My Mammaw has passed away. I now have no grandparents left.

Everytime we came to visit we would walk through the door, and she would turn around from whatever she was doing in the kitchen and smile this huge, brilliant smile and exclaim "Hey, Darling!".

I don't feel like writing. I just thought I should document this. Goodnight.

Here we are now, entertain us.

My friends and acquaintances and I are a strange crew, in most people's eyes. We were almost all metal/goth/punk/hippie kids and we almost all still have piercings, colored hair, tattoos, creative hairstyles, and wear a lot of the same clothes we did as teens. Yet here we are, bringing our children into the library storytimes, doing mommy-and-gymnastics or yoga classes, taking our children to girl and boy scout meetings, watching daughters practice their cheerleading routines or parade around in their princess dresses, encouraging them at sports events, etc.
My point is, not everyone raises their child to be who or what they are. A lot of us raise our children to be the people they choose to be. No matter what the surface looks like. It's very liberating and honestly...quite humorous. The parent/child couplings produce some very striking counterpoints, in the best way.
Happy Sunday.

I have come to realize that when my client tells me they're going to be on a boat in the middle of the ocean deep sea fishing until around 1pm....I tend to play around on the computer instead of doing my files. Maybe I just love the thrill of a deadline?

On the road again...but not literally. Literaturely.

I am trying to be more dedicated in my writing. Daily discipline along with moments of inspiration. I do have interruptions to contend with. I just have to learn to work between the pauses.

On a side note: my 2 year old daughter has begun referring to us as mommio and daddio. It's pretty hilarious.

We sure do get het up about a whole lot of nothing, don't we?

I don't have a follow-up to that remark, I just had a need to use "het up", in a sentence.

I'm trying to get back into writing mode. With all of this extra time to houseclean, etc., with work being so slow, I figure let's turn lemons into lemonade and channel some of this angst and anxiety into some art. It's always worked well for it anyway.

I feel very awkward typing where family can see me. This is another thing I have to work on; writing under the eye of discovery.

It's so much easier to write when you're in a place where nobody knows your name. (You see what I did there?)

Tenacity and commitment - we're ending the month with those two words being our key-phrases for personal un-lockings.

“Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another's work, whatever its blessings, however better it is than ours, but from our own poor scratched-over pages. For these we can hold up to life. That is, we are born with a mind and heart to hold each page up to, and to ask: is it valid?” - Eudora.Welty

(p.s. : I made a pretty awesome pillow for my almost father-in-law for Christmas. I now have an itch to make more throw pillows. This may happen.)

Financial stress is the worst. In fact, I can say that, across the board, things would improve by 100% if I wasn't laboring under the financial burden that I am. I better not owe any taxes this year, because I figure that whatever color you're supposed to be "in" (i.e. red or black)...I'm in the opposite one of that. I am excited, however, about getting my certificate of completion of the paralegal's workers' comp course and expanding my business out to those kinds of files. Then I'll get some personal injury and some family law courses and I'll be much better rounded. Real Estate can remain the expertise, but it's much too volatile a marketplace to depend on it. That, and I have too much debt to pay off to wait statically for it to rebound. We need to move so Doodlebug has a yard to play in and I won't be worried about drive-bys. So send good profit thoughts my way, light an abundance or prosperity candle for me. Let's have a party for the dollar...or rather, not the dollar, but a party for the work that will earn the dollar.

This little camera letter looks awesome.

Just...one...more...file...

I am probably one of the few people in the world who actually gets more stressed about going on vacation. I have to be dragged away from my work with my fingers embedded and leaving claw marks. Even then, I get up at 6am in order to get a little bit of work done before the vacation day starts. I really enjoy the vacation day once I'm into it, but I think it's just part of my brain complex that I can't help but fret that somehow I'm going to lose a client by taking some time to myself, if that time comes in spans of more than a day or a few hours. Sometimes I don't even realize that I've been waiting for something terrible to happen, until the sky doesn't fall on my head, and then I inhale. I'm working on this, because hey! - we're going on a Disney cruise to the Bahamas next year, and I can't be trying to sneak Wi-Fi to work from afar when I'm on a cruise. I think that is probably under the definition of crazy in the dictionary.

Who are you again?

I've pinpointed what the issue is. (At least, one of them.)

What made running e-zines and then blogging easy when I was younger, was the anonymity of it. That's what I need to get back to, kind of, is feeling as freely inspired now, as I did then. Back then, you didn't worry about what you put up for publishing on the internet because hardly anyone was on it. Even when the digital diaries were really peaking, you were still under a pseudonym and for the most part, hidden from all of the immediate peers of yours who may have begun stumbling around the worldwide web. Now, everybody is on Facebook, it seems. The internet has no privacy, anymore.

(As an aside, it astounds me that the acronyms we used in chat rooms have become text speak and put on public titles, but sometimes people say it out loud - which is just bizarre. Whenever I hear some "omg" or "lol" come out of someone's mouth it makes me want to chloroform myself immediately.)

When I was younger, since no one I knew was online at the time, it was easy to write down thoughts and inspirations and art. The fact that a stranger would come to my page and be presented with this self-exhibition of the most private nature, and would, possibly be inspired and respond in kind with their artistic presence, was invigorating.

Now, although I have many thoughts, and ideas and arts dancing around in my head, I rarely ever write it down. I feel like I'm on filter now and anything might possibly be found offensive by someone close to me, basically family, gets monitored out and shucked away, even if I love it.

When I was younger, I always said I could never stop writing for someone. Love makes us grow and time makes us wise, if we let it. I have stopped some of my writing for many someones, and I am learning to work within those parameters as well as is possible. Hey, even race horses train with blinders, right?

It's the discipline that matters. To have a disciplined art of many things.