My tiny $16.99 Black Friday 2010 tree is all decorated, I have half a dozen Christmas Cards written and will probably finish writing all of them after all this year. I was so sure I would not get time to do this favorite task. My vision is clearing and with any luck I will be able to track my knitting directions again tomorrow and use Thursday and Friday to complete some important presents. This week has been an unexpected gift of time and love and people.

What I thought I needed was more money, I have been talking frequently with God about my goals to help my children be financially free of this house, for me to have enough savings to return to college, and to be completely free of all debt, medical and otherwise. I have read and listened to “Think and Grow Rich” I have been doing the legwork, working as hard as I can, taking opportunities to earn, neglecting a bit some of my usual holiday tasks, and budgeting, budgeting, budgeting.

Friends and family have made comments about my absences from fun and frolics, but I excuse myself with the needs of my patients and my own strong need for more income. Don’t get me wrong, if I could just get even, I would actually be OK, no wiggle room and minimal savings, but I am one of the truly lucky single women in my working class age group, I make enough to support myself. So the gift I asked of the divine in my life, was money.
However, I also ask the universe each morning to help me listen and be useful, help me know where I am needed, as the greatest moments of my life were those when I let myself be the tool rather than the artist.

I believe I get what I need the most just when I want it least.

Last Saturday, a woman drove into the back of my car at high speed. My guardian angels kept me from hitting the wall and telephone pole, but the impact still hit my face and head on the steering wheel and more significantly shook my brain a bit giving me a concussion. My wonderful high mileage Beige Pearl is damaged and not drive able, I am not released to work until next Monday so will loose a full weeks pay, our kind of work doesn’t have sick days. These facts and the pain of my injuries are the dark in which the real miracles of this week shine.
The first was at the scene, I miraculously regained consciousness just long enough to throw my emergency brake. Then the second was the people who witnessed the accident who not only delivered the food box from my car for me but sat with me until the ambulance came. The staff at Banner Ironwood were the kindest and best listeners I have ever met in an emergency room. And the friends who took custody of me so I would not have to be transported to the VA for admission were kind enough not to point out just how obviously confused I still was (apparently concussions are kind of like drunk in that you are truly NOT a good gauge of how not normal your acting!)

The list goes on and on, including my two sons giving up two days and a lot of mileage to help me get my follow-up care at the VA.

I also am seeing this week as a divine gift of time. Time to remember ANC reflect on how truly blessed, loved and lucky I am,

In all fairness, if this blog does not make sense, blame the fact I should still be resting my brain.

Frost on the car before the baby pink fingers of dawn bring temperatures back to a more typical Arizona winter warm as I wend my way to work, Christmas music and holiday decorations in public waiting places catching and holding my patient’s eyes and multicolored light displays peppering my night road home; it must be Christmas!

December means a lot of things to me; respiratory illness is in full swing and my hands dry out from all the washing; the 201 half finished knitting projects form yarn mounds around me as the thirty or so Christmas movies I watch every year, reveal some new way to bring a laugh or a tear. Everything I want to shrink (like my thighs and my laundry pile) get bigger; and everything I want larger (like bank balance and available time) shrink to almost nothing.

But however cold, mucous filled (not so much mine as theirs) or exhausting December days are, every single one I get play Secret Santa to some unsuspecting stranger! Finances are at an all time low (as they are for so many people) so I don’t do anything big. My Guerrilla RAK (Random Acts of Kindness) rarely cost more than 5$ and sometimes cost nothing, but seeing a real smile delivered from Santa to a stranger via me, makes me smile all the way to my pancreas!
Try it, you’ll like it! I promise!

So my weight is way up again and my spirits have been a bit down. October was an amazing month starting with a fabulous vacation to Disneyland thanks to kind and generous friends. The lows equaled the highs and my decision to forget my healthy eating habits and meditation made for a rocky journey.

Now it is November again and I have just been released to train again…..

So back to the drawing board….started with a leisurely 1 mile walk with my kiddo in a stroller today…

This is the third place I have stopped to try to blog today. And the third time that within the amount of time it takes me to get logged in and my thought stream started I have had a male of that indeterminate age of past childhood but before adult hygiene skills kick in, settle next to me. At which point they open to Minecraft and put in their high quality earphones and start listening to Thrashing Driving NOISE, too loud for me concentrate on this side of the earphones. I give up for today, and totally miss internet at home.

So I am rabidly trying to revive my yard and garden. My Suburban Homesteading headed south with so many other things this year.

To give you an example of just how far south, I started this blog on June 4 at 8:59 PM.

What is up with me as we head into July?

I have a brand new patient on a fulltime basis, who really is brand new, less than 3 months old. I will add that babies are still a great challenge, what they lack in strength (please remember I work with patients who have trachs, ventilators, g-tubes or this young NG tubes) they make up for in minute size and squirmy flailing! I love my new patient, and again I am placed with a superb family.

I am wobbling back and forth between choosing to meditate, exercise and eat right and laying around on the couch hibernating eating my organic, vegetarian version of junk food and feeling a wee bit sorry for myself. I have found that the level of breathing issues and pain are about the same either way right now, so really, really, really working on motivating myself to pick the better long term outcome.  This morning I was successful, but honestly only the second day this week I have run, did make 5K.

