Life Can Be Stressful

Stress can be quite damaging to one’s body as it can cause physical, emotional and psychological strain on a person’s well-being. I am one that can vouch for this. For a few months now I have been completely stressed out due to work. I have always been busy at work; however since last November I went from busy to extremely out of control busy. I love it though, but my body can’t handle it. Stress has caught up to me and now I am at the point of trying to figure out how to handle it before it gets any worse. I am still seeing my acupuncturist once a month and when I saw her a few weeks ago I explained my level of stress to her and that it was causing my IBS and TMJ to flare up and be out of control. I have never been one to be stressed out so I didn’t know how to handle this. Ms. Acupuncture told me to a) take two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar a day and b) learn how to relax myself when I reach high levels of stress. The apple cider vinegar was to get my IBS under control. The thought of a shot of straight apple cider vinegar didn’t sound appetizing, but I figured I would try it because she has steered me in the right direction with everything else so far. The first night I did it I about vomited. It is horrible! After a few nights of this though I got used to it and noticed that it was helping my insides get back on track. As far as learning how to relax I had no idea how to do that, so I figured I would skip that homework and stick to choking down the apple cider vinegar, but then I started to get severe pain in my neck and head. The pain got so bad that it was making me nauseous and I knew I couldn’t continue this and had to do something. I then booked a massage and figured that would do the trick since Andy would only massage my neck for about 5 minutes before he would be done. I went to the massage therapist and saw someone who specialized in neck pain so I was pretty hopeful that I would feel a million times better by the time I left. Yup, I was right! This guy, Hector, was amazing. By the time I left the sharp pain in my neck and head was gone. I was so thrilled that I signed up for their monthly membership. This membership allows me to get a massage once a month. So, I will see Hector once a month to take care of my stress. There, I found a solution to learning how to relax so when I see my acupuncturist tomorrow she will be proud of me that I did my homework as I choked down her cider for the past three weeks and I found a way to relax, well at least once a month I did. This massage membership also gets Andy off the hook for having to listen to me whine about the pain and begging him to rub my neck. So, stress is my enemy and it has done damage to my body, but I am in the process of taking care of it.

Happy Hallmark Holiday

I hope everyone had a happy made up holiday. As everyone knows we are not big fans of the holiday and since I blogged about this last year I will not go on a rant of my beliefs on this holiday. Instead I will talk about our great weekend of making strides on my New Year’s Resolution. The best thing we did was spend the day cleaning out our garage. We have lived in the house for two and a half years and our garage definitely showed it. It’s embarrassing to admit, but we started to turn our garage into a storage shed. If we didn’t know what to do with stuff we started piling it into the garage and since our garage is pretty deep it allowed for plenty of crap to store. I started to feel like we could be on that show Hoarder’s. Ok, maybe that is a bit dramatic because we could still fit our cars in the garage…barely! So, we spent the day together cleaning , throwing items out and making trips to Goodwill to donate other bigger and nicer items. For those of you that know me pretty well, you can imagine my excitement to do such laborious work. Yes, from the minute I woke up this morning I was plotting a way out of this. I kept telling myself to suck it up and just do this, but then again, that wouldn’t be my true self. I did more of assisting Andy in the cleaning, so basically, he did the majority of the work. I am not ashamed to admit that either. I even got in an hour long hike around the mountain and when I got back Andy had the garage looking fabulous. I am so proud of him that he had to put up with a lazy assistant and still got the garage looking super clean. He even assembled shelving to put stuff on. What a great guy!

Besides the cleaning we also finished one wall of decorations. As you remember from my New Year’s resolution I wanted to get decorations up, but just didn’t know what to do. I am so impressed with our decorating skills that I should go back and edit what I said back in the New Year’s post. Behind our couch we have debated a lot what to put there. Andy’s brother is an artist and has said for two and a half years that he would paint us something for the wall. Well, we couldn’t wait any longer and had to do something about that empty wall. We got these really neat pictures from Andy’s mom for Christmas and Andy and I didn’t know what to do with them until one day it just hit me to get shelves and go from there. It took HOURS to get the pictures and shelves up on the wall. It was also mathematically stressful because it included measuring the couch, the pictures, the space between the pictures, the shelves the indentation of all this from the edge of the couch, blah, blah, blah! It was also nice to see Andy work with tools in the house to get all this hung…kind of hot! Anyway, here are pictures of our fabulous decorating skills.

This is the back wall with the new lamp, decorations and our couch.


Here is a close up of the framed artwork Laura gave me for Christmas. Plus, check out that elephant. Andy and I thought that was pretty cool at the store and had to have it.


Here is a close up of Andy's framed image from his mom. Have you noticed the framed images spell out our last names? They are also images the photographer took around the Madison area? How cool is that?


Here is another picture of the layout of our creativity! Not too shabby, huh?

The Chocolate Festival

Yesterday we spent the afternoon with Brian, Amber and baby Stella at the Chocolate Festival in Glendale. Many people might be excited about a chocolate festival, but Andy and I really went to hang out with our friends because neither of us are that into chocolate. We either could take it or leave it; however, if it was held a different time of the month I might have been more excited to go. Since neither of us were that excited about the festival neither of us were disappointed that the event sucked. Yup, that’s right it wasn’t all the website said it would be. The website had pretty pictures and mentioned how it made the nation’s top 100 things to do. Eeek! If that made the list then I am scared at the other 99 things to do. Well, we first venture into territory neither of us are familiar with and that is downtown Glendale. We have never been there before so we had no idea how ghetto it is there. Then parking was atrocious because every man and woman from every trailer park in the state was there, so Andy was getting very frustrated and wanted to leave. Luckily our friends found a lot that they directed us too. Crabby pants and I get out of the car to meet our friends to find out that new mommy, Amber, had leaky boobs and we needed to find a Walgreen’s to get those pad “things” that new mommies wear. Unfortunately there wasn’t a drug store within walking distance and driving out of this mess was not an option so Amber had to go back to the days of junior high and stuff her bra with toilet paper at the nearest restaurant bathroom. I looked through my purse to see if I had anything that would help her and I offered up a tampon. Everyone laughed, but I thought I was being helpful. I thought she could unroll it or flatten it out and stick it in her bra. What are friends for anyway if they don’t come up with creative ideas in awkward situations? After the leaky boob was taken care of we proceed to this chocolate festival that Amber was so excited to eat chocolate. We made our way through the insanely packed crowd with the baby stroller. Young friends, when you get to be my age your other friends have babies and strollers start to accompany you at all outings. It was fun though because Stella was such a good baby and so sweet and cute. Ok, back to the festival. After we, and the stroller, made it through the masses of people we entered the beer garden and made a loop there. After we canvassed the area we found out the chocolate festival is really a generic carnival with carnival food drizzled on top of everything. Well, there were a few stops that had decent looking chocolate, but for the most part it was carnival food dipped, dunked or drizzled with chocolate. We stuck around for a couple hours before we decided to hit up the Mexican restaurant that serviced the leaky book earlier in the day. We get there and the host is outside taking down names. She said it would be about a 15 minute wait and she was right because about 15 minutes later our names were called. We all walk into the restaurant saying “WTF” because it was 75% empty. What were we waiting outside for when majority of the place was empty? We get seated and all commented on the 1975’s décor. The booths were bright orange with the giant buttons in them. Everything looked like a scene right from 1975. After some food and good laughs we all headed back to our cars to find them safe and sound…surprising! We are glad we checked out the chocolate festival because now we know we wouldn’t go back next year and we got to hang out with our friends and have some good laughs.