Weekend Warrior # 34

Weekend Warrior # 34

by | Oct 16, 2017 | Weekend Warrior

As another weekend comes to a close, I am going to spend a few moments with a quick summary for you.  I had the Lobster and Gouda Grilled Cheese with the crock of Lobster Poutine in good company at Claudine’s Eatery Friday evening.  We had family visiting this past weekend, and it was very nice to spend time together.

Saturday started slowly with a visit to Sweet Belgian Desire for a late brunch.  I had the Omelet Florentine with a side Greek salad and coffee.  It was delicious and on plan.  We then ran a few errands, and I bought a stability ball.  I will let you know how I make out with that purchase once it is assembled and I get a chance to try it out.

We then had a BBQ Saturday evening.  My guests were quite happily entertained with 2 back to back live stream concerts from home.  I also enjoyed watching them.  The Celtic Colours International Festival is well known for the music and concerts held yearly in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada.  If you love traditional Cape Breton music and want to experience it firsthand, I highly recommend planning a trip to see some of the shows live.  If you can’t be there in person, like us, they pick one concert per night of the Festival and live stream it online.  They don’t reveal which one until the day of the broadcast.  It is available for 24 hours after the live stream is ended.  I started the Friday show and the Grand Finale was able to be watched also last night.  I am glad we found it, it was a pleasant way to spend time together.  I am able to use the tv and stereo for my computer, so it was a full-sized concert with surround sound that we watched from my living room.  It is nice to be able to watch events like that on my TV with excellent sound quality.

This morning started with coffee and tea at my kitchen table.  My family left for the next visit after that.  It wasn’t a rushed morning.  Roy and I watched a couple of TV shows together, and then we went to get a few groceries.  After this, I took a nap.  Sometimes, Sunday afternoon is meant for taking a nap.  Today was one of those days.  When I woke up, a friend had delivered some coffee K-cups for my Keurig.  I will gladly add them to my stash, and enjoy them.  We then went out to supper. I was craving Chinese food.  Since we were planning to go to Oromocto for Kingsman: The Golden Circle to see it in the early show, we chose to eat supper at Diamond House Chinese Restaurant, also in Oromocto.  We had combos and enjoyed the meal.  We had to hurry for the movie, it had just started when we got there.  We met up with our friends, chatted a bit in the parking lot after, and came home.

We ate out more than usual this weekend.  However, it was not an ordinary weekend.  I am going to be cooking tomorrow as I am not going to make it to Zumba, and I have things that need to be made.  I have leftover tossed salad saved in 2 mason jars to help start the week’s lunches off in the right direction.  I still have my picnic lunch ingredients too.  All was not lost in the planning this weekend.  I can also say that the cleaning is progressing nicely.  The dishes are being kept up and I still have a lot of organizing to do.  I made progress throughout the week like I needed to do.  The trick will be to start back at it right away this week.  Today, I needed to rest for the upcoming week.  And that is a wrap for this week.  I think I won again. 🙂

Trust Your Gut: Tish’s Story; Part 33

Trust Your Gut: Tish’s Story; Part 33

by | Oct 13, 2017 | Trust Your Gut

 

Trust Your Gut is a series of stories about real people with weight issues, and complications arising from those issues.  It will explain what the person is facing, what their options are, what they have decided to do to take action, and why they chose the path they are on.  Each person’s story will be based on truth, so it won’t all be happy, but it will be real.  The goal of this series is to get people talking about options that are available for people who have weight issues, on either end of the scale.  If you would like to contribute to this series, there is a contact form linked on my Homepage for this blog.  I know there are people out there that want to help people like them; as I do.

 

The names here may or may not reflect the person’s real name.  If someone wants to remain unknown, we will choose a different name for that person’s story.  The goal is to help people, and anonymity is a valid personal choice for contributors.  I will use a person’s name only if they give permission to do so.

This week I am pleased to share another of my own stories.

Here is  Trust Your Gut: Tish’s Story; Part 33

Insulation.  Fat. I have it in abundance.  Someone might think that it would result in me being warm all of the time.  That is not true.

