New Moon

Tonight is a New Moon. It's the period of the month when the night is the darkest, since the moon isn't there to illuminate the blackness. For those uncomfortable with the dark, this can be a scary and troubling time.

But not for me. I enjoy the energy of a new moon. It's symbolic of new beginnings. It's a good time to set intentions for things you want to achieve. A chance to put new ideas in motion. A chance to ask for forgiveness for past actions. A chance to ask the universe for new things. For power. For strength. For hope.

A new start.

The power of the new moon is alive and well and I'm soaking it all in.

The winds of change are picking up.

Good things are coming.

Stay tuned...........

Sarah

You're Such A Positive Person

It's been a very rough week. And we're only half way through. I haven't been feeling so hot. Last night was really bad and I spent the day in a fog, concentrating very hard on holding it together.

Maybe it's the early cold weather that we've had. Or perhaps is the abundance of alone time I've had of late. Two weekends in a row plans went askew/off the rails and I ended up flying solo, which isn't anything new for me. It just sucks when I actually make plans and start to look forward to some human contact and conversation and then end up on my own anyhow. Or maybe it's the reminder/realization that I really am on my own here. It's just me. I am not a priority in anyone's world, except my own. Maybe one day that will change, and I think I'd really like that, but for now, it's my reality. I'm always the one asking other people to do stuff. I can't recall the last time someone approached me and invited me to do something. Unless you count my new boss. She invited me to do a 5k walk with her at 7am on Sunday. I think she was mostly kidding though as she was trying to find a way out of it. It just really sucks that people mean more to me than I mean to them. Actually, it doesn't suck. It hurts. 

Anyhow, it was a rough day. I didn't sleep well last night. I was late getting up, late getting moving. Got to work and had multiple items thrown at me right of the get go. That part actually helped. It distracted me for a bit. Let me get outside my own head for a while. It was a nice change of scenery. I did go for a walk at lunch and that felt good. The fresh air on my face helped to wake me up a bit more and just being away from the office made my soul feel better for a while. My afternoon was ok until about 3pm when I started having dizzy spells and my head felt tight, like it was in a vice. Brutal. Don't know if was a stress issue, or I'm coming down with something or low blood sugar or pressure. Who knows. All I know is that I felt like crap. All I wanted to do was go home. But some co-workers needed help and I soldiered on.

I was just getting ready to leave work when one of our officers started talking to me and asking for some information. So we got into a discussion. Said officer actually said some very complimentary things to me about my work and hopes for my future, then they said something that almost made me burst out laughing/break down crying. They said "You're such an optimistic person". I'm standing there, feeling like crap. I'm exhausted from holding it together all day, having been on the verge of tears about 6 times that day, cried myself to sleep the night before and they're standing there telling me how optimistic I am.

The Universe really loves throwing stuff like that at me. I found it funny and sad all at the same time. I guess this means I was doing a good job of not letting it show how miserable I was today. I hate feeling like this. But I've been through it enough times now to just sit back and let it get out of my system. Give myself a day to wallow and then slowly pick myself up, dust myself off and start putting one foot in front of the other again.

Tomorrow will be a new day. Hopefully the sun will be out and the black cloud hanging around me will start to sail away. So long as I have hope, I have something going for me.

Now it's time to go and hopefully have a full and restful night's sleep.

Good Night

Sarah

I Think Your Shirt Is Nice

As anyone who's ever worked out at a gym knows, you don't exactly look your best when you finish your workout. Yes, you have that "glow" about you (which is usually sweat) but your face is red, your hair is a mess and is stuck to your face/neck and sometimes you don't smell the best.

My gym outfit changes from week to week. It all depends on the weather and what's clean. This week, it's cotton shorts that come to my knees and a plain jane, dark blue, scoop neck cotton t-shirt. It's actually very comfortable. The shirt is very soft.

Anyhow, I was too tired to bother changing back into my work clothes after the gym today so I opted to go home in my shorts and t-shirt. What do I care? I'm just going to the bus, getting on it and going home. So I get on the bus tonight. It's almost full but there's a seat in the back. I get there and I'm organizing myself and moving my giant backpack out of the way and I notice the guy to my right looking at me. I looked over and he was looking directly at me. He smiled, so I smiled back. I always do that. Doesn't matter who offers me a smile on the bus or on the street, I always smile back. It's the polite thing to do, especially in our digital obsessed work. I dig my iPod out of my purse and I'm playing with it and I look over and the guy is still looking at me. He then pulls the cord and gets up to get off at the next stop.

On his way to the door, he leans over and says to me "I think your shirt is nice." So I just smiled and said "Thank you very much". He got off the bus and I plugged in my iPod and dissolved in my music. He was kind of cute too. LOL.

Here's the fun part - my internal monologue is thinking "you look like hell. Your face is blotchy, your mascara is most likely flaking off  and your outfit isn't flattering at all" but thankfully, confident Sarah over-ruled and simply said "thank you".

