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Royal Run Around

Education is an absolutely wonderful thing. Don't get me wrong - I believe everyone needs to continue their education long beyond the end of High School. I also believe you don't really have a choice - if you don't learn from life alone, you aren't LIVING life. However, colleges, while absolutely wonderful institutions of higher learning, are a bit wrapped up in red tape and hoops. Here's the fun issue I've been dealing with the last few weeks and why I've been so quiet lately.

I'm two classes away from my Anthropology AA, according to the RSCCD (Rancho Santiago Community College District) standards. Those classes are Anthropology 103: Archaeology, and Anthropology 104: Language & Culture. If I could, I'd take them both, in one Semester, and be done. Here's the issue - in the last 3 years, the colleges haven't OFFERED these two classes. Due to financial aid rules, I can't attend any more classes except the ones required for my degree, and still get financial aid. And I need the financial aid in order to afford the books for the classes, therefore I haven't been able to attend any classes for the last two semesters. This isn't a problem except for the fact that they marked me as a "non-attending/abandoned student", even though I was in contact with my advisor more than once throughout the last few semesters. Therefore I was unable to register for the class this semester when it was finally offered. I had to reapply to the college system, wait for that approval. By the time they let me back into the system, the class was full. There was no waitlist. So I figured, fine. I'm not letting them stop me. I'll leap through this hoop, and go in on the first day of class and talk to the teacher and petition to enter the class.

This morning was the very first class. I got up early, and Lona drove me up there so I could talk to the teacher before everything started. We got there an hour before the class started, and I went to find the classroom. I was shocked to find it full of people. I managed to get to the teacher, and was told that roll had already been taken and all 45 people who'd signed up for the class were present, and as I knew, there was no waitlist. I explained to the teacher my situation, and after some thought, I was sent to Admissions to ask if they had any suggestions, because there was no way the teacher could allow me into the class. Apologetic or not, it still meant I had no class.

I went to admissions. What it comes down to is that because the inability for me to get into the class on time was their fault, and that the school hasn't offered the classes in so long, I have a chance to petition or challenge the school to just GIVE me my A.A., without actually taking those last two classes. The catch? I have to wait until next semester to do it because in order for the challenge to go through, the school can't currently be offering the classes I need. If they ARE offering, I have a chance to get in again.

Another catch? This is all assuming I still live here by next semester. See, Lona and I have finally decided on an area. We're moving up to Washington, the Seattle area to be specific. So when I got home today, I emailed the South Seattle Community College to see what they could do to help me if we move up there before the next semester (that's more of a when than an if at this point, though). I got a response that they were very encouraging. It looked like, according to my unofficial transcript, I've already satisfied their requirements for an A.S. of Anthropology. She couldn't tell me anything officially without me applying to and being accepted to the college and providing them with an OFFICIAL transcript from RSCCD, but what it looks like is that we move up there, I apply, I get accepted, they take my transcript, and I get a letter in a month that says "Hey, you've already fulfilled our requirements for an Associate's degree." Basically, I'll end up graduating from a college that I never actually physically attended. So while this is an amusing outcome, the hoops I've had to jump through to get to this precipice are very frustrating - and I still have to jump off the ledge and hope I can fly.

So that's why I've been so quiet lately, and now you know what's going on in my school life. :P Yes. Hoop jumping abounds. So I maintain, college and education are wonderful things. But sometimes I just get really tired of this royal run around.

Blog Fail

I need to be actually writing blogs more. It's not that I have no idea what to blog about - it's the opposite, actually. I keep having great ideas, not being in a place where I can start blogging about them right that instant, and when I get home I've either forgotten entirely or the meat of the post idea is just gone.  This has resulted in me only doing little stupid link blogs in the last month, and I feel horrible about it. So here's my attempt to throw an update blog with some actual meat to it.

So, let's go into some personal updates! For the first time in several years, I have short hair! I need to take some new pics for Facebook and stuff. It isn't overly-short. Just a little less than shoulder length in back, and I have my bangs again. Lona and I went and got our haircuts at the same time, so that was nice. I've gotten back into going to the library and picking out regular books rather than just doing the ebook thing through the digital library because, well, let's face it - unless something drastic changes soon, the e-libraries will never have the full selection of the physical ones. And sometimes it is nice to just hold a real book in your hands.

I've been trying to find time to work on my own books again. So far I've been only moderately successful, as my writing muse is a fickle thing and at the moment we seem to be having a lover's spat. Much like my talent for blog writing, it seems to only be showing up when I'm actually incapable of acting on it - utterly frustrating.  My artwork is the same, though I'm having a bit more luck with that and getting old owed commissions out. I am open for commissions again, as well as having my <a title="SALE! $5 Therian Icons!" href="http://www.tygerwolfe.com/?page_id=863">$5 Therian Icon Sale</a> still going on.

In gaming news, the release for World Of Warcraft: Mists Of Pandaria is a month and a week away as of today. I'm excited, and also looking forward to the patch next week, even though it'll completely change the talent system, the glyph system, and quite a few stats as well. I haven't been playing much with the exception of doing Argent Tournament dailies on Kalitri and earning more mounts, looking forward to when they go account wide, and sometimes bumming around on Ionaria, my troll druid. I've been playing a bit more of Zynga games, mostly on their site, though I play on Facebook from time to time as well. And I've gotten into an Android game on my phone called Dark Summoner that's a bit like a cross between Pokemon and Yu-gi-oh. I'm enjoying that.

Lona and I are currently car-less, having sold the Jeep when costs of keeping it running outweighed it's usefulness in a massive way. I was very sad to see it go, but it really was for the best. We're still looking into moving, though now our sights are set a bit higher than the around-the-corner apartments we'd been looking at. I hesitate to say more for risk of accidentally putting a universal kibosh on it, so just send us good thoughts and we'll be on our way eventually.

I think that's about it as far as personal updates go for now. No, this wasn't a particularly massive update, and it did draw my attention to the fact that I need to trim my fingernails, as my fingers keep typing the key above the key I want to type. So I'm going to do that soon.

Storyteller's Howl: Blank Page Syndrome (BPS)

Writers, have you ever stared at a blank document file, or a blank pad of paper, and felt your mind seem to sink into  the blankness of the page? Have you ever felt that you were personally becoming one with the nothingness of the virgin writing surface beckoning you to fill it with prose? If you have, then you're experiencing something I call BPS - Blank Page Syndrome. And there is help for you!

