I just exercised. Granted it was  about 15 minutes and I had to use a (very) beginner level exercise video, but I did it all the way through. I was really glad when it ended but I must admit I feel better. My body feels awake and that’s pretty nice.  I started out with the plan to do one of the exercise shows I’d taped from Fit TV but quickly realized I’m not in good enough shape to do any of those. So I popped in my old stand by, the 1 mile walk away the pounds video I bought about a decade ago.  For someone as uncordinated as I am, the movements are perfect, not too complicated & pretty smooth. With most exercise shows I spend most of the time trying to figure out how to do the moves but with the walk away the pounds video I can just concentrate on exercising.

I  have been so incredibly sedentary since the beginning of the year. To be completely honest I’ve been slowly going down hill with exercise since I got married almost 4 years ago. We live in a teeny tiny place and honestly I either sit on my bed to watch TV or sit in the chair at the computer. A little while back I wore my pedometer for the day and just did my usual routine and found out I only took 896 steps during the whole day. The average person takes between 3000-5000 steps a day, and should take 10000. It’s no wonder my body has fallen apart. I think I have the muscle tone of about a 65 year old, a very inactive 65 year old. Weekends I move around more. We do quite a bit of walking on weekends, usually at Disneyland or SeaWorld or just out running errands, but it always leaves me feeling exhausted. So I’m trying to change. I’m definitely at rock bottom physically and I have to build up from there. I’m hindered even more by having bad knees. I’m hopeful that by getting some weight off and strengthening the muscles around my knees it will keep me from having to have knee surgery, at least for the time being.

So today I made a start towards building the future I want. My first baby steps were triggered by watching a ‘reality’ show as embarrassing as that is to admit. I’m secretly addicted to the Tori (Spelling) & Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood show.  They are just so happy & in love (reminds me of me and my hubby) but they have something we don’t; a gorgeous laughing happy baby boy and every time I watch the show my biological clock starts gonging at me. After all, I’m nearly 36 years old. If I’m going to have babies I need to start soon.  My husband and I really want to start a family in the future, but we can’t unless I get this weight off. I just couldn’t handle a pregnancy on top of weighing 200 lbs more than I should. My husband won’t risk my health or the health of a baby, and neither would I. So babies have been relegated to the future, IF I get down to a healthy weight. Basically it’s up to me when, or if, we are able to start a family but I haven’t done anything to improve the situation. Until today anyway.

I feel like I need to update here though I haven’t much to talk about really. At least nothing of interest to anyone .  I’m strongly considering changing my webhosting to typepad, which will mean a new url address. It would be the third url I’ve had in a year, which makes me feel like a flighty, flaky blogger; but I just haven’t found the perfect situation yet. I haven’t found the right url name or the right server. I just don’t feel completely at home with my site. Currently I’m not with a blogging service, just a regular website host service and it’s a lot more work to maintain than I really want. I want a place I can quickly log into and update, with minimal fuss. Another huge drawback to this blog is that it gets spammed constantly. I spend 10 minutes deleting nasty spam advertisements from my blog each time I log in. I’ve heard that spamming is a bit less frequent with a site like typepad.  If I do end up starting over somewhere I’ll keep everyone who reads here updated. And I promise that if I move again, this will be the LAST move for a long time (so it better be the right move!!).  Does anyone out there use typepad? What are the pros and cons?

As far as self improvement goes, I’ve mainly been focusing on trying to eliminate all the negative self talk that runs through my head. I’m just trying to get my mind set right to begin the big overhaul. I know if I don’t have my head in the right place, if I’m not completely ready to commit 100% then I’ll just end up failing. I want this to be the FINAL time I have to deal with these issues, not yet another roller coaster ride of weight loss success then massive failure & regain of everything lost. I have to be deeply committed. Committing to myself is something I just don’t do but that’s something I need to talk about in another, longer post.

Anyway, that’s what’s up with me at the moment. I’m just trying to focus myself a bit, trying to overhaul my site, and generally living inside my head quite a lot at the moment.

We’re back from our epic trek across the southwest & great plains.  We started our trip around noon on a Friday, heading south towards San Diego with the intention of taking the most southernly route to Texas, heading through such places as Tucson, Arizon; Las Cruces, New Mexico and Elpasso, Texas. The weather was a lovely (sarcasm) 122 degrees for the majority of our trip and for the most part there isn’t a great deal to see along this route,  other than the mexican border. I did see my very first real sand dunes which was rather fun. I didn’t take a photo though because that would have involved rolling down the truck window which I wasn’t about to do in that heat. Neither my husband or I like the desert much I’m afraid. I know many people who find it incredibly beautiful and while I can see some beauty in the desert, mostly I see dry, dusty, aridity and a general lack of greenery. As a person who loves a good rainstorm and big beautiful trees, the desert just isn’t for me.  Needless to say, we didn’t do a lot of stopping for snapshots. In fact we didn’t do much stopping at all. About half way through Arizona my husband decided that if we drove straight through we could make it to Texas around midmorning the next day and then run up to Missouri to see my parents & sister. Since I haven’t seen them since November, three plus years ago I was incredibly excited. So, my hero (aka my hubby) drove 30 straight hours across the desert, up through texas & oklahoma to meet my parents and my sister in Joplin, Missouri. I’m actually from a tiny town outside of St. Louis but my family drove down to Joplin and met us in order to save us a few hrs. drive. It was so wonderful to see my family again. Two weeks earlier I’d gotten to see my brother’s family & my sisters boys when they visited us in California. Now I got to see my parents & sister as well. The only person missing was my brother in law who had to work. We talked and talked, which is what my family does best. We also did a little exploring. Joplin Missouri is right on the edge of Kansas and Oklahoma and since my family hadn’t been in either of those states we decided to explore a tiny bit and visited a couple of little towns in Kansas and then went over to Miami, Oklahoma and attended a Pow Wow held by the Peoria Tribe. It was incredible. I’ve always wanted to see a Pow Wow in person and it lived up to my expectations. My family has a bit of native american ancestry, though we’re mainly scotch-irish, so it was exciting to come in contact with a bit of our (distant) heritage.  We just had the day with my family and then had to rush back to Texas so that my husband could be at work the next day.

