I sure know how that guy feels right now–staring out the window wishing he could go.
A little backstory. This is Copper. Copper is “grounded” because he didn’t come in the night before when it was time for bed. He loves the outdoors, but since we live in the middle of the woods and he’s white, he’s prime coyote bait. Or bear. Or whatever else lurks around out there after dark.
But I totally get the gazing out the window, wanting to go somewhere look in his eye. I’ve had it before. I have it now.
I need some adventure. Not drama. Drama and adventure are two different things. I like the predictable-ness of my life. I love the safe space that I have where I spend most of my time.
Sometimes, though, I just want to get away for a bit. Take the camera and go for a drive. Pack up the camper and spend a couple days by the water. Try out a new coffee shop. Spend the day rummaging through flea markets.
I am the world’s worst daydreamer. No, really, that’s me. I can easily spend time just daydreaming about anything. Seriously, give me a topic and I can daydream about it for hours. Maybe even days if I don’t have to get up and go to work the next day. I think that’s why I love to read fiction…why I’ve always loved to read fiction…so much. It gives me permission to daydream. There is nothing like curling up with a good book and immersing yourself into the story. My mind is like a stream that flows on and on sometimes.
“The mind is like a river. The thoughts are like the various droplets of water.” -A. G. Mohan
But in all that daydreaming, there’s a problem. I don’t like to admit it. I don’t want to give up my daydreaming. I don’t want to give up reading fiction. I certainly would like to write a fiction novel someday. So what’s the problem? Sometimes I get so caught up in daydreaming, that I miss stuff.
Important stuff. Real life stuff. I get so caught up in the daydream that I miss the reality that is going on around me. I’m there, but I’m not really present. My body is occupying space, but my brain is off in space. Emotionally I am somewhere else. Hello, are you in there? That’s a problem.
I miss some pretty awesome stories when I am not paying attention.
I miss some pretty deep connections when I am not being intentional about being present.
And because I want to experience life and deep connections, I decided to figure out how to be more present.
“I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”-Jane Austen
I started reading a new book today called “Present Over Perfect” by Shauna Niequist. A question posed in the book is, “If someone gave you a completely blank calendar and a bank account with as much money as you wanted in it, what would you do?”
I’m pondering that. Would I retire? Would I travel? Would I buy everything I ever thought I wanted? Would I give all kinds of crazy money away? I think a little bit of all of that. I’d do whatever I wanted. I’d go wherever my heart took me. I think I would build a house, but maybe just get a class A (or a truck and a big 5th wheel) and travel to all the places and see all the things and take all the pictures and read all the books. And write a book or two. I’d blog about all of my travels for sure.
Anyone know where this hammock is located?
I’m getting away from the reason I picked up the book in the first place, though. Daydreaming again.
The book is about ditching the frantic and embracing the simple life. My life isn’t that frantic. I’ve been practicing simplifying for a while, but I do struggle with being present.
Keeping my head where my feet are is a work in progress.
As my friend expresses it, “keeping my head where my feet are.” I struggle with that. I daydream. I analyze. I overthink. I make lists in my head of things I need to do. Then I make more lists in my head of things I forgot to do, only to forget again. I’ve tried writing them down. I’ve tried putting reminders on my phone. None of those things help if my feet don’t go where my head is.
So how does a person practice being more present? No clue, but that is the journey I am on this summer.
It’s been raining here a lot lately. It’s cold for mid-May. And muddy. It’s been hard to plan camping trips on the weekends. It’s been nearly impossible to do any outside projects. And since I’m a preschool teacher, I have an even greater reason for disliking rain–inside recess. Ever tried keeping a bunch of 3, 4, and 5 year-olds contained in a classroom for hours? It’s not fun.
The end of this very challenging school year is in sight, and I’m tired. So despite the rain yesterday, I took a walk. I even had a couple furry companions go with me. We had no destination. We didn’t go anywhere special. We just walked up the driveway, trying to stay out of the mud and wet grass (I dislike wet socks and shoes).
