Trying New Stuff is Scary

Trying new stuff is scary.  I don't know about every one else, but there is a phase when I am trying anything new that my immediate reaction is that I don't like it.  I don't like it because I don't understand it. I don't like it because I am not good at it. I don't like it because it isn't with in my normals. Then I do the same things over and over and over again, until it comes to a point that I feel dull and lifeless. At this point I start to crave trying something new, just so that the regular becomes refreshing.

I think the only way to grow is to move out side of your comfort zone. It is also the hardest thing for me to do. Thankfully I don't have to do it alone. There are people in my life that constantly challenge me to be more than what I am and help me shape the path to which I want to grow. Those that challenge, encourage and inspire me to be more than what I already am are dear to me.

 "You'll never change your life, until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in yours daily routine." - John C. Maxwell

Routine is easy. It would be those things that I do all the time.
I am pretty sure that I have procrastination down pat as part of my daily routine. I want to be a person of action and not to grow dull and boring.  In order to do that, I have to change the part of my routine that has to do with procrastination and I needed to move out of my comfort zone.

I am the sort of person that takes small steps, and if those small steps don't kill me, then I jump right in. The first step that I took was in and area that isn't a huge stretch of my comfort zone. I stepped into the kitchen. I often get bored with fixing the same things over and over again. My friend Lizzy told me of an experiment that she was trying to run, which involved her using at least one recipe out of all of her cooks books with in a year. Seeing that the first quart of the year is over and I have over 50 cook books in my house, I decided to scale my experiment down a bit and try some of those recipes that I bookmark on Pinterest. If you are going to experiment, I think it is always good to have test subjects, dinner guests were invited.

The menu consisted of slow braised Pork Ragu with Garlic Gnocchi's, Endive and Frisee Salad with Oranges and a dessert of Vanilla Coconut Rice Pudding.  It was a tall order for a Sunday dinner, mostly because I had only ever made gnocchi from scratch twice before and never with potatoes, and some of the combinations in the Pork Ragu made me head to the grocery store and look for things that I had never purchased before.  Then came the Rice Pudding, it sounded easy, until I realized that I had invited a vegan over for dinner and had to replace the milk with almond milk, which made me really skeptical if it was going to turn out.  I spent a day in the kitchen rolling gnocchi and fretting.

It was nerve racking because there is the fear that dinner was going to be horrible and we would have to order out for pizza. It was out of my comfort zone, but it was refreshing and it painful and it was delicious. Everything turned out. Everyone lived, and I learned a couple of new recipes that I will try again.

Next step was to learn a new game.  I enjoy playing various board games, and it is an easy routine to play the ones that you already know.  My husband came up with a great idea to have a game day. We would invite more test subjects/friends over and make a day of playing new games. With beer and chili with armed ourselves and started to go through the stack of games.

Love Letter is a game of  deduction and luck, and only needs a couple of people play. It is a quick game and once you get the rules, it becomes a game of learning how to read  other people, and in some way reminded me a bit about poker. You wanted to try and figure out what was in every one else's hand, because that was the difference between winning and losing.  It was the perfect game to ease us into other games.  Smash Up was next on the list, and my husband had seen it on Tabletop, so he had a fair idea of what to expect.  I had no clue on it and at the beginning I struggled, because I didn't get it immediately.  I had thought about quitting the game, because I thought it was just too hard. It isn't a hard game. It just wasn't in my preconceived notions as to what to expect. Instructions on how to play were feeling Greek to me, and everything wasn't clicking.  The more I stuck with it and the more turns that passed, the easier it became. I realized that I was having fun at the game and that sometimes I just need to get over my initial dislike of being out of my comfort zone and everything would get easier. The more tense I was about something the harder it would get.

If only I could remember that lesson when I decided to try Zumba. Zumba is an exercise program that is based off of dancing.  Zumba helped me remember more things about myself than I had expected, and they weren't positive things. I remembered about how little coordination I really do have. I was reminded of body parts that haven't stretched in years, and I was way out of my comfort zone with people that I didn't know, which is scary to me. I was reminded that I like to be good at things, and I get frustrated when I am not adequate at things.  I didn't know any of the dance moves, and there is no baby steps to learning it. You just have to jump right in.  By the end of the program I was drenched in sweat and hurt in area's that weren't funny, and was pretty sure that Zumba was an endurance test for a zombie invasion.

