Hope Is Real!

I just woke up and it is Friday morning-the last full day of our vacation.  I will try not to be sad.  Blogging about the fourth day of my family's vacation and showing you that day's beautiful pictures will surely help! Day four was all about beauty.  It was also a day when my fibromyalgia really acted up, so I wasn't able to do much of anything physical-no bike rides, beach walks, or swimming for me that day.  I stayed in my yoga pants and tank top all day (my pajamas) and took it easy.  It would have been all too easy to mope around and feel bad for myself and it is true that I would sometimes feel a twinge of jealousy when someone announced that they were going to take a walk on the beach, but really, day four was a very happy day for me.  I guess it has been a blessing in disguise that I have never been a super athletic person and that I have already developed a bunch of hobbies that I can pull out and pursue when my fibromyalgia gets out of control. Lucky for you,

My two first cousins once removed spent most of day three at the dock throwing a net into the water in   an attempt to catch crabs and they caught many things!  By the end of the day, they had caught small squids, minnows, bigger fish, crabs, shrimp and even an eel!  I didn’t get to see the squids, but I did get to see the eel and I was surprised by how beautiful it seemed to be to me.  I’d always pictured eels as ugly creatures, but this one was a quite pretty shade of green.  I wish I had held it in my hands to see what it felt like!   Sometimes I view my body in much the same way that I viewed the eel’s.  My cousin took several pictures of me swimming in the ocean with my parents that day and when I looked at them, they sort of took my breath away, because I am not used to seeing my body in such an objective way.  In several of the oceanic pictures, my back is to the camera and one can plainly see my full figure.  It was a little startling to view at first, because normally I do

This was the first full day of the vacation, but for this blog’s purposes I am counting it as day two.   Like I said in my last pos t, Georgia weather has been awful lately, so I was really worried about our first full day on the beach, especially since the skies were already cloudy. Fortunately, it did not rain. In fact, I have noticed a pattern here at Sunset Beach that my family has decided is the perfect summer weather-cloudy and windy weather to keep the temperature fairly low in the morning with the sun fully appearing in the afternoon, so that one gets enough vitamin D to not become depressed. Of course, the key element is to have NO RAIN, at least no rain like Georgia has had for weeks straight with no break.  Mid-morning my parents and I, my cousins and their children, and one of my aunts all headed out to the beach for the first time. The wind was blowing something fierce, which made it the perfect day to fly a kite. Also, that Sunday was the first day that I got

Right now I am on vacation with my family at Sunset Beach in North Carolina. (lettering on the living room wall of our beach house-we were worried that the place might be a dump, but it's a beautiful and perfectly sized house.)  I was a little worried about the trip, because Georgia has been having rainstorms nonstop for about three weeks, but fortunately the weather in North Carolina has been perfect so far. The beach house that we are renting has also turned out perfectly too. It is ten of us in total – all relatives in some way – and we are having a wonderful time swimming, fishing, biking, cooking, relaxing, etc. The relaxing really is the most important part for me, as I have been experiencing a lot of anxiety this summer. Don't these pictures look beautiful and relaxing?  Here are some views from our beach house: (The house isn't quite at the beach, but in a marshy area.  Still, we're within walking distance to the beach, so that's fine with us.) I&#

Let me introduce you to Gertrude:   Gertrude is my fire breathing dragon that I made in my art therapy class to protect my boundaries. I absolutely love her! I think the name Gertrude is a very strong and no-nonsense name, perfect for a female dragon. Here is another, more colorful picture of her:  Okay, so she may look more like a snake, but the look I was originally going for was based on a Chinese dragon. See the similarities?  No?  Just use your imagination. As you can see, I wrote down some positive affirmations about my right to set healthy boundaries, because that is something that the universe seems bound to teach me this year.  This past month, I have had to set some really firm boundaries at work and with one of my best friends.  It was incredibly hard, because setting boundaries is new to me, but I had finally gotten to a point when I had realized just how much I needed to take care of myself and taking care of myself means setting hard boundaries and saying "no

I hope everyone who is from the United States had a good Fourth of July!  I must say I am not too happy about the state of our reproductive rights in the United States of America today.  Despite that, I did have a good Independence Day, which was so nice, because I have been struggling with a lot of anxiety lately.  I took my parents to see the new movie, The Heat, with Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock.  I really, really, really recommend this movie!  It’s a classic cop buddy movie, except that the two buddies are strong female characters.  It is so wonderful and refreshing to see a movie starring two women that isn’t about marriage or even romance.   The movie is absolutely hilarious and is destined to become a comedic classic.  Today was the second day I’ve seen it in a row and I might go see it again next week-it just brings me so much joy to see powerful, strong, funny women in action! But now on to my book reviews for June: As always, I give detailed reviews, so there