Decisions.....

It's a good thing I blogged about my awesome birthday last year, because my birthday this year choked and died on the news that one of my wee nieces has Leukemia.

When I heard the news, my imagination immediately conjured up images of the Grimm Reaper himself showing up at my door, complete with a birthday card and balloons, “Happy Birthday Aleigh, your niece has cancer.  Have a great day.”  

Sometimes I really wish I could punch my imagination in the face.

Regardless, this whole experience has helped remind me of a few things:

1)  Mortality doesn't last forever.  Everybody has an expiration date, and you never know when yours (or that of your loved ones) will be up.
2)  Los Angeles is a very long ways away from pretty much everyone that I love
3)  Los Angeles has never felt like home.  I've been here for 4 years now, and I still feel like a foreigner.  I don't think anyone could argue that I haven't given it a fair shake.
4)  I HATE being so very far away from my family

I'm still mulling over what I want to do next.  Big decisions lay ahead, and a very sick little girl is 1,000 miles away.  One way or another, I think it may be time for me to go home......at least for a while.  

Happy Birthday to Me

To celebrate my birthday this year, I'm going to blog about my birthday from last year, because I didn't blog about it last year, and it was totally awesome.  

It all started with the decision to spend my birthday on Catalina,  a tiny island off the coast of Los Angeles.

 I’d wanted to go for quite some time,  but last year it just made sense for several reasons:

1. My birthday was on a weekend.
2. You get a free ferry ride to the island on your birthday, and you get a bunch of other free stuff to boot.
3. I keep telling myself that I won't be in California for another year.  

So I conned convinced my best friend from high school and her daughter to travel down from Monterey to join me on my trip.

We took advantage of pretty much everything there was to do on the island. 

A Little Snorkeling 

I'm still not really sure why our guide had me put on a single red glove or why we had a guide at all; about 15 minutes into the tour he got seasick, and had to "feed the fishes". 

Underwater Boat Experience 
While it provided a much better photo op, the lighting and view were better snorkeling.

Ziplining
Totally awesome five line course.  Appropriate for ages 7 to 80, at least that was the age range of our group. 

Some Rock Climbing

I think I spend more time falling than climbing. 

Chilled at the Beach Club
Oddly enough it's a beach club that's open to the public.  They have the most amazing nachos EVER

Toured the Casino 

It's kind of mandatory to tour this place your first time on the island.  It's a stadium sized dance hall and movie theatre from the island's heyday. It's really quite stunning.  

Mini Golfing

I totally could have beat her if it wasn't for that annoying loopity loop.

Sunsets
Between my friend and I, we took close to 50 photos of the sunset, but I shall only torture you with one.  Pretty amazing, right? You should totally go and enjoy it for yourself.  :)

Flying Fish Tour
I kid you not, Catalina has these foot long fish that fly over the water.  Unfortunately the tours are at night, and my camera is crap-tacular in low light.  Instead I located this artist's representation of the experience.  They shine a light out on the water, and you watch those suckers fly.... until they hit the hull of the boat and drop out of sight.  Poor guys, I'd hate to imagine the headaches they have in the morning.

Making fun of other tourists
Is any vacation complete without poking fun at the other vacationers?
Nothing says love more like complementary color coordinated outfits?

Or how about those people who opted for the Segway tour of a town that in its entirety is ALMOST 3 square mile.

But you really can't blame them since car options are pretty limited in a tiny town on a small island.

In Conclusion
Catalina is pretty awesome and totally worth a visit, especially on your birthday.  Just make sure you should bring along some great friends.   And if you'd like to hear more stories and see a million more photos, just let me know. :)

Therapy 30's

Forgive me.  I've been remiss in my blogging, but it's not my fault,  really.  It's just that I'm going through that stage of development commonly called the "Therapy 30's."  It happens to the best of us, even those OCD-prone valedictorian types who followed their life-plan flow charts with eerie accuracy and precision timing (definitely not me).  At some point in your 30's, you be overwhelmed by the realization that life is moving much faster than you ever expected, and once-in-a-lifetime opportunities are passing you right by.  

