#one of our nappers was so tired the rest of the day i had a 2 1/2 tall shadow

[i-earned-my-stripes]

I love working with tiny humans, but sometimes, I really forget that tiny humans don't know how to human, and therefore do things that I failed to even consider could happen.

Take what happened today during nap time for instance. Today, I was in one of our two year old rooms, and of the seven children there, only two were asleep. Somehow, we managed to keep the five awake children quiet so that the two nappers could continue their naps. Eventually, however, we had to give up because they got too restless. So, my coteacher started changing/taking them to the bathroom, while I cleaned the sleep mats, all of this happening pretty quietly so that our two sleeping friends could continue to sleep. Well, two of the ones waiting for their turn in the bathroom decided that they wanted to help me clean the mats, and they had a blast putting away our friends sleep stuff and then wiping the soap and water away from mat with a paper towel. It didn't take long before we finished the mats of all the ones awake, and they just looked at me and said, "more". Here's where I made my mistake. I responded, "There are no more! We have to wait for our friends to wake up before we can clean more." What I, for God knows what reason, expected to happen was that I then moved on to something else to distract them for the next 15-45ish minutes while our friends finished their naps. What actually happened? You probably guessed it! They ran right over to our sleeping friends and started doing everything in their power to wake them so that we could clean their mats. One even grabbed the mat underneath one of them and started pulling so that they could bring me the mat to clean it. I don't think I've ever regretted my words so fast. Those two poor kiddos were so tired the rest of the day because they did not get to have a full nap.

Want another instance? Sure! After nap and snack, we went outside to the playground. Our playground has a few cozy car/plastic four wheelers that the kiddos love to ride around in. These all have a back rest that someone could hold onto and push the car around. They are a hot commodity to our tiny humans. Well, two kiddos made a beeline to the same car, and as what happens, one got there before the other, and that friend was NOT having it. They absolutely broke down that they could not have that specific car. This was expected. This kiddo had already been having a day, and we kinda expected them to still be having a rough time. What wasn't expected? This kiddo grabbed the back handles of the car that our other friend was actively sitting on and yanked downwards on it so hard that they flipped both the car and their friend backwards onto themselves. Thankfully, I had already been trying to intervene, so I was able to catch the friend that was flipped backwards, meaning they were not hurt, just scared (and surprisingly? They kept ahold of the car throughout all of this), BUT STILL!!! I did NOT think a two year old was going to flip another two year old.

[wyrddogs]

Training update

It is stupid hot and smoky here and I don’t like it. Here’s what we did this week, under a cut because it’s longer than normal:

-- Remedial “we don’t bark at people or dogs” training for Kermit. He refused to be gently redirected, so I ended up gripping his collar, giving it a firm but gentle shake, and saying, “No” in a firm voice, then rewarding heavily when he was ready to continue walking quietly. He is definitely much barkier in areas with less people.

-- Remedial “losing your mind at dogs walking past my car is unacceptable” training for Bindi. She blew off my verbal commands so I gave her a firm collar correction as soon as I opened the trunk. The next day I drove past the dog that is constantly chained outside and she was silent so I gave her heaps of verbal praise.

-- Bindi is definitely much more reactive on off-leash walks with the greyhounds since the incident. She’s lost off-leash privileges twice for going after one of the bitches for daring to be near her. Sigh. That’s why she wears a muzzle. We’ll work on that. She does try extremely hard, though.

-- They both did extremely well when I took them to the park during dogwalking hour. Both were able to watch the dogs quietly and engage with me when I asked. We were also able to walk behind another person and dog for a while without any fuss. I’m very pleased because it was only two days after our experience with the mal puppy.

-- Kermit takes his afternoon nap on tie-down in his dog bed on a daily basis now. He’s doing super well, and so is Bindi. It’s a very big step for both of them.

-- I was able to do a reinforcement switch from an acorn (current highest-value toy) to a stuffed squirrel (ex-high value toy, now med value) and back with Kermit. It was very hard for him, but I’m really pleased.

-- He got some one-on-one time with my family members as I went into a clothing store to get a jacket, which was good for him. He also got to put his head on Bindi’s butt and snuggle with her for the first time in their lives in the car, because it was so cramped, and both dogs were so tired. Kermit was thrilled beyond measure. I think Bindi thought I was resting my elbow on her.

-- Went to socialize some baby puppies to small dogs this morning, so Kerm got exposure to a bunch of strange dogs and (masked, socially distant) people. He had a blast running around playing with everyone, getting into things, and chewing on bones larger than he is. At one point the breeder’s young daughter kidnapped him and all the small dogs and shut them in her room with her, which was a great experience for him, too. XD  He did extremely well. It’s really novel and fantastic to me to have a dog that is so stable around other dogs and people.

-- Had a nice wrestling session with him on my bed. He’d jump at my face so I’d (gently) throw him onto my pillows. He had a blast.

-- Also had a nice long nap with both dogs. Bindi laid in her usual spot on my legs and Kermit took his now-usual spot by my arm. He’s a very good napper once he settles.

[t-underneaththeradardancing]

imma sure theres a moon - that kinda day - now imma look - yes about where in the sky expected - big and waning 

so housecleaning - way more than usual and had help - and a bit more than fuck all but not much music - some discussion and play along to a liam song and finally get it - i dont know wat threw me b4  - pretty sure my fingers remember enuff  - we tawking a year now - wait i think i wrote about this or a msg text or email - so many texts imma tired and havent had much napping - it dont fit w my rawk star image  even tho imma bad ass napper yo - ru u laffing i fuckin hope so cuz it would make me sad if u think this is whyning 

we r laffing again now - tentative may not full blown hilarity verging on - yah go t sez it it rhymes buster - insanity  - inanity is better yah - inanity - tho we all have breakdown once and again still we aint broken - wounded scarred as fuck yah - maybe always healing but ffs healing 

then again tomorrow - i cant explain w o tmi and messy and no gain from anyway knowing  - many different winning outcomes possible  - so ez to fuck up in the telling and interpretation even when in love ur acting as best u know how to - im a bystander     no say in outcome    even tho it affects me     a wild card i saw coming long time awready played it  down to waiting 

im ok - got over myself enuff to quit being a dick at least - thats something - aint it 

its late - nap a possibility manana maybe - a little fear inna mix tho gonna trust love cuz - yah wats the choices  

if i hafta pick up pieces - i dont like that metaphor - if soft soothe comfort a hand to help lift a kind word and all that comes after - is needed i b there somehow - if it delays the bizness so be it - its only $  - our goal is to b non profit anyway at least a large part  - we already talking a spin off in terms of time and duties if theres any real cash flow - hey we did have about $70 income in our almost 1st full month of operation - we havent even finalized a name yet - tho at last months rate of cash burn we got 10 weeks left lol or is it months nope week t - i pull the reins in a little but mostly justified  - theres artist kids working feverish hoping for a sale  - yah we gotta feed them and sometimes keep it on the down low cuz its late and liams parents are amazingly tolerant but strange street kids at all hours - uh no - but sometimes cuz they understand the nature of a rock and roll life - if its kids known and trusted - and the workspac more soundproof daily - fuck imma in a band , sometimes back up not to mention them backing me up - with 2 teenagers  - i mean they live at home  ffs - and that is the least of our fucking problems but we wont go there - not tonights its too late  - oh yah and we doin a start up bizness goodness gracious  - its going nothing like imagined but they never - 

im alive  - they also - tbh its a bit of a miracle  cuz death dont like dare to often or being cheated  - yah we all gonna die so death shouldnt b so damn impatient  - wats another decade  more or more  (for the kidz - 1 more decade me i think b plenty  - cinder b advance aging - unpoet will grieve but get on and its unlikely i outlive her  - the kidz b adulting - my nephews nieces should b ok cared for enuff to make their life work at least have a chance and a safety net - i could die tomorrow happy  - im doing wat im meant to on many fronts and mind dimensions - the smooth path is usually boring 

sciatic pain transforming - acupuncture sez my mind processing all stimuli on lower right side as pain itching or numbness - many x all 3 - some is side efx from meds  - still much improvement - despite hurting like a mf right this moment - its been a long day in a string and hard ones  - basically the last 2 months have been hard as fuckon all 3

just thinking - theres so many pleas on tumblr - begging ppl thinking suicidal thoughts or further to consider the devastation to their loved ones

this whole dark period started with the suicide death of a teenager (rest in peace from torment child )  - someone im not  sure if i ever met  - but only 1 ripple removed from - another stone turned pebble by erosion -tossed into the pond another ripple 

fed and talked w crows  - and a birb - someone sitting under my tree when out - ok it 130 still dishes 

later

love 

[silvensstorycorner]

Century-old forced bonding

The senior play in my high school was a big deal.

Every year, in December, the seniors finish classes a week before everyone else. From that Friday afternoon onward for a week straight, everyone learns a play from scratch, learning lines, choreography, and songs until the first rehearsal on Wednesday night, the first performance Thursday for faculty, and the main event for the school Friday. It’s the fanciest event of the year for underclassmen, all formal dress and rich chocolatey brownies and deafening excitement as they see if they guessed everyone’s characters and what twists the traditional script took this year. It was the best time of the year, and when I was a senior, it wasn’t nearly what I had expected.

One half of one of the buildings was blocked off to the rest of the school, and because it was all a secret, we had to hide out there when practicing. That meant a whole week around only my 76 classmates and a couple teachers, from morning to night, except when we snuck out to the dining hall to eat. I was best friends with eight of my classmates, and really close with maybe another five, but given the many different characters and subgroups in the play, it meant time spent with nearly everyone.

It was a cold December in New York State. My winter coat was a heavy black overcoat, shin-length, with a fake-fur-lined hood. Practice was dwindling for the evening, and I was about to go to dinner. Some people, though, chose to use the break for a much-needed nap; the couches in the basement lounge were already full of nappers. When I went to retrieve my coat and bag, one of my classmates sighed. She wanted to sleep, too, but…no space.... Since it was in my hand, I offered her my coat, and after a moment’s surprise, she took it. That meant I had to run across campus in 36°F weather in a T-shirt, but I’m a New Yorker, I’m hardy, I can take it. When I came back, she was curled up on the carpet, using my coat as a blanket and the hood as a pillow, still snoozing.

We weren’t that close. I had talked with her before, of course, because it was a small school, and we’ve had classes together, but y’know, not really friends. However. Have you ever had an interaction where afterwards it’s like you actually felt like you gained XP? I saw her all snuggled up and it’s like “Friendship with Rira – Level Up” popped up on the UI with a little fanfare.

After the weekend and into the week, the vibe changed. People were getting tired, starting to get sick, and morale could fluctuate instantly for one specific reason: It was mid-December for high school seniors. Early college decisions week. Some people were ecstatic. Many got deferrals/rejections.

I was eating dinner with one other senior. It was Wednesday, and our first full rehearsal was soon. I absently checked my phone, saw an email, and realized it was an acceptance (from the school I eventually went to). I was so distracted by play practice and already getting an acceptance on Monday that I had forgotten all about it.

I went back to the lounge, where my squad had managed to claimed a couch. They saw me coming, and one shouted, “How’d it go??” I gave two thumbs up, and she lit up. “You got in?!” And almost everyone turned to me, and the muttering changed to, “Hey, Silven got in.” I don’t know the details, but a good number of classmates applied, and based on the acceptance rate, I don’t think a lot got in. I might’ve been the first person they heard that got good news from that college.

Combining those two topics - of gaining friend XP and college - one of my classmates approached me outside the theater on one of my breaks. “Can I get your opinion on something?” she asked. I blinked. We weren’t close, and I couldn’t remember ever having any one-on-one conversations with her, but I said sure, what’s up?

She was deciding between two schools. One was some normal university with premed, and then she’d decide on med school after. The other was a tiny premed-only college that streamlined the medical degree. It was only for NYC residents and was super small, but it doubled as both undergrad and med school, condensing it by a year or two. She wasn’t sure whether she should prioritize this unique experience that locked her into a medical degree from day one, or a classic college experience with more people and a variety of classes.

I felt appreciated. We weren’t best friends, but she still thought I would have good and honest advice. Or she was surveying everyone, that’s possible too, but she didn’t ask any others in my squad. It was an earnest chat about the future with someone I wouldn’t’ve minded getting to know better.

And then, once we were all practiced and now were running full shows, I had another encounter. After our first real performance, I was hanging around in the dressing room. Most people had gone, and I can’t remember why I was still there (I had relatively no makeup and a simple costume). But only a few were still around, including a girl in the makeup room, sitting in front of a mirror. I wouldn’t call her anything more than an acquaintance. She was basically a sporty prep, almost a valley girl, while I was a geek. We didn’t normally interact.

Her character in the play might’ve been living in a cave for a decade. Her hair was poofy and matted and contained an excessive amount of hairspray. She was sitting at the mirror, getting increasingly more frustrated and upset as she tried to brush her tumbleweed of hair. Now, while I can’t remember the last time I used hairspray, my meter-long hair doesn’t need any help getting knotted. I had experience. I leaned over and offered to help. 

For 10-15 minutes, I brushed her hair, explaining what I was doing as I went. She simmered until she had calmed down, once or twice asking a question. We didn’t have much in common to talk about, so I think we just talked about the previous week and the play: our favorite parts, who was the best actress, and how we spent our practice breaks. I eventually got her hair all smooth and untangled, reminding her to wash it with plenty of conditioner after every performance, and she took the brush back with a quiet “thanks.” Level up.

