessions in between.  In the last week, that's started to add up to 5K territory, so it was time to Pick a Race.  I chose the April 12 Color Vibe and paid my money down, so this is going to happen!  I'm hoping to get drenched in color as I stagger around the course (my team of one is called the "Dancing Sloths," by the way) and I might even make one of those no-sew tutus.  I'm going to look ridiculous anyway, so I figure I may as well embrace it with a tiara and tutu!  Honestly, I've been so gratified by the level of support I've gotten from Facebook friends and real-life neighbors - it's heartwarming and I mean that.  Maybe this old-ish dog has a few tricks left.

The "good book" read - I just started my second "good book" (I read other stuff in between, you see) and selected Dumas' The Three Musketeers for this one.  So far, I'm just loving this!  It's so over the top and the language is so flowery - it's like literary curlicues!  We'll see if it maintains my attention for the next 400+ pages, but so far, so good!

And lastly, the "good movie" challenge - this month was Rent and Bad Day at Black Rock. (Not a double feature, by the way!)  I wrote about Black Rock on another blog earlier, so I won't say anything here.  I watched Rent during the mid-month snowstorm.  I'd had it on my shelf for quite a while (probably picked it up when the local Blockbuster closed) and I knew it vaguely follows the outline of Puccini's La Boheme, but that was about it.  I liked it and I'm sure that if I'd seen it in my early 20s, when I was living my version of the Bohemian life, I'd have swooned over it.  Now, I'm a bit more cynical and world-weary.  Still, it's hard not to be moved at "Seasons of Love" and I've been fortunate to have known an Angel-like character and I wept that he no longer walks this earth, for the planet was a better place with him on it.

So overall - not a bad month.  Work still remains to be done and there's plenty of room for improvement, but I'm liking how things are shaping up in 2014 so far!

The Quiet Times

Winter Storm Pax came a-roarin' into town earlier this week.  All the usual jokes and ribbing about Southerners being genetically incapable of driving in the snow were made, along with our own self-deprecating remarks about the sudden run on grocery store supplies of bread and milk.  Let me just say this - it's true.  Maybe once a decade do we get that much of the wintry stuff - I took two measurements in my front yard and I had somewhere between 7 and 9 inches of snow/sleet - so no, we don't prepare the way others might.  We don't have much in the way of snowplows, road salt, or brine (isn't that used to prepare Thanksgiving poultry?).  And snow tires? Don't make me laugh - I'll probably slip on my ice-covered steps.

But you know what?  We probably enjoy it more than folks who are inundated with the white stuff.

For me, it was all about attitude.  Pax screwed up my plans - since FryDaddy is enrolled in grad school up and over the mountain, he took off from home a day early to beat the storm.  He wound up getting snowed in up in TN, with everything he went up there to do being canceled, so he could've stayed here and we could've been snowed in together, complete with that sinfully-rich hot chocolate from The Chocolate Fetish in Asheville.  Then he was scheduled to get more icy mix this weekend and our Valentine's plans crashed (not that big a deal actually, as we both think V-Day is a bit of a over-commercialized rip-off.  Still).

So there I was, safe at home with the snow starting to drift down with the promise of a snowfall the likes of which we haven't seen in a decade here in North Cackalacky.  I had food, water, the Furs for company, candles in case the snow turned to ice (it usually does here and that spells "disaster" for power lines), and movies in case it didn't.  (Not everyone was so lucky.) What to do, what to do.

Here's the beauty, so stick with me.

It snowed.  And snowed.  And just when I thought they had overestimated their forecast, it SNOWED!  The road I live on is a gentle, yet continual, slope, so driving up that was simply not happening - not in my little sedan that clutches its automotive pearls at the sight of snow.  So I eventually put on layers upon layers of clothing (thanks for teaching me about that early on, Mom!) and took the Spooky-dog out to 'splore this winter wonderland.

And everything was perfect.

Perfect.