Life is full of choices, little ones, big ones, right ones, wrong ones.  Everyday we make choices that shape and bend our life path.  But for many of us those choices seem reversible, at least in your 20's. Let's say right out of high school a person wants to move to France, study culinary arts, and date a man with an adorable accent.  Then two years later she realizes she's inept at learning languages, can't cook to save your life, and the man with an adorable accent, has six other American girlfriends.  She'd be devastated, right? But she'd move home, and figure out a plan B, which may include joining her friends at whatever college their attending.  Sure she'd be a couple of years behind but it's no big deal.

Now let's say this person takes 14 years to discover she really doesn't like cooking for a living, and has a cheating boyfriend/husband.  She can still move back home, and she can still go back to school; however, the experience will be drastically different then it would have been in her 20's, because she will not be part of a cohort of people her same age going through similar experiences.

Then of course you have to consider many of us will made choices in our 20's that aren't reversible. Using our example of the french chef, let's say this person racked up $50,000 in student loan debt and also had a baby.  Babies and debt are fairly permanent, since it's generally frowned upon to try walk away from either, and these permanent conditions will drastically affect a start over.   Can you afford to go back to school?  Does you need to find child care?  So on and so forth.

The further you go in your life the more complicated it becomes to backtrack, and seize those opportunities you passed up all those years ago.   You can still do it, but it will be a very different experience than if you had done it earlier.  I have friends who paused careers to have a raise a family, and I have friends who delayed families to follow the career path.  With a few exceptions, most of them will say they are happy with the choices they made, but most had never considered how difficult it was going to be to reclaim those opportunities they passed up initially.  Those who chose careers may discover they have a hard time getting pregnant, or that raising small children in your 30's can be an exhausting experience.  Those who put off careers sometimes find it difficult to find time/money to go back to school and break into the job market.

So here I sit in my own life.  I have a masters degree.  I've chased my dreams from the east coast to the west coast.  I've had some amazingly awesome experiences, and I've had some I'd rather forget. But now I've reached that point in my 30's when I need to  reevaluate my trajectory and decide if I'm going to backtrack to seize missed opportunities or if just going to plow forward with my life to see where that path takes me.  Either way, I'm sure it will be quite the adventure.  Regardless of what happens, there's one thing's for sure.  In 20 years when I hit my mid-life crisis, I'm heading off to France to attend culinary school and date a man with an adorable accent. ;)

How to Make Friends in the Office

If you ever feel like you're just not as popular as you'd like to be in the office, just follow these four easy steps.....

1) Visit Pinterest.

2a) Find the most tempting and yummy looking dessert.

2b) It should probably involve peanut butter and chocolate, and if possible, Nutella.  For example,  Peanut Butter Sandwich Cookies with Nutella Marshmallow Cream Cheese Filling.

3) Spend a Sunday afternoon baking.

4) Bring treats to the office and sit them in front of your desk.

And viola, you'll be the most popular person in the office for an entire day, or at least until the last cookie is snatched up.  :)

Regarding Happiness, Lemons, and Silver Linings

Happiness is a choice.  We've all heard that old catch phrase from psycho-gurus pedaling their self-help book on daytime talk shows.  It's sound advice really, especially if you find your life resembles the world's most depressing country song (i.e., you've lost your spouse, job, dog, and house, and you are now suffering from a terminal form of toe fungus).  Your horrible circumstances do not need to define your mood, you can still be happy.  However, you have to actively make the choice to be happy inspite of your experiences

That totally made sense to me.  When life is using a potato cannon to launch lemons at you at the speed of 85 mph, it's vital that you shield yourself with silver linings or risk getting impaled with lemon shrapnel (and you thought lemon juice in a paper cut was bad).  But I'm beginning to consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, you need to choose happiness even when life is far from miserable.

Consider my world at the moment.  I've got a good paying job.  I live four blocks from the beach. I seem mostly healthy.  I'm no longer addicted to Diet Coke. See not that bad. Sure, there are things that are lacking in my life. I'm not a size 6, I don't own a dog, and my knight in shining armor is apparently lost in the Enchanted Forest.  Not exactly life threatening problems, right? But still I've found myself with a bad case of the blah's.

You see it's just that I thought that by this my point in my life, things would be different. I imagined I'd have traveled the world, married a scottish version of Tom Hanks (yes, that is indeed my ideal man), had 2.3 children, owned a house and a dog, published several books, and achieved that elusive size 6 waistline. Instead I live a very different, but good life. That should be enough to make me happy, right? Yet, when my coworkers ask how I'm doing I generally answer with a non-committal, "meh."