Man, this post was longer than expected, but what a good week. Not only were the play and the century of tradition great, but having a bottle episode in season 4 of high school was also a wonderful, heartfelt setup for the finale.

[darkmystress00]

Babysitter’s Club - ch 13

A/N: Sorry I missed ‘Misha Saturday’! I had to run our Saturday school yesterday on campus, and the rest of the day just kind of got away from me. I appreciate the understanding, and hope you enjoy this next chapter!

Trigger warnings: none? I mean...there is mentions of alcohol so if that squicks you out...I’m sorry.

Pairing: Misha x Reader

Catch up here!

You smoothed down the front of your dress. It wasn’t very fancy (you hadn’t planned on having to dress up for this trip) but you’d brought it knowing Vicki was going to insist you took some time off. It was a simple dress that followed your curves and landed very respectfully in the middle of your thighs. It was dressier than normal, but nothing too scandalously revealing. The top was why you loved it when you’d bought it. It was an illusion neckline dress and the sheer fabric at the top really sat well against your skin tone.

You heard the knock at the door and took one more look in the mirror with a sigh. You didn’t look like you were going to an interview, but you also didn’t look like you were going to be lounging on the couch...so this was best option you had for a night out with friends. You walked over and opened the door to your room, smiling as you saw Misha waiting. “Just you?” You asked, extremely proud that your voice didn’t waver at your suddenly present nerves.

“Yeah. Jared, Jensen, and a couple other people are going to meet us down stairs.” He responded. You nodded. “You ready to go?”

“Just one second. I need to put on my shoes.” You wrinkled your nose and then held the door wide for him to enter. “Come in for a second while I grab them?” He nodded and walked past you, shoving his hands into his pockets. He stood awkwardly by the wall as he watched you sit on the bed to slip on your shoes. You felt your heart thump, suddenly very self conscious about the way you were dressed, and the fact that you were sitting on your bed only feet away from him.

Misha watched you. He felt his pulse rise as his breathing came a little quicker. You were absolutely stunning dressed up like you were. He liked when you were casual and relaxed with the kids. He liked when you were professional, ready to impress. And he really liked when you were dressed up, ready for a night out with adults. He’d never really seen this side of you, but now that he had, he knew he was done for. He was going to have a tough time keeping his hands to himself, and he knew he wouldn’t be the only one looking at you tonight. The thought made him oddly jealous, but he tamped it down quickly.

You secured your heels to your feet and looked up at Misha. He was watching you and you flashed him a bright smile. He looked amazing in his nice, pressed button up shirt. The long sleeves were rolled up to his elbows giving him a more casual look, but he made you fidget with nerves all the same. “All ready.” You said softly as you stood. You walked towards him and he swung his hand out, motioning for you to lead the way. You ducked your head a little, tucking your hair behind your ear nervously. You moved down the hall and into the elevator quickly, all the while feeling like someone was watching you.

As the metal doors of the elevator closed, you caught a glimpse of Misha watching you in the reflection. Your eyes darted up to his and you could feel your cheeks heating up. “What?” You mumbled.

“Nothing.” He said quickly before dropping his gaze down to the ground.

“No…” you pressed, expecting him to start in on his teasing about how you looked different when you dressed like an adult. “You want to say something...I can feel it.” You smiled at him. “What?”

“I just,” he started before he dragged his eyes up to yours and smiled a small, almost nervous smile, “you look really nice, Y/N.” You rolled your eyes.

“You mean now that I’m dressed like a big kid?” He let out a laugh before shaking his head.

“You’re ridiculous.” You smiled at him. “But I mean it,” he paused and met eyes with you again, “you look really nice.” It wasn’t exactly what he wanted to say, but he knew he couldn’t start spouting off about he thought you were the most beautiful person he’d seen in the longest while. Your cheeks flamed hot under his gaze and you offered him another shy smile.

“Th-thank you, Misha.” You smoothed the front of your dress once more out of nerves, and Misha had to physically grip the railing next to him to keep from reaching out and grabbing your hand. Luckily, he was saved as the elevator dinged and the doors slid open, revealing Jensen, Jared, and a few more of their Supernatural group waiting. Jensen turned first and cast you a blinding smile.

“Damn, Y/N.” He called as you walked towards him. “You clean up really nice.” You would have smiled at him, if you hadn’t been completely shocked at the feeling of Misha’s fingertips on the small of your back as he led you towards the group. You managed a small awkward grin, of which you were proud, because anytime Misha touched you was enough to make your brain short circuit. You startled a little as Jared turned as well and let out a low whistle once you joined their group.

Jared gently took your hand and held it up, “You look beautiful, Y/N.” You heard a few agreeing comments from some of the other members of the party, and couldn’t help the feelings that flowed through you. Part of you was mortified. You hated being ogled, and you were extremely self-conscious, but these were your friends and you knew they were giving you genuine praise and compliments. That fact alone allowed you to bask in the warm glow of appreciation that took over you as you felt Jared sweep you up in a hug.

Jensen followed suit and gave you a hug, before playfully wrapping an arm around your waist. “I have decided something, Y/N.” He said overly loudly. “Since we are the best looking people in this group, we go together.” He gave you a playful grin as you rolled your eyes.

“Wouldn’t Dani be jealous?”

“Are you kidding,” Jared cut in, “seeing you, Dani would completely understand. Want to Facetime her to make sure?” You closed your eyes in mild embarrassment.

“Do you really think the world is ready for all this amazingness? I mean, Jensen, think of all the pictures.” You feigned concern. “The world might explode.” He let out a hearty laugh and gave you a gentle squeeze before leading you towards the front of the hotel.

Misha watched as the boys fawned over you. He wanted to beam with pride, like you were his girl to show off and be excited to be seen with, but checked himself before anyone noticed. When Jensen slung his arm around you and started joking with you, Misha had to swallow the feelings of frustration the welled up inside him. He wanted to be the one to wrap an arm around you. He wanted to be the one that was able to be so familiar and playful and comfortable with you. He wanted to be the one that was with you when the paparazzi snapped pictures and asked questions. Oh, he was in so much trouble. “This might be a bad idea…” he mumbled under his breath.

“You say something, Mish?” Jared asked as everyone made their way outside.

“Nah. Nothing important.” Jared nodded before narrowing his eyes.

“You ok? You look off.” Misha nodded.

“Yeah. Think I might just be tired. It’s been hectic the past few weeks.” He grinned. “Nothing a night out with friends won’t fix.” He offered.

“Yeah. And it’s awesome that Y/N will be here with us.” Misha felt himself nod as he watched you laugh and talk with Jensen and some of the other cast. “We haven’t been able to have a night out, just us adults, in a long time. I think it’ll be good for all of us.” Misha cast a confused look up the Jared. “I just mean, Y/N has been working a good few weeks straight. First in Vancouver, and now down here with Vicki. This is her first night off in a long time. I hope she’s able to unwind and have a little fun.” Misha’s eyes drifted over to you again.

“Yeah...sometimes I feel like we don’t pay her enough for all she does for us.” That feeling settled on his shoulders. That heavy, uncomfortable feeling that stirred every time he remembered that you were only in his life because he paid you to be.  For the millionth time he wondered if you’d even give him the time of day if he wasn’t paying you. Jared watched as Misha’s face seemed to cloud over and instantly he knew what was going on inside his friend’s head.

“Hey, man, don’t do that. Y/N is your friend, and she’d be your friend even if you weren’t paying her to do a job. We’re all friends and we started out being paid to do a job.” Misha nodded. “Think about it man. I mean, she’s here with us, with you, on her only night off in the past how many weeks? She wouldn’t be doing that if she didn’t consider you a genuine friend.” Misha paused as you looked over your shoulder at him and flashed him a bright, dazzling smile. Jared was right, Misha acknowledged. It may have started out as a job, but you were his friend now. That was all that mattered.

You reached out to Misha, “Help, Misha!” You called playfully. “Jensen is trying to recruit me! Save me!” Jensen cast you an affronted look.

“Hands off, Jensen.” Misha teased, grabbing your hand and playfully pulling you to him. You let out a giggle. “Get your own.” He felt you slide your arm around his neck and casually rested his hand on your side, pulling you ever closer to him. You weren’t looking at him, and he took the moment to just revel in the sound of your laugh. Jensen tossed up his hands in surrender.

“My knight in shining armor. Saved me from the nanny-napper.” You giggled as you turned at looked at Misha. The look on his face made you pause. He was smiling so brightly, and looking at you, that your breath caught in your throat.

“Always.” He rumbled before winking at you. Your heart tumbled in your chest and you moved to let him go. You watched as the others piled into the vans, silently soaking in the feeling of Misha holding you (he hadn’t let you go yet) and trying desperately to control your emotions. Being around Misha without the kids was a completely different experience, and you weren’t sure your poor little heart was going to survive, but you were going to enjoy every single second of it.

~~~

Everyone was laughing around the table as Jared told a story about the getting up to some mischief. The food had been amazing, and everyone was sipping drinks, enjoying the low buzz the alcohol seemed to add to the atmosphere. It wasn’t late and no one had any plans to return to the hotel right away, so you felt content to just enjoy the evening. Your phone buzzed and you seemed to stiffen at the name on the caller ID. Vicki was calling. Your heart thumped but you quickly picked it up.

“Hello? Vicki? Is everything alright?” You couldn’t help the worry in your voice. You were supposed to be off the clock tonight, and Vicki made it a point not to call unless it was an absolute emergency when it was your time off. You felt Misha stiffen next to you, and vaguely recognized that Jared paused in his story to focus on you.

“Hello Y/N. Got a minute?” Vicki asked cheerfully on the other end.

“Y-yes. Of course. What’s up?”

“West and Maison are refusing to go down without saying good night to you.” You let out a sigh, relaxing into your seat next to Misha, who still looked pensive.

“Of course they can say good night.” You supplied, smiling as Misha relaxed at hearing it wasn’t an emergency. You started to get up. “Sorry, I’ll be right back.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Jared said, holding his hand up to stay you from getting up. “You don’t have to leave. It’s alright.” He grinned at you. You nodded before settling once more as West’s voice sounded on the other end.

“Y/N?”

“Yes, West. I’m here. You getting ready for bed, buddy?”

“My kids call her to say good night. I feel so replaced.” Misha teased from his spot next to you.

“Is that my dad?” West asked and you smiled.

“Yes it is, West. Want me to put you on speaker? You can say good night to Uncle Jensen, Uncle Jared, your dad, and me all at once.”

“Yes please!” You laughed and turned the phone on speaker before setting it down in the middle of the table.

“Hello Westy!” Misha said, followed by a chorus of hellos from everyone around the table. “Getting ready for bed little man?”

“Mhm. Just finished brushing my teeth. Maison too. Mom let us stay up a little extra late ‘cause we were watching a movie.”

“You two are so lucky.” You supplied to the phone.

“Yeah, but now we gotta go to bed.”

“Yeah. It’s getting really late, but we’re gonna do breakfast together tomorrow, right Mr. West?” You asked, not paying attention to how everyone had fallen silent to listen to the exchange between you and West.

“Of course, Y/N!” He let out a yawn into the phone. “I’m sleepy, and mom says I gotta go climb into bed. So g’night dad!”

“Good night bud.”

“G’night Uncle Jared and Uncle Jensen.”

“Sleep well sport.” They called.

“Good night Y/N. To the moon and back.” he mumbled, very clearly getting really tired.

“Good night, West. To the moon and back.” Everyone heard a small ‘to the moon and back’ chirped from the background. “To the moon and back to you too Miss Maison.” You smiled, staring at the phone, not feeling how all eyes on the table were watching you. The phone rustled as Vicki picked it up.

“Thank you, Y/N. They wouldn’t go down without it.” You grinned.

“No problem.”

“Now, enjoy your night and sleep in tomorrow. Text me when you wake up and we’ll all go do breakfast before we head back.” You nodded.

“Sounds good. I’ll text you tomorrow. Good night.” And with that the phone clicked off. You reached out and scooped up your phone before your eyes floated up to notice everyone watching you. Suddenly you were nervous and self-conscious. “What?” Your eyes danced from person to person before landing on Misha.

“You’re just really good with kids.” Jared supplied. You gave a nod and smiled. “It’s touching.”

“Thank you.” You smiled.

“She’s been a godsend.” Misha responded. “I couldn’t imagine life without her.” You beamed at him.

“To Y/N.” Jensen said and held up his drink. You blushed as everyone held up their glass, toasting you, and then took a sip of your own drink. You felt Misha take your hand gently and give it a squeeze.

“I mean it, Y/N. You really are an irreplaceable part of all of our lives.” You smiled and squeezed his hand back.

“I couldn’t imagine life without all of you either.”

~~~

Your head was fuzzy and you were overly warm as you sat in the van next to Misha. You’d had far too much, and now all you wanted to do was curl up and go to sleep. Misha had his arm slung along the bench seat back, and it nestled you firmly against his side. You knew, somewhere in your fuzzy brain, that you normally would have fluttery butterflies filling your tummy, but right now all you wanted to do was bury your face in his shoulder and enjoy the feeling.

