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‘Ain’t Life Grand’ Category

  1. Tips for the New Year

    January 3, 2016 by Diane

    Gone Fishing

    It’s time, once again, for me to take a break from my blog. But I’m leaving you with some handy tips to help you navigate 2016. Some of these nuggets of nuttiness, er, wisdom, I’ve posted before. Others are goodies I’ve discovered over the past year. Enjoy!

    Do you want to gain or lose weight? Curious about how many calories you’re scarfing down daily, and whether you’re getting the right amounts of vitamins, minerals, carbs, fats and protein? Check out Cronometer, a free web application for tracking your nutrition, health data, diet, exercise and biometrics (whatever the heck those are). It’s an eye-opening experience.

    Is this the year you start writing your novel? Need a support group, maybe some guidance? Sign on to Now Novel, a structured method to help you start and finish your masterpiece. You’ll be prompted with questions about mood, theme, character, plot and so on, guiding you to develop a blueprint of your novel. You’ll also have the opportunity to get feedback from other writer’s on the site, as well as give feedback. This might be just the nudge you need to reach your fiction-writing goal.

    Okay, you’re ready to warm up those writing muscles again, but you only have fifteen minutes a day to devote to your creativity. Here are fifteen writing exercises you can do in fifteen minutes. Set your timer!

    If you’re starting a blog this year, here are 8 tips about blogging from one who knows (and my nutty take on it all).

    Looking back at 2015, do you have any regrets? Any incomplete actions, unfulfilled dreams? Turn your regrets into intentions for 2016 in one easy step.

    Got stress? If not, I want to know your secret. But if you’re like me, reeling from the holidays (or is that holi-daze?), you need some easy stress busters. When I was riffling through some old files, I happened to come across a list of 52 proven stress reducers. I don’t know where they came from or who proved them, but I’ll share four with you now. Try one a week for the next month:

    1. Go to bed fifteen minutes earlier. If necessary, use an alarm clock to remind you.
    2. Every day, do something you really enjoy.
    3. If an especially unpleasant task faces you, do it early in the day and get it over with.
    4. Do something for somebody else.

     

    Last but not least, if you’re an introvert and you want to get out of your comfort zone and attend an event, I offer hope for introverts who feel like party poopers.

    Happy 2016!

     

    Category Ain't Life Grand | Tags: ,,, | 11 Comments

  2. Not Every Christmas Must be Memorable to be Cherished

    December 27, 2015 by Diane

    When I logon to my computer a reminder pops up:

    It’s Christmas Day.

    As if I can’t remember that yesterday was the day before Christmas. As if I can’t recall last night’s dinner with friends…

    We bring a cheap bottle of Chardonnay to the Italian family-style restaurant where we meet every Christmas Eve. He’s wearing shoes that he dusts off once a year, she’s wrapped in a muffler knit by hand. I shrug off my rain coat with the broken zipper, unable to shrug off the wisps of my day at work, the customers with their pained, desperate faces: “Do you think my son’s girlfriend’s mother will want this? She’s sixty-nine.” The man sets a bottle of lavender massage oil on the counter.

    “Do you even know this woman?” I wanted to say. “Why are you buying her a present? Go home and spend time with your son instead.”

    These thoughts swirl in my head as my two friends reminisce about their adventures as a duo in times gone by before I came into their lives. I can barely hear what they say but I’m too tired to participate. I hear instead the family in the booth behind me chattering. I hear snippets of Dean Martin singing the lounge-lizard version of The Christmas Song, or is it Frank Sinatra? My eyes rove the walls adorned with old photographs: Sophia Loren sitting next to Jayne Mansfield, her eyes cutting down to Jayne’s pendulous breasts spilling over that low neckline. Another photo: a dapper man passed out on the table, one arm flung overhead; his companion, a young woman with short curls, stroking his slick hair. Did he have too much cheap wine to drink? Did the chicken marsala do him in? I wonder these things as my companions reminisce about a hostel in Marin under a full moon, a lump of man snoring in the bottom bunk.

