Where do I start? Ever have one experience after another that just seems impossible to be happening? Well, 2023 has been that year for me.

Last January my dad’s wife who had been living in a memory care situation suddenly fell ill with pneumonia and a secondary infection. My dad was at her adult family home to pick her up as he usually did every week or few days to take her back to their condo and spend some time which she normally always enjoyed. But that day in January was different.

Patti was very shut down. I spoke to my father that day in the afternoon and he said he was taking her the ER as she just wasn’t right.

Once there she refused any kind of treatment. It’s like she was checking out. The best option offered was for her to receive hospice care.

She was gone in two weeks.

My father and Patti had been married for 29 years.

One thing I know that no one should have to live with is losing adult children before oneself. Patti unfortunately had dealt with terrible loss in her life. Both of my step brothers are deceased. The youngest in 2012 and the oldest in 2016.

It’s hard to talk about it, as how do you explain suicide? You can’t. To me there is no doubt after David passed in 2016 that the light went out of Patti. That’s when her memory and self care problems loomed. My father did his best to care for her, but he also had some of his own health concerns to deal with. Eventually he found an excellent adult family home which is where Patti lived the last three plus years.

Following Patti’s death I thought my father would rally and do better now that his phone wasn’t ringing constantly with Patti calling every three minutes because she forgot she had just called him. I thought my father would be able to finally put his energy into his own care.

When March rolled around that would not be the case as neighbors found my father in the condo lobby by the mail boxes. He had fallen down.

Things started to go south from there.

My father fought Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (CML) for many years and in 2021 a benign brain tumor was discovered and removed. My poor dad had a huge metal plate in his forehead after that surgery. Some things he didn’t tell me. Like I didn’t know the benign brain tumor would come back. It was the kind of brain tumor where you have to get all of it, but it spreads out little roots everywhere and if you don’t get them all, it will grow back.

After some hits and misses my father ended up in the hospital for two weeks mid to late March. I remember being in the room as the neurologist laid out the situation. Basically the brain tumor had come back rather aggressively and on top of that his body was not managing the leukemia anymore despite weekly transfusions. Both issues were not good. His body would not survive another brain surgery due to the leukemia.

I remember talking to my dad’s yoga teacher who came to see him at the hospital and is a personal friend of mine. We both looked at each other and knew he was dying.

My father chose hospice and after in-home care was coordinated he was able to go home to his beloved condo at the end of March. No one could really give us a time frame, but things most certainly were not looking good on paper. I was very happy to see him be able to be home, but we all knew how it would end.

He passed away on April 27^th.

You would think the Universe would stop there, but no, more things happened after that.

In June my husband and I lost our beloved rescue Beagle named Daisy. She was only 9. She was exhibiting a lot of pain and we thought it was her IBD that had acted up, but after taking her in we found out she had a large tumor on her liver. There was no choice but to let her go.

Ugh.

On top of all of this loss my job was difficult. Due to a huge pull back of spending from customers the market was not good. In September my company did a massive reorganization and I unfortunately was on the receiving end of a layoff.

Yep. More loss.

So what is my point in sharing all of this loss? My point is to use it to do better and to do more. Sure there is a lot of grief to process and feelings about my job, but despite the losses I know that there are always gifts to find. I firmly believe the Universe puts stuff in our way or takes stuff away from us in order to show a better way, or a different path, or an opening of some kind that leads to a better, healthier direction.

I am really glad for all of the experiences I had and the things I learned in my job. I look forward to taking those with me into the next adventure.

I am still in the process of “processing” everything that has happened this year. I am cherishing extra time with our remaining dog, Zip and enjoying some very long walks with him. I am continuing to work on his training. I am enjoying more yoga classes and time at the gym. I have reached out to a lot of friends old and new. A lot of these things were being ignored when I was still employed and dealing with my father’s care.

I have drawn inspiration from the movie about Diana Nyad, who tried like five times to swim from Cuba to Florida and she was able to do it at the age of 64. Mind blowing. I highly recommend watching the movie Nyad. It’s on Netlfix. Some of the things she has said is to never, ever give up, and you can’t do it alone. It is amazing to think the nearly impossible actually became possible for her.

