February Goals Recap

Last month I reviewed my 2018 goals and what I had accomplished so far. Now it's the end of February and I'm here to do it again. 

My February goals were:

-Lose 8 pounds

-Meditate 5-10 minutes every day

-8 Push ups a day

-Work on my script 2x a week

-Add strength work to my routine

-Flossing 5 days a week

 

So how did I do? 

I lost 3 pounds. Not as much as I planned, but I lost 3 pounds, that's in the right direction. That makes 11 total for 2018. And with all the new habits I'm building, I'm feeling good moving into March and beyond. I'm still only drinking one day per week. (A trip to Las Vegas not withstanding in February...there was a bit more drinking there!) And not snacking after dinner. This one is huge for me. And I've done REALLY WELL on that new habit. Snacking and drinking wine after dinner are about comfort and imagined "I've earned this" baloney. I've had two months to build these habits and they will be put to the test in March and beyond as I started a new job this week. Stress for me leads to comfort eating and now I'll find new ways to relieve stress. Like....

Meditation. I started with 6 minutes a day (more than 5, less than 10!) and have upped it to 7 minutes a week or so ago. I missed 2 days this month, so I'm proud of myself for that commitment. I enjoy it and feel like it might already be helping me to just be calmer in my mind when things are busy and nutty and stressful. There is definitely a pause in certain situations where I do a "huh, that's a thought" and observe it, then decide what to say or do next. All that instead of just reacting quickly. I'm not saying it happens every time, but it seems to be making an impression. I'm doing Mindfulness mediation and it's challenging to my little rabbit brain. And again, with this new job and new stress, I need to commit even more to being still for 7 minutes a day. I have a plan to do 1 minute of meditation instead of snacking at work. We'll see how that goes!

I exchanged push ups for planks. I do 1:15 worth of planks 6 days a week. I find if I rest a day, I'm better at it the next day. The push ups were not getting better as I wasn't doing much of other exercises to increase my upper body strength and I was frustrated with my lame push ups. Perhaps I'll return to them in April.

Have not worked on my script. Fear.

Have not added a regular strength set to my daily/weekly routine. I need to put it in my daily journal as a thing to check off. (Checking things off on a page is R E A L L Y satisfying for me!)

Flossing has been continuing apace. Well done me.

 

Goals for March:

-Lose 8 pounds

-Meditate 5-10 minutes per day

-Plank 1:15 or more per day (Along with the regular walking/stair steps)

-Work on creative writing 2x per week

-Schedule the stretchy bands work outs into my weekly routine

-Keep flossing 5x per week!

 

I'll be back with updates around Easter....! 

Field Trips

Harper had her first school field trip last week. They walked to Louise's Restaurant and learned about making pizza. It sounded pretty fun for them all and she drew great pics in a little book they all made:

Interesting to see how 6-year-old, learning-how-to-read/write-brains work. This is how she spells all on her own. Super fascinating to me is how their young brains are still connecting left to right and often they will reverse the direction of letters and numbers.

Anyway - her field trip reminded me about the first field trip I remember - going to McDonald's in Kahala*. I was either in first or second grade and we walked the block or so to the restaurant and got to see inside the kitchen and how it worked. Then we all got a small bag of fries. What a treat! (We rarely ate at McDonalds when I was growing up.)

I love this tiny little similarity in our lives.

 

 

 

*And now I have the damn Kahala Mall jingle stuck in my head. The one from way back in the 80s....

34 Years Ago Today...

...Seabury Hall had a dance, planned and executed by the Social Committee, headed by - guess who? - that's right - ME.

On February 15, 1984, we put on a Valentine's Dance and I made mix tapes for them. Two mix tapes to be exact: #1 called "New Music" and #2 called "Harder Rock". 

(Quick thing to point out: Seabury back then was 7-12 grades, about 200 students total. And we had dances every month or six weeks and everyone could come, very casual, you didn't have to ask anyone or dress up or anything. We also had a prom in the spring every year which was just for 10-12 graders and it was very fancy.) 

