Regrets

Our pasts shape us. They shape us by what we have done, what we have not done and how we feel about it. Regret is one such feeling.

Do you look back at your life and regret?  Do you regret things you did, such as hurting someone? Or things you did not do, such as going to the prom or learning to ski?

What we regret can define us. 

Don't spend your future looking back and regretting your past.

Think about your regrets. Is it too late to change them?  If you regret the things you did not do, then can you do them now?  Can you take those piano lessons or that trip?

If you regret the hurt you have caused, can you make up for it?  You could track down the person and apologize. Maybe you stole some money. Can you return it now?

If you can not make it up to the person you hurt, maybe you can do something else.  You say you stole money as a child from someone who could not afford to lose it? Maybe you could give time or money to a charity now. If you can not pay your debt to some one directly, there are ways to make the world a better place. Pay it forward if you can not pay it back.

Maybe all you need to do to get past the regret is to forgive yourself. Think about what you did. Really look at it. Do not make excuses. Do not try to justify it. Examine it. Accept it. Do what you can to change it or make up for it. Then forgive yourself. 

It may take you a few tries to get it right but letting go of regret can be like removing a heavy coat after a long winter.  Enjoy the spring.

I Love My Local Library

My town has a pretty darn good library. It has books, DVDs, cds, blu-rays, audio books, digital downloads, newspapers, magazines and even yes, some VHS and cassette tapes.   They even have a website that lets me download some digital content like putting audio books on my mp3 player.  I can log into the website and access major databases like HeritageQuest if I decide to check out my ancestors or Mango if I want to try my hand at learning to speak another language.

When I hear a movie is coming out on DVD/Bluray, I go to the library website and reserve it. They send me an email (calling is also an option), and let me know it is in. I pop over, pick it up and have the choice of regular check out or going through the quick automated self checkout.

I have saved literally hundreds of dollars by getting movies at the library instead of renting them; by getting books instead of buying them. I am able to check out authors I have never heard of without having to spend money on them.

If I stumble upon a topic that sounds interesting, I can grab several books on the subject on the library. If I like it, great. If not, well, I didn't waste any money on it. 

My library doesn't have the money or the space to get every movie or book that comes out. Libraries have found a way around that these days too. Multiple libraries will join a network such as CW Mars or MinuteMan.  You can then request a book, DVD, audio book, etc from another library in the network. They will courier it over to your library and you pick up and return it there.  It becomes your own personal database to pick and choose what you want.

Give it a try. If you don't already have a library card, visit your local library and get one. They usually are free or only a couple of dollars. All you need is proof you reside in that town such as a license or a utility bill in your name. If you already have a library card, dust it off. Go to your favorite search engine and type in the name of your town followed by "library"and the website will pop up.  

The library will give you a card or receipt with the due date or you can always look it up (or renew it) online.  

Give them a try! This is not your grandmother's library.

Making Choices

Ursula the Sea Witch in Disney's Little Mermaid rather sarcastically says to Ariel, "Life is full of difficult choices. Isn't it?"   She is not wrong.  Life is full of choices. You make hundreds of little choices every day. Some by your actions and some by your inaction. Some of those choices are relatively easy such as whether to watch your favorite show. Some are hard such as whether or not to break up with the person that being with, breaks your heart.

Doing nothing is as much a choice as doing something.

Say you have to submit an application by Friday at noon and 1 PM comes and you say, "Oops, too late." You made the choice to ignore the deadline even if you did not sit down and say, "I think I will miss the deadline."  Choosing to procrastinate is making a choice. 

Sitting around waiting for someone else to make the decision for you is no less a decision.

Making decisions can be very hard. They can be gut wrenching. Sometimes it just feels easier to wait and see what happens.  Do not mistake. You still chose. You chose to give up control and wait, perhaps because you feared the decision, perhaps to be able to say you didn't make the choice.

You did. You chose.

Putting off something unpleasant is a choice. Rushing into something without stopping to evaluate the situation is a choice. If you become paralyzed by indecision because you feel you have too many choices, then try sitting down and eliminating them a few at a time.