So despite all of the losses from one hell of a year, I know good things are on the horizon. I am really enjoying taking the time to explore myself differently and to really find the things that inspire me. One project I am working on is developing the spiritual and energetic skills to learn how to help heal and communicate with animals. Stay tuned on that one.

I’ve restarted this blog as I always want to try and help if I can, and if someone reads this and gets something out of it that might help, then that was the whole point.

The other point is I can’t let all of this loss get me down. There is too much work to do. Of course I am still working on the loss part of this year, but in doing so I know more will be revealed and I’ll find the next cool thing.

If you’ve read this far, I appreciate it. I hope it was helpful.

As my step mother always used to say, “make it a great day!”

Seems hard to believe another year has come and gone already.

A year ago at this time I was facing a tremendous amount of physical pain from an osteoarthritic condition in my left knee and I had found out the cause of it: Bone on bone.

Needless to say I was not in a good mental space about the news. Being in horrible pain daily and knowing the only real answer for the condition would be a total knee replacement.

I started having knee trouble in 2010 which started with my first arthroscopic on my right knee which at the time was to fix torn cartilage. Turns out then I did not have torn cartilage (yet) but a massively enlarged plica and cartilage that was beginning to fray. So they removed the plica and cleaned up the cartilage.

Plica is tissue we are all born with that wraps around the kneecap and can become enlarged when overused and is a condition that occurs from cycling a lot which of course I was doing a lot of that at the time. My plica was 10X larger than it should have been so it can rub near your kneecap and feel like torn cartilage but isn’t torn cartilage which explains why the MRI was negative for torn cartilage.

I was told in 2010 that I had some bone exposed on the lateral side of my right knee. I put that in a file at the back of my brain because I absolutely positively did not want to go there or what that might mean one day because in my eyes bone on bone would be a death sentence.

Why do I say that?

Because for those humans like me who value fitness and exercise and who use it to help handle stress or depression…well, if that gets taken away the mindset suffers. And does it suffer.

In 2010 the recovery I had was pretty long and awful and painful…but I did recover and went on to continue to enjoy cycling, other cardio activities (the step mill is my favorite…yeah, the rotating stair case that kicks your ass, yes, that one is my favorite), and my hot yoga practice.

Moving forward to 2016 now and after jumping off of some rocks into the Wenatchee river on an absurdly extra hot 4th of July get away I did damage my right knee with torn cartilage.

After making a return trip the orthopedist I was seeing at the time (Dr. Peter Mandt at Proliance in Bellevue whom I do not recommend), I did go in again for arthroscopic on my right knee to remove the torn cartilage.

Another long recovery that did not end well since I had been favoring it for so long I ended up injuring one of my right hamstring attachments while playing golf on a summer get away to Bend. I felt like someone had literally come up behind me and toe booted me in my right butt cheek.

Imagine the base of your ass cheek in so much pain you can’t sit for very long unless it’s on an ice pack. Not fun.

So in that time I was denied my usual physical activities for about three months while I was looking for work as I had gotten laid off at the same time. (Thank you Amazon).

So once again I came back but I’ll say that my hamstring attachment has never been quite the same and I am careful to this day to not aggravate it.

Moving to 2018. After stepping out of a sand trap kinda hard while playing golf on a trip to Cabo that I had won for my new job (which was amazing and awesome) I hurt my left knee this time.

Went back to Dr. Mandt. Torn cartilage left knee which meant a third arthroscopic. Good times.

So in April of 2018 I went in to have my left knee scoped and repaired. Long and awful process afterwards that eventually became NO RECOVERY.

I went in to the summer of 2018 thinking my left knee would get better…but it didn’t, and in the end it would not.

Being athletic you learn how to block shit out. You live with a certain level of pain all the time especially if you are used to pushing yourself.

By October of 2018 I was still not feeling any better. Went back to Dr. Mandt where he did a steroid injection. I had about two weeks where I felt like my old life was back. I was going to spin classes again, using the elliptical, and practicing hot yoga.

At the same time x-rays were taken and Dr. Mandt went over the films with me and told me there was joint space. I clearly saw space myself between my femur and tibia.

So I thought “it will have to get better.”

It did not get better.

It got worse.

While traveling for work in December of 2018 I was so miserable with pain yet again. I went back to Dr. Mandt, an MRI was ordered, and then he told me I was bone on bone.

