Just Me

  I’m someone who sticks to a schedule. I cling to routines and prefer to do certain activities on certain days. I have been doing this for a long time because I have found that following a schedule has helped me to ensure that I get done the things I needed to get done. When my kids were little, a schedule helped me make school mornings easier and they got into bed when they were supposed to.   Now that my kids are older, with one of them attending uni, I started using a schedule just for my own purposes. Yes, my youngest still had school hours and he needed some time with me too, but for the most part, I was doing other things. As a teenager, he does other things too.   But I have learned that when it comes to summer vacation, the schedule is not a part of our daily routines.   In fact, we don’t even HAVE daily routines!   We have been having a lot of family time this summer, and I prefer that over a schedule or routines any day. I still stick ...

One thing I love to do is go for a nice long drive. Oregon is filled with A LOT of scenic areas to drive through and I have had the good fortune of seeing a lot of country-style villages, lots of farms, a lot of beautiful land, forested areas and rivers. Especially rivers! I have also seen creeks, ponds and lakes. Any opportunity I have to go for a drive is something I would jump at! I also enjoy taking my kids along for these scenic drives, too. One reason why we love visiting other places in Oregon like the coast, Salem or Portland is because the drive there is beautiful. Oregon is beautiful!   Unfortunately, because I am still unemployed, I have to be careful with gas. I can’t really drive around as much as I used to because I don’t know when I’m going to have any gas money again! My husband has helped me out with gas money but we are up to our eyeballs with bills and he also needs to buy groceries for the whole month. If I didn’t need to worry about having money for gas, ...

  In November of 2020, I lost my job with Alvord-Taylor, Inc. I got a new job with a cleaning company but, unfortunately, I was very sick for the last part of November and I couldn’t start my new job until December. Then I was let go in March, 2021.   Right around the time I lost my job, we got news about something else going on: My oldest lost his scholarship to the University of Oregon. When he had won the scholarship in January 2020, he was told he was guaranteed 4 years of paid tuition.   But, apparently, no guarantee is ever a guarantee!   When this happened, all I could think was, It’s a good thing I’m unemployed.   On one hand, I was furious, scared and disappointed that the university did this to him. My son takes his education VERY seriously. He is all about school and work! All of us have sacrificed so much just so that he could attend school and work virtually without any problems.   But on the other hand, I really wasn’t su...

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 hav...