Misha resisted the urge, for the thousandth time just this car right, to turn and press his nose into your hair. You smelled amazing, and felt amazing, and he knew the main reason you were allowing yourself to be so comfortable with him right now was the alcohol you had consumed. Somewhere throughout the night, both of you had had more than you planned, but you were responsible adults, and it wasn’t like you were on the clock or driving, so what would it hurt? He felt your head loll to the side and gently rest on his shoulder. He looked down to make sure you were still awake, and noticed your eyes were open as you watched the scenery pass by.

“You still with us, Y/N?” Jensen asked tiredly from the front seat.

“Barely.” You breathed. “So ready to go to sleep.” You mumbled.

“We’re almost back to the hotel. You can sleep when you get there.” Misha said somewhere close to your head. You groaned and then shifted to sit up as the van pulled into the hotel driveway. You climbed out, vaguely registering Misha’s hand on the small of your back as he led you inside to the elevator and then to your door. You pulled your key card out and slid it into the lock and opened your door before turning back to Misha. “You steady?” He asked as you leaned against the door frame.

“No, but I’ll kick off my heels when I get inside and be fine.”

“Drink water.” He instructed and you smiled.

“I will. I promise.” He smiled at you. “Will I get to see you tomorrow?”

“Maybe, I don’t have a panel until later in the morning. I’ll try to swing by breakfast so I can see the kids too.”

“I think that would be great.” You smiled up at him. “I’m going to head to bed Misha. I’ll see you tomorrow.” You stretched up to hug him and sighed when he wrapped his arms around you. “To the moon and back.” You breathed without thinking. He pulled back to look at you with a smirk on his face.

“Are you ever going to tell me what that means?” You just grinned at him and turned to walk into your room.

“Good night, Misha.”

“Good night, Y/N.” He watched as your door clicked shut and let out a breath. “Good night.” He turned to make his way to his own room. He had to find out what it meant, because he knew it meant something important.

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[prorevenge]

How I became Summer camp Sherlock.

Okay so, I was having a conversation with a friend and they said this was a good story to post here. I hope you all agree. I decided to add a bit more information on this one than in the original story I told her, since I wasn’t expecting to post it here until she suggested it. Please, enjoy.

Background Info: I work as a staffer at a small summer camp, and during the off season they have retreats. Staffers aren’t treated badly, but we are the lowest on the totem pole and do ALL the hard work, from 7 AM till around 2 AM, so we have some long work days. We also don’t get paid as much as the counselors; we only get about 100$ dollars a week. Our food and board is the rest of the payment, you see, and most of us aren’t old enough to worry about rent quite yet. The camp also has a very strict hiring policy because they have a good reputation and value every member of staff. Also, I’m either an insomniac or narcoleptic, or both if that’s possible (doctors have said all three answers so, I dunno), AND anemic. So, I’m CONSTANTLY tired and trying to nap everywhere. This is important.

The Story: for several week someone from staff has been stealing money from the rest of the workers. Lots of it. At this time I didn’t have a nickname like everyone else, though they did occasionally call me Smartass because I love random facts and can get pretty snarky for the fun of it, or Ninja Napper because I sleep wherever and whenever I can and will attack you if you touch me. But I also love to watch Sherlock and write detective stories, so when my bosses were talking about how to solve this problem, I volunteered.

The Revenge: So I started by scouting everyone out. My closest friends were out of the question, since they roomed with me and I knew where they were at all times. Still, I investigated a bit before ruling them out completely. Then I moved on to the rest of the staffers. There were two I was suspicious of; Britney and Dayton. Britney held true to all the stereotypes about a girl with her name. I know a few nice Britneys, but she was not one of them. How she got on staff I have no clue. Dayton was obnoxious, but a good worker. However, whenever I joked about being keleptomaniacal (because I love stealing and wearing everyone’s clothes- we were all pretty close at this point so it was just fun), he went quiet and laughed nervously.

I checked out the counselors next, but they were clean. Too busy dunking campers in the pool or doing crafts to care about the missing money problems of staffers. Same with Tech team, Rex team, and outdoor team. That’s when I knew that my two suspects, Dayton and Britney, were the only two options. It only took me a day to rule out Dayton. He was off campus when the next theft occurred. Britney had been in the pigpen cleaning dishes, near where the Crime was committed. She was smart, though. She had a ‘witness’ testifying she talked to her the entire time. Even though no one was really sure when the theft took place, they believed her alibi.

The Game: She was relatively clever. It took me two weeks to catch her. First, I had to get her used to some things. 1. I nap everywhere. It was easy to adjust her to this, since I was famous for it (Ninja Napper) already. I don’t sleep in those five hours we get to rest between finishing cleaning up Late Night and serving breakfast in the morning, so I sleep everywhere. On roofs, halfway up the rock climbing wall, under the serving counter, on TOP of the serving counter... you name it, I’ve slept there. Check. 2. It’s impossible to wake me up from noise or light- but touch me even barely and I’ll attack. This was also easy because it was true. Once I managed to sleep, I was dead to the world. If someone bangs pots over my head (happened) I stayed asleep. If someone flicked the lights on right in my eyes (happened) I stayed asleep. If someone brushed me on accident, I attacked. (Ninja Napper) 3. I leave my money wherever. This was a bit of a sacrifice. I’m pretty laidback- and lazy because I’m always tired- so it’s not too far a stretch to believe... but in truth I’m meticulous with my money. I had to leave it and let her steal it for two weeks. That was my paycheck, and she was taking all o it. But sacrifices had to be made if I was going to properly get revenge on Bitchney. 4. I’m an idiot. Everyone knew I was investigating the thief. Including Bitchney. So, I accused several OTHER people, and confided privately about my suspicions to her. Don’t worry, I told the accused beforehand what was going on, but no one else knew. She was... very agreeable when I suggested anyone but her.

The Trap: Finally I set the trap. Over the span of a week, I let her steal about a hundred bucks from me in twenties, each time following her ‘tips’ and ‘accusing’ several people. (The week before it was all fives and ones.) Then, one day, I took a nap next to a handful of twenties (reminder that all this money was my paycheck.) and waited. I videoed her walking up, taking the money, and giving me the fucking bird. Bitch.

The Reward: So, I showed bosses where she kept the money (under her mattress. SO original) and the video. I explained my random accusations to everyone who didn’t know- who all thought I was a bitch by then- and made a ridiculous amount of Sherlock jokes and references on the way, because how could I not? Bitchney was fired, I was given my money back plus a little extra, and my nickname has been Sherlock ever since.

Tl;dr I caught a bitchy thief by napping and making Sherlock references.

Buckle down and let me tell you about Bitchney’s Reichenbach Fall.

Once I went to my bosses with the evidence and they were able to say that she definitely did it, there was a meeting called between her, and... let’s call them Lestrade, Mycroft, the Queen, and Mrs. Hudson. That would be the Camp director, camp supervisor, and the two staff coordinators. Let it be known I was on first name basis with both director and supervisor before this summer, and the coordinators were fond of me since I worked hard and cheerfully to make up for my mostly-accidental naps.

Because I was the witness, the one who provided the evidence, AND the ‘consulting detective’ (couldn’t resist during the investigation), I was called into this meeting as well.

I laid out the evidence, showed then the video and the money, and brought in each ‘accused’ person from the last two weeks so they could confirm that it was an act and I wasn’t a clueless but lucky idiot. Bitchney, in her plastic blue chair, was glaring at me with populargirl-knives-for-eyes.

The time came for her to defend herself. She tried to spin some bullshit story about me framing her. When that didn’t work, she tried to say I was her partner wanting the money to myself. First of all, I couldn’t resist saying at this point that she was acting like a one of those dumb crooks from a tv show. That also didn’t work, and she said a few choice words to me for my comment.

Finally, they excused me from the room. After all, I was a big help but I was just a staffer. It wasn’t appropriate for me to be in the room or contribute to their deliberations. I waited outside for a good twenty minutes before the door was slammed open so hard it almost hit my face (I will admit to tying to eavesdrop) and Bitchney walked out. When she saw me, I fully expected her to leap at me.

Bitchney did not leap at me. She cursed me out, said she’d ruin my social media accounts and call me out on all the slutty stuff I did, and left. As she left, I called to her that Crime never slept, but I certainly did. (I do believe I commented that earlier. No one asked, so I didn’t get to tell this story to explain it ;-;)

Joke’s on her. I don’t have any social media, and I’ve never even dated.

So! While it wasn’t as fun or clever as the actual revenge, it was still hella satisfying to be part of that. Last I heard, she tried to reapply this year. Haha no. The bosses aren’t idiots and won’t rehire a thief.

Tl;dr: “Crime never sleeps but I certainly do!”

(source) (story by 1stdreadpiraterobert)

[wherethewildjinsare]

Don’t Burn the Coffee - Ch. 5

It was just going to be one of those days…until Suga walked in. 

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3| Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6

Word Count: 3,834

“You know what we should do?” Yoongi says, his mouth full of seaweed and rice. “We should go get one of those horse rides in Central Park and then go to Koreatown and get some soju. Oh, I miss soju. So much. Or maekju. Korean, not American. Either one is good.”

I reach over and grab his wrist, looking at his new watch. “We have some time. It feels like it’s been two days but it’s only been a few hours. Let’s do that.” I pull out my smartphone, looking at the best route from our location as Yoongi stuffs the rest of his food in his mouth. I put down my smartphone and follow suit, silently racing him to finish first. He wins and I toss my wooden chopsticks down in mock frustration.

“I was so close,” I say.

“Were you racing me?” He smiles.

“You won.”

“Do I get a prize?”

“Nope,” I say, popping the last piece of sushi into my mouth. He looks disappointed and shakes his head.

“When we have soju, we’re going to play a game. And if whoever wins gets a prize that time. We can make a bet.”

“What bet?”

“Let’s decide that later.” He hops off the bench and strides forward.

“You don’t know where you’re going,” I say, jumping after him.

“Okay, lead me,” he reaches his hand back toward me, expectantly. I grab it and purposefully lurch him forward, trying not to grip his injured hand too hard. The smile at the corners of my mouth is hard to subdue as relief floods my chest. His hand feels good in mine, and we walk.

“It’s not that injured, you don’t have to treat it like it’s broken,” he says, gripping my hand tighter as we walk.

“Ow! That hurts.”

“Don’t lie, I can tell,” he grins. He’s right, and I squeeze his hand, taking him toward the nearest subway.

Thirty minutes later, we’re jogging toward a carriage, trying to reach it before someone else snags it. We’re unsuccessful with this one, a young couple with a 5-year-old girl getting to it first, but we land the second one, settling ourselves in as I hand cash I’d taken out from Duane Reade to the driver. With a jolt, we’re off.

“I never thought about how much traffic sounds would change the atmosphere of the carriage ride,” he says. “In all the movies it’s always romantic and peaceful.”

“Yeah, it smells in the heat too,” I say. “And the traffic is twice as bad as they show in the movies. Three times, actually. And it can actually be really isolated living here.”

“You feel that way?”

“Yeah sometimes. It depends.” We look at the scenery.

“This is a lot less exciting than I thought,” he comments, stretching out his legs.

“I could throw a rock at the horse,” I suggest before quickly reconsidering. “Just kidding, I couldn’t. I’d both miss and feel bad.”

He laughs, stretching his arm and resting it on the chair behind my head. “This is nice though. I can’t do stuff like this very much in Korea.”

“Yeah, is that something you can’t do because of recognition or because it’s hard to go out for you or because you literally just can’t leave the dorm or there’s too much work?”

“A bit of everything. I mean, we’re not forbidden from leaving the dorm, there’s just no time. The time I do have, I don’t usually feel like going out. And to be honest, I’ve got social anxiety. Leaving the dorm is hard, as much as it can be suffocating to stay there. But I do, good friends and good company are enough incentive, and enough support.”

“Aren’t those two things the same? Good friends and good company?”

He laughs again. “Sometimes. You really should come. To Korea, I mean.”

“Oh I doubt we’d even see each other,” I say, looking out the other side of the carriage.

“Of course we would, why wouldn’t we?”

“Because of fans and schedules and Seoul is a big place and time and…”

“Schedules and time are the same. I do get breaks sometimes, you know.”

I shrug. “It would be nice to be able to hang out. If I make it up there I’ll let you know.”

“You’d have to give me your number. Or email. Or SNS account.”

“Do you have Facebook? Or a private Twitter? Or private Instagram?”

He thought. “I forgot the password for my Twitter account. I haven’t been on there in ages…Here, one second. Give me your phone.”

I hand it over hesitantly, swiping the password on the screen before he grabs it from my hands.

“Just don’t look at everything.”

“Why, you have stuff on here you don’t want me to see,” he asks mischievously, his fingers swiping and tapping the screen.

“No, it’s just privacy and…”

“Here,” he thrusts the phone back into my hand. “I installed KakaoTalk and put my number in.”

“I know Kakao,” I say, looking at the new yellow app on my homescreen. “Wow, that’s great.”

“Modern technology. It’s great. Free text. And talk.” He says the last with a hitch in his voice. “You know, if you ever need or want to talk.”

I purposefully ignore the last. “Why no social media?”

“It’s a hassle,” he states. I nod.

“Wow, this is so relaxing.” He lays his head on my shoulder. “Wake me up when it’s over.”

A grin spreads on my face, his green hair tickling my neck. It is relaxing. And really nice, despite the traffic and the faint smell from somewhere that I don’t want to think about too hard. I lean my head back too, letting the feeling of the air gently brushing against my face mingle with the sound of people and the city. It’s strange to pause in the middle of the chaos. I haven’t done this in a long time.

