Thanks for lovely description. I felt refreshed just reading about your day!

yeas! lovely description of farm and visit.

Aw. Love me a cuddle horse.

Oh my, it sounds heavenly.

what a wonderful day!

Yeaaaahhhh…..
And today (Sunday), I’m wishing I could have another day just like it!
But there are other pleasures, and other beautiful days, too.
Sigh. ;-)

The film’s title is actually “La Lengua de las Mariposas” (transl “The Tongue of the Butterflies”).

Yay long weekend!!! and yes, outside is definitely the place to be :) have a good one Mary Ann…xoxox

enjoy your green break!

I like the idea of a green break

Ah, green breaks are good. Thanks for the tip about the movie. I’ll check it out.

Our little Willpower book club. Taking it to Vermont with me for the wknd.

It feels great when the bags get picked up, like the action reaps rewards kind of thing. Love your lake walk writings.

That’s an interesting thought! The reward for decluttering is opposite to the reward when acquiring. It feels so good to see the stuff disappear!

happy to hear that you are making good progress on the decluttering :)

relax and enjoy the good weather, it’ll be gone soon enough…you deserve it!

“The Willpower Instinct” – I love it already, and I’ve read only the Intro. As recommended, I want to pick a willpower challenge to work through the book with. I have 5 possibilities; hard to pick one.

Cynthia, Sylvie, Bridget, Quinnie, and anybody else who’s reading the book – did you choose something (a willpower challenge) to use as a personal test case? Have any trouble picking one? Did you come up with a rationale or a criterion for your choice?

My possibilities all seem equally hard and equally important. Even on the basis of which one would improve my life the most, in the long run… they all seem pretty equal. Maybe I should pick “make faster decisions”, or “quit dithering”. Haha.

love it, MA!

Mary Ann, brilliantly done re: the decluttering!

And re: a specific willpower challenge – I have three, and I can’t choose, either (yet)! For starters I decided to read the whole book first, then I’ll go back and work it week by week with a particular challenge. I’m leaning toward the most concrete of my challenges, the one that’s least abstract and therefore easiest to hold in mind.

Thanks, both!
And BTW, the stuff is gone now.
Goodwill picked it up and left a thank-you note behind.
It’s a good thing, because I was still debating with myself about keeping versus chucking (A true tale from Ripley’s Believe It or Not! )
And now the stuff is gone, gone, gone. Hallelujah!

I have not decided which challenge to go for.
I really want to mark one in the win column and don’t want to be discouraged again.
I have thought of reading the whole book 1st to see if strategies seem effective for me but have also wondered about just taking a leap of faith.

Hey Bridget,
What if, by choosing one, and by using it to work through the book, you get a BIG WIN!
:-)

Ah, dear Mary Ann. You have such far-fetched ideas!

thanks

You are going to love “Willpower”.

mine did also!

I’ve had it from the library but need to buy my own copy. Really good stuff, and it takes a while to let it sink in. I love that we’re all reading it!

That Willpower book has reall changed my ability to deal with life’s everyday nonsense and particularly the temptations and tendency to put things off. As Sylvie says, there is sinking in time. I find, several weeks later, the little exercises I have done are coming back to me as prompts or queries when I am faced with something. I, too , am chuffed a group of us are exploring it.

Yay, a book club! :-)
I just started poking through it last night, and it looks really good.

what is “put $0 in a jar at least 1 day a week”?

Kimberly -
I used that pre-set rule, but bent it to function as a custom rule. Because I’d used up all of the “do” custom rules, the real ones.

The actual rule has to do with recording money in a certain way, once a week. But it’s not “track spending”; it’s incoming money. So this rule was close enough. (Close enough for rock ‘n’ roll.)

I do this sort of thing fairly often — that is, I “bend” a rule into what I want it to be.

Oh, that’s cool. I like the rule bending concept. there are so many rules I would like to include and so few custom ones.

Expanding on what Bridget said in her Friday review, that Mother’s Day isn’t so great for some people . . . .

