I coach, sponsor and encourage people to ask for help a lot of the time but it’s still very uncomfortable for me to ask anyone for help. Today was my day to go take photographs of a building that could best capture the problem set about color that was assigned to me for a class.  After some thought, I decided to go take photographs of the new Austin Public Library that had just been built in the Bouldin Creek Neighborhood (South Fifth and Mary).  The only clue I had that I really didn’t know how to go about doing what I needed to do for this assignment was that I kept dragging my feet about everything this morning.  Feeding the dogs, feeding the cats, feeding myself, washing the dishes, everything just seemed to take a long time to accomplish.  I’m so glad the angels whispered in my ear loud enough for me to hear the suggestion  that I call a friend who lives right down the street and just happens to be an artist and is married to an artist/builder.

I’m wondering if in my head’s rule book under “calling friends for help” it says “only in extreme emergencies” because just my friend calmly walking beside me and pointing out different aspects of the building and landscaping that I could photograph helped ease my unrest about this project.  I actuallly began to have fun finding various funky angles to shoot. By the way, for anyone living in Austin you must go see this library. It is gorgeous and they have done an incredible job with the building and landscaping.

I’m an extrovert so I get my juice from working with other people when it comes to work and play so I need to remember to ask for help when I feel overwhelmed about a project even if the judge in me thinks I’m being ridiculous.  I’m sharing this with you in hopes that if you don’t already think of asking for help (and then go ahead and ask for it) from friends, that you will consider doing this for yourself now.  Besides, two of my friends that I spoke with about this class (one of them is an architect) both wanted to take this class with me because it sounded like fun!!!  I was really worried about making the perspective elements of little people, furniture and trees for later on when we make our models but now I have two friend, at least, who are actually looking forward to helping me make little people.  Go figure!  What may cause my hands to break out in a cold sweat may manifest in my friends’ hands as that tingly sense of anticipation!

Just remember, people who really love us will be absolutely happy to help us when we tell them specifically what we need and if they can’t (or don’t want to) help us, hopefully we’ve grown healthy enough friendships by now that they will tell us that too.

So much color….so little time……

I just made some advertising person really happy using that title, but it’s ingrained in my head so there you have it! Before I begin to write this blog about being O V E R W H E L M E D! I should probably lay out some caveats. Being just a wife and not also a mother with children to consider, to all my friends who are parents I know to the bottom corpuscle of my little toe that I have no idea how overwhelming overwhelm can be when you are a parent AND having to deal with everything else that life throws at you. So that’s caveat number one. In some of the recovery rooms that I have haunted lo these many years, I’ve heard some of the people who have long term sobriety and abstinence acknowledge that the problems they have today, as compared to back when they were indulging, are really “high class” problems. Pretty much anything beyond not waking up on a cold cement floor next to the porcelain throne with vomit on your face can qualify….so I know that my overwhelm is really of the higher class variety…..let that be caveat number two.

I hit overwhelm today at 4:30pm when I walked out of my last class at school and had a couple of hot flashes in the 93 degree heat as I trudged down a couple of flights of stairs and wobbled precariously across wide expanses of cement walkways (why the hell did I think the mules I put on this morning were a good idea?!?) and spastically hobbled up the hills to finally stand in line in order to pay for parking in the garage (which was a last minute choice after waiting for 45 minutes at the full student parking lot for which I have a sticker) Let me just say that every semester that I take my trusty two classes, I have a finer appreciation and a more heightened degree of empathy for all the classes that my fellow students are carrying. I really don’t know how they do it.

The overwhelm pentameter began to make its rhythm known when our “Making Spaces” professor told us that our first modeling assignment was due this coming Monday. On top of that, we were to make little quarter inch and 1/8 inch people, trees, tables and chairs to use as models for our class this semester and bring those in on Monday. Luckily, he realized that perhaps we needed to have a whole class devoted to teaching us how to make unassuming scalable elements when we could barely keep up with him to make 1/3 of an origami human with his fifteen minutes of instruction. On the one hand, my mind was hysterically remembering an episode of CSI where the psychopathic killer made these perfect miniature scenes replete with elements, people, murder weapons…the whole shebang of which I was completely in awe but on the other hand I felt a gurgling panic silently rising up into my throat when the prof passed out these thin little wire reeds that he was then going to teach us how to produce miniature human models..REALLY!!!? I can’t even use my thumbs to type text messages and instead resort guardedly using my index fingers when no one is looking, what the hell makes you think I can whip up a tiny human specimen with a wire as thin as a piece of dental floss!! But I digress.