I noticed this flower on my walk and had to take a picture. It reminded me that despite the consequences or circumstances we find ourselves surrounded by, we can rise up, square our shoulders, and stand tall.
Did you hear me? Rise up. No one can hold you down without your permission. No one can keep you down without your permission. Rise up and stand tall, whatever your circumstances. You got this.
It might be raining right now, but take a walk anyway. Let the rain wash away all the mud and the gunk. Let it refresh your soul.
We’re going camping in a week and I am so ready! This has been the longest year of my teaching career up to this point. I’m not sure why that is, but I need to get away to the forest and decompress.
Just because I am ready, doesn’t mean the camper is, however.
We have a small popup camper, so we don’t have to worry about a lot of holding tanks and water lines. So if you’re looking for a post about those things, I can’t help you there.
I did have some very specific things that I wanted to do in my popup before next weekend. I just had to wait until it stopped raining so that I could crank it up and get in there to work.
Fresh Coat
The first thing we did was give the outside a bath and put a fresh coat of paint on. I loved the vintage look that the faded paint gave the camper, and didn’t really want to paint it, but the husband had other plans. I’m ok with how it turned out. Eventually I would like to paint the whole thing, but that will be later on.
Before
After
A Good Cleaning
When I was finally able to get the camper popped up, I took everything out and cleaned. The camper was folded up tightly all winter, and things just needed some freshening. It smells lemony-fresh in there now.
New Gear
All winter I have been collecting things to add to the camper. Not a lot, because it is a small popup, but I added some things and took out a few things.
I took out the carpet squares that had been thrown down on the floor. They collect dirt and dust from our feet, but I didn’t like them. They are harder to clean than just simply sweeping the linoleum. Eventually I would like to put some vinyl floor planks down and get rid of the linoleum.
I found a couple of welcome mats at the Dollar Tree that we will use this year. One on the outside at the step and one right inside the door. Other than that, we are going bare floor this year.
I covered the bench cushions. I’d been seeing a hack of how to cover the cushions without sewing. Since I don’t sew, this spoke to my soul.
I bought bedding to be used specifically in the camper. Pretty much the only thing we don’t like about the popup is that you still have to load up A LOT of stuff to take with you every time you go camping. Hauling around bulky bedding was the worst last year, so this year we have bedding that can be loaded into the camper before the departure day, saving us some room in the backseat of the pickup for other things.
I added an electric skillet to my camp kitchen. The camper has a propane stove that can be used inside or outside and it works great, but when we stay where there is electric, I can save fuel and use the electric skillet instead.
I also added a coffee maker. What’s camping without a cup of coffee in the peaceful morning air? Last year we used a stainless steel percolator on the propane cook stove. It makes good coffee, but it takes a long time. The coffee maker will be much simpler and I can make more coffee. You can never have too much!
Something else I’ve added to the camper this year is a small popup privacy tent. Most of the places we go have bathroom facilities, and that’s great. We won’t need the privacy tent that often, but we’ve scouted out some primitive camping sites that won’t afford us the luxury of flushing toilets, electricity, or running water. Those are the kind of spots I like to go camping…remote and peaceful. The privacy tent can be popped up and the port-a-potty set inside for a place to go to the bathroom.
The last thing we added were rope lights. This was my husband’s contribution. He loves rope lights! I’m not sure why, but he does, so I let him. They do look really cool and light up the outside of the camper so you can see when returning from the bathroom or a night of fishing down at the lake.
Lights!
Another thing to check before heading to the campsite is the lights on the camper. When you plug the camper into the vehicle you are towing it with, make sure that all the lights and signals work properly.
Now we just have to throw our clothes and hygiene items in a bag and put the groceries in the cooler and we are ready to go! It’s too bad I have to work four days before we can leave.
What does that mean? Living your best life? What does that entail? What do you need to have in order to live your best life? A new house? A lot of money in the bank? A spouse and 2.5 children? Do you need to be at the top of your career to enjoy your best life? Do you need to be retired? Sunbathing on a private island? Traveling and full-time RV living? All of those things sound wonderful, but not everyone aspires to them. What does your best life look like?