It's a horrible thing, to be unable to write when you want to. You have the drive, the inspiration, but you're lacking something that will make you actually start typing or get your pen moving. The page might as well be made of molasses, for all the good trying to type on it will do for you. So you tab away, go on the internet, try and distract yourself from that looming blank page in the background. But every time you go back to it and think now, NOW is the time for you to put pen to paper, you find yourself stuck yet again.

What causes this? This isn't a lack of inspiration or a drive to write. This isn't writer's block. You KNOW what you want to write, but you just can't seem to make it come out. You have the drive but seem to have lost the ability.

Now, I started this by saying that there's help, and there is. My personal method relies on the fact that I know how to touch-type. STOP staring at the blank screen. Close your eyes, take yourself to the beginning of your story - and honestly, just start typing. (It's important to make sure that your fingers were on the home keys before closing your eyes. I've made THAT mistake before.)

After you've written a few paragraphs or even sentences, open your eyes and look at what you wrote. The page isn't blank anymore! And suddenly what seemed insurmountable a few moments earlier is now a story that's gotten rolling, and you can just keep going as long as inspiration maintains.

I've actually done this for school papers as well as personal fiction, and even the occasional blog post. Breaking that blank page is the first step to creating something amazing. If you have other ways of getting past BPS, please share in comments!

Two Years...

(For ease of reference, "mom" and "dad" referred to in this posting are Lona's biological parents.)

Today is the two year anniversary of dad's death.

I read back over all the posts I made over the last two years about mourning and his illness and everything. One line stuck out at me. I wrote in an earlier post, "A year from now, this house won't even be recognizable." It took two years, but that's happened. With this latest rearranging of the house, the conversion of the former living/dining room into a full time office with five desks, the den (dad's former office, and after that Kata's for awhile) into the living room, and me and Lona taking the bed that used to belong to mom and dad and moving into the front bedroom - what was formerly Lona and Claudia's office while the rest of us already were in the living room.

If dad were to walk around this house physically today, it would drive him nuts. He wouldn't know where anything is, and there are a couple of places were egress (one of his big things) is severely limited.  My thoughts have been drifting to him more and more as we've come up on this anniversary, and earlier today the only way I could stop reliving that day two years ago was to allow one of my bonds to be in control while I was out with Lona. But that only stopped the grief from weighing down my body - my mind is still swimming.

In this new configuration, physically, I'm actually the closest to dad. His urn is in the breakfront directly behind me, with the urns of Squeak, Flake, and AJ, our kitties that have likewise passed on. But one thing that hasn't changed over the two years is that my feeling of safety and that he's still somewhere in the house hasn't gone away.

A couple of weeks ago, Lona put a kleenex down on an empty part of her desk. She left her desk. She came back. She moved the kleenex - and underneath it was a pen with the Marriot hotels logo on it. It hadn't been there before. In fact, we hadn't SEEN any of the Marriot pens for a long time before this happened. Dad used to work at a Marriot, years before I met him, you see...and he brought home quite a few of their pens in the years his band played there. It's little things like that, that let us know that dad's still around and wants us to KNOW he still is. It's odd things like that, that make me feel safe still.

It is true, I suppose, that time heals all wounds. This year has been thankfully free of "a year ago, dad....", which haunted me for the first year after he died. Knowing we've now been through two years without him and we're all still here, and we're all still ok, does make things a bit easier. But I still laid awake last night at 2am, remembering dad saying he couldn't breathe...Mom knocking on our bedroom door and saying she was calling an ambulance...The ride to the hospital, the interminable waiting...Dad's shallow snoring....and the presence of Death, which still makes my heart constrict and my blood chill when I think of it.

The days and weeks following are a blur now. Reading over my past journals I was surprised how much I'd written about then that I didn't remember now. I'd forgotten that when dad's urn first came home, he sat on the dining table for three days, and I did my homework and ate with him. I remembered that I'd been the one to put him into the breakfront, though. Still, that night keeps coming back in horrible clarity today...and I just can't shake the sadness.

I cried this morning over something stupid. And it wasn't the tears stinging my eyes feeling that I get sometimes and shrug off...I had trouble fighting this off without sobbing aloud. And I realized as I was doing it that it wasn't just about what had happened - it was a grief release as well. Two years later, and while I can identify and tell you about how I've gone through all the stages of mourning, I can also tell you that just because you've reached acceptance doesn't mean you won't still cry.

I miss you, dad. I'll probably always miss you. Thanks for sticking around.

I am Annoyed - at my own Eye...

But let me explain.

A few years ago, I had an eye infection in my right eye. It was, to say the least, disturbing. It resulted in that eye being closed a lot of the time, and me having to put drops in it (I don't like eye drops at the BEST of times), and I came out of it with what my optometrist says is permenant scarring on my cornea.

The result of this is that sometimes my eye works just fine, but other times...like when it's hot, or when I slept oddly the night before, or when venus and mars decide they don't like me, or whatever...I'll wake up and put my glasses on only to notice that I feel...lopsided.

The first time I noticed the lopsidedness, I thought I'd somehow lost the lense out of the right side of my glasses. The difference in my vision is that stark. There's almost no difference between how I see the world through my right eye without my glasses, and how it looks with my glasses on when I'm having what I've come to think of as a "blur attack." A quick tap of my finger proved that the glass was still there and hadn't somehow leaped from my frames (inside their glasses case) in the middle of the night. So the next thing I did was go in the bathroom and wash out my eye (another thing I strongly dislike doing - the pattern here is that I don't like things touching my eyes, thank you very much), which would usually fix this for awhile when I was in the worst part of the eye infection.

Washed my eye out, put my glasses back on...nope, still looked as if I didn't have a lense on the right side. I took the glasses off and leaned in close to the mirror to try and see if there was something in my eye....Nope, nothing. No visible evidence of why it was blurry.

I thought it might clear up, so I worked around it for a day or so. The down sides of this quickly became apparent. It started with a dull throbbing centered behind my right eye that eventually evolved into the feeling like my eye socket was rocking out to some rave I couldn't hear. I needed to be able to keep working, so I did what most people in my situation would do - I closed the eye, kept it closed, and continued working with just my left eye.

The headache eventually faded to a dull throb, then left entirely with the addition of some pain medication. However, every time I opened my eye, it was still blurry. So I closed it again. This was the beginning of several months in which I would keep my eye open as long as I could stand it every day, and then close it. Some days were worse than others. Then, one morning, just as suddenly as I'd woken up with the blurriness in the first place, it was just gone. I still have no idea what happened. But I could see normally, and there was no more headache. I was thrilled.

Until I noticed that my right eye seemed to have developed a mind of it's own in all that time it was closed.