The good thing about these assignments is that I realized that I had, once again, piled way too many things upon my plate and that something was going to have to give before I ran screaming into the sunset. Luckily, it takes me about 45 minutes to get from school to my home so I had plenty of time to make some panicky phone calls to friends to off load the frothing fear of my mind and get everything back into perspective. As much as I would have you believe that EVERYTHING is a Ten on a scale of 1-10, as any sane person knows that simply is not the truth. I realized that there were at least three meetings that I could re-schedule for next week. I tried to re-schedule the professional presentation that I committed to do on Saturday but with no luck. After working it all out with trusted friends, I was able to get things down to a loud roar.

Tomorrow I plan to take my trusty digital camera to a new neighborhood library and take a plethora of photos so that I can cull through them to pick out 8 that best captures “color” for my project. I’ll also be creating slides for my professional presentation, giving myself permission to do a bit less, perhaps, then say Martha Stewart might do.

Overwhelm is our mind’s way of telling us that we’ve said, “Yes” way too many times. Overwhelm is our heart’s way of reminding us that we’ve forgotten to add in some play time. Overwhelm is our soul’s way of reminding us that we don’t have to do it all alone, there are others out there who can help us when we’ve gone full tilt boogie.

I’m feeling so much better just for having written about this and now sharing it with you! If nothing else, I sure do have verdant grounds for a one woman humorous play sometime in the future!!

How does overwhelm show up for you and what is in your emergency preparedness tool kit to take care of you when it does?

This title, “Moving Beyond the Pale” came to my mind the minute I started writing tonight so I thought I’d look it up to see if there was anything to it and found several stories and songs with “beyond the pale” and one religious song that used all of the words “moving beyond the pale”. What I felt when this title came to me was to “move” physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually beyond unacceptable behavior.

I was very proud of myself this morning while waiting for the Dental Assistant to glue back on the temporary crown that I’d popped off in a flossing frenzy, that I picked up the 40th Anniversary Issue of the Smithsonian Magazine (instead of a People Magazine) and fell upon an article written by senior editor T.A. Frail who interviewed satirist Carl Hiaasen. Carl is known for writing very satirical novels about humanity so it shouldn’t have come as any kind of a shock to me that his interview was heavily saturated in the same way when he said that any speech he gives now is entitled, “The Case Against Intelligent Design”.

All kidding aside, perhaps it’s that I’ve been on this planet long enough to start recognizing patterns and growth in human behavior or perhaps I’m actually able to see where history is repeating itself but whatever the case lately it really seems that there is a big divide happening now between those people who want to understand as much as they can about the world and the people around them and how it all works and fits together and those people who really couldn’t (or wouldn’t) give a flip about any of it. For some people who may be caught in the varying shades of gray in-between the two, they may look up in wonder and ask what the heck is going on anyway? It really all boils down to where we want to put our focus on and/or about life.

I posted a question to LinkedIn this week on this subject and asked if people really thought humanity was devolving. God bless my friends and acquaintances on LI who humor me by answering questions that previously, when I was younger, would have gotten the “you think too much Lynn” response. One of the responders put it in a way that I really appreciated. He suggested that it wasn’t so much whether humans were good or bad or whether what was going on now in the world, in terms of human behavior, was good or bad but rather to pay attention to who is seeking to understand. Kind of made me stop in my tracks because although I believe seeking to understand is one of the most important behaviors we can do, by asking the question I was allowing that dark side of my petty little brain out to play by focusing on the problem rather than the solution. I can so gather up the moldy parts of my brain that can only see the dank and dark side of life and hold a little party in the den of my brain rather than dare to stick my head above the din and look for the rays of sunshine that are out there. For they are out there.

So, as you can see, moving beyond the pale for me today means to move beyond the knee jerk easy response to humanity and our behaviors today when we say that we’re just all going to hell in a hand basket and that’s all there is to it. That’s too easy.

Looking for the beauty in the midst of the cacophony of life, now there is an elegant way to find grace!

Now you have to understand before I begin talking about the particular dream that I had last night that I was raised with the understanding of two primary ideas about dreams. The first idea is that often times our mind is like a drunken monkey and is just doing back up of all the bits and pieces of information that we’ve collected during the day. Like any good piece of fine running machinery, it does its nightly backup and so sometimes dreams are just a montage from that backup. The second idea I believe about dreams is that we can get symbolic messages that can help us to unravel the mysteries of life.

