I read a book about the laws of magical thinking recently (The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane) and I obviously didn’t read it carefully enough, because I don’t know which of the laws is the one that applies when you think that the turn of the calendar from one month to the next is magically going to change the weather. It’s September, which means the air is getting brisk at night and the leaves are falling from the trees, right?

Not really, no. 

I am trying to get more motivated, however, despite the weather still calling out for sitting on a front porch in a rocking chair drinking mint juleps, or long slow beach days. Yesterday I was doing useful chores, including some reorganizing of towels — more useful than it sounds, I swear — and I was pleasantly reminded that we can always make new choices. Always. It’s easy to get into a routine and then have that routine turn into a rut, but all we need to do is pause, step back, take a look at that rut, and then decide whether we want to continue in it or not. Any pattern that we can recognize, we can change if we want to badly enough.

And okay, yes, this pattern was technically about not having found a place to comfortably store my towels  — my desk chair has been serving as a linen closet for the last two months — but it applies to anything that I want it to apply to. If I’m just spinning my wheels, I can choose to stop spinning & do something else. I can make new choices! Such an obvious thought, and yet also so radical, and so powerful.

Of course, I haven’t actually managed to make those new choices yet — with the exception of taking over a shelf in the bathroom for my towels — but at least I’m reminded that they’re mine to make if I want to.

Unrelated, I fell in love with an author this week and I’ve been gobbling down her books like potato chips. Trying to do some of my own work and my own writing between books, but reaching for my phone (and its Kindle app) in every spare minute. My Japanese lessons have been getting short shrift and my meals have been mostly bagged salads. Oh, well, bagged salads are pretty healthy, right?

Anyway, the author is Katherine Center. I’d read one book by her before, The Bodyguard, and I enjoyed it, but not so much that I started binging. But The Rom-Commers was on my library wait list for weeks from some recommendation I got somewhere, it finally showed up this weekend, and it just delighted me.

A quote:

They’re romances and they’re definitely not plausible or realistic, but they made me want to believe in love again, which was extremely unexpected, ha. Anyway, I’m not sure which one of her books is going to be my favorite, but since I could be reading one now, instead of writing this blog post, I think I will go do that. And then maybe I’ll open up the file for the romance I was writing that I haven’t touched since sometime in 2023, and see if those characters would like their story to continue. Maybe they would!

I’m having a lot of trouble believing in today’s date. Where did August go? How did it slip away from me so quickly?

Ans: August in Florida is hot and sticky and slow and profoundly un-motivating. I haven’t even been eating my stir-fried vegetables for breakfast, because by the time Sophie and I get home from our typical morning walk, the thought of standing over a hot stove is so unappealing.

That said, August in Florida might be un-motivating, but if you give in to the lazy (as I have), it’s also languorous and lovely. Sure, I’m moving in slow motion, but I’m appreciating my slow movement.

A few photos, attached to a few memories:

Plenty of other pleasant things have happened this month. Lunch with family, ice cream with my friend J, some fun thrifting, and so much time spent in the backyard with Sophie. Lots of reading, lots of organizing of notes on happiness, lots of peaceful quiet time. Lots of sudden rain showers that make for cozy afternoons snuggling with my girl. Not much in the way of writing, but word-by-word, it happens.

One random other summer note that I’ve been wanting to write about for days: the cicadas are insanely loud. So loud sometimes that I’ve had to go inside because it’s like sitting in a giant static noise generator. So loud they’ve set off my noise safety alert on my phone. Not consistently! And I don’t understand why they’re crazy loud in the middle of the day some days and not other days. The reason I haven’t written about them is that I don’t have anything more to say about them than that, but I want to remember them — they have been the sound of this summer of 2024, and as it draws to a close (where did it go?!?), I want to remember that it was a good summer, despite — well, and maybe even because of — and the humidity and the heat and the bugs.

Last night, I woke up around four or so, needing to use the bathroom, and when I came back to my room, I had a text message from my brother, saying, “Got time to talk?”

Okay, it was 4AM, so yeah, I had time to talk. But could I? Did I want to? Really, I wanted to go back to sleep, but the Best Brother Ever wouldn’t text me in the middle of the night asking to talk unless it was important.

But if I called him, I’d have to talk in complete whispers or else I’d wake Jamie up. Our rooms are adjacent and it’s really easy to overhear conversations between them: I can basically ask him a question in a normal speaking tone and he’ll answer (during the daytime, obviously.)

Still, important, right? So I could go outside to talk to the BBE. But yesterday the side edges of Hurricane Debby were just skimming Sanford, so it had been rainy all day long. Also, of course, it would be completely dark and there’s no way Miss Sunshine would let me go outside without her. At nighttime, though, I put her on her leash, mostly to avoid wildlife interactions that might make both of us sad (aka skunks, rabid raccoons, coyotes). So I’d be juggling my phone, Sophie on her leash, in the rain and the dark… ugh, it sounded so unappealing.

