Will Work for Food

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This morning, I saw a man standing on the corner of a busy intersection, holding out a cardboard sign that said, "Will Work for Food" in black marker.  Every time I see someone like this, my heart instantly pinches up.  It breaks my heart to see anyone hungry, and in this current economy, with crops dying of drought, the hungry will only become hungrier.  When I see someone offering to work for food, it's all I can do not to invite him over to my house to cook up a huge batch of something homemade for a meal and for leftovers to go.  I realize that, as a woman, I simply cannot be inviting strangers into my house, and that only makes my heart feel even more pinchy.  

But when I saw that man today, with his messy hair and too-big clothing, I nearly broke down in tears.  I was five minutes from my workplace, and I wanted to turn my car around to go home and make this man an overflowing pot of spaghetti.  And while I was internally lamenting my inability to ditch my day job for an apron and stack of recipes, I remembered a Pin in my feed yesterday:

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Blessing Bags.  An utterly genius - and empathetic and empowering - idea.  A bag of helpful items to feed and better someone's life.  A helping hand in a ziploc.

Some twenty years ago, a similar man was standing on a busy corner with a similar sign.  My family was on our way home from a picnic in a local park, and we had leftovers tucked away in a cooler in our car.  When my dad saw this man, he instantly rolled down his window to hand the man all our leftover fried chicken, oranges, and cans of cold soda.  Twenty years later, and I have not forgotten the look on that man's face.  He was instantly overjoyed and lit up with a smile.  He said a million thank yous to us as we continued handing him food through the window.

These days, when I'm up at night, worrying about budgets and finances and plans for the future, it's easy to forget that others are in much more fragile situations.  Others would be delighted to receive something as simple as a plastic bag filled with nourishment.

I have a new project to focus on.  One that makes my heart feel light.

Blessing Bags #1

Blessing Bags #2

Hurdle Jumped.

I did it.  I said goodbye. 

I posted notice on my website.  I put Etsy in permanent vacation mode.  I've officially closed up shop.  And while I'm still feeling a bit antsy about all of this, I know that given a couple of days, I'll feel calmer and calmer and begin to enjoy my newly reclaimed freedom.

Already, I can feel my face more relaxed and less pinched.  And, I'm not feeling as frantic as I go through the steps of each day.  I've had two friends interrupt me to say that I look happier and healthy.  My mental to-do list has dwindled from a thousand entries to somewhere near twenty-five.

Ahhh.  I just can't begin to put a price on that.  Sometimes, I forget how much my well-being is worth.  I hope you'll jump in and remind me from time to time.  I certainly need a nudge every now and then when it comes to considering myself a priority. 

This feels good.  Great, even.

Saying A Sad Farewell on Sarandipity Sweets blog

Dragging My Feet. Or Maybe Just My Toes, A Little.

It's getting to be that time.  That time where I need to make a definite, written-in-unbleached flour decision about the future of Sarandipity.  I'm 99.5% sure of my answer.  But I'm dreading the notification and general alerting portion of my steps ahead.  I was hoping to ride out this little break until cooler weather, but I'm already being bombarded by requests for October orders, and I just can't put off replying to these people.  Sigh.

But on a completely lighter note, I'm thoroughly enjoying all this "time off."  It's pretty telling that having paused Sarandipity feels like being on vacation when I'm still putting in my 8 to 5 somewhere else.  I feel as if I have room to breathe and the space to pause and look around at the world.  It feels as if my eyes are looking upward instead of assuming a head-down, completely focused approach to each day.

Because when I have more time to relax and breathe and feel comfortable in my skin, I do highly important things like this:

{ yawn.}  Time for us to go relax some more.

Sugar Substitutes

Want to hear something mildly shocking?  I've cut nearly all the sugar from my diet.

For the average person, this might be no feat worth bragging about, but for me?  Well.  It's life-changing.  I may as well have decided to start speaking in Pig Latin all day, it's that big a deal.  Not eating sugar is a conscious choice that I must make throughout my entire day.  "No sugar, Sara.  Choose something else."