I know that I went through a period of time in my younger years when nightmares seem to be the de rigueur. Luckily my mom had been studying Carl Jung for quite awhile and so she introduced the concept of lucid dreaming to me. My understanding of lucid dreaming is it is when you are in a dream state during REM sleep and you can realize that you are dreaming. Then, as the theory goes, you can reconstruct your dream–such as a nightmare—while you’re in the middle of it to construct a different outcome. The first couple of times I realized that I was in a dream, I woke myself up out of sheer excitement. Eventually I was able to work within a dream state and ask questions as to why I was dreaming certain things and working within the nightmare to bring it around to a peaceful ending if not ascertaining some modicum of understanding.

Last night I had a compilation of both of these two theories where I was in the middle of a very vivid dream state with several threads of subjects playing simultaneously. I was able to understand why I was dreaming about certain things such as going sky diving with some friends of mine. In the dream, we were always on the verge of going skydiving but we never quite made it. I was very nervous about skydiving but was going to go anyway because my friends were going. I surmised that this portion of my dream came from hastily reading over an article about a Vet sky diving in San Marcos with an artificial leg and before going to sleep, I had blogged about my scuba diving group on our way to Mexico on September 11.

The best part of the dream, for me, was walking along a beautiful beach just after sunset and looking down at my feet. I could see my feet in the dream and I could feel the pebbles on the beach to the point that I was thinking to myself in the dream that I should put on my shoes so that I could walk easier on the sand. It’s been several years since I’ve read Carlos Castaneda’s books but I remember lucid dreaming was considered an important aspect of realization and seeing your hands in a dream was an ultimate goal. I haven’t ever been able to see my hands but there’s just got to be something to having seen my feet, such as that I’m grounded and I can see where I’m standing and where I’m going.

For me to get humble about being human and still having so very much to learn, all I have to do is bang into something I don’t know! As far as humans have come technologically, we sure do have a long way to go to really understanding our psyche and soul. It’s amazing to me what a large portion of most societies are apparently inured to most things psychological and certainly spiritual. It seems to me that exploring the concept of lucid dreaming and learning from people such as Carl Jung, Edgar Casey and Carlos Castaneda (to name a few) we can start on the path of learning about our subconscious and unconscious while we sleep.

One simple exercise that you can try tonight before you drift off to sleep is to give yourself some quiet time before you go to sleep and focus on one question that you would like to know more about. The worst that can happen is that you’ll sleep through the night and wake up with nary a clue as to the answer to your question and the best that can happen is anything (other than nothing)! Have fun. Who knows, maybe you’ll even see your feet…..

Sweet dreams!

But it’s so convincing! That FEAR thing, false evidence appearing real. One of the definitions (noun) for fear found at dictionary.com is: a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc., whether the threat is real or imagined; the feeling or condition of being afraid. I know how fear feels because man have I harbored it, entertained it, seduced it, named it, left it, loved it, and hated it for many years. I’ve heard it said that faith and fear couldn’t exist in the same instance. But I think it is very possible to have faith and still be very afraid. It doesn’t mean you don’t have enough faith or have the “right” kind of faith, it just means that you are feeling fear.

On September 11, 2001, my husband and me, along with 9 of our best friends, were on a plane bound for Mexico for a scuba diving vacation. We were worried about making our connecting flight from Austin to Houston to Cozumel when our plane began its taxi towards the gate. For some reason our flight attendants got very, very calm and were talking to us in a very calming voice to assure us that we would make our connecting flights. Then cell phones began ringing and word began to spread throughout the plane. We all walked down the corridor in shock as we made it into the airport to see the first footage of the planes hitting the towers in New York. Clusters of people were gathered around all the television monitors throughout the airport in silence. I called my father immediately, since he used to be in the kind of business that would have been in the know about what was going on and it was my father who told me about the plane in Philadelphia.

My friends and I worked together like a fine oiled machine renting one of the last vans available in Houston to come pick us up at the airport, gathering our suitcases in the melee at the baggage claim area and heading off to a hotel in the Houston area. Because we were all in a state of shock, I think we still thought we’d be able to take a plane the next morning to Mexico. We pretty much stayed up all night long in two connecting rooms walking back and forth processing, processing, processing all night long while watching the news reports over and over and over. All of us had called every member of our families to make sure everyone was okay—and they were. I did have a cousin who lived in a town in New Jersey where several families had members who became victims that day. He doesn’t talk about it much.

