Two kinds of people…

There are two kinds of people in this world…

I always liked those types of sayings…I know whatever they say is going to be fairlytrue. Sometimes it’s funny; sometimes it’s something to think about.

Today and tonight I have been thinking:

There are two kinds of people in this world, those that just DO things, and those that get stuck, can’t make a decision, can’t move a step in any direction. This latter group often DOES move somewhere. It just takes them a long time.

Why?

I don’t know.

Obviously, I am in the latter category.

I am feeling better about career pursuit stuff…just need to keep that momentum going. But I am having a huge struggle changing some other things, as well as sticking to that schedule. I don’t know why I can’t change these things. I don’t know why. My mind is always shifting from good to bad. It’s like there are two me’s. I guess there are in a way. I want the good me to prevail.

B is in the former category. He just DOES this. If there is a problem, he solves it. If the first solution doesn’t work, he just goes for another one. I feel like I was not born like that! (But I am glad at least one of us was. 😉 ).

I should be living such a full life. Things have gotten better, but I don’t know what is wrong with me? I want my blog to be interesting. Wedding planning, adventures, writing my book, mindfulness. I will always have struggles but I want to believe in my dreams and also cope with them in different ways.

The good thing is I wrote for 5 hours on Sunday, and feel like I really know where I am going with my writing and have a plan for it. I have a schedule and a writing schedule worked out. I read all these articles today about motivation and routine while working from home. I just need to keep in my mind that it is work, and worthwhile, and if I DO the schedule, it will actually get me somewhere. I want my schedule to be like what I did Sunday! I want to do the SAME THING every day.

Wake up, coffee, write 9-12, swim, hang out with B for a bit before he goes to work, relax until 4 or so, write until 7 (or just keep relaxing since I wrote that morning), watch my shows and dinner, read, bed. It makes me smile to think of that. 🙂 Just need to do that Sun-Weds, and one the weekends Thurs to Sat, write in the morning if I want, then have fun and get out of the house all afternoon. Can we challenge me to do this schedule for ONE week? And then I will check in. Just one week. I want to take care of myself for ONE WEEK.

I don’t want to drink. I don’t want to binge. I don’t want to eat in the middle of the night and have a stomach ache in the morning. I want to keep eating more healthy foods to help my body heal as much as possible (have been doing better at that). I don’t want to feel guilty for eating healthy foods (weird thing, too long to explain, haven’t been doing so well at that). I want to practice my snacks in the daytime (I have trouble eating in the daytime because I hate feeling full – also too long to go into, and my main problem in life). FOR ONE WEEK. I will see my mood go up and stay steady, I will feel better, it will help me be good to B. I will get hope back. I will feel proud.

Which of these types of people are you? Some people are obviously the latter and then have a moment where they switch to the former. I want that moment. I know I want it, I feel so ready. I even know how to go about it. I just get undermined by my own mind and mental illness and anxiety and who knows what.

Sorry for the heavy posts (well, I guess mine always are)! I am really starting wedding planning because we are going to Denver in June to pick the venue. I think I will feel a lot less stressed about the wedding planning after that. Anyway, I want to cover more of that stuff.

I just had a really hard day today. Still want a dog, just trying to find the right one. I found my dream dog today, a Corgi puppy at the shelter! We planned to go get it tomorrow at 1pm when they open. B was going to get up an hour early so we would have time to swim and do the other things we need to do before that. Then I called right before they closed and it was already gone. I am SO bummed out. Feeling a little better about it now, but for hours all I could think about what how lonely I am going to be tomorrow and how much my own puppy would have made me feel excited about life tomorrow instead.

A good thing, one of my good friends (whose boyfriend was deployed with B) just got engaged last week! 🙂 We would spend hours planning our weddings as we talked online every night when they were gone (before we were even engaged), so I am so happy for her!  I am also proud because he picked out her ring based on what I told him she would want. And she loved it. She was such a good support to me when they were gone because she had already been through another deployment with him. Now he is getting out of the Army too.

Peace be with you. Stay strong.

“Tomorrow is the most important gift in life. It comes to us each midnight bright and clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and puts itself in our hands. It hopes we learned something from yesterday.”

Lord, let me have learned something from today. Let me take my lesson and make tomorrow good.

Bittersweet

Today is my official moving day, my last day of living at my parent’s house.

I am going from here:

Denver, Colorado

Where I lived near here: 

Red Rocks ampitheater

To here:

San Gabriel valley

 

Where I can see these outside of my apartment window:

I am sad to leave. I wish I could stay here for a couple more weeks. First, because I was SO rushed this week and have a bunch more things to do that I will have to just do there or finish in June (like organizing things). And also because I will miss it here and just want a little more time.  I love spring and summer in Colorado so much. We have the most beautiful summers of anywhere I have ever been in my life.

But my plane ticket is for today. And I know it would be hard for me to move any time so might as well be now. And just get things set up. And I want to be with B. I am so excited about California too, I love where we are going to live and getting to be together now. It’s just bittersweet.

