Inconceivably 40…or “oh crap, I’m there."

One way to make a severe change in your life is to change what you spend your money on and how much of your money you spend.  I will be perfectly honest, I spend as much and sometimes more than my family earns.  (i.e. I am in debt)  I have been reading a great deal of blogs about people who are living a more frugal existence and seem to be pretty happy about it.  The only down side to their story is that they are all “after”  pictures.

I am the before photo.  Since like most changes in my life, this is not going to be an easy one to tackle.  I am going to start by dropping just one expensive and unnecessary item from my budget each week.  So since this is Week One (3/17 to 3/23), I am going to start with our biggest drain and that is EATING OUT.   This is not the first time I have attempted to change this one thing in my life and budget.  However, I think this is a great place to start.  So here it goes…no eating out for one whole week.  My waistline and my wallet will thank me.

“I’m back.” says it all. I have definitely been away a long time but I have found a new purpose in life along the way. De-cluttering, downsizing, and organizing my life has become my new mantras.

The man of my dreams, my husband, and I are still where we were since we saw you last with one exception. We are currently trying to move from a house of about 1,350 square feet into a RV that has about 341 square feet. Yes, this is by choice. Due to my husbands health issues, we are trying to find a way to transition from our old “normal” to what will become our new “normal” and try not to lose our minds in the process. One way I am going to tackle this Herculean task is to declutter my life.

Like most people in my age range, I have way more possessions than I can keep track of on a daily basis. How this happened, I have no idea. Well, that is not completely true. I love shopping and I am a self proclaimed thrift store junkie. Though it has been a barrel of laughs collecting everything in my life, it has led to more “stuff” and less “life”.  It is time to reverse this process.  I am not going to start behaving like some hemp wearing, tree hugging, hairy legged harpie that renounces all her worldly possessions and go live on a mountain side with a herd of goats.  I am going to try to have a more simple, laid back life with the things I really need, want, and simply can’t live without.  So, since every journey in life starts with a single step (and a few face plants)…here I go.

Today has been marked with flowers, gifts and enough chocolate to drown a small country.  I have never really had a romantic spirit. (well, not until I met my husband)  Now I am as sappy as the rest of the world appears to be.  I was always one of those aloof and distant people.  Any affection in my past, except the love for my child, I had to fake.  Sad, huh?  Not really when you hear the rest of the story….

I met my husband a few years ago by complete accident.  I haven’t left his side since.  I follow him around like a puppy dog and if you knew what a fantastic butt he had you would realize that the view has been pretty awesome.  But what I feel for him transcends anything that I have ever felt or even heard of in fairy tales.

I admire him.  He is strong without being harsh or cruel.  He is gentle and kind without being weak,  intelligent without arrogance and beautiful inside and out without being vain.  He is dangerous for the heart in so many ways.  He is all I want to be and everything I am not.  I love our differences and I love him because he doesn’t even see them.

I could be wiped from existence tomorrow and go with a smile on my face.  So, for today and forever I want him to know that he has been the one thing I know I did right.  So, yes, I took another shot in the butt this year from cupid’s arrow and I just wanted to say thanks to that chubby little cherub.  See ya again next year.

Signed,

Your Most Grateful Victim

“…no excuses, no apologies”, Julia Child in credited with saying this about cooking.  I love it.  I wish I could live life under these laws.  It would be so freeing.  I would quit feeling the need to apologize to my friends when I am not able to be at their beck and call,  quit making excuses to my parents why I am not living my life under their impossible expectations and be able to accept failure with no excuses and no apologies especially to myself.

I have been torturing myself over how to restart my life over forty.  You know, get control of the spiraling hole which has become my life and take back absolute control.  Maybe that’s it.   I am not in control.  Maybe that is whats freaking me out so much lately.  I feel I have no control over what is happening in my life, my family and my body.  Maybe I should get comfortable with the fact I don’t have control and control only what is within my power and quit making the excuses and apologies to anyone including me.

I would love to be perfect.  I am so not.  I have always dreamed of being like Barbara Billingsley with a degree in astro physics who splits her time between teaching at Harvard, rescuing puppies and reading to the elderly.  My hopes are high aren’t they?  Maybe I need to set my goals at a more obtainable level for right now.

1.  I have got to get the training I require in my new chosen field.

2.  I have got to start eating healthier.  I have a confession.  I am a stress eater.  I eat in times of great stress and lately boy have I been eating well.  Yeah, …eating well enough for a herd of water buffalo.

3.  I have got to start being more physical.  I have been pretty much a couch potato (with a glandular problem)  I love sleep.  Being unconscious appeals to me.  Nobody bothers you, you are never fat and you are always the person you thought you would be when you were in high school.  All this inactivity is progressively making all of this stress worse.  I need this as an outlet.

I have tried a couple of sites so far to help with the eating and exercise issues.  So far I haven’t met anyone who wants to motivate me or be my support system at all but they are all about me being their cheerleader.  Sad, how I always take the role as the ultimate care giver.  If I don’t learn to start letting people be there for me and not just being there for them.  I am going to find myself as one empty cup with nothing left to offer anyone.  You know that empty little cup that everyone came by and drank from and because I don’t know how to fill myself up I end up empty.  What an image.

