OODLs (Observations on Daily Life)

Our electricity went out just before 1:00 this morning. When the alarm woke me from a light doze at 5:30 AM, power still hadn't been restored. I woke up sleep-deprived, grumpy, and thinking of everything no power meant for my morning: A workout in the dark with no Grace & Frankie to distract me from the fact I had voluntarily left my bed before dawn to torture myself with cardio. No daylight lamp to give me the wakeup (and mood) boost I desperately needed. A seriously cold shower after my workout. No tea (read: no caffeine) with breakfast. T.G.I.F.  On the bright side, I could still meditate. The thought of enjoying those few moments of undisturbed silence cheered me up quite a bit. As I settled in for my morning meditation, the power surges started. And they didn't stop. This caused our battery backups to beep incessantly. I grumbled. Then I smiled. To put it delicately, my morning had been shot all to hell. Nothing had gone according to plan. The routines I depend on for ...

Many of us are now a full month into social distancing, and things are starting to get nasty on social media. As a financial professional, I've seen firsthand the fear of small business owners whose businesses have been deemed non-essential and ordered to temporarily close. I've helped some make the heartbreaking decision to furlough loyal, long-time employees in order to help ensure the survival of the company so those employees have a job to return to when this crisis has passed. And the business owners I work with are better off than most - most of them had a cash reserve going into this "intentional recession" - but even the ones with robust savings will feel the strain if their businesses remain closed for more than another month. The "help" promised by the government in the form of the PPPL and EIDL has fallen short. I'm concerned many small businesses that survive the initial crisis will ultimately close when they are unable to make their loan...

I've often wondered how people in countries besieged by war or terrorism are able to live seemingly normal lives. They go to work, send their children to school, take the bus, go grocery shopping...just like we do. After this week, I think I finally understand. Look, I'm not going to go into a long lament about these "unprecedented times" or "weathering the current situation" or "navigating these rough waters." We've all heard enough of that to last a while. And that's my point. I realized yesterday that, for the most part, I've adapted to this new normal. My Facebook and Twitter feeds indicate many others have, too. We're starting to talk about things other than community spread and lockdowns. People are sharing pictures of their gardens and flowers and sunrises and sunsets. I'm not going to pretend I'm not scared, or that as a nation - hell, as a PLANET - we aren't all scared.  I'm also not ...

I hope I haven't caused mass hysteria. I hope I haven't sent dozens of people scrambling to their nearest bookstore to purchase books and avoid certain death. Okay, that second one isn't entirely true. If you own a bookstore and notice a spike in sales, you're welcome. Seriously, though, I do  hope you read the headline for this article and clicked on it to find out what on earth I was writing about. (I'll know how many of you did when I check my view count.) With that little headline up there, I intended to spark enough interest to get people to open the article and read it. Why? Because I want to inform. I want to entertain. I want the ego boost I get when I see a high view count for an article. The media wants the same things I do. Ever since the invention of the newspaper, headlines have been written to spark interest. The more sensational the headline, the more likely people were to buy the paper. This meant the paper made money,...

Poor Mercury. It seems like every time there is a communication or technology foul-up, or whenever people are just acting weird, the planet closest to the sun is the prime suspect. If a quick check of the website  www.ismercuryinretrograde.com  yields a positive response, that cinches it. Mercury is responsible. And when Mercury is retrograde, there's nothing you can do but sit back and ride it out. Brief astrology (and astronomy) lesson: Whenever a planet goes retrograde (some say "in retrograde," but this is grammatically incorrect) it appears to move backward across the sky. All planets go retrograde from time to time. They aren't actually moving backward - it just looks like they are because of how their orbit around the sun looks to us here on Earth. Astrologically speaking, the planet Mercury is thought to control communication. In mythology, the god Mercury was a messenger (he was known as Hermes to the Greeks...and he was a trickster to boot.) T...

I used to be obsessed with keeping everyone happy. My thinking seemed logical: If everyone was happy, there would be harmony, and everyone's lives would be easier as a result. Including mine. This obsession continued for decades. I became something of a master at making [almost] everyone happy. As you might have guessed, I was the [almost]. There were times when I did successfully make everyone happy, there was harmony, and life was easy for everyone. The problem was, those times were very rare. Usually, I felt like I was holding a giant, knotted, sparking ball of livewires, playing the world's most sadistic game of Twister while I tried to keep the ends from touching and blowing up the whole thing. I can't tell you when enough became enough or when I finally understood the adage "If you try to please everyone, you please no one" was a truism and not a challenge. And I won't lie and say I have it all figured out now and never fall back into that...

