We went camping this weekend and took Scout. She had a blast, but she got FILTHY. This is that ensued when we got home:
I hope you can grasp from these pictures the hilarity. She really was quite tired and looks so skinny when she’s soaking wet. I apologize for the lack of content, I’m pretty wiped out myself.
Weird. I almost own my very own little piece of Rancho Cucamonga.I just have to put this out there… it’s shameless, I know, that’s my disclaimer.
I’ve opened a bookstore.
Well, sort of.
You can too, I won’t be mad at all – in fact, go you because it’s really awesome.
Next time you’re ordering from Amazon, please think of me and use my Amazon Affiliates Store. You’d be feeding my reading habit because I get a % of all purchases made through that link.
And I buy a lot from Amazon, but it’s completely unethical for me to buy from my own store with the way this system works, so I’ll tell you what: if you set up a store, I’ll buy from yours if you buy from mine. Deal?
I’m really trying to figure out just what that is.
I never really gave it much thought before I got married… what my purpose was, what I was “made” to do. Of course, now, by virtue of being married and having a BA under my belt, I feel like some of those decisions were made along the way. Life is what happens while you’re busy planning (or, in my case, not planning) for the future, right?
So I’m working on this whole concept of a mission statement. My personal little mantra that I read over and over and allow to guide my life. There are about 10 “I will” statements that follow this, but this is what is, as of today, my mission statement. I’m open to refining it, but for now I feel like I have to stop being such a perfectionist and just go with it:
I am made to live a life of love, starting with God and extending to the people around me, to pursue growth and health; spiritually and personally, and to strive for excellence in everything that I choose to do.
One thing that is becoming clear to me (ha ha, thanks Dr. Rocklin), is that my focus on health is extremely imbalanced. I’m extremely concerned with relational, emotional, and spiritual health, and strive to maintain it in all the venues I find myself in, but I absolutely neglect my physical health. Not just my weight, but that’s a large part of it.
And if you skip ahead to the striving for excellence ideal, I’m not striving for that in my physical health. I think that affects all of the other areas of health as well.
I know I bring that concept up a lot, of the need to lose weight, yada yada yada. But I’m really just trying to wrap my head around it in a way that actually motivates and inspires me to do something about it.
For now, I think my next steps are to read 7 Habits (finally) and Getting Things Done. Earlier this evening I was telling Aaron that I really need to figure out how to eat an elephant. He said, “trunk first,” but I meant the part about being one bite at a time.
Ah, the magic of the reset button.
And yes, that is a picture of MY Nintendo, which is still in good working order. Jealous? I know.
My perfectionism started at a very early age. Maybe it's just us "OCD" types who utilized the old skool Nintendo reset button regulary during game play. For me, it was missing the "easy" levels of Duck Hunt. Or missing that first "big" in Super Mario Brothers. Or as I got progressively more skilled, it was missing the fireworks at the end of a level.
There I would sit, indian style in my pjs, on the floor in front of the tv; just at the edge of an arm's stretched out reach to that magical button. It's no wonder I did better on that PE test than the others (you know, the one with the wooden box where you reach and see how many centimeters you can stretch?). Sometimes I would just be playing for fun and be embarassed at the thought of such a low score. Other times, I would actually try for what, in my opinion, was a perfect score. Miss a coin? Reset. Miss a duck? Reset. Get shrunk down? Reset. Get 9 coins out of a question mark box instead of 10? You get the idea.
It really is unfortunate that there's no such obvious reset button in life.
But lately I've been thinking a lot about my weight, and my quest to lose it. And my 6-week focus character traits, and my bad blog habits, and something occurred to me. I have a reset button! A button that is within reaching distance every morning when I wake up. Yep, you know where I'm headed. But it's not that the alarm clock holds some mystical power of ctrl-zness... it's that each and every single day is new. It's better than theatre, it's less rehearsed and less repeated. It's actually a brand new something every single time I wake up.
So a new chance to be a better Christian. A new chance to work out, or eat right, or write more. A new chance to be on time, to be kind to my husband and friends, to work with my dog on her bad habits, to be patient, to call that friend who I haven't talked to in a while. And that does not have anything at all whatsoever to do with how I live today.
I know it's cliché, but each day I get this gift, the only thing it's missing is some pretty printed paper and a bow. It's mine to do with what I choose, and I'm going to take it.
Step aside little perfectionist-nerd-kid inside of me, you're going to have to stop trying to get the perfect score each day. It's just not going to happen. But don't worry, sometimes, if you hit it right, you might just see the fireworks.
