WW – Great Courses: Stress and Your Body

Posted on May 9, 2018 by Thistle

For the last few weeks, I’ve been listening to a series of 24 lectures from Great Courses. These were taught by a professor named Robert Sapolsky, who was an excellent speaker. Not only was the subject matter something that strongly interested me, but Sapolsky made each lecture informative, entertaining, and engaging.

I’m not going to really talk much about the thousand things I learned about the way stress affects our bodies. There’s a reason this is a 12+ hour long series of lectures, and even then, we were just getting the basics. However, I did was to put this information out there. If you’ve ever been interested in the way psycho-social stress affects our biology, hormones, sleep, mental health, aging, in-utero children, digestive track, memory, metabolism, and a ton more, this is an excellent course. I got mine from Audible, but apparently you can get some kind of print copy with diagrams and such as well.

A sampling of interesting things I learned:

– People with major depressive disorder (one of several of my diagnoses) sleep differently from other people. Instead of sleeping more the way many people do when they’re depressed, they fall asleep like normal and wake super early (say, 4:00 am) feeling completely unrested but unable to go back to sleep. Their sleep patterns while actually asleep are disordered and unusual. Well…that’s about spot-on for me. I guess my upcoming sleep study – assuming I can get insurance approval – will show whether I’m disordered as well as unable to stay asleep with sleep aids!

– The evolution of hyenas is a fascinating subject. They are unlike other mammal species in so many ways. Look it up!

– Doctors should do more to test inflammation when they do regular blood exams. I’ve only had my inflammation level (CRP) tested once ever, but that level can affect cholesterol, blood pressure, and many other things that are tested for. (PS – Not talking about mythical fad diet inflammation here, but inflammation in the circulatory system and other parts of your body caused by certain hormones released when the stress response goes on too long. That’s over-simplified, but I didn’t want this to sound like I’m talking about something Mr Avocado might say. If you don’t know who that is, be thankful. Heh.)

– More tests need to be done for women. Too many tests are done on men only, but their results aren’t often accurate for female physiology. There’s been improvement in this area, but there’s still not enough known. Of course, I didn’t really need this lecture series to tell me that…

There you go. Just a tiny sampling. This is a great way to get a lot of good information. A lot of it is bad news for us, yes, but personally I believe that knowledge is power. When I know why things are going wrong inside me, I can more easily correct the circumstances that cause those things. Especially when it comes to psycho-social stress. It helps to me to understand why my metabolism when to hell a few years ago and why all my metabolic disorders appeared, and I can now make plans to reverse the process and improve my biological, hormonal, physiological selves. So I loved this lecture series and I’m so glad I took a chance in buying it. I definitely need to see what else Great Courses has to offer.

Posted in Wellness | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Readathon: Since We Fell, by Dennis Lehane

Posted on May 7, 2018 by Thistle

Years ago, Rachel was a globe-traveling journalist with a hot career and her life put together. After a PTSD-related mental collapse, she’s become agoraphobic and has lost most of the people she was once friends with. The big exception is her husband, Brian, who has spent several years helping her to ease out of her comfort zone. Then a chance encounter one afternoon changes everything, and Rachel is thrown back into paranoia and fear. Only now, her fear is justified.

I’ll say this: Since We Fell was a far more engaging and intriguing thriller than I’ve read in quite some time. Similar to Stillhouse Lake, it focused on the psychology of someone who has experienced trauma and is struggling to cope. For a big chunk of the book, I honestly wondered if this would end up being a traditional thriller at all. It took a long, long time to get to the chance encounter and the actual thriller part of the book (about 160 pages). And I liked the book better before it went off on that route. I was quite enjoying the whole psychological bit.

However, even once the thriller part popped up, I continued to enjoy the book…up until the 3/4 mark of the book. One little happening – not even really a twist – was just too far out for me to suspend disbelief, and everything that happened after that point felt contrived and out of character. I sped-read through the rest, trying to salvage something. I nearly abandoned the book, and probably would have if I hadn’t been reading it during Readathon. It wasn’t that it was bad, it’s just that I didn’t believe it anymore. I couldn’t buy into the book after it veered way off the tracks. And it never recovered from that, for me. In the end, the book was just okay.