I have never lived in Arizona but I will be very shortly.  I thought what a better way to get to know the desert cities than to make a bucket list.  You know, that list of things you have to do in the “desert cities” before I kick the bucket.

Well, let’s see I have already stood at the corner of Winslow Arizona.  Cool, huh?  I know jealousy abounds when I tell people that story.  🙂

So next on the list would be…

2.  Buy my very own golf cart with Super Swampers.  I know it sounds weird but Yuma, Arizona’s population swells to almost twice it’s size in the winter when all the snow bunnies come from the North bringing with them the caravan of RVs.  What goes in the back of a retires Coachman?  You guessed it, a golf cart.  Since I am not part of the AARP generation at least not this year.  I will have to have my very own golf cart with Super Swampers (huge frickin’ tires)  it’s a status thing amongst old people.

I have to protect my rep when I roll up for that senior dinner buffet at 4pm.  They will all be green with envy or maybe it is from the oxygen tanks.  Either way…they’ll be green.

Well, it won’t be long before I will have to put my house on the rental market and move across the country.  That means all of the six million projects that I have left undone are coming back to haunt me.

We did build a half bath on the house which my back side has been enjoying greatly.  No more waiting for what use to be the only potty in the house.  It is so nice and turned out to be one of the cutest bathrooms you have ever seen.

But now we have to tile the kitchen countertops, tile the kitchen floor, tear down the old shed and put up a new one (in a different location), landscape the yard, paint the house, replace half the windows, repaint the inside and about sixty million other things.  It’s feels like I am being pecked to death by a duck (with roid rage).  Basically, when I am finished it will be a brand new house.  It is beginning to look like a HGTV special.  OK…maybe the before picture but I am trying.

Why is it that I never have anyone begging to come home with me  to fix my house?  I have stood in the isle at the home improvement store looking desperate and sad like a shelter pup but still no takers.  I would probably have to crawl naked over broken glass to get one of those TV shows here but I am ten seconds from being in the clothes God gave me.  At this point, I will try anything.

So until next blog…May all your 2×4’s be straight, your roof be leak proof,  your drywall be dry…..and for Pete’s sake if you run into the HGTV guys, tell them I am looking for them.

It’s Saturday and I actually rolled out of bed at 5:30am this morning.  I dragged myself into the bathroom and just out of sheer morbid curiosity, I weighed myself.  Mind you, I am well aware I will not always lose at this rate but I have dropped 4.2 pounds.  I didn’t increase my water intake and flush my body.  I didn’t really change much at all of my normal routine.  I have been eating a tremendous amount of vegetables in the last 2 days.  So go veggies!  (My “Green Grit” drink will improve when I buy a juicer today.)  So I am 4.2 pounds closer to my six-pack. 

You know it never ceases to amaze me that most men I know can skip breakfast and drop a “Back Street Boy” (about 90 pounds) but I have to exercise, cram in veggies and donate an organ to drop a pound.  Now these 4 pounds are a give-me, I know, but I’ll take them anyway they come off.

I am not like most people.  Even though I get excited about losing weight.  I care more about my body fat percentage.  That is the real factor of how much you weigh.  Everyone in my family is built like a body builder with broad shoulders, substantial hips and a big chest.  I am no different.  In fact, I have always enjoyed looking more like Mae West than Kate Moss.   Ask any guy who likes fast cars, curves are always more fun.

I am sick of diets.  Low carb, high protein, high fiber and any combination there of.  I am absolutely ill from all the expert advice out there.  There is so much advice out there that I think it has become white noise.  I am tired of searching for Mrs. Good-Body in pills, diets and protein shakes.  Yuck. 

I am a lover of food.  I think the new term they use is “Foodie”.  That’s me! Ever since I was a small child, I was brought up with the finest foods that a multitude of European countries had to offer.  I loved every butter filled bite.  Now that I am forty (a lot of throat clearing here), the midlife spread in setting in a bit early for my taste.  Honestly, I have met slugs with more energy.

My husband (bless his delusional heart) thinks I am perfect just as I am which is great.  I, on the other hand, would like to have more energy.  So, I am saying screw diets and other four letter words.  I am going to make an honest attempt to find the fountain of nutritional youth.  You know, I am looking for anti wrinkle cream in a juice jar or some other kind of unicorn fantasy like that.   We start tomorrow with a detoxifing drink we will call “Green Grit”.  It is a Dr. Oz suggestion and the ingredients are as follows:

2 cups spinach

1 head of celery (but not for me I find celery repulsive)

1/2 or 1 tsp ginger root

1 bunch of parsley

2 apples chopped

juice of 1 lime & 1 lemon

Puree for 30 seconds or until smooth.  Serves 3 to 4 servings

So I will shop tomorrow morning and spend my afternoon “frappe-ing” my brains out.  The detox effect is supposed to be very quick.  We shall see.  Until tomorrow…”Go Green”..ish!

I give up on cell phones!  As of tomorrow, I am going with the great Native American tradition of smoke signals.  It has to be less frustrating then having to spend hours on the phone trying to unscrew some cell phone issue.  After speaking to the people from this company, can I just say this, really how many Bob’s and Sue’s can there be in India.