August 2018 - Lexical Abandon

Welcome to the sixteenth instalment of my Thankful Thursday series, Breakthrough!

I’m coming back at you on a Friday again. I’m getting into the swing of things slowly but surely before work starts up again and grad school starts up for the first time, both on Tuesday!

This week I’m focusing on gratitude for a breakthrough I had mid-week.

Here’s my Thankful Thursday for the week of August 24 – August 30, 2018!

Things I am thankful for over the past week:

I lost my glasses on our trip to NB, and on Friday my new ones arrived and I love them:

Funko HQ!!

This place deserves its own subtitle. On Saturday, I drove to Everett, Washington. I went there because it’s the home of Funko HQ, and a friend that I met on Bookstagram and I decided to meet up there! She lives in Seattle, so it was a place in between Seattle and Vancouver for us to get together. It was AMAZING.

The day we were there, you could build your own monster or Freddy funko.

Posing with a life-size Hagrid funko! (And two of the five funko I purchased.)

My friend and I also hit up this beautiful coffee shop called Narrative, both before and after our Funko HQ adventure.

Other things I’ve been thankful for this week

It’s been a pretty quiet week in terms of doing things or going places. And it’s been nice sometimes, but also pretty dreadful others. Sometimes I get so anxious that I fall into a depression, and that happened to me this week. One thing that helped to start bringing me out of it was following the suggestion of a mental health advocate on Instagram and posting a selfie of myself in the sun.
I did it, and the supportive response was really amazing.
A lot of my quiet time this week involved coffee and reading in the sun, which is pretty much my favourite thing ever.
I also took some time to make my cozy space a little neater and more spacious, and I feel like it’s so much better now! I find that living in a small space I have to be really conscious of the things I keep and how I organize and I’m constantly moving things around to make it work better. This also goes along with the tendency my anxiety has to go up incrementally in tandem with the cleanliness/organization level of my space.
Finally, pumpkin spice is BACK! And as much as I’m sad to see summer go, autumn is my second-favourite season, and PSLs are my all-time favourite hot drink (but half-sweet, because holy is that syrup ever brain-tinglingly sweet). I’ve had three already. I know, I have a problem. TAKE MY MONEY, STARBUCKS!!!

And finally, the theme for this week, Breakthrough!

This week I have some major gratitude for a breakthrough I’ve made. Since getting back from our trip to NB, I’ve spent a lot of time feeling depressed. Like I said above, when my anxiety gets really bad, it transforms itself into this full-blown depression monster who also has anxiety, and it’s the worst thing ever. I have already started brainstorming a post to tell you all about it. For now, just know that most days in the past couple weeks I’ve been pretty comatose.

On Monday or Tuesday, however, I had a major AHA! moment, and since then I’ve been slowly climbing my way out of that dark hole. My motivation, happiness, purpose, inspiration… everything – I guess you’d call it mojo – is starting to come back. I’m going to write a whole post on this soon. I wanted to share about it now though because it was so meaningful for me this week. I’m really thankful for all the things I was doing in my life even though I felt like shit that helped the breakthrough to happen.

There you have it!

So, that’s my Thankful Thursday list for this week. I hope it inspires you to make your own, and get on that gratitude train!

Peace and love,

Bee

Welcome to the fifteenth instalment of my Thankful Thursday series, Movement!

It’s been about a month! For my husband and I, it’s been a month FULL of travel, so I took almost all that time off from blogging. We hit up Seattle for four Blue Jays games, and went to our hometown in New Brunswick to visit friends and family.

Now that I’m back, this week I’m focusing on gratitude for movement.

Here’s my Thankful Thursday for the week of August 17 – August 23, 2018!

Things I am thankful for over the past week:

On Friday, our last full day in NB, Andrew and I hosted a BBQ at his parents’ house with a ton of our friends and their kids. Great food, company, and baby cuddles, what more could a girl want?!
Our trip back to Vancouver on Saturday went off pretty much without a hitch. Even though it was smoky when we got home, it wasn’t too hot in the apartment, and we slept well and adjusted to the four-hour time change quickly,
We grabbed brunch at our favourite weekend haunt Sunday morning – I’m sure that helped us adapt, too!
On Monday, I did a whole bunch of major adulting things make me anxious – getting things sorted for the upcoming start of my M.Ed. program, and making phone calls for things like car maintenance, car insurance renewal, and getting my new glasses.
I spent a lot of time reading and relaxing.
I took the time to enjoy the chalk art that has taken over my home corner of Robson Street recently.
And although I really hate the smoke because it’s keeping me cooped up inside, it does make for some eerily cool photos.
On the way to Starbucks, very close to my home. It felt like walking around in a dystopia that day!

The view from my counsellor’s office. Normally you can see a huge stretch of North Shore mountains. Not so on this day!

Out our apartment window, that crazy, yellow, hazy post-apocalyptic light.

And the theme for this week, Movement!

This week I’ve felt gratitude for the exercise routine I’ve gotten myself into over the last month. I believe I mentioned in my last Thankful Thursday post that I started a new workout program. I’m doing Kayla Itsines’ BBG program using the Sweat app. And it’s doing me a world of good. I knew I wanted to do a body weight exercise-based program to go along with a reduced running schedule as cross-training during the half-marathon off-season (which for me is July through December). I’d seen a few others trying and loving this program, and it was easily accessible for me and reasonably priced ($20 a month, and I can do it at home!).

It has been really smoky here in BC since we got back from vacation. I am so thankful that I’m in the rhythm of doing these workouts, because I’m still getting my body moving even though I can’t run outside now. I’ve always needed to exercise regularly for my mental health. Even though I’ve done the BBG workouts, I’m still feeling antsy because I haven’t been able to go for a run. But I am thankful for the movement I have been able to do! And to get some cardio in this morning I pulled the stationary bike out of the closet to do a little HIIT.

A little more about BBG

I love everything about this program except its name. BBG stands for Bikini Body Guide. Ugh, even typing it out makes me cringe. All bodies are bikini bodies, not just bodies that are as RIDICULOUSLY sculpted as the trainers in the program videos. I have to admit, it would be nice to see someone a bit more average-sized demonstrating the exercises in the app occasionally. I’m not trying to be down on myself, but with the lifestyle that I want I am realistically never going to look like Kayla, and sometimes it makes me feel bad. I’m human.

Anyway, the program is composed of three resistance sessions a week that take 35-40 minutes each. Then, you can do whatever kind of cardio movement you want three times a week. For me, this is running, obviously (or stationary biking this week, due to the smoke). It can be hiking, swimming, walking, biking, whatever. The last part is recovery. One day a week is completely off, and one day you incorporate a stretch and foam roller session. I think this is a really great balance that helps me keep my running legs. And I also get to build muscle and strength to help me do even better next half-marathon season. Plus, it’s structure that works really well for my mental health. It’s gotten me into a really great routine, so it’s easy to motivate myself to do it. And it’s almost daily, so my anxiety levels are partly managed by all that movement.

There you have it!

So, that’s my Thankful Thursday list for this week. I hope it inspires you to make your own, and get on that gratitude train!

Peace and love,

Bee

Month: August 2018