Author: Shahri
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It Has Been Quiet
Thanks for being patient with me and waiting for my blog to reappear. My husband David passed away. Cancer was more powerful than we were, more powerful than the medical system, more powerful than prayer, positive thinking, and healthy eating. It was more powerful than everything we threw at it. The cancer was slow going…
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First World Problems
We complain at a high level. The maid dropped a glass, I have a broken nail but my nail lady has the flu, one of our rentals has been vacant for a month, and private school tuition has gone up again. Are you hungry? I mean truly hungry? No food, and no possibility of food,…
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It Is Hell In The Middle
The world “middle” has been buzzing around in my head lately. Not that middle is an uncommon word, just too common for me. Maybe I am more aware of middle since we just finished reading Lord of the Rings, which is set in Middle Earth. It’s that old reticular activator at work in my mind.…
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Too Much Stuff
Most of us have too much stuff. Even the people who think they have very little, probably still have things they don’t need or use. We have a multitude of reasons to keep things. They are sentimental, they were a gift (from someone who may visit and check that we have the gift), they are…
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Giving Up For Lent
Here is a short diary of what it is like to give up something for Lent. 2/17/2015 – Shrove Tuesday, Fat Tuesday, whatever that Tuesday is – start of Lent. Said goodbye to my friends on Facebook. I can go 40 days without it. Went back on to be sure I really said good bye…
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Memories of My Daddy
My dad, whom I called Daddy or Beebee, cherished cars the way he cherished women. He was not a gear-head who cares about the horsepower of the engine or the specialty shocks. He was an admirer of fine art, and treated cars and women in a passionate way, as a lover would treat them. The…
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Laughing More
Thinking about April Fools’ Day since it’s today. Wasn’t it just the best when we were kids? Some of the jokes went unnoticed. Replacing hamburgers in the school lunch line with rubber burgers was one that passed the “who knew?” test. Several sets of twins I know traded places at school and the teachers didn’t…
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Enjoying the Journey – No Direction
“They” say you need to have a destination, a goal in mind, to help chart a course towards success. This means success in all areas of your life, not just financial goals that the goal-setters look to, but on a personal and spiritual level, as well. If you have a goal you may need to…
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To Do List
Why is it that my to-do list gets longer instead of shorter? A big part of my to-do list is phone calls. Getting anything done by phone is almost impossible. I spend hours on hold. It is an active hold where I am pushing buttons and entering my social security number. They don’t always have…
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Reading or Real Life?
I read a lot of books. I love novels. By the time I was in kindergarten I had read every children’s book in the library near our house. I graduated quickly to teenage appropriate books and, before I was a teenager, I was reading adult literature, virtually anything I could get my hands on. My…
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Enlightenment
Get really quiet. Turn off your phone. Get away from your computer and your television. Go someplace by yourself. Keep away from your journal. Stop thinking. Don’t ask for help, don’t even talk to anyone. Stop listening to the platitudes, the affirmations, the well-worn clichés, the stories in your head that came from your parents…
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How Real Estate Agents Get Paid
For my real estate friends who don’t quite know how to explain commission to their clients, here is my take on it. I have a bit of a background, having been a real estate agent for 25 years. Although people understood that I worked on commission, some still thought I got a paycheck or could…
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A Different Valentine’s Day
Today I washed the kitchen floor. It’s my least favorite job. I love to do laundry, I don’t even mind scrubbing toilets, but for some reason I hate doing the kitchen floor. In my financially comfortable days I paid someone to wash my floors but those days are behind me now and I have to…
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Harry Potter as Comfort Food
We read to each other in the evenings. We started this tradition when David and I first met. He read out loud to me, starting with The Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov. I would drift to sleep, falling in love with him in the process. We married and continued to read out loud to each…
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Christmas Letter
If I had written a Christmas letter for 2014, which I didn’t, I would have had to start with events at the end of 2013. Our daughter was nominated to be a student ambassador for People to People. As a senior in high school, she left for Christmas break to teach English, build outhouses, and…
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The Opposite of Fear
My family is made up of entrepreneurs. We have always worked for ourselves. Architecture, real estate, bookkeeping, it doesn’t matter as long as we have no boss. Working for yourself is honest work. “Be of service” my parents said “and the money will follow.” Growing up, our financial life was feast or famine. There were…
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Find a Need
When I was in my twenties I tripped on a piece of broken walkway in front of a restaurant. I fell hard on the cement and cut open my chin. The owners of the restaurant were very concerned (looking back now, I am guessing they thought I would sue them). They paid for me to…
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Table Cloth
In September of 1978 one of my grandmother’s friends was moving to a nursing home and she gave me her “special occasion” table cloth. She had received it as a wedding present in 1925. It was still in the original cellophane tucked into the original box. It had never been used. Christmas of 1978 was…
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Gratitude
Gratitude. This is not just a Thanksgiving word, although it is a word bantered around more at this time of year than any other time. It seems to have lost any power it used to have. The word gratitude has become as meaningless as a “have a nice day” from an unsmiling checker at the…
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Words, Glorious Words
I love a good pun, which by most people’s standards is a bad pun. I like the one that makes you groan rather than laugh. I am now groaning about descriptions, some of them are as funny as puns. Since I have been looking for a new career, I google companies that recruit me to…
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Lesson Learned Through Cancer
Learning about life is an on-going process. Just when you think you have it down, something new comes along to tell you there are more things to learn. The lesson today, how to live with cancer. Cancer takes over your mind, even more than it takes over your body. It consumes your every thought. Both…
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Tech No! Heck Yes!
Back to the blog. It has been some time since I have posted. I started working on a few other business ventures and this creative outlet went on the back burner. Check out www.technoyeckyes.com to learn about one of my other businesses. Learn to live one day a month without technology. Learn to be mindful…
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What Am I Doing Now?
The new path is exciting and diverse. Here is some of what I am doing: 1) Teaching English at a language immersion school to mostly Latin American executives, although we get people from other places, too. I work one or two weeks a month, depending on class schedules. This is so fun! It is intense…
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Teaching English
It never crossed my mind that I would have the chance to teach English professionally, but it is one of the things I am doing now. I grew up in a family where nearly everyone spoke a different language so I started my ESL career when I was only six year’s old. When my grandmother…
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Habits 2
It is nearly 10:30 in the evening and I am finally getting a chance to write about habits, as promised yesterday. I have been too busy, too distracted, too tired, too every-other-excuse-in-the-book to finish this post. Bottom line, I am out of the habit! We are all creatures of habit, both good and bad. Anything…
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Creating a Habit
Just five days off from the blog and it could easily turn into a year. A habit takes 30 days to create but it can be broken in only a few days. I have a good reason for not writing, we drove our daughter to college registration and stayed in a primitive hotel with no…
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Off On A Tangent
As a story teller, I often take off on a tangent. I layer patina in my narrative to create depth and richness, bringing my listener back to the original characters with a deeper understanding. This quality doesn’t work so well in other areas of life. I am hungry so I go to the kitchen to…
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Warning – This Is A Long One!
If you are a factory worker and align this widget with that widget and bolt them together, you know your job and you are guaranteed a desirable outcome. Keep bolting widgets and on Friday you will get paid. If you are a student you can read a book and write a paper based on your…