It was quiet.  No traffic.  No fuss.  Just - snow.  I hiked up to the secondary road (which was completely covered at the time) and down to the main road (which had been scraped, but was impassable with new snowfall by then) to "tsk, tsk."  The owners of the local Mexican restaurant were busy building five-foot tall snowmen by the road and draping them in serapes.  I'll probably never see that again.  When I got back to my street, my neighbors were experimenting with the best way to create the perfect sledding hill out of our slope.  We all took our dogs off-leash and laughed at their doggy enthusiasm.  We watched the kids play and remembered how to play ourselves.  We built snowmen (okay, just the base for a giant one), and decided to join forces for a four-house potluck that night, which involved homemade soups, Russian tea, and four kinds of desserts (we like to bake when it gets cold, it seems).
Am I behind on grown-up work?  Yep.  And I wouldn't trade any of those two-and-a-half-days my car was parked for a gold monkey.

You want to know the people around you?  Let it snow, baby.  Let it snow.

Checking In - January!

Near the end of December, I set five goals for 2014 (they're all laid out in this post) that are all designed to create some lasting changes in how I approach things. None of these are quick changes - I've tried those and I've never had much luck with them. I had to get very specific about what I was hoping to accomplish, so I looked at three areas that needed work (body, mind, soul) to develop my goals:

1. A cluttered house is easy to lose things in and that causes me to run late and stress out. So to give myself some "soul calm", I decided to work "zone cleaning" into my housekeeping.
2. Stressing over money causes me to fret, worry, and fail to live in the present. So to contribute to some "soul calm," I decided (with FryDaddy) to keep a stringent budget to lower our household debt.
3. Although it's inevitable, I lament the fact that I'm getting older and particularly that I don't feel strong. So to strengthen my body, I decided to train to participate in a 5K race sometime this year.
4. I have always loved to read, but (like all readers) I know I've missed many, many good books, so to improve my mind, I decided to read six "good books" that had slipped past me.
5. I love movies - I even co-host a movie show with FryDaddy on the local community college TV station - but an astonishing number of good movies had slipped by me. So to improve my mind, I decided to watch 24 "good movies" that had slipped past me.

Now that I've got a month under my belt with these resolutions, let's recap and see where things are headed.

Zone cleaning hasn't been too bad at all - regular readers here know that I discovered FlyLady last spring and I have to say that it's really turned around my concept of caring for my home. Now that the house is decluttered, it was time to add in the zones. With the zones, you concentrate on one room a week (usually - sometimes it's more, like the home office and the bathrooms) and there's even a checklist to get you started. You don't worry about doing everything at once and I haven't done all the rooms "perfectly" - there was no way I was washing windows when the wind chill was a non-balmy 8 degrees Fahrenheit! - but anything is better than the nothing I had been doing. It's off to a good start and I'm calling it a win.

Budgeting - woo, boy. January is a tough one. We muddled through and we're on track to go forward into February. On the plus side, I sat down yesterday and roughed out the bills, and we're caught up and even paid off a credit card we'd been working on! So I'm calling that a win.

The 5K training - wow. This has been hard. I wobble-jog (jobble?) during the "run" intervals. I'm using a "Couch to 5K" podcast called 5K101 that talks me through each session. I repeated Week 3 and I'm in Week 4.5 now, since I didn't feel quite ready to jump up to 8-minute intervals, so I'm using the supplement which calls for 6-minute ones instead. It's hard, but I really feel a sense of accomplishment with it and my friends have been fantastic about supporting me during this challenge. I'm slow and a little clumsy, but I'm lapping the me who was on the couch, so again - this is a win!

The book challenge - I started with E. M. Forster's A Passage to India because I've read and thoroughly enjoyed other works of his. Alas, Passage didn't work quite as well for me. Others, I'm sure, have read it and loved it beyond the telling. I found it a bit of a slog - competing narrators and nary a likable character in sight. Well, I read it, so that's a win.

The movie challenge - this month I saw both Touch of Evil and Moneyball. (I know, two very different movies - whatever; it's my list). Touch of Evil was stylistically gorgeous, but deeply flawed from a narrative standpoint. To be honest, the plot is pretty much a hot mess, and I saw the restored, this-is-what-Orson-Welles-wanted version. Well worth seeing, but I so prefer The Third Man. Now, Moneyball was a different story. Aesthetically, it can't hold a candle to Welles' work, but it's a fun, feel-good underdog story about that most American of sports - baseball. I see why Jonah Hill earned an Oscar nomination and I'd recommend it be included on any list of sports movies. A win.