And how do you know? That’s my big question. How do you know that you are living your best life? You have a picture of what you think it is, but what if you get there, and it’s not what you thought it was going to be? Your new house has a house payment you can’t afford. Your bank account is full, but your heart isn’t. Your spouse and your children think you nag too much. Your career doesn’t afford you much time for anything else. Retirement is boring. Your private island is lonely. Your RV finds you missing community.
Too much of one thing can literally be too much. For me, living your best life means living a balanced life. You have enough, but not too much. You have a house, but you aren’t house poor. You have a little emergency fund, but not enough that everyone is asking you to give them money. You have a spouse and 2 (adult) children who still love you enough to put up with you. You have a career, but are content to let the younger generation claw their way to the top. You aren’t retired, but you get summers off (or vacation time). No private island, but you have a little corner of the world that is all yours. You’re not a full-time RV status yet, but that pop-up camper is ready to go for the first camping trip of the year in a couple weeks. That’s what my best life looks like.
Do I wish that I didn’t have to get up and go to work on Mondays? Absolutely. Am I counting down the days until summer break? You bet I am. Do I dream about winning the lottery and quitting my job to take up traveling? Some days more than others. But the truth is, toward the end of summer break I am wishing for that familiar routine and my work people. My best life is one filled with all the things I love– my faith, my family, teaching, camping, reading, photography, etc. And there is room for so much more as I go! My best life is a full life with room for new people, things, and animals (always room for more cuddly animals). My best life is a balanced life with just enough of everything.
I really should have taken along my big camera instead of just my cell phone this weekend, but I didn’t. I thought about it because it is fall and the leaves are so pretty right now, but I knew that where we were going was notorious for wind and the weather was calling for cold and rain. We missed out on the rain, but man was it cold! The little pop-up did good, though! It has a furnace, but instead of using our propane, we run a small electric heater and it stayed nice and toasty the whole time.
Most of the weekend was spent sitting as close to the campfire as I could get without getting a lung full of smoke. Some of the guys we were camping with decided to throw up some tarps between the trees for a windbreak, and that did help with the cold, but we needed a smoke stack to divert the smoke from our eyes. Or an oxygen tank. Just sayin’.
All in all it was a great weekend with some great people! And the campground wasn’t bad. There were some negatives, like no showers and a flushing toilet for those of us who were not in a big camper with a bathroom. The trek to the bathroom was short, but filled with sticker bushes. I spent 30 minutes after using the restroom just picking stickers off my pant legs. After the first trip I just decided to drive the Jeep around the long way to avoid the headache.
It was a beautiful campground, though. Crabtree Cove on Stockton Lake is a peninsula with a view of the Stockton Dam on one side and a quiet cove on the other. The campsites were big and spread out to give ample room. We camped with three other campers and our group was 13 people. We had plenty of room to sit around the campfire and “chill”.
Of course, no camping trip would be complete without cooking over an open fire, right? Most of the time the cooking was done in electric skillets outside. No one really wants to cook in the fancy camper kitchens. This pot of green beans and bacon made it to the fire, though. It was a special request of my brother for his birthday dinner at the campground.
Tomorrow is a Monday and I will head back to work, but I did have a great weekend after a long, stressful week in the classroom. There is just nothing better than spending time with those you love, making memories and enjoying the fresh air. The camping season for us is over, and that makes me sad, but there are lots of things to do around the farm before the snow starts flying. Next weekend we are cutting wood. I’m already tired just thinking about it.
I’m up early today. Not as early as I should have been because I wanted to get some writing done this morning, but I did manage to get around at a pretty good clip, so that helped. Then when I was grabbing my flash drive to save to (I always do this just in case I want to write where there is no wifi—I like the peaceful country setting) I saw my mom’s flash drive setting on the table and remembered that I was supposed to download some pictures on there for her. I did that, and now my fingers don’t seem to want to type as fast as I’d like them to.