I look at Yoongi. His mouth is slightly open, and he looks like he’s really sleeping deeply. It doesn’t surprise me he got separated from the rest of the members in the Met if he can sleep like this here. Though it is surprising the other members could leave him behind so easily.

A dull ache grows in my chest as I look at him. He’d be leaving, and I’d be here, living life like none of this had happened. The idea leaves me feeling empty, and I tear my eyes away from his sleeping face. It’s not that I need him, or any guy, I tell myself. I’ve never needed a man, I’ve always told myself that. And while the idea of Suga is exciting, it’s Yoongi I’ve grown to appreciate over the course of the day. And really care about. I scold myself. You’ve only known him for a few hours, my inner voice says.

“Who cares,” another one says. “You feel the way you feel.”

“Feelings are fleeting,” the first one says. “It’s trust and companionship over the long-term that matters.”

“Yes, but how do you grow that? By following the feelings and working at it.”

The first voice has no retort this time, and I sigh, wondering why the voices in my head always sound like two warring old ladies. It didn’t matter anyway. I feel the way I feel, and it doesn’t change the fact he’ll be leaving.

Before I know it, we’re approaching the spot where we got on. I look down at Yoongi again and ruffle his hair. “Time to get up.” His eyes blink open. He looks up at me, still leaning on my shoulder, then looks around as he sits further up, rubbing his face.

“How long was I asleep for.”

“About 10 minutes. Power nap.”

“Did I drool on you?”

“So much.” I look at him. He looks at me. I smile.

“Liar.”

“You’re a very clean napper.”

“You should see me in REM sleep.”

“I can only imagine. Come on.”

We jump off the carriage, and I thank the driver. We both pat the horse as we leave and head down the sidewalk leisurely.

“Okay, one more subway ride until Koreatown,” I say, grabbing his hand. He looks down at our interlaced fingers.

“Wow, so bold.”

“How can you say that, you did this earlier about five times!”

He shrugs. “I’m surprised, that’s all. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“Fine, you can walk on your own.” I drop his hand, and he quickly snatches mine back, the feel of the gauze around his knuckles and wrist against my fingertips as they search out the skin of his palm.

“We have to go on the subway again?” he moaned.

“Already tired of it? You’re practically one of us now.”

“Hardly, let’s go.”

This time, instead of music, we look through pictures on our phones. I show him photos of my family, and he shows me his, as well as his hometown and the house he grew up in where his parents still live. Soon enough, we’re stepping out and walking the short distance to K-Town. Yoongi pulls his facemask up, his eyes peeking out and his hair partially concealed by his hat.

“Ah, you’re still so conspicuous,” I say. “Best not to talk.” I wrap my arm around his waist, pulling him closer, hoping to make it harder to see him. He jumps slightly as I do this, but soon he’s following suit, wrapping his arm around my shoulder.

“Is this what it feels like to be normal,” he muttered.

“I guess,” I say, considering the idea. “I don’t know, actually. I’m definitionally normal but I’ve never felt ‘normal.’”

He nods, humming to himself. I steer him toward a restaurant I think we may be able to have some privacy. It’s darker, and if we request a corner it should be comfortable for him. It’s not quite in K-town, just across the way from a bank with a huge hangeul sign and up a flight of stairs. It was a bit hard to find when I first heard about it, but the place is always full of people.

We walk through the doorway and are met with an empty reception desk in a narrow hallway. We pass by the counter, and I lead him up a flight of steps, the light growing dimmer. I push open the door, and thumping music immediately hits our ears, just loud enough to be heard but not so loud you can’t talk over it. Just barely.

I request a corner seat. It’s still a bit early for dinner but too late for lunch, so we get seated immediately, a corner just outside of the window’s light. They’re just putting candles on the tables in preparation for the impending dinner rush.

“Do you want the wall or the chair?” I ask. People will only see the back of your head here, but it might not be as comfortable…”

“Here, how about this.” He pulls out one chair for me, and I sit down. Then he pulls out the other chair and sits himself down catacorner to me, leaving the corner booth seats empty as we scoot up to the square table. It may look a little awkward to anyone looking at us, but my head mostly blocks the side view of curious onlookers, and there’s no one else to his other side. It’s a good setup. And we can actually hear each other this way, rather than having to talk across the table.

“You order whatever you want. What are you craving? I’ll pay.”

“You’re not paying, I’m paying,” he states, picking up a menu and handing it to me.

“I thought the older one pays in Korea.”

“A lot of times, but I’m paying right now.”

I’m about to protest but decide against it, partly because I like that he wants to and partly because I’m remembering how expensive this place can be.

“Ah, I want the barbecue, but…oh we’re getting chimaek,” he says resolutely.

“Wait, that’s…”

“Chimaek. Chicken and maekju.”

“Oh right right. Right. I’m good for that.”

The waiter comes over, and he’s attractive. I’ve been here before, and he recognizes me, making some small talk before taking our menus and leaving. “You come here a lot?” he asks through his mask.

“I guess.”

“He complimented you too much.”

“Oh, yeah, I guess, yeah.”

“Do you not get guys or do you just choose not to notice?”

I feel my face get hot. “What, I said thank you, I didn’t say yes to marriage or…anything else.”

Yoongi smiles, looking over. He grabs my hand from its resting place against my neck, interlacing his fingers with mine as the waiter comes with our beer. I see him glance at our hands, setting the drinks down.

“Your food will be out shortly. Enjoy your drinks,” he smiles, walking away.

“You did that on purpose,” I say, turning to Yoongi and picking up my beer, taking a sip. He shrugs, squeezing my hand as he takes a giant gulp of beer. Our dok bokki arrives, the rice cakes smothered in the slightly sweet, mostly hot and delicious sauce and melted cheese. The smell makes me salivate inside my mouth, and he lowers his mask enough to set his own mouth free as we both dig in.

“This is hotter than I remember,” I say, breathing out to cool the food in my mouth.

“Can’t handle spicy, such an American.”

“I can, it’s just, ouch, this cut. It’ll get used to it and be fine. Oh, so good.”

We’re both on our second beer when the barbecue chicken arrives, and we order a pitcher of the alcohol to share instead of making the waiter keep coming back.

“So,” I say as I struggle through my third spicy piece of chicken breast, taking a gulp of beer to ease the food down. “I don’t know if I should…I mean, is this, well…”

“What?” He’s eagerly making his way through the platter, chugging the beer as he does so. I stare at him as he drinks.

“Wow, you drink so well.”

“I’m tipsy, for sure. But the food is helping. What were you going to say?”

“Um, what happens when I take you back tonight and you go back to Bangtan and your life?”

He chews on a piece of meat thoughtfully, looking down at his plate. “I don’t know. I’m kind of just enjoying this, being in the moment like this. With you.” He looks up at me.

“Oh, okay,” I nodd. Looking at my own plate. A silence descends.

“You know, I didn’t fall asleep in the Met,” he says suddenly.

“You didn’t?”

“No. I told them I wasn’t feeling well and they should go explore the city so I could rest and be well enough to perform tomorrow. So they’re at K-Con right now, probably, and I’m supposed to be at the hotel. I snuck out.”

“But why lie about falling asleep in the Met?”

“I guess because I didn’t want to admit that I get tired of being Suga sometimes. I love music and the fans and the other members. They’re my family and music is my life. I wouldn’t trade any of it, but I feel lost sometimes, and it feels like I’m looking for something, all the time, and there’s this weight in my stomach constantly, like I’ve swallowed a stone. So I needed to breathe. I needed to force myself out of my comfort zone. Alone in this city, and I found you. Or you found me. You saved my ass with the coffee lady. And you’ve made me forget about that weight for a little bit.”

“I’m glad,” I say, bringing my lip between my teeth on the uninjured side.

“Why are you biting your lip?”

“I guess I…I guess I’m going to miss you, that’s all. When you go back.”

He put his chicken back onto the plate, wiping his fingers on a moist towelette they’d left with us. Then he took my hand and cleaned the sauce on my fingers from the chicken with the same wipe before clasping my hand in his and bringing the tangle of fingers to his lips, resting it against his mouth.

“What do you want?” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t mean from me, it’s not a rhetorical or accusatory question. What do you want to do? Where do you want to be?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Where I am isn’t bad.”

“That’s not being happy.”

I look at his eyes over our hands.

“It sounds stupid,” I say, looking away and laughing nervously.

“It won’t sound stupid. I promise I won’t think that.”

“I want adventure. It’s not very original, but I want to feel like I’m seeing things and that I won’t regret what I haven’t done 10, 20 years from now. When I’m old I want to be content with what I haven’t left undone.”

“Okay then. What will you regret not doing 10 years from now?”

I hesitate. “I think, I think, if I don’t explore, travel, go to places like Korea, Europe, Africa, these places. And, if I’m too afraid to risk leaving my job and the life I’ve gotten used to so I can do those things and see those things that I’ll just always have the weight of regret.”

“Okay. You don’t have to do it all at once, but maybe you can…come to Korea?”

“Then it looks like I’m stalking you over there.” I laugh, hiding my sincere concern.

“No, you’ve thought about doing it before now, it’s not about me. You just haven’t done it yet.”

“Maybe.”

“You don’t have to teach, like most people who don’t know this language do. You’re fluent in English and Korean, you know how valuable that is in Korea?”

I look up at him.

“You could write, or teach if you want. Or…well, I don’t know much honestly about what might be out there. I just know my own niche. But there’s something for you over there. I promise. And you wouldn’t be alone. And it’s not like you would never come back.”

I sigh, smiling, bringing our hands under my chin now. “What about you? What will you regret not doing 10 years from now?”

“Finishing my mixtape. Telling my story.” He nods to himself. “For now, that’s what I’ll regret not doing…It’s almost done.”

“Really?” I gasp. A Yoongi mixtape has been talked about eagerly for two years. “Good thing I’m really not a reporter, that would be huge.”

Yoongi flinched then burst out laughing. “I forgot all about that. Whoops. I guess you won me over. A few more months. Ah, I’m nervous about it.”

We finish, laughing and smiling as we talk about our lives, occasionally growing somber through the less pleasant topics. He pays, as he promised he would, and we walk out together. A light drizzle has begun as we exit the building, and the city has that look it gets at night, lights shining from the windows of the buildings, casting away the darkness but putting a new weight to people’s steps as they hurry toward home or their evening get-togethers and night jobs.

“Ah,” I say. I put my tongue on the bottom corner of my lip as we step into the night air.

“What, what? What’s wrong,” Suga says, turning to me, pushing me out of the way by the shoulders toward the wall to avoid a group of what looks like students who are crowding the sidewalk as they breeze past.

“Just the cut on my lip from earlier. The spice. Normally I don’t have a problem but the spice, the dok boki. And the chicken too. It got in the cut and now it’s burning. It’ll be fine.”

The street light above us flickers as the sound of the students passes. Suga looks around him and pulls off his face mask.

“Here, I can help.” He gently glides me closer to the wall with one hand and cups my chin in his other, bringing my mouth up as he lays his lips on mine. He caresses the cut with his lips, the soft buds applying gentle pressure to mine. He’s warm. Opening his mouth slightly, he brings his tongue to my bottom lip and pauses as he rubs my shoulder gently. I open my mouth, hesitantly, and I feel him smile as he puts the hand that was on my shoulder against the wall by my head.

He moves his tongue again, bringing it to the cut, where the taste of salty, dried blood has mixed with the aftertaste of the spice. As he places it on the spot, I feel the burning begin to calm, like he’s soaking up the pain with his mouth. I release the tension I realize I’ve been holding in my shoulders since he touched me and bring my left hand to his arm, the one against the wall, gliding my fingers up timidly to rest on his shoulder. He takes this as a sign to move in, and he begins exploring my mouth with his lips again, not forcing his tongue further than where it’s already gone.

He alternates gentle pecks with longer appreciations for my upper and lower lips, and I try to follow suit, letting him take the lead before deciding to move on my own to his bottom lip. I linger there, bringing my other hand up to his face. As I do this, he sighs into my mouth and moves closer, bringing the hand against the wall to my lower back and the hand on my chin to the back of my neck. I feel his chest just glancing my own, barely touching as we continue our timid dance.

Slowly, he releases my lips, lingering over my mouth as he drags his gaze from my nose to my eyes, resting there. I brush my lips against his before looking back into his dark irises, and he smiles, laughing quietly before giving me a final peck.

“I’m not going to go back and just forget, you know,” he whispers against my lips. I clasp my hands behind his back, pulling him into a hug as I bury my face into his shoulder and nod.

“I know,” I mutter into his shirt. He hugs me back, putting his head in the crook of my neck as we stand against the building together, the rain growing heavier.

“We didn’t make a bet over soju,” I breathe into his cheek as I lift my head.

“That’s okay, this would have been my bet anyway.”

I smile, closing my eyes and feeling the warmth from his body, not noticing the rain until he pulls us both a few feet away so we’re standing underneath an open awning.

He hugs me tighter as he puts his mouth next to my ear and whispers, his voice breaking. “I have to go back now.”

