If You Can’t Get Out of It, Get Into It

2 people putting a sail togetherThe source of this quotation may be Outward Bound, the program that helps people gain confidence through adventure. Or someone named Patricia Ryan Madison, a leading teacher in improvisational theater. Or Gretchen Rubin’s mother. Whoever! I will quote my friend Cecelia here again, who said about a youth group trip to the Six Flags amusement park during the heat and humidity of a Virginia summer, “No one can make me miserable.”

​Okay, we’re now launched into the rehearsals for the March concert of the Cherry Creek Chorale. Usually I say about the current concert, “This is the best one ever!” which is a good attitude. I get into it.

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A Sad but Uplifting Story

Man's arms holding a babyI have a few cooking blogs to which I subscribe, Smitten Kitchen, Sally’s Baking Addiction, and Pinch of Yum.  So back at the end of December suddenly there was an e-mail from POY titled “An Urgent Baby Update.” Lindsay Ostrom, the author of the recipes, was expecting a baby in April. She and her husband, Bjork, run this fantastically successful and profitable blog. I wrote a post about it back when I first discovered it. Blogs such as this one are much more than recipe repositories; they invite the readers into the authors’ lives.

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Yet Another Sugar Screed

Poster for "That Sugar Film" movieThat Sugar Film, 2015, written and directed by Damon Gameau, who also stars. Streaming is available for free through Amazon Prime, or you can rent to stream or buy the DVD if you’re not a Prime member. Also available through Netflix.

I don’t want to wear out my welcome here, so if you’re kind of weary of the whole “sugar is evil” hoopty-doo feel free to skip this. However, Jim and I thoroughly enjoyed this film, and it’s a pretty painless way (except for the tooth-extraction scene) to find out a little more about the silent white killer. (Cue ominous music. And full disclosure: I just caved in and ate three smallish peanut-butter cookies that my husband made this weekend. They were calling out to me from the freezer. But I won’t say that I couldn’t resist. I could. I just didn’t. So sue me!)

Gameau is an actor who decided to make a documentary about what would happen to him if, after about three years of eating a very healthful, low-to-no-sugar diet, he deliberately ate 40 teaspoons of sugar every day for 60 days, yet another one of those “stunt journalism” stunts, akin to “Supersize Me,” the 2004 film in which Morgan Spurlock, an American filmmaker, ate nothing but McDonald’s food for a month.

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In Which I Prove, Once Again, As If It Needed to Be Proven . . .

Burrito with cheese, beans, peppers, and morethat procrastination is a bad idea.

News flash, folks!

Anyway, this morning I was in charge of the retreat breakfast for my wonderful Chorale, and I had a major meltdown as I flurried and scurried out the door because I hadn’t gotten my prep work done ahead of time. I overslept this morning, so my “get up at the crack of dawn” plan didn’t work, as it rarely does. I was tired last night after getting all m shopping done (but no one forced me to wait on it until late afternoon).

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The Joys of Podcasts

White earbuds with cord coiled upNormally on this blog I’ve had a book of the week, which I’ve either read or listened to. Of late I’ve been doing so much reading from news outlets online about the political situation that my actual book reading has suffered, although I do have a fascinating audiobook all loaded up and ready to go about the US role in the conflict with Al Qaeda and ISIS. (Sounds really cheerful, doesn’t it?) I’m going to try to finish that and report on it next week.

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The Ongoing Sugar Struggle

wonderful pear pieI write periodically about the dangers of sugar consumption and my own efforts to control if not banish this substance from my life. Right now I’m working on re-doing my recipes over on the hospitality blog, and for every dessert I’m including information on how many grams of sugar each serving contains. The typical amount is around 25 grams, or about 6 teaspoons, which, coincidentally, is the limit given by most researchers for the daily maximum we should have for added sugar.

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Celebrate the Quirks of Those You Love.

girls braiding each other's hairThis is becoming an almost-weekly tradition when I take an idea from the Gretchen Rubin/Liz Craft podcast, expand on it, and apply it to my own life. So this was episode #100 (hey, a good time for you to start listening if you haven’t yet done so!), and for this special episode they centered the whole podcast around listener questions. One listener asked about their relationship as sisters, how they manage to get along so well and whether or not they’ve ever had a big blowup.

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Further Self-Knowledge.

head half covered in mosiac lines and head reflected on left and rightI wrote earlier this week about how self-knowledge can add to our happiness because we can quit trying to make ourselves do things that we don’t enjoy and aren’t any good at. I mentioned the Enneagram test as one that I’d taken but which gave me some rather confusing results. So I just re-took it, answering some of the questions differently and I think more accurately. Some of them are difficult for me, as either neither or both of the choices seem right. (Read that sentence three times.) One in particular gave me pause, as it was given the choice between a tendency to be sociable and friendly and being solitary and self-sufficient.

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Knowing Yourself Can Add to Happiness.

stylized face superimposed over rectangular colored tiles

This is another one of those posts that grew out of something I heard on the radio and then managed to find again. It was just a five-minute segment on some woman who lives in New York City and produces modern operas, running her office out of the second bedroom of her two-bedroom apartment. Her production company totals eight people, including her. New York Apartments are pretty small, so I can’t imagine how they all fit in and still get anything done, but apparently they do. She says that it would make no sense for her to spend $30,000-$40,000 per year on office space and therefore not have that amount of money to spend on what really matters to her: producing modern operas by new composers. She is completely focused on the business at hand.

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Three Books about Deception.

Great way to start the new year, huh? I got to thinking that I’d read these three books and enjoyed them immensely because they’re all the type of story in which you start out thinking one thing and then gradually you find out that everything you believed was wrong. Two of them are novels, and I’ve said before that I’ve sort of lost my taste for fiction. They must be pretty good! I will just issue my usual warning about strong language, for the novels at least. Having said that, if you’re just looking for some good reads, something to curl up with on a cold winter evening, these should fill the bill.

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