Another “perk” from cancer treatment is that sometimes now I can’t spell to save my life. That’s huge for me because I used to be amazing at spelling, and now I’m not. And sometimes I lose my words. I know what I want to say, but can’t think of the word I need. I’d say that chemo brain and what it does to you has been the hardest struggle of this whole journey for me.
Anyway, I wanted to write this morning. I had an urge to do it last night, but not until I laid down in bed and I knew that if I got out of bed and started it last night, I would never go to sleep and it would be impossible to get up for work this morning. So I told myself I would make time for it in the morning and I went to sleep instead.
I don’t know what I want to write about. Something. Everything. That’s the pull on a writer’s soul. You want to write about absolutely everything. Big things. Small things. A writer can write a whole chapter on the tiniest of details. Not me…I can’t do that yet. I’d like to do that, but my brain doesn’t analyze like that quite yet. I’m rolling an idea over in my head this morning of taking a creative writing course. I hate homework, though, so that’s what is holding me back at present. I love to write, but I love to write what I want and not what someone tells me I need to write. And certainly not on someone else’s timeframe. I work a full-time job as a preschool teacher…some days I don’t have any words left by the time I get home. I don’t want to be graded on that.
But surely there is something out there that I could do to hone my skills at creative writing. A “club” or something online…
There goes my alarm telling me that it’s time to feed the animals and get my butt in gear. I dream of the day when I can sit here as long as I want, crafting a story that people can’t wait to be released, much like the new John Grisham novel that just showed up in my Kindle library this morning…
I had ice cream for dinner tonight. Yes, I did. Not a bowl of ice cream after dinner. Not a little bit of ice cream with my dinner. I had a BIG bowl of peanut butter cup ice cream FOR dinner tonight. It’s been that kind of week.
But it’s the beginning of a three-day weekend for me. I don’t foresee having ice cream for dinner for at least another three days. What I do see in my near future is a lot of rest and relaxation, and also a little work around the farm. The weather will be turning colder soon and there are a few things I need to do to prepare for it. My chickens need a fresh layer of bedding put down in their coop. The garden is done and needs a layer of mulch put down. There are walnuts all over my yard that I am not picking up, even though I should. And the house needs some more de-cluttering. Always more de-cluttering. How do we end up with so much junk?
But that’s a post for another day.
What I am going to try to focus on this weekend while the husband is working and I’m home with the cat is self-care. Self-care so the next time I have one of “those” weeks, I will not feel the need to eat a big bowl of peanut butter cup ice cream for dinner. Self-care so that I don’t feel so tired and run-down next week when I go back to work. Self-care so I don’t have a headache for two days next week. Yes, I am going to be productive in a few things over the long weekend; but I’m also going to be productively unproductive in the things that matter.
I’m going to linger over my cup of coffee in the morning. I’m going to finish the book I’ve been reading, but have been too tired to open when I sit down in the evenings. I’m going to sit outside and pet the dogs. I might take an afternoon nap with the cat. I’m going to get out my guitar and sing as loud as I can and I don’t care if the neighbors hear me. I am going to get my camera out and chase a sunset or two. I’m going to soak in a bubble bath, burn a candle, and just be. Why? Because these are things that get pushed to the side during the work week. Life still moves forward without these things, so I neglect them…until I feel the need to have a big bowl of ice cream for dinner. What have you been neglecting? What are things that refuel your passion and heal your soul? Music? Crafts? A hike? Shopping? Go do something for you today.
It’s not October yet, but as the month approaches I always look back to the event that changed my life. This year I will reach the five-year mark, and I want to share my story with you in hopes that you will see how important early detection and yearly mammograms are.
Five years ago I discovered a lump in my left breast. I had just turned 41 six months earlier. Eight months earlier I’d had my first mammogram at 40 years-old. Just like I was supposed to. The mammogram was clear and I was relieved to be done for the year. I gave it no more thought until I found the lump.
Upon my discovery I promptly scheduled an appointment with my doctor. I didn’t think it was anything to be concerned about, but I also knew not to put it off. It was late October before the doctor could see me. He ordered some labs, which all came back normal; and a diagnostic mammogram.
