I guess I should start off by saying that I hope to finish this blog series before I’m 40. If I keep posting every six months I’ll be over 50… So I’ll try to do better.
I will attend the Cannes Film Festival. I love movies & all things French, so let’s just add the two together and make it a goal before I’m 40.
So I am starting a new blog series. Turns out that I don’t blog well unless I have very strict rules to go by. And that revelation does not surprise me at all. I long to be creative, yet I long for rules too… I believe my right and left brain will constantly be at war with one another.
Back to the blog series. As you might have read, I did a series called 30 Years in 30 Days, where I chronicled the first 30 years of my life in the 30 days leading up to my 30th birthday. It was fun. Stressful at times to come up with content daily, so this will not be a daily blog. Who knows what the frequency will be? I decided to wait and start this until I had 20 secure posts… Now I just must write them.
The new series is called 40 Before 40.
I have 8 years, 8 months and 6 days before that 40th birthday. And I am an overachiever, so this list should not be as hard as I am making it. The problem I’ve found so far, that the majority of “things” I want to do are actually “places” I want to visit. So expect some interesting travel destinations, or some uninteresting destinations. And few other goals in between.
Starting tomorrow, I begin the journey of “40 Before 40.” I hope I don’t disappoint myself and meet each of these goals. Thank you all for reading!
For the greater part of my life I have always been fascinated with ghost towns. The idea of a town that was once not only place you called home, it’s a place that emcompassed most of your life, as most towns do, suddenly disappearing. All life is gone, but the buildings remain. The walls of these houses that held in love, joy, passion, fear, pain, sorrow… They witnessed families being created, families being torn apart. They surrounded a lonely man who ate dinner alone every night. They were the support for children’s blanket forts. Many times they held up a woman as she leaned against it, crying, this wall the only reminder that she is still alive. They were there to give balance to a couple who stumbled inside after a night of drinking in a passionate embrace. These wall of our homes see more than we do. And then tragedy strikes, and these walls are abandoned. Not to be seen again. If we go outside and see the children’s play sets that brought 1,000’s of hours of laughter and joy and were often the cause of a few scraped knees, now empty, these play sets only now move with the wind. Office buildings left sitting empty. Schools and hospitals left standing alone. The emotion that one can feel for an abandonment of this kind can be overwhelming. Circumstances, man-made disasters of sorts typically are behind the mass exodus of the modern ghost town. There usually is time for the families affected to pack up there belongings and move on. But in some cases like the town of Pripyat and others surrounding the Chernobyl reactors the residents thought they would be returning home one day, but they didn’t.
Pripyat is a place that I have longed to visit for a while now. It isn’t just a town with hollow buildings; it is a town that stood still. Homes are still furnished. There are papers in the classrooms, clothes hanging on the clotheslines.
I am fortunate that the public tours are opening up this year.
Within the next 12 months it is my goal to make a trip to see this site.
Here are some photos that I have found online, they are from BoredPanda.com.
Entering the town of Pripyat
Empty Classrooms
Something about the broken globe makes my heart ache
Time stood still
Maybe my favorite of all the images
I will keep you all abreast of my plans in case you want to join me.
What a difference a year makes!
This time last year I was still working in marketing at the YWCA having no idea that my dreams of working for my dad’s company would finally come true.
I was a one dog kind of girl who thought she never love another dog like she loved her Toby, and then Bernard entered the picture.
So much has changed that I cannot even begin to put it all down, but let me just say that 2010 has been a wonderful year and 2011 promises to be even better!
Tomorrow I leave on a fabulous trip from LA to Ft. Lauderdale through the Panama Canal. I will end this wonderful year and welcome 2011 with my amazing parents, my brother and his family and my sister and her husband. I could not think of anyone else I’d rather be with on this trip, and this journey we call life!
Happy Christmas and New Year friends!
If I was a poet, I would write an amazing poem of adoration and love to my favorite thing in the whole world, Q-Tips. Not Johnson & Johnson cotton swabs, the real deal, the real McCoy, Q-Tips.
I ran out of Q-Tips the day before yesterday and let me tell you my life was thrown in to a tail spin when I realized last night that was my last box in my stash. I had just showered and was ready to crawl in to bed and I felt so lost. Just when I was about to get dressed to run to store when I thought, I’ll just go get some from my neighbor, Gail. But then I started to worry about what if she has the off brand, my ears are not at all okay with anything other than for real Q-Tips. So I got dressed and got in my car to head to Wal-Mart.
Oh my goodness… The elation, the joy, the unadulterated satisfaction my ears felt is a feeling to matched by no other. Maybe the birth of my first child will bring me as much joy, but maybe not.
I just looked at my DVR and schedule and ladies and gentleman, I have no idea how in the world I will be able to have any time to eat, sleep or work out, let alone see my friends and family. I’m coming off of a summer of very little TV and now… WOW I don’t know how I am going to keep up.
Here is the schedule so far. (Please let me know if I’m missing anything amazing and I will go ahead and add it to the DVR.)I am pretty sure that some of these will be cancelled either by me or the network, so hopefully that will free up some of my time. I also realize that I watch some pretty lame TV…
Leave a comment of a show you think needs to be on the list.
I’m going to share part of my dream last night in hopes that someone can tell me what it means…
Dream: I was living with a hearing impaired man. I didn’t know sign language but it seemed like we communicated just fine. One night we were laying in bed watching TV when a Tempur-Pedic commercial and he was sold. He said he wanted to order one. I said I would rather go vacation in Cypress. He won and ordered the mattress.
