The Cool/Hot & Not

Strangely there are collisions in life that are anomalies.  In everyday life we may not think about it that way.  We may not consider many things when we are living in the noise of life.  During the quiet, reflective moments various thoughts cross our minds & maybe we temporarily become our own version of a philosopher.   Over time I have learned how to take myself very lightly & that frankly is extremely helpful.  I use to find it emotionally exhausting to remain in the land of the super intensely serious mode for long.  Humour is a gift that I give to myself daily & at the top of the list is laughing at myself as often as possible.  For sure countless wonders touch my heart deeply & I feel everything at a level of intensity set to maximum however I also laugh like a mad woman from my toes to the top of my head.  Up until about 15 or so years ago I did not embrace humour as a daily necessity.  I cried too much for too long over things that would have been better laughed off many times.  A turning point for the choice to laugh more off came ironically while I was at one of the scariest times I have experienced.  Normally my go to reaction would have been fear & tears at that time however grace entered my life to stay almost 16 years ago in the form of a peaceful feeling & a tap on the shoulder to take myself lighter.  It was when my husband & I were expecting our first son as I have shared with you before.  We were told over & over again that we were going to lose our precious son.  I have never felt more fearless though as I did during that otherwise what would have been terrifying time.  And as you know our son beat the odds & now stands over a foot taller than me.  I like to tell everyone that he gets his height from me & then wait for their reaction.  Yes, I learned to welcome & embrace my inner rascal many years ago.  The rascal in me is even taller than our 6 foot 5 inch oldest son.

Have you noticed that we each have our very own way of communication?  It is a style that is part of who we are or have become or are growing into.  One of my traits is that I have kind of a sidebar form of communication.  That just means that I have a tendency to begin several different conversations within a chat with another person with many seeming to be disconnected.  Then I circle back around sometimes an hour later & finish up all the different conversations.  Often I will poke humour at myself at doing this by telling my husband when I am about to have a sidebar conversation within a conversation that I don’t want him to get whiplash so the next topic has nothing to do with the last.  Perhaps finding myself with a shorter memory these days could provide a tidy excuse for this communication style however honestly I have had this communication style my entire life.  I am a messy, flawed human being & there is nothing wrong with that because we do after all live in a messy, flawed world.  Yes, I do like my tall inner rascal big time.  This sidebar is brought to you by my way of circling back around to the original point of this story of asking you whether you found yourself philosophizing over certain oddities during the quiet moments.  Recently an oddity that came to my brain is that the words “cool” & “hot” have come to mean the same thing slang wise.  During your growing up years did you use the words “that’s very cool” or “that’s hot” to describe something that you thought was the bee’s knees?  Maybe you have used both of these descriptors.  I grew up with the “that’s cool” & landed on that permanently.  Either way, there are bound to be some things in our lives that we each find “cool” and other things that we find irritating, annoying or cumbersome or just plain not “cool.”

Let’s build a sandwich together.  The outside will be positive reflections, the inside will be pet peeves and the other outside piece will be perspective.  The positive sharings may seem a wee bit random but I think that is just fine.  You can think about some of your random “cool” things in your life too okay for fun.  My list of cool musings is just the tip of the iceberg of the things that I consider “cool” these days & yours likely will be too.  It seems as though my generation is the first one to have a cool collision of musical commonalities with our own children of today.  My husband for instance is obsessed with the band “Rush.”  I have come to learn a great deal of trivia about “Rush” from my Dear Heart & also from our 2 younger sons.  Our middle son asked my husband to hand him down one of his “Rush” tee shirts even though it is a couple sizes too big for our son, Brian.  Brian usually pulls this shirt on over top of his school uniform at the end of the school day until I seek out the shirt to wash before it grows legs & walks away on its own.  This past week I was in a “Smashing Pumpkins” kind of mood so while preparing dinner this was the music that was on.  Our oldest son, Matt came into the kitchen & told me how much he loves that band.  He & I share an enjoyment of many bands including:  Collective Soul, Nirvana, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Stone Temple Pilots and many more.  In past generations the norm would be for the parents of teenagers or kids to complain about the music that the kids were listening to & to turn the music down or off.  In our family our sons often ask my husband to turn his music down.  They add that they like the music however it is too loud.  It is a funny role reversal.  The next random cool thing that I like is spell check.  Growing up in the 1900’s (ha! ha!) meant that I went all the way through school without computers.  We had typewriters but you had to know how to spell or find the word you needed in the huge original desk top dictionary.  To this day the dictionary causes me to roll my eyes.  Spelling was not a huge struggle for me however it is super convenient to enjoy spell check all the same.  Spell check is a God send for my mathlete husband who still struggles with spelling.  Now I could use math check on a lighter note.  A couple of diabetes related cool developments in conjunction with the blood lab have come about recently.  One is that we can make appointments at the lab & then show up at that time & not have to wait behind a couple dozen starving marvins who are fasting for their blood work too.  There use to be a lot of “lab rage” that I witnessed before we could make these appointments because hungry people having to wait could get somewhat ugly at times.  Last week when I went to the lab to have 2 different sets of blood work done the tech told me that patients could now have the opportunity to view the lab results within a couple of days versus waiting until we see our doctors.  The results for the most part are like Greek to me however the result that I was most fixated on was my A1C.  I have battled the beast of diabetes control over the past 4 months big time.  Blood sugars have been all over the map & I am now doing 12-15 glucose tests a day for my own safety since I don’t know when out of no where my blood sugar will skyrocket or plunge since I am having ridiculous hormone battles.  I was convinced that I was going to get something like an A1C of 7.5% however I went online & was thrilled to see a 6.9%!  Thank you magical blood sugar fairies.  The A1C is up from last visit however given the huge battle over blood sugars I am ecstatic with this result.  Sometimes my husband & I will joke when we get a better result in some area of life then we realistically expected & we will say “it doesn’t suck so bad.”  Diabetes does suck so bad however my working my guts out was not met with an A1C slap in the face…the A1C does not suck so bad. 

