Mental health is just as important as physical fitness. There are two sides to mental health, and both are equally important: what weighs heavily on your mind and what puts wind in your sails.

Many of us share common mental stressors – time, money, work, emotions, and relationships. Ironically it can be too little or too much of each of these that causes stress. While we are never going to eliminate stress, we can address what do we do to manage it and its affect on our health.

As many humans as exist in the world, there exists as many combinations of answers to mental health concerns. For most diagnosis, medication and talk therapy has been proven to be the best practice. I am not trained as a mental health professional in any way. The information provided here is simply to be a resource for conversations about what has worked to help manage the stressors above to bring joy and lightness to my life and to hear what works for other. To make the daily grind something not just palatable, but something we can look forward too. Some of these ideas might be meditation, learning, or hobbies.

Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone – Brene Brown

Rating: 5 stars

Cliff Notes: A must read for everyone. THIS is a book that should be required reading in all schools (instead of The Hunger Games, perhaps?) and board rooms (I cannot believe we are not done with Who Moved My Cheese yet). This book outlines 4 lessons we all need in order to be gentler with each other and ourselves.

Full Summary: Everything Prophet Brene writes is golden and this book is no different. How do we disagree civilly? What does it mean when we are dehumanizing others in our arguments or requiring either / or thinking?

Brene Brown breaks down sociological constructs and concepts for easy understanding through her storytelling, examples from her research, and the writings of others. I highlighted and flagged so many pages in this book that I know I need to digest and write future blog posts about. I hope you will keep coming back to read those as well as going out to get all of her books.

By |2019-12-12T19:31:23-05:00June 9th, 2019|Mental Well-being|0 Comments

Salem Falls – Jodi Picoult

Rating: 5 stars

Cliff Notes: Besides Addy being a worthless ding dong, I loved this book.

Full Summary: I kept waiting for the twist (and brashly called it incorrectly about halfway through this book). When the twist I anticipated did not happen, I was satisfied with the twist we were given. And by “satisfied” I simply mean from an entertainment point of view. The new twist was disgusting from a human being point of view.

I am so angry at teenage girls who are manipulative and brutal to peers and “friends.” You know how mean girls are made – by watching women be mean to each other. And mean girls grow up to be mean women. Ladies – WE ARE BETTER THAN THIS!

I am so angry at false reports of rape. It makes it so hard for the truly injured girls and women. It makes it so hard for truly caring adults to interact with youth because of suspicion founded on lies. One false report out of a hundred actual rapes turns the tide of public opinion that “most reports are false.”

Then to adults who actually ARE predators. Take them out back.

By |2019-12-12T19:31:53-05:00June 8th, 2019|Mental Well-being|0 Comments

My Old True Love – Sheila Kay Adams

Rating: 4 stars

Cliff Notes: Some of the passages in this book just took my breath away. It was a short book, but I slowed down to not miss them so it took me a little longer to read it. I also loved the dialect and phrases and these cannot be read on Sue Speed.

“I went right back to bathing Sylvaney. Sometimes you have to set grief down and not carry it right then, but do not fret. It will squat right there and wait for you to pick it back up.”

Arty Norton

Full Summary: Like life, this book was a trudging of daily hardships at times. It would just outline this happened and that happened, then this happened so that happened. But then there was a flurry of joy or tragedy and the processing of it all. These parts of the story are what kept me engaged in the read. One of my favorite parts was around the deaths that occurred. Stay with me – it is not morbid.

At one point in the novel when Arty is grieving a death of a loved one, she refers to something she was taught. That you actually are born twice – once to the world and once to Heaven. I find this so comforting, like a way that death is a beginning, not an ending.

By |2019-12-12T19:32:25-05:00June 7th, 2019|Mental Well-being|0 Comments

Gone – James Patterson

Rating: 3 stars (3.5 in my head but Goodreads won’t let me do half stars).

Cliff Notes: Sometimes you just need a sure thing.

Full Summary: Sometimes you just need a sure thing. That is when I turn to authors like James Patterson. Some people complain it is cookie cutter and like junk food. BUT I LOVE JUNK FOOD. Junk food never lets me down – it takes me away from nonsense of daily life, keeps a fast pace through its unfolding drama in a setting that I am not very likely to encounter. I think it is always good to try to new authors and genres, but there is a reason that he has written and sold a gillion different books.

Anyway, I liked the story and the pacing. This book was well researched in a way that was interesting, but didn’t get bogged down in details about the weapons or planes and other stuff I didn’t care about. I want to go back to read some of the other books in this series to find out how they ended up with 10 kids.

By |2019-12-12T19:32:42-05:00June 6th, 2019|Mental Well-being|0 Comments

Dangerous Wildlife

We live “out in the county” as is said (translation: outside of the city limits), and we do see some interesting wildlife. There is a weekly update on coyote sightings on our Nextdoor app, we already talked about the deer that eat all my flowers, plus snakes and birds, and of course, Lucille. What I did not realize is that the most dangerous wildlife I needed to be aware of was Bixby. Yes, my husband.

Bixby and Lucille looking harmless
Yeah, they look harmless, don’t they!?

There are certain tools around the house that I am not allowed to use. The chain saw, for example. I am not the swiftest of foot so to add heavy machinery to that is not always our best yes (translation: I don’t want to get hurt, and Bixby does not want to have to take me to the ER). He was suspiciously panicked when he came home while I was working on the irrigation project carrying around a drill whilst wearing safety glasses. The weed eater falls into the caution category – I am not totally grounded from it, but if it is all humanly possible, Bixby does it. The problem is that I am not quite as particular with how low I am taking down the edges, often leaving dirt. I am sorry to Dean, who ran the landscaping company I worked for during a short break from college. I am a terrible edger.