Posted in 2018, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Sunday Coffee – Books I’m Looking Forward To

Posted on May 6, 2018 by Thistle

It’s been weird, having a year where I’m anticipating very few book releases. With so little coming out that I’m looking forward to, I’ve found myself reading a lot of books that I never would have normally picked up. In some cases, that’s been good – Eleanor Oliphant comes to mind – but in others, it’s just been time-fillers. Over the last month, I’ve tried to weed out the time-fillers because they’re just not worth it for me and I rarely enjoy them all the way through. But that means that my to-investigate list is now down to nothing and my to-read list (excluding future releases) is at bare minimums. Sigh. Thankfully, though, there are some books coming out over the next few months that I’m really looking forward to.

The Poppy War by RF Kuang – I read a long sample of this one and completely fell in love. It’s another fantasy set in a different culture than I’m used to, and I hope it’s just as good as the last one I read! It just released this week, and I’m waiting for whichever comes first – an Audible credit or my library hold to arrive!

Markswoman by Rati Mehrotra – This one released in January and my library still hasn’t ordered it. I’d read a tiny preview on Kindle but it wasn’t enough to decide whether or not to keep it on my list. Last week, I went to Barnes & Nobles to get a copy to preview. I read a bit more, and decided to just buy the book. Hopefully it lives up to its beginning!

Bright We Burn by Kiersten White – This third installment of the alternate Vlad the Impaler story is one of the few 2018 releases that I’ve been anticipating. It arrives in June!

Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett – I loved Bennett’s Divine Cities trilogy, so I’m hoping this will be just as good. He told me this one was releasing when I met him awhile back, and it sounded very interesting. Releases in August.

the Legion series by Brandon Sanderson – This is a series of novellas that is not Sanderson’s normal kind of books. I read the first novella years ago during a Readathon, but haven’t read the second. The third is supposed to release late in the summer, with the three novellas bundled into a single book, and I’m waiting until then to finish the series.

Interior Design Master Class by Carl Dellatore – I love learning about interior design. Jason bought me this book not long before the last Readathon. It’s huge and full of very detailed photos, with the print being secondary. My original plan was to read it during the ‘thon, but that didn’t work out because the print is TINY and my eyes were already too tired by the time I got to it. So I’ll read it sometime this summer instead.

Those are the big ones. Six books to look forward to for the next five months. I’m sure there will be others I read, of course, but again, I’m trying to stop with all the filler books. Which means that the blog might get a little quiet over the summer, or I might spend more time purely on health, wellness, kitties, or whatever else.

Posted in Book Talk | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Callback: Elantris

Posted on May 4, 2018 by Thistle

I first read Elantris by Brandon Sanderson back in 2012, and I’ll direct you to that link for a synopsis and/or my original review. It’s been nearly six years, and it was time to revisit the story and this world. Normally, I don’t write re-reviews, but I like this “callback” category when I have new thoughts and ideas about a book.

Let me start by saying that when I first read this book, I was relatively inexperienced in full-on fantasy as a genre. I’d only started reading Sanderson in March 2012, and Elantris was my seventh experience with the author in four months. I’d read a few other fantasy authors – most notably, Diana Wynne Jones – but I still had a lot of trouble with wrapping my head around new names, places, worlds, magic systems, creatures, etc. I felt the same about Elantris, though in the end, I declared the book a favorite of the year.

Now, it’s been six years. Despite this book initially being a favorite, it trickled from my mind very quickly. Certain parts of it remained memorable, as well as the general plot idea, but most disappeared completely. Hence the need for a reread. I chose to revisit the book on audio, read by Jack Garrett, a new-to-me narrator. For the record, he did a pretty good job. He sounded a bit too like a commercial announcer in places for my tastes, but mostly I enjoyed the production. I enjoyed the book even more, right from the very first minutes of listening.

The story begins immediately. One of the many storylines that entwine here is that of Prince Raoden, who wakes up to find himself taken by a local curse. He’s thrown into the city of Elantris, considered now to be a walking corpse. The king tells everyone that the prince has died rather than admit the shame of his son succumbing to the curse. When I say the story begins immediately, I mean that Prince Raoden wakes up cursed and finds himself bustled into Elantris by the middle of page two. Here’s the funny thing about that. My thoughts when I began the audiobook: “Wow, that starts fast. That’s probably the fastest I’ve ever seen Sanderson start a book.” Going back to revisit my original review: “The book was slow to start…After a hundred pages or so, though, it all came together and I found myself racing through it.” Ha! That’s the difference six years of reading fantasy makes.

