50 Days of Life As I Know It. A Plan to Savor Each Moment Left

It's official. I have 50 days left until I am on board a plane with my sister to Bali, Indonesia. I have thought of this for so long and now that reality has set in I have a mix of emotions. Of course I am beyond excited to be traveling in South East Asia for 6 months, but there is that sentimental side of me that has been creeping up every day since we booked our one way ticket. As the 50 day mark came upon me I realized that life as I know it is about to change in every way, at least for 6 months, maybe forever . I decided that until I leave I want to savor all of those little moments, those little things, that I may not feel or see for a long time. I thought of coming up with a list of 50 things to do, or 50 things that I will miss but I could only get to 35. So here is a mix of things I want to take in before I leave:

1. Enjoy the fall leaves
2. Do yoga as often as I can while I can still do it on a whim in my bedroom without getting in the way
3. Play my music out loud when no one is around
4. Wear as many outfits as possible and dress up for work. I'm going to be living out of a backpack soon enough
5. Spend useless bored moments on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter and remember that I have entertainment for now
6. Make a smoothie every morning not because it's healthy but because I can. Those blender days will be over
7. Eat as much pumpkin pie as possible
8. Lounge around in yoga/pj pants whenever I want
9. Lay on the couch and watch TV whenever possible
10. Spend countless hours killing my hair with a straightener
11. Use up all of my make up by getting done up every day
12. Take as many random photos to send by text or Snapchat as possible
13. Enjoy having a routine. I should want to run from this but it keeps me sane
14. My stuff. My pictures, my jewelry, my books, my stuff.
15. Love waking up in my own bed. Blankets, cool air, big stretches, sleeping in
16. Breath in the cool fresh air because it's going to be hot and humid
17. Wear sweaters as many days as possible
18. Bake cookies, cakes, chicken anything that involves an oven
19. Have long hot baths. This is something I will terribly miss however I'll let the ocean be my bathtub
20. Change my nail polish often while I have many options
21. Drive a car whenever I have the chance
22. Hug everyone in my family every time I see them
23. Wear jeans. My body will not see these for a very long time
24. If I get a chance, enjoy the first snowfall. I never wish for snow early but I want those big night snowflakes that stick in your hair.     
25. Buy a tub of ice cream and eat it all before I leave
26. Talk on the phone. I don't do this often but love when I do and shall do more of it
27. See as many friends and family members as I can
28. Enjoy the simple hot showers
29. Don't take for granted those moments when people need me
30. Have as many silly random conversations with as many inside jokes as possible, those are the moments I will think of when I miss people
31. Enjoy food like Kraft Dinner, grilled cheese, anything that is home
32. Play with the new roommate (the baby), when I get back he will have grown so much
33. Make sure I am not mad or holding a grudge with anyone or them with me
34. Did I mention eating lots of pumpkin pie?
35. Remember how many wonderful people are in my life and know that each one of them had some part in getting me to where I am today and whether I am close or far I love every one of them in some way

Each day that gets closer to my departure these things are going to get more important to me and that day I take off who knows what will happen but I will be able to look back at this time for the rest of my life and be glad that I let it all soak in. For now I have a ton to do but I am going to enjoy every second that I can in life. There's going to be a new adventure ahead of me and a new blog coming soon. I'm sure there will be many murrments along the way though!

Saying Goodbye To First World Problems

Last week I had the misfortune of dropping my Iphone and breaking it with three months of my contract to go, so I bit the bullet and decided to upgrade, resign and get the Samsung Galaxy S4. Amazing phone I must say but one week into having it, just when I got used to the device and downloaded all the apps, I dropped that phone through the crack of a table, smashing it on the ground. I guess I didn't knock on enough wood when I protested how in all my years I had never broken a single phone. Luckily I am able to get a replacement but that meant four days straight without a phone. After the initial separation anxiety and grieving of my lost pictures and conversations I decided what better time to disconnect myself from having something attached to me at all times.
There are certain things you realize when you don't have your phone anymore that seem like big problems which become unimportant after a few days. For the first twenty four hours here were my first world problems I had to deal with:

