Month: September 2021

Friday Five Things 9/24

~ kofriedery ~ Leave a comment

“Not what we have but what we enjoy constitutes our abundance.” – Jean Antoine Petit-Senn

First of all, this has been one of those weeks where I’ve lost track of what day it is…pretty much every day. I only knew today because my phone alarm went off to remind me to take the trash out to the curb for pickup! Anyway, it’s been a pretty good week and, like usual, I’m happy to be here sharing my thoughts with you.

  1. Freedom to adjust priorities. If there was a theme to this week it would be adjusting priorities. I’ve had a lot of things come up that have gotten in the way of my writing or my gardening or any number of other things on my weekly to-do list. But I remember someone once making the comment that we should change our perspectives from “I don’t have time to do xyz” to “Xyz isn’t a priority for me right now.” And to see how that feels. For example, this week writing has not been a priority and I’m okay with that. This month putting money into the “vacation” bucket hasn’t been a priority because of various other things and I’m okay with that. What doesn’t feel okay is to say that my health isn’t a priority. Or my family isn’t a priority. Or taking care of my animals isn’t a priority. So things had to adjust and rearrange this week and guess what…probably next week my priorities will look a little different!
  2. Getting outside every day. Speaking of priorities! I did not make getting outside every day a priority in August and I think I suffered for it. While I haven’t been able to hike as much recently as I’d prefer, I have been taking the dog on daily walks around the neighborhood and I think we are both benefiting from the routine of it. Getting outside before I dive into whatever else needs to be done helps me clear my mind and start things off on the right foot.
  3. Meditation. Something else that I decided to make a priority this week was doing short little meditations when I started to feel like things were going off the rails. Anywhere from two to five minutes of focusing on my breathing and clearing my mind. I do a visualization of a big black hole in front of me and any thought that comes into my mind while I’m meditating gets thrown into the black hole. Need to put away laundry? Not now, into the black hole it goes. Worried that I had too much sugar last night? Who cares, into the black hole. Getting overwhelmed with my ambitious writing goals? BLACK HOLE IT!!!! Somehow it just works for me, once something goes into the black hole it doesn’t come back until the meditation is finished. Also, I’m always amazed at how many thoughts can pop into my head in the span of two minutes!!
  4. Tackling home projects. Today I installed a new utility sink in our laundry room all by myself! Well…Tyler helped me troubleshoot an issue and even ran out to the hardware store to grab the right connection to solve the problem. But I was the one who put everything together from assembling to sink to connecting the water and the drain. I plumbed! I also understand why plumbers charge so much money! But I did it and now I have a functioning sink. Which (hopefully means) no more handwashing large items in the bathtub. Or rinsing out paint brushes in my bathroom! Love that accomplished feeling!
  5. Matt Amodio. If you watch Jeopardy, you know that Matt is having an awesome run of it right now! I don’t know what it is, but I’m enjoying watching him so much. He seems really humble and down to earth. I also feel like he is genuinely surprised and delighted each time he wins. Go Matt Go!!

Friday Five Things 9/17

~ kofriedery ~ Leave a comment

“Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.” – Napoleon Hill

Last night I learned that an old coworker and dear friend died this week after a long battle with cancer. She was the kindest and sweetest soul, but could also be incredibly feisty. I learned a lot about what it means to set personal boundaries and advocate for myself at work from her. I hadn’t seen her or spoken to her in a few years but I miss her like it was just yesterday that we were having dinner together. Squeeze your loved ones tight and remind them you love them. And in the midst of it all, don’t forget to find joy also.

  1. Drinks with a friend. This week I was running errands south of Denver and decided to see if a friend was available to grab a drink. Then what started as a planned one hour happy hour turned into almost four hours of sharing, reminiscing, and laughing. It was very much needed for my sanity! I spend most of my time alone at home talking to the cats and dog, so it was good to be around people.
  2. Applying for jobs. I have been thinking about getting back to work part-time for a few months and this week I finally pulled the trigger on applying to a couple! TBD if anything works out, but it feels good to be acting on it. Would love to start working with people and feeling like I’m contributing to society again.
  3. Cooler weather. It’s finally feeling (a little bit) like fall! The afternoons are still pretty hot, but the mornings are cool enough to wear a jacket. This morning I had an early appointment for my car and I had to pull a fleece on over my t-shirt! No leaves changing around me yet, but I think next week I’ll get some mums for my front stoop.
  4. Football! I know I mentioned going to a college football game a couple weeks ago, but I’m also so happy that now my Saturdays and Sundays are full of the familiar sounds of football on the tv. It’s rare that I sit still and just watch a whole game, but I love having it on in the background while I’m writing or cleaning or cooking. It’s a cozy and comforting sound to me.
  5. Booksmart. I know I’m a couple years late to the party on this one, but I recently watched the movie Booksmart and omg, I loved it. It is rated R with a lot of F-bombs and sex-references and drug use…but it was really a heartwarming movie about two best friends just trying to have fun and support each other! The premise is that these two girls only focused on schoolwork and didn’t have any “fun” but then they realize they could have been doing both and try to cram four years worth of fun into the night before high school graduation. It was really reminiscent of Can’t Hardly Wait in a way. I laughed, I cringed, and I cried.