All that time when I wasn't using my eye, it got lazy. Literally. I'd be working, both eyes open, and suddenly notice that everything in my vision had gone weird - my right eye was crossed, my left eye was still focused on what I was doing. Or sometimes I'd become aware that my eye had drifted off to the right somewhere, and it took a lot of work for me to focus the right eye back where it was supposed to be.

Genetically, I'm prone to lazy eye. My dad had to have surgery for it before I was born - and as I mentioned earlier, I hate the idea of anything going in my eye. I sure was NOT going to be happy if I had to have SURGERY on my EYE. So I began the painful process of forcing my eye to focus properly again. I had to monitor it very closely. And for quite a few weeks, I would keep getting eyestrain headaches after I'd been up for about five or six hours. Dull ache behind my eye as I worked muscles that had been allowed to atrophy over the previous months - nothing like the pounding rave that the blurriness had caused. I delt with it, though - like you do when retraining any muscle that's lost functionality for whatever reason. Eventually, the headaches stopped, and my eyes behaved normally and worked together like they were supposed to.

A few months later, I woke up with a blurry right eye again. This time it was gone in a few days. The next time it came back, it didn't even last a whole day - the next time it took a week or so to return to normal. It became clear that this blurriness thing was an intermittent problem that I would probably be dealing with for the rest of my life - a result of the scars on my cornea from the infection, perhaps. Annoying, but I'd learned how to deal with it, right? Just close my eye until it goes away.

The first time the blurriness lasted more than a couple of days, though, I started to recognize the subtle tug of my closed eye - it was trying to drift again. I forced it to move with my other eye - but without the eye open to be sure I was focusing on the same place as my left eye, I couldn't be sure I was keeping it trained properly. So, once again, I started keeping the eye open and trying to work through the blurriness. This resulted in my old friend, the pounding rave, having a return engagement in my eye socket by the third day. Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow...

But then, eventually, I would wake up and the blurriness would be gone again. It was a constant cycle. Recently, I've gone the longest I've GONE since this started happening without a blur attack. Several months, actually most of this year. The last attack I remember was in late January, so it's been almost six months.

Which brings me to the reason for my annoyance and this post today. See, I woke up this morning to a blur attack - one of the worst since the actual eye infection. I tried closing my eye, but it's been so long since I've schooled my eye muscles that I felt my eye start drifting almost immediately. So I snapped it back open again. I need my depth perception. I need my eyes. I can't work on art, I'm having a lot of trouble reading and writing (primary focuses of my JOB), and even looking at my computer screen for something like WoW on my lunch break gets painful quickly.

I can already feel the beginnings of the rave starting up around my eye, and this is only the first day of the attack. I hope it's the last, but for right now I'm stuck in the absurd position of being very annoyed and angry at my own eye. Yes, I understand, you had an infection. Yes, I know you carry scars - I have scars all over my body from various things. You are part of me, eye. Deal with it. Deal with it without having a freaking "oontz-oontz-oontz" RAVE in my EYE SOCKET.

I feel like an old guy telling annoying kids to get off my lawn, except that I'm talking to a piece of my own anatomy. That's all. Just needed to vent about that...Now I have to go take some pain medication and try to get through the rest of the work day without banging into walls from lack of depth perception and/or snapping at people because my head feels like there's a frat party going on in my eye.

Quiet down in there!

In Recovery

Sorry I've been essentially silent the last few weeks. We did a serious reorganization of the entire house, moving all desks into a central office area, making the former den into an actual living room that means that people don't have to watch TV in the middle of what amounts to two other people's office space, and there are actual doors that can be closed off to separate the living area of the house from the working area of the house.

Now this does put us at a bit of a disadvantage of that when any of us are on the phone for business or whatever, anyone can hear it. Also that all of us have tendency to talk to ourselves and our computers and, in some cases, our characters, while working. This can result in literally five different conversations going on in the same room at the same time at various volume levels, on top of calling out across the room to each other. So it can get kind of noisy. I have my own window now, though, with a lovely view of the woody part of our front yard, and I get to watch squirrels when I don't have anything else to do.

Which, admittedly, is not often.

Lona and I have the front bedroom now, filled with our bookcases, a big overstuffed chair, and our california king sized bed (oh so very comfy), Nyx has her own room now - the one the 3 of us used to share. So now there is a definite line of demarkation and everyone has their own little territories, which I admit that the wolf in me appreciates very much.

But, the reason that the title of this post is "in recovery," is that in the midst of all this moving, I started getting sick. But this was not a normal cold. This was not a "push through what we're doing and then sleep for the next few days and be fine" cold like I've had many other times....This was a chest cold, and a real pain of one, too. For the first few days after the move I couldn't sleep lying down....or sitting up. I had to prop myself on the edge of the recliner in the living room, rocked forward, legs crossed indian style under me, because it was the one position in which I could breathe for a few minutes in between chest-wracking coughs.

My nose never got stuffed up, but I got what had to have been a fever of over 100 that came and went over several days while I coughed and my chest rattled with every breath. Nyx sat up with me one night and we watched Avatar in the middle of the night - it was on. :P So we watched it. I appreciated the company, but I wasn't doing all that well. I only vaguely remember that night now, and it was less than a week ago.

I dosed constantly on naturopathics, as well as Nyquil and Dayquil and Mucinex, trying to rid myself of the stuff that was filling my chest. I fought to breathe, and ended up having to use my asthma inhaler when the coughing and choking would set off an exertion asthma attack on top of my already fighting to breathe. There were several times over the week or so that I was this sick that I considered asking to be driven to the emergency room...but my fear of hospitals and my dislike of the crap they put people through won out, and I worked through it.

Even now, I'm still coughing and my chest still rattles a bit when I breathe. I wake up in the middle of the night and have to sit up very quickly and cough in order to breathe, and for some reason I can't lie on my right side or my stomach without coughing, but I'm fairly ok on my left side.  However, the fever is long gone and my body is back to working mostly the way it's supposed to. I lost several pounds over the week I was sick just by virtue of not eating regularly. Or...at all, really. I was kind of living off pills and water.

