Just. Breathe.

Some things: Stacy Keibler and George Clooney broke up after a couple of years. Stacy is now married and pregnant. How do you handle being the guy  after  George Clooney?  Danica McKellar (Winnie) and Candice Cameron (DJ) are on this season of Dancing With the Stars. I loved   The Wonder Years  and Full House . I could never pick between those two - with or without dancing. And if they'd thrown Topanga into the mix, I'd have had to watch every single episode.  I want this to be my next job. [To be clear - I want to be holding the water hose.] The Malaysian airliner situation just breaks my heart. Whatever happened, I can't imagine how the families of those passengers are coping with not knowing.  There are several families I know who are really struggling right now--a 16-year-old in a car accident who is struggling with recovery, a mom recovering from back surgery, a grandmother with MS who has pneumonia...sometimes it seems so overwhelm...

OMG I'm out of ideas for blogs!!! Forty days.... F O R T Y days! How on earth am I going to do this?! [TK, get a grip. Jesus withstood temptation for forty days in the desert...you're talking about blogging. Seriously.] Fine. Let's talk random stuff then. [It's the safe talk of bloggers everywhere. I googled it. It's an officially sanctioned strategy when you have absolutely nothing to say. Expect a lot of this in the next 33 days.] 1. RDub has introduced the fam to a new show -- Arrow . Premise: Spoiled rich kid is stranded on an uncharted island after his yacht sinks, killing his father and sister-of-girlfriend-he-was-cheating-with. Rescued, comes back to right the wrongs his father had done. Oh, and the girlfriend is still around, pissed that her sister is dead AND that he cheated on her, AND their father is the police. He uses...wait for it...arrows (and a hoodie as a disguise). I sound sarcastic, but it's really good. Elliot Queen keeps up the prete...

Apparently I have a habit of making lists to clear out my brain when I haven't blogged for a week or more. I've had time to blog, but nothing to say. I know, it shocked me too. The weather cooled off, finally. Saturday morning I hit a new personal best for a run. It was only 59 degrees here when I left the house, and I got a wild hair to run for an hour and see how far I could go. The result:  Not setting any speed records, but LOOK at that distance! I was ridiculously excited about this. Also, sweaty and parched! I didn't start this running thing with any distance ultimately in mind -- not a marathon, or a half-marathon, or anything like that -- but knowing I CAN run almost five miles at once if I want to is huge. And I might survive the zombie apocalypse. RDub was gone for about 5 days on a men-only camping trip. I had grand intentions of having a girls' weekend here, but plans, timing, blah blah, didn't work out. Instead, I did stuff like t...

End of summer, start of school. Books. The Walking Dead.  Goals for fall. Cooking. Eating. Trip to Seattle. Unplugging. Decorating. Movies. Consistency. Blogging. Just a random sampling of the million things floating around in my head at any given moment. I have half-formed blogs, plans, notes on all of them -- and then the paralysis.  Let's just grab one (or four) and go. My baby girl is a senior in high school. A. Senior. How in the name of all that's holy did that HAPPEN? We're dealing with college apps, financial aid, 6 AP classes, and figuring out her future. No pressure or stress there. Bug's senior ring I've been working to find the fine line between "doing stuff online" and just "wasting my life online" - harder than you might think. At any given moment, I might be listening to a movie or show on one laptop, checking Facebook on another, and playing that stupidly addicting Candy Crush on my phone. THAT, I believe, is over...

Happy Earth Day! I don't have a cool Google doodle to celebrate, but I'm going to go sit outside later and soak up some sun. It's a Monday (when I started this post; now it's Tuesday), and my brain is feeling pretty Monday-ish. Here's just some stuff: 1. I love our yard with its new fence. We've been working on the plants and the pool, and I'm trying to decide if I want a garden (RDub insists on growing watermelon if we do) or a compost. I just can't decide if I want to spend the time learning what I need to learn to make it work, then spend the time making it work. We're still killing weeds, but so far, we've spent more evenings out there than usual. Even my basil is happy in the revamped yard! 2. I'm running again. The weather has been nice enough and my allergies have been mild enough that I've run out of excuses (see what I did there?). It helps that Bug wants to run, too, so we've gone in the morning a couple of times....