I had no words at the time because just two months before that I was told there was no bone on bone and there was space there.

You can only imagine what my mind did at that time.

My death sentence had arrived.

I went to a pretty dark place trying to figure out my next steps. I was devastated. Yes, it’s not like I got a terminal diagnosis, but it felt like one to me because I didn’t know how I was going to survive without exercise.

When you take the activities away from the active person, they suffer.

I first cried for a few days. I cried a lot. I kept thinking what did I do to deserve facing a total knee replacement at the age of 53??

I thought about how I started running when I was 13. I did track. Before that at the age of 9 I started playing soccer, basketball, and softball.

I was a skier through high school and I also played volleyball.

I chose soccer as my favorite sport and played it pretty much for 20 years. I played both indoor and outdoor and had at least two games every week. In between I was a runner and would do two laps around Greenlake often.

I lifted weights. Especially heavy weights with my legs because I wanted the muscles to be extra strong for soccer which in my mind would help prevent knee injuries like torn ACL’s.

I started practicing hot power yoga in 2000 and eventually became a yoga teacher in 2013.

I started to think about all the shit I had done and I started to blame myself. I kept thinking I should have run less, I should have done lighter weight lifting, I should have not pushed myself so hard for so long.

My athletic friends were around but not really. No one knows what it is like to have to face the prospect of losing mobility until they have to. I felt alone and scared and unsure. I can’t blame anyone because it’s hard to relate to something you haven’t gone through…but it’s lonely on this side sometimes.

So what did I do? I went to work! I started researching and figuring out my next steps.

I did a lot of networking with people I know and got names of good doctors as I was DONE with Dr. Mandt whom I felt had really let me down. In 2018 he didn’t bother to read the radiology report for my left knee and he kind of bragged to me at one appointment that he didn’t need to because he has seen enough of them.

I can’t help but wonder if the egotistical idiot had actually read the radiology report that maybe the radiologist would have said something about bone on bone. In the spirit of ownership I should have pursued that, but at the time I trusted Dr. Mandt to do the right thing and tell me the situation.

My take away is that in 2018 when Dr. Mandt did the arthroscopic for torn cartilage that procedure basically lead to me being bone on bone. The only answer for torn cartilage is to cut it out which limits the amount of cartilage left.

I could have skipped nearly a year of my life being completely messed up had I known a bit sooner that I was bone on bone and needed a new knee. A whole year!

I also talked to people. I interviewed two people that had total knee replacements and felt reassured that I would be okay and that there is a new life afterwards. What was especially helpful was to talk to a former soccer teammate of mine who had a total knee three years before and how well she was doing now. She is Scottish and she told me to stop thinking about it and “just DEW IT.” This gave me so much hope!

So I did my research and went to two different doctors with a third on the list, and landed on Dr. Paul Manner at UW Medicine. I chose him because I researched knee replacement brands and found Conformis.

I found Conformis online and started watching patient testimonials and saw a video of a woman 10 years younger than me who teaches yoga and spin classes. She had a total knee at 42 and was rocking it so I decided I wanted what she had.

So I got in line. Took months of having to continue to endure agony until May of 2019 where I had my left knee totally replaced with Conformis. Conformis knee replacement is made with 3D printing technology that matches the replacement to your bones exactly. A CT scan of your knee is done and they use that to create a knee replacement just for you.

Within two months after my left knee was replaced I was back on my yoga mat, on the golf course, and doing some walking and gentle cycling. As I continued to recover I got my range of motion to 130 degrees. Not completely perfect, but before my range of motion was worse. I was able to enjoy 30 minutes on the elliptical for the first time in a year. A YEAR!! I cried I was so happy!!

As the rest of 2019 began to wind down I knew that my right knee was also in trouble. I couldn’t really push myself the way I normally do and when I did push a little I paid for it. I went back to see the doc in September and yes, similar arthritic condition as the left knee and the right knee also moved in a super creepy way that it should not because of again bone on bone. Fortunately I wasn’t to the same level of agony the left knee was before I had surgery so it wasn’t as difficult of a journey.

December 9th I had my right knee totally replaced. It’s been three weeks and two days. I am still pretty darned sore but I am driving and walking unaided. I went to the gym on the weekend and did abs and lifted weights. I am on my way back!!