And his message wasn’t, “Call me, please, it’s urgent,” so was it really so important that he would want me to be standing in the rain and dark to call?

But then it occurred to me — there’s a back room in the house that’s not currently being used. I don’t think of it as usable in the same way I think of the kitchen and living room as usable: it’s not shared space, it’s a bedroom waiting to be rented. But I could probably call from there without disturbing Jamie and obviously, I don’t think my landlord would mind if I used the spare bedroom to make a middle of the night phone call.

Perfect. Although I really would have preferred to go back to sleep, I would drag myself out of my comfortable bed and go call my brother.

And then I woke up.

The whole thing had been a dream, and I still needed to pee.

SO WEIRD! It took me a minute to convince myself that yes, I had just dreamed the bathroom visit, the text message, and the entire problem-solving thought process, but in fact, I had. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a dream that felt more realistic, and that had less of an aura of unreality about it when I woke up. I was literally dreaming that I was in bed, thinking. It felt like I’d slipped between multiverse worlds or something, that maybe in some parallel reality, the BBE actually had texted me to ask if I had time to talk.

I was honestly really tempted to call him. Or at least text him. But I didn’t, because it was 4:30 in the morning and I didn’t think he’d really want to talk to me right then either.

Instead, I went back to sleep and when I woke up, Sophie and I went for a beautiful walk down on the riverwalk. Some photographic proof:

I thought this bird looked so much like the night heron I posted last week that I was excited to discover that we had night herons here, too. But the Apple photos info says that it’s a limpkin. That is a word that you will have to fight with auto-correct to type. I type limpkin, auto-correct says pumpkin. Over and over again. Yeah, right, auto-correct, that bird sure looks like a pumpkin to me.

On the other hand, in an extremely cool piece of trivia, the limpkin call was used as the sound of the griffin in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and that is a fact I would never have learned if it had been a night heron. (Speaking of auto-correct, it also wants to say “heroin” every time I type “heron” and… what? I really think I’m a person more likely to write about herons, or even heroines, rather than heroin, but apparently I’m unusual enough in that for auto-correct’s default to be the hardcore drugs. Strange!)

Moving on, the construction project across the street is — oh, wait, have I mentioned that? If not, short version, they’ve taken the lovely green space and are turning it into a retention pond, which is exactly the kind of tragedy that turns people into NIMBYs. I understand the reasoning and approve in principle of proactively planning for more intense storms and potential flooding, but in practice… much sadness.

And more sadness because of the NOISE. Beep, beep, beep… please stop backing up your trucks. Just… stop. Don’t back up anymore! Go forward instead! Turn in circles!!

I strongly suspect that it’s only going to get worse, but I’m also mystified by the hours that they work. They show up, they do something, and then they disappear for two weeks. I’m not complaining, because I do think that I’m going to yearn for those disappearances long before they’re done ripping up the space and the surrounding roads, but I feel like it would be much easier to cope if I knew when they planned to work and could plan my own life accordingly. So far my coping strategy is loud music, which is good and bad, I guess, depending on the music. Not all music motivates me to work harder, but that’s what I need to find.

Speaking of which, I should get back to it. I’m jumping around all over the place in my course creation/book creation, with lots of processing of notes right now. I’ve got so much information, but it’s a struggle to keep from sounding like a term paper. I am entertaining myself with mixed metaphors, though.

In my latest section, I was writing about thinking of nutrition as basically a recipe for your body. If you want to bake chocolate chip cookies, you really can’t skip the chocolate chips. You’re not going to get chocolate chip cookies if you do. If you want to create a happy brain, you can’t skip the omega-3s and the olive oil: they are literally the ingredients that provide your brain with the building blocks to create neural connections and grow your hippocampus. No nutrients -> no connections -> shrinking hippocampus -> depression and dementia. If you want to be happy, you have to give your brain the ingredients it needs to thrive.

Here’s another one: iron is an ingredient for creating hemoglobin and hemoglobin carries oxygen throughout your bloodstream. Low iron = lower oxygen distribution = lower energy. You’ll never want to run around and have fun if your iron is low, because your body will be conserving its resources, and your conscious mind telling you to go out and get some exercise can’t win against a cautious body knowing that it doesn’t have the resources to do so.

Like I said, term paper. And probably a scientist would say that I’m oversimplifying. But simplifying to make information easier to digest and remember is where I’m at right now. (Oh, and my mixed metaphors are — is this ingredients, and a cooking metaphor? Or foundation plus building blocks, a construction metaphor? Or fuel and energy, an engine metaphor? Or maybe just all of the above, in their own places and times.)

But now I really am getting back to it!

I spent the weekend with four of my oldest friends, in Isle of Palms, South Carolina.

This is an activity I highly, highly recommend. And a place I recommend, too. What a great weekend it was. I sort of feel like I’ve been coasting on the high of good times with old friends ever since.

