I worked on the deck all afternoon…repotting some indoor plants….moving some of the big ones outside…organizing and cleaning.  Doing things I can control to occupy my mind and keep me from thinking about things I cannot control.  I sat in the sun and read but as soon as I was distracted with thoughts, I would get up and be productive.  The one thought that continued to surface was:  my life is full of strong women!

I speak for myself but I think others can relate.  It’s the hardships and the negative (whether it is our health or circumstances) that enable us to overcome…every time we succeed in overcoming life’s obstacles we get a little stronger here and a little stronger there.  I think, for that reason, I will say it comes with age.  When raising my girls, I hurt like hell when one of them was troubled but I also realized that you cannot grow into a healthy person without these little obstacles as a child because when life happens….it happens…and they must be able to deal with the juvenile problems in order to be able to deal with the grown up problems.

I watch my friends.  I learn from my girlfriends.  I don’t know if some of them know how really strong they are…but I notice.  I used to let the negativity of my past weigh down on me and thought….why did this happen to me…it’s not fair.  But I’m very confident that I would not be where I am right now in my life if I hadn’t  had to deal with the negative crap.  Shouldn’t all of this shit be over now, haven’t I “grown” enough.  Nope, doubt it.  but, what I have is now and I’m going to work hard not to waste it.

That’s it, Dear Diary.  Until next time…

First….I’m feeling better today.  Antibiotics have kicked in.

Second….I’m finding out that many people suffer from diverticulitis.  In fact, the dear like-souls seemed to come out of the woodwork to empathize!  I’m sorry y’all have experienced it but thankful because I learn lots of helpful hints.

The question I have rolling around in my mind.

Why for all of the years I was on a death wish diet….eating copious amounts of crap on an hourly basis and washing it down with diet pop, did I not have diverticulitis flare ups.  But now that I eat healthy and have cut out the aforementioned foods, is my colon revolting?  My last theory after reading the article after article is perhaps with my bad habits, I was preparing my body for its future battle.  Do you think this is a process?  During an irritated moment while fixing my jello, I thought….maybe I should just say screw it and go back to sugar, gluten and foods with preservatives.  My colon apparently liked it better.

GO!

The only bad news today is the fact that I woke up this morning and realized, yes, I wasn’t wrong yesterday…diverticulitis is back. Three weeks ago, I was having some minor cramping…Dr said she thought I could probably heal it by doing a liquid diet but gave me a couple of antibiotic prescriptions just in case I couldn’t. So I started taking them this morning and back to the liquid diet. After a day of antibiotics, liquid, jello and essential oils, I’ve had a few moments where I’ve stopped dead still and thought…wow…I think the pain is decreasing. This is the only bad thing about my day. Life is good!

I spent a mentally healing day in my craft room. No video games, no TV, just the music and me and a couple of awesome messenger conversations with old friends…

I think it should be noted that I now have on headphones because he has gone to bed and he insinuates the walls in the bedroom were vibrating.

Interesting thing I noticed today was how good these scissors feel in my hand.   When I’m having peaceful positive moments, its amazing how I can notice the simple things!

and then a picture of my project.

Cold packs for the freezer, filled with rice…small ones for my small boy.  I thought they would be more accepted than trying to make a big one work.

So…that’s my day…it has been perfect!

I wish you could hear the Osmond Brothers “The Proud One” playing in my ears right now!

Until next time…..

My blogger friend, CIndy  came into my life…somehow. I’m not even sure how we found each other….but she is trying to tame her demons and get her life back…she uses her blog the way I do…to get it out…her bogs are sometimes dark, sometimes painful…but, I see progress in the last year from despondent to very strong!  She often sends me down my rabbit hole to “contemplate”.

This morning she commented on my blog of a couple days ago about projecting on to others.  In a nut shell she said.  We all do it…how do we not do it.  It’s normal, yet unhealthy.  THANK….YOU….Cindy!

I’ve been so busy, busy, busy analyzing the things I don’t particularly like about myself that sometimes I fail to see the big picture.  This big picture is the part I need to continue the project.  My daughter frequently tells me that I cannot control other people…and that negativity toward me really has nothing to do with me but, in fact, is the reaction to the fermenting trash in their own life.  Not her exact words…mine.  There are certain people in my life who will say things to me that hurt my feelings, make me question myself (what did I do to bring that out),  totally piss me off to the point I want to verbally take them out  or just say F you and shoot them on a rocket launcher out of my life.  I’m learning that their negativity is not my deal…it is their inner garbage.

How many times…I’ll answer…..too numerous to count…I’ve asked a question or made a comment to Him and he turns and shoots me in the foot.  My immediate feeling is WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?  When the possible correct  responsive feeling should be…wow, I hit a hidden nerve, I hope he figures this out.  Or how many times I’ve been discussing something with a  daughter and she answers me with an opinion to fix my problem while obviously not listening to my question.  I’ve stopped and thought, did she even hear what I said.  Instead of wow, my question surfaced an inner struggle that she is projecting on me.  So, yes….we all do it!  We project and think we are reading someone’s mind or empathizing with someone and the only thing we really know is our stuff based on our stuff.

I hope that little inner contemplation makes sense to someone other than me.