I however did not try Zumba alone. And while we sat panting in the car after the end of the class we talked about it. We discussed if we didn't like it because it was new or if it was because we were uncoordinated and felt like idiots.  It was a cross of both reasons we decided in the end. Then the big question came up, do we try it again. I find that in order to make something not new, you have to do it over and over again. Since that first class, I have taken another two Zumba classes and will probably continue for a while, because even though I am almost positive that I will never be graceful, the benefits out way the discomfort.  I can say that I definitely had a work out. I might be slow to get to know people, but every one in the class seems nice and pleased to see me when I attend, and ever so slowly I am getting better.  Is it still out of my comfort zone?  Yes. Is it making me a better person and hopefully a healthier person? Yes.  

All these new experiments didn't kill me, and no friends were harmed in these experiments. It also brought to light some things that I learned about myself and things that I learned about the people around me, and over all made me a better and some what more interesting person. Will I continue to try new things? I hope so, and I hope to always move in a forward direction, no matter how awkward that my be in the process.

Friendship is Rare

Have you ever gotten a song stuck in you head? And you hear the same stanza over and over in your head and it won't stop.  You have tried playing the song to get it out of your head, and listening to other music to drown it out, but in moments of utter silence the words float about in your brain sort of song? I have one of those songs stuck in my head.  I figured the one way to really get it out of my head would be to write about it. For the past couple of days I have had Tenacious D stuck in my head, and thankfully it is a stanza that won't get me fired if heard muttering at work.


"Friendship is rare, Do you know what I'm sayin' to you? Friendship is rare. My derriere, When you find out much later That they don't really care. It's rare to me, can't you see? It's rare to me, can't you see? "

Of course after the the third hour of singing this, I begin to think about my friends, instead of how to get the song out of my head.  I started to think about who my best friend is and realize that there is no one person that is my best friend. If my friends are reading this, I am sure that some of them are a little surprised. They know my pretty well and would be willing to join me on some pretty stupid adventures. Here me out, before you pull the pitch forks out and start the march. 

Friendship is rare. It isn't easy to make friends. It isn't always easy to find some one that you click with and that understands aspects of you.  I think that when most people think of a best friend, they think of a person that understands you the best. That could be a sibling, spouse, coworker or muggle. 

What if there were multiple people that understood various aspects about you, would they all be considered equal in their level of friendship? Or is it the person that I see most often considered my best friend? If that were true, I would be considered best friends with a good majority of my co workers.  I like my co workers, but I am sure that some of them would not think twice about tripping me if it meant getting away from the zombie apocalypse or a bear. 

I believe that a person can have multiple best friends, because people are fulfilled at different levels. I can be the best friend to several people at once because I am fulfilling a need and they fulfill my needs. My best friend to bake cookies with is not the same best friend that I go shopping with, because those actions to mean the same thing to each person. 

While the rest of that Tenacious D song did not stick as much as that first stanza the lyrics, I think that it might have been the reminder that I needed to be thankful for the friends that I have, and that finding someone to connect with is a rare thing and should be cherished. Not every one will understand a friendship, and it is okay, because we all connect at different levels. 

Here is all of the song lyric, and good luck not getting it stuck in your head. 

                                                           "Friendship"

Friendship is rare, 
Do you know what I'm sayin' to you? 
Friendship is rare. 
My derriere, 
When you find out much later 
That they don't really care. 
It's rare to me, can't you see? 
It's rare to me, can't you see? 

Oh shit there's a bear, 
Could you hand me that shotgun buddy, 
Also that chair? 
We're fighting a bear 
Now your life's in grave danger 
And you don't even care. 
It's rare to me, can't you see? 
It's rare to me, can't you see? 
It's rare to me, 
Say a prayer for me, 
'Cause it's rare to be 
In Tenacious D. 

Friends will be friends 
They're running naked in the sand, 
Friends holding hands 
Will someday surely form a band, 
Friends will be friends 
They say that friends are friends 
To the bitter end. 
Long-as-there's-a-record-deal-we'll-always-be-friends! 
Long-as-there's-a-record-deal-we'll-always-be-friends! 