There is a lot packed into these 600+ pages. Sanderson explores politics, religion vs faith, the effects of greed and hatred on a person’s soul, the struggles of women to be who they really are in a culture that expects them to be demure and frivolous, and the importance of study. One of the biggest themes is on the way our lives are changed by having a purpose.

The cursed Elantrians feel constant pain. Always hungry, every tiny cut or bruise acute because they never heal, not to mention the psychological trauma of being tossed into a prison city and separated from everyone and everything they loved. Some turn to violence, others to madness, others to despair. Raoden, however, has spent his life trying to figure out how to make the world a better place for his people, and he simply shifts focus. The Elantrians are now his people, and he attempts to drag them from a place of misery to one of purpose. Even if that purpose is simply to make shoes so that no one walks barefoot, or to plant seed corn so that there will be food to eat in a few months, the simple act of having a purpose helps to ease pain both physical and psychological. I love that so much.

So yes, I fell in love with this book all over again. Hopefully now, less of it will trickle away from me over time. And hopefully one day, Sanderson will return to this world and write more, as there is so much still left here to explore.

Posted in 2018, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Wellness Wednesday – Scale

Posted on May 2, 2018 by Thistle

Back when I was pregnant with my first son, Jason and I went down to our local Walgreens and bought two tubes of Chapstick. In reality, we bought one tube of Chapstick and a rotary bathroom scale, and somehow the clerk really messed up. We didn’t realize it until we got home. Anyway, this particular scale became a regular household fixture in 2000, and I weighed myself on it nearly every day for well over a decade. I went through my entire original weight loss journey on that scale. But halfway through said journey, I noticed something odd. The Wii Fit used to always be six pounds higher than my rotary scale, but suddenly it was more like four pounds higher. My weight continued to drop on the Wii, but not on my bathroom scale. There seemed to be a little bit of a reliability issue on the rotary scale – common for those, no?

(dirty and worn after so many years of use!)

I continued to use this scale anyway, for sentimental value. Then for Christmas in 2012, Jason gave me a digital scale that supposedly measured numbers like body fat percentage, and I began using both scales plus the Wii. (Do you remember how much I love data?) The new scale was identical to the Wii for weight, both about four pounds above the Chapstick scale. Still, I loved my Chapstick, and didn’t get rid of it until we moved to Boston in 2014. However, I found that the digital scale – which I didn’t use nearly as often as the rotary one – didn’t make a reliable daily scale. That was frustrating. I used it the whole year we were in Boston, but when we moved back to San Antonio, it broke in transit and I needed a new one. I bought and returned four scales in a row because they were grossly unreliable (you could step on it five times in a row and come out with five wildly different weights) before finally finding a decent scale from (ironically) Walgreens. This is what I’ve been using since then.

Of course, I don’t like my numbers to be inconsistent. When I first switched over to the new digital scale, I continued to keep my weights consistent with the rotary versions, so that my data wouldn’t reflect a big jump up when there wasn’t one. Unfortunately, since the Boston scale broke during the move and it took two months to find a scale that actually worked, I had no comparison numbers between the Boston scale and the new one. At the time, I decided to just assume they were the same (since the Wii showed about the same as the new scale). Rather than continuing to adjust the numbers to match up with the Chapstick scale, I just adjusted my original journey up to the new system. I know this is all ridiculous, but I really like my data to be consistent. Which made my recent predicament frustrating:

I noticed that my digital Walgreens scale was starting to act funny after almost three years of use (not to mention two cross-country moves). The little footies kept coming off, and even though they’re only a millimeter thick, the loss of one makes the weigh-in completely different, by plus/minus three pounds! Rather than waiting for the scale to become entirely broken, I decided to get a new one and compare the two so that I could adjust accordingly. Only it’s HARD to find a reliable digital scale! I bought one that was supposed to be good, only to have it vary wildly. It could be anywhere from 1-2 lbs off my previous scale, and could change by half a pound from one minute to the next. Sigh. Research time.