Heya! Thanks for sticking around this far. I really appreciate those of you who appreciate this story, because sometimes with my writing I feel like I’m an old man taking a stroll through some woods. I can be too ambling and reflective sometimes, so I’m glad you guys don’t feel bogged down!  Ahem, so I’ve been crazy silent the last month on here. Sorry about that guys, leaving you hanging on some of these stories. I moved to Daegu from the U.S. at the beginning of December, and mentally I’m kinda a slowpoke when it comes to adjusting and getting situated, so the blog, and many other things, fell to the wayside. I’m hoping to be a bit better, but no promises :P Anyway, thanks for hanging on!

[beeholmesgonewild]

The woods of Hollowtown #1

There was this little girl sitting on top of this really dirty rock. There were plenty of rocks, big ones, small ones, but of course she had to be sitting on top of the one, right next to the deepest ravine a visitor could probably find in our neighbourhood. Slowly I made my way towards her. “Hey little girl,” I calmly said. “What are you doing here?” She was playing with my dog. What would be the most strange and terrifying thing I had ever seen since my dog hated children. She hated children more than he hated anything else. Therefore seeing her getting petted by a five or six year old girl, relaxing and even enjoying it, yeah, that is strange. “Sweetheart?” I wasn’t sure to whom I had been talking right now. She turned her head and glanced over to me. “Is this your dog?”, she asked. Not really shy, more as if she decided that it would matter right now. I didn’t think it would matter. “Yeah” I walked a bit closer. “She’s my babygirl.” The girl stood up and came to me. “I am terribly sorry, I didn’t want you to think I would take away you baby.”, she smiled. “Why would I do that?” “I don’t know. Because you were looking for her and shouting all along the way while you were on your way up here.” “You don’t look like a dog-napper, honestly, sweetheart.” She smiled at me again. “I like her. She has so soft fur.” “Yep. She is just perfect. And perfectly stubborn I have to admit.” “That’s why she ran away?” “I guess so. Sometimes she is… sometimes she doesn’t listen at all. Then she is just like ‘I don’t care now go and search me’, you know. She likes to provoke me, I guess.” I had to admit, that my little baby was more of a human that I’d have ever thought of a dog. Sometimes I got scared of her. “Are you trying to avoid talking about why a little girl is sitting in the middle of the woods?” gingerly I asked.   She eyed up at me. “Maybe.” Her eyes looked tired, her clothes a bit dirty, not as if she had been in the woods for longer than a few minutes and definitely cleaner than I would expect it from a child of her age. A few blobs of dirt covered her light blue jacket and her trousers had foliage and pine needles sticking on it. She had bitten her nails, maybe from nervousness or wariness. “Are you hurt?” She shook her head. “No, I’m fine.” Again, her eyes were full of suspicion, a sensed a bit of anger. “You know, I’m just curious, sweetheart.” “I know.” While I rearranged my thoughts and plans for the rest of the evening, she did the same. Something in her face changed, her glance got enlightened. She caught a thought. “What’s up, sweetie?” “Do you know how to find people?” she fixated me. Her melodically voice was more serious than before. “Um.. Yeah, I guess. I do. Do you want to find someone?” She nodded. “And whom do I have to find? Did someone get lost in these woods?” “I don’t exactly know.” “Uhm…. Okay, so why don’t you tell me a bit about yourself and then we can talk about me?” “Okay.” She smiled. She seemed to like me. I hoped so. Gosh, she was cute. But something about her, the way she behaved, the way she talked, moved, how she looked, something was off. Something was odd. I didn’t know what it was, but it was… outlandish. Bizarre. Maybe peculiar? I crouched in front of her. “Ouch. I’m getting old.” I crooked a smile and looked at her. “Are you hurt?” “Oh, no, no, I’m fine. That sound was just coming from my bones.” I laughed quietly and tried to joke. “It sounded like an elderly person.” Thank you, girl, I grinned. “Yeah, I guess I am almost an elderly citizen.” Wrinkles appeard on her forehead. “How old are you?” “I’m twenty.” I had to smile. Somehow she was right. “You know, for a human being it’s a big step, loosing that one-ish age.” “That is not quite old.” “And you? How old are you?” “I’m two and a half.” What? I mean, she looks like… five? Six? Or seven? She could even be ten or so, I mean, these days you can’t tell, kids play with makeup, the could be in elementary school and be looking like teenagers. Hell, how come she is two?! “Oh wow” I smiled. “And you’re already that big? That’s-” “weird? I know.” She grinned a bit. “My grandpa tells me this all the time.” “I can imagine that.” I had to admit. “So… Where are your parents?” If she is two there is absolutely no chance that no one was here with her. Local parents would let their children play outside in the woods, but they would have to be at least eleven I guess. At least I had to be ten to go alone into the forest without a grown up. And I was one of the youngest since I had grown up on a forest farm. “At home. I hope.” Why would they be? “Don’t you think they are looking for you?” She nodded. “They are. But they shouldn’t.” “Why shouldn’t they?” “Because it is dangerous.” “Dangerous?” “Yeah.” “Do you want to tell me why?” She hesitated. Something was very odd about this situation. She was holding back something. “I promise I won’t tell anyone, okay?” Her eyes found mine and I did my best to look convincingly and trustworthy. Finally she nodded. “Okay.” She took a deep breath. “Although my family always tells me I mustn’t tell anyone about us. But I guess you are kind and they would like you. Can you promise me something?” When I nodded, my intuition told me I shouldn’t be. I had this feeling that I should run and abandon her. Not promise her anything else than leaving her open to the beasts inside the woods and running off without her. So I nodded. “Of course, sweetie.” She looked down for a while. “I want to go home. I miss my parents. Nobody did hurt me, although I suppose they wanted to.” Confused I asked her “Who? Your parents?” “No!!!” furiously she glared at me. “No! These people! The people who took me with them! They told me it was the only way Mommy and Daddy would survive!” Tears filled her eyes and rolled down her pink cheeks. “They were so strong I couldn’t even defend myself. I did my best, I punched, screamed, I bit them, but it wasn’t enough. I became annoying to them so they put me inside this… this… room. Like a jail, just… mini. And then Grandpa came and opened this entry-thingy and told me to run off.” She whimpered. “I couldn’t even hug him anymore. He shooed me away and made me run.” Apparently this little sweetheart had gotten abducted and locked away, before someone helped her to flee. I should’ve got called the police, however something is telling me not to. “Okay, sweetheart, why don’t we go back to mine and phone Mommy and Daddy? Maybe we can find a solution to all these problems, hmm? What do you think?” She looked up and suddenly was clutching my dog’s fur. Her other arm was across her body, holding the other like holding on to a rope. Her slumped shoulders were shivering heavily. Her face was ashen. I stripped off my jacket and wrapped it around her. My dog and I embraced this little girl in a big hug. I bet she was longing for someone to hold and comfort her. “Shhhhhhh, everything is going to be okay, hmm? We’ll find a way to get you back home. I promise.” “You promise?”, she hushed against my chest. “Yeah.” “Thanks.” After a few minutes she let go of me. It was one of my rules. Always be the last one to let go of a child when hugging them. You never know how much they need it. And this little one here needed a really compelling hug. She took my hand and together we walked back to my house. It’s been quite a long walk, nethertheless she trotted next to me, all the way holding on to my fingers, her hand maybe half the size of mine. The last two miles I carried her.

_______ Let me know what you think 😘

Stay a Twihard!

[celebritylive]

A Connecticut family whose father recently died is sending him off in the best way they know how: through laughter.

Joe Heller spent the duration of his life pranking others, so when he died at the age of 82 on Sunday, his family couldn’t resist getting in one last prank before laying their patriarch to rest — and they did it through a hilarious obituary.

Inspired by her father’s unique perspective on life, Monique Heller (one of Joe’s three daughters) wrote the comedic, yet touching farewell on behalf of her family and shared it to the Robinson, Wright & Weymer Funeral Home website, CNN reports.

“My dad has an unorthodox view of life, and I wanted to honor him and make people smile,” Monique told the outlet.

Detailed in the lengthy remembrance article is how Joe, who was born during the Great Depression, lived a life of “frugality, hoarding, and cheap mischief, often at the expense of others.”

“When the doctors confronted his daughters with the news last week that ‘your father is a very sick man,’ in unison they replied, ‘you have no idea,'” the obituary jokingly states.

From his very beginnings, Monique said her father enjoyed “torturing his siblings through a childhood of obnoxious pranks, with his brother, Bob, generally serving as his wingman.”

RELATED: The Most Savage Celebrity Pranks

Whether it was inappropriate games such as “Ding Dong, Dogs—” to pranking school lunch bullies with “laxative-laced chocolate cake and excrement meatloaf sandwiches,” no hijinks were too small for Joe to achieve and no person was ever in the clear.

“He named his first dog, ‘Fart,’ so she would have to scream his name to come home if he wandered off,” Monique hilariously wrote in the obituary.

Later in life, while Joe was working as a self-taught chemist at Cheeseborough-Ponds, he met a woman named Irene and she soon became his wife — something Monique joked was still surprising to this day.

“ was hoodwinked into thinking he was a charming individual with decorum. Boy, was she ever wrong,” the obituary reads. “Joe embarrassed her daily with his mouth and choice of clothing. To this day we do not understand how he convinced our mother, an exceedingly proper woman and a pillar in her church, to sew and create the colorful costumes and props which he used for his antics.”

RELATED VIDEO: Man Fakes His Death To See How His Cat Will React

Joe and Irene eventually welcomed three daughters — besides Monique, they also had Michelle and Lisette — but the pranks didn’t stop there. In fact, they were only enhanced, especially when the girls started dating.

“During their formative years, Joe made sure that their moral fibers were enriched by both Archie Bunker and Benny Hill. When they began dating, Joe would greet their dates by first running their license plates and checking for bald tires,” Monique wrote. “If their vehicle passed inspection, they were invited into the house where shotguns, harpoons and sheep ‘nutters’ were left clearly on display.”

His family also joked about his Joe’s tendencies to frequently hoard items from the “Essex Dump,” take inconvenient naps and snore incredibly loud.

“He left his family with a house full of crap, 300 pounds of birdseed and dead houseplants that they have no idea what to do with,” Monique wrote. “If there was ever a treasure that he snatched out from under you among the mounds of junk, please wait the appropriate amount of time to contact the family to claim your loot. We’re available tomorrow.”

“Joe was also a consummate napper. There wasn’t a road, restaurant or friend’s house in Essex that he didn’t fall asleep on or in. There wasn’t an occasion too formal or an event too dour that Joe didn’t interrupt with his apnea and voluminous snoring,” she added.

RELATED VIDEO: Can You Guess the Biggest Prankster on the Set of ‘The Walking Dead’?

Besides his three daughters, Joe leaves behind three siblings, two sisters-in-law, 14 nieces and nephews, and eight grandchildren, all to “squabble over his vast fortune,” according to the obituary. He was predeceased by Irene and “his pet fish, Jack, who we found in the freezer last week.”

A celebration for life is scheduled on Thursday, Sept. 13, where his family has requested that guests wear the “most inappropriate T-Shirt that you are comfortable being seen in public with as Joe often did,” in honor of his hatred for “formality and stuffiness.”

His funeral is then scheduled for Friday, Sept. 13. In lieu of flowers, his family joked that they’re “seeking donations to offset the expense of publishing an exceedingly long obituary which would have really pissed Joe off.”

RELATED: YouTube Prankster Poses as Walmart CEO and Tells Employees They’re Fired, Prompting Outrage

Changing tones for a moment, Monique noted that “what would have made him the happiest is for you to go have a cup of coffee with a friend and bulls— about his antics or play a harmless prank on some unsuspecting sap.”

That seriousness didn’t last for long, however.

“Everybody has a Joe story and we’d love to hear them all,” Monique wrote. “Joe faced his death and his mortality, as he did with his life, face on, often telling us that when he dropped dead to dig a hole in the back yard and just roll him in. Much to his disappointment, he will be properly interred… next to his wife.”

“Sorry, Mom, Lisette and I did the best we could to take care of him and keep him out of your hair as long as we could,” she jokingly added. “Back in your court now.”

from PEOPLE.com https://ift.tt/2N9bnqz

[apt-to-embellish-blog]

A Parisian Holiday

As I write this post, I am listening to the mourning doves coo, as the sun rises across a pasture near Mont St. Michel.  While Josh and I thoroughly enjoyed Paris, we were happy to escape the bustle and heat (hello historic European heat wave!) for a more pastoral northern Normandy retreat.  While in the city, though, we did our best to soak up as much of Paris as possible.

On Wednesday morning, we strolled to a small local bakery, starting the day right with Quiche Lorraine and plenty of optimism.  One of my favorite characteristics of Josh is the wonder he brings to traveling a new city; it seems that no matter where we go, he always notices the beauty in details, such as the perfect crust of our quiche.  Fortunately, this crust was so perfect that we American-style wolfed each piece down in about 3 minutes; I regret nothing.

Breakfast Quiche

Sandeman’s Free Walking Tour  Having finished our “leisurely breakfast” in record time, we decided to catch an early free walking tour of the city.  The tour company, Sandeman’s, is present throughout Europe and has been a long-standing staple of our vacations; we love the perfect mix of humor and history as we gain our bearings on a new city.  Strolling through the city, we saw a sampling of it’s finest sites: Notre Dame, Sainte-Chapelle, the Louvre, Pont Neuf, and even the Arc de Triomphe de Carrousel

Meeting at Fontaine Saint-Michel for our walking tour 

Bumping out in front of a statue

Fun fact: the Arc de Triomphe de Carrousel is a miniature but still sizeable Arc De Triomphe built by Napoleon between 1806 and 1808, as the real arch was taking too long to build and dang it, he wanted to celebrate his victory by marching through an arch!  Anyone who has ever settled for less than their ideal while decorating for a birthday party will understand his motivation...after your arms get tired from hanging decorations, suddenly minimal decorations are totally what you envisioned all along!