I'm actually really bad with accepting compliments. I get thrown off my game when someone offers me a random compliment. On the up side, I've gotten very good at accepting them. I used to brush them off and try to downplay whatever the person has said but now, I say thank you and that's that. Learning to accept that other people, even perfect strangers sometimes, can see good things about me and make complimentary comments to me is all part of the growing process.

As a random funny thought, my horoscope told me that a new person on my social scene would get my attention...but a relationship with this person would never last. Maybe that was kind of cute bus man? LOL.

Good Night!

Sarah

No, this isn't what I was wearing but it's one of my favourite dresses

Searching For A Stress-Free Job

We're only two days into the week and it seems like it's been a long week already. LOL. Work's been one issue after another. Lots of fun there. I've been crazy tired at home too. I keep waking up in the night and worrying about stuff that still needs to be done at work. Sigh. My nightly mantra is "stop worrying about work." One night I might listen to myself. Things are slowly coming together so I'm hoping the worry will leave soon too. Some days I wish I had the kind of job where I simply forgot about it when I walked out the door at the end of the day. No stressing. No worrying. Maybe if I win it big in the lottery I can find a job like that. Everyone knocks working in retail. I kind of liked it. I didn't like the sore feet from standing around all day but I liked the staff discount and getting to talk to people and the whole 'when you leave work, you leave work behind you' thing. Sadly, I can't afford to live on a retail salary, especially if I keep buying stuff from the store where I work. Working in a book store would be cool but I'd spend all my money at work and I've already run out of room for the books that I already own. That would present a major problem. I think it might be fun to be a chef too, so long as someone else did all the dishes.
Being a dog walker would be cool too. Unless one of the dogs ran away. That would be stressful. And I don't think I'd like to walk them in the winter. I hate winter. I hibernate in winter.
Maybe I could get a job as a personal shopper! Then I'd get to shop but spend someone else's money. Only downside is that I don't get to keep anything that I buy. That would be a bummer.
Ironically, my dream job is to be the Governor General of Canada. I'm guessing that job comes with a fair bit of stress. But then again, you could always pass all of your work off to someone else. Hmmm. Something to think about. I need to start getting in friendly with the Prime Ministers if I want to be GG for Canada.
Or maybe I just need to win it really, really big in the lottery and then I don't have to worry about working at all......

Eyes are closing.

Good Night!

Sarah

100!!

Something I forgot to mention: I hit my 100th work out at Curves on August 11th.

That was a pretty big deal for me. When I first joined, 100 work outs seemed like something far away, especially since I only work out 3 days a week. And some weeks it's only twice and for one week last winter I gave up going all together (but I went back the following week!). So I was pretty stoked to hit 100.

I'm not sure that I've ever stuck to a diet/exercise regime this long before. It's become routine for me. I actually enjoy going (most of the time). Today I learnt that I won 2 prizes from games/contests that the club ran in August. I won a pen from our trivia contest and I won a "100" t-shirt from the 100-150 work outs contest. Awesomeness!!!!! Now I'm slowly inching my way forward to the next goal: 150 workouts.

Despite going to the gym on a regular basis, I haven't actually lost all that much weight. Some is gone and while a few pounds keep coming back, the vast majority of what I've lost has stayed lost. So I'm rather pleased with that. I know why I haven't lost much weight. It's no real mystery, especially when you've been in this game as long as I have been. Simply put, I need to modify my intake. And I'm working on that and will be making some changes in the near future. But I'll share more on that later.

Funny part is that people keep telling me that I look like I've lot weight. Probably because I have better posture now. I sit and stand up straighter. Strengthening your core will do that. I'm also slightly leaner, as I'm redistributed the weight around a bit. So it's small changes but they're changes and they're occurring.

Losing weight is a very funny beast. In theory, it's a simple process: intake fewer calories than you burn. But there's so much more to it than that. It's emotional. It's mental. It's a constant internal battle between side A that screams: Love yourself the way you are. Fuck society and accept yourself the way you are. Everyone's beautiful and side B which simply states: Keep it up and you'll have diabetes by 40 and drop dead of a heart attack by 50. Both sides make some valid points. So I think there's a 3rd option: I love myself and am confident enough in myself to know that I have to change. I don't want to die young or be a burden on my family or society because I have a weight related disease or issue. But at the same time, I have no desire to be skinny. I don't even think that's possible given my bone structure. I personally think curves are sexy and plan to hold onto some of mine. I'd just like to reduce them a bit and give them some more definition.

I'm not perfect. Never have been, never will be and I'm happy about that. If you're perfect, you've got nothing to strive for and that sounds a little boring to me. One little step at a time, except on Curves days, and then it's several big steps for about a half hour.

Good Night!

Sarah

Told You So and Mystery Chicken

It was an interesting day today. It was one of those "hit the ground running" kind of day. Thankfully, there were no major fires in my little bubble but there was a big one burning away with the big project. And I knew there would be. I called it. Weeks ago in fact. And I had a very opportune "I told you so" moment, but, alas, I opted for the moral high ground and kept my mouth shut.

