August 2018

What I’m Grateful For: Sleep – and Insomnia (again) If you tally it all up…. we spend about a third of our lives asleep (or at least we are supposed to, if we get our ‘recommended’ eight hours a night!). That’s a lot of life, when you stop to think about it. Sleep didn’t come easy for me as a child. I had a strange, very high fever around the age of 5 and had several

This is one of those upside-down gratitudes – an exercise I try to undertake whenever I catch myself thinking how unhappy I am about something. This week, it’s smoky. Really smoky. From wildfires – lots of them. Like most of the west, Washington State seems to be on fire this summer, especially after a spate of dry lightning started 20-some fires yesterday morning. Then later yesterday afternoon, a hay baler caught fire (rumor

What I’m Grateful For: The Carrot AND the Stick I was reading a little bit on “flow” the other day – you know, that recently popular buzz-word that means the state where you kind of lose yourself and you are incredibly productive and massively engaged and the rest of the world kind of floats away. It’s a state I love but it’s not easy to just replicate any old time you want to, which

What I'm Grateful For: What Goes Down, Goes Back Up So I'm no longer a "spring chicken" - which is a nice way of saying I'm kinda old. I don't FEEL old, not one bit. But I am noticing a few things that are markedly different now from my "younger days." Yeah, there's the bits and bobs that are not quite as perky or bouncy or resilient. There's my darn trick knee, a torn ACL

What I’m Grateful For: Horses (aka, “Hard Work”) Right now I’m sitting in my car, on my laptop, hooked up to my hotspot, writing this while I watch my youngest warming up her new horse, Theo (short for Prometheus – yes, she IS her mother’s daughter.) It’s hot and dusty but the sun just sank beneath the ridge and a slightly cooler breeze is just now rolling off the dry hillside. In short, it’s