So looking back at all of this I realized that my life has been on hold to some degree or another due to my knee problems since 2016. I cannot say how amazing it is to just think about being normal again. The healing process takes nine months to a year I’ve been told.

I am fine with that and I look forward to enjoying my road bike again, using the step mill, and getting back to spin classes.

I wanted to write about this experience to help anyone else out there facing the same thing. Knee replacement is not a death sentence after all.

I will say it is not easy and it’s through the roof in terms of pain. I’ve not given birth nor had a kidney stone but I venture to guess a total knee is pretty close to those pain levels. It takes everything, and I a mean EVERYTHING to work through the recovery process.

Being athletic has helped me recover faster because like I said earlier, mental pain blocking helps, and the toughness required to overcome is also required. There is also no doubt that my yoga practice has helped me recover.

The rehab process is slow and also not easy as it does create more pain to get the range of motion back again.

The cool thing is it does get better and I know 2020 is going to be great in that I will be enjoying my road bike again, my yoga mat (without gasping in pain holding warrior I or II), walking my mutts, climbing the step mill, and enjoying spin classes again.

The other thing that creeps in to all of this is the aging thing. That’s why I felt like the weirdo being at least 10 years too young to have this done.

Let’s face it friends getting older and dealing with middle aged bullshit is not particularly fun. Dealing with a world that I feel is rather age biased the last thing I want anyone to know is “hey, I’ve replaced both my knees…so sexy.” NOT!

What I’ve learned is even if something seems like the absolute end of the world, it doesn’t have to be. Having walked through this whole process I was able to get informed, stop freaking out, dig in, chin up, and carry on.

I’ll see you guys out there on my bike this spring!

Here’s to a great, 2020!!

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It seems as though we have entered in to a very strange time. What I find the most bizarre about our current political and social environment is that we think that it is somehow…normal and okay.

Well, folks, it is very far from normal or okay. We are so far from normal, in fact, that it’s hard to even find the words.

I just read a very interesting article by Tobias Stone from the UK who is a historian and archeologist. He talked about history repeating itself at this time and in a rather unpleasant way. I fear that his words are rather spot on.

You can read his article here: https://medium.com/@theonlytoby/history-tells-us-what-will-happen-next-with-brexit-trump-a3fefd154714#.5mogi8ice

In this article he talks about history repeating itself. Specifically he goes in to a lot of detail on historic events surrounding the Black Plague, World War I, World War II, and the myriad of issues facing Europe and/or the U.S. at those times.

I would have to agree with this author in that he states that what may seem like a no big deal situation can easily spiral in to a very out of control situation where all of a sudden, at the end of the event, 17 million people lost their lives. He is referring to the start of World War I, when an unknown Austrian Arch Duke was murdered in Bosnia, and next thing you know the War to End All Wars began.

Never before have I seen a presidential campaign devolve in to name calling, bullying, and penis size. Nor have I ever been so disenchanted and disappointed in our current political process.

The one thing humanity has forgotten is if we are constantly brainwashed to live in fear all the time  we are easier to divide. Remember that old saying…”divide and conquer?” Yeah, that one.

Now just because I posted an article about the worrisome aspects of the Trump ideology does NOT mean I am a Clinton supporter. I am NOT. I am done with both parties as they are completely disconnected from the rest of us, and one reason for that (and there are many), is the Supreme Court decided a few years ago to allow large corporations, billionaires, and even foreign countries to channel big, big money in to our political process. What does that mean? Well, folks, that means we have become an oligarchy.

So much for a government for the people, and by the people. I am also done with career politicians. No one should go in to politics as a career…it should be to serve and be of service to the greater good of our communities. Not for putting money in their pockets from lobbyists, corporations, or other foreign countries.

I also believe that corruption is rampant in both parties and a lot of the cause of that is what I just mentioned…big money to fuel campaigns full of fear, hate, divisiveness, and utter bullshit. And we just drink it up like a bunch of preschoolers too naive to see the truth.

Everything we see on the news is not real news, as the news media has become a landscape for entertainment which means extreme views get mentioned, facts get skewed, fear and anger get amplified, and on and on and on. Remember that divide and conquer thing? Well…there ya go.