Arc de Triomphe de Carrousel

This guy really understands how I feel about running out of purse snacks

But I digress.  We finished our walking tour by the Louvre, and decided to take a quick opportunity for a snack under a bench, because pregnancy has turned me into a ravenous wolf, until I start eating, and then into a squirrel, because I can only eat a moderate amount before my real-estate-lacking-stomach registers as full.  I think you all can imagine a wolf-squirrel eating a snack by the Louvre, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this blog; it was charming.

The Louvre Following said snack, we entered the Louvre, where once again baby bump magic tried to work it’s wonders; unfortunately, as my babydoll-style shirt suggested that I may just be ambiguously chubby, or perhaps due to the shortness of the line, we were told at this site that we had to wait in the normal line (10 minutes).  Spoiler warning: this was remedied by the next day’s outfit and has not happened since: baby-bumping the line is serious business in Paris’ busy season!

Ready for the Louvre

The Raft of Medusa by Géricault (which we enjoy far more than the Mona Lisa)

The Louvre was tremendous.  We prioritized French and Italian romantic painters, as they are my favorite, but also had an opportunity to take in sculptures and artifacts from around the globe.  While the Mona Lisa was a site to behold, it’s fame created a crowd that was less than enticing. Interestingly enough, it’s fame above Da Vinci’s other pieces is largely due to the fact it was stolen in 1911.  A media frenzy around the world tracked this caper, which was not actually so daring, as the piece was not as beloved at the time (Hint: it took a day for them to even notice it was missing!). Headlines world wide sensationalized the loss; people came to the museum just to see the pegs where it originally hung, and by the time the painting was returned, everyone knew it’s name.  And now, everyone wants to see it, hence the crazy line and throng of people.  True story: we actually many other works better!

Following the Louvre, we returned to our lovely air-conditioned room for a quick siesta and outfit change, awaking refreshed to continue our adventures.  

Sainte-Chappelle  Given that it was a cloudless sunny day, the lighting was perfect to take in the splendor of Sainte-Chappelle, a gothic-style royal chapel with one of the most extensive 13th century stained glass collections world wide.  Baby-bumping the line, we were allowed instant admittance to this stunning place; words cannot do it justice, so I’ll let the pictures below speak for themselves.

Climbing Notre Dame Following our Sainte-Chappelle adventure, we strolled by the Conciergerie, a former prison that held Marie Antoinette and others during the French Revolution, and headed back to Notre Dame.  Although we’d enjoyed the cathedral nave the day prior, we couldn’t leave this city without climbing to the top, pretending to be gargoyles, and yelling “sanctuary!” at the bells.  We really know how to blend in at historic sites.

Jardin du Luxombourg Having conquered all 387 steps of Notre Dame, along with the previous walking tour and Louvre, admittedly this girl was tired.  Fortunately, the Jardin du Luxombourg was close at hand.  This gorgeous green space is open the public, featuring an iconic fountain, tree-lined soft grassy lawns, and loads of flowers--in other words, we were strolling in a napper’s paradise (and yes, I hope you read that a rhythmic way like “Livin’ in a Gangster’s Paradise,” because that’s how I said it).  The garden was created in 1612 by Marie de Medici, King Henry IV’s widow, to imitate her native city of Florence--needless to say, it didn’t disappoint.

Lounging in the grass at the Jardin

Dinner and a miracle? After a sizeable rest, we awoke to realize that we were ravenously hungry; fortunately, cafes and restaurants lined nearly every block in the surrounding Latin Quarter of Paris, so we figured it couldn’t be too tricky to find a bite to eat.  Admittedly, by this point, I was a bit...how shall we put it, hangry?  So when we were seated in our first restaurant, with a mouth-watering menu, and the people around us started to smoke, this tired mama-to-be was not having it.  “Josh, I have smell aversions and this is bad for the baby.  I just can’t eat here,” I said in a not-whiny-at-all-voice. It’s true that in my current state, the smell of fish, smoke, or nasty body odor can currently bring me to my knees.  Josh brought up that I’d said that I was very hungry, and I agreed that I was hungry, but not hungry for cigarette smoke.  A new appreciation for non-smoking patios in Minneapolis bloomed.  No less than 30 seconds later, we sheepishly got up and left in search of a restaurant that wouldn’t take my breath away...at least not in that sense.

Fortunately, strolling around the bend, I spotted a gem of a restaurant that appeared to be serving pasta, at least if my gawking eyes saw the patron’s plate correctly. “Here, Josh, this one is perfect, it’s Italian, I’m just going to love it!’  We strolled up to the entrance, and with hesitant bonjours were granted a small window-side table, despite lacking a reservation.  Unfortunately, in a squeeze to get around the  table, my derriere managed to knock over the salt and pepper shaker on our neighbor’s table, but they pretended like it didn’t happen and so did we.

The setting was intimate, but there were no smokers in sight.  The stage was set for a perfect pasta meal.  While the menu was entirely in French, this girl was too tired for any sort of translation.  Spotting what appeared to be basil tomato pasta, I confidently pointed and ordered my craving--it was on!  A few minutes and a ton of baguettes later, the waiter arrived with my much awaited for dish: clams over a light bed of basil tomato pasta.  Clams?  Who knew?!   At this point, all I could do was laugh at swapping my smoke aversion for a seafood averson, making me look a bit manic to the surrounding tables.  In fact, all of the surrounding tables were eating fish, crab or lobster and the decor was nautical--course this was a seafood rather than the Italian restaurant I anticipated.  That said, when in Rome...err Paris, and served clams over pasta, one can eat clams over pasta.  And you know what?  Even though it wasn’t at all what I expected, it turned out to be delicious and I can cross one more aversion off my list.  Paris, no wonder you’re one of the food capitals of the world!

The only shot of the clam extravaganza

[djsamaha-blog]

Winston Churchill’s Secret Productivity Weapon

One of the more unlikely museums in London is located in the basement of the Treasury, between 10 Downing Street and the Palace of Westminster: the Churchill War Rooms, the underground complex from which Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his ministers and generals fought World War II.

The War Rooms is a large warren of small offices, dormitories, and dining rooms for the prime minister and his staff, top cabinet officers, and general staff, hidden under a bomb-resistant five-foot-thick, steel-reinforced concrete ceiling. During World War II, hundreds of people worked in them, from clerks and secretaries to generals and ministers. Today, though, the space is dominated by the memory of Churchill.

The exhibits describe the ups and downs of his political career; his indefatigable energy defending Britain and the empire; his eloquence and skill as a writer; his daily life during the war; and his mix of political opportunism, realpolitik, and idealism. But one aspect of his working life gets only a brief mention, at the end of the tour: his habit of taking daily naps.

Churchill himself regarded his midday naps as essential for maintaining his mental balance, renewing his energy, and reviving his spirits. He had gotten into the habit of napping during World War I, when he was First Lord of the Admiralty, and even during the Blitz, Churchill would retire to his private room in the War Rooms after lunch, undress, and sleep for an hour or two. Unless German bombs were falling, he would then head to 10 Downing Street for a bath, change into fresh clothes, and return to work. Churchill’s valet, Frank Sawyers, later recalled, “It was one of the inflexible rules of Mr. Churchill’s daily routine that he should not miss this rest.”

Churchill regarded his midday naps as essential for maintaining his mental balance and renewing his energy.Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Not only did a nap help Churchill keep up his energy, his sangfroid also inspired his cabinet and officers. Napping during boring parliamentary debates was one thing. Going to sleep literally while bombs were falling signaled Churchill’s confidence in his staff and his belief that the dark days would pass.

Churchill wasn’t the only Allied leader to nap regularly. George Marshall advised Dwight Eisenhower to take a daily nap; on the other side of the world, Pacific Command adjusted its schedule around Douglas MacArthur’s afternoon nap, which was part of a daily schedule that “had scarcely changed since his days as superintendent of West Point,” according to his biographer William Manchester. (Adolf Hitler, in contrast, kept more erratic hours at the best of times, and as the Allies closed in on Germany in 1944 and 1945, he tried to stay up for days at a time, powered by a mix of amphetamines, cocaine, and other drugs.)

Winston Churchill has been a model for many leaders, and at least two American presidents were inspired by his example to take up napping. John F. Kennedy was so “impressed by Churchill’s eloquence in praise of the afternoon nap,” said Arthur Schlesinger Jr., that when he entered the Senate he imitated Churchill’s practice of keeping a cot in Parliament. Later at the White House, Kennedy would normally take a 45-minute nap after lunch; like Churchill, he wouldn’t sleep in the office but would head for the residence and change into pajamas. Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, likewise broke up his long day with a nap and shower in the afternoon.

The power of power naps

Why do naps do you good? The most obvious benefit of napping is that it increases alertness and decreases fatigue. A short nap of around twenty minutes boosts your ability to concentrate by giving your body a chance to restore depleted energy. But regular naps—the habit, not just a single nap—have other benefits.

Regular napping can improve memory. Just as the brain uses a good night’s sleep to fix memories, so too does it use naps to consolidate things you’ve just learned. Neuroscientist Sara Mednick found that napping for an hour or more during the day—a nap long enough to allow one to dream—improves performance on memory and perceptual tasks. In a study published in 2003, she had people learn a texture discrimination task in the morning. If you’ve ever been to the eye doctor, you’ve probably had a peripheral vision test: you focus your attention on a light into the center of a large screen and push a button when you see a light on the periphery. Mednick’s test was a bit similar. Subjects were shown a field of little horizontal lines with an L or T in the center. After an irregular interval, some of the lines in the lower left morphed into diagonals. Subjects had to indicate when they saw the change, whether the lines formed a horizontal or vertical row, and what the central fixation target was (partly to keep people from just focusing on the lower left-hand quadrant). It’s a simple test, but this sort of visual discrimination is the kind of thing our brains are designed for, you can quickly get pretty good at it.

After the test, subjects were divided into three groups. One group didn’t nap at all and went about their normal days. The other two took either an hour-long or ninety-minute nap in the afternoon. Everyone was then retested that evening. The subjects who didn’t have a nap did worse on the test. Among the subjects who napped, though, Mednick found that a third had essentially the same scores, while two-thirds did dramatically better in the evening.

A short nap boosts your ability to concentrate by giving your body a chance to restore depleted energy.Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

So a nap was helping the brain fix this new pattern-recognizing skill. But what accounted for the two sets of results among the nappers? It wasn’t just the length of the nap: while the ninety-minute nappers were almost all in the high-performance group, people who slept an hour were split between both groups. Medick found the answer when she looked at EEG tracings of their sleeping brains.

When you sleep, you go through a 90-to-110-minute-long cycle that proceeds from light sleep to deep slow-wave sleep and finally to REM sleep. In REM sleep, your eyes twitch (REM stands for “rapid eye movement”), your brain waves pick up again, and you’re more likely to dream. The balance of slow-wave and REM sleep varies depending on when you fall asleep and how tired you are. Some people had fallen into slow-wave sleep during their naps, while others had both slow-wave and REM sleep. The slow-wave sleep group performed the same on the morning and evening tests. The slow-wave and REM sleep group, though, were the high performers. Finally, Mednick had the subjects take the same test again the next morning, and then two days later. Everyone’s scores went up after a night’s sleep, but the nap group’s scores rose more sharply than the non-nap group.

Other researchers have found that even a short nap can improve memory. At the University of Dusseldorf, Olaf Lahl showed two groups of students a list of thirty words for two minutes and told them to memorize as many as possible. One group was then allowed to nap for up to an hour, while the other stayed awake. When they were tested to see how many words they could recall, the students who napped did significantly better than those who didn’t. In a second experiment, one group was kept awake, a second napped as long as they wanted (about twenty-five minutes on average), and a third was woken up after five minutes. Lahl found that even a five-minute nap yielded measurable improvements in retention: not as great as a longer nap, but still statistically significant.

Naps can also help workers avoid mistakes and bad behavior. Jennifer Goldschmied, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, found that naps improve emotional regulation and self-control. She measured her subjects’ levels of tolerance for frustration by giving them paper, a pencil, and a set of diagrams. They had to copy the diagrams without lifting their pencil from the paper or tracing over a line.

What they didn’t know was that half the diagrams couldn’t be copied without violating one of those rules. The participants thought they were being tested on their visual acuity or problem-solving skills, but Goldschmied really wanted to see how much time they would spend trying to come up with a solution before they quit. She found that people who had taken a nap before trying to complete the Frustration Tolerance Task were less likely to give up than those who hadn’t napped, were less impulsive, and were better able to handle frustration.

In separate studies, Dan Ariely and Christopher Barnes found that chronic fatigue or mental exhaustion decreases a person’s self-control and decision-making ability, making them more likely to impulsively cheat than their better-rested colleagues.

How long and when?