Friends will be friends 
They're running naked in the sand, 
Friends holding hands 
Will someday surely form a band, 
Friends will be friends 
They say that friends are friends 
To the bitter end. 
Long-as-there's-a-record-deal-we'll-always-be-friends! 
Long as there's a record deal we'll always be friends, yeah

Now that I have written about it, hopefully it will move on and make room for other songs to get stuck in my head. 

Power of Suggestion

My dad came out to visit me for the winter holidays. It was great, I hadn't seen him in years, and despite being a bit under the weather, we had a great time. One morning while he was out here and over a cup of tea, he asked me about the lady doing ironing. I had no clue as to what he was referring to.  My blankness must of shown on my face, because he explained that at the foot of his bed it looked like there was a lady doing ironing.  I inquired about what she looked like, and all he could tell was that she was in a long dress and she was ironing and paying no mind to him.  I do not have any hired help at all. I do not iron if I can help it, and I certainly would not be ironing in the guest room where my father would be sleeping in the early morning. I asked him if his cloths were pressed, and sadly they were not, so we joked that she wasn't doing a very good job at ironing and we went on with our morning routine.

It is now a couple months later and I am seeing stuff out of the corner of my eye. At first I wrote it off as the cats. I have two healthy cats that some times treat the house as their own personal play ground and it would be really normal to see the cat move out the corner of my eye.  Then I noticed it started happening when the cats were not in the room or  when they were directly in front of me.  Just a little something off to the side the would move quickly and be completely out of focus.  The thoughts of the "Lady Doing Ironing" came to my mind.  And I started to think about it in more detail.

I live in an old house. It was built early 1900's and has had a fair number of occupants prior to my husband and I purchasing it. It still has a lot of original woodwork and stain glass windows along with the pocket doors and hardwood floors. I do not use the guest room that my father stayed in. I have never slept in that room the entire time I have lived here. My husband and I sleep in the room across the hall that is slightly bigger and gets the morning light.  As far as I know there is nothing wrong with the guest room. It has plenty of windows  for natural lighting and bed is comfortable seeing at it was our old bed before we upgraded to a bigger bed. The few people that have slept in the room, have normally done so out of exhaustion or out of excess of libations and aren't able to be aware of the their surroundings. The "Lady Doing Ironing" certainly could be there, but not a person would know, and my cats could care less unless the "Lady Doing Ironing" unless she turned to the "Lady That Feeds Cats"

I will admit that I am open to the suggestion of ghosts, mostly because I know that I don't know and understand everything and I am not going to in this lifetime. Who really knows if there are ghosts or displaced dimensions that over lap? I have been on several ghost tours, and I have a love for interesting history. I have never noticed anything strange about my house. No strange noises that can't be explained by cats and old hardwood floors. My dad is one of the few people that I can just talk to about all sorts of stuff including ghosts, astral travel, and parallel dimensions and not worry about offending his delicate sensibilities on religion and philosophy.  It probably comes from spending a lot of time with my dad watching the SiFi Channel and reading science fiction and history novels and just throwing a bunch of "what ifs" into our conversations.

It struck me today as to what was going on and why I was seeing things out of the corner of my eye. It was because there  really was something moving in peripheral  vision. I was in the kitchen chopping cooked chicken for a meal I was making and the cats are positioned in their usual begging positions for scraps. A couple of months ago I cut my hair fairly short to frame my face. It has been slowly growing out, and I am not to the point where I can pull it in a pony tail and have just some bangs framing my face. While I was moving around more of my hair slipped from its tie since it was still a little short to be pulled back, but I need to have my hair pulled back when cooking. I hate getting hair in my food.  It wasn't until about five minutes later that I needed to fix my hair, because it was getting in my way that I realized that what I saw was my own hair and not anything supernatural.

Part of my feels really silly, that because my dad suggested that I might have a ghost in my house, that I came up with ways to prove that he might be right and in the process spooking myself at a little bit of nothing in my own hair. The other part of me is amazed that how a small comment can get a persons mind turning in all sorts of direction and it is always the comments that you never expect that stick with you.

"The progress of the natural sciences in modern times has of course so much exceeded all expectations that any suggestion that there may be some limits to it is bound to arouse suspicion."-Friedrich August von Hayek