If we stay separate on our “teams” then the Powers That Be are very happy because they will just keep us “divided and conquered”until we become awakened or aware of this very process.

I believe that deep down we all long for the same thing: Happiness, health, peace, and prosperity. The only thing that keeps us separate is what we tell ourselves, and what we tell ourselves is based on labels that get reinforced every single day in our mass and social medias.

So what can we do about it? Look in the mirror. A long time ago I learned that peace begins with me. Nobody can control my thoughts…only I can. So what story are we going to tell ourselves today? Will it be about compassion, love, and kindness…? Or will it be about judging and condemning anything or anyone that might be different than I?

I have worked in a customer oriented business for many years, and I am used to helping people of all kinds. I have every different kind of person walking in to my store from who knows what background(s). I can’t say how many incredible conversations I have had over the years with all kinds of amazing people. I also have this experience when I teach yoga at a very culturally diverse studio.

I can’t control what other people think, say, or do…but what I can do is be a starting point of kindness and compassion.

I wonder what kind of world we would have if all of us tried that? I think it would be completely different than the world we live in now. There is a meditation that I learned in yoga teacher training and it goes like this: May I be happy, may I be healthy, may I be safe, may I be at peace. After going through that a few times we then turned it in to: May YOU be happy, may YOU be healthy, may YOU be safe, and may YOU be at peace.

What if the world stopped hating and fearing for 5 minutes to do this?

May peace be with you.

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View at Medium.com

I really start to look at things when I lose family members. I was supposed to drive my father to see my aunt one last time before she was to pass, but she passed before we were able to make the trip to see her. She has been battling cancer for a few years and there was nothing left to do. I just got back from her memorial in Wenatchee over the holiday weekend.

Life is precious and short.

Since the spring of 2014, I have lost four family members. Two uncles, my aunt, and my mother. All I have left now are my father, brother and various cousins.

Death doesn’t really hit home until it’s a bit closer to you. Closer in the sense of parents or friends. I was in yoga teacher training when a high school friend who fought breast cancer for several years passed away in 2013. It kinda hit me in the face when I lost people in my own age category. A year later I lost another high school friend to breast cancer. And of course I lost my mother in 2014.

What starts to creep in with death is how short and precious life really is. I feel like I belong to the “incredible shrinking family” these days. At the same time I have seen my husband lose all three of his siblings in a matter of six years. He faced a tremendous amount of loss before I really had loss on a similar scale.

It’s hard to relate to loss if it hasn’t really happened to you, yet. I have a dear friend who lives out of state who lost her mother 20 years ago. At the time it happened, I was supportive, but not at all able to really be truly of support because I had no concept of what it was that she was going through. I was in the middle of grad school at the time, and I spoke to her about it a couple of times, but I was not able to really comprehend what had happened, or the toll of caring for a sick parent has on a person.

For about a year and a half I was pulled in to care for my mother, who began to decline in late 2012, and really took a downward turn in 2013, and ended in the spring of 2014. The process of caring for a sick parent is one of the most draining, never ending, emotional roller coasters I have ever been on in my life. It consumed most of my time and energy, and being the intuitive person I am, I knew how it would end.

The hardest part was trying to help my mother when I knew none of it would end up the right direction. Nothing was more heartbreaking than to see my mother cry in the hospital because her brain wasn’t working right because she was severely anemic and/or dehydrated, and scared, and in pain. Just like she did for me as a kid, I wanted to do for the same for her and that was to make everything go away that was causing pain and fear.

Grief for losing a loved one really never really stops. It goes through various stages. One stage it’s just right in your face daily. Other stages it recedes but creeps in unexpectedly at the oddest of times. Other stages of grief include feeling the loss of things that did not happen in that relationship while that person was still here.

I have really had a lot of that experience because my mother struggled mightily with clinical depression, borderline personality disorder, and addiction. Our relationship was not always the best, particularly when I was in my 20’s and 30’s. It wasn’t until I was in my 40’s did things seem to get to a point where I did not react to her issues the same way anymore. So a lot of my grieving process has been about feeling loss from all of the things I wish she and I COULD have had together, but did not due to these other issues getting in the way.

I spent a lot of time working on my own issues in order to be able to have a better relationship with her later in my life, and for that work, I am so grateful.

