Breaking Frodo Out of the Box
Don’t all women want a Frodo doll for Christmas?Frodo was all I wanted for Christmas 2001, the year Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring released in theaters. My poor husband (then boyfriend) went to a “nerd” store to purchase this special gift for me. He had to wait in line and plunk down $50+ dollars. Now, that is love! He always seemed ashamed of purchasing this doll for me. After all, folks in a “nerd” store happen to be our people, so that should not have been embarrassing. Maybe he feared other people might think he wanted the doll for himself, which would have been a bit weird considering that my husband kind of looks like Elijah Wood. Okay, that is a bit creepy. Nevertheless, I was thrilled to have my very own Frodo doll.
After that Christmas, Frodo moved to my bookshelf and lived quietly in his box for many years. Believing he’d be worth big money one day, I insisted that Frodo remain encased in dust and stashed away. As a child who was denied the opportunity to own Star Wars figures in the late seventies and early eighties, I always felt that I missed the boat on highly-valuable toys. Surely this Frodo would be worth big money one day! Frodo made three moves from an apartment to our first house and now to our final house. He’s been an on-going joke between my husband and me. Every once in a while, my husband would look up Frodo’s value and laugh about how he’s worth about half his original price, even in the most pristine condition.
This past year, I moved Frodo to my desk at work. Surely, others would appreciate Frodo’s awesomeness. That didn’t happen. For months on end, Frodo stared at me from behind his dusty plastic tomb with his arms and legs tied down.
It might sound weird, but I kept thinking that Frodo deserved his grand adventure. Living in a box limited the wonders of Frodo in the world. I went online and looked up Frodo’s value. Some sellers on Amazon had him listed for something close to his purchase price. Ebay told a more dismal story where he had sold for about half his original value. The Amazon searches opened all sorts of wormholes into the world of doll collecting. After peering into that abyss, I decided that really wasn’t the right world for me. My mind was made up, Frodo would break free from his cardboard and plastic tomb and enter the real world.
The next day, I took Frodo home and unveiled him in a cheesy video. My husband provided the amazing music.
After escaping the box, he ran into some trouble.
Mr. Grey will see you now. Frodo’s manufacturer had him all tied up!
After he escaped bondage, Frodo found himself in the clutches of a cat who wanted to eat his hairy hobbit feet.He took off on an adventure to Asheville, North Carolina.
Once he safely arrived in Asheville, NC, Frodo downed a mojito and tried to forget the cat attack.
The next day he imbibed a fine selection of beer at the Sierra Nevada Brewery in Mills River, NC.
He crossed dangerous terrain at the Biltmore Estate.
He almost fell into the chasm.
After reaching the Biltmore, he took a break and reflected on his journey.
Leaving the dusty box behind him, Frodo looks forward to even more adventures that await just beyond the horizon.Looking back, Frodo’s escape from the box resembles my own escape from the work world. I might not be gaining value in my bank account, but I’m gaining a wealth of experiences outside the box.
Returning to Night Owl Life
Despite my best intentions to remain on my husband’s schedule, I find myself slipping. The pull of staying up later and sleeping in later overwhelms me. The past few days I have allowed myself to wake up naturally around 10:30 a.m., and I feel in synch with my internal clock again, at last.
Left to my own devices, I go to bed around 2:30 a.m. and wake up around 11 a.m. or noon everyday. Throughout my childhood, high school, and college years, I stayed up late. My most nocturnal schedule developed while I was in graduate school when I would stay up until 5 a.m., go to sleep with the birds chirping, and wake up around noon for my afternoon classes. Some people would think that the reduced sunlight would lead to depression, but it did not, at least not at that point in my life. During vacations the last several years, I would transition with ease back into my nocturnal schedule, going to bed later each night and sleeping well into the morning.
Though the old saying “The early bird gets the worm” persists, I never thought I was missing out on anything that happened in the morning, and I definitely never thought worms sounded very tasty. I admire people who wake up and exercise, write, cook a full breakfast, etc. all before the workday starts. Fortunately, I know myself well enough to know that the morning life simply is not for me. One day years ago, I decided to wake up at 7 a.m. (forty minutes earlier than my usual work wakeup time) to exercise. Slogging away to my Wii Biggest Loser game that early felt like some sort of medieval torture. It took forever to feel remotely awake and forget about getting my heartrate up. The workout needed about 10 times more effort than the same exercise routine at night. Needless to say, that was the only time I exercised in the morning.
As a night owl, you have to find ways to cope in the early bird world. Over the years, I perfected a routine that required the least amount of time to prepare for work, allowing for me to sleep longer in the morning which was always top priority. In the end, my morning routine lasted about 45 minutes.
- Shower at night – This one was a big morning time-saver. Plus, showering at night reduced the amount of pollen and other allergens on my body, and it helped me fall asleep faster (with the sharp rise in body temp followed by a fall), which is something a night owl needs anyway.
- Maintain a low-maintenance hairstyle – My hair is straight with a good cut. All I did was brush it and walk out the door. If I noticed sleep hair (usually a lump in my crown), I’d just pat it down with water. Yes, it sounds lazy, and it is, but when you’re choosing sleep, you make sacrifices.
