Today

Today I:

Walked 3 miles  (Brings the total up to 30-woot!)

Made a yummy breakfast.

Took a hot shower.

Caught up on my DVR'd shows. (Love the new show "Parenthood")

Napped for a little while.

Read more from my Thankful book and from a new fiction book I got from a friend.

Wrote something that my husband helped me with that made me realize again what a wonderful teacher and writer he is.

Sat in the hammock swing on our balcony and stared up at the sky,  listening to the wind chimes while swaying gently.




Today was a good day.

Today I am thankful for:


The blooming flowers on the bushes and trees on my walk this morning.  They smelled heavenly.

A day to do nothing.  Not one appointment. Nowhere to be. Nothing to do.

Putting a spin on something negative:  (This is hard!)

My car is falling apart.  Like literally falling apart.  The air conditioning is broken.  The paint is chipping on the outside.  Both the front doors won't unlock anymore(yes, this means I have to get in through the back door and reach around to the front to open the door.  It is a pain).  So many people I know have brand new cars right now.  Shiny new cars where everything works like it should. To say I am envious would be an understatement.

But at last I have a car, right? I mean, some people don't even have a car and they have to take the bus.  At least I don't have to do that.

Did that sound convincing?  No?

I'm working on it okay?

I'm not going to post these here everyday.  I'm keeping an online journal for them but since I've only just started I'll post them here when I feel the urge.


Now I am headed off to work.


Goodnight.

Perspective

 I had to get that last post off the top. Sometimes you just need to vent, you know?

I tend to get mired down in the negative stuff. I hate to say it, but often I am a “glass half empty” kind of girl. 

I think I come across as a negative Nellie moreso here because this is my place to vent and process my thoughts. I’m a lot less negative in real life.

No really. I am. I’m actually a lovely person once you get to know me. (No comments from the peanut gallery on this one please :)

I have been kind of stuck in a negative pattern the last couple of weeks. The longer my husband goes without a job, the more stressed out, sad,  and just plain angry I become.

I have been experimenting with different ways to deal with these feelings. I found that lying in bed crying wasn’t making me feel better. In fact, if anything it perpetuated the negative feelings and created a vicious cycle from which I couldn’t break free.  I was doing a lot of lying in bed crying. More than I care to admit.

So I started looking for other ways to work through those feelings.

You already know about the baking. While that helped a little, the aftermath of having 10 dozen cookies (and brownies-last week it was brownies) around the house is not good for my husband. He was being very supportive in getting rid of them for me, but it wasn’t the healthiest alternative. I like the idea of giving them to a senior center, but honestly right now I don’t have the time (and often don’t have a car) to deliver them. I am going to keep that idea on the back burner though.

Another thing I have been doing to help me look at things more positively is that I have started walking. Every single day. I’m not talking about going for a leisurely walk around the block for a half- hour. No, I’m talking about hard core, walking as fast as you can, for an hour to an hour and a half a day. I’m not going to lie, at first it was hard. Really really hard. The first half an hour of every walk was pain. Pure pain. I almost gave up. But I didn’t. I powered through the pain and you know what I found out? The last half hour to 45 minutes of my walk, I started to feel great. My mind cleared. I felt the stress melt away. In a way I started to feel free. Now I get what people say about the “runner’s high." (Although I am nowhere near running). But the rush of endorphins? Totally get that. Now I find that my body needs it. Wants it. Looks forward to it. I even got up at 7:00 a.m. on a Sunday to go for my walk.  If you know me, this is highly unusual because I like sleep. A lot. :)

So far,  I have walked every day but one for the last 10 days, and I have logged 27 miles. 27 miles!!!! Dude. That’s a long way! I’m kind of proud of myself, and I intend on continuing with it. I’m not focusing on weight loss right now. I’m focusing on the stress relief it provides and how much stronger my body feels after engaging in it.

