PadawanOfHappiness

Is TV viewership down?  Maybe and likely, but I doubt it is a simple answer. Nielsen's answer is they have a smaller sample size and they don't track streaming viewers and that the industry like other industries wasn't ready for the pandemic shift. I have not spend any real amount of time watching "TV" since February 2020 and this is big because I LOVED TV, I always have but I turned it off and very rarely turn it back on.  I watch a bit of the super bowl (I was disappointed and I didn't follow the NFL at all last season, nor am I following the NHL and begrudgingly a bit of the MLB because one of my little Padawans is listening to the games on his radio.) but I have not picked up on any of the series that I regularly watched.  I would watch re-runs, new stuff, and reality TV.  But I stopped I just could not stomach it any more. I stopped watching for several reasons: Political ads of all varieties and affiliation Fear mongering news promos Double standards i...

On a previous post I had mentioned I am I am feeling torn because I am struggling with my professional life.  I have a lot of different ideas but at the same time I want to be a worker bee and not necessarily the CEO, Marketing, and Sales person too. The world really needs far more worker bees that leaders.  If you feel the call to be a leader, fantastic for you but for to lead you need people that will support you.  I am perfectly capable of leading but that doesn't bring me joy. I am not a terribly competitive person, I like to do a good job but I don't have to be #1. Additionally, my interests are varied.  I like to dabble in a lot of different things and I think that adds to my struggle.  I like to do creative things, I like to do technical things, I like to create schedules and plans, I like someone to say I want to know more about X and then I provide them a little report about X.

I had contemplated playing Powerball the other day but I just wasn't feeling inspired to play.  I woke up this morning and checked the numbers and someone in Maryland won, and those numbers were not even on my radar to think about playing.  I am very happy for that person (or group) and I hope they use their newfound money wisely and have someone to ground them to reality so they do not become a statistic. The amount of money that is out there to be won is amazing and life changing to be sure, but it isn't always life changing in a good way.  I can only imagine how easy it would be to just go crazy and really lose your head.  Sure winning that amount of money can certainly solve a lot of your problems, but it also introduces a lot more that I don't think any of us could fully comprehend until it happened to us and the odds of that are slim. They are even more slim for me because I rarely play the lotto but boy do I love to dream about what I would do with the money....

I write this in mid November 2020 so COVID is still around we are in the aftermath of the election. It can be scary and overwhelming, which makes it easy to allow yourself to be swept up in a vortex of fear, anger, and anxiety. There is a lot of noise in social media about who is evil and who is not simply based on if someone disagrees with your political and cultural philosophies and quite frankly it makes me sad and scared for our nation because it seems that social media is not doing anything to promote unity and those so called influences as paying lip service to unity. So the question again is what can I do? I am reminded of the phrase that has been used in so many different contexts. Think globally, act locally. The way I am trying to use that phase for me to try to help those that I can with the knowledge that my act will be paid forward in someway even if I don't see it.  There are a lot of people out there that are hurting and quite frankly I cannot help all of them....

In previous years our school district went back 'late' because we started the Wednesday after labor day.  This year our whole state is going back 'late' and starting on September 16th, which is well past labor day. Mr. Padawan and I have been doing a lot of work as I had mentioned previously in order to make the house a bit more functional for his 'office', my 'office' and a place for the kids to do their remote learning.  In order to do that we have been doing a lot of cleaning and organizing, and getting rid of 'stuff' that is no longer useful. This has also led me to draw up plans to make myself a desk, because I am short and standard desks do not work for me comfortably and I hate using a foot stool as an accommodation to using a standard desk.  I had thought that we would build my desk this weekend, alas that did not happen because I measured incorrectly.  The good news is that I am devote of measure twice cut once methodology, so while anno...