I was not the organizer, and, in fact, I might have missed out entirely due to never opening Facebook, but one of said friends (Lauren) reached out to me a few months ago and said, “Hey, we’re planning another mini-reunion on FB, if you want to come.” I immediately jumped into the messages threads and offered my two cents (Napa Valley in July: absolutely not. South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, all lovely possibilities.)

A friend more organized than me (Beth) found an airBnB in Isle of Palms (which is right near Charleston) with enough beds for six people, a swimming pool, and walking distance to the beach; all votes were yes, a reservation was made, and four friends flew in — from Vermont, New York, Michigan, and Wisconsin — while I drove up. It was a long drive, and totally worth it.

We did a couple obligatory tourist activities — shopping at a market for a couple of hours, visiting the night heron rookery and seeing the beautiful row houses in Charleston — but mostly we floated in the pool and talked, and talked, and talked some more.

And ate good food, of course. The first night was grocery store salad for me and sandwiches for the others; the second night was deep-dish pizza and salad at a restaurant owned by Lauren’s family (cauliflower crust pizza for me, but the company made it excellent); and the third night was unsurprisingly, my favorite, at a restaurant that takes GF seriously, and had so, so, so many options including a really delicious chocolate cake for dessert. I had to eat the leftovers for breakfast the next morning, which was delightful. Chocolate cake for breakfast, two thumbs up.

I went swimming in the ocean a couple of times, and loved it. I’m not a huge fan of ocean swimming, because the ocean is enormous and powerful and filled with uncertainty. Also, you know, despite lots of practice in managing my anxious imagination, thoughts of sharks and riptides and jellyfish always pop into my brain when I’m in the ocean. But it was so incredibly nice. The water was a perfect temperature, the waves were a perfect height — lifting me off my feet, but never knocking me over. The second time I went I was in the water by myself (although with friends on the beach) and the sun was just rising, and it was so spectacularly gorgeous and vivid and serene. All senses fully engaged, all of me completely present in the moment I was in.

That was the morning that we were leaving, and when we got back to the house, everyone was packing up. But I was in my bathing suit still, and we had plenty of time for the limited amount of packing that needed doing, so I headed for the pool, and then everyone else came outside too, for one more hour of pool floating and chatting, much of which was spent focused on when and where we were going to meet again.

Next month, or maybe at the tail end of this month, it will be forty years ago that I met these women. We lived together for one year and then our lives veered off in different directions. On the surface of things, I’m not sure we have a lot in common. But it turns out that the bonds formed during that one remarkable year are stronger and more sustaining than I realized. It’s been five years since we last saw one another and they were hard years, in their own ways, for all of us. (Honestly, the COVID years were hard years for everyone, weren’t they?) But it felt so rejuvenating to share the stories of those pains & fears, and then to move on to appreciating the moment we were in.

Now that I’m home, I’m back to the usual stuff: playing with Sophie, writing with my writing buddies, mowing the lawn, laundry and unpacking, grocery shopping and cooking, and, of course, working on my Choosing Happiness projects. But among the things that I am definitely going to get to will be uploading lots of photos, and making everyone else share their photos, too. I took some beautiful sunrise pictures, but I was never the person who handed my phone to a stranger to take a picture of all of us, so I don’t have a single group photo. Birds and sunrises are nice, but I do want the reminder of the people, too, because the people were what made the weekend so special.

So here’s the long story about how I wound up responsible for mowing the lawn:

Last time the landlord’s dad (Mike) went away for a few months, he asked the neighbor to mow the lawn in exchange for using the lawnmower on his own lawn. The neighbor seems like a nice guy. He also seems like a person who has kind of an overwhelming life. Four kids, (maybe), a couple dogs (the bigger one of whom is clearly not trained at all, and not exercised, either), and more yelling at the house than I would ever be comfortable with. Recently Mike repaired three broken windows at their house, because he was worrying about their AC bill and because he is a super, super nice guy. Me, I was curious about how three windows get broken. One, sure, accidents happen. Three?

But moving on… also last time he went away, Mike texted me regularly asking me about the lawn. Had it been mowed? Was it getting too long? And the answer was usually, “Well, no, and, ah, maybe.” But I hated being the lawn police. Really not my style. And, to be blunt, there are no circumstances under which I am ever, ever going to tell that neighbor that he needs to get his a$$ in gear and mow our lawn. (Incidentally, he is not the one doing the yelling, although he is sometimes the one being yelled at, so this is not because I’m afraid of him. That would be a different issue.)

When faced with the question of how the lawn was going to get mowed while Mike was gone, I therefore volunteered to mow it. It’s not a big lawn, nor a major chore. I can tell you from personal experience now that it takes 25 minutes to mow. Even in Florida weather, that’s a reasonably trivial amount of effort, not exactly hard labor.

But, OMG, do I hate lawnmowers. As you may recall, the first time I tried to mow the lawn, it took three tries, because the lawnmower kept dying on me. Mike replaced that lawnmower with another lawnmower — not a new lawnmower, but the one from his own house. I’m kinda gonna guess now that in order to transport the lawnmower in his car, he took the handle off. Just a guess, I don’t know that for sure. It could be entirely random that the screws holding the handle in place on one side were so loose that they fell out, making the lawnmower impossible to steer.