• How was I going to Snapchat all the pictures of me eating ice cream to people? I found some great deals on ice cream and it's sad that my first thought was to take a picture and send my find to someone. (I did buy two boxes of Drumsticks and a box of 24 Fudgesicles in case you wanted to know)
• How was I going to continue the everlasting ongoing text messages that I had going on? Some of these were very important conversations that I no longer was able to continue.
• How would I Instagram my selfies of me doing nonsense things like making dinner on the BBQ? 
• How would I check in to all the non important places I went to on the weekend on Facebook?
• How was I going to survive a bus ride without my playlist of music?
• How was I going to check my daily horoscope?
• How was I going to check the weather for today, tomorrow or next week in Ottawa or a random city? (I did get poured on today not knowing it was going to rain)
• How was I going to set my alarm in the morning for work? I don't have an actual clock in my room anymore.
• How was I going to get all my pictures off of my phone? (They were pretty dumb ones but still)
• How was someone going to call me (Let's face it my total talk time in a month is maybe ten minutes)
• How was I going to make plans to meet up with people and know if either one of us would show or be late?

After a day or two these things became so irrelevant in my life. I still have a computer so I still have Facebook. Anyone that matters knows how to get a hold of me through Facebook or email and they have. So today I woke up for day one of work without my phone and it was amazing how many things are different without it. I loaded up an Ipod shuffle because I can't live without my music and set on my way. Here are some things I noticed without having a phone:

• The moment I walked out the door I had three construction guys on my street say hi to me all in a row.
• My Ipod is so much lighter than a phone and easily fit in my pocket, freeing up my hands for my purse and bus pass without me being all awkward.
• The bus driver actually said hello and smiled at me this morning.
• I may have danced at the bus stop listening to Fleetwood Mac's Sweet Little Lies and am now obsessed with the song.
• I paid attention to people. There was one woman doing make up on the bus, one reading a book, a man outside cutting hedges on the sidewalk side of his property, a mom with her child on a slide at the park. It was the people watching I love to do.
• I realized how boring my job really can be without the extra distraction at my desk. This could be a very good or very bad thing.
• I started looking at vintage clothing, looking into my dreams, reading the news. Stuff I used to care about.
• I stopped looking for my phone, waiting for text messages, deleting junk emails. All the things that waste so much time in my day.
• My phone does have a voice activated command thing. I finally used it and realized I can set my alarm, send and receive text messages and call her a whore when she doesn't do what I ask, but then she tells me to come back when I feel like being nicer and that she doesn't understand when I say goodbye forever alone. 

At the end of the day I'm not completely disconnected from the social aspects of technology, they just have to be done at a different pace. I have noticed there is more time in the day and that I am generally at peace without my phone. Tomorrow the new one comes in and I may just treat it a little different than before.

I may just want to wear my jean jacket, pretend it's 1987 and listen to Little Lies on a plain old Sony Walkman.

What Are The Hardest Things To Ask Yourself?

A few months ago I sat alone in my apartment and was really trying to figure out my life. Maybe I think too much. I just wanted to find out some answers to things I couldn't comprehend. Why were people treating me a certain way? What did I really need in life? What direction did I want to take? These are all questions that popped in my head but they didn't really get down to the core of who I am inside.
One of the hardest things to do is to be honest with yourself, look inside your mind and heart and then write down some answers that you truly believe in. Not answers you think people would want to read. Answers that challenge yourself. I wrote down five questions in a journal. These questions seemed simple until I wrote them down. The key is to write all five out, leaving spaces for your answers, just like an English test in high school. The words on the paper scared me, haunted me and were extremely challenging to answer. I actually took a couple days filling in my blank lines until there staring back at me was exactly what I was looking for. Here was my key to finding my own happiness, I was realizing things that I did and didn't want in my life and things that I could be proud of. It was a very freeing experience and I still think about these questions every day.

I challenge people to try this out and see what you can learn about yourself.
Here are the questions:

1. What are you good at?
2. What do you like about yourself?
3. What do you dislike about yourself?
4. What makes you truly happy?
5. What makes you sad or angry?

I've passed it on to a couple of friends and hopefully they were able to gain some good insight to themselves. Maybe you can too.