I'm hoping I can keep the weight off - every little bit helps. If I wasn't so heavy I wouldn't have so many other health problems, so my focus is currently on my health. I want to get up to riding my bike regularly, and get myself in a  better physical place. If nothing else, this chest cold nightmare just epitomized all the reasons I need to be healthy. So here I go, once again, trying to take care of myself. Go me. :P

But yes, for now, I'm still technically in recovery from the chest cold, and I'm dealing with exhaustion as I recover from what I'm starting to think was mild pneumonia rather than a simple chest cold - I got it much worse than Lona did, and we got sick at the same time. She's barely coughing now, and I'm still coughing regularly enough that movies have to be paused to wait for me to recover.   ( - . - )  It's frustrating, and annoying, and makes me feel rather useless...add to this that my car has died and I don't have the funds to fix it at the moment, and I start feeling very trapped. By my body, by my lack of car and therefore ability to help the house....It hasn't really been an easy couple of weeks.

However, I refuse to lose my positive. Things will get better - I KNOW they will. I just have to let it happen. And with that, I leave you until my next update...or until I have the time and focus to actually write out something meaningful. :P

So Many Updates!

OK! I'm going to try and be as concise as I can POSSIBLY be here. Which means that I'm probably going to babble on for pages. Bear with me. So much is going on recently that I barely know where to START.

Ok, let's start with a blog progress report. YES! I am still working on the Inside Animal Emotions series. Thanks to my wonderful friend, Paleo, who gave me a copy of the fantastic book When Elephants Weep, by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson & Susan McCarthy. The book is now a highlighted mess. :P And I haven't even finished READING it yet.

I have a whole folder in my bookmarks bar with research and things I want to cite while I'm writing, and pages written up in a word document with the citations in place for certain things. I'm approaching this thing like a research paper rather than a blog series, and I know that...but I want to be as thorough as possible while covering this controversial and close-to-my-heart topic.  I'm also hoping to present some newer information as well - as soon as I can find a source for where I heard it and make sure that I'm NOT pulling it out of my own assumptions. I swear I read it, but I'm having trouble finding the source - and if I don't find the source, I can't use it. Which is a shame, because it's fantastic. :P

In other news, a wonderful friend sent me something fantastic that just arrived today. She goes by the name Shimmerhawk, and I've known her for many years. She's a taxidermist among other types of artist, and I received this glorious, beautiful boy in the mail today:

Coyote 2 - Pale Coyote by *shimmerhawk on deviantART

He has had the wood base removed, but I'm going to personally make him a new base for his rock to sit on - maybe with some driftwood or something to accent the rock. When I have time. Right now I'm so slammed with work...Which brings me to my next thing! :D

Claudia Suzanne is not only the CEO of the company I work for, Wambtac Communications, but she's also a survivor of one of the most insidious and debilitating diseases out there: Multiple Sclerosis. She's a ghostwriter with over a hundred invisible credits to her name, and several books she wrote have been on the best seller's list over the years. However, this is the first book she's written for herself, about herself. And we're trying to get it funded to get to the printer. And you can help! Just share the link if you can't donate - every little bit is appreciated.

Kickstarter Link

Still on the topic of work - I've been promoted. :P Sort of. I'm still Lona's assistant, but on top of that I'm also an intern in the marketing department. So while my life used to be fairly balanced between work and personal time, the personal time has kind of been cut in half as I learn what amounts to a completely new thing on top of everything else I already do. As a result I've started establishing a professional name that I may or may not keep...or that may become a pen name, since I do like it quite a bit. But again, as a result, I'm completely swamped with work, and my personal time keeps being taken up by helping friends with various things so I don't end up getting what I wanted to get done, done.

I'd talk about my gaming life too, but that's a topic for a Tooth & Arrows update, so I won't do THAT right now. Leave it be at saying I'm still progressing through content and am now a much more confident bear tank than I ever have been before...and my hunter's kind of getting left in the dust. Other topics!

Thanks to the Nook that my best friend got me for my birthday, I'm able to read comfortably and regularly again. That makes me SO very happy. It's the only personal thing I seem to have time to do lately, since I also have to allocate personal time for fulfilling commission artwork, and advertising for myself to get more commissions IN since my primary income right now is less than I'd like it to be.

Speaking of art and reading, however, I had the pleasure yesterday of attending a lecture by the wonderful author Dean Koontz. I'd taken one of my favorites of his books in the hope that he'd be able to sign, however he'd had to leave quickly after the (incredibly entertaining!) talk, and so instead of signing books, he had provided for the library 300 copies of a couple of his books that he'd already signed. Everyone who attended got one, and I snagged a signed copy of A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog, which I think really IS my favorite of all his books, and not one I happened to own yet. So that was fantastic. He's incredibly personable and amusing, and told so many wonderful stories about his life as an author. It was really great. :)

My health is improving as well - I'm doing more moving around and, well, let's be honest, less eating. :P As a result, I've dropped a few pounds in the last few weeks, and I'm not having so much trouble with my legs. I'm trying to find time in and among everything else I'm doing to ride my bike, and to actually work on my own writing - primarily the book I have a deadline on. See, the rewrite of Tigerwolf has been picked up by our in house publishing group...so I need to have that done in the next year. It's hard to split my time between all of these different things and still find time to blog and keep up my online commitments, but somehow I'm doing fairly well.

I'm leading a truly blessed life right now, and my fiancee and I are looking forward to moving out fairly soon and into an apartment of our own, as soon as one comes available. So we're also working towards that, parring down our possessions and designating what will be going into storage - either in her mom's garage, or in our storage unit - once we move out. When we visited my parents last month, we did the same with my stuff that remains in Texas, marking what is to be sent to us once we have our apartment. So I'm looking forward to that - and I'm sure my parents are, too, because they'll have far more room in that big closet once my stuff's out of there. :P

I THINK that's it, as far as I can tell, for updates. I probably forgot something, but I have no idea what it might be. So there'll probably be more posts later when I remember them. Because, see, you can't upgrade the memory in your brain. And that, I feel, is very inconvenient.

