Author Archives: Andrea

Clementine Oranges Prove We Don’t Have The Same Experience

Did you ever wonder why two people sitting side by side doing the same thing can have such different experiences?  A couple of Januarys ago, a friend and I were sitting in a sunny clearing in my woods eating clementine oranges.  We had a little basket of them between us.   Tony can be a real pouty puss sometimes, although he’s a really cool guy.  But he does seem to focus on things around him that are not going well.  So we’re sitting and eating the clementines, which I’d been buying all month.  He  complained that “these tangerines were good but they had so many seeds.”  Yet I’d eaten 2 dozen of them in a 2 week period with nary a seed.  He was getting seeds and I was not.  He was not fibbing; I saw him spitting out seeds.  So I hand him my clementine and take his.  He bites into mine and finds a seed.  I eat the rest of his with no seeds. We did the same with two more clementines.  So take notes that being a pouty puss pretty much guarantees you’ll come across seeds, even in seedless fruits. I SOOO know it’s about vibrational matching.  Yes, even when I am the one getting the seeds.  Especially then.

A Psychic Reads the Auras of the Real Housewives of Orange County. How the aura and energy field appear to me.

Last night I caught the Housewives of Orange County on Bravo TV and Vicki had a slumber party for the gals. As a surprise to them, she invites over psychic Dougall Fraser who gave them all aura readings. It was pretty funny, since everything he told them he could have learned on last year’s show.  Particularly comical was when he told Tamra she had “a blue aura, indicating truth and wisdom.”  Yes, Tamra who does nothing but diss and lie and connive. Of course, Tamra and Vicki, who invited the psychic, are best buds now and still ganging up against Gretchen.  The psychic of course had a caveat over the relationship Gretchen has now with Slade Smiley. Coincidence I guess since Vicki and Tamra don’t like Slade. Despite Gretchen saying she didn’t want a reading, Fraser had to play to the camera – and to whoever paid him – and give her a very public one. Gretchen has a point when she says in her blog “I don’t want to have someone instill doubt in me about a relationship or my future.” And I think it’s always amusing to hear anyone tell someone what their aura looks like, what color it is and what it means.  Don’t get me started on that. Continue reading

Keeping My Mouth Shut When My Neighbor Puts Leaves in Plastic

With the February Horizons having gone to press, this is the week I coordinate my drivers and distributors, and update all my addresses before the mag hits the streets next week.  I’ve got about 150 small stacks of mags that get mailed each month because postage is cheaper than paying a mileage to a driver.  Last year, the U.S. Postal Service changed their rules about mailing, and I had to get an imprint permit and start doing a bunch of paperwork each month.  They used to charge me $14.25 to come pick my job up. Now I have to separate by weight, sort by zone, count by zip code, and put into mail sacks weighing no more than 36 pounds per sack, and put the correct routing label – according zip code – on the mail sack itself.  That’s a lot of math.  But now I’ve done it for 5-6 months, I’m getting the hang of it and find it’s not all that hard to do, after all.  That happens a lot.

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A Stranger Buys My Lunch

Yesterday was a day of errands.  I went to the bank, the post office, to Office Depot, to The Waterman, to the produce stand for carrots, celery, scallions and mushrooms. On the way home, I went to the new Thai Thai House on Palm Bay Road at Hammock Landing for an early lunch.  I had their volcano roll, which is a California roll with baked seafood “dynamite” on top, and a cup of miso soup. Only one other diner was in there – it was only 11:15am – and so we talked as we ate. He’s down here helping out his grandparents and is job hunting.  It was his first Thai food experience. When my dish came, I placed a portion on a separate plate and shared with him so he could taste an extra dish. He was young, maybe 30.  I was going to secretly buy his lunch on my way out. He left first and secretly bought mine! And what a cool kid. Continue reading

Overnight Camping In My Backyard Woods Defrags My Stress

3-08-firepit-5-72After a high of about 72 yesterday, it went down to 50 degrees last night, when I thought it was going to be 60 again.  There’s not much difference between 50 and 60 now that I got a taste last week of what 27 feels like. I’d forgotten to glance at the weather channel, but I was in a hurry.  I’d finished up the February Horizons Sunday and had cabin fever from being glued to my desk for 10 days straight.  I went outside and set up a lean-to tent in my west woods, so I could be outside in the open, in nature with the trees.  Out under the stars, where I could be “out of the box” – out of the house of full of wires and electricity and equipment.  No clocks, no phones, no computers.  Yes, I was in a hurry yesterday evening to set up a little camp outside so I could defrag from final layout week.  Nothing relaxes me more than watching the night sky and the small critters make their nightly way up and down the paths in my little patch of woods here. Continue reading

Facebook Shenanigans

I shared on Facebook yesterday that  a particular person keeps ending me a friend request and my spidey sense goes off each time. Twice I’ve accepted and saw I was her only friend and she had zero info listed, so I unfriended her again.