Urgh. I spent about ten minutes struggling with it, before the problem became excruciatingly clear to me. I then spent another ten minutes, maybe more, carefully retracing my steps over and over again, looking for the lawnmower part. Did I mention that it’s not a big lawn? It’s not a big lawn! (I know I told you that already: the question was rhetorical.) But I couldn’t find the piece at all. The best I did was to find a chopped up piece of black plastic that might have been part of the handle cap. So, so, so annoying. It was, of course, 90+ degrees outside while I was doing this, so I finally gave up, put the lawn mower away, and went back inside to start researching the problem.

I did what people do these days when confronted with such a problem: two minutes of research and then a quick purchase of lawnmower replacement parts from Amazon. Then I waited for the parts to be delivered. In the interim, I did the things one does, including taking the trash out. Lo and behold, sitting next to the curb, a black plastic thing that was clearly the missing lawnmower part. ARGH! I hadn’t had the lawnmower over there at all — on that specific day — but it was where I’d finished mowing a week earlier. It hadn’t even occurred to me to look on the street.

Still, the handle was missing the piece that would hold it in place (a black plastic piece that presumably got chopped up) so I comforted myself with the knowledge that I needed my Amazon order after all. It arrived with all due speed, and I tried to put it on and… No. Maybe the universal bolt wasn’t so universal as all that, or maybe I just wasn’t strong enough to screw it into place on a handle that was slightly corroded from a week sitting in the sun and rain, but there was no way I was getting that handle back on with that handle top. Also, the two pieces that needed to be held together — the actual lawnmower and the metal handle — needed to slide smoothly into place, and also, No. I just could not make that happen. Jamie tried to help, but he couldn’t get it, either, and the frustration level was rising dangerously high, so I finally just said, the hell with it, and did a crappy job. Will it last until Mike gets home? Probably. Is it good for the lawnmower handle to be kinda loose and wobbly? Probably not. Is it good enough? Yes.

But at that point — remember, 90+ degrees — I was not going to mow the lawn.

So this morning, bright and early — although not too bright and early, because I do like to be kind to my neighbors — I set out to mow the lawn. I managed two rows… and the lawnmower died.

All this to say, next time around, I will be the lawnmower police and nag the poor neighbor whose life is already overwhelming. Because I’m fine to mow the lawn, but I am really not at all fine to manage lawnmower maintenance and repair.

As for the dead lawnmower, I didn’t think it should need gas, because Mike filled it right before he left, but I added gas anyway and lo-and-behold, it started up again just fine. I spent my time mowing worrying that maybe gas was leaking and maybe the whole thing would explode, because yeah, that’s where my mind goes, but eventually reconciled myself to the idea that maybe all the times I started and stopped it yesterday while I was trying to figure out what was going on with it just used a lot of gas.

And now my lawn is mowed and I get to feel all triumphant and tough. Shine on, self, shine on. Go, me! A good start to a hopefully productive Monday.

My July has continued on its trend of delightfulness. Although I just got thoughtfully stuck on that line for about ten minutes, because perspective is everything, isn’t it? But my perspective is that my July has continued to be delightful, and the small bumps along the way are just that, bumps.

Delightful exhibit #1:

A terrible picture of a very happy dog. I’m going to upload some video to Instagram, because the video shows the happiness in action. There’ll be a link in the sidebar on my actual webpage or if you follow me on Instagram, it’ll probably show up in your feed. Hmm, maybe I’ll try to include a link here for those of you who read via email.

Puppy Play Date at Gemini Springs

Anyway, over the course of the past few months, as I’ve chatted with other dog owners on my morning walks, we’ve more than once mentioned that it would be nice if our dogs could romp. After a recent solo visit to Gemini Springs, I decided it should happen, collected people’s numbers, and invited four or five other dogs to join Sophie and me for a morning adventure at the dog park.

She had SO much fun! Her friends — Ariel, Bella, Jorgi, and Riker — had a good time, too, but Sophie was definitely in doggie paradise. I did say afterwards, somewhat wryly, that if the dogs were graded on energy levels, Sophie would have gotten an A++. Her desire to move, explore, chase, run, and play is… well, to be fair, that of a border collie, not a more mellow dog. She’d make a great working dog. Her friends are content to be relaxing dogs, ha. I do love her just the way she is, though!

Other delightful activities of the week: wandering around downtown Mount Dora one day, checking out the art galleries and gift shops; swimming at my dad’s swimming pool another morning (the water was perfect); the Spellbound Writer’s Group and an exercise on dialogue using tarot cards; and some delicious meals, including really good Mexican for lunch one day as well as an excellent GF sandwich and fries another day.