And here we go!

I need to remember: figuring out my stomach (what makes me sick, etc) is a work in progress and I can’t keep blaming myself.

Part of it is something, part of it is dietary, part of it is fibromyalgia, and part of it is anxiety. Some of these things I can control, and some I cannot. So I need to take care of myself and stop the self-hatred about it!

This is a stomach, not my stomach, but we can pretend…

It is plagued by chronic stomach aches and nausea. Every.single.day. Some of this is from IBS/Fibromyalgia, some of it is from my gluten intolerance (helps that I stick to this) and dairy intolerance (doesn’t help that I don’t stick to this), some of it is just sensitive, some is from anxiety, who knows what else.

I just need to love myself.

Moving on to something happier —> wedding planning! I am excited to share some of this stuff with you guys on this blog.

I have been exploring theknot.com since last summer, before I was even engaged. I love looking at their “Real Weddings”. Now I need to begin the REAL wedding planning!

These are just some things I have decided on so far:

• my favorite color is blue, that will definitely be the main color
• I have to have an outdoor ceremony and outdoor reception (with tent fine). I want them at the same venue.
• I want (read: have to and will have) a summer wedding. We are planning for June 2012 right now, exact date to be determined
• I want ceremony, pictures and cocktail hour, reception. B and I want a buffet (literally all he cares about is food and drinks, he is such a foodie/gourmet!).
• I have a pretty good idea of what I want my dress to look like. 🙂
• We are getting married in Denver. I want more botanical garden look, in the city, than mountain look.
• B has his four groomsmen picked out – his two brothers, his best friend, and another really good friend. I will have my two sisters (assuming the middle one is speaking to me by then) and two more people that I have to find, haha, okay, decide on.
• I want to go somewhere where I can speak French on my honeymoon.

These are my two favorite flowers

I have other things in my head of course. I made a timeline.

I will be doing most of the planning. I decided we need to start with these things: a rough budget and guest list, then finding a venue, and then setting an official date. We will go to Denver in June to look at venues. Before then, I am really going to work on the budget, and continue making my list of venues we want to look at (and calling them to ask questions). Then I want to set our official date and book the venue in June.

What did you start with when you were planning your wedding? If you aren’t married, do you have any rough ideas like these that are “must’s” for you? I am just interested in hearing other people’s opinions and ideas/dreams. 🙂

10 things I am loving here

I.love.it.here.

Things I am loving about our new home and life in southern California:

1. THE WEATHER! 70* today and all week!
2. Getting to be with my fiance every day without worrying about when he will be leaving again
3. Palm trees!
4. Having a ‘home’ that feels like mine and ours
5. Knowing that after some stressful set-up, I will be settled here for awhile, with no more moving around all the time and feeling so unsettled
6. Seeing the San Gabriel mountains every day (even if they are often surrounded by a cloud of smog…mountains remind me of home)
7. My new pool and how I can swim outside every day
8. Getting to walk around our apartment complex, read in the picnic area, and smell the flowers
9. MY BED! I can actually sleep with B again because it is so comfy and big enough
10. Again, the weather and everything beautiful outside! 🙂
11. Oh, and MY RING! 🙂

Would it be tacky if I showed pictures of my engagement ring on here? I really want to and I am deciding about that. 😉

Scouting-trip update

Okay, this is going to be mainly a little journaling post. I can’t wait to get home and/or get back here again and get settled in so I can regularly blog again. I am so happy that I will start being able to write about LIFE again —> adventures, new things here, restaurants, our explorations, getting my new dog and setting up our apartment, setting up my life.

On Thursday, we found an apartment we really like. We like the area and its proximity to everything – shops, restaurants, bus stop, and B’s work.

I love the warm weather here and how we can see the mountains outside our window. It’s more humid than Denver (everywhere in this country is more humid than Colorado save maybe AZ, NM, UT, WY, and MT which are all about the same), but not super-humid. Just a little bit that I can notice because I feel my best in a super-dry climate.

I am excited to explore with B:

• do the touristy stuff in LA
• escape on the weekends to San Diego (where my grandparents have a second home a block from the beach…it’s like my second home because it is the only place we really vacationed when I was a kid – cheap because there is the house there but also awesome)
• go to Joshua Tree, Big Bear, all the mountain areas around here
• explore the wine country down here and do wine tastings
• and more 🙂

I love how we will live by a bus stop, even though the public transportation here isn’t very good.

The apartment complex has a big pool but it is oddly-shaped, so I am worried about that situation. We looked at a lot of other places to find a great pool (some had real lap pools with lane lines!) but they were all much farther out from the city center and had no buses close (too isolated). I will probably get a membership at Bally’s. It’s only 4 miles away and I could ride the bus there (which will take over 30 minutes for 4 miles!) or go with B but I like to have my independence with that. We are going to look at one more city pool today and see if it’s closer. My other worry is medical stuff. But that’s about it.

