Author: Victoria

“It’s your place in the world; it’s your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live.”
~ Mae Jemison

Happy Monday, and what a strange sunrise this morning! Saraha dust maybe?

So it’s the beginning of another month, which means I spent yesterday reviewing my goals and plotting them out on my calendar. It feels very similar to last month, which means I did not get accomplished what I had hoped to achieve. I’ll be installing an iOS ap called “I Track My Time” to figure out where my time wasters have been, what my distractions are, and to monitor shifting priorities. I also re-designed my Goals List, so that it’s become more of a “To-Do List” to be checked off. read more

“We trust nature to know what it is doing,
but we are not nearly so kind, understanding and trusting of our own rhythms and cycles.
It’s ridiculous that we are so hard on ourselves.
Can we not trust that the very same forces that created the rhythms & cycles of nature created our own?
Of course we can. We often don’t, but we can, if we remember.”
~ Jeffrey R. Anderson, The Nature of Things – Navigating Everyday Life with Grace

Good morning everyone, and happy Sunday! Boy, it’s been hard getting up the last few mornings!! May is typically more of a rainy season for us here in the VI. I’ve been glad for the clouds that have impeded and slowed the sunrise, because I might have missed it, if it rose right on schedule. read more

“Do you know why hurricanes have names instead of numbers? To keep the killing personal. No one cares about a bunch of people killed by a number. ‘200 Dead as Number Three Slams Ashore’ is not nearly as interesting a headline as ‘Charlie kills 200.’ Death is much more satisfying and entertaining if you personalize it. Me, I’m still waitin’ for Hurricane Ed. Old Ed wouldn’t hurt ya, would he? Sounds kinda friendly. ‘Hell no, we ain’t evacuatin’. Ed’s comin’!” ~ George Carlin from Brain Droppings

Happy first of June! Which for anyone on the coast, means the start of another Hurricane Season. Time to set the Tivo to start recording the Weather Channel at 10 til the hour

So NOAA has predicted this will be another above average season, with a 70 percent likelihood of:
13 to 20 named storms
7 to 11 could becoming hurricanes
3 to 6 major hurricanes

And we have the following line-up, raring to go …
Andrea, Barry, Chantal, Dorian, Erin, Fernand, Gabrielle, Humberto, Ingrid, Jerry, Karen, Lorenzo, Melissa, Nestor, Olga, Pablo, Rebekah, Sebastien, Tanya, Van and Wendy. read more

“Vacations are seen as an antidote to work. They are medicine, a remedy for counteracting the effects of labor…. Vacations allow us to be away from the job, to change the patterns of our day, to alter our routine, to reconfigure our actions and habits, to rediscover ourselves.”
~ AL GINI, The Importance of Being Lazy

As has often been the case, the mood of the sunrise seemed to echo my inner world … Hazy! It was a bit of a challenge to return to waking at 5:15 in order to make this post. I’ve enjoyed the lazy mornings of vacation, awaking whenever my body said it was ready. And I’m happy that the sunrise is now at it’s earliest – 5:43 – and will be heading back the other direction. 5:15 is even a bit early for me LOL.

Do you know how a room feels ‘different’ somehow, when you’ve just cleaned all of the windows? You realize you’ve been living in a fog, and suddenly the whole world seems anew, brighter. I’m experiencing that feeling in reverse. It’s as though I’m standing outside the cleaned window, looking in. The time away polished the window to my life here at home.

Mark Twain says the secret of success is making your vocation your vacation. As I sat with my calendar and to-do lists yesterday, it was easy to pick out what feels like vacation and what feels like work. What I want to do, and what I have to do. But do I really have to do the things I don’t want to do? Nope … Time to reconfigure read more

“No gift to your mother can ever equal her gift to you – life.”
~ Unknown

To both of my Moms – and all of you Mom’s out there – Happy Mother’s Day.  It’s not often enough that I get a chance to tell you how much I love the both of you, the friend that you are to me, the encouraging love and light that keeps me uplifted, sharing with me in this life. I hope you have a beautiful day!!

I am headed off on vacation this afternoon. Woohoo!! David Allen says it best: “Isn’t it interesting that people feel best about themselves right before they go on vacation? They’ve cleared up all of their to-do piles, closed up transactions, renewed old promises with themselves. My most basic suggestion is that people should do that more than just once a year.”

I still have a to-do list waiting for me upon my return, and plenty of old promises, but they will wait. I spent most of yesterday updating all of my electronic gadgets – MacBook Air, iPad, iPhone, Kindle. I’m seriously tempted to leave them all at home, bringing with me only one book, nothing serious, some cheezy romance novel, like back in the olden days read more

Good morning! I’m testing from my iPhone to FB Pages app preparing for vacation!! After tomorrow, you’ll be treated to sunrises and maybe sunsets from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Spokane, Washington. Happy Saturday!

And P.S. … Wow, that was some thunderstorm that blew through here last night!