sun day

today was super cold.  like -20 degrees celsius cold.  cold, cold, cold....but sunny.  and pretty.  and blue, blue skies.

eli has been working away at finishing the doctrine and covenants and pearl of great price {his goal for this year}.  last year he finished the book of mormon.  we sat at the fireplace after church and read for an hour and half.  diligent dude.  my inspirational thought for today comes from the doctrine and covenants.  it totally stood out to me.  i hope i am not that inhabitant....

**d&c 68:31


now, i the lord, am not well pleased with the inhabitants of zion, for there are idlers among them; and their children are also growing up in wickedness; they also seek not earnestly the riches of eternity, but their eyes are full of greediness.  

sewing, sewing, sewing

my halloween quilt is coming along.  i have had to fussy cut a lot of the fabric.  look at those spinsters knitting, i wonder what they are talking about...

**examine your measuring standards


internal measuring standards -- idiosyncratic to you -- allow you to assess others' behaviour, opinions, values and ideas.  however, your standards probably do not measure what is real at all -- they reflect only what you know, what you've experienced, what you're comfortable with.  when others don't fit your measurements, as perceived through your unique and imperfect lenses, you may find that you label and judge them as inadequate, bad, sick, or sinful.  in fact, you can impair your own judgments by assuming you know why someone behaves in a certain way.  this is where you need to pause, stop making assumptions, and ask.  the explanation might surprise you.  consider dan p. graylings account of a woman who was surprised by the explanation for one young man's seemingly arrogant behaviour as he sat across from her at an airport restaurant table.  


the woman, who had just purchased a sack of cookies at the airport, sat reading a newspaper and eating her cookies while waiting for her flight.  she became aware of something rustling at her table and looked up to see a neatly dressed young man helping himself to her cookies.  reluctant to make a scene, she leaned over and took a cookie herself.  the young man in turn took another cookie, until the two had shared all but one cookie.  by this time, the woman was fuming.  then the young man took the last cookie, broke it in two, pushed half across to the woman, ate the other half, and left.  later, still angry with the young man, the woman opened her purse to retrieve her boarding ticket and was confronted by her own bag of cookies.  she had been eating his.  


negative judgments can be dangerous.  most often, they say more about our own deficiencies than those of others.  and sometimes we can get into big trouble {complicating our stress} when our judgments come back to haunt us and we have to listen to someone repeat word for word what we shouldn't have said.  it appears, as someone once astutely offered, "nothing is opened by mistake more than the mouth."

easy as it goes

look at these two.  living the cushy life getting pushed around costco, enjoying crackers and samples from the old ladies.  could life get any better than this?  they must be taking my next tidbit to heart...

**go with the flow

to really "go with the flow" requires graceful management of disappointments.  disappointment attends the human condition.  you hope and dream, but inevitably you can't escape disappointment.  within reason, of course, expectations are functional, even vital, providing security and ability to make future plans.  but how easily you modify or surrender expectations drastically affects your coping ability.  not life, but how much you expect of life is what generates high stress.  you may often agitate yourself when expectations don't materialize.  as you know, however, the world doesn't turn on your bidding;  only by hanging loose can you avoid such upset.  make "going with the flow" a lifetime endeavour.  relax.  spend more time just doing, enjoying, being, and loving and less time evaluating, assessing, analyzing, and interpreting.  essentially, at any one moment, you decided whether to enjoy life.  you can choose views that are encouraging, energizing, and enhancing or ones that are discouraging, devaluing, and devastating.  you can "go with the flow" or not.  fortunately, the choice is yours.

sewing

last night i decided to bust out my sewing machine.  we bought a new car the other day, it has a built-in entertainment system.  the 2 headphones that came with it were loose in the back seat and bugging me.  how am i going to keep these things clean, off the floor and safe?  i decided to make a bag for them so they were together and out of the way.  i found a easy pattern here and went to town.  after making that, i decided to start cutting into the halloween fabric that i had been collecting and hoarding for the last year. what the heck right?  get that halloween quilt going!  what am i waiting for?  i love fabric.  i just love it.  sewing is such a good hobby.  anybody can do it.  try it, you'll like it.

reframe your troubles.


cultivate the art of reframing or redefining troubles so they are no longer problematic.  simply call your troubles "experiences" and remember that every experience helps you grow.  life's lessons are abundant, just waiting to happen, and experience is that wonderful vehicle that provides them.  experience is a handy thing, helping you learn how to predict your next mistake.  from experience, you can also recognize a mistake every time you repeat it and know when to cringe. and one thing about experience:  if you don't have any, you're likely to get a lot.  even in the midst of frustrations and disappointments, if you think about experiences and troubles as being really, really, good for you, you can sustain a sense of contentment.  life is hard, and you do have to work at it.  but if you can face difficulties or trying tasks with peace in your hearts, you can know something of happiness.  in this respect, author william lyon phelps taught:  "if happiness truly consisted in physical ease and freedom from care, then the happiest individual would be neither a man nor a woman; it would be, i think, an american cow."

howdy

found her napping the other day...

well, i have been an absent.

halloween has passed.  we were simon and garfunkel, eli was scooby doo and ida was a hot pink metallic super girl.  they had fun trick or treating.  we went to an adult halloween party and everybody's costumes were primo.  funny thing, everyone thought cj was gallagher.  i guess he scored and did double duty on the halloween costume.  he should have had a watermelon and sledge hammer under one arm and his guitar under the other.

life is stressful.  the other day, sitting in the bathroom.... i found a goofy looking book stashed under the sink.  a frazzled lady with storm clouds above her head, a broken umbrella, groceries falling out of a ripped bag standing in a puddle was on the cover.  i'm not going to tell you the title {it was that cheesy} but the subtitle was "Strategies for Simplifying Life".  the book was an easy read, written in point form.  i feel bad about ignoring the blog over the last month or so.  just not sure what to say or how to inspire.  so, here you go, i am going to include snippets from the book everyday.  it's good info, good to think about, good to implement, good to share.  enjoy.

**quit complaining.


little causes people {and their intimates} more stress than indiscriminate complaining about life and its loads.  yes, it's all right, though not particularly productive, to complain once in a while about something.  in fact, at the one end of the complaint continuum resides the "once-in-a-very-long-time" complaint about a truly annoying problem.  at the other end resides the perpetual "sick-and-tired-of-everything-most-of-the-time" complaint establishing that everything is always awful. we all can afford to move further toward the judicious but just occasional complaint -- aiming to make complaining a luxury rather than a lifestyle.  


p.s. don't you just love eli's class picture?  i got it back the other day.  i laugh every time i look at it.  what is going on there? just look at that cast of characters.  it's still killing me.  eli is looking very napoleon dynamite-esque.  throw a pair of glasses on that kid...

quick trip

in october, cj had meetings with his east coast rep and a few clients.  i tagged along.  we walked our feet to bloody stumps, ate well and did some things that we hadn't experienced last year when we went.  some highlights this time was the high line, billy elliot, occupy wall street, ground zero, grand central station, the new york public library, purl soho and more central park.  the weather was perfect, just perfect.  new york is great.  go if you haven't been.