The Divine Ms Em: 9/29/13 - Catching up is hard to do

Goodness – it seems I haven’t blogged in forever…or very close to it. I need to commit myself to writing at least once a week for a lot of reasons, but I think the most important is so that I can go back and revisit both my successes and my failures. Repeating the same actions tends to lead to the same results. In some cases, that’s really good – in other cases – not so much.

Then there’s those goals that we all set for ourselves….once its written down it becomes more real, and hopefully more likely to be achieved. Sadly, that hasn’t been the case for my Weight Watchers Online program which I started with the best of intentions close to a year ago – and yet I am still pretty much where I began….but that’s a blog in itself.

For now I’ll start rather where I left off…..with Little IM’s birthday party back in late August. I had very mixed feeling about going but it turned out just fine. This time it seemed there was a lot of effort put into making it a more social occasion – little IM was encouraged to interact with me and everyone else there – presents were opened, discussed and played with – and a few days afterwards – I got a thank you note from my DIL for the gifts. Maybe it was a result of my blog being read (sometimes good comes out of bad), maybe it just happened to be that way because she’s a year older, or maybe it just was – but in any case it was a thousand times more comfortable than it had been in the past.

Things still aren’t where I would have wished them, but again on the bright side – I know where it all stands and have decided it falls into the “accept the things I cannot change” . Now I won’t claim sainthood – my acceptance is less than perfect and I still have my dark moments – but I’m going to do my best not to give them more power by blogging them…..instead, I’ll focus on the ridiculously large number of things in my life that are going just fine.

Starting with the next thing I didn’t blog – my vacation to Hawaii………

First off, I’ve discovered that once you have spent more than 14 consecutive hours in a plane and more than a full day and night traveling, like I did with Australia – everything else is easy. So the 9 hours between Chicago and Honolulu was surprisingly OK – even without inseat entertainment or being served food. My sleep mask, pillow, and earplugs worked well to let me get some daytime rest (even though I forgot my music player, sigh)…..and when I arrived, being on east coast time made me early to bed and early to rise which worked well with the active schedule we had planned.

No relaxing on the beach vacation for me, lol…..but it needed to be busy because there is so much to see in Hawaii – each island has its own magic. At the end of it all though, I still would love to live on the Big Island…..it has a bit of everything. But unless I hit the lottery, or decide to give up traveling, it’s much more likely that I’ll end up in Florida – easier to travel from/to, and much more affordable. I really have my heart set on a condo or townhouse that is oceanfront because I love to watch the sea.

But for now – back to Hawaii……I’ll put the link to my Picasa albums at the end of this blog…..and here I’ll mention just a few of the many highlights of this trip…..

On Oahu, I climbed Diamondhead and was rewarded with this amazing view....