Until next time…

The first is a picture of a lap quilt my youngest daughter is making for me.  She has no idea what this means to me.  The second picture is a Happy Birthday card made by Jaxon which I will always cherish!  Also the Happy Birthday greetings on Facebook…I felt the love!!

I spent a few hours this afternoon at the salon.  I’ve decided it is time to let nature take control and let my color grow out to my natural color…which at this point is white.  I’m to the point that there is so much white that after 4 weeks, I look like a skunk.  Nikki, the color goddess is up for anything and I’m sure once all of the color is gone, she will come up with some awesome unnatural color highlights.  

I’m pretty blond now which you can’t really tell in this picture

Jax spent the night.  Jax and he and I tried an Italian restaurant tonight for birthday dinner and then we all climbed into bed for book time and talk time,

I am blessed!

Until next time…..

I can’t believe at 61 years of age, I’m just figuring some things out.  I guess not all at once, I’ve turned a lot of corners along the way and with each new path I think ahhhhh…I think I have this journey figured out.

It came to me tonight that I project my feelings or my guilt onto him….and perhaps that is why he is often shocked when I “ask his permission” to think or do what I want to do or think.  I think what I’m figuring out is he is not thinking AT ALL what I think he is thinking.  I know that this is the way I was raised.  This was not verbalized specifically but I frequently heard from my mother that…your dad won’t like if I do this or go there.  Perhaps in their marriage this, in fact, was true.  But in my daily lessons in life, I learned to be a people pleaser and in a deeper way, I think I adopted this mentality….and to go a step further the pressure I put on myself to be worthy or to be good enough is nothing other than what  I project on people….. what I think is expected of me.

This was a shocking  slap to my psych tonight as we were doing our nightly ritual.  He was headed to bed at 10:30 as usual, I was in the bedroom making sure everything was off the bed and my earplugs would be easy to find in the dark.  I was mildly internally angry, as I am ever night, because I was having a dialogue in my head…I suppose I should go to bed so I can get up earlier but I want to stay up…I should be able to stay up if I want to just like he can go to bed before I’m ready…BOOM…he has never once told me that he wished we had the same bedtime or wake up time….this was all me….. all me reacting to what I thought or projected what I thought he was thinking.  And there it is…another cloud or in my case severe thunderstorm has passed.

Until next time….. 

My only concern for getting off the meds revolved around the withdrawal and whether 15 years of doctors and the pharmaceutical propaganda that I could have a serotonin problem and would have to figure out how to force myself to find other means of coping with the “disease” while laying on the floor in a heap of used tissues.  That was it!  What if I’m really depressed and fail!!

What I didn’t prepare for was ….as my daughter put it last night….welcome to the world of normal emotions.

Thankfully, the bedrock emotion for me is love and thankfulness!  But this weekend, I have been all over the place.  From incredible love and thankfulness and vulnerability with my sister-in-law, friend, rock, Gena to hot, Annie-get-your-gun rage when my IPAD started acting up, to being totally contented watching a 54 minute video on YouTube of a stylist precision cutting a woman’s hair into a Claire from House Of Cards style.

I graduated with honors from the university of People Pleasing.  I know how to act and what I need to do or say to be liked or even loved…but what no one knew except me was that I was NUMB.  My happy/sad meter didn’t move very much in my head.

NOW is now.  I need to learn how to accept criticism and learn from it, how to channel real joy, sadness and anger.  SItting  on the couch 14 hours a day finding things to focus on to occupy me is not the way to live a full life.  I’m now going to focus on learning to channel my emotions, gett off my ass and live.

A friend of mine was relating this morning her journey in detoxing from a mind numbing Med.  I told her this journey has shown me that I am, indeed, a strong woman.  I survived one of the hardest things I have ever attempted.

Until next time….

Facebook sent me to the cupboard for white vinegar and then what seems to be a day long project of running water through my keurig to rid the residual vinegar smell and taste.  I had thought about warm water sitting in the reservoir for days although not the same water for days.  When we leave home for an extended time, we unplug the keurig more to avoid the ant debacle we encountered one time but mainly because it just seemed the obvious thing to do.  I occasionally run a little vinegar through the keurig to avoid the buildup in the nozzle that sometimes happens.  But, holy crap coffee drinkers, I decided to use a heepa amount of vinegar to see if I could duplicate the disgusting residue that was shown in the Facebook post.  UH YA….NO!  Okay, I’m back just ran another carafe through the coffee maker and I still smell vinegar.  When morning comes and I brew my first cup……I’ll let you fill in my blank!

 But my real topic of the day.  Why has no one been curious enough to post a “we are all going to die” post about dryer lint.  Where does all of this dryer lint come from?  If it is coming from the clothes I just took off, I’m mildly embarrassed.  If it is just generally coming from cloth disintegrating then how can I still be wearing a 10 year old Tshirt?  Trust me, said the woman with 4 cats and a dog, I’m totally aware of the difference between critter hair dryer lint and regular dryer lint…..and why doesn’t most of it just wash down the drain of the washing machine?  Is there something we should be doing to avoid dryer lint and the better question, isn’t there something we should be doing with it to avoid wasting it?  Is all of this dryer lint building up causing some dryer lint disaster in the landfills?

BTW He just came up from the basement and said Vinegar?  

Until next time…..