- Manage your time – Each morning I would wake up at 7:40 a.m., start the coffee maker (a night owl essential), walk to the den to put on my makeup while watching the news, and then I’d get my coffee and breakfast and return to the den to watch the news. After breakfast, I’d go upstairs, brush my teeth, brush my hair, get dressed, and then head to work. My routine became clockwork, and by 8:25 a.m. each morning, I was out the door.
On the other side of employment, I follow a similar pattern but at a slower pace and at a later time. This pace resonates with me, and I already feel more alive. Though I know I will likely return to the early bird working world someday, I am going to savor living in my natural circadian rhythm for a change. I understand why the world operates as it does, but I have to wonder if people could contribute more to the world if they lived according to their own internal clocks rather than fighting what is natural. I hope that by stepping outside the whirlwind of everyday life and being true to my nature that something creative inside of me will unlock and flow. There is hope.
Grand Adventure: My First Monday
Yesterday marked my first Monday without employment in over 19 years. Though I had every intention of waking up early with my husband, I did decide to sleep later after all. During the weekend, I didn’t have a marathon sleep night, and I deserved one. Anyway, I woke up at 10:30 a.m. and started my day.
I spent the morning finishing off a blog post that I wrote back in May but never published. I added photos and captions and looked over it all one last time before hitting publish. Looking back I cannot understand why I didn’t take the final steps to publish that post back in the spring. Sometimes I do not make sense.
After publishing the post, I did some freestyle writing, which for me is just dumping my thoughts onto the page. In the end, I wrote over 1700 words, and though it’s total garbage, at least I wrote it. So many people say that you just have to write regularly, even if it’s not good writing. Well, I accomplished that! I can put a checkmark next to “Do crappy freestyle writing.”
Then I took a 3-mile walk at our local cemetery. My husband and I have walked there many times through the years, but I’m not used to going there during work hours. I forgot that I cannot park near the office since people are working and meeting with the bereaved. During this time of year, I view my walking time at the cemetery as very limited since the number of daylight hours marks how long I can walk. For whatever reason, that always made me think about the scene in Bram Stoker’s Dracula when the characters are racing against the setting sun, hoping to catch Dracula before his strength returns. The good news is that I am not a vampire, and I have plenty of time to go there during daylight hours now versus while I was working.
Of course, I was about a mile into my walk when I realized that I did not have my Fitbit on my wrist. I felt panicked for a moment as if this lack of technology would ruin my walk. Somehow having a Fitbit track what I do makes it more real. My walking matters if the Fitbit monitors it; otherwise, my walking might be a rumor or fairy tale. Fortunately I got over the panic, and I will strive to remember to wear it next time. I do love some data!
Exercise and writing are two priorities in this career break. I’m definitely not a hand model, and my Fitbit is covered in sunscreen. That’s real life!Other tasks in my day consisted of doing laundry and making dinner. Though that makes me sounds like a domestic goddess, nothing could be farther from the truth. My motivations are purely selfish. I ran out of clean clothes that I want to wear, and I want to experiment with the chicken tikka masala base I made.
Altogether my first Monday without employment felt fairly productive, and I managed to touch on some of my goals for this career break. Writing, sleeping, exercising, and cooking make me a very happy girl.
A Weekend of Trees
Note: This is a post I wrote in May that I never published, so better late than never!
Cheap trees, a little tree, and a sick tree gobbled up my Memorial Day weekend. Though I had every intention of doing absolutely nothing during my weekend, I couldn’t help but get involved with these trees. Plus I had never really conducted research on tree maladies, and I found the reading engrossing. While I wasn’t in the yard dealing with trees, I was on the computer reading about trees. The unexpected weekend tree activities proved to be entertaining.
This tiny bald cypress tree looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book.It all started when Mom mentioned that Wal-Mart had two young, pathetic-looking bald cypress trees for less than $5 each. She knew it would play on my emotions. I love bald cypress trees. I have loved them ever since I fell under the spell of a tree on my grad school’s campus. That tree looked like something straight out of The Hobbit, and I knew I wanted that kind of tree in my life. My Mom gave me my first bald cypress as a gift for my 40th birthday (along with a Japanese Maple). Both trees were fairly mature and professionally planted. I just couldn’t leave those young, gangly bald cypress trees at Wal-Mart. A lot folks wouldn’t know that they’ll grow up to be wonderful trees in the landscape. My husband scoffed about adding more trees to our heavily wooded yard, but after seeing them, he agreed that these Charlie Brown Christmas trees needed some love. I brought them home and planted them in my back yard. They look precious springing out of the ground like Dr. Seuss trees.
Later I wandered over to Mom and Dad’s house where Mom was pulling weeds in a flower bed. She told me to look on the step at the gift she’d found for me. It was a small flower pot with a tiny Japanese Maple in it. When I say tiny, I mean itty bitty. This tiny tree is less than 6 inches tall. It’s a tiny seedling that Mom found growing in her flower bed. Last fall, I put about ten similar seedlings into containers that I hid under my big magnolia tree for winter. I lost all of them in the extremely cold winter. I was crestfallen when I pulled them out into full sunlight this spring to find no signs of life in them. I took this little tree gift from Mom and planted it near my screened-in porch. I put bricks around it so that no one would mow over it. I am eager to see if this little tree flourishes.