After scouring multiple credible review sites, two brands appeared to pop up most frequently for accuracy: EatSmart and Tanita. EatSmart also was noted over and over for excellent customer service, so I decided to go with them. I put in an Amazon order, and received the scale early last week. Immediately, I put the two scales to the test. Day after day, test after test, I found extremely reliable results on my weigh-ins. The numbers were slightly different, of course – I’d already known my Walgreens scale was becoming unreliable – and I was pleased to note that the new scale with about a pound under the old one. That makes an easy adjustment to my numbers for consistency’s sake. Yay!

As for body composition, my old Walgreens scale never did a very good job with that. It tells me, for instance, that my entire bone structure weighs only 5 lbs. Um, no. I only used the body comp function once a month as a general trend-tracker, and even then, I’ve mostly disregarded the numbers that it comes up with. I mean, when your body fat percentage can vary 5% from one day to the next, you know the measurement is highly inexact! Now, I know that these measurements are entirely estimates anyway, but I wanted something to be at least somewhat consistent for trend-tracking. The EatSmart scale is definitely that! I’ve measured in multiple days now, and it’s almost always around the same body fat percentage and other measurements. So in all ways, this scale ends up being a winner!

 

Posted in Wellness | Tagged | 10 Comments

April in Review

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Thistle

April is usually a difficult month for me. The weather changing from warm to hot, plus all the oak pollen that continues this month, typically makes for one depressed month. This year, I actually did really well in April. I only had one anxiety attack during the month, lasting about three days, but all the rest of the month was either okay to great. It was a very good month, all things told.

Goals
Crossed off a couple things from my list this month, mostly in going to new-to-me locations. It’s very hard for me to go outside my comfort zone, especially when it comes to new location and new places to drive to. But I visited the local meat market (one my family has literally intended to visit since we first moved here in 2006!), and also met my friend Nikki at a new-to-me restaurant in a new-to-me part of town (below). So I’m doing pretty well on that front.

Health
This is another area that was excellent for April. I exercised on 23 days, including 22 yoga sessions and 35 miles walked, for a total of almost 22 hours of exercise this month. I averaged over 10k steps per day, an increase from previous months. I continued to track my calories every day this month, and ended up with an overall deficit equal to 3.5 lbs. But here’s the real kicker: my weight has continued to drop all month. Not much – from Apr 1st to May 1st, the drop is only 1.2 lbs – but that number is very deceptive. I’ve been dropping steadily since early March. To give a scope, I’ve been taking both weekly and monthly weight averages since we first moved back to Texas, and the graphs have shown a sudden change in the way things are going for me. While my weight only technically dropped 1.2 lbs in April, averages tell a different story: My average April weight is 3.7 lbs less than my average March weight. Sometimes averages tell more than the individual daily weigh-ins!

This shows every week’s average from September until now. Each graph line represents one pound. From September through January, my averages stayed steady within a two-pound range (area by the red horizontal line). Then around the week when my grandmother passed away, my averages bumped up for a little over a month (blue circle), staying in a two-pound range but over my previous range. Starting in early March (at the vertical orange line), my average week weights have gone down every single week. They are below where they have been since we moved to Texas, and they’re starting to creep down to levels I haven’t seen in well over a year. Yay progress!

Books
My reading mojo has been really blah lately. I read five books this month, three of which were just okay. Of the two good ones, one was a reread of a favorite. So I’ve only had one new-to-me book that I’ve loved in the last six weeks or so. Clearly I need to spend less time finishing books that are just so-so for me, and more time looking for books that I’ll love! Favorite of the month (excluding the reread): I’ll Be Your Blue Sky by Marisa de los Santos.