Many years ago, I was working as a pharmacy technician in a small town in Oklahoma. I hadn't lived here long, and I still had dreams of moving west to Seattle or Portland or somewhere in Northern California. Basically, anywhere except Oklahoma. The pharmacist's son was also a relatively new transplant to Oklahoma. He wasn't a fan, either.  One afternoon, he and I were talking about how we couldn't wait to move "anywhere other than here." Our highschool-aged coworker overheard us and asked: "What's so wrong with here?" We were shocked. "Have you ever been anywhere else?" he asked. "No," she replied. "Well, I mean, I've been places on vacation, and that's fun, but it's always nice to come home. I like it here." She went to help a customer, and my friend and I just shook our heads. Our coworker was obviously too young to know any better. Or maybe she just didn't aspire to much. Eit...

I've spent most of my life in the South, where "nice" is a point of pride. Our niceness is one of the first things non-Southerners notice when they visit. Mothers teach their children to "be nice" before they teach them basic human skills like using the toilet and brushing their teeth. I'd go so far as to say many Southerners are a little prejudiced against non-Southerners when it comes to niceness. Some of us act as though we've cornered the market on being nice. And there is one place we consistently point to that seems to prove this point: New York City. I've visited New York a number of times over the past 20 years. At first glance, this Southern girl concluded the rumors were true: New Yorkers aren't nice. But then again, they aren't mean, either. This puzzled me, because in the South if you aren't nice, you must be mean. After a couple of visits, I concluded that - at least in New York - the opposite of "nice" isn...

For as long as I can remember, my mom made me promise three things under penalty of haunting: I would never put her in a nursing home. If she ever had to be on life support, I wouldn't unplug her. I would make sure she was buried, not cremated. Ultimately, #3 was the only promise I could keep, and Mom wasn't the type to grade on a curve. Yet, she isn't the parent who haunts me. When my dad died, I was two states away with a newborn baby. I had made the trip to see him four weeks postpartum, and there was no doubt the end was near. But I couldn't make the trip twice in such a short period of time, and other family members couldn't get together for a funeral right away, either.  So, we did the only thing we could do: My older sister had him cremated, and we had a memorial service a few months later. That was 12 years ago, and I still have dreams that my dad has called but we have a bad phone connection and I can't understand him. I dream he...

For several years now, I've made a conscious effort to be overwhelmingly positive and optimistic. As a once-proud pessimist, this is something I have to work at daily. It's also something I feel I've gotten pretty good at. Most of the time. And then, someone will give me negative feedback. This can be about something I've done, something I've created, or something I've only been marginally associated with. Suddenly, my positivity is down the drain. I'm obviously the worst person ever, unable to do anything right, and everything I've ever created is crap. I thought my tendency to hear the negative louder than the positive was just proof that I might never fully overcome my pessimistic tendencies. Today, I learned there's actually a scientific reason for this. All the way back in the 1970s, Dr. Robert Levenson and Dr. John Gottman studied the differences between happy and unhappy couples. They concluded happily married couples have a praise...

The last few days of 2019 have been unsettling. Not because of the state of the world - though that is cause enough to feel unsettled - but because for the first time in my adult life, I am entering a new year - a new DECADE! - without: Resolutions Goals Plans A theme A word for the year Expectations 527 days ago, I started a daily meditation practice. I’ll probably rhapsodize about that in future entries. For now, suffice it to say I have decided to take mindfulness to the next level and enter a new year without any of the things I thought brought order to my life, but instead just caused undue stress. This decision has, of course, stressed me out. Don’t misunderstand: I still have daily successful actions - like my meditation practice - I will continue to complete. But I am letting go of any desired outcomes for these successful actions. Instead, I will strive to simply be. We’ll see how this goes. Personally, I’ll be surprised if I make it to mid-January. ...

My name is Billie Anne, and it’s been 10 years and 29 days since my last blog post on this platform. If I’m being completely honest, I actually forgot about OODLs for...well, years. I remembered it quite by accident as I was contemplating starting a Facebook page for my random thoughts. Thoughts of a Facebook page morphed into thoughts of starting a blog, which then morphed into the memory of a blog I had abandoned quite unceremoniously “a few years ago.” My, how time does fly. I thought about scrapping OODLs and starting over.  But I still like the name, and reviving what I’ve already started is so much easier than starting again from scratch. And so, here I go again.

November is of the past, as is NaNoWriMo. Gone is my excuse to ignore my blog because I need the extra time to bolster my word count. I did it. I wrote 50,000 words in fewer than 30 days. My final word count was around 54,000. Most of those words are actually correctly spelled and strung together in such a way that I have a good start on a story. Notice that I don't claim to have written a complete novel; in fact, at 54,000 words I am only about halfway through my tale. Now it's December, and I have to decide if I want to continue adding to that 54,000 words. A part of me (and more than a few books written about writing) says that I should keep on truckin'; after all, I just spent thirty days working on this thing. But there's another part of me that is itching to move on to smaller, greener pastures. In the process of working on a "novel," my brain pinged on some pretty good short story ideas (and more than a few blog topics.) And - let's face it...