I've missed being here! Things have been cray-zee lately but I'm trying to wrangle them back under control. Just a short list -- 7-day cruise was FABULOUS and I can't figure out why we came back! Oh, the kid probably had something to do with it. Posts with pictures coming. Started an 8-week intensive personal training series -- it was my idea and for some reason decided that I couldn't put it off until some of the crazy ended...and now I'm too sore to move... Maybe because I came back FOUR POUNDS heavier from the cruise! Granted, two of them were gone in two days, but still. We have a house guest this month. And his dog. (Totals three dogs and a cat, if you're counting.) Because of the food on the cruise, I came back determined to do the menus and such that I know I have to do, and detox this body. So I've cooked (not "thawed") every night this week after a training session. It's exhausting. I'm reworking that plan. Anyway, about...

Just stuff running through my increasingly taxed brain: 1. I'm trying to find a dress/outfit for our cruise, for the formal dinner night. I do not want to go to the mall, but shopping for clothes by mail is scary. I also have those 10 pounds I really want to lose. I'm sort of between sizes, so I may just have to shop in January to get something that fits right. 2. At work, the goal setting part of annual reviews is going on right now. It somehow seems unprofessional to write "win the lottery" as a goal. 3. Christmas shopping is hard this year. No one needs anything, and most of the wants are not things I want to buy! Shop for yourself, people, and just put my name on it. 4. Speaking of Christmas, what am I supposed to do for all those people who would usually get baked goods from me? Do I just suck it up and do it anyway, knowing that it'll just make me want junk food I really shouldn't have? And for that matter, giving away stuff that really doesn...

There must be something in the water. I've got at least four blogging friends who have complained lately about not having anything to say/write, and now I've caught the affliction. I'm doing fine on the weight loss front, so I think maybe I'm just bored with talking about it for the moment. I'm staying off the scale for another couple of weeks, so nothing to report there. Let's talk about something completely different. 1. I'm beginning to think I have an unhealthy obsession with the Harry Potter series. As I type this, Sorceror's Stone is playing on TV. I read the entire series over the summer for about the 8th time. I like the movies okay, but the books transport me to a completely different place. And this never fails to make me giggle: 2. I'm very annoyed with the availability (or lack) of classic movies on subscription services like Amazon and Huluplus. Seriously, what is the point of having those accounts if you can't get movies lik...

Apparently I took the month of August off from blogging. Not sure that it was a conscious decision, but here I sit at the end of the month wondering where time went. It's not that I didn't have anything to say, but somehow I just kept avoiding completing a thought. I blame the heat in Texas - it's fried my brain. On that note, SERIOUSLY? Sixty some-odd days of 100+degrees, 42 of them in a row? No appreciable rain in months. [Okay, there was that ONE storm, but who can remember...] The floors of my house are a wreck because the dogs go outside, jump in the pool to cool off, then run inside, dripping wet. It's fun and smells great. There's not enough Scentsy in the world... This is how they spend the day waiting for everyone else to get home. Yes, that's Theo crowding Beau every chance he gets. Bette tries to stay away. So during this ridiculous heat wave, what do my daughter and I decide to do? Take up running. Yeah, take a moment to process that. I'm...

The title is misleading. I don't mean "stuff" like possessions, although some of the stuff below is stuff. (Huh?) I was just thinking about little things that make me smile. So, here's a list of what makes me smile today, in no particular order. 1. Grilled cheese sandwiches . Not fancy, although fancy is fine, too. Just American cheese on wheat bread (crusts ON, please) is fine with me. Hubby taught me the art of putting the butter in the pan instead of on the bread -- makes it crispier -- but I still usually go for the soggier, butterier (is that a word?) style. 2. A clean desk . You'd think I'd work harder to have this, since I love it so much. 3. Word games . Boggle. Twist. Cryptograms. Anything that makes me make words out of other words or letters just makes my day. If you haven't found sporcle.com and you like word and trivia games, be prepared to lose hours. 4. This site . Never fails to make me want to bake or decorate something. 5. Read...

One of my blogging friends does a Tuesday Ten list (waving furiously at Gini). That's not what this is, but I'm feeling pretty random, so here's a list of stuff for today. There is nothing better than watching people you love have their prayers answered. When those answered prayers are going to result in unbelievable blessings for a baby that doesn't even know it yet -- well, that's just the icing on the cake. My mother cracks me up. She never fails to share some miscellaneous piece of information she heard or saw or got on email that is just hysterical. Here's a sample: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFWA1A9XFi8 . I'm not political. I won't suddenly become political just because of the news about Bin Laden. I will say I've got a little bit of "the devil you know" anxiety going on. What will al Qaeda feel driven to do to prove they're still a force? Our country has not done and can never do enough to say thank you to the men and wom...