Memory and Imagination

Lona and I had a wonderful time, weekend before last, hanging out with my parents for their 50th anniversary. The plane rides were wonderful and quite comfortable for being planes, and the time spent with mom and dad was absolutely lovely. One of the days we were there, we spent time looking through a lot of my old things, helping my parents decide what they could let go to a women & children's shelter, and what I wanted them to keep and eventually ship to me. However, holding my childhood toys again - some that I hadn't seen since I was much younger - remembering the stories attached to them and the things I'd put my parents through in order to get some of them, brought a lot of my childhood into the soothing light of nostalgia for me. I found myself remembering things I thought were long forgotten - like the time I turned my entire room into Jurassic Park, building little enclosures for all the different dinosaurs in various areas, complete with farm truck that carted food and livestock from paddock to paddock. The interesting thing I'm finding as I look back on it, though, is that I remember things like that two different ways. I remember the way it was, physically, and I remember the way it looked in my mind's eye. The imagination of a child is a truly wonderful and unique thing. As I guided my parents through my room like a tour guide, I was simultaniously wearing a Jurassic Park uniform and driving them through the park's winding roads. My parents were wealthy guests come to the island for a weekend - in my personal world, all the stuff that went down in the movie didn't happen, and the animals were as safe as any zoo animal would be. I could smell the exotic plants and animal scents of the ancient world, brought back through modern science for the Park. I was the penultimate tour guide, knowledgeable and skilled at pointing out that which my tourists would need to know. I don't remember their reactions, really (they probably do! Feel free to share, mommy!), but I remember being supremely confident in everything I showed them. It was absolutely fascinating - to me. So many things I remember with this strange duality of memory and imagination. I remember my parakeet riding on my shoulder or the handle of my exercise bike, as I rode it before settling in to my homeschooling every day. However, I also remember the imaginary scenerio: my family and I had moved to Australia, and I had to bike three miles to school and back every day. Wild parakeets liked me and would sometimes land on me while I was in transit. I can see the wilds of the outback around me, smell the dust of the road, feel the bumps of the rutted dirt road I followed from our house in the middle of nowhere to the small one-room schoolhouse where I and five other kids got our lessons every day. I remember riding my bike around the apartment complex - while at the same time I was riding a horse named Ranger around a large ranch, checking on herds of cattle and making sure the coyotes hadn't taken any the night before. I remember riding my bike with friends - while simultaniously reliving the movie "All Dogs Go To Heaven," which we would quote at each other as we rode around until we finished the whole thing - songs and all! We tried this with Fern Gully too, but for some reason we kept losing lines. Also, the fact that there were 3 of us to play all major parts did get confusing from time to time. I remember crawling into a hot bath and stretching out after a day of bike riding and other fun stuff - but at the same time I was Hank the Cowdog, settling into the Emerald Spring to soak my cares away. So much of my childhood is a duality of memory and imagination. So much of my life now I owe to those hours and days spent playing around in fantasy worlds and building stories around the otherwise mundane tasks I was doing every day. Would I be the artist and writer I am today if it weren't for those years of imagination? Would the story that's become my first novel, that branched itself off into my fursona and my online avatar have ever even taken shape if it weren't for these games of imagination? If I'd had more than two or three friends at any given time, would I have had the time to create the rich fantasy worlds I've constructed over the years? Would I even be where I am today? Imagination is so important in a child's development. Fantasy and reality exist along a blurred line that is very easy to cross when you have the mind of a child. But looking back on it with the mind of an adult, I can clearly see that line of demarcation. That duality of so many of my memories, the coexistence of fantasy and reality. I know my mom worried about me sometimes, and my living in a fantasy world. But it was just so much more interesting than reality - and looking back, I can certainly tell the difference. So I have to ultimately thank you, mom and dad. Thank you for the trip down memory lane when we came to visit, and thank you for encouraging me to create and live my dreams when I was growing up. Without that encouragement, I doubt I'd be where I am today. And I love where I am.

I Predicted....Ebooks?

When I was about seven years old, I had a dream that I remember vividly to this day. In the dream, once you were issued a library card, there was some sort of tube system hooked up to your house. When you wanted to return a book, you’d drop it into this vacuum tube thing, and it would go back to the library. Contrariwise, when you wanted to check a book out, you’d swipe your library card through a thing like a credit card reader, and somehow, the book you wanted would plop out of another tube.

I remember the dream, and I also remember telling my mom about it the next day while she was drying my hair. I think we had some sort of conversation about how some of the fun of the library would be lost in a situation like that, since you’d have to already KNOW the book you wanted to check it out, and there wasn’t a chance to discover anything new or even just sit at the library and read for a few hours. I can’t be sure though that this wasn’t something I thought about later, however I do know that I remember the dream. I think I might have had versions of it later that changed the delivery system a bit, but overall stayed with the same basic idea.

Tonight, I had the sudden realization that the dream itself was kind of prophetic.

Hear me out – stupid thing to have a prophesy about, yes? But still – I’ve had déjà vu occurrences repeatedly where I’d perform an action and realize as I DID it that I knew how it was going to come out, and then remember dreaming a similar situation some time earlier. All dumb things – dropping a pencil, a conversation involving several people…The closest thing that’s ever come to being anything useful was noting in a dream a couple of years ago that a conversation I was having with my fiancée and her mother didn’t include her father, and wondering WHY…and then late last year I HAD that conversation with them – and dad wasn’t present because he’d passed away the previous year. But if the universe was trying to warn me of that, it really could’ve picked some clearer ways – and a situation that didn’t involve a mundane conversation that occurred over a year after he’d passed away.

So I obviously don’t have a prophetic gift, however the reason I think of it as BEING prophetic anyway comes from hearing people talk about the bible, in particular the book of Revelation, as I was growing up. A common concept is that the things described in that book are not exactly what the writer said, but rather his interpretation of the things he was seeing, that didn’t make sense to his mind because he was seeing the world of the future. Imagine what an atomic bomb blast, or a giant video screen, or even a modern day TV and computer set up or something as common as a car might have looked like to someone in the early 100 A.D.’s.

To come back to my dream and the weird realization I had tonight. See, a little after midnight tonight, I finished a library book on my e-reader. I took it over to the computer, hooked it up, opened Adobe Digital Editions, and clicked the “return” option on the book. Just like that, it was gone from my e-inventory.  As I went to the site to hunt down the next book in the series and check it out for download, I suddenly remembered the dream. I saw myself, seven or eight years old, sticking my Hank The Cowdog book into the “chute” in my dream, and watching it get sucked away, then going over to the other chute to scan my library card and retrieve the next book in the series.

Not a direct prophesy, obviously, but there’s no doubt that the situation in my dream definitely came true! And, I both returned and checked out a library book a little after midnight on a Sunday, just to make it even MORE convenient.

So what does it mean that I have dreams and things like this? Probably a whole lot of nothing. I am a bit more tapped into the inner workings of things than the average person, or so I like to think, but just once…Only once…could I maybe dream next week’s lottery numbers?

Yeah. When that happens, THEN I’ll be excited. For now? I’m off to read my next e-book. I’d better hurry – I have to return it in twelve days.

Struggling With Addiction

I've been struggling the last couple of weeks. Not just with the addiction alluded to in the title of this blog, but with whether or not I should blog ABOUT it. However, as with many things I post, I believe my experiences might be of help to other people. So after another argument with myself over whether or not I wanted to reveal this personal struggle, I realized that if I didn't, I'd just keep putting off blogging out of the fact that I both wanted and didn't want to talk about this aspect of my life.