And let's keep in mind that I'm also back in the full swing of the spring semester. Far from making me Wonder Woman, effortlessly juggling all these competing goals, obligations, and responsibilities, I spent a chunk of this past week just grumbly, out of sorts, and generally snappish. So - not a win there. Progress is being made, but it's in steps, not leaps.

But I can see the path.

Halfway - January!

Last year, I had a lot of success with posting "halfway through the month" check-ins to keep me accountable for my progress and my "course corrections," so I'm going to continue that - don't mess with what works, I say!  (And no, we haven't gotten that sort of ice you see in the picture; but it's been COLD!!)

For 2014, I set five goals (they're all laid out in this post) - but in brief, they are all designed to help me be calmer, happier, and healthier.  Tall orders indeed, so I got specific with these five goals:

1.  Work "zone cleaning" into my housekeeping
2.  Keep a stringent budget to lower our household debt
3.  Train to participate in a 5K race sometime this year
4.  Read six "good books" that had slipped past me
5.  Watch 24 "good movies" that had slipped past me

So - two weeks into the New Year, how's it going?

I've been told that success is rarely total in science.  The same can be said for resolutions, but there is progress to report, so yay.

I'm working in the zone cleaning, although it's going to take a while for it to become an automatic "thing."  The FlyLady system gives you a daily task to do Monday through Friday and I'd worked those in (they're easy, quick to do, and yes - you feel like you've accomplished something when you take ten minutes and tear through your overstuffed sock drawer to get rid of the orphan socks!), but I was intimidated by the longer checklists for the "deep cleaning."  Turns out - pshaw! - just keep in mind that anything you do is more than you have been doing and move on.  For instance, last week was the "kitchen week."  I did really well in there - even cleaned the baked-on gunk in the oven - but didn't get everything done.  Well, that's okay; I'll get it next month when I'm back there.  I also didn't insist that I do the whole thing in one day.  By picking a couple of small things off the checklist each day (mornings are best for me), it wasn't so bad.

The budget.  Sigh.  January is a harsh month.  There were a couple of large unplanned for expenses (such as paying my annual fee to access an unlimited amount of legal continuing education seminars - a great deal, but a limited time offer) that have set me back this month.  But there's light at the end of that tunnel.  I've been employed at my state job long enough to qualify (for the first time ever!) for something called "longevity pay."  Essentially, it's a annual bonus given to employees to reward them for not running screaming into the night before certain benchmarks have passed - in my case, ten years.  (Bureaucracy at work - last January marked my ten-year anniversary; you wait another entire year [the anniversary of your anniversary] to be awarded the bonus.)  I had hoped to put the entire thing toward bills, but that's okay.  It'll get us back on track when I receive it at the end of the month.

The 5K training - okay, here's some joy.  I started an app called "Couch to 5K" and have been huffing and puffing around my neighborhood and the college's walking track for three weeks now.  The third week was just about to kill me, so I reluctantly decided to repeat it.  At that point, I also found a similar program in podcast form, which allowed me to put down the iPad and use a much smaller iPod.  (No smartphone for this girl.)  The podcast talks me through things, instead of just serving as a glorified stopwatch and yesterday (Day 2 of the three-day session), I managed to do the entire thing without stopping.  Mind you, there's not much grace or power involved and my speed resembles a three-toed sloth much more than a lean cheetah, but I've been reassured that it'll come, it'll come.  And the support I've received with this goal has been amazing! Thank you all!

On the book side, I've picked my first one - Forster's A Passage to India.  I'm in the middle of finishing The Round House for my book club, then I'll start on Passage.  I'm looking forward to it; I've always enjoyed Forster's work.