Little Miss Busy

I can't believe it has been almost a month since my last blog post but life has been crazy busy and it's just going to get busier. In on of my previous post, Big Changes Are Coming, I had mentioned that I was going to have some big changes in my life in order to take a trip of a lifetime. Since then I have moved out of my lovely apartment and am living with some friends for a few months to save up some funds. My last month has pretty much consisted of packing, moving things into storage, moving things to my new home and getting settled in. And to my surprise, I actually love it here. I had a year living on my own, no one around, did whatever I wanted, but it was extremely lonely. I guess I am more of a social person than I thought I was. I have been here in my new home for almost two weeks and it's great.
That has been my last month and today I realized, as I input my next two months into my calendar, that it's just about to get busier. There are the usual engagements of course, birthdays, baby showers and most exciting is the visit of my best friend from Luxembourg whom I haven't seen in a year! I've also decided that this is going to be the year to volunteer my time and efforts into a few different things. I'm sure it will be posted all over Facebook shortly but I am going to be riding the Big Bike for Heart & Stroke with MBNA again this year, missed out last year for the actual ride by 10 minutes, but still got some good fundraising in. This year some of us are working on a fundraising yoga class in one of the city parks which I will shortly start advertising and creating a website for info and sign ups if people are interested. I will be after those reading this that live in the city!
I signed up again this year to do the Ultimate Run for Men's Cancer's where I will be doing the 5km walk, I don't have the time to train for a run, plus I despise running. Both of these foundations are important to me as there have been family members affected by both.
I also found myself agreeing to do a Yogathon at the end of May in support of Because I Am A Girl, Woman for Mental Health, and Helping Hands for India. A full day of yoga is something I thought I would never do but now I am signed up for a yogathon and am in the works of a camping combined with yoga retreat in Vermont next month. I am quite excited to see what that is like.
Camping. Oh the camping. Nothing makes summer seem short until you try to plan out camping weekends. One trip at least, if not two are planned and ready to go to the Thousand Islands this year and hopefully another weekend I can get in with my sister, we have talked about it for a couple of years.
Pretty much three quarters of my summer weekends are booked up until August and I'm sure there will only be more. I am never complaining about being busy. I love it actually, especially when it's fun times with good people in nice weather.
Of course with being busy murrments are bound to happen. I have been posting most of them on the Murrments Facebook page and get a good laugh at the ones everyone else is posting. Keep them coming!

Murrment of the Week. Love On A Leg?

Life has been hectic to say the least. Last weekend I decided it was time to start packing for my upcoming move the end of April. I'm moving in with some friends for the next six months to save up for my big trip. I got home Saturday afternoon and went crazy packing. Some things are set for storage, some to take to the place I will call home and the rest for donation. Nine bags of clothes for donation, four storage bins filled and a few bags of garbage later I found myself almost set to move. I guess I had some good motivation that day because I started to run out of things to pack and have already taken one load of things to my new home.
With three weeks to go I then had to deal with living in chaos in my apartment with all of the containers and bags of stuff waiting to be taken away. It's pretty much like walking through a maze and getting up in the middle of the night to use the toilet is just a bad idea. I pretty much am guaranteed to trip over something. It makes me excited to move but it is no longer my home, no longer my sanctuary and place to find calmness in my life.
My murrment of the week starts with me trying to find some peacefulness in a life of craziness. I came home the other night and after looking around my apartment, seeing my artless walls, all of my last years memories packed away I just wanted to sit down and cry. Instead I decided to take a nice bath.
Being a girl as you all know requires the consistent upkeep of shaving ones legs so there I was in the bath spraying shaving cream on my leg and when I looked at it somehow it came out saying the word "love". I am easily amused by the small things in life and probably spent about five minutes admiring my leg with a possible word spewed on it.
My first thought was I should take a picture and Instagram it because isn't that what I do with everything funny I see? It would have been a great picture. Add a filter, maybe a frame, hashtag love. The usual. Here is where the problem lies. My phone was in the living room on my stereo playing music. I thought long and hard about how I was going to make this work. If I got out of the tub the shaving cream was bound to drip off my leg and would no longer would I have a word. Then I thought maybe I could get out carefully, keep the one leg up and woddle my way over to my phone. It could work.Then I remembered I would be naked. My lights were on and the curtains were open to the street so that would have caused a major murrment. So there I sat in the tub after realizing there would be no picture, no one would believe me, no hash tags would be made, no one would see this great little moment in life when the simple things pleased me and I found my calmness. Coming to this conclusion out loud all I could say was, "MURR".

Big Changes Are Coming

It's been a bit since my last blog post but as some of you may know I have been extremely busy lately. I've been trying to put a lot of my focus into my work, not really sure why but it gives me something to think of all day. I have also been going to the gym or working out at home five to six days a week, and on top of that have been planning on changing my life.