Last Saturday, Sunday, and Tuesday & the first half of Wednesday were the sandwich filling days or the not cool random things that agitated me. Out of nowhere I got hit with sciatica, a flare up of carpal tunnel, blood sugar boomerangs and life poking at me non health wise as well.    As a strange aside about 90% of the time while I am grocery shopping I experience low blood sugar.  This happened last week while I was in the line up waiting to pay for the groceries.  I inhaled my fast acting sugars like what must have looked like a crazed maniac & then had to wait 45 minutes after getting my blood sugars stabilized to drive back home.  That drives me up the wall. You will know exactly what I mean if you have type 1 diabetes too.  Those rotten low blood sugars are extra brutal when they happen in public I think.  Three days a week for the next 3 months I have a treatment program for one of my other 365’s at our local hospital.  Being truly Scottish means that paying $16.00 each time for parking is not going to happen.  Within walking distance to the hospital there are 12 complimentary parking spots that if you are an early bird you will be able to park in.  Usually it is a seamless trip to the hospital when I attend my treatments.  Last Tuesday morning however I ran into a shoe horn situation.  I was parked in the second parking spot of the 12 spots.  The spot in front of me is for smaller cars so I did not park there & it was empty when I began my walk over to my appointment.  Unfortunately when I returned a person in a luxury vehicle had parked in front of me & not bothered pulling forward properly into the front of the parking space.  Instead they parked literally 2 inches from my front bumper.  The person parked behind me was parked tightly in on my back bumper.  There was no room to get out of the parking space so I had to remain in my vehicle until either one of the people came out to leave.  I had hoped it would be the person in the front parking space as they were the root cause of the trouble but instead an hour later the person parked behind me mercifully left so I could then leave too.  It was a feisty drive home after that with contributions to our swear jar.  The sciatica pain for sure did not add to my patience for that situation.  Tuesday continued to be a challenging day with difficulties arising for one of our sons & 9 phone calls to me from him from school that day.  On Wednesday I woke up with the thought of the day turning around.  I went into work mode trying to catch up on the things I had to delay for many days.  Then I experienced the laws of flexibility.  Sometimes you have to drop everything & work on an unseen priority.  This priority presented itself in the form of our goldie coming to the back door covered in goose pooh.  The priority became a bath for one smelly dog.  Life goes on though & I sought out things to laugh at through these various moments of irritation.  Some days are smoother than others for each one of us.  I am reminded to keep being profoundly grateful for the smooth days.  The other outside slice or perspective through the things that are cool and things that are not contains the magic of gratitude.  I am big time grateful for humour in any form.  There is no word of thanks big enough for how fortunate of a rascal I know that I am to be a part of a nuclear & extended family of caring, loving Dear Hearts & a circle of encouraging, kind & dear friends.  What a feeling of gratitude I have as well for the comforts of home which in this moment are extra special as they contain such an ambiance of current peace.  I have created a zen backdrop in our family room right now of having our fireplace on, beeswax candles lit on the mantle, a gorgeous pot of lemon meringue tea and gentle, classical music and a celebratory cupcake.  This is the quiet, alone time that I have carved out even though there is a “to do” list waiting.  In a short time the noise of life will enter back in but in this moment it is gentle time that I am soaking in & being thankful for.  Tomorrow’s day of anticipated rain brings the opportunity to make many more fresh apple pies made from apples that my mom & dad recently picked from my Grandma’s apple trees.  Making these pies this year is a cherished gift.  Soon my kitchen will be covered in flour again & for sure my music will be blasting although never at the decimal level of my husband’s.

My heart’s hope for you is that the outside pieces of your life’s sandwich are many times larger than the filling.  May you too carry with you chosen treasures of the people & things that ground you…the people & things that you most appreciate.  And let’s all say thank you out loud for these treasured people & things every single day.

Smiles, Saundie :)

May the next couple of weeks contain all outer parts of this type of sandwich.  Be gentle with yourself.  Have a belly laugh every day.  As always I am cheering for you.  The next story will be in 2 weeks on Monday November 9th & it will be in honour of Remembrance Day which is November 11th.  In the meantime remember to pack humour & gratitude for the journey every single day :)