So what is this addiction I'm both hesitant and eager to talk about? Have I fallen in with a bad crowd? Taken up recreational drugs? Do I drink? Do I smoke? The answer to all of the above is a resounding "no." I'm not addicted to painkillers or anything like that. No, the mood-altering substance that I've become dependent on is far more insidious than any of the aforementioned things.

What I'm addicted to is, in fact, something that no person or living thing on earth can live without. My addiction...is food.

I'm sure there are those out there who are thinking the obvious, especially if they've seen me in person before. Yes, I'm overweight. This is due to lifestyle as well as genetics, and I am fighting it. Currently I work out an average of twice a week, I try to eat healthy, for the most part, and I take my supplements every day. The obvious is, at it's least insulting, a resounding "Duh." However, there's more going on under the surface that, while a part of me has been aware of, I haven't consciously allowed myself to see until it was brought into stark realization by my fiancee last week.

Some of the symptoms of food addiction are:

• Being obsessed and/or preoccupied with food. I personally experience this on a daily basis - somewhere in my mind there's always the focus on (even if I've just eaten) what and when I'm going to eat next. It definitely qualifies as an obsession, be it at the background or the forefront of my mind, it's always there. Even as I type this, I'm wondering what I will be having for dinner in a few hours - I believe the plan for the night is to make tacos. And there's part of me that's already anticipating the flavor of said food.
  
• Having a lack of self-control when it comes to food. Again, this is exemplified in almost every moment of my life. If I want a specific food, and it's available to me, I will eat it. I have stolen food. I've obsessively stared at other's plates, hoping they wouldn't finish their food so I could have it. I have run myself hundreds of dollars into debt buying fast food to satisfy cravings. If that doesn't exemplify a lack of self-control, I don't know what does.
• Having a compulsion to eat that results in bingeing despite negative consequences. I hate when I gain weight. I still eat obsessively. People have gotten mad at me - for stealing food, for spending money, and still every time I have the opportunity, I will still go for food. I don't like my physical body. I do not find it attractive in the slightest. Still, I eat.
• Gaining a sense of pleasure and/or comfort from food and obsessively using food to gain that feeling. When I'm upset, I want food - at my worst, I crave chocolate. Now this might sound normal, except that those who know me well know that chocolate is not my "drug of choice." I'll go for a cheeseburger before I'll go for chocolate - and my sweet of choice is in general things like white chocolate or  fruit-flavored things. I have a penchant for citrus flavored candies and I love all things lemon. But when I have cravings, nine times out of ten, what I'm craving is some sort of meat or dairy product, and when I'm upset the first thing my mind goes to is wanting fast food - usually McDonald's double cheeseburgers.
• Having a need to eat that results in a physical craving. This has been the hardest for me the last week or so since realizing my addiction and taking steps to fight it. The physical cravings are getting worse and worse. I've chewed through packs of gum, dosed on Rescue Remedy over and over to get through the worst of them, but still they persist. Even now, right now, I can almost taste a double cheeseburger with extra onions...

There are questions you need to ask yourself to confirm whether or not you are addicted to food. Have you tried, but failed, to control your eating? Do you find yourself hiding food, and/or secretly bingeing? Do you regularly feel guilty after eating? Do you eat because of emotions rather than to satiate hunger?  My answers to all of these questions are "yes," to varying degrees. I'll go into more detail to make it clear how much this addiction can impact a person's life.

I've tried diets before - the cravings for "real food" always got so bad within a few days that I couldn't continue. Diets aren't for me, I decided. So I decided to eat normally and control my portion sizes. I always felt hungry still, after eating, and I actually felt SAD looking at a plate with perfectly reasonably sized portions on it. "It isn't enough food," was the overwhelming thought. I tried tricking myself, telling myself that what I have on my plate is all the food there is, and that there's no chance for me to get seconds. This resulted in me finishing my food and then watching other people who are still eating, hoping they'll have food left that I can have. I am always reaching for and never quite reaching the "enough" point. Even in situations like an all-you-can-eat buffet, I would be frustrated. The feeling of being full, of having had "enough" food, only lasts for a couple of hours, and that first burst of hunger pangs after getting home from the buffet always sets off an anger cascade in my mind. "I should've eaten more! There wasn't enough food!" is the overwhelming thought process. And I find myself hunting down food again. Something I've had multiple discussions with my fiancee about is this "not enough" mentality and how it ultimately hurts me. Yet I still haven't been able to shake it - most of the time I can avoid saying it aloud, but I can't seem to stop thinking it. No matter how much or what I eat, there's never "enough."

People who are addicted to food are liars. That's right - liars. I hate being thought of as such, and this is one of the reasons that I'm finding this blog so incredibly hard to write. But I am a liar - when it comes to food. I would go out of my way to go out alone to run errands, with the hope of being able to sneak a fast food stop in there. I would tell myself that if I didn't grab a couple of burgers before going into the grocery store, I'd risk going off-list in my shopping because I was hungry. I'd lie about why I'd been gone so long when I came home, blaming non-existent traffic or accidents for my tardiness that could better be explained by the fact that the line at McDonalds or Burger King was insanely long and I sat in it anyway. I'd lie about how much money I'd spent, or where it went when I didn't have the funds available to do something at a later date that people thought I would have. And I would even lie to myself, saying that I was so hungry, I didn't have a choice - I had to get fast food, or I'd get a headache or some other excuse that I readily and eagerly believed if it meant I would get the food I was craving. And the more I did it, the more often I would find opportunities to do it again. And to make matters worse, I was so good at lying to myself that I believed every word of it.

Thankfully I never reached the point of addiction where bingeing would give way to purging. I ate to that point a couple of times but thanks to a slightly pathological fear of throwing up, I never allowed myself to actually take that step. Ironically the fear is because the last time I had a stomach bug after eating something I liked, it was years before I could again enjoy that thing - and I wouldn't let that happen because it would mean that I would lose all the things I craved for an undetermined amount of time, so I never reached that point. However, what I have been doing is detrimental to myself on a physical and emotional level, because like with any addiction, the more you feed it, the more you need it.