    We wait close to an hour for the eighty-dollar dinner to arrive and it’s disappointing: the spinach and tomato and red onion salad limp in a puddle of balsamic vinaigrette, the chicken breasts shrunken, not Jayne Mansfield proportions at all.  A disappointment; but still, this yearly tradition with our makeshift-family is something we all look forward to, tucking it away like a favorite present to be admired when winter has bleached the color from our faces, and nights are long and lonely.

    Another reminder pops up on my computer:

    Tomorrow is the day after Christmas.

    Those geniuses at Apple are on it.

    Category Ain't Life Grand | Tags: , | 6 Comments

  3. A Spoonful of Gratitude Helps the Anxiety Go Down

    November 29, 2015 by Diane

    practice gratitude

    As Thanksgiving dawned once again, I was beset by nervous tension. Why? It’s just another day, right?

    Not to my mind. To my mind, holidays require extra oomph. Preparing a special meal, even a fairly simple one, zaps my energy. Interacting with people for a good part of the day, even people I know and love, zaps my energy. As an introvert, my energy reserves are already limited. Even more so after a night of poor sleeping, kept awake by a mind that won’t allow my body to let go.

    So, with Thanksgiving upon me, and maybe a spoonful of energy available for the entire day, I knew I was in trouble. I needed to build my reserves. I needed to pull my brain from its anxious mode of thinking before it drained whatever remained in that spoonful, and open my heart to all that is right in the world. And what better way than to give myself a healthy dose of gratitude practice.

    Here’s how it works: ponder, talk about, or write down the things you are grateful for. As you do, your energy shifts, your vibrations rise, your perspective broadens. Even a teensy bit is a step up the emotional ladder.

    Here are five things I’m grateful for:

    1. I’m grateful to have a brain that holds my memories, a brain that allows me to create and imagine and discover and understand and make sense of life, even though that brain doesn’t always work well. Sometimes the circuitry gets stuck in anxietyville. Sometimes the messages it sends are lies. Still, for the most part, it’s a brain that I am grateful to have.

    2. I’m grateful to have a body that holds my spirit, even though that body complains at times, gets achy and painful and inflamed and shoots out much too much adrenaline and cortisol. Still, it carries me from point A to B, and allows me to see the sunset and hear the patter of rain on my roof and taste chocolate truffles, the dark ones from See’s, and smell the lavender bushes as I walk the neighborhood. It allows me to hug and cuddle and dance and hike and swim, and defend myself if need be.

    3. I’m grateful to have a cottage that houses my body, even if that cottage is the dimensions of an over-sized closet. Still, it’s bigger than a cardboard box, and it’s not under a freeway overpass, and I have my own bathroom.

    4. I’m grateful to live in America, a country where people who own playhouses the size of over-sized closets can rent them out at exorbitant fees, even though that country has a government that is sometimes populated by clowns. Still, it’s a government that ensures my food is safe to eat, the air is safe to breathe, and the water is safe to drink. It provides aid if I need it, and will rescue me if I’m taken hostage somewhere. Or at least attempt to rescue me. And I’m grateful to live in a country that accepts immigrants because I came from immigrants, we all did, unless we happen to be of Native-American ancestry and really, the only people who have the right to complain about immigrants are the Native-Americans, and why shouldn’t they, since it was immigrants who brought disease and wiped out their buffalo population and stole their land and turned it into high-rises and freeways, and truth be told, if my immigrant ancestors had been walled out by the native tribes, I wouldn’t be living here now, in an overpriced closet, shooting out adrenaline and cortisol. And I’m grateful to have the right to say any of this without being jailed or tortured or put to death.

    But I digress.

    5. I’m grateful to you, my reader. It’s you who make all this outpouring of words worthwhile. It’s you who keep me going when showing up at the keyboard seems like a monumental task. It’s you who make the process of writing complete, who answers the question: if a writer writes and no one reads what is written, do the words matter?

    They do. Because when I write with you in mind, I learn something about what it means to live on this big crazy revolving ball of energy.

    Blessings and love.

    Category Ain't Life Grand | Tags: ,,,, | 10 Comments

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