So we get the bed set up and he of course sets up a wine glass on the bed and tests it out. Then we make the bed and go to sleep. That night someone breaks in the house and attacks me while we are sleeping. It was horrible because I’m flailing and screaming and my partner is sound asleep because he can’t hear me screaming or feel me flailing because the bed is so masterfully made.
What in the world does this mean?
Sorry mom & dad my faithful followers, for not posting in quite a while. I must say Ree Drummond is an AMAZING woman, she blogs daily and cooks fabulously and travels for her books in addition to homeschooling her children and much much more. My posting a blog a day for 30 days wore me out! I have a new found respect for these folks who do it regularly.
So much has happened since I last posted. I woke up the morning of my birthday and posted my 2010 blog, the last in the series… This is a quote from the post that morning.
“I can tell you that this year will be a year to remember. I have a feeling that 2010 will bring great things for my life. I have a lot of exciting projects ahead of me. In my mind I thought of 30 as this golden age that would confirm my adulthood. So now, I guess it’s time to make those grown up decisions. This is my life, this is my time. I am excited about the future. I’m excited about 2010.”
Little did I know that change was closer than I had anticipated. That day something happened that really got me thinking about my future, more so than I had been thinking about. I started thinking about the “future” as the “now” and quite honestly it really started to freak me out. After a few weeks of trying to decide which path I wanted to take the light clicked on. I was sitting at my desk in my office working on something when I overheard a conversation take place. It was about following dreams, and how these wonderful women were finally going to follow their dreams. I sat there for a while just thinking that my time is now… It’s time to follow my dreams. Little did I know that the wheels were already in motion for me to do just that. So after time and contemplation with my family I decided that now is the time. I am not married, I have no children and I have nothing to lose. So I put in my two weeks at work. I had a great several years there, but I was not being fulfilled, I was not being inspired. And even though it was one of the scariest decisions in my life I knew it was right because I felt such a peace about it all.
As for the details of these said dreams, it’s not time yet to let the proverbial cat out of the bag. The details are still gestating and already things have evolved so much in the last month I honestly have no idea how will all look in the end. But I promise you all will be the first to now.
In the meantime I’m having a blast creating! It’s been such a joy sitting at my sewing machine making fun little things. I’m planning on getting enough made to set up an esty.com shop soon, so be on the look out.
I will make sure I keep this more up to date as I go along, I just needed a break after “30 Years in 30 Days.”
Well, it’s my birthday. I am officially 30 years old today! I can be honest with you and tell you that I don’t feel a bit of difference. Well except maybe relief, this blog a day thing has worn me out!
I don’t have a lot to report on so far in 2010… It’s only about 6 weeks in. Other than getting a love letter from a maximum security prisoner in Florida, not much has happened. But I can tell you that this year will be a year to remember. I have a feeling that 2010 will bring great things for my life. I have a lot of exciting projects ahead of me. In my mind I thought of 30 as this golden age that would confirm my adulthood. So now, I guess it’s time to make those grown up decisions. This is my life, this is my time. I am excited about the future. I’m excited about 2010. I’m excited to see what the next 30 years will bring. I’ll make a commitment to blog about the next 30 years in “30 Years in 30 Days: Vol. 2″ when I turn 60. So be ready!
Thank you all for taking this journey with me. It has been a lot of fun to remember all the things that have happened in my life to make me who I am today. Happy Birthday to me!
Tonight I will be celebrating with my wonderful family. We are having a delicious gumbo dinner that I cannot wait to eat. A few days ago Evie called me and told me Sam had a question… He asked if we could have my birthday party be a costume party. He loved dressing up in his super hero or pirate costumes, so I of course said yes. So tonight I will celebrate with my family in a pirate’s outfit. I can’t wait! I’ll be sure to post some pictures later on.
Thank you again for tagging along on this journey!
2009 was a year. A good year? No. A bad year? No… Just a year. The good canceled out the bad so all in all it was a decent year. Definitely a year of change! For example, my car’s warranty ran out. So that was a change, not driving a car with a warranty. Also about two weeks before my big 3-day fundraiser at work I kicked out my roommate, gave away my dog, broke up with my boyfriend, and tore out the tile in my kitchen & carpet in my living room and hallway.
I had decided in order to save money I would to the demo myself and then have someone come in and lay the new wood flooring down. Well I go and rent a tile hammer and told the nice fellow that I will have it back tomorrow. I thought it would be a one night event. Boy was I wrong! After one night I had one quadrant of my breakfast room done… This was going to take forever! My boyfriend was flying in from Houston in two days for a visit, so I had to get it done in time. I didn’t want him to have to worry about helping. Well I get the house cleared… He flies in for the weekend. I acted like a child and I ended the relationship, Monday came around and the floors were being laid. I gave a lady at my vet’s office my Labradoodle Layla… She was the driving factor of removing the carpets. She didn’t like to go to the bathroom outside when she could go in the house. And I asked Micah to find a new home. I was CLEANING HOUSE! I can say that all but one of those decisions was a wise decision. Regardless, I had a light load. A house with new floors… new carpets… a new bedroom suit… A dog that loved me and loved to go to the bathroom outside… And best of all my house, ALL to myself!
So the fundraiser came and went without issue… Now I finally got to enjoy my new clean life. It was charming.
This summer I got to really enjoy myself in Alaska with my family. It was a wonderful week that brought such peace and much needed serenity. I think I read about 5 different books, I hung out on the balcony most of the time, watching the gorgeous scenery go by as I read fabulous books. It was wonderful, it might have been the most I’ve ever enjoyed Alaska. Great time!
So 2009 was an eventful year. At least I had an eventful 2 weeks of the year.
Busting up Tile
After realizing this wasn't a "quick" job!
New Floors!
Living Room!
Mi Familia