It's All Just Happening Too Fast

In less than two weeks, I'll be turning 41. It's been a whirlwind of a first year in this new decade, and I find myself wondering lately if anyone else gets the sense that the world is spinning faster than it used to. As we get older, does everything start to come flying at you at more and more of a breakneck pace? Like a hailstorm in a tilt-o-whirl? Or the scene from I Love Lucy where she's working in the candy factory, trying so desperately to "process" all the chocolate until she finally just has to start stuffing it all in her mouth to keep up?

I knew this past week was going to be busy because my boss was on vacation. And I was having oral/sinus surgery. I didn't know I was also going to have unexpected houseguests for a night, witness the highs (and some drama) of watching an important project launch after months of hard work, plus spend several days caring for a sick, beloved pet chicken who ended up dying. 

Tilt-o-whirl hailstorm.

I think sometimes I forget that life is always a rollercoaster. It's like two weeks of calm give me amnesia and I suddenly don't remember that I've had two cats die and two new cats arrive in the span of 8 months. Or that I got a new car but also may have to get new foundation supports because part of our house might be sinking into our hillside. I keep going blind to the fact that the crazy candy conveyor belt is the norm.

Last month, my dentist pulled a tooth that had been hanging out in my mouth for about 38 years. It was a baby tooth, and although I'm 40, it was still attached with nothing above it to take its place. Mr. W teased me after my dental extraction and asked if this meant I was finally going to become a grown-up.

I don't think I'm ready.

Because if this planet really does start to spin faster and faster the older you get, I'd rather hang on to my youth and my immaturity and all of my baby teeth.

All this new and old and birth and death and planning and unexpected. It's kind of exhausting.

I'm grateful to be alive and to be lucky enough to be experiencing the full range of human emotions— but MAN I am tired. And I've got like 50-60 more years of this.

Someone, please tell me it'll slow down a little.

In the meantime, I think I'll have to just continue to mentally medicate myself with stuff like cat pictures...

Babies Powell Guinness and Oliver Montrose

Arms out, tail out

36: A Year in Review

I can't believe it has taken me an entire year to write about what happened to me on my 36th birthday. Last April 12th, I woke up to an email from one of the carpenters from FoodNetwork's Restaurant Impossible. He had seen my Etsy store and wanted to know if I could make him ten of the wine bottle hurricanes I had for sale. Here he is. Lynn Kegan. He's in really good shape by the way...surely he frequents the gym....

The show didn't air until August and by that time, I'd lost some major steam on the Etsy thing. Here are a couple shots of the bottle hurricanes in the renovated restaurant space:

 

The same day I got a call for the Etsy order, Mr. W and I went and bought a new couch. And that weekend, we threw a great wine and cheese party to celebrate the completion of Mr. W's last movie project. It seemed like 36 was going to be a great, easy-peasy year. 

And then on April 19th, our friend Pete died. And everything changed. 

It's strange how it still doesn't seem quite real that he is gone. I still picture him walking through our front door from time to time. I guess he probably does walk through that door and I just don't see him as clearly as I used to. 

Losing Pete broke open this strange sense of urgency and impermanence and clarity.

I think Mr. W and I both started looking at life differently and felt like we needed to make some important changes. So 36 became the year of change. A constant ebb and flow of undefined, yet wholly palpable change. 

I found myself feeling my way through the year, using my gut and my heart as my guides.

I enrolled in a life coach training program after ruminating on it since 2008. Mr. W and I bought our dream house. We began the never-ending process of packing up our current life and transporting it bit by bit to a new one. We got comfortable with the fact that we wouldn't be seeing each other a whole lot over the next year or so. We scheduled a multitude of flights between LAX and Vancouver. I made friends with all sorts of interesting people in Martha Beck's program. I did my first oyster shooter. I learned new ways to deal with stress and paid more attention to the small joys. I did a lot of crying and a lot of laughing. 

I feel very ready to go into this 37th year, even though I know now that there's no telling where it will go. The unexpected will creep in again and again. The change spin cycle probably won't stop. 

But that's all part of the ride. 

And this aging lady is finally beginning to be at peace with that.       

