Favorite Pins Monday!

Today has been...a roller coaster. Yes, that is how I'm going to describe my Monday.  It hasn't exactly been terrible, nor has it been completely fantastic.

Due to this roller coaster shaking my head around and causing me to not really think of anything important enough to share, I decided I would share my favorite pins on Pinterest currently since in the days I've created my new account (because when I got my new laptop I lost everything from the old one and had absolutely no way to log in) I've pinned quite a few things.

I absolutely love Ellen, and I don't know how many times I've come across this on the internet between Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. I just love it because I think there's a lot of truth to it!

10 simple things...that I somehow struggle to consistently do.  Still working on it!

 

This is true to a T! We can even sit and eat cookies while watching Netflix too!

Probably one of my favorite ecards I've seen recently. Definitely would make my life easier!

 

I'm seriously considering to make this my life motto.

 

Festive stuff for the holidays! I would have made one this year for our Christmas tree, except we didn't use any gold ornaments like this. Next year, perhaps.

 

I found this today, and I just had to pin it! One of my favorite quotes I've come across recently!

 

I pinned this because I wish I had this way of explaining the types of governments for a group project several semesters ago.  It would have made it so much easier, fun and tastier!

Inspiration for Artist Trading Cards (I don't do them...yet.) I would love to be this artistic to make ATCs.

 

MORE festive and cool nerdy things...Gingerbread Tardis, how could you turn that away for a favorite pin? That's right, you CAN'T.

I hope that my Tuesday will be much better tomorrow than today has been.  If anything, I'll be one day closer to Christmas, and one more day closer to school starting!  That there is enough to make me ready for Tuesday to arrive!

#SpoonieChat

This past weekend I went to Kansas City with a couple of ladies from church to go shopping.  It was a spur of the moment decision to go with them on this trip.  I had thrown together some clothes and packed the necessities including my medicine.  Off we go, a couple hours in the van to get there before we hit our first store.

Normally I get very anxious about traveling. I love traveling. Don't get me wrong, but when you've had hip problems since you were eight, sitting for a long period of time is a difficult task, let alone in a cramped space.  I do have to say that it has been loads easier to travel for more than an hour in a vehicle since I had my hip replaced, but that doesn't mean it's easy peasy, lemon squeasy.  Because this trip was spur of the moment I didn't have the TIME to over think and get all antsy about the traveling portion of the trip.

I was wiped out when I got home on Sunday.  I thought it would just take all day Monday to regain my energy back from doing so much in the three day span that I was gone. I was oh so wrong.  I forgot about Thy, my thyroid. I forgot how much she makes me feel sluggish when I use my energy reserves.  I also forgot that I'm working on finding that happy medium of using my energy for things that I need to do and not just pointless things.  It completely threw me off.

Wednesday was the first day that I actually felt like I could do something.  It was probably because I didn't do much but sleep since I had gotten home on Sunday and that I was two days in taking my medicine (last week I kind of got off with my meds, and then it threw me off completely; I'm pretty good at getting back on track after I travel though) and I felt like I could actually accomplish some things.

I did! But then I think I might have overdone it because I sat there on the couch Wednesday night watching Survivor with my parents and brother.  By the time the Duck Dynasty (the show is very popular in our house!) Christmas special came on, I was so low on energy I didn't even pay attention to the show.  So, I did what I do when I get bored during commercials, I hopped on Twitter via my cell phone where I found #SpoonieChat

I'm not quite for sure exactly what the chat is aimed towards, but I think the general idea is to unite spoonies (people with chronic illness) together.  It was a fantastic time, though I only jumped in about halfway through the chat.  I found some questions that kind of framed the chat, and I wanted to take the time to answer them.

1. Do you find that your possessions weigh you down or suck away time that might be better used elsewhere? Possessions as in "stuff" that I've collected over the years? Yes. I'm constantly feeling the need to get rid of things, or wonder why I still have something when I can't remember the last time I used it.  I spend so much time thinking about it, or attempting to do something about it that I often get side tracked during my day and waste a lot of energy in the process, thus bringing my day down with me.
2. Are predetermined time commitments dictating what you do and how you do it? Sometimes commitments made years ago no longer make sense, but momentum keeps them going? I don't really think I have much of a problem with this. Much the opposite I believe. I can't commit to something and if I do and I break it, it's twice as much trouble for me to get back to it. For example, last year I made a pact with my roommate to do homework every day together in the library.  Once I didn't go once because I was feeling ill, I just didn't go again for several days.
3. Do you are too many goals pulling you in opposite directions?  I do feel that some of them are.  It's difficult to explain because that majority of my goals have changed in the last two to three weeks, so now I'm more in a mind frame of focusing on how to get to those new goals.  On a simplified level, my day to day goals of what I want to get accomplished sometimes pull me apart at the seems just because I feel the need to list everything and get it all done; talk about one way to drain energy quickly!
4. Are negative thoughts hampering your progress? Sometimes, we take these ideas as actual “facts”. What could you rethink?  I'm struggling with this one I think.  When I think about my goals and my progress, I think of how I said above that I want to get it all done, or in my post from Wednesday that I have this picture perfect plan, when I can't get it all done, or something falls out of this picture perfect plan my mind immediately begins to think of all the negatives.  That I should have done "this" instead of "that" and so on.  It's something I'm working on (I've said that a lot this week, should keep me busy before school starts!), that instead of thinking about the negative things when I can't get all of my to do list completed, or when my picture perfect plan goes out the window that I think about the positive things. For example, I had a long cleaning list the other day.  I wanted to clean my bedroom, but all I got done was my closet.  The positive? My closet was an absolute disaster and it took ALL day.  But it got done.

I've rambled enough for today, but at least that rambling was kind of therapeutic for me.

Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning)

My brother was one of the many brave and courageous men and women who were doing their duty after 9/11.    At the time I didn't really know what was going on when he was deployed to the Middle East, I was in second grade and up until I started school in kindergarten and my brother came home for a bit, I thought I was an only child.  As a child, I didn't understand what happened to our country, to the world even.

Every once in a while I hear a song or two from the weeks after 9/11 when we were constantly listening to a local country station that was doing a lot of work to help out military families.  When I hear these songs that have practically been burned into my memory, I can't help but get emotional and sometimes I cry.  Tonight, while listening to Pandora, Where Were You (When the World Stopped Turning) by Alan Jackson came on.

I remember distinctly the first time I had heard the song.  I was in the truck with my parents and it was played on air and the three of us kind of lost it.  It still has a similar effect now, but mostly because I'm so thankful that my brother is here with us today, alive and well.

I think that sometimes we need a reminder. For me, I need the reminder that I'm so lucky to have my brother here with us this Christmas, and all the holidays and random days and visits between now and when he came back stateside.  It's a painful to think about; my brother could have very easily been one of those Marines that never made it back home to hug each of us.  Thoughts like that really rattle me, but they make me cherish the moments I have with him and the memories we've created that much more.

"It'll be okay."

I've been told many times since the beginning of my senior year in high school that things may not end up how I've imagined them.  Of course, the stubborn person that I am ignored taking this into consideration when I all but set out everything I wanted to do in college and what I wanted to do when I graduated from college.

Looking back, I should have known that I was setting myself up to fail for my first year in college.  The key words: should have. But I didn't and I'm really thankful for that now.

I only applied to one college.  An expensive and private college. I toured the college as a junior in high school and I fell in love, or so I thought, with how small the college was and the community feel it had to it.  I enjoyed my conversations with my future history professors, and was excited to get to know them and my fellow history majors more.  I couldn't wait for August 2012 to come so I could get started with this almost picture perfect dream I had tricked myself into believing I could achieve.

I wanted to be a history teacher when I graduated high school.  That's all I had planned for senior year and had even had in depth conversations with one of my favorite history teachers who had first sparked my interest in the subject.  When school season came around I was ecstatic to go to class.  No one told me that the college thing would be as difficult as I found. Some tried to prepare me for the struggle I would have studying history.  No one could have prepared me for the heartbreak when I realized that studying history was not my calling, or that I wasn't cut out for teaching.

When I left school in the middle of my second semester, I kept it pretty low key.  It was a spur of the moment decision that I had made with some thought. I hadn't been mulling it over for forever, but I knew I wasn't happy at this school and there was no way I could pull my grades up to par to pass my classes in the state that I was in.  A few times someone has asked me since I left in March 2013 if I wish I had stayed.  My answer has been the same, but I'm slowly realizing the explanation to have more meaning.

I don't wish that I had stayed.  There are nights that I lay in bed and think about the infamous 'what ifs' but I would only find myself dreaming of doing everything perfect again, something that I have now realized is part of my commitment problem.  I get discouraged easily when something doesn't go the way my picture perfect plan was set and I fall from the wagon and it's difficult to get back on the wagon.  I say this, but my explanation might make some more sense.  I used to say that I just wasn't happy.  Then I began saying, I wasn't happy and that God's plan didn't call for me to be in school at that moment.  Now? My answer is this, I ignored what God was trying to say so many months ago, and when I became so unhappy and dysfunctional I had to leave it was my sign that I was not in the right place.

I found work shortly after moving home and though that job didn't end up how my picture perfect plan had been I have learned so much about myself and how to be a good and responsible employee.  Not to mention that the biggest lesson I learned was a simple one: you never know what someone's day is like, a simple smile or telling someone 'thanks for stopping in' can change a damaged day into a slightly better one.

I left this job in August, for reasons that I'm not going to explain right now.  It was, at this point, too late to get started in school at the community college (the one that I had applied for when I got home in March hoping to take summer classes and never heard back from because my acceptance letter got lost in the mail) and I took a couple weeks to get readjusted from the crazy shifts I was working before starting to apply for another job.  I started to come up empty.

So I began to volunteer a bit more where my mom works and doing quite a bit of reading.  I don't remember when or why but I found myself looking into a hospitality management type major and that lead me into getting in touch with the community college to get things going.  I went for a campus visit in September where I had a wonderful (a bit long) talk with one of the admissions counselor.  Before she let me go to go on the campus tour, I asked her about my admissions status (we had been talking about the struggle of knowing what to do with your life after graduation and finding the right path in college and such, it had been more of just a lovely conversation that needed some coffee to go with it) and she checked and found that I had been accepted since May.

Now here I am, 41 days away from my first hospitality class in my hotel management degree.

I was freaking out a few hours ago about my goal of graduating in a year and a half instead of two years since I'm only able to take a part time load this spring semester.  I started to list the classes I need for my associates and checking them against the school's master schedule to see which classes I needed to take in the spring and which ones in the summer so between the two I would have a full semester completed before moving to campus in the fall.  In all the hustle when I sat down to talk to my mom, she let me rant on and on about this goal of graduating in a year and a half before she cut me off finally and told me simply "It'll be okay."

Things will work themselves out.  I say that I know this, but I don't think I actually believe any of it.  It's a hard thing for me to focus on, that I need to abandon this thought of the perfect plan I've dreamed up and focus on what lies ahead.  My perfect plan: graduate in one and a half years, transfer to Houston to do my bachelor's and graduate before working on the east coast.  I've realized today that I need to abandon the perfect plan and think of the goals to work towards instead.  For example, my goal is to graduate in one and a half years, thus I need to focus on the courses I'm able to take and do my best to succeed.

"It'll be okay."