Circulation.  Normally, if you have normal circulation, all that warm lovely blood pumping in abundance in your veins keeps you from being cold.

Diabetes.  The chronic condition that I live with every day.  Making it difficult to do a lot of normal things, like staying warm.

What do I do to combat being cold?  Layers.  Yeah, that’s what the morbidly obese person needs to do to keep warm.  Put on layers.  Make yourself appear larger than you actually are.  Brilliant.

A friend told me that I should try wearing a scarf, especially when I started cutting my hair short.  I have one I wear a lot. It is the first scarf that I knit for myself.  It does help.

If I get up and move around, it helps.  Can’t do that at work.  So I layer up.  I do stand up from time to time and get breaks.  But sitting still for seven hours a day in a generally cold office means I have to take my own comfort control.

I have been cleaning.  I unburied the bathroom scale, and am scared to step on it.  I fear the worst.  It is taking me away from the computer and writing, a bit.  It is also a form of “I am not sitting down I am up and moving around so it counts as exercise.

I went back to Zumba.  I got 4800 steps last night.  That is good.

It has been a long two weeks, and I am up too late again, this time with very little inspiration.  So, I will keep on working on me, my house and my writing.

I think I have hit a metaphorical wall.  There is only one thing left to do.  Get back up and try again tomorrow.

#TrustYourGut

 

 

Treasure Seeker Tuesday #1

Treasure Seeker Tuesday #1

by | Oct 10, 2017 | Treasure Seeker Tuesdays

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The unedited Tuesday Treasure Seeker photo, which I took myself, at King’s Landing.

Welcome to the first “Official” Treasure Seeker Tuesday!  I wrote it that way because there was a preview story a few weeks back when I was getting ready to launch this new category.  While I am still holding the reins and the keyboard, I thought it would be great to write about the Treasure Seekers (YOU!) and me.  We can start having adventures together while I am writing my books and working on this blog.

The first one involved thinking up a picture for this weekly category.  I am aiming to make it a weekly story, like Trust Your Gut Thursday, and Weekend Warrior.  I am hoping that it doesn’t become too much for me. Time will tell, as I am managing the blog commitments as best as I can so far, and the previous categories are still progressing. If I need to scale it back, it may be twice a month instead of every week, but we will see how it goes.

The struggle for finding the right picture for this category began with an online search for treasure, gems, treasure chest, maps, amongst other various thoughts and combinations.  While I was looking through many pictures and not finding what I wanted, I remembered that I had the picture I shared above.  It was taken at Kings Landing Historical Settlement a few years ago when I went for my first time.  It is quite the experience, to walk around, and see the farms and the people in costume playing the roles of people from our distant past.  We enjoyed our tour of some of the village and had a meal at The King’s Head Inn Restaurant before heading home.  It was the first time I tried Naughtea, which is a local honey mead made with green tea from Pollen Angels.  It is lovely.

Here are a few pics of my visit that day.

Now you can see where the inspiration for this picture came from.  I think that Kings Landing Historical Settlement is a gem, waiting for people to visit and take in the experience.  Now on to the “official” Treasure Seeker Tuesday business at hand.

I wanted to make a picture that invited the Treasure Seeker inside, to invite us to look for what lies beyond what is apparent in the picture.  This group and category are meant to be about more than meets the eye.  Not just the flash of the bling, but also about what really matters to us as a Tribe.  So when it came down to deciding on this, I reached out to friends and the “Official” Treasure Seekers Group on social media.

I am learning so much as I work on this blog.  I am not the type of creative that needs courses to prove what I can do.  I jump in, and likely because of the way I approach my projects, I feel like yelling and pulling out my hair sometimes, but I figure things out. Usually the hard way, first.  I am neither a photographer nor an editor, but I do the best I can.  Sometimes, people guide me to where I need to find the tools I need to accomplish what I need to do.  Other times, people pitch in and lend a helping hand.

That is what is so great about my whole blogging adventure.  I have friends that I know personally, and friends from around the world that are willing to help me out when I am stuck on something.  It humbles me when people open their hearts and minds to help me figure things out.  It also amazes me when a friend has the very answer I am seeking.  I treasure you all. (See what I did there?  I couldn’t help myself)!

