Vitamin-D Fatigue

You guys.  This weekend was such a good weekend, but the kind of weekend that you need a weekend from afterwards.  Or perhaps I just need a leetle bit more regular exercise in my days, because whoa! I am wiped. out.  Handsome is sleeping on the living room floor, per his usual I-ran-5-miles-today-so-now-I'm-tired.  Me, well, I just got a little bit of sun, and you know how that does.

I want you to know that if you ever, EVAR, have the chance to participate in a Color Run (by the legit color run folks), you should.  Unless you hate color.  Or happiness.  Or fanny packs.  Provided that you hate none of those, you should do it.

(before)

(after)

The weekend didn't stop with the run, though.  There was a gymnastics meet where I got to see little toddlers do their "routine" and about die of cuteness.  There was a great morning at church where RG did not get kicked out of the nursery for inconsolable fussiness (as opposed to last week...).  And then there was a stolen hour at the lake in the warm sunshine (hence my tiredness) (vitamin D-fatigue, its a thing). 

This was an especially sweet weekend because its one of the last for a while.  The proper motivation has been provided for me to finally finish my dissertation, and so there will be a lot of all-work-and-no-play-makes-Mariah-a-dull-girl weekends in my future, until I finally graduate this summer.  I'm not looking forward to the getting there, but being done?  Oh mylanta, the idea that I might actually be finished with being a student sounds almost better than chocolate.  Which, on this 35th day of Lent, is really saying something. [Note: the Lenten season expires (totally not the right word) on Thursday after Mass.  FYI.]  

Gear up, folks, its gonna be Monday tomorrow.  And that means its go-time.

<3 M.

Choosing Color

I don't know if you know this or not, but I've been working on some things lately.  Lots of things.  Its kind of a revolving door of things to work on, and some things jump in and some jump out and some keep going 'round and 'round.

Got it?

Anyhow, it started with the "Do what makes you come alive" post.  I felt those things then I wrote those things then I started to do more of what makes me come alive.  So I bought some candles, because apparently controlled flames and the scent of apple cider make me feel alive.  I walked in the woods more.  I made the food I wanted to eat, and I decided to want the food I could make.  I started reading The Barefoot Church Primer.  I made Handsome sometimes hold my hand.  All of these things, and more, I started consciously doing.  

And while that was a good change, I realized that I also needed to stop doing life-sucking things.  Like watching entire seasons of New Girl in one sitting.  Or answering every little "ding" from my phone the very moment it happens, even if my baby/husband/dog is trying to give me a kiss.  Or failing to eat lunch.  These things were not actions that made me feel more alive.  These fall into the "life-sucking" category. Because even though I think I want to do them in the moment, they turn into a series of choices that *zap!* takes the life right out of ya.

The changes, though, they just keep coming.  I know that there's a sort of reprogramming going on.  Which is probably a nerd thing to say, and I am not sorry for it.  Honestly, we've probably all got some sort of reprogramming going on all of the time.  The decisions we make, they either reinforce current habits or the begin new ones.  We are constantly becoming.

This is feeling heavy.  True, but heavy.

Really, I just got on here to say this: another change that I'm trying to make is to choose colorful things.  I tend towards neutral.  Heather Gray is my jam.  My homie.  My bestie-for-the-restie.  And white and black and more gray... always safe.  Heck, when I moved into my house, it was beige on beige with beige.  And then when I went wild and painted a room, I painted it gray.

Blah blah blah I have too much neutral stuff blah blah that doesn't represent the me I want to be blah blah blah blah blah I'm trying to choose colorful things.

Aren't you glad we've had this talk?  I'm branching out slowly, but deliberately.  I ordered some sweaters recently, and chose colors I wasn't sure about. And then, strangely enough, I kept them!  I mean, I kept a white one, too, but one of the sweaters was MUSTARD.  And I've never in my life worn mustard.  But its a color, and it turns out, I like it.

Sidenote: I don't like actual mustard.  So there's that.

On a related topic, going back to the beige on beige-i-ness of my home, I've got this wild idea to paint everything white.  I know Handsome thinks there are other things we should care about (something about heat retention and structural integrity...) but I have this overwhelming desire, particularly after peeping on Young House Love's kitchen reno, to paint. everything. white.  All of it.  And then, once that is done?  You guessed it!  Accent with color, baby, color!

And finally, on a not-really-but-slightly related note (re: white), I must confess that I used picmonkey's "whitening" tool on my teeth in the above photo.  Y'all are the only ones I've told.  If you see me in real life, please don't mention this, I'll feel all yellow-ed out in the moment,  by comparison, and I'll feel the need to start doing the closed-lip smile that I made famous in the 6th grade when I realized that not everyone could fit a straw in the gap between their two front teeth.  Yellow sweater: good.  Yellow teeth: not what I'm going for.  

Well.  That was a brain dump.  Thank you for sticking it out.  Tune in tomorrow when I go ga-ga for Thanksgiving meal planning and spontaneously invite you all!

<3 M.