One other strategy I have been using to battle the negative feelings is to be more thankful for the things I do have. I know I have tried to do this in the past. I would do it for a few days or a few weeks and then I would forget. It’s not good to forget to be thankful. It makes you focus on only the bad and forget about the good.

It's all about perspective.  I was focusing on all the stuff in my life that was going wrong and completely skipping over the stuff that was going right.  Not a good attitude to have when you are working on changing your negative thinking.

The other day we were window shopping at B*orders(well o.k. not exactly window shopping, as we actually went inside the store, but we had no plans to buy anything-just look). While browsing I came across this book.

Like I said, we had no plans to buy anything.  But this book spoke to me, especially since I have been trying to focus more on the positive.  So I bought it.

This is from the back of the book cover:

"Living life as if each day is a thank you can help transform fear into courage, anger into forgiveness, and isolation into belonging."

Sign me up.

I have to tell you that this book has helped me so much with the negative thinking.  Not only does it have stories of individuals whose lives have been transformed by thankfulness,  it offers suggested gratitude practices along with motivational quotes and blessings.

The first exercises the book suggest is to actively be more thankful in your daily life.  Thank everyone you come into contact with.  The Starbuck's worker.  The grocery store clerk. The gas station attendant who reminded me that the gas hose was still attached to my car before I drove off(duh!). I don't mean just give a quick thank you as you turn to leave.  Look them in the eye and give them a sincere thank you so they know you  mean it.  Strangely I found this a little difficult to do.  Not because I don't appreciate those people, but because I can be kind of shy with strangers and don't go out of my way to talk to them unless spoken to first.

Next it suggested you seek out the people in your life who help you or make your life better in some way and thank them.  Last week, I dropped off a bunch of cookies to various locations  for  people who have made a difference in my life over the last year.  I was even able to get a hold of a therapist Joe and I had worked with early on in our marriage on FaceB**k and drop her a message letting her know the impact she had on our lives and how thankful we are to have had the opportunity to work with her.  She was very happy to hear from me and the fact that we were still together.  She was touched that I would take the time to find her and thank her.

Of  course the book also suggests  the practice of being thankful for things every single day.

I'm only halfway through the book, but so far I am getting a lot out of it.  I highly recommend it.

So those are the things I have been doing lately to deal with what has been kind of a crappy situation.  I can't change the state of my husband's unemployment, but I can change the way I react to it.

Things I am thankful for today:

--The way my body feels after walking 3 miles. Tired. A little sore. Sweaty. Exhilarated.

--My husband. Every morning he gets up and makes me a cup of coffee before I head off to work. Every night I come home to a clean house. So although he might not have a job outside the home right now, he has been working very hard to do the work inside our home. I haven’t done laundry in a year and a half. No joke. How can I not be thankful for that?

I'm also supposed to look for something good in what otherwise would be considered a negative situation.  This is not going to be easy for me but here goes:

--I am thankful for my husband's unemployment checks.  I wish he didn't have to receive unemployment checks at all.  But I am thankful for them.

I think that was the longest post I have written in a very long time.  Well, ever.   Maybe this means I have gotten my blogging mojo back.

Sorry if that was too long or boring.

Stress Reliever

I have been having a hard time the last week or so.  We have been working through some very heavy stuff around here and it has left me feeling sad and stressed out and at times a little bit gloom and doomish.  As I have written here before, I tend to bottle things up inside until they burst out of me like an explosion. Someone close to me suggested I try to find things to do that will help me deal with some of this stress in an appropriate way so I don't bottle it up like that.  The first thing I did was start exercising again.  This has helped me immensely.  I have walked every day for the last 4 days and I intend to continue.  The physical release of some of those emotions has been cathartic.

The other way I (used to) deal with stress was to be creative.  Scrapbooking, making cards or frames or otherwise using my hands in some way. I haven't been doing much of that lately.

I wanted to make something for some people who have helped us in the last couple of months but I didn't want to spend a lot of money.  Everything I came up with I realized I needed one or more supplies that I was out of.

