The world needs the bees.

Get yourself good and caffeinated. Like six cups of coffee, skin on your face crawling off type of caffeinated. Then put yourself on a deadline... A meeting you have to make it to, something pretty important.  

     Definitely do NOT give yourself enough time to make this deadline. The destination should be quite a ways away. Long, curvy, and dangerous country roads. Never make sure your gas tank is full. It should be hovering somewhere right above empty. It's not time to refuel unless your gas light is on right?  Now heavily rely upon your gps to get you to unfamiliar places. In the country. With poor satilite reception. These maps shouldn't be updated either. Updating a Garmen GPS has to be too technical a feat to be accomplished. Right? 

    Anyways, focus on the task at hand. You're whipping around country curves with both hands white-knuckle gripped onto the steering wheel. Your eyes dart from left to right utterly paranoid that you'll miss your turn. Out of no where, bam!  You hear a strange thud hit the door frame behind your head. 

     Something foreign has just flown into the car through the open window.  You risk glancing around but see nothing.  Frustration and anxiety are creeping in from all around because you still don't see the damn turn.  It's then that you feel the strange tickling sensation IN YOUR HAIR. 

     Instant panic. 

DO NOT SWERVE OFF THE ROAD. 

    

      You swat blindly at your tickling hair while you keep your eyes fixated on the road for fear of one false move.  Never once does the option to slow down cross your mind.   As the tickling stops your eyes glance down and spot the fat bumble bee now in your lap. IN YOUR LAP!

UTTER TERROR ENSUES!

   You manage to maintain control of the wheel, but barely, as you attempt to rise up out of your seat to inch away from the fat insect stinger. Must. Remember. You. Are. The. Driver. The terror that the plump, pollen encrusted bug illicits is tangible.  Your skin crawls. You can't remember if these are the bees that can sting multiple times before dying. 

   Finally you manage to flick the thing off your lap. Relief is short lived. Now you can't see it. If you thought you were terrified before... Well, now the danger is lurking unseen by your feet some where. Please get a grip. It's only a bee you will tell yourself. Do stings hurt more on the feet?...you contemplate. While forcing yourself to calm down take inventory of your surroundings. Check hands, hair, seat, lap and visible floorboards for the creature. You could relax when everything checks out but you don't want to rush into calm just yet.   Suddenly something black and sinister crawls up over your knee. The damn thing is in your lap again. 

     Screaming you flick at your leg as if it were on fire. Most of you is hoping that you don't hurt the thing, because well, the world needs the bees but never in your life have you wanted anything away from you so badly. 

      Ok. It's gone. 

No really. You've made it to the stop sign and you haven't killed yourself. Or the bee you guess. Strangely, it's nowhere in sight. You put the car in park and step out. Your legs are jello and your hands are a shaky sweaty mess. 

   Seriously, no bee. Every inch of the car checked. Even under the floor mats. Caffeinated fever dream?  Coffe induced hallucination?  

     

     Get yourself all amped up with anxiety. I mean, evil bumble bees crawling all over your body, run away car anxious. Now try and find your way to a new destination while you're running out of gas and your GPS is on strike....

     Definitely do not learn from history repeating. 

Puppies and life experience.

This is why I don't get shit done. I break out the laptop and it's like a beacon. I instantly have a fifteen pound dog head in my lap.

And the cat people think they have it bad.  

  This people, is Charlie. Short for Charlotte. Yes, she's a girl and yes she is named after an over acted Disney kids tv show. Yes it hurts her self esteem some but hey, my children were into it at the time. 

   Charlie is adopted. I'd go through the ordeal of keepin it a secret from her but I'm pretty sure she knows. She was three when she came to us after all. I don't how ever tell her that she came into my life to fill a void. That would just be rude. She's unique and has a personality all her own. I don't want her thinking that she's just around because I miss my friend. She has found her own space in our lives after all. 

    My friend I refer to is Kalu. She was the first dog I'd ever had on my own. She was my first Great Dane. She was a life lesson for me. 

   When I bought my own home I'd vowed that I'd have a dog of my own, and no little pip squeak dog like my mother loved. So when that day came I scoured the adoption places but they wouldn't let me adopt with out 'previous experience'. I then turned to the papers where I found little Dane pups for sale. Needless to say a little Dane pup raised me. She taught me patience. Or tried to. She also taught me how to be a mom and how to say good bye to a friend. 

   Now I'm sitting here with Charlie wishing she'd teach me how to be productive. 

Is Social Media Always a Black Hole for Creativity?

I had a premonition that my social media use bogged me down. Kept me too distracted to get anything real accomplished. I set some goals for myself and went about attempting to move my life around to set things in motion for me to reach those goals. 