So I put in my work request to have Bixby take down the creeping phlox after it bloomed. It takes the dead flowers off and helps promote growth, plus it looks better. So the next time he mowed, he knocked it out. I verbalized my gratitude to provide positive reinforcement as all pet husband training manuals say to do. Then when I went to get the mail one day I saw this carnage:

mowed down gladiolas
The photo is about the missing half of the gladiola, not about the crappy grass / dirt patch and exposed drainage pipe. Don’t judge.

Apparently he got carried away with the phlox – note THERE IS NO PHLOX IN THIS WHOLE PHOTO – and took out half the glad before he realized what was happening. Then to top it off – he did not tell me AND left the leaf carcasses to rot. For better or worse, friends. Better or worse.

By |2019-11-30T16:33:52-05:00June 5th, 2019|Mental Well-being|1 Comment

Shine – Jodi Picoult

Rating: 4 stars

Cliff Notes: Jodi Picoult at her best. I am always amazed at the level of research she does for her books.

Full Summary: I think this is an important read for people who think racism is a thing of the past. Yes, the publication date is 2016 but nothing has changed since then – well, gotten worse if anything.

Reader beware – this is SHORT – 42 pages, 1 hour audiobook – 30 MINUTES IF YOU ARE ME LISTENING DOUBLE SPEED. I was sure my phone had messed it up and cut me short.

By |2019-12-12T19:32:52-05:00June 2nd, 2019|Mental Well-being|0 Comments

Casual Vacancy – J.K. Rowling

Rating: n/a

Cliff Notes: It was too dense to wade through with people I hated.

Full Summary: DNF’d after 235 pages (out of 500). I hated all these characters and there were too many to hate them all. Then piling on local politics — BARF. At least with Harry Potter I had Minerva and Hermione to keep me going – I remember being overwhelmed with the amount of people and magical names with HP the first time I read it too.

I wonder how much of my disappointment with Casual Vacancy is that I loved Harry Potter so much. There was just too much hype going into it, maybe? Maybe it just need a basilisk to goose some of these idiots into doing something interesting.

JK Rowling Casual Vacancy

By |2019-12-12T19:33:04-05:00June 1st, 2019|Mental Well-being|0 Comments

Garden Project – Irrigation

I have such great ideas. Then reality hits. This was a doozy, y’all. Like over ten months in the making doozy. It is like an episode of The Golden Girls when Sophia says, “Picture this! Sicily 1922...”

Last summer (and really every summer for the last 7 years or so) the garden has died because we don’t keep up with the watering. North Carolina is like the surface of the sun. Ironically it is swampy humid at times, yet the clay soil dries it out and cracks. Even cacti and succulents have died in the dried out clay in our yard. Welp, 2019 was going to be the year that I was going to change that!

It started as all things do – with a bright idea found on the internet. Homemade irrigation systems were WAY too expensive so I wanted to go the DIY route. Plus I fancy myself quite a DIY diva.

Step 1: Fall of 2018 I posted a notice that I was looking for janky hoses and social media came through!

Step 2: Put “Make drip irrigation with old hose” to my to do list and find a good website to give instructions.

Step 3: Wait for 8 months.

Step 4: Once weather turns crazy hot and I am tired of watering after 2 weeks, I try to drill holes whilst throwing the tennis ball for Lucille.

home irrigation system

Step 5: Connect drip hose (the one with holes drilled in it) to the good hose connected to the spigot. We had to use a 2nd hose because the spigot is too far from away to connect directly.

Step 6: Weave hose through garden so holes are in general vicinity of where you have plants that you want to be watered.

Step 7: Watch the wheels fall off of the project. Cry.

The old hose I got through the Nextdoor app and left in a wad in the yard through the fall and winter and most of the spring somehow got kinks in it. Weird. When I turned the water on – nada aqua. And I could not unkink the hose because someone had drilled holes in it. More weird. Then Lucille kept running through the garden with her ball trying to get me to throw it while I was getting more and more frustrated by the second.

This is not where I cried – I was still staying calm at this point. I got out a new hose and started again with the hole drilling (whilst ball throwing – there are no photos of this because I was feeling much less amused by it). The more observant of you readers will notice at this point the color of the hose turns from red to green.

Progress was made as water flowed from the early hose holes. But stopped about half way through. I moved it around, found more kinks. Used pliers to unkink. Did not work. This is where tears came in. Over a hole hose project.

Let me tell you about the self-talk that was happening at this point. I was 100% convinced I was a worthless human being because I could not get this to work. I did not want to have to ask my husband to help like a helpless female. I wanted to conquer it, yet who was I kidding with this “I can do it” nonsense.

Let me tell you what an asshole that voice is. I cannot stand her!! These old tapes are exhausting. And I know I am not the only woman (person, probably but men don’t seem to suffer this like women do) who deals with this asshole in her head. We are better than this!

During this whole second hose debacle, Paul was sitting on the porch chilling, not offering notes from the peanut gallery. Basically doing his strong, silent type schtick. But this is why he is perfect for me. Right as I was about to move to Defcon 1 and start destroying things, he wandered out to the garden and introduced me to physics. Apparently we have an incline juuuuuust enough to stop the flow. He moved the hose around, yada yada yada VICTORY!

Each red circle is a spout where water spews from.

I waited a day to make sure it was going to work like I planned, then put the mulch down to cover the hose and hold in the moisture. And mulch makes stuff look so pretty.

What garden projects are on your to do list? What self-talk do you need to nip in the bud?

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