It's day 11 of NaNoWriMo, and I've written just over 26,000 words of my novel. 25,500 of them will be deleted in the rewrite. And yet, I don't consider this a waste of time. There could be hope for me yet.

Ian walked into my office this afternoon and lamented, "I wish there were more hours in the day. There's not enough time for me to do everything I have to do and still be able to do the things I want to do!" He's ten years old. While we are busier than I would like to be, I don't think our family has a particularly fast-paced life. True, Ian dances three evenings a week, but that's his only extracurricular activity. He is homeschooled, so - while we do follow a lesson plan - he hasn't been pigeonholed into an academic schedule that is too difficult for him. Consequently, he rarely has homework. I work full time, but two days a week I work from home. Mike is a stay-at-home dad/microfarmer. Lily spends her days learning her ABCs and watching old episodes of Blue's Clues. Overall, I would say that we are much more relaxed than the typical American family. And yet, at ten years old, Ian is already craving the mythical 25th hour. I know how he feels...

Every word uttered in our house is recorded. Our conversations are stored in a comprehensive database for later review and utilization. No, I do not think the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, or IRS has bugged our house or tapped our phone line. I am not a conspiracy theorist. I am the mother of a 2-year-old. Sitcoms, movies, and even commercials are rife with cherubic children creating awkward situations for their parents by revealing intimate family secrets. Remember the commercial in which a little girl in an elevator regales strangers with the details of the Disney cruise she enjoyed with her parents the previous year? The one that culminates with her telling one of the other elevator passengers that her mother refers to her baby brother as "our little souvenir?" I'm pretty sure that commercial was scripted by a mom. For now at least, Lily doesn't tell embarrassing stories about our family. She does, however, repeat everything she hears us say. Every...

A few months ago, I attempted to read The Atlantis Blueprint , by Colin Wilson and Rand Flem-Ath. I say "attempted" because it took me four weeks to get 2/3 of the way through the book. My failure to complete the book rests squarely on my shoulders: sadly, I usually only have about a half-hour before going to bed each night to devote to reading, and the material covered in The Atlantis Blueprint requires much more attention than I was able - or willing - to give it. In other words, I was looking for a mindless read, and when I didn't get it I gave up and returned the book to the library. While much of what is covered in the book is speculative science and therefore does not pertain to this blog, one sentence made it into my "Random Ideas" (now my "Observations on Daily Life") file: "There are probably millions of human beings in the world today whose intelligence is just as great as the famous scientists, artists and intellectuals in our histo...

Forgive me, readers, for I have been delinquent in my blogging. It has been almost three weeks since my last entry. My reason for not blogging is a lack of time. No, that's not completely true. That isn't a reason. It's an excuse. While it is true that I have been busy recently, I haven't really been any busier than I usually am. What I have been is unwilling to work on balance in my personal life. Yes, I am admitting to - gasp - a bout of laziness. I have not been idle by any standards. I have consistently worked my customary 40+ hours each week. I have continued to do laundry on Sundays. I have finished knitting a sweater and a hat for Lily, started knitting a sweater for Mike, and made considerable progress on Ian's blanket. I have been hard at work on Ian's English curriculum. But I haven't written a word outside of work-related email since my last blog entry on September 30. I realized this morning that I feel out of balance. Incomplete. Un...

The top of the chalkboard in my high school Western Civilization class was emblazoned with this quote: "The unexamined life is not worth living." - Socrates A sophomoric sophomore or an eleventh grader acting like an 11-year-old would sometimes venture to alter the quote, either by erasing part of it or by adding letters here or a word there. Each time this happened, we would snicker and await the reaction of our teacher - Mr. L.R. Smith - when he entered the room. It was always the same. He simply rewrote the quote and started class as though nothing had happened. At first glance, it's obvious that Mr. Smith was following classic teaching (and parenting) advice by not reacting to this non-destructive, rebellious behavior from the children he was charged with teaching. I believe there was much more to his lack of a reaction, however. By writing the quote in chalk instead of using a more permanent medium, he was actually encouraging us to alter it. And, by altering i...

Sunday is a special day for me. It's the one day I can sleep late, even if sometimes that's only by half an hour. I don't feel compelled to check my email or - on some weeks - even turn on my cell phone. Sunday is my day to relax, hang out with the kids, and watch Mike play video games. In short, Sunday is my "guaranteed" day off. But you can't fully appreciate the sun without clouds, and there is one big cloud that hangs over my Sundays. Laundry. In the litany of household chores, doing laundry has to be the least satisfying and the least appreciated. Unlike cooking, washing the dishes, or grouting the shower, laundry is never truly "done." Even if you insist that your whole family spend Sunday in their birthday suits just so all their clothes can get washed, there is always the stray sock or pair of jeans that somehow escapes your notice and the washing machine, never mind that you walked by it a half dozen times while hauling baskets of soi...