Short twenty-minute power naps are good for boosting alertness and mental clarity. But sleep research Sara Mednick argues that by paying attention to what time of day you nap and scheduling longer naps with an eye to your sleep cycle and the highs and lows in your energy and attention levels (which follow an ultradian rhythm, rising and falling repeatedly through the day), you can tailor naps to be more physically restorative, to feed your creative activities, or to improve your memory.

Mednick did some of the first work that scientifically measured the benefits of naps. By the time she started graduate school at Harvard in the late 1990’s, sleep scientists had developed a whole toolkit to study the effects of nocturnal sleep and sleep deprivation on things like memory, alertness, and perception. Mednick applied some of those tools to study naps. Previously, researchers had mainly been interested in naps in the context of shift work and sleep deficits, no one had paid much attention to how naps could affect the cognitive performance or alertness of people with stressful or challenging lives but more regular schedules.

To her surprise, she found that a sixty- or ninety-minute nap provided the same kinds of cognitive improvements seen in people who had slept for eight hours. (That’s not to say you can trade a night’s sleep for an afternoon nap. It doesn’t work that way.) Further, she found that timing your nap can affect the balance of light sleep, REM sleep, and slow-wave sleep, and shape the kinds of benefits you get from it.

Sleep scientists have long observed that our need for sleep is governed by two things: sleep pressure and our body’s twenty-four-hour circadian rhythm. Sleep pressure is the body’s need for sleep, and, under normal circumstances, it’s what’s responsible for our feeling sleepy at night. When you wake up refreshed in the morning, your sleep pressure is at a minimum, and it builds up over the course of the day, until it reaches a peak the next night. Circadian rhythm regulates your alertness level. Under normal circumstances, you reach peak alertness around 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.; your alertness dips a little in the early afternoon, then rises through the rest of the day until late evening.

Circadian rhythm and the sleep pressure cycle operate independently of each other. Under normal circumstances the two are in sync: when we go to bed, our circadian cycle is at its lowest ebb and sleep pressure is high; when we wake up, our circadian cycle is revving up and our sleep pressure is low. But they can be thrown out of sync by jet lag, night shifts, or irregular work schedules.

The interaction of the two cycles helps determine what kind of sleep you get. When sleep pressure is high, your body demands more short-wave sleep. This is one reason why, when you go to bed at night, the first phase of your sleep tends to be dominated by deep, restorative short-wave sleep. As the night progresses, sleep pressure is eased and the need for short-wave sleep declines. In the middle of the night, your circadian cycle hits bottom and then starts to climb upward; as it does, you shift into REM sleep. By the time you wake up, your brain has been getting more active for a couple hours.

Mednick discovered that you can use knowledge of the relationship between sleep pressure, circadian rhythm, and sleep type to tailor a nap to your needs. About six hours after you wake up, your body’s circadian rhythm starts to dip and you’re likely to feel drowsy, especially if you’ve had a busy morning and lunch. A twenty-minute power nap at this point (say at 1:00 p.m.) is enough to give you a mental re-charge without leaving you groggy: if you keep it short, you’ll wake up fairly alert and can quickly get back to work. If you stretch it out to an hour, the balance between your circadian rhythm and sleep pressure will produce a nap that balances REM and short-wave sleep.

If on the other hand, you take a nap an hour earlier, five hours after waking, the balance will be different: more REM sleep, less slow-wave sleep. This kind of nap will deliver a little creative nudge: you’re likely to dream and more likely to enroll your subconscious in whatever you were recently working on. If you wait until an hour later, seven hours after waking, your body needs more rest, and an hour-long nap will be richer in slow-wave sleep and more physically restorative than creatively stimulating.

These aren’t dramatic differences: no nap will consist exclusively of one phase of sleep, and no single nap will magically turn you into Albert Einstein (who did nap regularly, it should be noted). And it’s also important to remember that there’s always a gap between laboratory studies of memory, cognition, and creativity, and real-world creativity and work. Few of us have jobs that require us only to memorize strings of numbers or remember pictures or think up unusual uses for tape. But Sara Mednick’s work on naps helps explain why, throughout history, so many dedicated, obsessed, competitive people have, in the middle of the day, stopped what they were doing and gone to sleep, and why they benefit from it.

A powerful but unused tool

In much of the world today, naps have fallen out of favor. They’re now something that young children do on kindergarten mats, not something for adults, least of all leaders and serious minds. As we move into a world and economy that seems to defy the constraints of geography and time, that operates globally and twenty-four/seven, we feel the need (or pressure) to work continuously, to ignore our body’s clocks and push on even when your bodies are pleading to rest. But this is a mistake.

Naps are powerful tools for recovering our energy and focus. We can even learn to tailor them to give us more of a creative boost, or provide more physical benefit, or explore the ideas that emerge at the boundary between consciousness and sleep. Even during his country’s most desperate hours, when he felt the fate of the nation and civilization hanging in the balance, Churchill found time for a nap. We would be wise to ask if our days and our work are really more urgent.

Adapted excerpt from Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less. by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. Copyright © 2016. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, a division of PBG Publishing, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

http://www.successwize.com/winston-churchills-secret-productivity-weapon/

[seanmalatesta]

Winston Churchill’s Secret Productivity Weapon

How a Midday Nap Can Boost Your Performance all Day Long

One of the more unlikely museums in London is located in the basement of the Treasury, between 10 Downing Street and the Palace of Westminster: the Churchill War Rooms, the underground complex from which Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his ministers and generals fought World War II.

The War Rooms is a large warren of small offices, dormitories, and dining rooms for the prime minister and his staff, top cabinet officers, and general staff, hidden under a bomb-resistant five-foot-thick, steel-reinforced concrete ceiling. During World War II, hundreds of people worked in them, from clerks and secretaries to generals and ministers. Today, though, the space is dominated by the memory of Churchill.

The exhibits describe the ups and downs of his political career; his indefatigable energy defending Britain and the empire; his eloquence and skill as a writer; his daily life during the war; and his mix of political opportunism, realpolitik, and idealism. But one aspect of his working life gets only a brief mention, at the end of the tour: his habit of taking daily naps.

Churchill himself regarded his midday naps as essential for maintaining his mental balance, renewing his energy, and reviving his spirits. He had gotten into the habit of napping during World War I, when he was First Lord of the Admiralty, and even during the Blitz, Churchill would retire to his private room in the War Rooms after lunch, undress, and sleep for an hour or two. Unless German bombs were falling, he would then head to 10 Downing Street for a bath, change into fresh clothes, and return to work. Churchill’s valet, Frank Sawyers, later recalled, “It was one of the inflexible rules of Mr. Churchill’s daily routine that he should not miss this rest.”

“ Churchill regarded his midday naps as essential for maintaining his mental balance and renewing his energy.

—ALEX SOOJUNG-KIM PANG

Not only did a nap help Churchill keep up his energy, his sangfroid also inspired his cabinet and officers. Napping during boring parliamentary debates was one thing. Going to sleep literally while bombs were falling signaled Churchill’s confidence in his staff and his belief that the dark days would pass.

Churchill wasn’t the only Allied leader to nap regularly. George Marshall advised Dwight Eisenhower to take a daily nap; on the other side of the world, Pacific Command adjusted its schedule around Douglas MacArthur’s afternoon nap, which was part of a daily schedule that “had scarcely changed since his days as superintendent of West Point,” according to his biographer William Manchester. (Adolf Hitler, in contrast, kept more erratic hours at the best of times, and as the Allies closed in on Germany in 1944 and 1945, he tried to stay up for days at a time, powered by a mix of amphetamines, cocaine, and other drugs.)

Winston Churchill has been a model for many leaders, and at least two American presidents were inspired by his example to take up napping. John F. Kennedy was so “impressed by Churchill’s eloquence in praise of the afternoon nap,” said Arthur Schlesinger Jr., that when he entered the Senate he imitated Churchill’s practice of keeping a cot in Parliament. Later at the White House, Kennedy would normally take a 45-minute nap after lunch; like Churchill, he wouldn’t sleep in the office but would head for the residence and change into pajamas. Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, likewise broke up his long day with a nap and shower in the afternoon.

The power of power naps

Why do naps do you good? The most obvious benefit of napping is that it increases alertness and decreases fatigue. A short nap of around twenty minutes boosts your ability to concentrate by giving your body a chance to restore depleted energy. But regular naps—the habit, not just a single nap—have other benefits.

Regular napping can improve memory. Just as the brain uses a good night’s sleep to fix memories, so too does it use naps to consolidate things you’ve just learned. Neuroscientist Sara Mednick found that napping for an hour or more during the day—a nap long enough to allow one to dream—improves performance on memory and perceptual tasks. In a study published in 2003, she had people learn a texture discrimination task in the morning. If you’ve ever been to the eye doctor, you’ve probably had a peripheral vision test: you focus your attention on a light into the center of a large screen and push a button when you see a light on the periphery. Mednick’s test was a bit similar. Subjects were shown a field of little horizontal lines with an L or T in the center. After an irregular interval, some of the lines in the lower left morphed into diagonals. Subjects had to indicate when they saw the change, whether the lines formed a horizontal or vertical row, and what the central fixation target was (partly to keep people from just focusing on the lower left-hand quadrant). It’s a simple test, but this sort of visual discrimination is the kind of thing our brains are designed for, you can quickly get pretty good at it.

After the test, subjects were divided into three groups. One group didn’t nap at all and went about their normal days. The other two took either an hour-long or ninety-minute nap in the afternoon. Everyone was then retested that evening. The subjects who didn’t have a nap did worse on the test. Among the subjects who napped, though, Mednick found that a third had essentially the same scores, while two-thirds did dramatically better in the evening.

“ A short nap boosts your ability to concentrate by giving your body a chance to restore depleted energy.

—ALEX SOOJUNG-KIM PANG

So a nap was helping the brain fix this new pattern-recognizing skill. But what accounted for the two sets of results among the nappers? It wasn’t just the length of the nap: while the ninety-minute nappers were almost all in the high-performance group, people who slept an hour were split between both groups. Medick found the answer when she looked at EEG tracings of their sleeping brains.

When you sleep, you go through a 90-to-110-minute-long cycle that proceeds from light sleep to deep slow-wave sleep and finally to REM sleep. In REM sleep, your eyes twitch (REM stands for “rapid eye movement”), your brain waves pick up again, and you’re more likely to dream. The balance of slow-wave and REM sleep varies depending on when you fall asleep and how tired you are. Some people had fallen into slow-wave sleep during their naps, while others had both slow-wave and REM sleep. The slow-wave sleep group performed the same on the morning and evening tests. The slow-wave and REM sleep group, though, were the high performers. Finally, Mednick had the subjects take the same test again the next morning, and then two days later. Everyone’s scores went up after a night’s sleep, but the nap group’s scores rose more sharply than the non-nap group.

Other researchers have found that even a short nap can improve memory. At the University of Dusseldorf, Olaf Lahl showed two groups of students a list of thirty words for two minutes and told them to memorize as many as possible. One group was then allowed to nap for up to an hour, while the other stayed awake. When they were tested to see how many words they could recall, the students who napped did significantly better than those who didn’t. In a second experiment, one group was kept awake, a second napped as long as they wanted (about twenty-five minutes on average), and a third was woken up after five minutes. Lahl found that even a five-minute nap yielded measurable improvements in retention: not as great as a longer nap, but still statistically significant.

Naps can also help workers avoid mistakes and bad behavior. Jennifer Goldschmied, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, found that naps improve emotional regulation and self-control. She measured her subjects’ levels of tolerance for frustration by giving them paper, a pencil, and a set of diagrams. They had to copy the diagrams without lifting their pencil from the paper or tracing over a line.

What they didn’t know was that half the diagrams couldn’t be copied without violating one of those rules. The participants thought they were being tested on their visual acuity or problem-solving skills, but Goldschmied really wanted to see how much time they would spend trying to come up with a solution before they quit. She found that people who had taken a nap before trying to complete the Frustration Tolerance Task were less likely to give up than those who hadn’t napped, were less impulsive, and were better able to handle frustration.

In separate studies, Dan Ariely and Christopher Barnes found that chronic fatigue or mental exhaustion decreases a person’s self-control and decision-making ability, making them more likely to impulsively cheat than their better-rested colleagues.

How long and when?

Short twenty-minute power naps are good for boosting alertness and mental clarity. But sleep research Sara Mednick argues that by paying attention to what time of day you nap and scheduling longer naps with an eye to your sleep cycle and the highs and lows in your energy and attention levels (which follow an ultradian rhythm, rising and falling repeatedly through the day), you can tailor naps to be more physically restorative, to feed your creative activities, or to improve your memory.

Mednick did some of the first work that scientifically measured the benefits of naps. By the time she started graduate school at Harvard in the late 1990’s, sleep scientists had developed a whole toolkit to study the effects of nocturnal sleep and sleep deprivation on things like memory, alertness, and perception. Mednick applied some of those tools to study naps. Previously, researchers had mainly been interested in naps in the context of shift work and sleep deficits, no one had paid much attention to how naps could affect the cognitive performance or alertness of people with stressful or challenging lives but more regular schedules.

To her surprise, she found that a sixty- or ninety-minute nap provided the same kinds of cognitive improvements seen in people who had slept for eight hours. (That’s not to say you can trade a night’s sleep for an afternoon nap. It doesn’t work that way.) Further, she found that timing your nap can affect the balance of light sleep, REM sleep, and slow-wave sleep, and shape the kinds of benefits you get from it.

