My Carbon Footprint

Well, my carbon foot print took a hit today, I flew to Baltimore on business. Both flights were at least pretty close to full.
I've done a half-ass effort at determining my carbon footprint before and it wasn't very good. Now with this, and flying again in June for Bitbee's college registration and again in September to get her to college. Ouch!
Guess I need to do a much better effort at all the other parts of my life to make up for it.

Shopping

So I went shopping yesterday. I haven't bought anything new for myself in quite a while, sitting here thinking I don't even remember.

I have a business trip next week and was looking at getting a nice winter coat(current coat is 4-5 years old), maybe a new pair of shoes (lost bought a pair 2 years ago), and maybe a new shirt off of clearance. In the end, I bought nothing. I just couldn't bring myself to do it.

I couldn't find a coat I liked in my size, I found a great pair of shoes, but at $55 I just couldn't justify it, and JCPenney had a ton of shirts/sweaters on clearance, and yet even though I would have only been paying 25% of the original cost I just couldn't do it.

So I need to start hitting the second hand shops, cause, the impetus this time was the trip, but reality is, I need some new clothes.

Food Storage

I took my first step toward an emergency food/water storage yesterday. I had been wanting to for a while but felt like I needed to buy buckets, and bulk quantities of stuff. After readying Sharon's ANYWAY post on food storage, I stored my first bit of water, in a 2 liter pop container. I know, it's only 2 liters, but our family drinks 3-5 2 liters a week, so if I fill each of those with water, that 6 liters a week, and 180 liters a month. My goal is a 30 day supply(using the ANYWAY list) for 5 of us I need.

Water: 30 gal/person x 5 people = 150 gallons = 600 liters = 300 2 liter bottles
Oats: 15 lbs/person x 5 people = 75 lbs
Beans: 30 16 oz cans/person x 5 people = 150 cans
Tomatoes: 30 16oz cans/person x 5 people = 150 cans
Fruit: 30 cans/person x 5 people = 150 cans
Mulit-vitamin: 30/person x 5 people = 150 vitamins

-Jen

Stressed Out!

So the last 2 days I've been making a conscious effort to try and de-stress. Taking lots of breaks between doing things, doing things that are relaxing to me. So yesterday mid-afternoon I was feeling pretty good. I felt relaxed and content. I thought my stressed out reactions to stimuli had left. I was wrong.
Cooking, just that one simple thing that every person does thousands of times. I don't like to cook much, but I hadn't in 3 days, the kids made their own or we had take-out. So last night we had bacon cheeseburgers and boiled new potatoes, green beans were also on the menu but never got made since I was stressed and I'm the only one who would have ate them anyways. I got so stressed out cooking. I think it was the trying to time everything to get done at the same time(they didn't). Anyways half way through cooking it all, I just wanted to scream!!! At someone, at myself, at the stove. I did snap at TJ and he apologized even though he hadn't done anything wrong...I said no apology, I'm the one who's stressed you are fine. Once the bacon was finished he took over and finished up the burgers and I sat down and de-stressed a bit.
How can a half-hour of cooking totally undo 2 days worth of relaxation?

Self-motivation

I heard a speaker about a year ago give a speech about self-motivation and how self-analysis of the success failure has a huge impact on continued self-motivation. The example she used was exercise. The national whatever group recommendations are for say 30 minutes 3 times a week (made up these numbers). If you have been doing no exercise and you start and hold yourself to that recommendation anything less is a failure. Whereas 30 minutes 3 times a week should be your long term goal, not your week 1 goal. If you take 1 walk for any length of time that first week, that a success for you. So if you've been getting no exercise and you walk 10 minutes twice the first week and then 10 minutes 3 times the 2nd, you've had a 50% increase in your exercise from week 1 to week 2. You have to use where you start to base your success/failure, not some arbitrary value that someone has created.

I found this post in my drafts. I don't remember starting to type it, but it is something that was good for me to find today as a reminder that small steps are important. Anytime you do something better than you used to, is a success for yourself, regardless of if it meets some arbitrary standard set by someone else.

Current status of me

This last week has been really hard emotionally for me. I think what triggered it was dad being sick and me worrying for him and mom. But reality is that this has been lurking at the edge of me for a while now and I've been fighting tooth and nail to keep it at bay and I just can't anymore.

I think every time one of the kids leaves the house that something horrible is going to happen to them. Every phone call that I don't recognize the phone number , I am terrified that it is someone calling to tell me that something happened to one of the kids, or someone else I love. I have a constant feeling of impending doom. I think that somehow any person I love is in jeopardy just because of me. However, I don't know what to do to stop all this. I don't know what I have done to deserve all this. I know life is not fair, but it just doesn't seem like anyone else has thing after thing after thing happen to the ones they love. And it's all stuff I have mostly no control over.