What is this change? Well after a long year of living on my own, trying to find my place in this new world, and endless let downs, I decided it was time to start living the life I really wanted. I had made a decision in the fall when my sister moved to New Zealand on a working visa that I wanted to try the same thing. The plan was to pay down some stuff, take a leave from work and go for a year.

Initially my sister and I had a little plan of meeting up, maybe doing some traveling and some random work, and then when she set off for home I could do the rest of the year on my own. This plan seemed great in a lot of ways however there are a few things that came up that stopped this exact plan from working out. I live on my own in Ottawa where it isn't the cheapest place to live and save money, and second as of today my baby sister is home early from her journey in New Zealand. A choice that she knows I respect and just hope that she is happy in whatever she does, however I will miss talking to her at 3am when I have the dreaded insomnia!

So even though my sister came home I decided that I still needed to do something for me. I need to get out of this city and do what I love...travel! I have always wanted to go to Bali, Indonesia for as long as I can remember, even before Julia Roberts and the whole Eat, Pray, Love thing happened. I started looking at planning a trip there. Then I started seeing the surrounding areas, then the surrounding countries and all of a sudden I had seven countries that I now want to visit. How was I going to afford it? Could I do it on my own? When could I go? And then it happened...

I realized I'm not the first person to ever do this. The cost of backpacking around Southeast Asia has fairly minimal costs compared to many other places I want to go or have been before and with some careful planning I could do it. It all came to me very quickly and I realized that I could actually accomplish this. I would have to make some really big changes in my life now and until I could leave, but I could handle that. It was the first time in my life I had an opportunity to do something crazy like this. No ties here to hold me back, and that is very rare to happen. Plus, Justin Timberlake got married this year so my hopes of ever becoming his wife went down the drain. Over the next little while I will let you all in on my plans and how I'm getting to live my dreams. Big changes are coming.

Top 10 Mini Murrments

I have random murrments happen to me which I have shared on here in past blog posts. These are my top 10 normal pet peeve style things that drive me nuts. Otherwise known as mini murrments.

10. Being early for the bus for once and then it's late. This happens to me all the time, but more so on days when it is raining, snowy, windy, or I decide to wear a skirt to work. I'm planning on wearing a skirt tomorrow so I'm pretty sure I will be late.

9. Doing your eye make up perfect and when you put mascara on it smudges on your eyelid. This also only happens when you have to go out somewhere and have spent more time on your eyes than the normal throw on one color and go.

8. Being stuck behind people who don't know how to use an escalator. If you want to stand, stand to your right people. Some of us are in a hurry and the left side is meant for the ones who want to pass by.

7. Knowing there is a quarter of a bottle of lotion left but the pump doesn't go down far enough to pump it out. You pump and pump and nothing comes out. Screw you lotion bottle! How is it even possible that this happens these days? After years of this happening to me I thought they would have it right by now.

6. Finding a hairdresser that does a good job and then they leave or the place closes. I haven't had a consistent stylist in a decade. Wow that made me feel old!

5. Losing articles of clothing when you live by yourself and have your own washer and dryer. This happened to me yesterday. I tore apart my drawers, made a mess of my room and relived my teenage years with a disaster of a bedroom. I decided to wear jeans instead only to find the leggings at the end of the day. They were in the dryer that I looked through four times.

4. Forgetting words.
Example.
I say, "I was sick and watched a bunch of movies".
Other person says, "Oh what movies did you watch?"
Me, ".......Ummmm".
Pretty much I felt like a dumb ass. I am horrible with names. People, movies, books anything that has a name.

3. Going to take a picture of something great and then your memory is full. This is such a disappointment. Not only did you not capture the moment, you actually missed it because you were buggering around with your camera or phone and got nothing.

2. Having a bunch of open tabs on your computer and accidentally hitting the close button. No word of a lie I just did that while I was writing this. At least this time it was only the blogger tab and not all of the internet.

1. Getting ice cream on the back of your hand. You know when you reach into the ice cream container and the backside of your hand hits the side of the container and you get that little bit of ice cream on your hand? I can't handle this. It actually makes me cry. When I was younger I refused to get ice cream if it was close to empty. My best friend thought it was funny to do it on purpose to me one day. Let's say it didn't end well for the eggs in the fridge that day. I knew I was doing this post today and purposely put ice cream on my own hand to take a picture. What a horrible idea. I panicked after the picture was taken, but at least I got to lick off the ice cream and then had a bowl after.