Old habits die hard.  In my case, they just never get around to dying at all.  See, one of my worst habits is procrastination.  I was given a poster in college called “The Procrastinator’s Creed” and I wasted no time whatsoever giving it prominent display in my dorm room.  It made me laugh, and still does to this day.  Laughter counts for a lot when you’re filled with regret over something you should have already done.

Read Full Creed Here

I continue to be a work in progress on this.  Self-induced positive reinforcement helps.  I make a conscious effort to start and finish projects early, and the feeling I have when I reach completion is so wonderful that I want to repeat it.  Negative reinforcement, not so much.  I’ve experienced migraines, panic attacks, marrow-level dread, and severe gastric distress all in response to looming deadlines that I “had plenty of time” to meet.  And I just keep doing it again and again.

Why is this so?  I’m far from being in the minority here.  Although it is most prevalent in student populations (some estimates are as high as 90%), it remains a problem for many far beyond their college years.  Perfectionism is a prime culprit; it’s very easy to stall on something when you doubt your ability to do it satisfactorily.  Avoidance of stress is another, but that beast rears its head hard when the deadline approaches.  It can be the result of factors such as ADHD or obsessive-compulsive tendencies, but we all know that that’s not the case for most of us.  Most of us just really don’t have any excuse.

So what to do?  Like anything else, you have to decide that it’s a problem, and commit to doing something about it.  Here are some things that you can do TODAY to start overcoming your habit of procrastination.

• Be aware of habits and thoughts that lead to procrastinating.
• Seek help for self-defeating problems such as fear, anxiety, difficulty in concentrating, poor time management, indecisiveness, and perfectionism.
• Evaluate your own goals, strengths, weaknesses, and priorities.
• Set realistic goals, and develop a personal positive link between the tasks and the concrete, meaningful goals.
• Restructure activities of daily life.
• Modify your environment for that newly gained perspective. For example, eliminate or minimize noise or distraction; put effort into relevant matters; reduce day-dreaming.
• Discipline yourself to the priorities you set.
• Motivate yourself with enjoyable activities, socializing and constructive hobbies.
• Tackle issues in small blocks of time, instead of trying to solve whole problems at once and then be intimidated.
• To prevent relapse, reinforce your pre-set goals based on needs and allow yourself to be rewarded in a balanced way for accomplished tasks.

Another big step is to figure out what your personal best time of day is (early bird? night owl?) and leverage your most high-functioning time accordingly to attack those tasks.  If you are feeling your best, both emotionally and physically, you have the confidence and energy to start, and persevere!

PS I committed to this for Christmas.  Look for my New Year’s submission eventually.  

The of and to a in is I that it for you was with on as have but be they.

Right?  You may be scratching your head, searching for meaning in a sentence that seriously resists meaning altogether.  Relax.  It’s (almost) nonsense.  But the meaning is there.  As it turns out, these are the twenty most prevalent words in the English language.  The first word in the list appears five times as often as the fifth word, eleven times as often as the eleventh word, twenty times as often as the twentieth word, and so on.  This is called Zipf’s Law, and it applies to all sorts of things.  As it turns out, eighty percent of any given book, article, or other writing is made up of the top twenty percent of all words.

This eighty-twenty phenomenon starts to seep out into all different kinds of areas in our daily lives.

Eighty percent of customer complaints originate with twenty percent of the customers.

Eighty percent of land in the USA is owned by twenty percent of the population.

And…eighty percent of our results come from twenty percent of our efforts.

That’s right.  Eighty percent of what we accomplish in a given day, week, or year is due to only twenty percent of the work we put into it.  Think on that for a minute.  There’s more meaning there than you realize.  I would go so far as to say that eighty percent of our stress is due to only twenty percent of our experience, too.

The holiday season is in full swing now.  I live and work in a tourist destination, and Black Friday was as packed as I can remember.  It’s a wonderful place (that’s why I call it home), and I certainly understand the appeal.  That doesn’t make the traffic and the crowds any less challenging.  So I went home, put on some music, poured a glass of good wine, and enjoyed a delicious dinner.  I changed into my most comfy clothes, made brownies, and watched a movie with my son.  I took a long, hot shower and fell asleep reading a really good book.  And I woke up feeling like a new man.  Four hours of my life, just twenty percent of my day, gave me far more than eighty percent of the joy and peace that that day had to offer.

Take some time before the holiday craziness sets in.  Figure out which twenty percent it is that brings you the most happiness, and guard it with your life.  And after the ball drops on 2018, go forward with this in mind.  You may surprise yourself with just how much you’re capable of.

Of note: the, of , and and are the three most prevalent words that appear above.  There’s something you know now.