Overheard in a park this afternoon — the voice of an elderly woman (well into her 80s), introducing her middle-aged daughter to someone:

“This is my daughter. She’s the most treasured thing I have. But she never gave me any grandchildren, and I’ll never forgive her for that.”

What a lovely day, Mary Ann.
Yay Yay

_~~~~~overheard comment.
Sad. Old family joke or just plain meanness?

Holidays can be so twisted.

Sounds like a great day, Mary Ann! I knew a Shiloh shepherd once; a more peaceful, serene dog doesn’t exist.

BTW, I appreciate what you and Bridget said about Mother’s Day. Never mind the backstory, but the assumptions that one has a mother and that it’s a viable relationship just don’t cut it for some. So, hurrah for them that do have, and peace for them that don’t.

Bridget – not a joke (and even if it was, how could it be?)

Sylvie – exactly

Wow, I can’t believe anyone would say something like that!

Sounds like you had a good day, Mary Ann. :)

My mom and I have always been close, probably closer than is healthy for a parent-child relationship. I am glad that I have a younger brother who has already given her three grandchildren, though, since (regardless of the advice of the doctor) I’m not sure when we’ll start trying for our own. (And yes, we do actually both want children, and we hope to apply to adopt, but right now we aren’t able to do either given the state of our home – and I’m not just talking about my housekeeping skills.)

Janna, re “I can’t believe….”
— you must have led a rather sheltered life!
Or maybe you’ve just been lucky. ;-)

Mary Ann, it’s the kind of thing you see on TV shows but don’t expect to hear in real life. I must have been lucky in the people I’ve known over my life thus far. :)

Sounds like it (that you’ve been lucky)!
I agree about the TV shows — that piece of conversation sounded like a bad soap opera.

Many who live in or through a poisonous, brutal, or superficial parent-child relationship don’t talk about it. It can be so isolating.
Stranger in a Strange Land experience.

But not in the fun Leon Russell way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQbk2C4ZmsE

ahh, but it was good to read under the magnolia, right?

Reading under a magnolia definitely trumps chores any old day.

Yes, it was lovely.

Everyone’s getting sunshine! YAY.

I mean, 2 steps in “one hippopotamus”.

Imagining the big rollers on the south shore, and looking at the map around Lake Ontario, to see where they landed. It seems odd that there are hardly any communities along the south shore. Except for Rochester, there’s pretty much nuthin’. Whereas a whole string of cities on the north shore. How come, I wonder? Any ideas, New Yorkers?

They say the average person walks a mile in 2000 steps, do you normally walk about 4 miles an hour? It would make sense. I do about 125 steps a minute and about 3 1/2 to four miles an hour, as a comparison.

How many steps are you averaging a day?

Thanks, Debbie!
Ha, that’s interesting – we both do about 125 steps per minute! Is that a brisk walk, for you?
For me, that’s walking really briskly – I don’t typically walk that fast.

I have no idea about steps per day. Don’t have a pedometer. That’s why I counted for those 5 minutes today, to get an idea of what it means when people say they’ve walked so many thousands of steps in a day.

And I also don’t know how fast I walk. Although I could prettily easily figure that out.
But… sure… 4 miles an hour sounds about right.

Sounds like you have a pedometer? What kind – Fitbit?

I have an Omron pedometer. This one:

http://www.amazon.com/Omron-HJ-150-Hip-Pedometer/dp/B000MNAXRA

I like it because it is really simple. And seems to be pretty accurate, which is more than I can say for the free pedometers I have been given over the years.

Honestly, for me 4 miles an hour is a pretty brisk walk, because 4.5 miles an hour is a jog. But I’m often walking quickly to try and lose weight so 4MPH works for me, at least for a couple of miles.

If you go someplace with a track (like a college or perhaps a local high school) and walk a mile/kilometer/whatever you can time yourself. And you can also count steps while you are there and then do the math to figure out how many steps in a mile.

I like the pedometer because if I aim to do 10,000 steps a day, I am averaging 5 miles a day. Which is about 4 miles more than I would tend to walk, since I am inherently pretty lazy….

to get general walking-at-work-pace I count the # of floor tiles I walk in 30 secs and multiply. The tiles are 1 foot.