It's been over a week since I've had any kind of fast food, and I'm telling you right now - years long addictions do not go away easily. They don't even get better in a week - in fact, the cravings are worse right now than they've been yet - probably because I'm actively thinking and talking about them. The problem with this addiction, versus any other addiction people might have, has been spoken of in the metaphorical form of a tiger. With most addictions, when you're ready to beat them, you put the tiger in the cage and then do your best to keep it there. With food, however, you still NEED it. You're forced to put the tiger in the cage - and yet take it out for a walk three times a day. It isn't just fast food I'm addicted to, though it's what I crave the most - it's just plain eating. Eating anything. As I mentioned earlier, the thought of the tacos tonight is making my mouth water. Chewing gum or gnawing on a bone after eating a steak or pork chop works. As a result, I'm having to police myself VERY carefully in every aspect of anything having to do with food.

In the mean time, the headaches I was getting in the last week finally seem to be going away, however I'm experiencing some serious mood swings at the moment. I've bounced back and forth between angry, happy, and frightened (about something inconsequential) within the last five hours, and now I'm having a simultaneous burst of manic-like energy while my brain is trying to convince me that I need to take a nap. This is resulting in an on-edge, hackles-up, tense feeling. It's taking everything I can do not to get up and pace the living room like a caged animal. I've caught myself grinding my teeth, biting my tongue, and fidgeting in other ways. I shift in my seat, make random quiet noises, and have had to stop myself from making up some excuse for needing to go out so I could sneak in a fast food run in the process and just maybe take the edge off of this for a few hours. If it was smoking I was giving up, this would be called "nic-fitting," however with food there isn't any specific name for it.

The feelings I'm addicted to are a result of the chemicals that eating releases in the brain - they're truly what I'm addicted to. I can distract myself with other things for short periods of time, get that seratonin high that I'm craving off of performing well in a WoW dungeon, or focusing completely on artwork or writing to the point of being proud of what I'm turning out...but it doesn't last. And here's another lie I'm telling myself - I just caught it. No, the highs don't last - but NEITHER does the high from food! Or else I would never find myself caught in the "never enough" loop again. But because the things I'm using to distract myself, much like the use of nicotine gum for smokers, are a stop-gap measure and my body knows they are not what I really want, what I'm actually craving, my subconscious is telling me that they aren't good enough. That the good feeling isn't enough. Just like the "wrong" food is never enough, or even the right food in too small of a quantity is never enough.

It's insanely hard to admit you're addicted to something. It's harder to fight the addiction - especially when it's a lifelong one. I'm taking the first steps in recognizing that what I have is an addiction to food and going out of my way to fight it, but this road isn't easy. However, with writing this blog and admitting to the world as a whole that I have a problem, I'm taking another important step - realizing that I am not alone in this fight. I'm writing this because perhaps knowing that someone else is going through this will help others, but I also know that getting it out there will help me as well.

I've been on the wagon for over a week now. Here's to taking steps toward freedom, one day at a time.

Personal Assistant

I have a personal assistant. It isn’t a person, and I don’t pay it (personally), but without it I have proven time and time again that my less-than-stellar memory will cause me to be unaccountably less productive.

I woke up this morning at eight am, after having gone to bed at…oh…five thirty this morning. (No, don’t worry, it’s ok. I slept until four pm the previous day, so it balances out.) I was groggy, but there was work to do. The problem was, other than my immediately noticing that it was raining and considering how that would impact what I needed to do today, I had absolutely no memory of what it was I’d gotten up this early to accomplish. Then, at 8:05 on the dot, my personal assistant said, “beep?” I looked at it, wondering if perhaps it knew what I needed to accomplish today. And, sure enough, laid out in plain English on the home screen of my Android phone, it said, “Mail package early morning.”

That was it! That was why I was up so early today. I had a package for work that needed to be boxed up and shipped out as soon as possible. Happy that I now knew what I was doing, I boxed up the shipment, stuck the pre-printed shipping label on it, and headed for the door.

“Beep?” said my personal assistant (I think I might need to name it soon). A quick glance at my phone showed that I was about to forget something vital – my daily pills. You see, I’m anemic. This means I have a deficiency of iron in my body – be it from diet, my weight, or what, I can’t deny that when I don’t take my iron pill every day (preferably exactly 24 hours apart, because as I’ve learned, an overlap of iron suppliments makes me feel just as exhausted as if I hadn’t taken it at all, and I can lose several hours to the feeling of leaden limbs and a sluggish mind), I have no energy and barely any ability to function. In fact, breathing seems to take up an insane amount of effort and concentration. And for someone who enjoys accomplishing many things throughout the day, that simply will NOT do.

So, in response to my assistant’s question, I headed into the kitchen and took my pills. Iron is only one of many suppliments I take every day to keep my body in functional (I won’t say “tip top,” as I’m rather far from the top right now, unless it’s of weight charts. :P ) and productive condition. It’s also Monday, meaning that I needed to refill my seven day pill container (makes remembering what I’m taking so much easier if I don’t have to hunt for the pills) and set things up for the rest of the week. I was very happy while doing this – several times in the last few weeks I’d been careless with my pills and lost several days worth of productive time to exhaustion and a mind that felt like it was stuck in molasses – and it IS January.

Having taken my suppliments, I once again grabbed the box and headed for the back door. “Beep?” said my personal assistant. I checked it. Oh! Right! I was going to the post office – I should grab my Netflix disk, too, while I’m at it. Thank you again, personal assistant! I grabbed it, fumbled with my umbrella, the heavy box, the Netflix envelope, and my purse, and headed out to my car. Other than having to rescue the Netflix envelope from a puddle along the way (oops), and having to vault over another puddle in order to get into my car without submerging my leg up to my ankle in mud, the morning went well and my assistant didn’t page me again.
Until this afternoon.

I had just come home from working out (started a new regimen today, hoping it does me good), and gotten settled at my desk. A series of questioning beeps sounded while I was concentrating on doing art commissions, and I stared at where my phone laid in front of me. What could have POSSIBLY gotten my assistant so worked up? A quick check made my eyes go wide – overdue notification. I had never put my laundry away two days ago. Oh, and while I was at it, didn’t I know that I should do the dishes? Oh, and what about the recycling bin? It should go out to the collection bin before it overflows onto the kitchen floor, don’t you think? By the time you’re done with all that the cats should probably be fed.

I’d like to say I sprang into action and flew through those chores with the greatest of ease, but I really can’t. See, I’d just worked out. There was absolutely nothing “easy” about the way I was feeling. However, the laundry was already overdue, and the red flag on my assistant’s screen spurred me into action with a feeling of urgency akin to hearing the “Red Alert” klaxon in Star Trek. The laundry must be put away! The fate of the universe may hinge on it! Well, not really, but it’s funny the things geeks tell themselves mentally in order to spur motion when all they want is to relax at their desks.