So, here is my Mix for:

(All spellings as per the paper label inside. Gosh-my all caps handwriting hasn't changed at all!)

A SIDE:

Bowie - Modern Love 

English Beat - Jeannette

Madness - Madness

Rod Stewart - Young Turks

Squeeze - Piccadilly

Pretenders - Pack It Up

Men W/O Hats - Ideas For Walls

Duran - Lonely In Your Nightmares

BowWowWow - I Want Candy

Culture Club - Karma Chameleon

Billy Idol - Dancing With Myself

B SIDE:

Duran - Is There Something I Should Know

Stray Cats - Rebels Rule

Rob Stewart - Tonight I'm Yours

BowWowWow - Louis Quatorze

Bill Idol - Baby Talk

Bowie - Without You

Stray Cats - Sexy & 17

Duran - Girls On Film

Led Zepplin - Stairway to Heaven**

Billy Idol - Mony Mony

 

**All my Seabury Peeps will understand the inclusion of this song 

 

Let's get to the Harder Rock! (OMG can't wait for this, I haven't read this list yet.)

 

A SIDE:

Rod Stewart - Baby Jane 

Led Zepplin - Black Dog

The Who - Who Are You

Van Halen - Jump

U-2 - Sunday Bloody Sunday

Foreignor - Head Games

Black Sabbath - Mob Rules

Soft Cell - Frustration

Thompson Twins - Love On Your Side

Madness - Our House

 

B SIDE:

Pretenders - Bad Boys Get Spanked!

Led Zepplin - Rock and Roll

Joan Jett - I Love Rock And Roll

AC DC (I wrote it with the bolt in between!) - For Those About To Rock

Alice Cooper - Schools Out...

Kajagoogoo - Too Shy

Thompson Twins - We Are Detective

U-2 - Refugee

Forgeignor - Dirty White Boy

Alice Cooper - I'm 18

AC DC - Let's Get It Up

 

Okay I think we can all agree that the "er" in "Harder Rock" was critical in that description...! 

Wow that takes me back. And now I have Rod Stewart stuck in my head. Of all the songs from these lists. {eyeroll}

I'll make a spotify playlist for you later so you can enjoy it out loud. Check back in a bit for that. 

Oh the 80's on Maui...

 

 

 

 

Your Los Angeles Lakers!

Last Tuesday night I went to my first ever Lakers game. I've lived here for over 30 years and FINALLY made it to a game! I was lucky enough to be invited by my boss from Jumanji, along with some other peeps from the Jumanji VFX crew. We were in the 15th row behind the Lakers bench. Dude.

I've never even been inside Staples Center. It's pretty cool. 

I'm don't really follow sports, but I usually have a decent handle on who the top players are, who the coach is, etc on the Lakers. But currently - NO CLUE.

Back in the day, when I went to LMU, the Lakers would sometimes practice in our big new gym on campus. One weekend, my college beau (current friend of the blog and back then a H U G E Lakers fan) and I drove onto campus and saw the lot full of very expensive cars. We parked near them and there was Magic Johnson, walking to practice. My beau had just been telling me about a great interview he read with Magic and I said, "Go say hi! Go tell him how much you liked his interview!" He hesitated and I encouraged and he went, I stayed at the car. Magic was gracious and shook his hand, chatted for a minute. I love that memory. 

Shout out to you, RCL!

Now, maybe I should pay attention to who is on the team these days....especially if I get to go back again some time to the 15th row! 

 

Look How Fat I Was*

*I was not fat.

But boy oh boy, I thought I was. This was me in 8th grade with the first and only marlin I've ever caught. 175 pounds (technically a "rat" in the big game fish world). My dad was friends with the captain, Ben Baldwin (in the boat behind me) and the fish were biting like mad in Kona for a few weeks. Dad called to say, "Come over and catch one!" so I did. An unusual weekend visit to the Big Island during school.