On the movie side, I've watched Orson Welles' Touch of Evil and I have Bad Day at Black Rock recorded (thanks, TCM!).  Honestly, Touch of Evil confounded me a bit.  Typical Welles - it's gorgeously shot, with intricate framing and (of course) that incredible opening one-take crane shot.  (We watched the restored version - Welles was famous with fighting with the studios over editing and apparently the studio wanted opening credits to roll over that crane shot - Welles was right to fight over that one.)  I have to say, though, despite the subject matter being interesting - race, corruption, border turf wars - the plot's just a mess.  Charlton Heston said that one of his biggest mistakes as an actor was not using an accent for his character in this movie - his Mexican D.A. sounds all Hollywood Hills, so I have to agree with him there.  All in all, an interesting film that I'm glad I saw, but I'm not entirely sure I'd recommend.

Not bad for two weeks in!

Building on the Foundation

Happy New Year, everybody!!  Last year was the first year I used this blog to post publicly about my personal goals.  While I know full well that the Wider World at Large probably couldn't care less than a scrawny rodent's posterior about one person's ramblings and musings, well, it's my blog. Plus, I found that posting every month on my progress was a very useful method of keeping myself accountable, so here goes for 2014.

As I worked through the "try something new every day" challenge I wrote about in the previous post, I found myself stretching beyond my usual comfort zone.  And the kicker was, I liked it.  I kept each day's "something new" on the teensy side since I believe in small, manageable, concrete goals as opposed to generic ones like "I'll eat better this year."  That's a worthy goal, to be sure, but it helps me more to say, "I'll have at least 5 servings of fruit and/or vegetables every day."  Setting specific goals like "5 servings" made me grab a handful of baby carrots and "something new every day" made me use the pretty things I so often "save" for company until they get dusty and useless.  With that foundation in place, here are my 2014 goals/resolutions/schemes:

The FlyLady system has revolutionized my approach to taking care of our home and I've made big strides in keeping the house more organized, which has had the lovely side effect of making me a calmer person.  Right now, I have my morning and evening routines and I work the daily "mission" (which every week includes family and "me" time, so more yay! there), but there are large chunks of the system I haven't managed to work into my routine.  I hope to change that this year.  So the goal is to add the weekly FlyLady "zone cleaning" to my routine of taking care of the house. 

In the same vein, FryDaddy and I got serious about our finances this year (Christmas shook us a little, but we're back on the financially-astute horse) and I plan to continue that as well in 2014.  It's great to see our debt load shrink, and I want to see that sucker get noticeably smaller this year.  So my goal is to put $5,000 toward our debt this year. (That's in addition to regular payments, of course.)

Exercising has become a much more "everyday" notion for me, and that's the third thing I plan to continue.  Just before Christmas, I started the "Couch to 5K" program and already I'm less sore and, while I still huff, puff, and gasp doing a gentle jogging lap around a flat parking lot, you start where you are, right?  So the goal is to participate in a 5K race.  (I I don't have to run the whole thing, but I have to finish.)

Now for the uncomfortable part.  See, a large chunk of my 2014 resolutions involve something that's a bit embarrassing - confessing.  See, I write about television and I co-host a movie show.  Yet, there are so many movies - really good ones - that I have never seen, at least not all the way through in one sitting.  The same goes for books.  I'm a reader - I often have two books going at the same time, and I usually read 3 - 4 books a month, but I'll also get swamped in work and not pick up a "fun book" for a couple of weeks and there are many, many classics I've never read.  In the past, it's been hard to admit that I have what I consider to be pretty massive holes in my experience, but as I've said in this post, I've come to accept that you start where you are.  Figuring movies are much, much shorter than books, I decided I can handle two movies every month and a book every two months.  (Keep in mind these are all in addition to the movies I see for the show and the books I read for my book club [wonderful group of women, BTW] or that I just come across and want to read for pleasure.)  So the goal is to read:

• Beloved (Morrison)
• Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky)
• Light in August (Faulkner)
• A Passage to India (Forster)
• The Three Musketeers (Dumas) and 
• Walden (Thoreau). 

No particular order and, please, don't bother replying that you're shocked that I haven't read these.  You start where you are, remember?