I got up, headed through the kitchen to the laundry room, but was stopped by the small pile of dishes by the sink. That was on my assistant’s list, too, and here I am in front of it…I’ll just do it now! So I washed, dried, and put away the dishes. Then I cleaned the counters (widely acknowledged in this household as part of the “doing the dishes” chore, for multiple reasons – not the least of which being that when we don’t do that, we have ant invasions. Lost a battalion of cookies to them last week, it was a horrible tragedy). I finished with that and finally moved on to the laundry room, retrieving my laundry that had been patiently waiting in the dryer since Saturday evening (thank goodness I don’t treat my pets like I treat my clothes).

Clothes folded and put away, I returned the baskets to the laundry room, and started to leave the kitchen. This time, it wasn’t my personal assistant who reminded me of what intended action I had forgotten, but an insistant, “Meeerrroooww?” from the orange tabby who had been following me on my multiple trips through and to the kitchen, hoping that at any point I would stop and feed him. How he knew I was returning to my desk having forgotten to do so and that this was the perfect time to insist I do it NOW, I have no idea. Ziggy isn’t the smartest cat, but when it comes to food, he’s an Einstein (even if he seems to think that everything is some different kind of chicken). I looked at the clock – it was fifteen minutes to when they were technically supposed to get dinner, but I was in here NOW, and as sore as I was, I knew I wouldn’t want to come back in fifteen minutes to do something I could do now. So I fed the cats, washed the spoon I used, recycled the can, and THEN headed to my desk.

I sat down, happily pulled out my assistant, and began checking off the things I’d accomplished to avoid any further Red Alerts. However, when I finished, one thing was still staring me in the face.

“Blog – Due 3 Days Ago”

I stared at it, wondering how I’d missed that in the flurry of things going on, then dutifully opened up Word and began to type. Where would I be without my assistant? Well, not here, for one thing. This wouldn’t have been written. :P So here’s hoping that in the future, my assistant will help keep me on track and we won’t miss too many more blogs.

On that note, soon my new series, Inside Animal Emotions, will start being posted. I’m trying to get many of the posts written before I start the series so that they can be updated simply and cleanly on post days. Yes, this blog is still on a Friday schedule. No, that hasn’t changed. And no, I probably won’t stop being spastic any time soon. You’ll thank me for it later.

Note: My personal assistant consists of the Android Apps:
1. Alarm Clock Plus (for general “wake up” alarms as well as other random ones for specific things)

2. Tasks N Todos Pro (a widget on my home screen that syncs to my Google Tasks and allows me to easily check off chores and other items as they’re completed, as well as see the next upcoming 3 items on the task list)

3. KeepTrack Pro (a program that allows you to set up multiple yes/no questions as well as creating graphs from the data it collected so you can look at something and have a good idea of how long you’ve been consistant, among other things).

Blog + Updates = Issues

So there hasn't been a post from me in a very, very long time. Yeah, I'm aware of this. This is partially due to the fact that thanks to a wordpress update, I can't seem to get into my site through anything other than the android mobile app on my phone. This has made posting and cross-posting blogs a bit difficult and it wasn't until today and some help from Nyx Goldstone that I finally realized I could pull it off. It just takes a bit more potchkeying than I'm used to.

Anyway! On to the actual update!

A couple of posts back, I blogged a request for donations to help me get my art back up and underway. As of yesterday, this has finally paid off as I got together enough money to get my software and hardware and am now the proud owner of a new Bamboo Connect tablet! I did some practice drawings yesterday in photoshop and let me tell you, it feels SO GOOD to be able to art again!

I owe a few people commissions now, and a couple of thank-you-gifts, but once I clear my commissions list I will be open and offering more types of commissions than ever before!

January is the month of Prosperity, and I see it everywhere I go, it seems. Starting with my return to the ability to release the art that has been locked up inside of me for years, and continuing into a prosperous new year and all the possibilities it entails. I'll be blogging more frequently again as I move along through this year, and eventually I'll get the rest of the story of my roadtrip from last year out as well (that's a promise!), but before I can do that I have to be able to get into my website through normal means, as I can't post my photo galleries to the blog without being able to enter the site on my computer rather than my phone. So right now that's still a bit of a roadblock.

In other news, randomly at about six am this morning, I regained my positivity and my happy after it being missing for...well, quite some time. I'm going to be working out regularly, getting my body in shape (and getting rid of the edema in my legs that's been caused by alternating colds and asthma attacks not allowing me to get up and move around enough lately), and working out always makes me feel good. I'm working on a life-schedule so I have time to take care of all the things I want to every day.

I had a strange epiphany while playing The Sims 3 (I want the Pets expansion SO BAD) the other day. When I used to play The Sims 2, I always played with a cheat. I'd never been able to balance the Sim's need for rest and food with all their other desires. I played through a whole week in Sims 3 without a cheat and for the first time in my life I had the realization that The Sims is very realistic for a REASON. I had to get my little person into a routine that allowed her time to get a full night's sleep, to eat at least twice a day (I say at least because I'm fairly certain she ate at work for lunch, but I didn't "see" that), and to take care of her household and personal chores, while still having time to work on her writing and other fun things she wanted to do. As I played through this week I realized that what I needed to do for myself is exactly what I was doing for this Sim that was based on me.

So thanks to Google Tasks and a related app for my phone to help me keep track, I've put myself on a schedule. Not random alarms that I'll shut off and not remember what they were supposed to be for, but actual CHECK boxes that lead me through what I need to do on a regular basis. But I'm not making the mistake I've made so many times before - I'm not writing down EVERY LITTLE THING that I need to do every day, to the point that my to-do list becomes overwhelming and I start my lazy pattern of shirking EVERYTHING for feeling overwhelmed. No, this is a new year and this is a new me, and from now on I'm getting this RIGHT.

Thanks to Lona, every month I have something new to meditate upon to help me keep my positive and my happy. I will control when I go to bed, and I will NOT allow random second-winds to keep me up until six in the morning and throw off my pattern for weeks at a time. I will have a cup of coffee when I feel like I'm flagging, and I WILL eat more than once a day. I will be eating less salt, and drinking more water. I will make time each day to work on artwork and commissions. I will NOT force myself to work on something until it becomes something I no longer want to do - I will want to work on it as long as I work on it, and I will work on it as long as I want to, to paraphrase Grandpa's normal toast. (May you live as long as you want to - and want to as long as you live.)

So hello 2012! You are going to be an amazing year, and I can't wait to see what you bring! Prosperity! Love! Charity! Passion! Sentiment! And SO much more!