Admirable Resilience

Five years ago today, my youngest niece came into the world with a tornado of shock and worry swirling around her. She was five weeks early and had to spend her first days on Earth in the neonatal intensive care unit. The sweet nurses at the hospital used heart-shaped patches on her cheeks to hold her little breathing tube in her nose.

Fighter that she was, she never seemed to show any signs of her prematurity.

She's sharp as a tack and has a sense of humor that constantly surprises us. When she was about a year and a half old, my brother (her dad) was lying on the couch watching TV and she came up behind him, tugged at the waistband of his shorts and threw three raisins into his underwear. That story alone earned her a place in my heart for all eternity.

The whole family was gathered to celebrate her big fifth birthday last night, when again she gave us a scare comparable to her unexpected birth. She had been chowing down on one of her pink princess cupcakes when my dad and I saw her leaning over a plate on the coffee table.

She was choking and I jumped up to whack her on the back, thinking something was just a little stuck. Not the case. As I began yelling for my brother—the fireman—to come help, my dad flew off the couch and grabbed her around the middle. He gave her a sharp squeeze and a ball of cake came flying out of her mouth.

My brother and sister-in-law rushed to her side, hugging her and giving her water. She cried for a second, then brushed her hair out of her eyes and asked, "Can I have another cupcake?"

I almost fell on the floor. My legs were Jell-O, my hands were shaking. My dad's eyes had been saucer-sized since the minute we saw her lean over the table. The laughter was a welcome release.

If anyone else in that room had choked on something, it would have taken us weeks to recover. The elder nieces would have wanted to stay home from school all week. The rest of us probably would have put ourselves on liquid diets.

But not the little peanut. She came into the world with a bang and now it seems nothing can rattle her.

Happy Birthday Panda Pie!

Three Dozen

Today I turned three dozen. It's kind of fun to think of your age as a few sheets of cookies or cartons of eggs. And we only get to turn a dozen every 12 years, so I think that makes these birthdays kind of special.

I felt awfully lucky when Mr. W suggested (after making me bacon...mmm...and French toast for breakfast) that we go look at new couches during lunchtime. I LOVE furniture shopping. Even if I'm not buying anything. Going into home design stores is like going into candy factories (or wineries) for me. I get giddy.

Anyway, we've been cruising couch websites because of this:

And this:

And sometimes this:

Despite the fact that Mr. W has owned his couch for nine years and that some of our friends won't even come over to watch movies at our house because the couch is so tiny, the thing that finally pushed him over the purchase edge was the fact that he was getting too crowded by the cats.

So today he bought this (color has been fudged in Photoshop because the picture on the website was bright magenta):

What he doesn't realize is that even with all the space the new couch offers, the cats will likely still be right on top of us.

In the midst of our shopping, we stopped at Culver City's famous Tito's Tacos for lunch. I texted an old Yahoo! coworker to tell him I was there (it's his favorite) and he happened to be on his way there at the exact same time, so he joined us for lunch. Birthday luck.

As I sat munching on chips and salsa with post-couchal glow, I felt so happy to be having such a simple, yet wonderful birthday.

Not all the birthdays were like this. I can think of one that included sobbing in a bathtub in Carmel and another that involved a screaming match and throwing a certain present at a certain belligerent boyfriend. Those were all years before I met Mr. W, of course. Three cheers and four deep breaths for being drama-free at 36. Whew!

But something else is at play this birthday. A sort of calm mixed with excitement at the sense of possibility and openness I feel in my life right now. Last year's birthday was great, but I definitely felt stuck in a rut. Thirty-five felt heavy and confining. Likely because I was tied to the same job I'd been in for five years prior. I launched an Etsy store in an effort to spice things up.

Well, this year I wasn't exactly looking to spice things up—more so follow that sense of possibility toward something I'm really passionate about: dating and relationships. So I finally finished the book I've been tinkering with for 4 years, I self-published it and I started a new website to go with it.

Introducing The Path to Wonderful.com

I'm excited to dive into this world and hopefully make contact with some single gals (and guys!) who are anxious to learn more about dating and manifesting.

Now that I finally have the book and the site done, I'll finally be able to get back to reading all your blogs more frequently!

That's another thing that makes this birthday happy!