There were a lot of attempts by myself to get this done.  I am now going to insert a slideshow of my own photo editing journey, then I will share the work of two friends that pitched in to help, crediting their work and sharing their online links for you to check out what else they are working on.

Here is my progression:

They are made with two different fonts.  I thought Great Vibes was a really pretty font.  I chose the other font, Lobster Two because it was a bolder font.  The Great Vibes was hard to read for some people, and the Lobster Two seemed to be easier for people to see on this pic.  I was then offered help.

Kirsty Allen, who hosted my first guest blog story, offered to give it a whirl.  You can find my introduction to that guest blog story here.  There is a link to the guest blog story at the end of my introduction story.  Kirsty is an author also.  You can find her blog, The Ramblings of a Madwoman with her writing and tips for other writers in this link.

Kirsty submitted two edited pictures for my review.

She used a different font, similar to the pretty Great Vibes I was working with, but it was even more elegant.  She also shared that she used, “…the wonders of Photoshop. Basically, I applied a filter in the second image, increased the contrast, and played around with the colour balance of the leaves to give them more of a blue saturation.”  I don’t understand what most of those terms mean, but I can see what they look like after she applied them.

Another friend, a former roommate Noa Price, also wanted to help.  She is living abroad now, and we were friends before and after we were roommates.  If she lived closer, I might be seeking her help out more often.  She is an artist, so she has a different background altogether.  She has studied her art in both New Brunswick, Canada, and also in Australia.  Her photo editing programs include adobe photoshop, but she shared that she prefers to use inkscape for illustrator and gimp for photoshop.  After a few trial runs, she sent her edited pictures for me to review.

Noa did some editing work on the original picture to fill in the hedge adjusted the colouring of it. In her words, “I changed it a bit leaving some of the path so people would “come in” and also made 70% opacity just behind the hedge so any text would be easily readable without losing the bush appearance. ”  You can see other examples of my friend Noa’s work at Noa Price’s Designs website.

After I carefully reviewed all of my options and considered the comments from social media gathered after this project, I made a final decision.  It was certainly a process, and as you can see, I am putting a lot of thought and effort into this picture, to get the correct one for this purpose.

This is the one I chose:

tish hedge square lobster

Noa Price 2

While I was working on this project, I played with different fonts.  Lobster Two seemed to be one I kept going back to.  Up to this point on my blog, I have used the font, Lora, with a tiny sprinkle of the font, Cabin Sketch.  I realized that Lobster Two really resembles my own personal handwriting style while working on this project, and I also really LOVE eating lobster.  It is my absolute favourite food on the planet, closely followed by chocolate and pizza.  So for me to see all of these things lining up, I have to go with my gut on this, and it is telling me that this will be the Treasure Seeker Tuesday picture moving forward.  Also, as I am building a new website, I think it is fair to expect a major font change on the new website.  At least until I find a chocolate or pizza font to mix in there. I hope that you agree with this picture as being the overall winner, and I look forward to writing in this category in the future.

If there are any topics or ideas that you would like to explore in a future Treasure Seeker Tuesday, please send me an e-mail or leave a comment below.  I can’t wait to see what we can discover together.

Weekend Warrior # 34

Weekend Warrior #33

by | Oct 8, 2017 | Weekend Warrior

Happy Thanksgiving from Canada!  I am indeed going to stuff myself full to the brim of turkey dinner at a friend’s house today.  I am thankful that I don’t have to cook a turkey this weekend, as it is still warmer than seasonal temperatures here and I would absolutely melt.  I did see a turkey roasting pot at Walmart yesterday that looks like a crock pot for turkeys and claims to be self-basting while the turkey cooks.  If that works it might be something that goes on my wish list.  If you have tried this out, let me know if you like it.

I am cleaning this week.  I realized that I need to get into the cleaning again, before November.  I have been inspired to participate in NaNoWriMo after I decided not to do it this year.  I am going to write about cats and Susan, and the theme is superpowers, not superheroes like I thought, but I will make it work.  I have asked friends to send me cat stories for research.  I have an idea of what I want to write, and how, but was worried that I may not have enough information to write it all from the original idea.  I will use my own superpowers to win this year, I know it!