Even though my mother broke my heart a thousand times because she herself was broken, and sometimes it was pretty rough, all of that seems so irrelevant now because she is not here. I am so glad I was able to walk through some very difficult times in order to have more of the relationship I always wanted with her before I lost her.

In the end, I found peace with her, and I knew she loved me. There were so many times in my life as a kid when I thought how could this person be so incredibly mean? She can’t possibly love me to be this mean. Really what was happening is she was showing the world how broken, angry, and sad she was with her borderline behavior and her alcohol addiction, and it really had nothing to do with me.

What was I able to do? Move to compassion. And forgive. I cannot begin to explain the tremendous gift in the ability to experience compassion and forgiveness. Compassion and forgiveness leads to freedom and love.

My mother spent her entire life looking backwards, and beating the crap out of herself for things she said or did due to her mental illness and addiction. She could not let go of past events, even though I already had. It’s like the never ending cycle of shame and feeling bad about something, and continuing to focus on it, which reinforces mental patterns that get ingrained, and are very difficult to change. Sometimes people can change them, and sometimes they cannot.

In the end I know there was peace and love and forgiveness.

Death offers an opening of sorts I have discovered. Every time I have lost someone, I learn so much more about them. It comes from the conversations of those of us left behind. In those conversations I know the memory of those lost will live on forever.

So I am sure a lot of you have seen that video of Candace Payne with the Chewbacca mask on laughing her ass off on Facebook?

If you haven’t, then check it out: https://youtu.be/QBJsQDDLGVQ

It takes awhile for her to get to the point, but once she does, OMG you cannot help but to laugh your ass off with her, so watch it until the end.

What is it about watching someone else laugh so hard that it is completely contagious? I think I have an answer…authenticity. This woman is being completely, and truly authentic. Her laughter is genuine and real. You can tell she keeps setting herself off with more laughter because she can see and hear how funny she is on her own video recorder and she laughs even harder.

I remember a quote I heard on a live concert recording of the Indigo Girls 1200 Curfews Album and I believe one of them said “you have to laugh at yourself sometimes…otherwise you will cry your eyes out.” Then they went on to start one of their awesome songs.

It is indeed so true that we must laugh at ourselves. Look how much laughter brings people together? How many people have you talked to about this funny video in the last week? I would venture to guess a few, right?

Sharing the gift of laughter is so incredible. I heard a story on NPR about Candace, and how people were reaching out to her to say how much that very video helped them pull themselves out of a deep funk or depression. It had that kind of impact on me as well.

I have been feeling sorry for myself the last two weeks looking like Frankenstein because I have stitches in my nose from surgery to remove a basal cell cancer spot on the end of my nose two weeks ago. Today the stitches come out thank goodness, and I am hoping it doesn’t look too scary. So this video of Candace laughing so truly hard at the mask and herself was so awesomely perfect to lift my spirits and know that all really is well.

More than just the video itself had an impact on me, and that is she is coming from a place of true authenticity. Although she was wearing a mask and laughing at herself wearing the mask, she herself DOES NOT wear a mask. She is real and being her true, authentic, laughing self. To me that kind of a person is a true light in this world.

I am a lot like Candace. What you see is what you get. Authentic. Have you noticed how many people seem so distracted and not present? I do. Every where I go all I see are people looking down at their phones and not at each other. I find this very worrying, as we are not as connected human to human as I would like to see.

Everyone has their reasons for doing what they do, but I like to be like Candace Payne, and be real, and laugh my ass off.

Namaste`, y’all!

Since I just turned swifty nifty I thought it was high time to start a blog.

So let’s start off by first defining the meaning of “chinwagger.” A chinwagger is a person who likes to talk a lot. I thought this was an excellent title for my blog, because as a matter of fact, I do like to talk a lot.

I used to talk quite a bit to my mother when she was still here. She and I could burn an hour on the phone and it felt like 5 minutes. For both of us even if we didn’t talk about something super important…like if we were ruminating on the last movie(s) we saw, or what to do next in the spring garden, to the heavier stuff like feelings about family (new and old), friends, pets, and life stuff.

So rather than continuing to spin in this world without that special outlet I had with my mother, that no one person can really fill in her absence, I figured it would be best and most productive to honor my mother’s memory by talking a lot here…thus the idea of the chinwagger blog was created.