This Japanese Maple will likely be small for a very long time.
The Red Sunset Maple has crown dieback. Notice how the upper branches do not have leaves.After taking care of the young trees, I turned to my young but ailing Red Sunset Maple. My Mom gave me this tree as a gift for my birthday, and it commemorates our first spring in our house (2012). It was brought in as a 12ft tree and planted by the nursery. I had no reasons to question how it was treated, but this weekend as I stood there looking at the severe die-back in the crown, I knew the tree would not last much longer. I jumped online and started reading about reasons for die-back. A lot of the materials I found suggested that the main culprit for die-back in a tree that young was being planted too deeply. When the nursery planted it, I noted that it did have a mound of dirt and mulch at the base. I, personally, didn’t plant trees that way, but I figured they knew what they were doing. I went outside and surveyed the tree and noticed that I couldn’t see the root flare. It resembled a utility pole stuck into the ground, no flare anywhere. I started digging for the root flare. I found surface root after surface root wrapped around the trunk. I cut the surface roots away and kept digging. After digging down a good 8 or 9 inches, I found the root flare. I was appalled. I dug out a wide dish at the root crown, cutting away roots above the root flare. My husband had to come out and haul away load of dirt after load of dirt. In the end I performed a crude root crown excavation. I did it all with a garden trowel and gloved hands, and at the end, my husband helped lift out excess dirt with a pick axe and shovel. The recommended method for root crown excavation uses an air spade, but I was a woman on a mission, and I figured that a tree in this kind of decline needed my attention now rather than someone else’s attention later. The next day, I cut out the totally dead parts of the crown. The tree will look weird for a while, but time should heal its wounds if it survives. Time will only tell.
The brown area on the trunk shows how deeply I had to dig to remove strangling roots from above the root flare. The tree was planted about 9 inches too deeply.By Memorial Day I was exhausted by my tree adventures, but my heart was warm with the thought of young growing trees and healing old wounds. Trees carry such meaning for me and always have. These trees will forever remind me of this weekend in my life. I hope they will grow old with me and outlive me.
A Grand Adventure
After some serious soul-searching, many pro/con lists, and discussions with my husband, I decided to leave full-time work for my first-ever career break. Yesterday, I said my goodbyes to co-workers and clients, tied off loose ends, and deleted my workstation profile. Today I embark on a grand adventure.
Stepping outside my comfort zone into the unknown required a leap of faith. Generally, I cling to security, which would be why I have been consistently employed without any breaks for the last 19 years. Of course, the 19-year stretch included a lot of luck in a world where layoffs happen every day. By my age, a lot of women have had some type of break even while employed, including maternity and medical leaves. Though medical leave and maternity leave can hardly be called breaks, they still mark a point of departure from the everyday work world into a different life pattern.
During my 19 years of working, I switched careers four times without time for reflection and restoration between shifts. I moved from being a reporter to an advertising sales representative to a banker to a web developer/project manager without stopping to catch my breath. So many times I wanted to stop the clock and figure out what I love and how I want to spend my time. The clock does not stop and neither does life. I had to make a conscious decision, no matter how terrifying, to pause for myself.
I will admit that I shed many tears. I worried and still worry about money. I am afraid about losing my identity. As someone without other defining elements in my life such as children or a nonprofit cause, I resorted to the default of defining myself by what I do, by my job. I know I am more than my job. I am a whole person all by myself, but my self-perception has been so wrapped up in work for so long that I have a hard time seeing beyond that. Unraveling my work identity from the real me and rediscovering what I love to do with my time will be an essential aspect of this adventure.
Through the years, I have complained that I haven’t had the time and energy to write. This break primarily will be devoted to writing. Whether or I not I write anything worth reading is another thing. I am focusing on writing out my thoughts and feelings, dreams and possibilities, and ideas and plans as a way to dig deeper into what I want out of life. I don’t want to sleepwalk through my life. I want to move forward with purpose and live life deeply, and I hope to find meaningful work.
Along the way, I’ll be fighting distractions such as television, web surfing, house projects, and general laziness, an affliction from which I suffer in my downtime. Oh, and kittens! Kittens could be very distracting. My husband and I took in two stray female cats, one of whom was pregnant, and now we have three precious three-week old kittens. Also with the arrival of fall, I definitely won’t be distracted with yard work, but I can see myself getting wrapped up in the holidays (Mom already has plans for me to help her with holiday baking).
I plan to post frequently about this new life adventure. I suppose the purpose of this blog is evolving into a gardening of the soul rather than my yard, and I’ll be making some changes to reflect that evolution. I hope my adventure can help others who are considering making a radical change to find a better path. In the end, this could be a cautionary tale, a successful experiment, or something in between. Only time will tell, and for the first time in 19 years, my time is open for me to tailor as I see fit.