Highlights of April
Always fun to look back on the best parts of the month! Especially when there are a lot of them. Things that called for celebration in April include:

  • Easter with my extended family
  • Atticus walking unexpectedly into our lives
  • the district-wide book sale
  • seeing A Wrinkle in Time in theatre finally
  • finally walking to my old neighborhood and back, something I’ve wanted to do since we moved back to San Antonio last August
  • breaking through a major barrier on the scale
  • finishing the first tier in our landscaping project
  • Trading Spaces starting up again (yay!)
  • being able to re-rescue Jojo when the situation at the Cat Cafe blew up
  • beginning the 100 Happy Days project
  • area rugs in our living room after having hard floors for nine months (whew!)
  • watching Atticus and Jojo bond with each other (below)
  • Jason finding my mom’s tatting that had been missing since we moved here in August
  • the new Harry Potter mystery game app
  • meeting up with my college friend Nikki for the first time in 12 years
  • Morrigan loved the college he visited this month (KU)
  • Morrigan starting driver’s ed

Coming up in May
Confession: May used to be a really good month for me. However, I experienced a lot of trauma in May back in 2014, then more in May 2015, and more in May 2017. Because I have complex-PTSD, my body tends to hold on to trauma in my subconscious. Every year, I re-experience the physical demands of that trauma even without knowing exactly why/what I’m experiencing. This results in lots of panic attacks, anxiety, depression, agoraphobia, and other manifestations, completely unrelated to the present time. In other words, my subconscious is a bitch. No matter how much I prepare myself for the upcoming blows, they are deep-rooted in my nervous system and I have no psychological control. Eventually, my body will process this trauma and let go of it, but that takes time, and I fully expect there to be some really rough moments in May.

I’m going to do my best to keep myself together. Counter anxiety with logic, refuse the urge to drown my triggered state with food or alcohol, spend a lot of time doing yoga to keep my nervous system as calm as possible, etc. Nearly all the trauma occurred in the first half of the month, so I just need to get through the first few weeks and then (hopefully) I’ll be okay. Just…send a little positive energy out in the world for me, if you can, to help me through the next month. I appreciate it!!

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Sunday Coffee – Readathon Wrap-up

Posted on April 29, 2018 by Thistle

I kinda failed this year’s Readathon. Heh. Things were all set up for me with the kids gone, but y’all, my reading mood is just not there these days! I started my day by trying and culling three books: Stalking Jack the Ripper, City of Masks, and Change Your Schedule Change Your Life. Then I finally started both an audiobook (Red Sister) and physical book (Since We Fell) that I enjoyed. Unfortunately, I just don’t think I’m cut out for Readathon anymore. As I sat around and read all day, I just started to get tired, and stressed about the stuff I wasn’t doing. So it was a good thing I got the text that gave me a break.

A college friend, Nicolette, was in town this weekend. She and I haven’t seen each other since 2006, and before that, we hadn’t seen each other since around with Morrigan was born. We’ve kept in contact mostly via social media, so I wasn’t going to miss this opportunity to get together with her for an early dinner. My Readathon essentially ended around 4pm. I spent three hours out with Nikki and her boyfriend, which was an amazing time. I posted the following picture – my favorite of the four we took – on one of my RaT updates, but I’ve got to post it again here, because it’s just awesome!

That dinner date made my night. Afterwards, I got home, finished Since We Fell (only had about 70 pages left anyway), and then greeted Jason and Morrigan as they finally made it home from Kansas. After that, I was just done for the evening. Instead of moving on to more books, I hung out with them, watched Trading Spaces, learned all about KU, and eventually went to bed.

Today, I’m stressed! I have to catch up on all the stuff I missed, because I really don’t like missing stuff, heh. I’ll be fine, but honestly, I think this may be my last Readathon. Perhaps next time I’ll participate in another capacity, hosting a mini-challenge or donating prizes or cheering others. I still want to be involved, but I think my reading brain has gone a route different from the way I used to do Readathon, and it’s time for me to accept that and let it go. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy myself, because I did – I love this event and the nostalgia that I have about it. I’m glad I signed up. I just think I’ll sign up differently next time!

Posted in Book Talk | Tagged , | 7 Comments

Readathon – Spring 2018

Posted on April 27, 2018 by Thistle

I wasn’t sure if I would sign up for Dewey’s 24-Hour Readathon this time around. My TBR pile is pretty low, my reading has been unmotivated, and Jason will be out of town taking Morrigan on a college visit. However, my mom decided to take the other two boys for the weekend, and I have the place to myself! And hey, why not? The setup doesn’t get much better than that!

So here goes! I signed up, and tomorrow I’ll begin at 7 am. (Or, well, whenever I wake up, as I plan to sleep in a bit if at all possible. Probably not, since cats.) I have a kind-of pile of possible reads (or possible culls), and some audiobooks queued up. No goals, no particular designs other than to go with the flow and enjoy what I can of the day. So that I don’t clog up your feeds, I’ll be posting all updates below on this post, again starting tomorrow morning!