An entertaining, although maybe not quite delightful, activity: mowing the lawn. The background is a long story, with tedious details, so I won’t bore you, but I’ve taken over the job of mowing for the next few months while Mike, the person who usually mows it, is out of town. I suspect that after a couple months, I’ll be happy to give the job back to him, but after three tries, I successfully made the yard pretty. Shine on, self!

The three tries were not my fault. Try #1: the lawnmower died. Mike had to take it apart and filter the gas tank to discover that a dead spider was blocking the line. Try #2: the lawnmower died again. Mike took it away with him and returned with another one and a new gas can, one with a cap over the spout. Try #3: success! It was 95 degrees out, and our AC was dead, so my sense of satisfaction was high — yay, me, persisting in the face of adversity — but boy, was I grateful for the delights of running water afterwards. Not, for once, hot running water, which is a pleasure five years of van life has engrained in my gratitude center, but cool running water, which is also awfully nice at the right moment.

Speaking of things nice to have — air-conditioning. Another long saga, and I won’t bore you with the details, but I spent a day sitting in the house watching the temperature rise and hoping the AC repair people would appear. I wasn’t happy about it, but mostly because it was interfering with my plans for the day, which could have been a lot more fun. The no-AC part was fine, though — I closed the blinds, turned on the overhead fans, and tried to pretend that I was living in the tropics somewhere. Thailand, maybe? Vietnam? Somewhere where life would just be lived a little slower when it got hot and sticky. Jamie was a lot more unhappy about it than I was. He bailed and went to stay with Christina, who offered the same for me, but I was actually quite content in the toasty house. And now the AC has been repaired, albeit with warnings and caveats, so we’ll see what happens. It’s good to be reminded to appreciate the things we take for granted.

I’m expecting this week to be quieter, which is probably good news, because I really do have lots of work that I’d like to get done. I spent a few hours working on a piece of my first chapter/module the other day and then threw it all away. It was actually useful work, in that writing helped me organize and process my thoughts, but I basically decided after I’d done all that writing that I was wrong about the central statement I was trying to make. So, yeah. I changed my mind. Which is good, really, better to change my mind now than later, but it was still somewhat vexing.

Super short version: do you have to change yourself in order to change? I started out saying yes, you have to be willing to change yourself if you want to be happier/choose happiness, but by the end of that writing session, I’d argued myself out of that opinion. You’re fine just as you are. So am I. Choosing happiness may mean that you have to change your habits, of both body and mind, but you — your core self, the person you are inside, the one you’ve been as long as you can remember — you’re great. You’re exactly who you’re meant to be. Our habits & thought processes don’t define us, they just determine the quality of our lives. Which is plenty, really. And hey, that was maybe not the super short version, but so it goes!

Amazon has been sending me reminders about Amazon Prime Day for weeks, since my blog is still an Amazon affiliate site, even though I don’t often use affiliate links, so I spent a little while browsing my recent purchases, wondering if I had anything to recommend for you.

Honestly, of all my recent purchases, this is my very favorite: Off clean feel insect repellent

And it has apparently been so long since I posted an affiliate link that I no longer know how to post the ad style links. Weird! But I’m not going to spend any longer looking for it, because… well, because it feels like a waste of time. But if you need insect repellent, this stuff is great. If you need anything else on Amazon & you have Prime, right now (or possibly tomorrow) is probably a good time to buy. And if you follow my bug spray link, you’ll be making a tiny, tiny donation to the Sophie Treats & Toys fund.

Thanks for reading!

 

I had a rather delightful 4th of July. It started, really, on the 3rd of July when instead of writing with my friend Joyce, which we do most Wednesdays, we went thrift-store shopping. Have I raved about the thrift stores in Sanford yet? Obviously, if you’ve been reading my blog for longer than a few months, you know I like thrift stores, but Sanford has particularly great ones. The cute little local one, just down the road, is probably my favorite, but on this specific day, J & I went to the big thrift stores first.

I was looking for light capri pants, because all my pants are denim and denim is heavy when it’s 90 degrees outside. I found a pair, in a nice light blue, $5, with the $36 Kohl’s tags still on them. I have no idea why the person who bought them didn’t just take them back — even if they didn’t have the receipt, Kohl’s would have given them a store credit! But I am not complaining. I am complaining even less about the silvery tank top from Banana Republic, also with its tags on, ($8), or the rose-colored Simply Vera Wang ruffled shirt ($5) or the other $4 shirt I bought.

A slightly weird picture, because I was looking at Jamie instead of the camera, but I love my new thrift store outfit. So comfy, so cute, and so satisfying when worn to my stepmom’s birthday lunch the next day. It’s not often that I want a picture of myself because I like my outfit so much, but I did this time. Sorta dressy, sorta casual, very very me. (And I adore my pink shoes, and am always happy to find an occasion to wear them.)

So 4th of July then was a lovely lunch and good conversation at the birthday celebration over in Mount Dora, then a return home for a quiet afternoon. Around dinner time, though, I was hungry and had no plan for what I was going to eat. Bah. Fortunately, I had plenty of ingredients. I’d picked up frozen mahi-mahi at Costco earlier in the week, I had fresh tomatoes and spinach… and voila.