   So what did I do? Yup, immediately started yet another form of social media. This blog. I've always documented my life in one form or another. I use to keep a journal, in high school. Then in college I got my first camera. From then on out I became focused on capturing my memories as they happened. College parties. Art. Interesting nature I saw along the road. Vacations. 

   What does this have to do with social media you ask?  Well, social media has expanded that drive to document 100 fold. Magnified the obcession so to speak. It's actually brought that obcession right to my finger tips 24/7. I can snap photos of my decadent restaurant dessert one night, tweet a rant, connect with family on Facebook and turn around and show you all a weird bug I found hiking the next minute. All equally valid to me. 

    Now as well as ease of use, there are an endless selection of outlets to release your self out into the world. Sometimes my thoughts and images find their way onto all my preferred platforms and sometimes I pick an choose. Depending upon my topic and targeted audience. 

   Now that I've chose to make this aspect of social media a force for drive and inspiration my struggle will be focus. Can I keep this momentum up while simultaneously creating?

   

Golden cornbread waffles, a breakfast confession

I'm not a morning person, never have been... And really, I'm only a tiny bit envious of those people that truly are morning people. The thing with my opinion about mornings is that I seem to feel that they are flexible. They can 'happen' just any time. Usually when ever  you happen to wake up. 

   That aside, breakfast is my most important meal. Favorite meal, hell I'd probably take it as my only meal forever.  When I think of breakfast I imagine friends and great conversations. Cozy couches. Steaming hot coffee. Gravy and biscuits. Ahh! Never mind. I really don't need to make an entire list because I think I could go on forever. 

   My point is, this morning I decided to push my creativity onto my breakfast. With the inspiration/recipe coming from a friend of mine, I made some utterly delishious cheesy cornbread  waffles. Golden, buttery, crispy cheesy goodness.   While I did still put syrup on them they were mildly savory. Here's to being creative in all aspects of my life. 

What is 23000 miles away from Nicholasville Kentucky?

How long can you sit in one spot?  Your couch lovingly conformed to your body. Visions of much more productive things dancing in your head.  I had grandiose plans of discussing how vast the ocean is.  Really?  How many whales are there out in the ocean?  How big is that, our ocean, for it to be able to hide enormous whales within it's folds?  So big that we literally have to hunt, search them out.  We can't just push our hands in and come up with a large handful of life. I don't know much about whales though.
    And for things I don't know much about I turn to Google.  Like hopefully most everyone does.  Because really, Google is IT.  It doesn't know, however, 'What is 23000 miles away from Nicholasville Kentucky'?  Or maybe it just doesn't know how to answer my query.  I Googled it.  No helpful result.  Our moon on the other hand, is about 23000 miles away from all of us.  It used to take NASA and it's astronauts two days to reach it.  I've been here on my couch thinking about all of these things.  How it's extremely difficult to hold in my mind just how incredibly large and infinitely small things can be.  How often do we take a moment to imagine how big a whale really is?  How small our blood cells are?
   We as humans are like a vast colony of ants. Spreading out as far as we dare.  We have the ability to look out.  See hints of what we as a species are achieving.  We can read about the men that have touched our closest celestial bodies and about the men who have gone to the lowest depths and highest points on our world.  But when we aren't focusing... these things softly drift into our periphery.  They are in our collective consciousness but not quite in the forefront.  I personally, easily drift into into my own very shallow depth of field.  Like why can't I focus long enough to drink an entire cup of coffee while it's still steaming hot?   I have to keep returning to again and again to the microwave.  It's still not as good as when it was first brewed.  At least my couch still has a spot held for me when I get back.

First Confessions

Eight months ago I birthed my third and final child.  Four months before that I was let go from my job of the past seven years....  I've just turned 35.  A desperate and bleak picture I'm painting here for you, no?  Well, that wasn't my intention.
   My main objective was to pair down everything.  Boil my last tumultuous year down into a few sparse sentences so that we could start anew together.  I'm here on a whim, and while that may be so, I'm hoping to make the best of it.  I'd like to use this space not only to release some steam, or as a journaling tool but to spark something fresh.  Reawaken my creativity.  Possibly strengthen my writing muscles and hold me accountable. 
   I'm now firmly in the trenches of being a stay-at-home mom of three.  I'm glad to be away from my previous toxic career but I cannot allow myself to become comfortable on the couch (or comfortable only running around picking up after three small humans). If I'm going to be on the couch I may as well use it as a comfortable sitting spot to be productive in.  Welcome to my journey, hopefully it will be interesting and thoughtful or what ever.  Here's to growth and new opportunities.