Then I was cleaning out the freezer and I found a bag of white sugar(we had an ant problem a month or so ago), and a bag of chocolate chips.  A quick search of the fridge and pantry revealed that I had the ingredients to make a batch(or ten)  of cookies.

That's it!(I thought to myself)  Cookies it is.

Now baking probably seems like a perfectly normal thing for most people to do.

It's not normal for me. To begin with, I hate to bake.  Secondly, I don't even particularly  like chocolate chip cookies.  Before you think I'm a freak for not liking chocolate chip cookies, it has something to do with hormones.  After  I had my hysterectomy I couldn't eat chocolate.  I mean I can eat it.  But I just don't enjoy it like I used to and I can only eat it in small amounts or I feel sick to my stomach.  I can't explain it.  It just is.

O.K. that does make me sound like a freak.  I swear I'm not.  :)

Anyway, back to the baking.

 I started some cookies on Friday night.  My first 2 batches I made off of the recipe on the back of the T ol l  h o u s e   bag.

These turned out so-so.  They tasted good, but didn't have the look or feel I was going for.  I wanted them to be like a chocolate chip cookie you buy at the bakery.

I packaged them up and gave them away on Saturday anyway :)

So yesterday I went on the internet searching for the best chocolate chip cookie recipe.

I found a whole bunch and started reading the reviews on each recipe.  After reading twenty a few, I decided on one and hit the kitchen again  to try them out.

Today I made 6 dozen of them.  And they are so much better than the last batches.

As I was baking I noticed something.  I started to feel more relaxed.  Less stressed out.  The more I felt relaxed and less stressed out, the more I started to actually enjoy it.

There was something about measuring out the ingredients and  pouring them into the bowl, mixing the ingredients by hand(I don't have an electric mixer), and lining them up in neat little rows on the cookie sheets that made me start to feel so much better. Like I was in control of something when I feel out of control in so many other parts of my life right now.

It was very therapeutic.

So therapeutic in fact, that I made 6 more dozen cookies.

That brings the total up to 11 dozen cookies people.  We're pretty much drowning in chocolate chip cookies over here.  I don't eat them, so this is a problem.  Because Joe does eat them.  So I have to get them out of the house.

They are being packaged up to be dropped off at different places tomorrow.  I hope they bring a fraction of the joy to the recipients that they did to me when I made them.

I'm going to have to find another way to relieve stress though  :)


If you could send some good thoughts our way regarding the gloom and doom stuff, I would appreciate it.


And also, anyone want some cookies?

I had a couple requests on FB for the recipe, so here it is. I got it off of AllRecipes.com.  I read all of the reviews and used a few suggestions from each one.  They really turned out yummy!

I doubled my recipe.

Ingredients
    •    2 cups all-purpose flour
    •    1/2 teaspoon baking soda
    •    1/2 teaspoon salt
    •    3/4 cup unsalted butter, melted
    •    1 cup packed brown sugar
    •    1/2 cup white sugar
    •    1 tablespoon vanilla extract
    •    1 egg
    •    1 egg yolk
    •    2 cups semisweet chocolate chips
Directions
    •    Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F (165 degrees C). Grease cookie sheets or line with parchment paper.
    •    Sift together the flour, baking soda and salt; set aside.
    •    In a medium bowl, cream together the melted butter, brown sugar and white sugar until well blended. Beat in the vanilla, egg, and egg yolk until light and creamy. Mix in the sifted ingredients until just blended. Stir in the chocolate chips by hand using a wooden spoon.
    •    Refrigerate dough until chilled. Drop cookie dough 1/4 cup at a time onto the prepared cookie sheets. Cookies should be about 3 inches apart.
    •    Bake for 15 to 17 minutes in the preheated oven, or until the edges are lightly toasted. Cool on baking sheets for a few minutes before transferring to wire racks to cool completely. 

I have found that these should be taken out when the edges are brown but the middles look not quite done.  Let them cool for a few minutes on the cookie sheet until they set.