Wow. It has seriously been a while. My last blog post was 10 months ago! What the heck. I guess I’ve just been living life? Nah, actually my reasoning is a bit different than that. I have been living life, but I just honestly haven’t really felt the motivation to blog in a while. My interests have just been taking me elsewhere. So… let’s catch up and talk a little bit about that.

The last post I made was about planners. That’s kind of what led me astray, maybe. I got a planner, then really got into the world of decorative planning. If you don’t know about it, I’m sure that sounds pretty strange. But there’s a whole subculture around this, basically. Lots of women (and some men) are really into it. There are tons of Facebook groups, YouTube channels, and Etsy shops dedicated to materials and stuff involved in planning… stickers, planners, inserts, paper clips, etc. I even ended up setting up my own Etsy shop making stickers. It kind of took off for a while, but lately I just haven’t put nearly as much effort into promoting it and updating it like I should. Hopefully that will change at some point. It was fun and a nice little source of additional income. Like I said, it hasn’t really been updated lately, but if you’d like to check it out, you can find it here.

So besides the planning, what have I been up to? Well, I did travel a bit last year. Ricky and I headed to Europe again, with a big focus of the trip being Oktoberfest in Munich. We had a blast, as usual. I should blog about that at some point and post some of the pictures I took there. Maybe I’ll get around to that too. Man, I really sound like a slacker, don’t I? Anyway, we also visited a few cities in Switzerland near Zurich as well as going to Prague.

Something else that took of quite a bit of my time and energy last year was one of my dogs, Sophie. I had Sophie since July 2008, about 6 months before Ricky and I started dating. She was a wonderful dog and I loved her so much. She had some health issues, though, and they got more serious right around the time we went to Europe last year. It turned out to be the beginning of the end. Her health began deteriorating to where she was on four different medications, kept getting bloated (poor thing), and had trouble walking to where I had to carry her around a lot even. Rather than prolong her suffering, we made the decision to let her go right before Christmas. It made the holidays rather difficult, and we ended up going to San Diego over New Years just to get out of town and have a change of scenery. It’s still taking some adjusting to going from having two dogs the last 3 years to only having one. She is missed very much.

Since the holidays, we’ve been just a bit busy with goings on around here and such. January through May is a busy time in Arizona, as that’s when our weather is best and we have more visitors than usual (we call them snowbirds, people who come here to get away from the cold and yuck in most of the rest of the country). There are a ton of festivals and events going on during that time. One is the Phoenix Open, which we volunteer for every year. Another is Arizona Strong Beer Fest, which we also go to every year. Stuff like that has kept us pretty busy, but having fun.

I’ve also been trying to read more lately. I’ve gotten kind of behind the last couple of weeks or so, what with trying to catch up with some other things, but I’m really trying to make my Goodreads goal of reading 40 books this year. It was my goal last year, and I didn’t quite make it, so I’m determined to get it done this year. I did good and got a bit ahead last month, so I’m still ahead of schedule, but I need to get a bit more momentum going soon in order to not get behind. I’ll work on that.

So that’s what I’ve been up to lately. It’s no excuse for not blogging, really, and I hope to get back into it. I just got a new, very portable MacBook, so I want to put it to good use. Hope to blog at you again soon!

As an introvert, I suffer from probably what a lot of people suffer from. I have things going on in my head ALL the time. I am constantly thinking. It’s very hard to stop it. In my head, I basically have a constant to-do list. And it’s not even things that would normally go on a to-do list, really. It can be anything from picking up something that’s out of place in my house to blogging to watching a certain TV series I heard about on Netflix. It’s actually pretty ridiculous and can drive me pretty crazy sometimes. I like things to be neat, orderly, and under control, at least in the little part of the world that is mine (and if not that, then at least inside my head!). That’s one reason I like having a relatively clean house. When it’s not as clean and orderly as I’d like, or when this list gets so big that it feels out of control (which can easily happen), I get a bit stressed and feel overwhelmed. I absolutely hate that feeling.

I like to-do lists, but only sometimes. For the last several years, any time I make a to-do list it’s usually been on my computer or phone (or syncs between both – thanks to iCloud). I spend a lot of time with technology, so it always made more sense to me to use it for those things instead of paper. Recently I’ve started to reconsider this some…

I had seen on Instagram where a friend had bought a paper planner called the Day Designer. This friend is always buying cool stuff, so I thought I’d give it a look. I checked it out online, and it actually looked like something I thought I might like to use. Given the time of year (this was back in April, I believe), they didn’t have any new Day Designers in stock, but I hunted around online and managed to find one on eBay, so I ordered it. And I’d have to say, this thing has changed my life a bit.

A habit of mine when I buy something new is to check around online about it and read reviews and see who else is using it and sometimes how they are using it. This new purchase was no different. Upon searching for “Day Designer”, not only did I find plenty of people using it, but the way they used it was all different. From just using it as is to people customizing it with stickers and tape, the variety of things to do with a planner like this seemed to be huge. There is no end to the things you can buy to customize your planner. And not just the Day Designer – I was finding there was really a whole huge planner culture out there of people who organize their lives in different ways. And here I thought everyone was just using their computer or smartphone. I was SO wrong.