For movies, I picked classics from a number of genres, plus a few that I just really wanted to see and never have gotten around to. The goal is to see (again, no particular order and please don't gasp and clutch your pearls):

• 2001: A Space Odyssey (science fiction)
• Apocalypse Now (war drama)
• Bad Day at Black Rock (Western noir)
• The Dark Crystal (family)
• Giant (drama)
• Godfather (crime drama)
• Godfather Part 2 (crime drama)
• Harold & Maude (comedy)
• Ikiru (drama, Japan)
• The Iron Giant (family)
• Mame (musical)
• The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (Western)
• Moneyball (sports drama)
• Psycho (horror)
• Raging Bull (sports drama)
• Raise the Red Lantern (drama, China)
• Red Beard (drama, Japan)
• Rent (musical)
• Stagecoach (Western)
• Sunday in the Park with George (musical)
• Sunrise (silent drama)
• Top Hat (musical)
• Touch of Evil (film noir)
• The Wild Bunch (Western)

Ambitious, maybe.  But that's what the first week of January is all about!  I'll check in soon and I'd love to hear what goals you're setting and achieving this year!

So How Was It?

Unwinding 2013's Watch!

Yes, it's the obligatory "year end" post.  It's been interesting to post every month and see how the journey toward my goals progressed.  I won't recap everything, but overall, I'm very pleased.  I'm exercising more, drinking more water, and my house is neater with less stress.  While things weren't without their glitches, I try to remember that this is a long road and pit stops and course corrections are part of the trip.  I think it was a good year and I'm excited about 2014 - I'll post about those goals once it's actually 2014; no need to risk jinxing things.

In December, I set the goal of trying something new every single day.  This turned out to be a lot of fun and I enjoyed sharing my "something new" with Facebook friends, who were incredibly supportive of my attempts.  (In fact, this challenge gave me two of my ideas for 2014!)  When I look back over the past thirty days, I noticed how many of my "something news" involved food in one way or another.  Let's see:

• Day 1 - I went to my hometown's annual Christmas tree lighting.  Friends, merriment, and carols.  No food.  This was a trend that would not last.
• Day 2 - Tried scallops.  Didn't work too well, but I tried.
• Day 3 - Had a Black Forest smoothie for breakfast.  Yum!  OK, I'm going to work the food angle now.
• Day 4 - Tried gourmet hot chocolate with cinnamon.  Again with the yum.
• Day 5 - Had snacks at the campus bookstore for Faculty/Staff Appreciation Day and bought a ridiculously on-sale sweatshirt.
• Day 6 - Cooked a comfort dinner and used the good china and crystal just for me.
• Day 7 - Tried hot jasmine tea.  (See, only a week in and almost everything is food-related!)
• Day 8 - Tried a Thai dish called "drunken noodle."
• Day 9 - Bought a springform pan with the notion of making a "from scratch" cheesecake.
• Day 10 - Made and tried instant cafe mocha.  Serious yum!
• Day 11 - Tried the "blue" Toblerone.
• Day 12 - Doughnut holes from my hometown bakery.
• Day 13 - Winter pedicure.  (See - it's not all food!)
• Day 14 - Tried an appetizer called "Crunchy Thai Noodle."
• Day 15 - Explored the "Farm to Front Porch" local food project.  It, of course, came with samples!
• Day 16 - Went to the community theatre show.  Hilarious!  (And yeah, there were snacks at intermission.)
• Day 17 - Discovered a wealth of do-it-yourself spa treatments on Pinterest and made a salt scrub.
• Day 18 - Unwound with hot tea and a homemade peppermint foot soak.
• Day 19 - Made that cheesecake!
• Day 20 - Elegant dinner at a friend's house, featuring roasted winter vegetables and a brined chicken.
• Day 21 - Tried tortellini al forno.
• Day 22 - Tried a fresh-made ginger limeade.
• Day 23 - Browsed in a nice jewelry store while my engagement ring was inspected and cleaned.
• Day 24 - Made cranberry-nut bread from my mom's recipe.
• Day 25 - Had a home spa night with multiple "treatments."
• Day 26 - Started "Couch to 5K" with my first jog in years and years!  (It doesn't look like it's related to food, but I'm pretty sure it's an indirect result!)
• Day 27 - Watched the anime masterpiece Akira.
• Day 28 - Made (and used!) a homemade "achy muscle" bath to treat my owowowowow! from starting the "Couch to 5K" program!
• Day 29 - Tried a to-die-for chocolate truffle made with lavender, honey, and lemon.
• Day 30 - Made a composting bin with the idea of composting yard and household scraps to enrich the garden.  (Again, an indirect result of all the food!)