Why put myself through the agony of finding other ways to quiet my grumbling stomach?  Another bit you may not know about me is that I've got a stubborn case of acne.  I've been battling it for six years since my body was mucked up by taking (and then quitting) The Pill.  I've tried all the popular cleansers, drinking lots of water, taking vitamins, using no fabric softeners, using "free & clear" laundry detergents, changing my pillowcases twice a week, and on and on.  I did discover, a few years ago, that eliminating dairy from my diet cleared up all the breakouts on my forehead.  It was a huge breakthrough moment for me, because you cannot put a price on feeling even a tiny bit less embarrassed.  

But, my skin took a turn for the worse last December.  I began battling painful acne on my neck and jawline, and each new spot took a month to heal.  And it kept getting worse and kept leaving marks and kept making me sad.  Because I agree with everything I've read that says acne is the outward evidence of a hormonal imbalance, I've started giving more thought to what I eat.  And, it's no surprise that I eat quite a bit of sugar.  Quite a bit.  Having Sarandipity orders in front of me three nights a week is an obvious source of sugar.  But, I also turn to baking sugary treats as a means to relieve stress.  Which, of course, I eat.  Every last crumb is devoured, because, seriously, I bake delicious things.  

So, after reading comment after comment written by acne sufferers who cleared up after cleaning out the sugar, I decided to step up and try it myself.  And then, I bumped into this article, detailing how both dairy and sugar throw insulin and hormones out of balance, and it sealed the deal for me.  I've long had issues with sudden drops in my blood sugar, so I'm now thinking in terms of the things I can do to keep it even, eliminating the steep peaks and drops.  

And, here we are.  Seven treat-less days under my belt.  The only place where sweet has maintained its stronghold is in my coffee.  I've cut out the Splenda, but I haven't yet managed to cut out the flavored creamer.  I'm weaning myself off it; my coffee is looking more and more like a sad watery brown instead of a lovely, cozy, and delicious shade of tan.  But I'm content making baby steps there right now.

I've dropped the treats, the sugar, and I've quit serving starchy carbs with dinner.  It sounds like a lot, and it has been a huge transition.  But, I'm feeling extremely proud of myself for sticking to this.  And, I'm finding joy in new foods - The crunch of a roasted almond.  The variety of fruits I had previously bypassed when grocery shopping.  The versatility of quinoa.  The way a delicious sauce completely changes the taste of an entire dish.  The rainbow of color I put into every meal.

I'm learning new ways to love food.  And there are still so many foods I can love.

Wordless Wednesday: In Keeping with This Theme

Link:  http://friendsoftype.com/2011/08/one-for-the-ladies-pt-2/

Weekend Scrapbook 6

We pretty much stayed at home this weekend.  Which, honestly, is something I always welcome.  The more I'm home, the more I'm available to tackle all the things in my house that scream at me for my attention.  And while this blazing heat is blessing me with some time off from Sarandipity, I'm feeling more and more able to conquer my house, instead of being swallowed up by it.  So, this weekend, I scrubbed half our house.  It's utterly boring and tedious to talk about, and I'm certainly not going to post before and after photos (the horrors!), but it was more necessary than I realized.  

I was trying to explain to Bo last night why I'm feeling so averse to watching tv or movies that are anything but Girly.  I said that not only am I living in a masculine world with my 8-5 job and with my running on fumes, but that our house was in such disarray, that it didn't feel like my own.  I quickly lost his attention while I tried to explain that a sense of home is so important to feeling feminine and that I'd lost it somewhere in all the clutter and dusty baseboards.  But, as I spoke, I really took to heart the words I was saying.  I hadn't actually realized until that moment that having a home I am proud of is one more piece of the femininity puzzle.  