And there is a preacher who knows how to utilize the media who had been threatening to burn the Quran today as a statement about what happened on 9/11. And there are Muslims who are trying to build a center near Ground Zero. And the United States is still entrenched in a war that has been going on since 2002. I have several friends who truly believe that 9/11 was an “inside job” which means that the U.S. Government was behind the towers collapsing and they believe that no one died that day…at least the way that it has been portrayed. I have friends and family members who believe that Islam is the most dangerous and prolific religion out there and that it is a very big threat to U.S. security.

FEAR can appear very big and very real in all kinds of shapes and sizes. It can cause men (and women) to unite together in a cause to hurt, maim, kill, and disempower the enemy such as the hijackers of the planes on that fateful day and then the echo of our troops for many years afterwards. FEAR can cause otherwise intelligent people to believe all kinds of scenarios about what things have happened and how they have happened and why they have happened to appease us with an answer to our questions. FEAR can turn countryman against countryman and world citizen against world citizen.

At some point, I hope there will be a gathering of minds, hearts and intentions to perhaps pay heed to some of the great Masters through the years who have taught us the antidote for FEAR such as to seek to understand rather than to be understood and to treat others as you would have them treat yourself and to love thy neighbor. The truth is that there just isn’t a gun big enough or a bomb powerful enough or prisons strong enough to overcome that which makes us fear for our very lives. At some point we have to use our brains in partnership with our hearts to find new solutions to very old problems.

I’ve heard it said that Courage is Fear that has said its prayers. I hope that we (humanity) will find the courage to move forth in different directions from that which FEAR would have us go.

Konbanwa (Good Evening!)

During my morning walk with the dogs I was struck with memories of when I was a little girl living in Japan. I’m not sure what exactly triggered the memories, but I think it may have been a combination of cool dry air with the bright sun coming up over the horizon. Whatever the reason, I’m glad I have these memories because all my senses were ignited growing up in Japan.

It’s amazing how much I can remember even though I was only about 3 when my Dad was stationed to Itizuki Air Force Base (Fukaoka) and almost 7 when we left for Big Spring, Texas.  Evidently my brother and I could speak Japanese with our maid/nanny and left Japan with various phrases in our vocabulary.  Both our parents still pepper their talks with Japanese phrases and both of them take on the same deference of a polite Japanese person when talking in the language even though they’ve been divorced for several decades.

There are two spectacular scenes that are imprinted on my brain and both of them involve me showing the signs of being a burgeoning hoodlum at only five years of age.  Evidently I got kicked out of kindergarten because not only did I willfully disregard what the teacher was telling me and I almost scared her to death in the process.  For whatever reason, in our particular classroom they had placed the rack where we hung our coats right up next to a big plate glass window.  Of course you know that the teacher’s “rule” was for us not to hang on the coat rack for obvious reasons, but I just could not resist hanging on the rack that was right at my height and so easy to grab.  The coup de grace was when I swung the coat rack full of coats into the window knocking all the coats on to the ground and thankfully somehow narrowly escaping breaking the floor to ceiling window.  I was relegated to a private school run by nuns with rulers soon after this fiasco.

The second scene was in our neighborhood on base.  The houses were a lovely white adobe, which to my little artist’s eye made the perfect sketchpad for practicing my writing.  Somehow I found a piece of coal and I vividly remember writing my name as big as I could with a back ward’s “y” onto one of the houses. I couldn’t wait to show my mother.  I think she almost had a heart attack (I was quite the little killer at 5…) when she realized that I had chosen to write on the walls of the Base Commanders’ home.  I do remember walking up to the door of the Base Commander’s home and apologizing to his wife who very graciously invited my mom and I inside for hot chocolate and crackers.  Even though I could tell that the BC’s wife was more entertained by what I had done than perturbed, I had to march home and get a bucket full of sudsy water and rags and cean my name of their wall until not a speck of black showed up anywhere!

I’m grateful today that I have learned how to play and have fun without breaking things (or scaring people have to death) and I’m learning all kinds of ways to express myself creatively.  Now when I remember the Japan of my youth, I can smile upon those times and feel good about my natural exuberance, my need to be recognized and my desire to express myself creatively which enables me to remember all kinds of other sweet memories just resting along side that I can bring out and dust off to enjoy with pleasure instead of pain.

What postcards from the Divine do you have inside you waiting to be dusted off and enjoyed?

