Just Me

I have a heart condition but when I was in the ER recently, I noticed a sign advising nurses not to give cardiac patients any caffeine. I thought the “no caffeine at all” policy was a little extreme and didn’t really take that sign seriously. But now I think that I should have!   I am a big coffee drinker so I pretty much threw caution out the window yesterday when I was guzzling one cup of coffee after another while happily typing away at the computer. But soon I wasn’t feeling so happy anymore; I started feeling sick. So sick that I had to go to bed and started contemplating calling 911 as my symptoms (nausea, headache, rapid breathing and stomach pain) got worse and worse. Eventually, I made it through that experience and came out of it okay, but it was definitely a big wake-up call that caffeine intake, especially for people with a heart condition, needs to be taken VERY seriously.   And as I learned later on, there really is too much of a good thing when it comes to caff

When it comes to achieving a goal, I’m a big supporter in reviewing progress along the way. I was doing that recently when reviewing 12 things that I wanted to learn about or how to do this year. And while I was reviewing my progress, I realized something: A lot of the things on that list matched a list of “desired fitness goals” I had written several months ago. I guess my subconscious was pushing that to the front so that I could stop dreaming about it and start DOING it!   I thought that was pretty awesome. And, I thought, an even better thing to do would be to chart my progress so far. After all, I will want to look back one day to see how I made it all happen, and I will want to know if there was anything else I could add to that experience. My blog is basically a record of things and it’s a good thing to turn back to every now and again to recall things or check for facts. Yes, I could put ALL of this into my journal, but I just feel it would be better to have this informat

  Recently, I was working on revisions for a nonfiction book that I wrote last year. In one part of the book, I talked about how I was forced to “trash my dream” because, despite all of my efforts and time invested, it never came true. Then I had to take a step back and think about this. I started to wonder how that sort of thing would be perceived —not by readers, of course, since nobody buys my books. But maybe by my beta readers or even my publisher. What would their take be about that sort of thing? There were two things I tried to gauge in trying to predict how they might see it: Seeing it as a bad thing because we are told to never give up on our dreams and seeing it as a bad thing because my doing so gave the impression that it’s okay to give up on our dreams.   Well, I think it’s okay to give up on our dreams. I certainly gave myself permission to give up on mine!   And why did I even give up on my dream? Because I could no longer keep giving 100% in trying to make th