I wasn't being a neigh sayer by any means. And this wasn't me being negative. I was being quite realistic. You see, I've done 3 previous projects that were very similar to this one. And there were issues with each and every one of them. And this time around, we had 2 newbies working on it and one not so bright coordinator over in group in charge of projects like this. So I'm pretty sure it was doomed from the start. Add in the fact that my previous (and very disliked) supervisor was the one originally in charge of it for our office and it was definitely doomed. But cooler heads prevailed today. My new supervisor got on it and fired off some emails and got some balls rolling. I jumped in too and lent a hand to the IT guys.

All in all, the day ended well and we're on our way to getting everything resolved. Which is good since we have 15 new people starting at 8:30 tomorrow morning. I'm with them (along with the recent addition to my team) until roughly 10:30. Should make the morning go by pretty quickly.

Speaking of work, I got official confirmation that the evaluation board for a process I applied on, has found me to be "qualified" for the position and I have been placed in the pool. That's two pools I'm in now. I'm excited to be in both pools. It was hard work getting there, but it's a little bitter sweet. This means that 2 other organizations has deemed me qualified to be doing the work that I'm currently doing, but my current organization doesn't acknowledge that I'm doing work above level. Just a wee bit frustrating.

I stopped at the grocery store after work to get milk, bread and veggies. I got milk, bagels, ham and raspberries. Totally forgot about the veggies. LOL. The raspberries were on sale and I find that they go bad super fast so I decided to use them up tonight. I whipped up a batch of lemon-raspberry yogurt muffins. I think they turned out pretty well. I'll take a few to work to share with a couple co-workers and we'll see how well they go over.

I bet you're wondering about the mystery chicken mentioned in the title of this blog eh?

While my parents were here, we stopped at one of my mom and I's favourite stores: Giant Tiger. They had my favourite stuffed chicken breasts on sale for $1.87/pack. Couldn't pass that up. Only problem was, we weren't going back to my apartment, we were going onto their hotel. No problem says dad. There's a freezer in the mini fridge in their room. So I buy 4 boxes: 2 ham & swiss and 2 herb & garlic. We get back to the hotel and try to stuff the box in the little freezer. Won't fit. So we decide to take the chicken out of the boxes and mom stuffs them all in to a bag and then we stuff the bag into the freezer. They fit! Only problem is, there's now no way to tell which flavour is which as they all look the same. D'oh! So now I have mystery chicken. And they threw out all the boxes, which had the cooking instructions on them so I had to wing it and go by memory. It worked out well. I ended up with Ham & Swiss tonight (which is what I wanted). I think I have the same one for lunch tomorrow too. I guess I'll find out at noon hour tomorrow which flavour it is.

Got to go and get some sleep so I'm bright eyed and somewhat alert for my day tomorrow.

Good Night!

Sarah

Duck! (because I don't have a photo of a chicken)

Catching Up

Hey. How's it going? Long time, no read eh? I know I haven't blogged in a long time but I didn't realize it had been that long. 5 months to be exact. I'm not entirely sure why I stopped just like I'm not entirely sure why I felt compelled to write this evening. Maybe I needed a break, so I stopped. Maybe part of me longed to write again, so here I am. I don't know. But that's a very big part of life isn't it? Not knowing.

I just spent the last 45 minutes writing a very long blog......only to discover that my computer disconnected from the internet, AGAIN (computer issue, not my internet provider) and only the first paragraph above saved.  Shit.

So I'm going to summarize the last 5 months of my life in 5 minutes or less:

Moronic, worst supervisor ever appointed to my team and has thankfully since left. New one is much, much better. New manager at work, seems very nice. Went home for my dad's birthday. Had a great time. Went to see Cyndi Lauper and Cher, awesome show! Turned another year older! Had a fun dinner out with friends and a couple of us won money at the casino. Right on! Bought myself a new camera. Love it. Went home for a wedding. Had a horrible time, mostly due to being abandoned by everyone and having to sit alone and then getting a horrible drunken text message from my brother. Moved on. Went to Bluesfest! Rocked out to Slash, Moist and Collective Soul. Got to meet The Barenaked Ladies. Had an awesome time! Got to go and see Katy Perry. It was a kick ass show. Well worth the money! Took a couple days off work and had a stay-cation. Got a pedicure, saw the changing of the guard and had tea at the Chateau Laurier. Bought a Kitchen Aid Stand Mixer. How did I ever bake without it? My parents came to town for a couple of day. Had a very wonderful visit with them and got to tour the little villages south of Ottawa. My mom made friends with the front desk clerk by giving him cherry tomatoes from their garden. LOL. I was very sad to see them leave. The older I get, the harder the goodbyes seem to become.

So that's it in a nut shell. I'm sure other stuff happened but that's the main points that I can remember right now.

It's now well past my bedtime and I have to be up and moving early tomorrow.

Good Night!

Sarah

Super Moon - taken with my new camera

Just chillin' with the Barenaked Ladies

Katy Perry

Mom and Dad <3