Our time in Texas was mainly spent with him at work and me hanging out in the hotel room. We did manage to see a tiny bit of the Dallas area and we made a brief excursion to see South Fork, the ranch setting for the 80’s TV show DALLAS. In person the house is not much bigger than the typical houses here in southern California and is much smaller than many of it’s neighbors, but it was still cool to see it. I grew up watching Dallas with my Grandma. Texas was okay (with the exception of their roads, which are incredibly bumpy and uneven, not to mention laid out badly).

What we really enjoyed was the drive home. We went back up through north Texas & Oklahoma, drove through Kansas and went through Colorado, utah and Nevada on the drive home. We both really loved Oklahoma and Kansas. I think the wide open spaces & tranquility appealed to my husband. To me it just felt like home because it looked quite similar to Missouri in many places. I adore corn fields and meadows dotted with little ponds, which Oklahoma & Kansas had in abundance. I swear if there were IT/analyst jobs available in those areas we probably would never have made it back to California. My husband would have just parked the truck right in the middle of a pasture somewhere and we’d have moved in :).

Finally we made it home and now here I am, happily reminiscing while I should be doing laundry. Guess I’d better get back to work!

My ‘little’ brother, his wife, and my three nephews on beach in Santa Monica.

I’ve returned! Actually I got home about a day and a half ago but I had a ton of stuff to catch up on. The visit with my family was absolutely wonderful. My three nephews have grown and changed so much in the last 3 years. It really made my husband and I realize that we HAVE to get back to visit my family more often. It’s so easy to put things off, say we’ll go next year for a visit and then not get around to it. We can’t keep doing that. My nephews will be all grown up before I realize it and I don’t want to miss out on it all.

I think my family enjoyed the visit. We went to Disneyland & Sea World. We did a boat excursion and saw dolphins and sea lions in the ocean. We visited the Crystal Cathedral and Santa Monica Pier. We even went to the Grand Canyon. I have to clean up my hard drive before I can download all the photos but you can expect to see some Thursday night or Friday morning.

Oh that reminds me! I’ll be leaving again on Friday. My husband is being sent to Texas (Dallas area) for work and I am tagging along. We’ll be there about a week. I should be able to access the internet occasionally. Hopefully I’ll manage to put up a post or two.  I’m not doing so well at my challenge to post three times a week, but I wasn’t expecting to do any traveling! Sorry about that.

How do you teach yourself to be disciplined, to do the miserable grown up things everyone has to do; like eating vegetables, taking vitamins, getting exercise, & doing jobs you don’t want to do? I’ve recently come to realize that I’ve spent my entire life avoiding things I don’t particularly like to do or giving the bare minimum effort so that I can just squeak by. I’ve often followed the path of least effort, building a cozy sheltered little world for myself with very little demands and unfortunately I’ve been able to get away with this for the majority of my life. You’d think that always finding a way out of doing stuff you don’t like would make for a happy life but actually it doesn’t because a lot of the things in life that you really want require WORK of some sort. Building a decent life takes work and discipline, two things I’ve never been big on. I don’t even take advantage of natural talents because what if I were actually to succeed at something? Success means work. It’s much easier to withdraw into daydreams. Lately though I’ve begun to realize I can’t just coast along settling for whatever comes my way just because it’s easiest. I have to actually get out in the world and put some effort into building the life of my dreams, building myself into the person I know I was actually meant to be. The question in my mind though is how to begin, how to break a lifetime of taking the easy route, doing whatever strikes my fancy at the moment, and generally being undisciplined & unfocused? Any suggestions?

My last post here was about how I should focus more on living in the now and that’s what I’ve been trying to do for the past few weeks. I’ve concentrated more on doing things I need/want to do and less time daydreaming and spinning my wheels. That has meant a bit less time spent browsing around on line or working on art projects and more time spent doing ‘practical’ things such as organizing my photographs & starting to work on the main portion of this website so that eventually I’ll have a decent photo gallery. I haven’t been completely uncreative though. I’ve been working a bit on making some t-shirt designs. I’ll probably post those here in a few days. All in all everything is good. I’m feeling more focused and things are actually getting done (slowly but surely ). I’ve also had very nice weekends with my husband. It’s Renaissance Fair time here in southern California so for the last few weekends we’ve spent our time hitting all the fairs, which we love. Ren Fair photos will also be posted here as soon as I get those edited too. So much to do, so little time!

Here are a few photos I took awhile back to brighten your day. Sorry I’ve been missing in action lately. Hopefully soon I’ll be inspired again to do another Affirmation Monday or Inspire me thursday challenge. I love those sites! Does anyone else have suggestions for other great photo challenge or art challenge sites I should check out?

Well, here I am. Inspired by all the wonderful art blogs and creative, inspirational journals I read every day, I’ve been dreaming of creating a blog of my own for a long time but now that I’m here, I’m tongue tied! I guess this first post should be where I declare what I’ll be writing about but honestly I’m not really sure yet. There will be oodles of photos, lots of quotes, plenty of tidbits about my daily life, a few plugs for my online shop, and my random thoughts. Sounds like fun right? Well, I guess I’d better get started then. Onwards and Upwards!!