Anticipation

As part of preparing for hours of airplane travel with his children, my Dad always bought us each a book to read during the flight. I was always so excited about getting on the plane and then cracking open my travel gift. And despite often having a new book in my hands days before departure, I never peeked inside it. I loved the anticipation.

Invariably, I would choose a collection of fairy tales or short stories, often written by my favorite author, Enid Blyton. Which is probably why the blue, leather bound collection of fairy tales I found at the bookstore yesterday came home with me. And accompanied me on my journey to the mountains. It was covered in plastic, but I refrained from unwrapping it until after our road trip was well underway. Anticipation is still fun.

I'm back!

I haven't discussed it at all publicly, but a shoulder injury required that I scale back my hula hooping activities. Really scale back. As in, just thinking about lifting a hoop was painful. Despite the pain, though, I continued offering my monthly Intro-to-Hooping classes through May of this year, and then took a break over the summer to focus on physical therapy.

I honestly didn't think my shoulder was going to get better, but now I'm beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel! So I've updated my blog with lesson information and I'm ready to schedule time to help local budding hoop enthusiasts get started on their new fitness activity.

Both private and group lessons are available, but I highly recommend setting up a private party at your home or local park! Gather up some friends and let's hoop and laugh together! There's nothing like hula hooping with friends to bring joy and laughter to a forever memorable get-together!

Glass half-full outlook on life. To the extreme.

There is such a thing, you know. One's outlook can be so positive that it's annoying to others. Or mildly amusing. This didn't occur to me until recently when I responded to a friend's story with what even I recognized was an unexpected question.

Said friend had just moved into an old house one street over from mine. She was young, relatively newly-married and with two little ones hanging onto her apron strings. The gas stove was old. So old that one had to manually light both the stove and the oven. One day, my friend tried to light the oven...nothing happened. A few minutes later, she returned to try again.

Of course, you know what happened, right? A ball of flames shot out of the oven right onto her face. This sounds like all kinds of horrible, but her hair was pulled back and she was far enough away that the fire only singed her eyebrows, eyelashes, and the edges of her hair. Her face looked sunburned; nothing major, but it did start to peel later. Seconds later, after I  ascertained that she had escaped relatively unscathed, I asked her, "Did your skin look awesome afterwards?"*

Yeah. I have some serious Pollyannaism issues going on here.
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*I asked about my friend's skin because it seemed to me that if the top layer of skin was singed, then it was similar to a chemical peel. Right? No. I know. I'm nuts.

p.s. I'm a professional technical writer, not a creative one. My attempts to write not-dry-content is giving me a complex.

p.p.s. Coincidentally, Starbucks is giving away free iTunes downloads to the song "Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive" by Paul McCartney. I grabbed three extra codes and you can have one! Just leave a comment stating that you've used the code and which one (either 1, 2 or 3). Codes expire on June 12, 2012.

1. AMRRARFXEW6R
2. RX49W3WL6AX9
3. XFFEL4K76JTL