With my struggles with balance and a penchant for over-committing, I've noticed that my femininity is one of the first things to go out the window.  I figure it's off traipsing through our mini-forest with my patience, leaving dark eye circles in exchange.  My friends always describe me as a girly-girl, and I think it's so funny.  I was brought up to be a tomboy, and for a while my favorite pre-date screening question was to see if I owned more power tools than the boy asking me out.  (Usually?  Yes.)  So, while I do wear makeup and girly clothes and sparkly accessories, it doesn't often reflect how I feel.

But this weekend, I cleaned and I baked.  Sans ruffly apron, but still.  If you came over to my house right now, you'd find clean shiny surfaces, chocolate truffle cakes, scented candles, and most importantly - a contented me.

Lifestyle Choices

If someone were to ask you what your ideal lifestyle looks like, how would you answer?  I'm not talking pie-in-the-sky descriptions involving winning the lottery or inheriting piles of money from a deranged great aunt.  No.  What I mean is this - Realizing that most of us must work at some kind of job, how would that fit into your life and how would your life fit around it?

I've been doing some deep thinking about what my life looks like right now and how I'm spending my time.  As one might guess, I'm plain burnt out.  And while a tiny part of me feels like a failure for having hit this point, a very large part of me thinks, "How could I not be burnt out by now?"  I'm putting in 6-day work weeks that include 60-70 hours of work.  Which, of course, requires that everything else get pinched back to almost nothing.  When I'm working 6 days a week, there isn't a lot of time leftover for:  Laundry, cleaning, cooking, grocery shopping, running, sleeping, friendship, reading, writing, playing piano, and sitting still.  You get the picture.  It's certainly not rocket science here.

So, I'm reevaluating my goals and plans for my life.  Up until this point, I'd been filled to the brim with "baking, treats, company-building, one day gonna have my own bakery" talk and intent.  But now?  Now, I'm not quite so sure that I want all of that.  The baking and the treats, absolutely.  Those will always be as much a part of my identity as my curly hair.  But the rest is seeming to come at a cost that I'm not so comfortable paying anymore.  And when I think forward to how I want my life to look in a year or two years or five years, I'm feeling a lot of discomfort about the fit.

How can I possibly maintain this schedule while planning for children?  While having children?  This kind of workload doesn't fit with how I picture that phase of my life.  It doesn't fit in at all with the lifestyle that I have in mind.

The quick answer would be for me to cut back.  That's always been the answer - Quit taking on so many orders.  But if I'm doing honest math, I can only take on one client per week in order to achieve a semblance of balance.  Which requires a whole lot of telling people "no."  With my current workload, I'm already turning away an average of two orders per week.  So, hmm.  Giving myself rules in order to cut back could work for the short term.  Would it work for the long term?  Will that help me create the lifestyle I want?

I don't have any answers, and I'm not allowing myself to make any definitive choices just yet.  I'm still trying to evaluate how and why I got to this place and what a long term solution might look like. What I do know is that this place I'm in isn't where I want to be.  I need to make some changes in order to fit work in with life.  And, after all, there's nobody in charge of my life but me.

Can't.

I had incredible, happy dreams last night.  My dreams are always vivid, and I nearly always wake up feeling that same emotion from my dreams.  But for some reason, when I awoke this morning, the reality of life came crashing down on me.  And it was heavy.  Ordinarily, I'm a take-charge person; I get things done.  If I want something out of life, I chase it down.  Maybe this is why God gave me such strong legs? 

But the past year has me feeling helpless and as if my life is out of my control.  This is such a foreign place for me that to say that I feel lost would be treating it with kid gloves.  There are frustrations with life that I just cannot fix on my own; I cannot put in enough elbow grease to shine up the situation.

I woke up this morning with the word "Can't" reverberating through my mind.  That word and I are not friends, and we never have been.  I do not identify with it, I do not empathize with it, I do not comiserate with it.  But this morning, I feel as if there are a million of billboards screaming at me from within my own bedroom:  Can't clear up your skin!  Can't get married!  Can't afford things!  Can't fit into your jeans!  Can't have babies!