Friday Five Things 9/10

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“Courage is very important. Like a muscle, it is strengthened by use.” – Ruth Gordon

Summer is not leaving without a fight here in Colorado! Last year at this time we were getting snow and this year we are getting temps in the 90s. Hopefully things get more fall-like soon…I’m ready for mums and pumpkins! Although, I finally decided not to spend money on pumpkins for my porch this year because every year the squirrels make quick work of destroying them. Anyway, hope everyone is having a wonderful September so far, wherever you are!

  1. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Tyler and I went to see this movie earlier this week and WOW it completely exceeded my already high expectations. It was such a great mix of a classic superhero movie and a classic martial arts movie, with lots of fun supernatural elements thrown in. I loved the story, loved the characters, and just had a lot of fun watching the movie. Side note: with our schedules we were able to go early afternoon on a Tuesday so the theater was practically empty. I think there were five other people there? I’m not sure I would have felt comfortable going to the theater during normal busy hours and being in a crowded room with stranger for a couple hours…
  2. Peanut Butter M&Ms. I don’t have candy very often, if I’m going to have a sweet treat it’s more likely to be ice cream or cookies. But Tyler picked up some candy for the movie and guys…I had forgotten how good those little suckers are! You know how sometimes when you haven’t had something for awhile it doesn’t quite live up to your memory of how good it was? Not the case with peanut butter m&ms. Seriously. Brought so much joy to my mouth.
  3. Hiking! Bama and I got back on the hiking train this week! After basically not hiking at all during August due to the heat and smoky air, we loaded up and drove a bit into the mountains to find a nice shady trail on Wednesday. It was about 3 miles round trip, which is a little longer than Bama prefers to hike with me, but she did it without too much struggle. I’ll probably leave her at home and try for something slightly longer next week, but so glad to have a few miles under my belt already this month.
  4. Long overdue dentist appointment. No, going to the dentist does not bring me joy. However, finally checking off “go to the dentist” from my to do list does! Like many others I’ve talked to, the dentist was one of the first regular doctors appointments to get bumped to the bottom of the list during the pandemic. In the early days, the office was closed. Then they opened, but the thought of going somewhere to sit with my mouth wide open for an hour sounded…risky. And then eventually I just started avoiding it because it had been so long and I knew it wasn’t going to be an easy appointment. Yesterday morning I sat down to journal and wrote down “Things are not as scary in real life as they are in my head.” And then I repeated that to myself a few times while I was getting my teeth looked at. And you know what? It’s true! It wasn’t a perfect appointment, I have to go back in a few months to get some things checked out and worked on, but nothing major that can’t be fixed. Not as scary in real life as it was in my head.
  5. Finished my Late-Summer Cleaning list. After chipping away at a it for a few weeks, I finished everything that was on my deep cleaning list for the house! Of course, between the two cats and the dog they are doing their best to undo my hard work, but the house really does feel cleaner and brighter.

August Book Report

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“The person who deserves most pity is a lonesome one on a rainy day who doesn’t know how to read.” – Benjamin Franklin

While August didn’t give me many (or any) rainy days for reading, it did give me lots of days where it was too hot to do much else but sit still inside. I was able to finish five books this month! One I had started much earlier, but I’ll still count it as five books read in August. This will also be the last time you’ll see Brandon Sanderson on the reading list for awhile. Although he has several other books, I’m going to explore some other series while I wait for the next of the Stormlight Archives to be published. Enjoy my thoughts and happy reading!

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer – I’ve been listening to this book for a couple months actually, usually when I’m doing chores around the house or on a walk with the dog. I can’t remember exactly how I can across this book, but I really enjoyed listening to it in small snippets. It’s not quite gripping enough to listen to for hours, but nice little 30 or 45 minute chunks worked for me. To be honest, I’m not sure I’d have liked reading it as much as I liked listening. The author herself narrates and she has a beautiful soothing voice. Kimmerer is a native Potawatomi woman who works as a biology professor in upstate New York. The book is part memoir, part ecology activism, and part cultural history. She tells the story of growing up apart from her Potawatomi culture and the story of her rediscovery later in life. She also very eloquently conveys the connection she feels to the land through her cultural ties and mythologies along with her academic training in biology. At one point she explains the tenets of the honorable harvest. The ones that stuck out to me the most and I think will stay with me are to never take the first one you see, as it may be the last one; take only what you need and only what is given; take no more than half; and give in reciprocity for what has been given.

Dawnshard by Brandon Sanderson – This (relatively) short novella fits into the one year gap between Oathbringer and Rhythm of War in the Stormlight Archive series. While it doesn’t seem like it moved the larger story forward much, it helped in the world building of mythology for the story. It was a pretty quick read and I enjoyed it, but it isn’t a necessary inclusion if you are interested in getting into the series. In fact, there was another novella that took place earlier in the timeline that I opted to skip and I don’t think I missed much because of it. In Dawshard, one of the characters we met during interludes of an earlier book opts to go on a voyage to try and save her pet/companion. Their trip comes up against many obstacles before they determine someone is deliberately trying to stop it from happening. Eventually they get to their destination and find much more than they bargained for.

Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson – This is the fourth novel installment of The Stormlight Archive and it was just as good as the last three! Unfortunately, this is the most recently published so it’s as far as I can go with this series for the time being. We see our characters split up into different groupings to achieve various objectives. Kaladin is put through grueling tests yet again, we learn a lot more about the nature of the tower, and Shallan and Adolin go on a journey in Shadesmar. While overall I really enjoyed the book, a couple of the characters seem to take a very long time to overcome their inner demons. I get that things aren’t nice and neat when it comes to addressing inner darkness and mental health issues in the real world, but I do think dragging them out for too long can wreck havoc on the pacing of a good novel. However, I’m happy to forgive Sanderson that one sin when the rest of the story marches along very nicely.

The Push by Ashley Audrain – Whew! This book was…complicated. I had read a review of this that called out the heaviness of the topics. Post-partum depression, loss of a child, divorce, mental illness, etc… And it was a lot at times. The story follow a young mom who struggles to bond with her first born daughter and then finds her second born, a son, incredibly easy to connect to. A terrible tragedy happens that rips the family apart and causes all kinds of suspicion and accusations. I would 100% NOT recommend this to any of my young mom friends!!! I felt like this book was 80% of the way to being perfect. The main character narrates much of the story through 2nd person perspective as she writes her side of the story to her ex-husband. There was such a great opportunity to make her more of an unreliable narrator, but even when she starts doing some crazy strange stuff, I never found myself not believing her. Which made the “twist” ending not seem very twisty to me. So…I don’t know. I don’t think I’d recommend it.

The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins – Now this one! 100% enjoyed reading. It’s a retelling of Jane Eyre, kind of. You’ll recognize the trope of a young woman hard on her luck who catches the eye of an older and richer widower. But things aren’t what they seem and a lot of twists and interesting past details are uncovered throughout the book. The ending irked me a tiny bit, I just felt that the premise wasn’t built on a super firm foundation, but other than that I found this book very readable. I think I finished it in just a couple days actually. Would recommend to anyone looking for a kind of romantic, kind of thriller-ish book!

Friday Five Things 9/3

~ kofriedery ~ Leave a comment

“The world always seems brighter when you’ve just made something that wasn’t there before.” -Neil Gaiman

Sometimes I think of myself as not very artistic. Like, only someone who makes visual art is truly creative. But then I remember this quote from Neil Gaiman and remember that every time I sit down and write, I’m making something that wasn’t there before. And it does make the world feel a little brighter when I’m done.

  1. It’s finally September! I am so glad that August is in the rear view mirror and we are marching on towards autumn! While chatting with a friend this week I commented how January, February, and August are always so difficult for me. I think it’s because while January and February are often too cold for me to spend significant time outside…August is usually too hot! So I am very much looking forward to the cooler weather on the horizon.
  2. The ability to rest when needed. Earlier this year I had my first episode of vertigo. It was scary and unexpected and frustrating. Earlier this week I had a second episode. Let me tell you, there is nothing fun about waking up and rolling over as usual, only for the world to start spinning uncontrollably. Luckily this time I understood what was happening and what would help me. I also gave myself permission to rest and recover. While I haven’t had any spinning the past couple days, I still haven’t felt 100% stable yet. So I’m continuing to take it easy as needed, even if it means delaying the completion of my deep cleaning this week! But I figure bending over to wipe down all my baseboards isn’t the best activity for my equilibrium.
  3. DIY Haircut. Okay, hear me out. I’ve been giving myself at home haircuts for the past year, just a couple inches or less every few months. And because I wear my hair curly it isn’t the end of the world if things are completely even. But I feel like I really nailed it this week! So I’m happy to look a little less scraggly and frizzy.
  4. Mike Richard ousted as Jeopardy EP. A few weeks ago I mentioned being happy that Mike Richards had stepped down from the role of the new host of Jeopardy. But I had resigned myself to the fact that he would remain executive producer, especially after hearing the Sony execs planned to send him to sensitivity training. It seemed like such a dated and disappointing move that I figured they wouldn’t be swayed further. BUT THEN this week they straight up fired him from his job. Guys, it is so gratifying as a Jeopardy fan to see Sony take it seriously that this guy has damaged their credibility. And it is so gratifying as a woman who has experienced blatant misogyny in the workplace to see someone truly be held accountable for their toxic behavior. I truly think Jeopardy will be better for it.
  5. Finding the right thing at the right price. While I’ve been trying to buy less and spend less, there are a few house projects that are still on the table for purchases. One of these is making our laundry room more functional. After we moved in, we took out the utility sink to reseal the floor in the laundry/utility/mud room. Then it just never made it back inside. And then I got a standing drying rack that took up the space where the sink used to be, but I really only ever use the top part of the drying rack. Anyway…I reorganized the laundry room a couple weeks ago and decided I want to get a new utility sink which means I needed a new drying rack solution. This week at Costco I found the perfect little rack/shelf with hooks underneath it! It was less than $15 and will fit perfectly over the space where the sink will go. Now we just need to find the right sink at the right price…