So we are going to live in the Rancho Cucamonga/Upland/Clairemont area of the Inland Empire east of LA. I won’t say exactly where for privacy purposes, but this is really a nice part of the Inland Empire. If you go farther east of the 15, it goes downhill. (I am still trying to get used to how they call the highways “the 15” instead of “I-15” here!)

B found out his work hours: 4pm to 2am four days a week (Sun-Weds). He will actually work 330pm – 330am because he is the distribution manager. His field is logistics, which is what he really did in the Army as well as a 1st Lieutenant. I am happy he didn’t get the Thurs, Fri, Sat shift because then we wouldn’t have weekends to see friends and do fun things!

We have more friends here than we realized which makes me happy. B has several cousins here, and his best friend’s parents live in Pasadena so we will see him every time he comes out to see them. I have known B’s best friend for as long as I have known B (I met them both the same night) and consider him and his girlfriend some of my absolute best friends as well. He was actually here on Thursday and we got to see him then and had SUCH a good time in Pasadena (which is beautiful – I just loved driving around and looking at the amazing houses!).

Overall, I am trying to just look at this as an adventure.

It is going to be a lot of work to move and I am honestly looking forward to being busy. I am feeling better than I have felt in a very long time. I decided I am going to just settle in here: set up our apartment & home, get my dog and train it, make B dinners and clean, volunteer. Just be patient with my career. It will come. And I will slowly look at transitional careers. But I am going to let it be okay to transition first and just enjoy myself. I felt a sense of peace with this today during my swim. My ultimate goal is to work part-time as a PA and the rest of the time be a housewife. I just think this is a good balance for me and for us.

Have you ever had to make a big move to a new place?
I have lived a lot places temporarily with B during his Army career. And we lived in Tennessee together for 9 months before I moved back to Colorado. That was a big move for me. I considered this ‘staying’ with him while I saved up enough money to move to Nashville when I went to Vanderbilt. But this is going to be better. I don’t feel so worried about planning things because we are engaged now. And I feel like I am older and wiser.

Beautiful Heart: The Next Chapter

The weather is beautiful here today in sunny Denver, 64*.

And life feels beautiful today too! 🙂 ❤ I feel suddenly so much more like an adult, on my way to things. And that feels great.

I actually had a really hard day yesterday with anxiety and irritability –  worrying about if I will EVER get a job/get my career started. That is a fear that keeps coming up on bad days.

But I had a good night of sleep (always does wonders!) and I am going to look at our trip this week to California as the first step in setting up my new life. I have this thought running through my head, very often, about, “what am I accomplishing? what am I accomplishing?!” and it really sucks. But I want to be in the present moment this week. I AM going to accomplish something! The first step is finding the right apartment/townhouse for us, so we can set up our home and move there. This IS a necessary step, and I should enjoy it and look at it that way, as a good step and as an accomplishment.

There are STEPS to where I want to be. I have to break it down and do them one by one.

1. The first step is finding our home and then moving. Remember that, self!
2. I just have to breathe and then do the next step after that. This next step is finding a volunteer job out of the house (I am planning to continue my online work there for the Denver rescue as well), and signing up for my French class.
3. I will continue applying for jobs. I really want to find the RIGHT job for me, working with animals. I would LOVE right now to have a transitional job as a receptionist in a vet clinic.
4. Then, and meanwhile, I will take the one class I need for a pre-requisite (hopefully this summer, fall at the latest) and apply to PA school.

I started thinking about this today when Caitlin @ Healthy Tipping Point asked readers to tell her their life plan for the next few years. I think about this a lot, but it feels good today to write that down. What I am afraid of is this: I will be okay not getting into PA school at first if I have a job, any job. But what if I don’t have a job OR get in? I don’t know if I can handle that, I don’t know if I can continue being this bored and unfulfilled and not knowing when it will end.

I hope, hope that it will be okay. And I am excited about this FIRST step at least, and I know I can do the second one and accumulate positives and be busier in my life. Just trying to do that ABC skill right now (Accumulate Positives, Build Mastery, Cope Ahead) – to gain confidence and enjoy life more!

I am just SO excited to be engaged, and to get to plan together for the here-and-now, and for the future! ❤

Announcements

Here is my news to share today:

I AM ENGAGED! I got engaged last night. 🙂

Also, B is (we are) taking the job in California, so we are going down there this week to find a place for us (A HOME!) and then we will come back here and get all the stuff and drive down the week after that. I haven’t decided yet if I am going to go there and stay right then, or if I will come back here for a few weeks and take care of some things. I will probably have to do the latter but I want to make the drive together and unpack together and set up our home together.

Then I am going to set up opportunities for myself to be an active member of life again, to work on my career, volunteer, find a job, work on my book (I finally got a dictation program that should help that along for when I start to get pain on the computer). All overwhelming but good opportunities.