Even when you feel like you have no choice, you have one. But all choices have consequences and sometimes the consequence or cost of the choice is so horrible or so expensive that you tell yourself you have no choice. You do have a choice. It is just a lousy one.

Choice is one of the greatest aspects of your personal power. The choices you make define you. They shape your future. Do not abdicate your power by passively waiting for whatever happens. Look at your life. Embrace your choices and find your power. Even when it's hard.

Wasting Blame

"I suffer: someone must be to blame." Friedrich Nietzsche.

Every single day something will probably go wrong. You sprain an ankle in your exercise class. You get a run in your stocking. Your purse is stolen. You forget your lunch. Life is full of problems and issues.  It is very common to try to find a person to blame for it.

Just because something happened does not mean someone has to be blamed.

If someone steals your purse, yes, you can point to a particular person and event and lay blame. That is easy and obvious.  What about tripping on a curb? Some people shake their heads at their own clumsiness and pick themselves back up. Others try to sue the city for not painting the curb fluorescent orange so they would be sure to see it even though they were texting.

When a tree blows over in a hurricane, some people go next door and demand that their neighbor pay to have the tree removed because the roots are on the neighbor's land. Is the neighbor to blame because the tree fell?  Probably not unless they blatantly left a rotted out tree standing but it's hard to collect money from the wind that was to blame. So we blame our neighbors for having let the tree grow at all and expect them to handle it for us. (By the way, if you have home owner's insurance, you probably have coverage there if the tree hits a building.)

I'm not saying people are always blameless. I am just saying not to assume that someone is to blame just because something happened. Accidents happen. Mistakes happen. Unless there was a mistake that was grievous, it may not be anyone's fault that something happened. 

The same is true of yourself. Do not assume that every bad thing that happens to you is your fault. Do not drive yourself crazy blaming yourself for not being quicker or smarter or better. Sometimes it's not your fault; it's just your turn.

Save the time you would have spent looking for someone to blame and go straight to using that time to think about how to fix the situation. It's a lot more productive.

Your Net Worth

Your net worth is your total assets minus your total liabilities. In other words, your net worth is everything you own minus your everything you owe.

Why should every goddess know her net worth?  Because it gives you a simple picture of your financial health. It lets you make informed decisions about where you stand financially. It helps you plan for your financial future by showing you what you need to work on and what you have with which to work. It can be easy to lose track of how much you owe or how much you have. This gives you a simple number to sum it up.
I compute our net worth about once a year around this time so I can see how we are doing year to year.

How to compute your net worth.

Basically you add up everything of value and subtract what you owe. There are computer programs you can use to plug it in; just search net worth calculator for some examples.

You could also make a list of all of your accounts and add them together. Examples include:

Savings accounts
Checking accounts
Retirement accounts (401k, IRA, etc)
Stocks and bonds
Mutual Funds
CDs (certificates of deposit)
Value of your home
Value of your car

You could also include any valuable jewelry or artwork you may own.

This is your total assets.

Then list all of your liabilities aka debts and add them together. Examples include:

Balance on your mortgage
Home equity loan
Car loan
Student loan
Credit card debt
Personal loans

This is your total liability.

Now take your total asset amount and subtract your total liability. This is your net worth. Hopefully it is a positive number. If not, it shows you what you need to work on.   More importantly, it gives you a number to focus on. If nothing else, it is knowledge and knowledge of your financial health can only help.

You Deserve A Vacation Or A Chance To Rest

A lot of women tend to work themselves into exhaustion trying to help everyone; trying to accomplish everything. Maybe you work full time outside the home, then you come home and take care of the house and the kids. It seems to be a common issue amongst women that we try to accomplish 80 hours worth of work in 60 hours.  This may mean staying up too late or getting up too early. Sacrificing your sleep, your health and your peace of mind to help everyone.

You deserve to rest. You deserve a break. It is OK to take some time for yourself.

The number one cause of death for a woman is a heart attack. Some of the leading causes of heart attacks are stress and not taking care of your body.  I know the kids need feeding and the dishes need doing. It may feel like a waste of time or a betrayal to take 20 minutes for yourself. It is not.

Would you want your kids working themselves to death? Would you want them overdoing it and causing themselves stress and health problems?  Then don't do it to yourself.