I don’t know why I care really.

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I’m just discovering Facebook
Managing Incoming Information; What Is Facebook For?
Facebook quizzes; every little bit of insight helps
Facebook posts; I’m in charge of what I attract
Facebook friends to the rescue, helping me Excel
If a Friend Asks For $$ In Facebook, Ask A Personal Question
You Want To Be My Friend On Facebook?
How To Stop The Stupid Facebook Posts On Your Wall
The Zen of Farmville on Facebook? WTF?
Are Your Facebook Friends Really Your Friends? Don’t Assume Mine Are Either
What I post on Facebook
Finding childhood buds on Facebook, flashback to age 18
Putting personal details on Facebook and Myspace
Is it ok to break up with someone over Facebook?
Why I like Facebook

DUI, DWLS, Probation, PCP and False Positives

Don’t risk it

A 62 year old long time friend went to court this month for a DUI – driving under the influence.  She’s not a regular drinker, she doesn’t do drugs, she’s as straight arrow as they come. Christmas Eve she had one glass of wine at dinner with friends, and her slow driving back home got her pulled over.  She did the breathalyzer test and was charged with DUI.  Afterward, we had the talk about don’t get caught driving  – anywhere.  But the week after the DUI, she drove 6 blocks to the laundromat since the one in her building was out of service.  She got stopped. So now it’s a DWLS (driving while license suspended) as well as the DUI.  I wrote on Facebook, “It snowballs! Don’t risk it!”

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When Jealousy and Competition Raise Their Heads in Your Face

We’ve all done it. Gotten angry in the moment over some perceived wrong and then created an entire scenario about it in our head, blaming someone else.  But when we’re conscious, when we’re on the Path, we take the time to contemplate what is going on in our life.  We take responsibility for what we’ve put in motion.  We know that whoever we think is to blame is just someone we are allowing to have some power over us.  Power over our thoughts and emotions. Allowing your thoughts and emotions to go there is a choice.

Let me re-phrase that.  Your thoughts may appear out of nowhere.  You can’t stop that from happening.  What you can decide is how long you will continue to dwell on that thought.  You have the choice of staying on that thought long enough to get pissed off about it.  You have the choice of moving to a better feeling thought, before you attract something you don’t want.

If you haven’t yet trained yourself to pivot your focus to a better feeling thought, you can learn how by reading at the free Abraham-Hicks website.  If you want to gain clearer understanding of why you do what you do in particular situations and how you can see the other perspective, ask yourself Byron Katie’s Four Questions.

Jealousy and competition runs rampant in the personal growth/self help genre no less than it does in all other genres.  There is no competition and that we each attract what is ours by right of consciousness.  No one steals business from anyone else.  If a client leaves you and goes somewhere else, that’s fine; they are not your target market anyway.

You want the people who are attracted to what you have to offer, plain and simple.  You don’t have to go all car salesman on someone to talk them into buying what you’ve got.  You don’t want 200 people to attend an event if only 11 are going to buy.  Your market is the 11 who really want it.  Remember that the next time you look out into your audience of 12.  And if you don’t think you can make an honest and lucrative living with just 12 clients, then you just have short vision.  It’s not a numbers game; it’s a consciousness game.

And that’s one thing I have that sets me apart from some others: I know that. I know that I will be able to create a fine happy living for myself, no matter what anyone else is doing or not doing.  No matter what someone is saying or not saying, whether it’s true or not true.

Since I know who I am and I know what my thoughts are capable of attracting, I don’t feel the need to blame anyone else for anything I experience.  I know it’s unproductive to be emotionally attached to what anyone says about me.  I’ve never been so free as when I gave that up.  Now it’s easy for me to just let that stuff go.  It’s my favorite new habit.

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On Political Correctness

I woke up ready to dive into final layout for the February Horizons, so I wasn’t going to take the time to make a blog post.  Then a friend sent me this and I thought it too cute (and relevant) not to share:  Sometimes you are encouraged about our country’s future when you see something like this.  Specifically, there was an annual contest at Ohio State University calling for the most appropriate definition of a contemporary term.  This year’s term was “Political Correctness. The winner wrote: “Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.”

I’m Too Busy for Unannounced Sales Pitches

A publicist called me earlier in the week, interested in “speaking about some out of the box ways we might work together in co-branding efforts.”  He’s the publicist for a popular author whose work I support.  And if you’re reading this, I mean no disrespect, it’s just a good example to share.   I emailed back that “I don’t sponsor or barter advertising, so I guess that means I don’t go out of the box or co-brand.”  He called again last night, 15 minutes after I closed the office, and was leaving for a meeting.  My mind was completely on what I was doing and where I was going, yet I answered the phone automatically when it rang.  He’d earlier asked for ad rates and we were up on deadline, so I wanted to make sure to get him in if he wanted in.  But I was on the way out the door with other matters on my mind, and frankly, I did not have time to hear a press release about why I should donate an ad to his client. Continue reading