Catching a marlin is hard, btw. It took 20 minutes to reel it in. And as the angler, you have to sit in the chair and do all the work yourself, just in case it is a record breaking fish. (Record breaking fish are 1000 pounds or more, just so you get why this one is called a "rat".) The crew on the boat, all experienced anglers, coach and cheer you on while you do it. It was a blast and I was really excited. 

But back to the fat part. Where did I get the idea that I was fat, ugly, unattractive, etc etc? So sad that I had no confidence in my strong body (well, maybe a bit more after wrestling that fish in). I am working so hard now, almost 40 years later, to feel good about who I am, what I look like and to not say a damn negative thing about myself in front of Harper. Even when she pokes my fat tummy and says "big tummy!" How do I create confidence in her? How do we help her know she's beautiful, inside and out? How do we make sure that when she looks at a picture of herself in 8th grade she thinks, "damn, I look great!" 

I will keep working to make it happen!

Also, in the last few years, I weigh lot more than that rat fish did. And I bought a bikini last year because F*UCK IT. Life if short. It feels good to just enjoy being at a beach or pool. Maybe that's the best way to teach Harper. 

Trip to Yugoslavia

Kurt's mom Dot died three years ago this month. She was about to turn 97. (That's her, the blonde on the far right in the fabulous teal ensemble, enjoying drinks with the girls*. Please click for best big-hair viewing.)

After she died, there was the usual, exhausting grief-filled process of emptying her apartment and deciding where everything should go. Much of it went to charity, some we sold, the well-loved pictures and knick-knacks went to Kurt's brother and niece and to us. And her dear cat Dynamo came to live with us, may he also now rest in peace. The remaining boxes filled a small storage unit nearby until we could figure out where to put it all. 

Time has a funny way of flying and now, three years later, we are finally unloading that storage space to sort through those remaining boxes and make some final final decisions. To do that we had to also clear out a ton of stuff from our own garage storage area and man, that was satisfying. We hadn't cleared out old bills, papers, household stuff since before Harper was born. I ended up taking 170 pounds of documents to my favorite shredding place. 

Kurt has done a heroic job of reorganizing our garage storage. He's been unloading his mom's stuff in stages and the first part was mostly old files of her own. We kept the tax stuff and shredded the rest, keeping only a small box of things that relate to Kurt and his brother - grades, certificates, clippings, older family stuff. There were boxes of vinyl records and CDs, all classical or jazz. We have a turntable so we may keep some of it, but most of that will go to charity or maybe we sell to Amoeba records. 

The hardest part of it all is the photos. There are photo albums galore, many of them are Dot's, some are her sister's (all three are long dead now as Dot was the youngest) some are her parent's. There are also boxes of loose photos. But what to do with them all? 

Dot took a trip to Yugoslavia in 1979 when she was 61. There is a whole photo album for it. It's heartbreaking to look at because it means nothing to us, not even Kurt as he doesn't know anything about who is in the photos and wasn't part of the trip. What is the point of keeping it? It's kind of historic, but really, who would ever look at it again?

Yugoslavia doesn't exist. 

It's so sad to think that the entirety of your life gets distilled down to a few dusty boxes of pictures no one cares about. Okay, maybe that's a bit dark, but it's not far off.

Of course your life can also be continued in your children and their children, and that is wonderful. There are stories to relay and some of the photos to look at. But Harper won't remember Gamma Dot. Later it might be fun for her to look at pictures of Kurt and his brother as kids, but that's maybe one or two photo albums out of twenty. Do we simply throw the other photos away? It seems brutal to do that. We have become the recipients of all this history as we are the youngest children of the youngest children in the Frey family. Many of Kurt's cousins have died and there aren't a lot of kids in any of those families. 

It's strange to be the caretaker of a family history that nobody is around to appreciate. It's a trip to a place that doesn't exist. 

We'll probably keep most of it for a few more years, then move on. 

 

 

*Who the girls are, what year this is and what the event was, we will never know

Excellent Reminder

 

“Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most.”

― Augusta F. Kantra