The past two days I have listened to the IG Live with Gretchen and Liz ('cause we are on a first-name basis even if they don't know it!) and decided to write out some answers to the questions they posed.  I didn't take notes so some of these questions maybe just ones I made up in my head. Are you having trouble sleeping? I didn't think I was but now I am realizing that yep got it.  Fortunately for me if I have a bad night Mr.Padawan is able to get up with the boys and let me sleep in a bit and vice versa.  Most of what is bothering me seems to be the tension in my shoulders, it is hard to work out and leaves me physically tired even if I am not mentally tired in the morning.  That and the stupid seasonal allergies that is causing some congestion which then makes my CPAP a bit vexing and I get air leaks; they are minor in the sense that my numbers are still good but the hiss of the air or even feeling the air blow on parts of my face wakes me up.  Yes you c...

My first success, is not solely related to my most recent weight loss and healthier life journey but it has lingered in the back of my mind.  It was not too long ago that I hit my highest weight, and so I did start to exercise more and I lost some weight it was in the double digits but then I started to slack and hovered around the same weight for well over a year.  So if I look at how much progress I have made since I was at that heaviest point I have lost roughly 26 pounds.  That is certainly nothing to sneeze at. Secondly, since I started this journey about 30 days ago I have lost roughly 7.6 pounds, again that is a healthy and respectable amount.  During this time I have dropped down a BMI class. I have various feelings about BMI and I know that there are flaws with it but this was a big mental thing for me, my BMI was going down!  If you are interested in the different categories of BMI  you can check out the table at the NIH and the NIH also has a...

Success for me is: Financial Security Happy Family Enjoy My Life Experiences Enjoy My Work (so what is work?) I am guessing that reason this is hard to define is that these bullet items interweave and influence each other.  I know that I have fallen into the trap of thinking that one item will be the one to focus on and obtaining that one item will lead to obtaining the other items. At this moment I feel that I am doing a pretty good job "enjoying my life "experiences.  Meaning that my vacations, my daily life, things that I have accomplished are good and I don't really feel like that I have any huge debt in that item to over come. Something similar can be said for having a "happy family" overall I think this is something that is working pretty well for me.  This is not a stumbling block for me right now.  I feel like what I have going on is mostly good and for now my groove is working and that I have better areas to focus on right now. ...

I am not really sure where I am going with this but I have been toying with this idea that success doesn't lead to happiness but it can sure enhance it.  So what exactly is success and really shouldn't I define success for me and ignore what "others" define as success? I have been thinking about this a lot and not really going anywhere partly because I am afraid of the answer.  But really I need to think about this for my own happiness, I get to decide what is right for me.  I also need to accept that I do not live in an ideal world so my vision of what I thought was success, probably isn't going to exist in the real world.  I need to adjust my idea of success to match reality and not what I wish, I have done it in other areas... Example of shifting expectations and ideals So I had this idea of how I would be as a parent before I had children, in fact I was an amazing parent and then I had kids.  The the kids came into my world and life changed in so many...

While I was dropping the kids off at school today two of the three morning hosts were ranting against all the extra gym goers in January.  They felt that they should be there in August and September, which I understand to a point but hey everyone has to start somewhere right?  And there can be safety in numbers, hitting the gym for the first time in January seems safer because you feel that there may be people like you and seem less intimidating.  And quite frankly if you start in January who is to say you won't be there in August and September, sure the numbers indicate that most will not be but some will be. The third host seemed ok with it and he held the attitude that I have, January is somewhat arbitrary however it also feels like a clean slate for some (myself included) so I completely understand how someone would want to start a new routine in January. Finally one of the two hosts that doesn't like the January invasion as I will call it, did make a great poi...

2018 was both good and bad, but I would say more bad than good unfortunately and I wanted to make a change. The bad that happened this year was partly my fault and partly not fault, life happens. As the year is winding down I realized I didn’t like the person I was and the way my life was going, but I also had the power to make some changes. If I am brutally honest (and occasionally I will be brutally honest and sometimes I will just be honest) most of the so called “bad stuff” was my fault. This is not to say that I am a horrible person or that I was doing a lot of “bad things” but it was a lot of little things that just ultimately added up, as they say the journey of 1,000 miles begins with the first step, and additionally going in the wrong direction those little mistakes can compound themselves making them not so little anymore. So lets lay it out there my issues as I see them are: Stress - honestly I used to deal well with stress, at least I believe I did. Howe...