A Peek Inside My Brain. It Ain't Pretty.

Periodically (and by periodically, I mean one other time) I pull questions from a questionnaire that I found on the blog Grass Stains. I've decided to do a few more of them. Enjoy!

1. Have you done anything lately worth remembering?
   Yes, actually. Bryan had a gig in Los Osos, CA a few weekends ago and we went together. On Sunday, we hopped over to Morro Bay to do some thrift store shopping and we went to Morro Rock. We were walking around when Bryan spotted a gorgeous Saint Bernard. His owners let us greet him and he was the most loving, gorgeous dog. His name was Wally and I was smitten.  I need a Saint Bernard, stat! After that, we went and had lunch at The Galley which was amazing, then we went to feed the seals. It was a special day for us and one I will remember for a long time. 
2. What does your joy look like today?
   Today, my joy comes from my blessings. Every day I get to drink water and eat. I can put on clothes and buy things I need. I can walk. I can drive myself to work and back to a warm, comfortable home. I am so very blessed.
3. Is it possible to lie without saying a word?
   Yes. And you feel just as guilty when you omit as you do when you lie verbally. Trust me.
4. If you had a friend who spoke to you in the same way that you sometimes speak to yourself, how long would you allow this person to be your friend?
   Not long. My internal dialogue mostly consists of "Megan! Why do you suck so bad at life?" and "Megan, its cool. No one is looking at you weird. You do not seem out of place. You do not have toilet paper stuck to your shoe. You probably do not have a booger hanging out of your nose. Just keep being invisible. Do not attract attention! Wait... Am I attracting attention by not attracting attention? Be cool. Breathe." It would be annoying to have a friend that is berating me half the time and trying to ease my anxiousness the other half. 
5. Which activities make you lose track of time?
   Anything with Denise, my best friend. Crafts, painting, watching TV. Swimming/tanning. Pinterest. Reading books. Oh dear that is probably the worst! 
6. If you had to teach something, what would you teach?
   Budgeting. I'm good at helping people get out of debt and stay out. I have a knack for everyone else's cash. I just hate analyzing with my own. :)

It's About to Get Real

This post is the first in the series, Get Real. Please stay tuned as I go through this journey of self discovery.

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you probably know that the quantity of my posts has severely decreased. There are many reasons for this and I'm sure I've addressed it before. But have I really been honest?

I want to say that I have. I want to say that when I look back on this blog I'm going to read it like I would an old diary or journal. Actually, it will probably be worse. I'll probably be more mortified because this is public, my old diaries are not.

Very quickly after I got married life got hard. That's not to say that my life didn't have sweet moments or fulfilling ones. It just got hard. We were looking to rent, and somehow we ended up buying a foreclosure. I damaged one at that.

We moved into my father-in-laws house and immediately started construction to make it livable. Now, when you picture any newlywed, moving into an in-laws house, having construction done on their first home... It sounds like it could be a TV show. Everyone knows marriage is hard. But everyone thinks that newlyweds go through this blissful stage their first year. Yeah, no. That so doesn't happen. It would be amazing if the first year of marriage was like two sides of a zipper, fitting together perfectly and securely.

Unfortunately, people are not perfectly cut. We are jagged and broken, we have scabs and scars. It's hard to fit two jagged pieces together, isn't it? Same with people. Taking two lives and melding them into one smooth operating machine is a pipe dream. It's hard with a capital H.

I'm NOT saying it can't be easy. There are personalities that are just easy. I am SURE that more than a few people would be like, our first year of marriage was full of rainbows, unicorns and butterflies! However, in our case it wasn't.

We had fitting-together pains. Heaped upon that were the growing pains of buying a house, coupled with living with an in-law. Topped with a cherry of working 40 hours a week while trying to make sure the contractor freaking. showed. up.

You know those people that can handle fifty-thousand stressful things at once, all day, every day and they are fine? More than that, they live for it? Hi. I'm not one of those people. I'm great under pressure. I can juggle a thousand things at work. What I cannot do is juggle a stressful job, a stressful relationship, a stressful marriage, a stressful house, physical and financial stress all at the same time. I can handle some of those things together, but not all of them at the exact same time.

To bring it all together, for the past two years and five months I've been dealing with all of those together. And after a while of pushing through I just gave up. I stopped fighting. I don't have the motivation to fight all of them at once. I do the bare minimum in order to survive. I don't feel like I am thriving right now.

I feel like I suck at life because when I wake up in the morning I groan and think, "No. Not again." I get ready and head to a stressful job that I love. After 7-8 hours, I drive home to a stressful husband that I love. The last thing I want to do is clean the litter box. Or make dinner. Or THINK of making dinner. I don't want to scrub toilets or floors. And ew, don't even talk to me about exercising. I do the bare minimum to just get through the day. If I have to do laundry I'll do it. If I have to go grocery shopping I'll go.

Where is my joy? My zest or zeal for life? I'm a Christian and I feel like a failure because I pray every day for God to change my heart. I 'fake it' hoping that he'll follow through on my actions with feeling. So far, it hasn't happened.

I hope this doesn't sounds complainy. That's not my intention. I am not unhappy. (Well, I am unhappy about how much a weigh. Gross.) But, I'm missing a key ingredient in my life. I feel like a cake that is sunken in the middle. Why?

In an effort to be as cheesy as possible, that is the million dollar question. Why do I feel this way? Where is my joy? What can I do to fix this? Is it even fixable? Can I strip my feelings down to find the source?

I'll be posting as I go through this journey. I don't know if it'll be every day, once a week, or once a month. This is all in real time, so however long it takes I'll be writing.

The Weekend

Sometimes, having a day to sleep in, watching your husband play Zelda while casually flipping through magazines is just what the doctor ordered.

Oh, and painting your nails? The cherry on top. :)

My Life

My life is:
complicated.
lazy.
busy.
hectic.
annoying.
blessed.

I lose sight of whats important. And the 'free time' I have? I don't want to spend it scrubbing toilets and floors, doing laundry and cleaning up after myself, Bryan and the dogs. I want to have fun!

So, what I'm trying to say is that I'm a slacker.

I've been having a hard time getting motivated to do ANYTHING. Even blog. I suck.

Here are some recent photos of my life:

I made my FIRST pizza from scratch. Its Margherita pizza with chicken, basil and oven roasted tomatoes! I made the pizza dough from scratch by following this recipe. The only thing I would have done differently is I would have made the crust waaay thinner. I do not like my pizza to be bready. Yuck!

This is Bryan standing in front of only a small part of Morro Rock. We walked all around it and I got to meet my FIRST Saint Bernard dog. His name was Wally. I need one STAT.

This is Bryan in a tree in Los Osos. It was a perfect climbing tree!

Before Bryan and I headed off to Los Osos and Morro Bay, Bryan played at Harris Ranch. He's an amazing musician! My favorite cover song of his is Last Kiss by Pearl Jam. He was singing that when I took this picture. You can check out his stuff here.

I saw this AH-MAZING desk at a thrift store in Temecula the week before last. I wish i would have bought it. :(

A terrible picture of me but a cute picture of the birthday girl, my sister Alison! We went to San Diego for her 30th birthday and we had a blast!

I was going through old pictures, and I came across this one of my Dad. Since we aren't on speaking terms, I don't have to worry about him getting mad at me for posting him looking like an old portuguese lady. :)

I'm going to hopefully bust a$$ in the house this weekend so I'll have some updates for next week!