But you know what, I'm tossing off the blah's and meh's. No more discontented sighs.  I'm tired of being two shades away from happy. I don't need to be dodging speeding lemons to choose happiness.  Right here, right now, I'm choosing to be happy.  In spite of everything good and bad in my life, I'm fashioning myself a coat of silver linings.

Ala Peanut Butter Sandwiches

So there I was at Costco, buying a supply of peanut butter, jelly, and bread so I could maintain my steady lunch diet of PB&J sandwiches, when an inkling of an epiphany started to form at the very back of my brain.

I have cupboards full of soups, beans, tomatoes, pastas, sauces, spices, and three different types of flour. At best guess, I could make 20 meals with the ingredients I have on hand, but those ingredients will stay on my shelves for awhile longer, because I just bought my Costco-sized PB&J supplies.  As I walked into the parking lot, that pesky epiphany churning just beyond my conscious thought started to seep into my rational brain.  Why on earth am I buying more ingredients so I can eat the same boring meal day in and day out, when I have so many other meal options at my disposal, which are "free" and probably taste 100 times better?  This question is particularly poignant considering I HATED and refused to eat peanut butter until I was like 25-years-old, and I still refuse to eat it unless it's paired with something very, very sweet.

The answer to the question is simple or, more to the point, simplicity.  It's so super easy to have the makings for PB&J sitting in a drawer at work; they last forever, and I can break them out whenever lunch happens upon me.  Whereas using the other ingredients in my cupboards requires thought, planning, and the ability to locate a tupperware container with a matching lid.

But my epiphany didn't stop at the PB&J sandwiches.  I started to think about what other resources in my life are being under-utilized or worse completely unused as I live a "Groundhog Day" sort of existence. I'm not talking resources like the Stair Master in your room that doubles as a clothes hanger.  I'm talking about your internal resources; those skills and talents that lay dormant simply because they require extra time and effort.  These are things that naturally interest you, that come easily to you, but they do not currently benefit or may even complicate your current living situation, so you put it on the shelf.  You tell yourself you'll use it one of these days.  You'll find time to break it out.  At least that's what you tell yourself as you continue to live a PB&J life; it may not be as interesting, but it's definitely easier.

I do not want to live a PB&J life.  I do not want to subsist on a diet of something I find mildly intolerable, but it may be prudent for me to take stock of what I have on my shelves.  After all, I wouldn't want to throw out the PB&J when all I have waiting for me in the pantry is corn flour, olives, and vinegar.  ;)    

The Purple Unicorn (A Mostly True Story)

Once upon time in a fantasy French villa, I came upon a friendly creature, who took some time to chat with me about my life journey.

"What you need is a purple cow," he said.
"A purple cow?" I asked.
"Yes, a purple cow, something remarkable. Imagine if you were driving along and you saw a purple cow. You'd probably jump out of your car to take a picture.  You might even have your picture taken with the cow and post it on Facebook."
Feeling a bit self-conscious for lacking a lavender bovine of my own, I asked, "What's your purple cow?"
"I'm a magical unicorn."
"A what?"
"I'm a rare creature who can both write the code and create the design for a website."
"And that makes you a magical unicorn?"
"Indeed."
"So do you put a giant picture of unicorn on your resume?" I asked.
"With sparkles and rainbows," he added.  "Now about your purple unicorn."
"I get a unicorn too!"
"I meant cow, but I suppose you could. You'd just need a rare and useful combination of skills that are remarkable."

This of course got my brain gears turning, churning, and burning.  How in the world was I going to go about finding my purple unicorn?

Before we parted ways, the magical unicorn texted me a list of  books he'd recommend I read as I pondered my purple unicorn.  I reviewed the titles and thanked him and said that after I find my purple unicorn, perhaps I'd see him in the unicorn forest.  He suggested Candy Mountain* instead, which lead to a conversation about the wisdom of visiting Candy Mountain, if you wanted to keep your kidneys, and I was informed that he was a mutant magical unicorn that had 3+ kidneys.  But I digress.  My search for my purple unicorn is on.  I'm not sure when or where I'll find it, but thanks to the magical unicorn I know how to get started.  When I do find it, I'm not sure I go to Candy Mountain, because I don't have 3+ kidneys. :)

*If this makes no sense to you, see "Charlie the Unicorn"on Youtube.