Just like when I teach yoga I do not care if you finish all of the postures. What does that mean? It means the PROCESS of practicing yoga is what I care more about. How does that apply to this blog? I do not care if this blog gets read or not. I am simply chinwagging, which is a process. There might be useful information to you here or there might not be. I plan on sharing on a whole myriad of topics that may not even be related, but whatever it is I invite you on this journey with me!

Work Stuff:

Have you ever seen an entire industry come to a screeching halt? I suspect that happened to a lot of people during the crash of 2008. At that time the business I am in just began to boom. What do I do? I am in the business of retail/wholesale garden supplies to gardeners of all kinds.

We had our boom year in 2010-2011. Wild beyond dreams…then the market began to change and here we are struggling through one of the worst seasons ever.

It’s really hard to see an industry change so drastically in a downward direction. It’s really sad to listen to your owner talk about selling his assets just to keep the business going. I thought I would be part owner of the same business, but if it were offered to me today I would not want to take it on because the market has changed so much and the future is very uncertain.

Not that uncertainty is part of any business. I think it’s easy to get complacent, and stay in a comfort zone. It’s hard to make changes when certain strategies that had worked for so long seemed to be enough…and then all of sudden those same tactics are no longer workable.

Being successful in any business requires staying ahead of the curve. That’s hard to do when the curve keeps changing by the minute, but I think it is possible. Some people are better at this than others. Some people are just lucky. Some people work their ass off and are lucky. Sometimes shit just doesn’t work out.

Like Dr. Wayne Dyer has said…think of fear as curiosity instead. Instead of going straight to fear mode when shit happens, think instead of being curious. WOW.

So I have taken things lately to be curious, and to expand my network, and to look at things with a fresh perspective. And of course, I am looking for any new opportunities that might arrive in that process.

Other things…

I love this time of year. Some people might be annoyed by the lighter skies so early, but I love the long days of May, June, July. I love the early light which helps me get up early for spin class or yoga. I love driving home from an early yoga class feeling inspired and watching the sun rise over the Cascades as I get off of my freeway exit. Yeah, I love it.

I also love my garden this time of year. I can spend hours.

More other things…

Man, I don’t know what it is about this year, but it is the year of surgeries for me. Knee surgery in January and now Moh’s surgery yesterday for basal cell carcinoma on the tip of my nose. (Wear sunscreen)!!!

I am still recovering from knee surgery, and I figure by the time I get back to the gym once again after this nose thing in about a week maybe, just maybe it will feel normal again. Maybe, just maybe I can bend my knee all the way in floor bow or standing bow yoga poses. Maybe, just maybe I can ride my road bike or do spin and my knee won’t blow up and get swollen later in the day. That alone has been a spectacular journey of severe frustration.

Why so frustrating? Because I have to move. Movement is my anti-depressant. If I can’t move then I start to get pissed off. I know there are a lot of you out there who understand this important thing.

As for Moh’s surgery…what is it? Sounds creepy, right? Well, it means they cut you until they find free margins. Yep. They cut a chunk out of the tip of my nose and then cut more of it in order to sew it back together again. Thank goodness they only had to do one cut to get clean margins.

Right now I look like a skunk with a big, white bandage down my entire nose. They had to cut it all the way up to the bridge in order to sew it back up again and look normal. I look like I was in a bar fight or something. Tomorrow the white bandage can come off, but stitches stay in until next week. Fun times.

Never thought cancer could be part of your story? I didn’t, either. I am grateful, so grateful that I have the most treatable form of skin cancer a person can get. Shame on me for being in the sun too much in the past. Must have been all those golf games in the blazing sun, even with sunscreen.

After that I get to have a ganglion cyst removed from my left wrist. Probably 15 years of chatarunga dandasana is partly to blame and lots of road biking of course has put pressure on the joint which is probably why it’s there.

After all of that I should be the new bionic woman!

I find that no matter what is going on in my life that if I can find one thing to be grateful for today, then that makes it all worthwhile. It can be something so simple, too.

Gratitude opens the door to new things and in my view is a gateway to the Universe.

More to come on the chinwagger! Thank you for reading all the way to the end!