So this week I don't know, I've done some crying, over some pretty stupid stuff I know, but I can't help it. Yet even when I'm crying I don't feel like I'm feeling anything, I'm just crying. Part of me thinks that truly not feeling anything would be good, maybe I wouldn't be so terrified and anxious and stressed and depressed. Feeling nothing sounds a lot better than all of that. But this week of not feeling anything has just been worse. It's like I'm walking through water, everything is slowed down, I can't think as quickly.

Work is awful too, I dread going to work, the thought of having to interact with people all day long and seem happy and ok and all that jazz seems an insurmountable task. I drove around for half an hour on Friday before I could make myself turn into work. And even though my job can be stressful, I love it, I know I do, but not this week.

Friday afternoon at work, I didn't get much work done, I just couldn't make my brain actually work. What I did is look up therapists for myself and called a couple and left messages to call me back. I know that I need to get back into therapy, I can't fix this myself I don't think. So I think starting therapy will help.

I decided I also need to start doing some things to help myself as well. So this labor day weekend, I'm going to give myself 9-10 hours of sleeping time but no more. When I'm anxious/stressed/depressed/etc all I want to do is sleep, it is my escape, but in the long run I don't think it really helps me. So far I've done ok. I slept 9 hours last night. Which may seem like a lot, but I've always required more sleep to function fully. Generally 8 to 8.5 and I'll wake up on my own, this morning I woke up after 8 and then dozed on and off for another hour before I got out of bed. Then I made my bed. It was a visual reminder when I looked in there that I was not going to sleep today.

I'm also going to slowly work up to working around the house. All I want to do it sit and veg and sleep and when I'm feeling this way it's really easy for me to look at everything I need to do and never get to any of it, since normally I feel like I need to finish the whole task at once. Today (and this weekend), I'm just going to do a bit then take a break/play a computer game/chill for bit, then just keeping doing that back and forth.

So it's 5pm now, I've been up since 8:30 this morning, I've done 7 loads of laundry, a bit in the kitchen (it needs attention the most so it the most daunting to try and work in there), a bit in the 2 bathrooms, picked up a bit in the living room/dining room. I'm hanging out all the clothes to dry, which I really like, it's soothing somehow, maybe clothesline meditation?

I do feel better today than I have this last week. Less guilty (though guilt is still there about the kitchen). I spend a lot of my life feeling guilty. Maybe that has contributed to the funk I've been in.

On the off chance that someone someday reads this I feel the need to validate why I am where I am right now. The hard part is where to start, how much of my life history has contributed to where I'm at now. The last 5 yrs, 10 yrs, 39 yrs...I'm not sure. I know that there are lots of people out there that have it just as bad and even worse than I do. I'm not living in a war zone or battling starvation, and for those things I am grateful. But the reality is that I live in the Midwest US and I'm middle-income. This is where I'm at and although I know it could be worse, I'm still terrified of what might happen to someone I love.

All 3 of my children have totaled cars. My son had his in Aug. 2005, he rolled a single time and had no injuries. The most recent accident, Katydid's was in May 2008. She wasn't hurt, just sore, nor were the people in the other car, for which I'm very grateful. Nor was it her fault, it was an older couple and they didn't see her and pulled out in front of her.

My youngest totaled her car on Oct. 2, 2007. The car rolled 6 times and she was ejected out of the sunroof on the 3rd. She was life-flighted to the hospital. Many of my fears, flashbacks, nausea causing events/triggers are from that first hour, the phone call, hearing the helicopter come, hearing and seeing her trauma team being assembled (it is one of the weirdest, there were 10-12 people, which made me feel good that they were going to take care of her, but then I realized my daughter was so injured that she needed a 10-12 person trauma team).

Now every call that is an unknown number makes me fearful to answer, every time I see or hear a helicopter or drive by an accident I get nauseous. And I never ever want to let any of my kids or family drive again. But I know that isn't realistic, so instead I say "Drive safe" every time and live with my fear of what may happen.

The thing is she was incredibly lucky, she had only a mild concussion but no permanent head injury, a chipped vertebrae but no damage to her spinal cord, 4 pelvic fractures (that did not require surgery), a tibia plateau fracture, a left clavicle fracture, an internally lacerated kidney(no surgery), bruised spleen, both lungs bruised, and multiple cuts/scapes/road rash (but none on her face). It was a rough intensive recovery but I had time built up at work so I was able to take 2.5 months off at the beginning and continued to work only part time for the next month or so to help her to and from school and to appts.

I should be counting my lucky stars and I am extremely grateful that she had no permanent injuries, but instead I just feel like the boot is going to drop at any time and she won't be lucky again. Or Katydid won't, or TJ won't, or ... the list includes all my family.

I think this probably 3 or 4 posts worth of data, so going to publish now and just write each day on how I'm feeling.

Update and Challenge info

Wow, it's been a long time since I posted anything. I've kinda been in a holding pattern, and just not done much lately. I noticed I also need to update my challenge text box. Haven't been doing great on it, but haven't been horrible most days. Meat is the hardest. Which really surprised me. I have never been much of a meat eater, so I figured that one would be a breeze.