Ko-in ya no gotoshi. Time flies like an arrow!

Principle #2 Unhook Yourself From the Future: Attraction works in the present not in the future (from Thomas J. Leonard’s’ 28 Attraction Principles).  You could also add, “unhook yourself from the past, attraction works in the present….” not to be confused with Principle #27 which is: Have a Vision: When you can see what’s coming you don’t need to create a future”. Basically all this to say that the present is where it’s at!

I know that I used to spend a good portion of my days either staring off into space thinking about the future “what if” or looking back at the past “if only” and not a whole bunch of time was spent in the present because the present was just too dang painful.  Then when I got into therapy, I was able to talk about my feelings and look into the genesis of those feelings from my past that were zip filed and stuck on top of my feelings in the present.  Until I learned how to feel my feelings and let them find their place, I was not able to feel anything at all. Just too dang painful.  I spent an entire summer after my freshman year in college smoking as much weed as I could get my hands on so that I wouldn’t have to feel anything.  All I ended up doing was creating more problems and stress from inaction and/or poor choices and then compounding more difficult feelings on top of other difficult feelings. Yeeee gads!! Calgon take me away!

I’m so grateful today that I am able to be in the present (as best as I can) and enjoy my life as it unfolds.  There’s pretty much nothing extra curricular that I am feeding my brain that would prevent it from being in the now.  I go to three 12-step meetings a week, sponsor people, have a sponsor, stay connected, do what I know to do to help me be sane and take time out to have a conversation with the Divine each day.  So the tiny little things that these actions enable me to do today include being able to listen to one of my brothers (who I dearly love) admonish me for not being more careful about what I post on FB. Instead of jumping down his throat in rabid defense (which, believe me, I so would have done before in my life) I was able to listen to him, wonder where he was coming from and take into consideration what his intention was for telling me his perspective. Wow.  I didn’t earn a million bucks but I sure felt like I had won some inner battle that I’d become tired of fighting for years.

The having a vision part is important but people like me have to be careful because I could so fly right into the future and only have my body left in the present.  Because I’m someone who pretty much has to hear, see and do to learn anything, I didn’t really grasp how I could have a vision and remain in the present until I trained for a marathon.  Pretty much the only thing that got me through those hard long runs (when we ran 15 miles and longer on the weekends) was having a vision of being at the finish line.  I was still in the present, my body sure wouldn’t let me forget that, but I was able to have a vision that could pull me through.  Then when I finally did get to the finish line, it always felt so good.  If not mentally or emotionally, certainly physically!

There are all these tools that I’ve picked up along the way to help me get to where I am today and I am so grateful for them all but if I had to pick the top ones that have been the most helpful, I would have to say that “Being Present in the Present” has got to be one of the main ones.  Really being able to show up for your life is a wonderful thing. So many of us don’t or haven’t and many of us don’t even have a clue as to what we’re missing. I know I sure didn’t. Couldn’t imagine why those crazy people who wanted to be in the present could possibly desire that! Yuck, for one thing, when I tip toed up to the pain I was harboring and yuck yuck to staying there because the present just seemed way too b o r i n g!!!  I wanted to embellish the past or decorate up my future!

Give yourself the present of the present. And if the present just seems really hard, painful, boring (add your own word here) then whatever feelings are coming up are your first teachers and there are all kinds of classrooms available in all kinds of places to unravel their mystery so that you can learn what they are trying to teach you.

Be wiling to be.  Be open to learning and enjoy being present.

When I was a child, one of my favorite things was to organize all the kids that I played with and direct everyone as to the scope of the “scene” that we were playing, which characters we were playing and what we looked like (hair, skin tone, costumes etc.). I still remember in 3rd grade getting into a spat with my friend because my pretend character was supposed to have the longest hair of either of our two characters (and of course, she wanted her character to have the longest hair). But I digress. The point of this share is that I have loved to create whole new worlds for a very long time.

I’ve shared with you in previous blogs that this summer I was asked by a friend of mine to help her to create a talk show that we hope will be picked up digitally and also be televised. I can’t say much more about it yet because my friend wants to keep it under wraps but what I can share is that I have been having an absolute blast through this process. During our meeting this week as we ran down our list of tasks that need to be done before our three pilot shows are produced at the end of October, we were both impressed with how much work has been done by all of us already.  I don’t know why setting up this business of a talk show is so much more fun than other businesses that I have created or helped to create before, but I think it may be because this is the closest I’ve come to doing something that I really want to do probably ever in my life.