I have yet to complete the website setup.  I am working on it this month, but I now have more going on than I did before.  Since I started this blog in November last year, it seems fitting to make my move a year later.  I wanted to test my writing abilities before making this leap.  I think I can safely assume that it is not a passing fancy and that I am totally committed to keeping it going.  I am about to add my new third category this week, and I am really excited about it.  It is also going to have a few surprises, in terms of nerdy author geeky things.

Along with working on concepts and ideas for my NaNoWriMo novel, I have taken up the fantasy trilogy project.  I do not want to fall too far behind on it and am working on it every few days.  I am happy to say that a challenge I am in (are you surprised that I started another one? No?  I am in two right now, with one to catch up on when I finish these two) has fired up my writing for the book one of the trilogy.  I started a little bit of free writing and got some plot and character ideas going.  That was all I needed to pick it up again.  Who knew?  I didn’t.  I told you that I even surprise myself sometimes.

Weekends are supposed to be fun filled.  It was.  I also went to the Northside Market on Saturday, and am now as I write re-organizing furniture in my mind in the Master Bedroom/Craft Room.  I have made some progress, and want to finish it tomorrow so that I can move more craft supplies back out of the living room and into the neatly organized space in my Master Bedroom.  I hope to get this done because I am on a deadline.  I have to push through this week and work at work and clean at home so that I can really focus on the writing.  What do I need to finish before then?  After the cleaning is done, then I move on to website building, including an online store (exciting and terrifying at the same time) and moving the Blog to the website.  If I am going to get this all done before November, I need to be focused on progress and getting things finished.

By the end of the week, on Friday, I want to kick back and relax after a week of doing double duty.  Then I can implement the maintenance cleaning schedule and have a monthly and weekly chore list that keeps things from reversing into chaos again.  I know that chaos is a true sign of a creative mind and that it is not always a bad thing, but I am trying to change my ways for the better, and fight my way to be able to feel like I can spend more time creating and be happy about it.  Not feeling guilty and not doing anything because what I want to do can’t be done until I do what I need to do, which I don’t want to do, and then I fall into the nasty non-productive loop of living in chaos and getting nothing done at all.  I have a plan for tomorrow, and I have to set myself up to succeed before I give up on it all.  I know what I have to do, and it is up to me to do it.

What did you do this weekend?

 

Guest Blog Host Post #1: Tea or Coffee?

Guest Blog Host Post #1: Tea or Coffee?

by | Oct 7, 2017 | Guest Blogging

 

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When someone comes to visit me, I will offer them a cup of tea or coffee, as a host.  I chose this picture in particular because it has vibrant colours.

 

As a Blogger, you generally love to read and write.  A part of the craft is to continually learn and challenge yourself to become a better author.  In doing so, one often subscribes and follows numerous blogs within the community.

I have been fortunate enough to start on this path with a lot of help and guidance from my friends, and peers.  I have enrolled in free online workshops and found some that I think are worth saving up to participate in.  Through one of these challenges, I launched a free Guest Blogging invitation to the world.

While I haven’t been overwhelmed by people looking to share in this opportunity with me, a few people have approached me, and today I have the pleasure of sharing a story that another blogger wrote.  I do think as we are reading each other’s words and having online conversations about each other’s work, that we are well on the way to becoming friends.

I am a member of several different writing and blogging groups and communities online.  I am loving the support that I get from each one, and how they are all unique in their own ways.  I met my next Guest Blog Writer in one of these groups.

Syl DiNada was interested in Guest Blogging when I put out the invitation.  We started chatting, and Syl was more interested in sharing than hosting.  As it is an open invitation, I decided that I would see what came out of our discussions, and reading my new friend’s blog.

Let me tell you, the artwork that is prominently featured in Syl DiNada’s Blog is phenomenal.  I can visit just to look at the pictures.  Truly inspirational and magnificent.  Well worth checking out.  The writing, well, we definitely have different outlooks on life, and that is absolutely wonderful.  I love reading different things, and Syl puts a lot of thought behind the artwork, and consequently the writing for the blog.  I rather enjoy the visits, you should take a peek, and find something to read there.