Some years back, in my former life as a retail manager, I spent a beautiful spring week in sunny Los Angeles at a trade show.  I suppose it was beautiful…the vast majority of my time was spent on the floor of the convention center, and at the end of it all, the attendees were all very much in need of some good old-fashioned release.  After many hours of howling at the moon, and a couple of hours of barely restful sleep, I crawled out of bed and headed to the airport to return to the cold & rain that the mountains just never quite seem ready to let go of at the end of winter. And since too much is never enough, I had to contend with the fact that the morning that I tottered into LAX to catch that flight back to North Carolina was also the dreaded first morning of Daylight Savings Time. My most ever-needed hour of sleep on loan until November.

Spring forward. Spring. Clocks used to have springs, and mine was clearly broken.  And that’s how I learned all about jet lag.  Every morning was a struggle for the next week.  Cold, damp shadowless days under a sky the color of low-grade aluminum.  It took me the entire week to feel marginally human again. The extreme nature of this episode aside, every spring and every autumn, I still have to deal with something very much like jet lag.  And I’ve learned how to make it as painless as possible until the day that someone decides to to stop the madness, and leave the time alone forever and evermore.

My case was truly the perfect storm of circadian rhythm disruptions.  A week under artificial lighting with little to no actual sunlight (what a waste of a trip to California).  A night of Dionysian excess to wrap up my trip.  Five hours of canned air on an eastward flight across three time zones, with that extra bit of savagery from the clocks moving forward an additional hour. And nothing to greet me except more no sunlight.  Now the regular shifts back and forth between standard time and Daylight Savings Time may not be as bad as my ridiculous example, but they certainly manage to grind my gears all the same.

So what have I learned?  The first thing I learned is that there’s an upscale name for jet lag that all the cool scientists use: desynchronosis.  Set a personal goal to work that into casual conversation this week.  Your friends and coworkers will be impressed, and it’s current, with the clocks having changed and such.

Pro Tips:

Pro tip #1:  Breathe.  Studies have shown a correlation between low levels of environmental oxygen and susceptibility to jet lag.  Conversely, increasing your oxygen levels can go a long ways towards getting your internal clock back on track.

Pro tip #2: Drink up.  Not like I did before my flight.  Water, water and more water.  This is a good habit to get into anyway, so go ahead and do it.  Dehydration just makes everything worse.

Pro tip #3: Drink up (again).  This time, if caffeine is your thing, an early morning dose of it can increase alertness and tell your body that it’s morning, rewiring those circuits and getting you back more to a normal existence.

Pro tip #4:  Sunshine, sunshine, sunshine!  Exposure to direct sunlight is maybe the best way to get yourself back to normal in a hurry.  Your body can take subtle cues from its surroundings that help retrain that internal clock and bring everything back into line until the powers that be see fit to monkey with the time once again.

Pro tip #5: https://enddaylightsavingtime.org/sign-the-petition/

Crustless Mini Quiches

I love this one. They are individual portions that can be made ahead of time, put in the freeze, and heated up in the microwave as needed.
Healthy, easy, and always ready when you’re on the go! I like to make these muffins at the beginning of the week, so they’re always on hand in the fridge or freezer. (Naturally gluten-free)
Author: Willow at Will Cook For Friends
Serves: 16-18 regular sized muffins

Ingredients

12 large eggs
½ cup heavy cream
¼ cup milk
2 TBSP fresh parsley, chopped
2 TBSP fresh basil, chopped (or other herb)
¼ tsp. salt
¼ tsp. pepper

Veggies*:
1 cup broccoli, cut into teeny tiny florets
1 cup fresh spinach, roughly chopped
¼-1/2 cup onion, diced fine
1 red bell pepper, chopped small
1 jalapeno pepper, seeds and veins removed, diced fine (optional)

Add-ins (optional):
1½ cups cheddar, gruyere, mozzarella, or other cheese, divided
1 lb. bacon, sausage, or other meat, fully cooked

Instructions

1. If using meat (bacon, sausage, etc.), cook it fully first. Set it aside to cool, then cut into small pieces.
2. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F., and thoroughly grease (butter, coconut oil, or non-stick spray) a muffin tin. (NOTE: I recommend using a non-stick muffin tin for even easier removal.)
3. In a large bowl, whisk together the eggs, cream, milk, parsley, basil, salt, and pepper. Set aside.
4. Get all your veggies diced up and ready to go. Optionally, you can saute your onion with a bit of olive oil to soften it up and take away some of its bite. Set aside and allow to cool.
5. Add all the veggies to the bowl with the egg mixture, and stir to combine. Stir in half of the cheese, and all of the meat, if using.
6. Using an ice-cream scoop or ¼ cup measure, scoop the mixture into the prepared muffin pan. Fill to about ¼ inch from the top, then sprinkle a small amount of reserved cheese over each. Place in the oven, and bake for 20-25 minutes, or until the egg is fully set and the cheese has just started to turn golden on top.
7. Remove from the oven and let cool for 5-10 minutes before running a butterknife around each muffin, and gently removing from the pan. Enjoy while warm, or let cool completely before storing in an airtight container in the fridge. Leftovers can be reheated for several seconds in the microwave (time will vary depending on your microwave), or a few minutes in a preheated oven or toaster oven.

