I just realized that Instagram has stunted my blog activity more than the common culprit: Facebook. Here's what I plan to do about it.
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My Name is Melisa and I’m a Perfectionist.
One of the things I've been working on since I started having time on my hands over the summer is attempting to back off on the symptoms of two signature parts of my personality: control freak and perfectionist. Let's see how that's working for me, shall we?
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My Refrigerator: In Constant Evolution
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my refrigerator lately. I remember when I was in college: my roommate and I had one of those tiny dorm refrigerators. We had typical college dorm stuff in there: leftover pizza, pudding, cheese, cans of pop…you get the idea. When Jim and I got married, he was in the Navy and out on the ship a lot. We were also on an extremely tight budget so as I recall I had the following in the refrigerator: cheese, jelly to go with my peanut butter sandwiches, ketchup, bread, and milk for the endless supply of Kraft macaroni and cheese I kept in the…
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What If We Just Don’t Ask “What If”?
Recently I visited an alma mater of mine. Sidenote: I just had to look up “alma mater” to make sure it means “a school I once attended” rather than “a school from which I graduated”. The fall after I completed high school I entered Tennessee Technological University as a freshman majoring in German and stayed there for six months. I loved my time at TTU, short-lived as it was. My visit a couple of weeks ago brought back all kinds of memories. I drove by Jobe Hall, which is where I lived on the third floor. I walked through the student union. I walked across the quad to the south…
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Home is Where the Heart is.
One of the scariest things about moving away from a long-time home is the idea of starting over again, from scratch. Finding the nearest grocery stores and other preferred shops, setting up new doctors and a dentist, figuring out if the area where you think you want to purchase a home is actually the area in which you think you’ll be happy long-term, and so many other details can be completely overwhelming. Multiply that frustration by three or four times if your long-time home also happens to be the city where you’re from originally and then multiply that by ten times if you’re a control freak who hates change. I…
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The Lazy Daze of Summer
This summer is…different for me. Here’s the thing: I operate on “high speed” most of the time. I have for years and years. The first part of the summer had me burning the candle at all the ends–we’re obviously not talking about a regular taper candle here–for a few key reasons: 1. We’ve been settling into a new house in a new-to-us-again town. 2. Listen To Your Mother season came and went, and due to #BlogHer17 being moved up by six weeks I didn’t have my normal month-long cushion of part-time rest before conference season got crazy. 3. Conference season was REALLY crazy. It was actually the craziest ever, for…
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There Are Worse Things To Obsess Over.
I have an odd obsession: toilet paper. My preoccupation doesn’t have anything to do with a particular type of toilet paper or even having a firm stance on whether it should roll over or under. I’m obsessed with having enough in the house. Weird, I know. I have worried about it for as long as I can remember, and I was never able to figure out why until I came up with a theory a while back. More on that in a minute. I get extremely nervous when the stash in the house goes down to single digits: heart palpitations and all. What if someone has a bathroom crisis and…
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The First Four Days
As of this evening, I’ve been in Knoxville for four full days. It’s been eleven days since this happened, and right after that Jim and I went to Phoenix where he was speaking at a conference and I had grand plans to spend half of my time relaxing by the pool with a book and the other half of my time working by the pool. Mother Nature had other plans, bringing clouds and wind and rain for about 85% of our visit. THANKS Mother Nature, NOT. Still got some good pictures, though. Upon landing back at O’Hare after a two and a half hour flight delay I hit the ground…
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I Just Keep Moving Because I’m Moving.
Strange times around here lately, as you know. As things go when you have an impending move, time seems to speed up as it passes and all of a sudden it’s as if there are literally a million things that have to be done in what seems like an extremely short amount of time. We have movers coming to pack our belongings so that’s a relief, but moving to another state is a huge endeavor even without that element, made more difficult (and exponentially complicated) with each extra year of being planted in the same place. It seems like I remember six new things every day that need to be…
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You Can Take the Girl Out of Chicago…
It’s finally time to write about what’s going on around here. I’m leaving the Chicago area. I say “I” because Jim has been gone for nearly six months, and the boys are sticking around here: one in the western suburbs and the other just over the Wisconsin border (Kenosha County is considered part of Chicagoland). This past year has been the most stressful one of my life. We’ve dealt with Roxie’s death (that anniversary is coming up in a couple of weeks), Jim leaving one job and taking on a new one four states away, his bike accident, my staying behind to sell this house so I can permanently join…