Honestly, as a kid who really got into her pens and pencils and markers and notebooks and folders in school, I have to curb myself a bit to keep from spending to much because if you are an office or school supplies nerd, there’s no limit out there to what you can buy. There’s even a couple of other planners I like even better than the Day Designer. One is called the Erin Condren Life Planner. I love how colorful and pretty this planner is, but it just doesn’t work for me for the day to day. I need a full page for each day for both my schedule as well as work and personal to-do lists, and the Erin Condren planner fits a whole week into only two pages, with just a skinny box for each day. But I like it enough that I’m now using one as a blog planner, which actually works pretty well. (Now hopefully it will get me to blog more too!)  There’s also another daily planner very similar to the Day Designer that I like and might get for next year called the Simplified Planner.

I’m just getting into this whole planner thing, but I’m kind of enjoying it. Not only does it give me a chance to go back to being a kid and hoarding school supplies, but it actually does help me cut down on stress a bit by getting everything out on paper as well. I feel a bit less flustered about getting everything done when I can see my whole day or week in front of me on a piece of paper.

So I’ve noticed something lately.  Actually, it’s something I’ve been aware of for a while, but I guess I’ve just never really thought about it before.  It’s become pretty normal, or more likely, been normal for quite a while, to dislike yourself.  I mean, I’m not saying that most people hate themselves (hopefully most don’t), but it’s normal to always have something you want to change about yourself or something you don’t like.  I mean, if you really think about it, doesn’t this strike you as kind of weird?  I mean, so we are all born into this world, a world filled with people of all sizes, shapes, skin colors, hair colors, eye colors, genders, sexual orientations, heights, weights, likes, dislikes, food preferences, and plenty of other differences.  The world is a VERY diverse place.  Which to me, is pretty awesome.  It makes it a very colorful and fascinating place to live.  But yet, we spend so much of our time wanting to be different than we are.  Wanting to be more like someone else is.  I’d dare to say that all of us have something we’d like to change about ourselves.  We want to be skinnier, “better” looking (based on whose definition of “better”?), stronger, smarter, or different in some tangible way.  Why is that?  In a world that could not be more diverse, why do we want to be anything other than what we are?  Why do we want to be like someone else?  If you look at it from an outsider’s perspective, doesn’t that seem kind of strange?

We’re all so unique.  I mean, it’s evident in what we do, what we wear, what we like, what we read, what we listen to, who we spend time with, what our jobs are, or in any other aspect of our lives.  But yet, still, we want to change ourselves.  More than that, most of us dislike ourselves.  Why?  Why do we feel the need to be something else?  In a world that obviously accepts diversity (in general… I get that not everywhere or everyone accepts it completely) or at the very least, allows its existence, why do we not celebrate our own uniqueness?

I’m guilty of it too.  My biggest dislike about myself is my weight.  I wish I was skinnier.  I wish I had a different body, one that was more “normal size”.  The truth is, there are people both fatter and skinnier than me.  Don’t get me wrong, part of it is that I wish I was healthier, and I guess there’s nothing wrong with that.  We should all want to be healthy and live long lives.  But in all honesty, even being healthy is kind of misleading.  Sure, you can make sure your body is healthy.  But can you protect it from all the things out there that could harm it?  Not really.  I’m not saying we shouldn’t want to be healthy, but don’t let being healthy deceive you… just living in this world causes all kinds of risks that your health cannot prevent.

But even healthy people don’t like themselves.  They wish they were better looking, smarter, or better at something.  It’s never ending.  Why can’t we just decide that we are awesome, no matter how or what we are?  Each of us is a unique person in a world full of unique people.  Makes it sound not so great, doesn’t it?  But I think it’s awesome… because it gives us permission to be different, and yet to celebrate what we do have in common… that we are all different.

There are so many things out there that make our differences a negative thing.  Fat people are looked down upon.  Racism is still an issue.  We make fun of people who do things differently than us.  Why can’t we just decide that it’s all okay?  We’re unique, we’re different, we’re a wide variety.  And that’s a good thing.  We don’t need to change.  There’s nothing wrong with improvement, but that doesn’t mean we can’t like ourselves exactly as we are… even celebrate how awesome we are, right now, before any improvements.  It goes against the grain, but I think if we choose to like ourselves exactly as we are, it is the first step in also accepting and even celebrating everyone else’s uniqueness as well.  I mean, think about it – everyone liking and accepting themselves and each other?  World peace?  What a concept, huh?

I’ll leave you with a video that I think expresses the idea I’ve got here a little bit, if not a lot.  SO many women chose average in this video… why is so hard for all of us (men AND women) to see ourselves as beautiful (and awesome just as we are)?