It Came From Outer Space…

Lately I’ve felt like I’m greatly in need of a turbocharger for myself, but really I just need to pace things. My “good” days have been a bit missing over the past week, so on days where I’ve been feeling good there’s been a danger to overwork myself and make things so much worse.

I was reading a good article the other day that reminded us that the ideal of having everything in balance is more of a myth and detrimental to us. If we try all our lives to get to this balance we’re doing ourselves a disservice. Our role in life is to juggle things, and in order to be able to do this juggling it’s important that we take care of ourselves first and foremost, and try to be in tip-top condition.

That being said it’s not an easy thing to do. I know a good many people are trained or become of the mindset that everything and everyone else is important and we’re secondary. I find myself doing that a lot. I do all these things for my son all through the day, and when he’s napping I spend my time trying to clean or make food or catch up on work (all in a very short space of time). Even when I was on bed rest while pregnant it was hard for me to just do nothing. Unfortunately for my thighs and waist line a lot of my busy work involves the computer…which isn’t so good.

Then again, the way I’ve been feeling lately…it’s good for my overall health even if it isn’t good for my weight. We’ll get there. In order to take care of myself so that I can be a good juggler I need to start doing some exercise, even if it is just boxing and playing tennis on Wii Sports. Build up gradually.

Maybe I’ll find myself re-energized yet.

In a random side note this is my 300th entry on this blog. Go me!

Certain things are strange to me now that I’m a citizen. I don’t know if I mentioned it specifically on this blog or not (my brain is a sieve) but I got my citizenship in May of this year. Many people don’t realize but I was born in the United Kingdom and emigrated here in 1995. I’ve been living here ever since, and have no thoughts about going home, as it is right now I couldn’t I don’t have a valid passport. Whoops. But I can get a US passport now. I wonder if they’ll have an issue with my green and purple hair?

Anyway…I’ve got the right to vote now, and I’m itching to exercise it, although I have to wait until November. This citizenship has done me a great deal of good, it opens many new doors for me and should help our family out in many ways. I probably still won’t ever get jury duty because of my husband’s employ, but I can vote and have a say in my son’s future, and help better fight for equal rights for those like me who are not mainstream. I might not ever be able to run for president…but some times I entertain the idea of being active politically anyway. I’m in a very small town, and most of the church’s in the area are baptist and the like…but so far we’re doing pretty good…my son managed to scare off the Mormon preacher who came by the other day (and he’s only two). I think generally we weird out a lot of people anyway because there are pentacles and crosses equally all over the house.

Anyway…enough ramble from me. I hope everyone’s having a good night.

One of the stories that I told while we were wandering around involved the De Mesa Sanchez house. I have a friend who in college worked in the Spanish Quarter, which is a living history museum. The workers would wear period clothing and live like they were in the time period for eight hours a day.

She told me of the family that were in the De Mesa house, a wife and two children and their evil father, who had abused them. I’m not sure if he had anything to do with their death, but the family would apparently run around in the upstairs and be afraid of the bad man who was down stairs. The children would be seen running around playing every once in a while, and the wife could mostly be seen sitting on the bed in the upstairs bed room ringing her hands, from time to time there would be banging from downstairs and all the ghostly activity upstairs would cease.

It’s not that there aren’t any in St. Augustine just that we didn’t see any while we were there. We wound up leaving fairly early because the weather was oppressively hot, and we were all miserable. We spent a good portion of the trip looking for sunglasses and mostly finding vintage sunglasses or over-priced fashion knock-offs that looked like they would break the first time that you put them on. I guess I’m just going to hit Walmart and get some cheap sunglasses that will hopefully last more than a few hours.

We did have fun in St. Aug though. We visited a couple of restaurants I’ve never tried before, and we tried gelato at Whetstone’s. We walked around by the Spanish bakery and I told ghost stories as we were wandering about the different places that I remembered having legends. We spent some time at the fort looking for messages, and found the hot shot oven seemed to have the resonance that someone might have been put in there and poked with sharp objects, and my friend kept humming a tune that she was hearing like it was being played on the viola or violin, and felt that there were a couple of soldiers helping a little girl get some wildflowers somewhere near the hot shot oven.

We’ve decided that we’re only going to go up to St. Aug between the months of October and February because then it might not be so oppressively hot when trying to walk around.

I’m trying to remind myself that taking it easy and not thinking about work and things can be just as therapeutic as packing up Briggs and Riley luggage and actually going on vacation. Day trips are fun and hanging out with friends and talking about all kinds of things can be fun too.

Today we’re going ghost hunting with a friend of the family. Which will be a wonderful distraction I’m looking forward to be refreshed in time to do some heavy work in preparation for a friend’s birthday party that we’re hosting

I’ll be sure to let you know if we see any ghosts!

As much as I complain about my husband’s health insurance at times I’m grateful to have it. The seven months where I was without health insurance were really awkward, especially as I managed to dislocate my elbow during that time, and didn’t go to the E.R.

I remember that my MIL was pretty upset about that, but given a year before I had done almost the exact same thing to my elbow while I was camping, had insurance through my employer and all that had done was cost me $300, and get me a sling and two Tylenol…I wasn’t relishing the idea of going there without insurance for similar effect that would cost me a lot more than $300 without insurance.

It’s dropped off in the last few months but for a while I was constantly getting calls from various insurance companies offering me discount rates to insure employees at my business. Given I’m a sole employee/proprietor of the business it’s not really viable to get insurance. It costs a lot more than it’s worth. I doubt I’ll ever be a large enough business to really warrant getting health insurance.

I go through in cycles about this, and it’s silly. I know that I need to exercise more, but that’s tough because I’m overweight. There’s so much bombarding me daily from things that I see, saying oh it’s simple just take Leptovox and you’ll drop the weight, but I realize that’s not going to help because it’s a symptom. I need to make so many changes in my life itself so that I’ll live better overall instead of just taking a magic pill. Why is that so hard to comprehend?

It’s funny to me that a portion of my brain feels that I can’t work out unless I have ellipticals, or exercise bikes or step machines. But seriously, I don’t need that. I just need to be able to self-motivate. It’s so nuts really that I find myself not being able to do certain things when it will benefit me, it’s like I have a block in my brain that says I’m not worthwhile, but I am worthwhile. I’m going to benefit from this, all around, my family, my life, my outlook, my own well being, but somewhere in me a portion of me feels like I’m not worth it, obviously, otherwise I would do it.

Why is that? Why do we feel so bad about ourselves that we won’t do things that are going to make ourselves better?