It was so delicious! It’s tomatoes, sautéed with capers and pine nuts, then the mahi-mahi seasoned with salt, pepper, and smoked paprika, with spinach added at the last minute. Then I discovered that I’d forgotten to add the diced red onion while cooking, so I just threw it on at the end. Yum, yum, yum. The pine nuts (more or less toasted, I really just cooked them in the pan with the tomatoes, because I was not going to turn the oven on for any reason, much less to toast pine nuts) went so surprisingly well with the sharpness of the red onion. Hmm, I’m making myself hungry.

Anyway, post-dinner, Jamie & I had talked about going down to Sanford’s 4th of July celebration, but we were both feeling too lazy. Until 8:45 or so, that is, when we could hear the local fireworks starting. We hopped into the car, with Sophie, and drove down. Parking and traffic were insane, of course, but we stayed away from the center of town and parked on a side street that was a straight shot to the waterfront. We walked down to the water and got there approximately 20 seconds before the fireworks started. We stood on a grassy hill on the inside part of the street, comfortably away from the crowds, and watched as all the communities around the lake lit off fireworks, some in the distance, some up close. They were quite impressive!

I got a few dirty looks, I think for bringing a dog to a fireworks show, but I ignored them, because I was exactly right about how it would go for Sophie: she was uncertain at first, definitely worried, borderline distressed, but once she’d seen the fireworks with Jamie and I being relaxed and interested, not tense, she was fine. Not particularly interested in fireworks, more interested in the people, but not at all worried about the loud noises.

We left a few minutes before the end to avoid the crowds, and the above photo was taken on our walk back to the car, timed pretty perfectly so that the grand finale was happening as we got there, and we beat all the traffic home. A perfect fireworks show — I think we were back at the house by 9:20, which is exactly how much time I’m actually willing to give to fireworks. Less than an hour!

I had a quiet Friday, working on various things, but Saturday I drove to Merritt Island and spent the day with my friend Lynda. We usually claim we’re going to write, so I did bring my computer, but it had been a couple months since we’d seen one another and she has a lovely swimming pool, so we didn’t write. We talked, talked, talked, floated in her pool, talked, talked, talked, ate lunch, talked, talked, talked.

Sophie was with me and very well-behaved: we stayed outside on the back porch and she explored everything, then found a comfortable place to sleep and napped. I’d hoped she’d come in the water, and maybe if I’d brought a ball, she would have. But I forgot to bring one, so she had no motivation to try swimming and therefore didn’t. Still, she did an excellent job in that new situation: no barking because her person was in the water (a habit Bartleby needed to overcome), no running around the pool frantically, no stress. She found herself a nice patch of grass where she could see the front yard and waited patiently for something interesting to happen.

Today, I spent the morning puttering through my course notes. So many notes! I have such a variety of things that I’ve written, things that I’ve learned, and I’m starting to put them together. So I think I will get back to that, maybe after some lunch and some outside time with Sophie Sunshine. Summer is really not my favorite season in Florida — it’s easy to love it here in winter, but harder in July. But we’ve really been managing surprisingly well. Sophie’s not getting nearly as much exercise as she used to but, as I probably should have expected, she seems fine with it. It turns out that a dog with a heavy fur coat doesn’t actually want to spend 30 minutes at a time running after a ball when it’s 90 degrees outside. Who knew?

On Sunday afternoon, I went with Christina & Co. to see Ordinary Boys, a Smiths cover band, at a bar in downtown Sanford. Actually, we thought we were going to see two cover bands, the first called New Dawn Fades, a New Order cover band, and then Ordinary Boys, but it turned out to be one group of musicians with two identities, a concept that I appreciated. So first we had New Order music, then The Smiths music, and interspersed at the end — in a move that had most of the bar crowded onto the dance floor and singing along — a few random 80s songs, including Tears for Fears and Simple Minds.

So much fun!

I am really glad that people don’t smoke in bars anymore, because in the midst of my nostalgic trip, I did notice that key difference to the bars of my early 20s. I’m also glad I don’t drink anymore, because we got there around 2:45, left at around 6:45, and four hours of drinking in a fun, boisterous, musical environment would have killed me even back then. Instead I got to thoroughly enjoy the music, then come home and play with my dog and eat a healthy quinoa bowl for dinner: win-win. And a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

It was not the only nostalgic event of the weekend. On Saturday, we went to see a live version of the Rocky Horror Picture Show at a local Sanford theater. Wow! I’ve only seen Rocky Horror once previously (hmm, maybe twice, another memory just popped into my head of a movie theater on Castro Street in San Francisco), and never a live version, and that was back in my Clarkson years, eons ago. That show is so weird! There was no throwing things at the actors, fortunately, and the audience was quite tame, but the cast was energetic, enthusiastic, and looked like they were having a great time. Also really good. I did wonder about auto-tune, tbh, because the voices were so great and the technology — lighting, video, music, mics — was all top-notch for a small theater, and it’s certainly possible that technology was helping the musicians a bit. But the acting and the dancing and the having fun was all real people doing a great job.