Here is the Guest Blog share from Syl DiNada.

Wednesday, 25 January 2017
Sharing the Self

Syl 1Z: “Syl, I like your avatar but seriously, what do you look like? Why are you standing behind a mask and yet trying to convey true words?”

Y: “Z, I would just like to say we live in a world where we sometimes put too much importance on how others look. An Avatar can be a way of allowing a much larger audience to pay attention and really hear what is being said.

Personally, not for myself, as I honestly don’t care how someone looks, but I
care what is in their heart and how they convey that.”

Syl: Yes, Y has it pretty much. Although I really do make the majority of my
posts with just me in mind.

But really, at the time I signed up for FaceBook I did not own any pictures of
myself. I don’t use a phone either and had no digital camera. I just don’t
have much interest in personal pics, never have. (Yes, I know it’s hard to
believe in this day and age, but some of us have never taken a selfie.) So I
used this avatar pic of mine. And ofc…”There is More…”

Pictures of faces have a very particular effect on cognition. They instantly
convey an impression of someone. Pictures of faces are limited in what they
can convey, particularly when someone is outside of the typical cognition
pattern. I feel pretty confident that I am very much Not what a picture of my
face looks like.
I mean you will see a fairly regular face. But I think I can say without any ego
that I am not very regular at all. Not better or worse, just quite different. This
is something I know for sure from an objective standpoint.

Syl 2So any picture I put up of me will actually be *Inaccurate.* It won’t, and can’t, tell the whole story. Lol, I struggle to tell my story when I make an effort to do so.

For instance, a friend whom I chat with regularly, asked and made some specific comments about how it all started for me. And well, they completely
miss-assumed how it all began. So I had to explain. Lol, a few hundred thousand words, or half a dozen books later, I am still not done telling that story.

Haha, nothing for me is simple anymore, and that was just a straight-up
chronological story, telling about my early days as a philosopher, as a boy.
(Yes, I was a philosopher as a boy.) So really, I can’t put up a picture, it
would be a falsehood.

And besides, I am not sure why folks assume some other profile pic means hiding, That avatar pic actually says a lot, but that is a whole other post by
itself. I would say my posts reveal more about me than most pages I have
seen.

I am sharing my very essence. That is about as intimate as one can go. To
share what one’s favorite colour and food is, means nothing at all really. In
order to truly know someone, we need to know what matters to them, what
is important, what resonates with their Inner Being, with their Core.

It is knowing what they *Aspire* to. Not even ambitions really tell us about
someone, those are typically relatively superficial, and often artificial. But
what someone’s Heart and Soul truly *Aspires* to, that is *them.* Knowing
someone, one could say, is getting to know their Soul and Heart, not their
temporary and arbitrary likes and dislikes. We have to go past the surface
superficialities to really get to know someone.

Besides, I don’t feel what I Share for the most part “belongs” to me.
Concepts, thoughts, ideas, Perspectives and all the More I Share, belong to
everyone. In this way I feel I am Sharing what is Us. I truly make every effort
to live in Attunement to everything around me, to everyone and everything in
my life. I try with everything I have to live in Attunement with the World and
the Universe. Perhaps I need a picture of a community, a large community,
that would be more accurate. <3 <3
Syl 3***

And well, there is another reason also… I am way too handsome to post my
picture. I would get err….unwanted attention if I did. 😀 😀 😀
However, in amongst all the art in my posts, somewhere, there is a picture that does resemble me. <3

 

Syl DiNada is a Philosopher-Writer focusing on the Application of a comprehensive Practical-Personal-Philosophy.
Creator of: The Philosophy of Appropriateness and: An A+ Philosophy.
Syl 4

Thanks for letting me share your story from January, Syl DiNada.  I look forward to reading more of your writing, and further conversations.  If you are reading this and want to get in touch with me for Guest Blogging opportunities, here is the invitation.

You are cordially invited to start a discussion with Tish MacWebber about Guest Posting opportunities.2