I am slowly crawling out of a financial shock that pushed a wobbly lifeboat completely over. I am working hard and trying to just take one bite at a time. My friends are incredibly kind and generous. Challenge in this area is feeling guilty or undeserving of their help. I am incredibly better at giving than recieving. More things to work on in my journaling and meditation than I ever fell comfortable sharing here, but I am completely under reconstruction.

In much less serious matters I have been playing a lot of a phone word game called “Words with Friends Free”. My personal Goal was just to be #1 for one week (of friends playing) in average word score.  No attention at this point to overall game scores but suddenly winning a lot more and have suddenly had a lot more turn downs for continuing to play, which is exactly why for so long I played the other way. “What way,” you may ask. Well I would choose a point spread say 10 points, 50 points, whatever I felt like and that would be the amount I would lose by, let me tell you that is A LOT more challenging than winning; more math, letter counting, creativity, etc. There are a few players in my circle who I do play “all out” so to speak because they are that good. I win maybe 1 out of 5 with them, and could never predict them well enought to lose by a set amount. On the other hand, I am less annoyed these days when it becomes obvious that my opponenents are using cheats to place words. Although I don’t get it, how can it feel like winning if its cheated? How is that even fun? However, it does make for more fun for me 🙂 I also am breeding, training and fighting digital dragons. These are my current favorite time wasters. (Yes, still reading a lot, THAT is time use!)

I plan to do some real blogging again soon. This is more of a “Hello” I am still alive. Maybe I should talk more about the challenges of life, my personal pains, failures and foibles: some of the bloggers I followed when blogging was still “in vogue” (and still follow) are/were quite up front about all of it. Of course, it is that sort of surrender of a private life that lets them cherish the fame I abhored, so maybe not. Instead look for some amazing vegan recipes. Who wants to come be my guinea pig?

And now off to do more of that stuff that earns the money to finally pay the bills that have been piling up since the catastrophe….

So backup to last night’s entry, I never mentioned the story of “he who will not be named”. Once upon a time, in a world far, far away I totally fell into the “f***able category of women; I also had a syndicated column; and well good Geek Cred (like I could tell you the episode number of a Trek show and knew my away around D-20’s AND D-10’s.) So during this time I used to roll a few dice with a would be  writer who was a pretty nice guy, we were what I would even call friends, or at least I thought he was and we were. A decade plus of years,  two long moves, and a wee bit of illness and stresses later I had totally graduated into the UNf***able category of women and he had made it onto the NYT Bestseller list. He was appearing at a medium size convention in my city and I bumped into him at a local gaming store. I said, “Hello!,” excited to bump into this now very successful D&D buddy. He heard my voice, turned, started about 7 inches below my eyes and scanned down. The guy never really met my eyes, and turned on the “professional author” voice to politely tell me to leave him alone, he would be signing at the con. He NEVER even recognized me, because women in his world really belong in two categories and those in the second are invisible and not valuable.

All this back story to say all this training for the Tough Mudder is either paying off and I looked hot yesterday, or the more likely scenario, the guy is finally growing up and getting over himself, because yesterday, he remembered me. I am returning to the floor to get some autographs this afternoon in my cloak of invisibility (least complimentary T-Shirt and jeans). Let us see if he knows me now!

More later……

Today was, how shall I say it, AWESOME!

To play it in rewind, I just returned to the hotel room after eating dinner at the Tilted Kilt and listening to Phoenix Firefighters Pipe and Drum Corps. The Kiltlifter is great with the garlic fries. Sadly all my first, second and third choices off the menu were out by the time we hit the restaurant at 10 pm. I had a salad in Balsamic and fries. It was vegan and tasty, and well, men in kilts wiped down tables all around us.

We got to the restaurant so late because we were at “Wil Wheaton’s Awesome Hour” in which we learned to wash our hands before as well as after using the restroom if capscaisin(? sp) is involved to avoid wasting good milk; that the women in Wil’s life are patient; nerd is not genetic and most importantly, that Wil can deliver more than an hour of the best stand of comedy time, after time, after time. It was also just before this event that I learned for the second time today that Phoenix Comicon is growing bigger with some pains to show for it but leadership whose own improv skills keep everyone happy and satisfied.

The premier of the “REAL” Star Trek reboot was incredible and if the series premiere is any indicator, I will be thoroughly addicted. It has distilled the essence of the original series and delivers it in a dashingly original ode to all things Roddenberry/Shatner/Nimoy/etc.

Nichelle Nichols (or Grace as her family knew her) is beautiful, charming, intelligent and able to make her significant hearing loss a part of her charming schtick. And boy can she still sing.

My morning was all about the work portion of my being here and few things can make a convention as fun as actually being of use to someone. I was. Even cleaning the trash off the floors of rooms between panels was enjoyable (yes, someone has to do it, cuz the participants seem to believe we have already perfected the trash eating carpet.) It was during my useful part of the day that I might the three charming young men who designed “Bake Shop Drop”, my new favorite app to addictively make sweets disappear without gaining a pound. Can’t wait for their new word find app or their next game which promises to do for number play what “Bake Shop Drop” does for donuts.  Go try their app, it is on FaceBook and phones and fun.

That is about all of my second day I can remember at the moment, it is well into day three and tomorrow is my day to play. I will finally meet John Scalzi Author of online blog “Whatever” as well as my 2012 favorite scifi novel “Redshirts”; and maybe meet Jewel Staite. So time to sleep and dream of tomorrow. Hope others time at con was better narrated and at least as enjoyable.

Namaste my Geek Friends!