That last one makes me pause.  It makes me gasp if I dwell on it for more than a few seconds.  It's not referring to a physical inability to have children, but my inability to have them now.  And with each passing day, my body ages toward a point where physical inability becomes a very real enemy, lurking from within. 

There aren't many things in this life that I can say without an ounce of doubt that I am good at.  But, I have always known - from the depths of my being - that I will be a good mother.  When I feel insecure with my career or filled with doubts in other areas, I ache to devote my energies toward something where I know I will thrive.  And it always goes back to one, unshaking thought:  Motherhood.

I am aware enough to know that things can be done to help fix my world of "Can't."  Enough creativity and enough trying will resolve most anything.  I need to return to that place of creativity and effort.  Because I know me - feeling lost and helpless isn't something I tolerate for long.  Like a gypsy, I feel the pulls of change in the wind, and there's no keeping me still once I feel those whispers across my skin.

Making More Happiness

You have to love the universe's timing of things.  Not ten minutes after I published yesterday's post, I stumbled onto Ted Talks of a pertinent topic - 7 Rules for Making More Happiness.  Too fun!

Oh, Ted Talks, how I love you to bits!

About Ordelia.

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I've disappeared on you once again. 

I've officially tiptoed near that line emblazoned with the brightly colored "Burnt Out" signage placed every two feet.  Anyone who's been with me for the long, long haul could have predicted this; I'm following nearly the exact timeline I did with my stint as a part-time piano teacher.  That gig lasted a little over two years before I cried uncle and regretfully mailed out resignation letters to all the students' parents. 

It's my own, perfectionist, over-achieving doing that puts me here.  My drive to do things well.  Sure, that trait has served me well over the years (hello, piles of college scholarship money and two engineering degrees!), but it's also been a cleverly-disguised enemy that has no qualms about driving me into the ground, all while congratulating me for nearly earning a Superwoman cape. 

I've learned to identify this ne'er do well sitting on my shoulder, whispering tuants into my ear as I pile more items onto my list.  I've even named her - Ordelia.  She pretends to have my best interest in mind but certainly does not, and she thoroughly enjoys how inadequate I feel when I don't complete my long lists of tasks each day.  But although I've identified her and named her, I'm not as diligent about keeping her silent.  It's not long before I start assuming that her whisperings are my own thoughts; that I truly do enjoy being in motion from sunup to sundown.  That sitting on the couch with my favorite book just isn't important and isn't worth accomodating by removing things from my list. 

Damn that Ordelia for twisting my thoughts into a jumbled mess.  Damn her.

Operation Pretty Up, No. 1



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As in, pretty myself up.  But on the inside; not so much what might make me drop-dead anything to anyone else.

As everyone is talking and writing about New Year's resolutions, I've been reflecting over this past year and how I currently feel about myself.  I'm in the middle of a small lull in my side business, and it's giving me much-needed time to breathe and think and strategize.  You see, I've been feeling downright awful about myself over the past four months.  Longer than that actually, if I'm being completely honest.  And it's not just the usual, obvious things that women generally lament.  My issue is that I know full-well how to take care of myself, but I'm just not doing it.  Not hardly a speck.  Sure, I slap on makeup every morning, and I do make an attempt with my mop of a hairstyle.  But there are other things I've let go by the wayside - like ample sleep; eating well; working out; heck, shaving my legs more than once a week.  And I'm tired of feeling ugly for not doing them.  I yearn to feel feminine and alert and, well, pretty again. 

So, with the New Year beginning, I'm putting myself on the track to Pretty Up.  And I don't care what the rest of the world thinks of how I look on the outside.  This is all about feeding my soul some beauty.  I'm going to do the things - no matter how small - that make me feel like a girl.  A pretty girl. 

Today?  Today, I work out.  I will bust my shoulders and quads to the Jillian Michaels dvd, and I'll (stiffly) walk away feeling so proud of myself for doing a small thing to feel good inside.