Updates

7:00 am – Good morning! As anticipated, the cats got me up well in time to participate from the beginning of this thing. Heh. My reading pile today consists of a scattered assortment of books, mostly ones I have marked to investigate. Part of what my day will be all about is culling those which won’t work for me. I also have several audiobooks lined up, and that’s where I’ll be starting while I get ready for the day: Stalking Jack the Ripper by Kerri Maniscalco.

10:30 am – Off to a decent start this morning. So far I’ve culled three books from my list, and I’ve settled on a physical book (Since We Fell by Dennis Lehane) and an audiobook (Red Sister by Mark Lawrence). I’ve walked 2.3 miles this morning and spent the rest of my time with a cat or two on my lap (ha!). I’ve looked into a few mini-challenges and quite enjoy the spread of them this year. I particularly love that they’re all-day this time!

2:00 pm – Not much else to report. Been going back and forth between my audio and physical books. Quite sucked into the latter!

7:30 pm – Took a couple-hour break from reading to go meet up with a friend that I haven’t seen in 12 years! She just happened to be in town, and that took far more precedence over RaT. I’m back now, and since my last update, I’ve just continued making a bit of progress on my books. I’m almost done with my first physical book and hope to finish tonight. The audiobook is 44 hours long so I definitely won’t finish that one, haha! But I’m making progress.

9:30 pm – So…well, not much else happened in my Readathon. I got home from my evening out in time to finish Since We Fell right before Jason and Morrigan got home from Kansas. Then my eyes were pretty tired and my interior design book had tiny print, so I decided to watch Trading Spaces with Jason instead. Now I’m heading to bed. So nothing too impressive today – one finished book, about three hours of an audiobook, three books culled from my list, and a few mini-challenges that I played with. I hope the rest of you have a great reading night!

Running Stats

  • Books: 1 finished, 1 in progress, 3 culled
  • Pages: 450
  • Audio: 213 mins
  • Exercise: 47 mins
  • Mini-Challenges: 4

Mini-Challenges

Pre-Event Survey
1) What fine part of the world are you reading from today?
San Antonio, TX

2) Which book in your stack are you most looking forward to?
Interior Design Master Class (I’m such a dork)

3) Which snack are you most looking forward to?
S’mores!

4) Tell us a little something about yourself!
I’m a long-time blogger who has adapted this undertaking to fit all my various interests. 🙂

5) If you participated in the last read-a-thon, what’s one thing you’ll do different today? If this is your first read-a-thon, what are you most looking forward to?
It’s been a year since I participated, but mostly this time I’m going to concentrate on going with the flow. I have several other things happening today which will take me away from books, but I’m okay with that. No stress!

Anthology: I’d love to see an anthology about synesthesia and all the different ways it can be experienced!

Page Pen Pals: I would love to be pen pals with Sophie from Howl’s Moving Castle – she’s smart and funny and I admire so much how she grew into herself despite her curse!

Mid-Event Survey:
1. What are you reading right now? Since We Fell, Red Sister
2. How many books have you read so far? None completed…
3. What book are you most looking forward to for the second half of the Read-a-thon? I’m looking forward to finishing Since We Fell and maybe getting into my interior design book.
4. Have you had many interruptions? How did you deal with those? Tons! My biggest was spending a couple hours out with an old college friend, and I just totally said that was okay! Always nice to see old friends!
5. What surprises you most about the Read-a-thon, so far? I’ve done so many of these, not much surprises me these days I suppose?

*****
And finally, thank you to all the wonderful hosts, cheerleaders, volunteers, prize-donors, and all the rest of the people out there who make this event wonderful!!!!!

Posted in Book Talk | Tagged | 2 Comments

Wellness Wednesday – 100 Happy Days

Posted on April 25, 2018 by Thistle

Most people have heard about the 100 Happy Days project by now – an attempt to take a photo of one thing that makes you happy each day for 100 days. This is my third time participating in the challenge. This time, my goal is to help me with my one-word for 2018: Cultivate, as in to cultivate a life that I love. To cultivate happiness and contentment with my life as-is, even though I struggle with depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues.