It would be late November, the day before Thanksgiving before the mammogram could be scheduled. Gotta love healthcare in the US. I went for the appointment and after the mammogram the radiologist wanted to do an ultrasound for a closer look. He gave it a BI RAD score of 4C and then scheduled me for a biopsy.
The biopsy didn’t happen for another couple of weeks. Once again, no one really seemed to be in a hurry. But as the days and weeks kept passing, I was growing more and more frustrated with the timetable.
At the time of the biopsy, the results were found to be invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) about the size of a marble. That was early December. My doctor then scheduled me to see a surgeon. When the surgeon’s office called me, however, they told me that I couldn’t see that particular surgeon until January 31, 2016. I had a redheaded meltdown right there on the phone in my office at work. I told them while everyone was just dragging their feet like it was no big deal, I had something growing inside of me and I wanted it out immediately. I demanded the first available appointment with the first available surgeon in that office. The woman on the phone told me she would have to clear it with my doctor since his orders were for a different surgeon. I told her my doctor was an idiot (he was…after ordering the diagnostic mammogram and returning to him for the results, he asked me why I was in his office that day…don’t get me started). Anyway, I told the lady on the phone that it was my body and I had a right to request another surgeon. She gave me the next available appointment with the next available surgeon, but that was still two weeks out.
I had the surgeon consult mid-December and returned for surgery on December 26. At the time of the surgery the lump had grown to the size of a bouncy ball you get in one of those quarter machines. In four weeks the cancer had doubled in size.
Four weeks isn’t a long time when you are waiting on a vacation, or for school to get out, or for your wedding day. Four weeks is an eternity when you are waiting on surgery to remove cancer from your body. Had I waited to get the lump looked at; had I accepted the timeline for the surgeon; things could have had a much different outcome. I caught it early. It seemed like the lump popped up overnight. My cancer was highly aggressive, but because of early detection the prognosis was good. I still had a very long journey…lumpectomy and lymph node dissection, six rounds of a four-drug chemotherapy cocktail (the first dose took 6.5 hours), two hospital stays (one in ICU after almost dying on my son’s graduation day), 36 radiation treatments, 16 doses of a maintenance drug, and recommended 10 years of tamoxifen (I did one year and ended up with a pulmonary embolism).
Even today, five years after I discovered the lump that changed my life, I still deal with long-term side effects of chemo and radiation. I forget what word I want to say sometimes. I can’t remember anything without writing it down. I still have to go to the oncologist every six months. I still get nervous before every mammogram. I am super-sensitive to changes in my body and there are days when I have to fight the urge to wonder if the cancer has returned. It would be so easy to live there, but I don’t want to. I refuse to let it have anymore of my life than what it’s already stolen.
I am not telling you this so you will feel sorry for me. I’m telling you this so you know how important early detection and yearly mammograms are. It could be the difference between life or death. I know mammograms are uncomfortable, but they sure beat having your port accessed every three weeks or having a sunburn from radiation. And they don’t hurt nearly as bad as radiation fibrosis in your shoulder four years after treatment.
Schedule your mammogram. Make time for self-care. Listen to me. Self-care isn’t selfish. Use your personal days for something that brings you joy. Go get a massage. Get your nails done. Take a weekend by yourself. Do it! You are beautiful and you are worth it.
Who doesn’t love a wedding? Me. I don’t go to them unless I have to. It’s not that I don’t believe in love, or marriage. I do. I just prefer not to go to weddings.
But I had to go to one last weekend because it was my nephew’s. And I said I would take pictures. It was hot. It was humid. We were racing against the clock to get photos done before it got dark. There were times I thought I might be the only one there who cared anything at all about the pictures. That’s probably not true. A wedding is like trying to drive in rush hour traffic in the biggest city you can imagine. There are so many lanes and everyone needs to go somewhere, but someone else has to go before you do, and then someone else needs to go at the same time as you. It’s total chaos. I came away from the experience knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that I do not ever want to be a wedding photographer. Enough said.
Tornadoes & Rainbows 