Tuesday, February 17, 2015

When Life Kicks You in the Butt- Run and Hide

4 Tips to A Better State of Gratitude - 

What? Me? Give Tips? Ha! You're on the Wrong Blog :-)


Baby Blueberry and Oscar

Meet Oscar. He's a friendship turtle. Actually, I think he's a Western painted turtle. Here is a photo of his colorful underside. Tattoo lovers be like jelly- this guy is born with ink. 




He came to us from some very dear friends that were moving overseas and couldn't take him. So one crisp autumn night, they bring him over, along with his tank, and some containers full of misc. turtle requirements. I did not know one small reptile needed so much stuff. How would I ever remember the instructions on how to care for him?

But for being simply a turtle- ha, he's more than a turtle, this guy has personality, as my friend says, "like a t-rex with a shell"- he has his way of communicating. Like when he's hungry- he does this when I get close to his tank.
Back and forth he swims in his tank until we pay attention to him. My friend fed him in a dog dish, so his tank would stay cleaner - longer, and so since I'm all for time-saving cleaning ideas- I kept up with the idea. We put him in a dog dish- ahh, a turtle feeding dish- and give him shrimp. We also bought night crawlers for him, which he thinks are the tastiest critters to feast on. The worms disagree with his opinion. Greatly disagree and it's difficult for this soft-hearted gal to feed him living worms.

 Later this week I will write a blog about how the cute and ahh- not cuddly- but friendly Oscar  turns into a cold-blooded killer turtle when fed a worm. 

But for right now, I did promise 4 tips, so I've better write some sappy stuff this morning. 

1. God has a tendency to speak to us, even if it's not through a burning bush. Although, a talking, burning bush would be cool- I would probably grab the hose and dose the flames before listening to any message. It's a safety thing. But here's the story...next month I lose disability, which cuts our income by quite a bit. Perhaps our house payment. Ouch. I was feeling a bit upset by this and worried and generally just stressed beyond belief. When Hero Hottie reminded me I should be feeling grateful.
       "Uhh, how much wine have you been drinking, honey?" I was getting ready to take Bean to her early morning dance class, so of course Hero Hottie had not been drinking but still I had to wonder.
       "None. No, we should feel grateful." He looked dead serious. My honey, who is more cynic than positive, more bitter than sweet, more doubting than faithful- was telling me to be grateful over a significant lost of income. 
       "Okay, I give up. Please explain." Where was that wine? 
        "We found out before I get my yearly bonus. Now we have a plan. We use the yearly bonus to pay most of the house payment for the year. If we had found out after my bonus, we probably would have spent it and then we wouldn't have that money for the house payment. God let us know in perfect timing to save our asses." 
       Simple. (And also, this plan allows the girls to keep their dance classes, which is so important to them.)
       I know we would have spent it. I had plans to find myself a beach and camp out for two weeks. Without moving. Except maybe my toes in the sand. 

Alright, I probably wouldn't even had done that- I would have paid off Abu's braces. But still, we would have spent it.
    
        Instead we had money for our house payment without me having to rush out and trying to work full-time, even though my Crohn's is seriously screwed up right now. 
     But just to drive the point home, when I stopped at the store after dropping Bean after and my mind was still trying to wrap itself around the concept of gratitude, the car in front of me had a speciality license plate- and it read 'gratful'   Good one, God. - good one.
    

2. I just found out my Grandma's cancer has spread and she has limited time. Months. And there is unfairness to that. I can't be grateful for such limited time left, because it's not enough time. - I will never feel like it's enough time. -  But knowing time is precious, that can be viewed as a gift and one I don't plan on wasting. Other things will wait, time with Grandma won't.

3. So the basement is desperately trying to kick Hero Hottie and me in the ass. Seriously. If you knew us and our record for completing house repair projects. Well, lets say we're really good at having BIG IDEAS and DREAMS and not so good at knowing how to implement the plan. The beginning is easy- the end will look great and somehow we don't know how to travel the journey. So when the basement was destroyed and Hero Hottie decided to take on most of the work himself, I was filled with misgivings. Serious misgivings. But being the supportive wife that I am, and knowing it would look AWESOME if we finished, I jumped in. (That and I have a tendency to dream big too, it's why Hero Hottie and I get along so well.) Plus, we eventually finished our kitchen (over a year) and it was AWESOME. 
     "Honey, we need to think like our old neighbor, "Finish it like P." I said, referring to an old neighbor that seem to finish projects like magic. That guy knew what he was doing and accomplished it, in half the time a normal human being would take. I admired him greatly. 
     He laughed, as he measured the torn apart bathroom. "Okay." 
     Hero Hottie had taken a week off to get ahead of the projects looming downstairs and it was day one.
   And we accomplished...nearly nothing. 
   Why couldn't we be like P? We had gone downstairs with a lot of energy, plans and a gung-ho attitude and every time we turned around something wasn't measuring right, or we didn't have the correct tool, or we didn't know what the next step should be. 
   We should have just hired someone. 
   The next day, I told Hero Hottie again. "We need to approach this like P. If we do that we'll be done by the end of the week." 
   He frowned at me. Yesterday had not gone well and I don't think my cheerleading comments were helping. 
    I started painting, trying to go as quick as I could, which resulted in a bunch of spilled paint- on the floor, on me- drips down the side of the wall. This was stressful trying to be like P. 
   I felt my jaw clenched, as I looked at the time every half an hour, trying to push myself. Spilling more paint.
   Finally, it hit me. 
   What was I doing? 
   I wasn't P. I was me. Which meant, I was not going to succeed at this basement if I kept trying to do things like someone else. And perhaps, Hero Hottie was seeing my comments, which were meant to be encouraging and 'you can do it' as a comparison. And he wasn't P either. 
   If we were going to finish this basement, we would have to do in our own way. Carefully. Perhaps slowly because we were learning as we went, but we could finish it and before our girls moved out. 
    We just had to be ourselves. Or at least better versions of ourselves. 
   The rest of the week went much better. We had the plumber in to fix the shower drain, something we couldn't do. Hero Hottie framed the new shower stall. And with help from my mother in law, we painted until our fingers were numb. 
     Not completed, but we accomplished a lot. So be grateful for yourself, it doesn't mean you can't improve yourself- be a better version of who you are- but don't try to be someone else. It just results in spilled paint and frowns from your honey. 

4. Friends. I can't say enough about great friends. And technology, because right now without technology my great and wonderful friends would seem so far away. But with the magic of floating, invisible bits of info, I can communicate with them in an instant. (Perhaps I'm crazy but has anyone sent a text message and then stared at the air, wondering how your thoughts looked when they were being sent to the next tower of communication? And how many thoughts do we walk through every day?)

How cool is that? Because I'm starting to realize that with faith we're suppose to depend on God, but I think he blessed us with friends to make that journey easier.

Gibson and Blueberry know the value of true friendship



Happy Tuesday to my readers. Now go out and find your gratitude. Because it's somewhere between lessons learned hard and our messy mistakes of human-ness. And it can usually be found hanging out with grace and forgiveness.

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