So why do this challenge a third time? There are two parts to that:

Part 1: The Challenge
As I said, this is the third time I’ve done this thing. The first time was in 2014, when we were in the process of moving to Boston and my life had fallen apart completely. It became a touchstone in a difficult time. I repeated the challenge the next year, in the days we were preparing to move back to San Antonio amidst personal and family chaos. Both times, the process of taking happy photos for 100 days in a row helped to ground me. I was able to work through very tough times. I posted the photos both on Instagram and on Facebook, and while Instagram doesn’t work in albums, I have a dedicated album both on FB and on my home computer where I can see just those 100 photos as a snapshot of my life. Despite the pain in those months, there’s nostalgia there, and I credit that entirely to the 100 Happy Days Challenge.

Part 2: The Motivation
This time around, I’m not in quite so negative a space. Rather than a lifeline, I want to use this challenge as a tool to appreciate the good in my life. I’d been thinking about doing the challenge for awhile, but I chose my start date for a specific reason. On April 14th, I’d gone 38 days without drinking any alcohol or having any binges. I’ve said before – my reasons for cutting out alcohol weren’t to do with drinking too much, but because drinking tends to make me binge-eat, and that isn’t helping me with weight loss! In the 38 days of no-alcohol-no-binging, I lost just over six pounds, the first real loss I’ve seen in quite some time. My scale was moving steadily downwards. But then on April 15th, I had a couple glasses of wine, and ended up binging for the rest of the day, as I often do. My streak was broken, and my weight bumped up a few pounds as it always does. So I’m starting again. April 16th was Day 1, and I decided to correspond my goal of 100 days alcohol-and-binge-free with 100 days of happy photos. Wish me luck!

If you’d like to follow along, I’m posting once again on Facebook and Instagram.

Posted in Wellness | Tagged | 3 Comments

I’ll Be Your Blue Sky, by Marisa de los Santos

Posted on April 23, 2018 by Thistle

It’s the last few days before Clare’s wedding, and her misgivings about the whole thing have reached a crisis point. As she struggles through a panic attack, she’s comforted by an elderly stranger named Edith. Edith gives Clare the courage to call the whole thing off before making this mistake. Clare goes home feeling like a monster, no longer sure what to do with her life. Then Edith dies and for unknown reasons leaves Clare a house, a sanctuary where she can find herself in peace. Only Clare is not just finding herself – she’s discovering Edith and the mysteries of a long life of service and dangerous secrets.

So you know how I’ve been saying I needed to read something to break through the monotony of mixed-review books? Well, people, this is it! Marisa de los Santos always delivers, but even more, this is a book made up of old friends: Clare, Dev, Cornelia, Teo, the whole big sprawling family and almost-family of Love Walked In and Belong To Me. Though I hadn’t read either of those two books in nearly a decade, I remembered every single face and voice, and it was lovely to revisit them all as they’ve grown up and older.

Marisa de los Santos is a master writer. She weaves Edith’s story into Clare’s both in the present and in chapters told from Edith’s younger days. This isn’t the sort of mystery where you discover a culprit or event, but instead, you unravel the life of a stranger and the reasons two lives intersected. In the meantime, Clare deals with fallout from her broken engagement and rediscovers the true meaning of home and family. It’s this last one that gets to me personally – I think one of the reasons I love de los Santos so much is that she just gets family in the way that I’ve always related to it. Big, sprawling, messy, tangled, not-always-blood family. That network of support that should always be there even though it’s not for everyone, and the beauty that exists when you’ve had that cradle of love, even when it’s broken and messy and difficult. It’s perfect – not idealistic, but real and present in all the good and bad ways.

The characters, too, are real and messy and not always good. I love watching several of the characters struggle with demons that are trying to lead them into anger, violence, and menace, and how they are trying so hard to channel that anger into good. It doesn’t always work, and it’s not always enough – that’s real. Heartbreaking, but real.

This is just what I needed right now. I have a feeling I’ll be going back to read through those older books again soon.

Notes: First, you don’t need to read the older books to follow this one. It’s completely standalone. Second, a trigger warning: This book heavily discusses physical and verbal spousal abuse.

Posted in 2018, Adult, Prose | Tagged , | 1 Comment