The encouragement that I want to share with you today is to go ahead and let yourself create something that you’ve always wanted to create and see what happens.  Let the editors in your head take a vacation.  Allow yourself to play with your ideas.  Right now with this talk show, my part is the sweat equity, which means that I will not earn anything until the show earns revenue, and I do not have to expend any of my own money—just my knowledge, passion and ambition to create.

What I’m learning about myself through this process is that I really do know a whole lot of stuff about getting things done (just as I had always suspected but wasn’t quite confident that it was true) and that I’m very good at learning how to do things on the fly, especially when I’m interested in what I am doing and learning.

Stay tuned for links to the show’s website and downloads of the first three shows, hopefully, sometime in November or December of this year.

In the meantime, what have you always wanted to create?  Would you like to create with someone else? Who can support you in helping you to create?  What do you need to make this happen for yourself?

In continuing the conversation about Thomas J. Leonard’s 28 Attraction Principles, the one that popped out at me this evening is  #9 is “Get a Fulfilling Life, Not Just an Impressive Lifestyle:  A great life is attractive; a lifestyle is usually seductive.  We all sure could have used this a few years ago don’t you think?  Now, it’s all many of us can do to keep a roof over our heard, food in our belly and clothes on our back.  Even so, believe it or not, there are still many of us running around out here trying to look really good for—I really don’t know whose benefit???

So what does getting a fulfilling life mean? I think it means what you probably think it means which is to really get in there and have a fulfilling marriage, parentage, friendship, volunteer life and really exercise those wings that are hidden in your back and let yourself out to fly with all those talents and gifts that only you have. Or at least only you have the expression of that however it is that you express your talents.

What does an impressive lifestyle mean? Well I’m really jaded when it comes to the whole impressive lifestyle thing because I’m always looking for the little man behind the curtain (reference to the Wizard of Oz).  I can’t believe I’ve actually changed, grown, become the kind of person that is more ecstatic that my car is ten years old, has over 145K miles on it and still has great pick up and go rather than having a new shiny one sitting in my drive way. Well, okay, if you wanted to give me a new car–I certainly wouldn’t not let you do so…but it’s more important to me today to spend and save my money elsewhere rather than to take my budget right to the edge of reason just so that I can drive a spectacular car.

And still I hear about people, like the neighbors of some of our good friends, who have a gorgeous, expansive house with a huge Travel Bus just sitting in its special garage because at one time, not so long ago, they had wanted to travel with it back and forth to their ranch a few hours a way and back again.  It turned out that it was less arduous for them to fly in a jet rather than trek in their bus so now it sits and collects dust.  I don’t know that their intention was to get the bus to show that they have an impressive lifestyle, but so far from what I’ve heard and seen about their life, I’m not impressed.   I hope if I ever have an overflow of money from my reserves that I use that money similarly to how some good friends of ours use theirs.  They do live in a nice home and travel to lovely places but they are also very active in the community in many ways and help people out all of the time in mostly anonymous ways.  Their priorities are in the right place; they come from their hearts.  Now their lives, I’m attracted to because I see all the good that they are able to do from others out of the overflow of reserves that they have in their lives.

One last thought, in case you didn’t know this about me already:  I love a beautiful car.  I love a purring motor, elegant handling, beautiful craftsmanship, gorgeous color and a fantastic sound system.  But do you know after all these many years and many beautiful cars that I’ve seen the one car that sticks out in my mind above so many is my best friend from college’s Datsun B-210.  She is a little girl, 5′ 2″ maybe 100 pounds and that car was just the perfect car for her, small and compact and powerful. It was also painted a light blue with white and had one red door. I think one of her brothers had repaired it when they bought it because it had been in some kind of a fender bender. Anyway, we used to have an absolute blast in that car getting all dolled up and driving from our university town to the big city about an hour or so away. We’d pull up to the best most incredible restaurant or bar in that little car reeking of cigarettes, because my friend was a big smoker, but we were both dressed to the nines and dared to have it valet parked.  I never thought twice about being embarrassed when guys would walk us back out to our car and see our golden chariot.   Actually, I think most guys became even more intrigued that we were driving that car with a really incredible engine.

Point of the story is that we were more involved in having a great life rather than a great lifestyle and I have many, many fantastic memories because of it and none that will be captured digitally I can assure you!

May the B-210 spirit of life grab you and help you to have an impressive life!