Watching people perform always leaves plenty of room for my brain to wander, though, so it spent a lot of time wandering through the past. As it happens, I’d done a fair amount of that on Friday, too, and much less happily, because on Friday, I went to Costco.

You might think, Costco?! Nostalgia? And you’d be right. Except this Costco was achingly familiar, from a period so long ago that it hurt. I used to drive near that Costco 5 days a week, taking R to-and-from school, back when he was in a private middle school for kids with learning disabilities. It was not the happiest time of my life. I was commuting two hours a day (half an hour there, half an hour back home, 2x a day), working hard and entirely remotely while trying not to think about how much I hated my job, and living in a place that was more house than we needed in a neighborhood that would never feel like home.

But oh, how I loved my boy. Every day we listened to the Zombie Survival Guide on audiobook in the car — over and over again, multiple times, we just got to the end and started at the beginning again — and discussed our own zombie survival strategies. Of which Costco was a huge part, actually! We’d decided that the best plan was to move into the top shelves at the Costco aisles. Use height to our advantage in fighting the zombies, with plenty of supplies right next to us.

He wasn’t happy there either — neither one of us were happy — but I had decided that my priority in life, our priority, was for him to overcome his learning disabilities. That was how we wound up in Florida. The public school in California, where we’d been living, had made it clear that middle school was going to be a sink-into-mediocrity experience for him. He couldn’t go to the middle school where most of his friends would go — an excellent charter school — because they didn’t take kids with learning disabilities. And even though he wasn’t “remediated” to the extent his intelligence suggested was possible, he was no longer far enough under grade level to qualify for support. Our options were limited. The one private school in CA was insanely expensive, nothing I could remotely afford. I looked at schools in Washington, in Massachusetts, finally in Florida. Florida won. But we didn’t love it here, especially back then.

But, oh, I loved him. I would have done anything for him. Giving up my cute house within walking distance to the beach so that he could learn to read was a sacrifice I was willing to make. Giving up my career ambitions, the possibility of achieving the kind of corporate success I’d unthinkingly expected, was a no-brainer. He was my everything.

And now, of course, he is not a part of my life. I think of him with love, I try to only send the typical loving-kindness energy his way (may he be well, may he be happy, may he be loved) when his name crosses my mind, but I also think of him as someone lost to me.

I don’t think I’ve ever shared this story here, but I actually had a major breakthrough in coping with our estrangement when I started thinking of him — the real him, the R who still exists in the world — as a zombie. Someone who had been bitten by zombies, hopefully against their will, and was no longer the same person. Because no one wants to become a zombie. No one chooses to get turned into a zombie! And yet once they’ve been bitten, you have to say good-bye. You can’t keep trying to get someone who wants to hurt you, who will eat your brain, into your life. You have to let go, and let go with love and grief and sorrow, but also by choosing to save yourself.

So yeah, I went to the Costco we used to go to, back in the days when we listened to the Zombie Survival Guide every day, and planned to save ourselves by moving into the Costco, and my heart just broke. All the pieces so painstakingly held together with the duct tape of my choices for happiness and health, just… broke. It was not a good afternoon.

But I did my best to breathe and to let myself feel my feelings, to remember that young R with love, and to forgive the zombie R who exists in my imagination, and to get through. And I did. And the next day I went to Rocky Horror, and remembered the me that existed when I was 17, wide-eyed and confused, and the day after I went to Ordinary Boys and remembered the me that existed at 21, the smoking-drinking-dancing me, and I remembered those past selves with love and amusement and compassion.

And it made me remember that 30-something self with more love, too. I tried so hard. If I had known where trying so hard would take me, I would have done things differently, no question about that. But there is no rewriting the past.

Anyway. Today I’m going to choose to be happy, and that means it’s time to walk my poor patient dog and live here in the present for a while. I’m grateful, though, that I got to have some really good nostalgia this weekend. Two thumbs up for live music and time with friends.

 

I decided this weekend — after messing around with innumerable variations of coaching website designs — to just keep my Choosing Happiness site ridiculously simple and use the template from this website on that address. A new name, of course, and maybe a front page, rather than the main page being the blog, but as basic as possible, using a design I’m already familiar with. It turns out, however, that the theme for this blog is no longer included in the wordpress theme collection and so my “simple” plan immediately got complicated. I swear, that is the story of this career concept. If it is possible to overthink a word choice, I’ve been overthinking it. If it is possible to take a straightforward idea and turn it into a ridiculously complicated plan, done.