Whew!  As I said, much fun.  May 2014 be a good year for all of us - full of opportunities, delights, and growth.

See you next year!

A Month of New!

About three weeks ago, I embarked on what I called "30 Days of New" with the promise that every single day I'd try something new.  At first, I saw it as a way to get out of some very comfortable ruts.  Then I started seeing it as a tiny, daily adventure.  What I never expected was how friends would help me along this new road - I've gotten messages of encouragement, recipes, suggestions, and a very nice gift basket crammed with all sort of sweet and savory delights (still have to try the "blueberry acai puffs") to help me along my month-long journey.

If there's been a theme to this, I think it's been "be kind to yourself."  While I didn't start out with a specific message in mind, I have to say - that's not a bad one.  The holidays last year were a rats-nest of self-inflicted stress and holly-trimmed hysteria.  I wanted things Just So and ignored the realities of teaching full time (the end of the fall semester is beyond crazy) and having a commuter marriage, then felt like a Grinchy failure when I didn't have cards sent out by Dec. 10th.  (Or at all, finally.)  Not this year, we both swore.  And so far, we've done a much better job of enjoying our holidays - yes, yes, they aren't Martha Stewart's or Alexandra Stoddard's and our house will never be mistaken for Biltmore.  That was never the point.

We decorated in small spurts instead of a marathon, stuffed our discounted tree (remember my family motto of "Never Pay Retail!") into the car, were entertained by the new kitty exploring the conundrum of outside things being inside, and overall, it's much calmer and more celebratory.  Amazing what sitting down with a calendar and saying "no" to some things can accomplish.  Oh, there's still work to do - we need to tighten the budget and I need to relax a little more about things not being Just So - but wow! what a difference!

Among the things I've tried during this "30 Days of New" - you can follow the daily posts on Facebook - have been:

• Sampling local foods from the Farm to Front Porch initiative and figuring out how we can be part of this movement to shop local.
• Exploring DIY spa treatments on Pinterest - I even invested in little Mason jars for this one!
• Finally taking the plunge and buying a springform pan so I could bake a "from scratch" cheesecake that was an overwhelming success.
• Discovering that yes, I still don't like scallops, regardless of the recipe.
• Trying other new foods and finding some I really, really liked (the "Crunchy Thai Noodle" appetizer at Joe's, for instance).
• And the biggest one - making time.  Time for a cup of tea drunk while sitting in a chair, instead of standing over the sink.  Time to go see a community theatre play (hilarious, by the way.  Beloved holiday classics ("BHC") in a blender.), time to firmly shut my office door and go take a walk.

To everyone who says, "Well sure - she could do it.  She doesn't have to deal with my [fill in the blank of personal obligations here].  I couldn't do that," I say (as lovingly as possible; we're always so hard on ourselves), you're spouting complete and utter hogwash.  I have too much to do and too little time to do it.  I also have too little money to spend lavishly and freely.  If I can scale back my holidays and find daily joy, so help me, so can you!  Of course you're valuable to your employer and of course you're important to your family and friends.  Of course you take on too much - it's a way we validate ourselves and it's a way we show our love for those around us.  But it so very, very easily slips into resentment - and barking "No, you can't help - you'll just do it wrong" is a guaranteed ouch!   No wonder people stop offering to help us and we wind up doing absolutely everything at work, at home, and in between, often while sighing deeply and wondering why no one is helping us out.

Let it go.  Sure, maybe the sheets won't have sharp hospital corners.  Maybe the whites will have a brown sock slip in there (that was me yesterday BTW.  Color-safe bleach saved the day.)  Maybe the tree will be decorated a little lopsided.  Maybe (gasp!) an heirloom dish will get broken.

It'll all be okay.  Someone will have helped with the chores to show you that they love you.  The tree will be done and gorgeous because it was done with love.  And - well, dishes break - even heirloom ones.  At least you used them instead of needing to dust them.  They're in your house, not a museum.

Go try something new.  Do it joyously and with abandon.  If it works out, fantastic!  If it doesn't (scallops), you tried it with a spirit of adventure.