Make Ahead Mason Jar Smoothies

Ingredients

½ of a banana broken into pieces
About 1 cup of berries or fruit of choice
About 1 cup of milk of choice
Tsp sugar (optional)
1 TBS protein powder (optional)

Instructions

1. Break up bananas and put about ½ in the bottom of each jar.
2. Fill the jar with about a cup of fresh or frozen berries or fruit of choice.
3. Freeze in Mason jars until ready to use.
4. Screw off lid and fill up with milk of choice or water.
5. Add sweetener or protein powder if desired.

Freezer Breakfast Quesadillas 4 ways

Ingredients

Instructions

Pancakes

Ingredients

Instructions

1. In a large bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar.
2. Make a well in the center and pour in the milk, egg and melted butter; mix until smooth.
3. Heat a lightly oiled griddle or frying pan over medium high heat.
4. Pour or scoop the batter onto the griddle, using approximately 1/4 cup for each pancake. Brown on both sides and serve hot.

Pennzoil AutoFair

Concord September 21 – 24

Belmont September 7 – October 29

High Country

Ghost Train Halloween Festival

Blowing Rock September 22 – September 23

8 million tons of plastic ends up in the ocean every year. No wonder the ocean is giving us the middle finger (aka hurricanes) right now. The amount of resources it takes to produce and deliver each bottle is astounding, fossil fuels are used to create the plastic and transport them to stores. Only one in five of those bottles are recycled.  Recycling uses fossil fuels and the other four end up in the ocean or landfill to sit for hundreds of years attempting to decompose. We’ve let marketing get in the way of common sense. So, here are some ways to prepare for storms without the waste. And even some tips that aren’t just about water.

Water

We’re fortunate enough to get plenty of warning before storms now.  To ensure that you’ll have enough drinking water start filling up jugs and food storage bags. The bags can be frozen and kept cold even if the power goes out. You can reuse those bags a different time. We’ve acquired one of these jugs from a family member, but any type will work.  One jug can avoid the cost and waste of bottled water. Fill your bathtub with water. The tub water can be used for drinking, washing, and flushing the toilet. If you have small children, please keep safety in mind if the bathtub is full.

Electronics and flashlights

Fully charge all of your electronics. This includes cell phones and reusable batteries for flashlights. One of my favorite items, while expensive, is the Goal Zero Mini Lantern. This thing is BRIGHT.  On it’s lowest setting it can provide light for up to 500 hours. You can also use it with a USB cable to charge phones. The larger version has a hand crank and solar panel to keep it powered. Make sure flashlights and batteries are easily accessible.

Food

Stock up on nonperishable food items. Canned foods, granola bars, trail mix, peanut butter, and crackers are good choices.

Medication

Have all of your prescription medication is filled before the storm hits.  All states have their own laws, but typically you can get a 30 day supply of your medication if you’re in an area that is under an evacuation order.  Keep the medication, along with other first aid items, in a bag that you can grab if you need to leave quickly.

Pets

Be sure you have plenty of food and medication for your pet before the storm. Research shelters that will take your pet temporarily if you have unable to evacuate with them. Many hotels and vacation rentals will make accommodations for evacuees with pets. Ask and have a game plan in place ahead of time. If you’re pet is unfortunate to be tethered up outside, please have a heart and bring them inside, take them with you if you leave or let them free.  Pets who are tied up don’t stand a chance.

Documents

Place all of your important documents in a watertight bag. This includes driver’s license, photo ID, birth certificates, passports, emergency contacts, insurance policies and wills.

Home

Preparing your home depends on where you live and what type of storm you’re expecting. No matter what, it’s important to review your homeowners insurance policy. Consider purchasing flood insurance if you’re in an area at risk. Seal windows, remove furniture from the yard and porches, and be sure roof is secure. If you have a generator check to see if it’s in working condition. Don’t be like my family. We have a generator that we don’t think about until we have no power. It sits in our shed in disrepair while we sit in the dark.

Stay safe and take care of each other. Please let us know if you have any other useful tips!