Last week, during my meeting with my accountability partner, I mentioned that I’d decided to make business cards with the job title, “Happiness Consultant.” The title amused me, mostly because breaking down the job descriptions of counselor (requires a license!) vs coach vs consultant sort of goes like this:

• Counselors help clients develop a deeper understanding of their own history and how their past affects their present. Counselors aren’t supposed to offer advice or guidance; they should ask questions that lead clients to self-discovery, letting them find their own answers.
• Coaches focus on supporting their clients as they make changes in the present to improve their futures. A coach can be like an extremely reliable accountability partner.
• Consultants give advice. They listen, but their focus is on solutions to problems. They don’t assume that the client knows everything that they need to know in order to solve their problem or reach their goal.

Part of the appeal for me of coaching (and counseling, when I started graduate school eons ago,) is that good conversations fascinate me and I like talking to people. A job that involves me listening intently as people tell me their stories sounds great to me.

But I also very strongly want to say, hey, if you’re not sleeping 7-8 hours/day, that’s what you need to work on first. If you’re not eating a solid mix of vegetables and protein, we’re not going to talk about gratitude, we’re going to look at the ways food fuels mood and how before you can be happy, you have to have energy, and that means providing your system essential nutrients. If you’re not getting enough Vitamin D, preferably through sunshine, than trying to find a happiness boost by listening to music from your childhood is not going to do much.

All of that = advice. All of that = probably bad coaching. But probably good consulting.

Back to the point, I decide to call myself a Happiness Consultant.

Greg said, “you need a tag line or something succinct to explain that.”

Cue so, so, so many hours of over-thinking. Really, what I need is a website, a contact email, a course, and to start actually doing the WORK instead of thinking about the work. But maybe something like, “shaping habits for a happier today,”? Or “helping you shape habits for a happier now”? I don’t know… ugh.

Meanwhile, I am about to run late for this week’s accountability meeting, so quickly…

Yesterday was a delightful day: it included no work whatsoever, but a very nice trip to the beach.

My new beach umbrella was sadly ineffective — it kept blowing away — but I layered on the sunscreen, went in the water multiple times (always watching for sharks, yes, I’m paranoid) and appreciated my day.

Poor Sophie was less appreciative of her day.

I checked in on her through the blink camera regularly, and she was almost always lying in this exact spot, looking out that window. I was watching when we turned into the driveway coming home and her head went up in a flash, and she was off the bed and at the door before the car even stopped. So happy to see us!

But the good news for her is that my accountability meeting = her playdate with her best buddy, so today will be a much nicer day for her. Starting now!

 

If you had asked me two weeks ago if I had ever owned a red raincoat — or indeed, if I had ever worn a red anything, anytime in my life — I would have laughed and said no. Red is not my color. I never wear red, I’ve never worn red.

I would have been wrong. Apparently sometime in my long-forgotten past, I DID own a red raincoat, and I was super cute in it, if I do say so myself.

The picture is part of a collection that my brother sent me — several hundred incredibly small jpgs, most about 150K, that my mom had probably scanned sometime decades ago. The vast majority of the images were what you’d expect: snapshots, blurry, unposed, with scattered artifacts like dust and even the occasional hair from the scanning process, often too dark or too bright. But they were also the record of a childhood I mostly don’t remember — picnics, pony rides, petting zoos. Swimming in Lake George, visiting Niagara Falls, Easters at my grandparents. I had fun browsing them, and then I spent a probably ridiculous amount of time trying to enhance some of them to make my dad a Father’s Day movie with highlights of the past.

Along the way, I discovered the fun of using apps inside Canva to turn photographs into drawings. Of course I’d done that before, many years ago. Wow, that technology has come a long way.

Behold, anime me:

And sketched me, looking far more solemn than original me, with the addition of a city backdrop quite unlikely in my own childhood:

And another sketched me, this time with people and cars in the background, and honestly, just crying out to become a kids picture book somehow. There is clearly a story that goes with that cute little pudgy-faced girl in the rain. I suspect a puppy should be involved.

I justified all that playing with Canva as learning, of course — figuring out how to make presentations and graphics so that I can use them as I work on developing my Choosing Happiness site and course and other products. I keep reminding myself that it’s okay to be in a building/learning stage, as long as someday I move on to a creating/sharing stage, and I will. Soon. Someday. Eventually. Really.

Meanwhile, I have far too many goals for this week. Update this, work on that, finish the library books I’m reading, organize my notes, create a link tree, write the damn content for the landing page on the other site so that I can start blogging over there, design a pretty infographic, decide on the image style…

But the actual goal on my to-do list for the day? Have fun with Sophie. She was alone for a big chunk of the past two days, on Sunday while I had a lovely Father’s Day brunch with my dad and stepmom, and yesterday while I had an entertaining summer day at Epcot with friends. While I don’t feel like I’ve neglected her — believe me, my dog is not neglected! — I do want to make sure she gets some entertainment in her days, too. Does she care? Probably less than I do, tbh — more than once recently, when we’ve been playing ball in the backyard, she has let me know that hanging out in the air-conditioning would be fine by her — but still. Goal for the day: do many useful things AND have fun with Sophie.