If the problem is a lack of help from your spouse or kids, then talk to them. Make sure you do not act as though it is a confrontation; that will just make them feel attacked and not inclined to help. Ask them to do things and praise them when they do. Everyone wants to feel as though they are being helpful.  And yes, chances are you are doing a lot more and not getting praised, but this is one of those cases where it is a small investment that will make everyone feel better in the end. You will get more help and they will feel appreciated.

Also, do not be afraid to use paper plates sometimes so you can save that time you would have spent doing dishes. If sometimes the dinner dishes wait until after dinner the next night so you can sit down and rest for 10 minutes than so be it. If you have to use your slow cooker a few nights a week so you can do 20 minutes of yoga, by all means.

Remember that you being around 10 years from now is a lot more important to your kids continued health and well being than whether or not the dish washer got unloaded. Take some time for yourself. It will make you healthier and happier and that makes your whole family better off. Plus you deserve it.

Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse

One of the things every goddess should know is how to survive. The first most important thing is a good attitude. Tell yourself you will survive. You can do this. Yes, there has been a terrible outbreak and many of your neighbors have turned into some kind of hideous zombie, but you can survive this. You have to believe it.

When dealing with zombies, it is very important that you determine what kind of zombie you are facing.   Are they intelligent or brain dead? Are they fast or slow?  This information will be very important to your survival plan.  If they behave like complete idiots, then you may be able to out think them or scare them off with flaming torches. Perhaps you can thwart them by climbing stairs. If they are intelligent, you have to be more cautious.

If you are lucky, they will be slow shambling dumb zombies. Congratulations! These kinds of zombies can often be outrun. You can build fortifications to keep them out.  Their constant moaning, while annoying, makes a great early warning system. If you are not so lucky, they will be fast. If you are extremely unlucky, they will be fast and intelligent. These are the most dangerous forms of zombies. Avoid them at all costs!

I recommend finding an easily defensible area of your home. In our house, I would go for the basement. We have a partially finished side that could be used as a living space and the unfinished side has an assortment of tools including saws and axes.   We have fire wood and lumber down there that we could nail over those small basement windows and over the door leading down stairs.  It gives us a defensible choke point if the enemy comes down.

You will want to stockpile as much canned food and water as you can as soon as you realize there is a problem. If you wait, most of the food may be gone. Make sure you take a manual can opener with you into your safe area. You don't want to have food but no way to open it if the power goes out. Be cautious about hunting fresh game. Always check to make sure the animal has not been zombified first. You don't want to be infected by eating zombie rabbit meat.

Eat perishable items first and then eat the food in order of what is going to expire first. I know this is an upsetting time emotionally but now is not the time to revert to emotional eating choices. Practical choices must be made. Limit your calories and eat what is available so you can stay healthy.   Spend the time you are confined exercising so you can be stronger and faster. You may want to take the opportunity to practice such as swing an axe or striking targets with your available weapons. This will come in handy if some zombies do find you, especially if they are the fast kind. 

Make sure you know what counts as a kill shot. Do you need to take out the head? The heart?  Will cutting off a limb stop them?  Avoid getting bit or scratched as these are going to be your most likely sources of contamination.  Grab anything in your home that might be a good weapon--guns, of course, but also baseball bats, broom handles, butcher knives, my husband's Japanese sword (sorry honey!).  Try grabbing chemicals such as bleach and seeing if the zombies react to it--preferably thrown on them from a safe distance.

You will also want to stockpile medical supplies. I would not go too overboard on these. Chances are any wound that would require bandaging is going to be one that turns you into a zombie anyways so why waste the shelf space that could be used for important things like food and toilet paper?  Decide early how you will handle latrine issues. If you use a bucket system, be careful of where you dump it. You could be leaving a smelly trail right to your hiding place.

If you can manage to hole up, be cautious and practical, chances are the zombie infection will run its course in a few weeks to months or the government will come in and shoot them all down anyways. Be patient, be careful and you can survive this. Just don't poke your head out when you hear gun fire. You don't want to have survived this long to get shot down by friendly fire.  Good luck and good hunting.