Sleep scientists have long observed that our need for sleep is governed by two things: sleep pressure and our body’s twenty-four-hour circadian rhythm. Sleep pressure is the body’s need for sleep, and, under normal circumstances, it’s what’s responsible for our feeling sleepy at night. When you wake up refreshed in the morning, your sleep pressure is at a minimum, and it builds up over the course of the day, until it reaches a peak the next night. Circadian rhythm regulates your alertness level. Under normal circumstances, you reach peak alertness around 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.; your alertness dips a little in the early afternoon, then rises through the rest of the day until late evening.

Circadian rhythm and the sleep pressure cycle operate independently of each other. Under normal circumstances the two are in sync: when we go to bed, our circadian cycle is at its lowest ebb and sleep pressure is high; when we wake up, our circadian cycle is revving up and our sleep pressure is low. But they can be thrown out of sync by jet lag, night shifts, or irregular work schedules.

The interaction of the two cycles helps determine what kind of sleep you get. When sleep pressure is high, your body demands more short-wave sleep. This is one reason why, when you go to bed at night, the first phase of your sleep tends to be dominated by deep, restorative short-wave sleep. As the night progresses, sleep pressure is eased and the need for short-wave sleep declines. In the middle of the night, your circadian cycle hits bottom and then starts to climb upward; as it does, you shift into REM sleep. By the time you wake up, your brain has been getting more active for a couple hours.

Mednick discovered that you can use knowledge of the relationship between sleep pressure, circadian rhythm, and sleep type to tailor a nap to your needs. About six hours after you wake up, your body’s circadian rhythm starts to dip and you’re likely to feel drowsy, especially if you’ve had a busy morning and lunch. A twenty-minute power nap at this point (say at 1:00 p.m.) is enough to give you a mental re-charge without leaving you groggy: if you keep it short, you’ll wake up fairly alert and can quickly get back to work. If you stretch it out to an hour, the balance between your circadian rhythm and sleep pressure will produce a nap that balances REM and short-wave sleep.

If on the other hand, you take a nap an hour earlier, five hours after waking, the balance will be different: more REM sleep, less slow-wave sleep. This kind of nap will deliver a little creative nudge: you’re likely to dream and more likely to enroll your subconscious in whatever you were recently working on. If you wait until an hour later, seven hours after waking, your body needs more rest, and an hour-long nap will be richer in slow-wave sleep and more physically restorative than creatively stimulating.

These aren’t dramatic differences: no nap will consist exclusively of one phase of sleep, and no single nap will magically turn you into Albert Einstein (who did nap regularly, it should be noted). And it’s also important to remember that there’s always a gap between laboratory studies of memory, cognition, and creativity, and real-world creativity and work. Few of us have jobs that require us only to memorize strings of numbers or remember pictures or think up unusual uses for tape. But Sara Mednick’s work on naps helps explain why, throughout history, so many dedicated, obsessed, competitive people have, in the middle of the day, stopped what they were doing and gone to sleep, and why they benefit from it.

A powerful but unused tool

In much of the world today, naps have fallen out of favor. They’re now something that young children do on kindergarten mats, not something for adults, least of all leaders and serious minds. As we move into a world and economy that seems to defy the constraints of geography and time, that operates globally and twenty-four/seven, we feel the need (or pressure) to work continuously, to ignore our body’s clocks and push on even when your bodies are pleading to rest. But this is a mistake.

Naps are powerful tools for recovering our energy and focus. We can even learn to tailor them to give us more of a creative boost, or provide more physical benefit, or explore the ideas that emerge at the boundary between consciousness and sleep. Even during his country’s most desperate hours, when he felt the fate of the nation and civilization hanging in the balance, Churchill found time for a nap. We would be wise to ask if our days and our work are really more urgent.

Adapted excerpt from Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less. by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. Copyright © 2016. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, a division of PBG Publishing, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

from Michael Hyatt, Your Virtual Mentor http://ift.tt/2iBPP43 via IFTTT

[terryvbryant-blog]

How I Keep My Day to Day Life Organized

Organized chaos.

That pretty much sums up my life right now.

It's no secret that trying to be productive while taking care of a baby is not the easiest even though us Moms tend to have a bit higher expectations before our new bundle of joy enters the world. (AmIRight?)

The first 8 weeks of the baby's life were very unpredictable but for the past six weeks things have calmed down and have become MUCH more predictable and routine. Since then I've managed to stay fairly on top of the things that need to be done. The house has stayed clean, the clothes are washed, the kids are sent to school fed, and every now and then I get to pop in and get some work done.

Here are the ways in which I've kept life fairly organized here lately.

Keeping the House Clean

One thing I must do for my own sanity is keep the house clean. If my house is a mess it's literally ALL I think about. I can't seem to keep my focus on anything else. So, straightening up is the first thing I do each morning.

Luckily, the messes never gets too out of hand so cleaning up really doesn't take much time.

Every morning I get up at 6:20, take a shower and then head downstairs. The baby normally sleeps until about 7:30 so I use this time to wipe down the kitchen counters, unload the dishwasher, sweep and mop the kitchen floors and empty the dehumidifier in the basement.

The kitchen is the only room I worry about sweeping and mopping every day since it's the room we come in the house through and mud and gravel dust gets tracked in daily. (Plus we have older, wide plank hardwood floors that have gaps in between. Those gaps can quickly fill with all kinds of gunk if I don't stay on top of it.)

My two main tools that make clean up super easy are my cordless Shark Sweeper and my refillable mop

I also do 1-2 loads of laundry each day and put all the clothes away. I keep a hamper in the upstairs hallway and everyone tosses their dirty clothes in it making gathering all dirty laundry easy.

Other than a sweep through of rooms picking up random trash and throwing any stray toys in a tub, this is all the cleaning that needs to be done.

Every couple of days I'll do a quick wipe down of bathrooms and once a week I'll sweep and mop the entire downstairs.

Staying On Top of Finances

This is still super easy. I use this method and don't have to worry much about bills piling up.

Work

Not gonna lie here, I work anywhere from 15 mins. To 2 hour per day, depending on how the baby naps. (She sleeps awesome at night and is a HORRIBLE napper.) If you're wondering if this has had an impact on how much money I make the answer is a big ole YES. (And also, I'm fine with that!)

Lately I've been focusing on doing just one thing per day. I can no longer jump around. I'll pick a task and work on it until complete or baby wakes up.

Here are some of the things I've done lately:

Write 4 emails

Respond to the past three months' worth of comments

Schedule 1 week worth of Pinterest

Send out all invoices, record payments by check

Write half a blog post

Write other half of blog post

Update old, popular blog posts

Dinner

Again, simple to the rescue. I lay out something each morning and Jamie grills it. The side is chopped up vegetables stir-fry style or fruit. (Super fancy, I know!)

If Jamie has to work late or it's going to rain I dump random ingredients in the crockpot or make Salmon and a simple salad.

The Rest of the Day

The rest of the day consists of fairly mundane stuff. Baths and showers, playing with baby, doing homework with big girls, cheerleading practice and of course, spending a whole ton of time getting Claire to sleep so that she naps for twenty minutes. (Thank God for reality TV! Currently addicted to 90 Day Fiance and all of its spin-offs)

Putting this all into words sounds a bit boring but I'm honestly enjoying it most days, as corny as that sounds. And before I know it everything will change once again.

At about 9:00 I'm beyond tired and ready for bed so that I can wake up tomorrow and do it all over again

[apsbicepstraining]

8 Expert-Backed Tips On How To Sneak Exercise Into Your Life

We all need to be exercising.

Most adults should employ at moderate vigour for about 150 minutes per week — or about 20 hours of vigorous act three times per week, in agreement with the American College of Sports Medicine. But that doesn’t mean you have to go to a dedicated gym or expensive store studio to get fit.

There are many ways to be physically active outside of officially recognized forms of workout. And the good news is why you don’t need to do it all at once. Activity can be done in explodes of as little as ten minutes, according to Michael Jonesco, an auxiliary clinical professor of internal and plays medication at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.

“This is good news for those adults-on-the-go who are lucky to get 20 or 30 hours to themselves, let alone the time it takes to are going to the gym and end a dedicated workout, ” Jonesco told HuffPost. “These shorter erupts of work are much easier to be obtained and can be acted into our day at times that work for all of us.”

With that in brain, here are eight ways to sidle 10 minutes worth of physical activity into your era, several times a day, courtesy of Jonesco and Dr. Paul D. Thompson, Chief of Cardiology at Hartford Hospital. Jonesco is a fan of finding dead zones in the working day to squeeze in a quick exercising whereas Thompson’s strategy is to think of things you’re already doing and see how to transform them into effort. How many of these can you are integrated into your schedule?

1.’ Earn’ your shower

One of the best ways to wake up in the morning is with a bit physical pleasure — it was able to even be more effective than coffee. Jonesco does a ten instant exercising made up of extends, boards, push up, sit-ups, squats and “wall sits” every morning before he reaches the shower.

His routine TAGEND

1. Stretch for one minute

2. Boards for two minutes

3. Pushups and sit-ups for five minutes

4. Pull ups for two minutes

5. Wall sits for one minute

6. Lunge hunkers for two minutes

In all, it takes him less than 15 times from start to finish, and he’s already about one-third of the direction done with his vigorous activity purpose for the day. Extend to sleep ten minutes earlier than you ordinarily would to make sure you can get up on time, he advised.

2. Play with your kids

If you can’t be removed from your teenagers for a few minutes, find ways to involve them in your workouts. Jonesco, for instance, utilizes his toddler daughter as his “own personal kettle bell.”

“I lift her overhead, let her go my back as I do push ups, or include some knee bends when I’m rocking her to sleep, ” he answered. “She sleeps, I sweat — it’s a win-win.”

Or you could take situations a gradation further, like fitness Instagram star Kristy Ardo, a pregnant mama who use her toddler’s load to induce her practices more challenging.

#26weeks pregnant here! This pregnancy will no doubt been knocking my laughingstock. I’ve been soooo exceedingly tired and get told out so fast. I’m not a good napper plus i got little being to entertain! Tucker has been my central motivating for continuing to workout during my pregnancy. When I get home from make we go outside or do something active! If I’m outside playing I know that I have to get a exercising in. Tucker’s going to be such a good older brother he clearly knows something is cooking in my belly I’m his little mare now

A video posted by Kristy and Tucker (@ baby_fitgym) on Apr 26, 2016 at 8: 53 am PDT

3. Turn wait times into flex times

Waiting in transaction or long threads is the perfect the possibilities for a few targeted muscle efforts. If you’re stick behind the rotation and gondolas aren’t moving, contract your core muscles and try to hold it for 30 seconds at a time, says Jonesco. If you’re standing in line, do some calf conjures or flex your gluteal muscles( your laughingstock !) for same periods of time before secreting them.

4. Take the long route

Put more interval between you and your end, even if you’re driving, Jonesco admonishes. That could entail parking at the furthest place in the bureau parking lot, walking a round-about direction to your table or going off the bus or qualify a little earlier than you usually would. Those extra paces can really add up if you start doing them regularly.

“Whether you are taking the stairs, parking further, marching to the next bus/ subway stop, or expending your table to act plunges, as long as the activity intensity is moderate( belief: working harder to talk while going, but not gasping for breeze) then you are working towards your goal, ” Jonesco writes.

5. Use shortcuts

Research been shown that people who exert at maximum capability for about ten minutes can have similar health gains as those who do moderate practice for longer periods of time. A recent survey found that participants who did what amounted to one minute of sprints and nine instants of light-headed rehearsal had similar additions in VO2 peak( a measure of how much oxygen your person utilizes ), insulin sensibility and muscle perform as participants who did moderate exercise for 50 hours at a time.

But be alerted: these sorts of interval improve is intense, and during sprint occasions, study players became “all out.” For this study specific, the interval training took place on a stationary bike and is constituted by two minutes of warming up before a repeating area of all-out sprints for 20 seconds and recovery tempo for two minutes. This sprint-recovery section reiterated two more times before a three-minute cool down.

6. Stir your travel your exercise

If you walk, bike or even run to your work, you won’t have to worry about trying to squeeze in “real exercise” the rest of the working day, adds Thompson.

“A lot of people are busy, so what are the things you were supposed to do regardless that you are able to induce more age efficient? ” Thompson asks.

Thompson is a personal love of the utilization commute. He residence 16 th in the 1976 Boston marathon, and he credits his achievement to his 12 mile-roundtrip run travel, which he ran every weekday.

If your workplace is too far to steps or motorcycle, you could also consider stepping up and down steps as part of your travel. Thompson now works on the seventh flooring of a hospital and tries as much as possible to avoid exploiting elevators.

“Walking up to the seventh floor and walking down as much as I can is a way I constrict exert into my epoch as much as I can, ” he articulated. “In a infirmary, you spend a huge amount of meter waiting for elevators, so it’s actually quite efficient.”

7. Don’t just watch your teenagers play boasts — get involved

Soccer mothers who are caught at the edge of a discipline all Saturday would do better to walk around the field than sit in a foldout chair. It gives you different angles to watch the game, and you’ll also get some physical activity in as well, spoke Thompson. If there’s no cavity to walk around, even standing provisions a measure of physical activity that’s better than sitting. And for those who are truly dedicated to practise and boy sports, you are able ever learn how to referee your kid’s games.

“Standing is better for your cardiovascular system than sitting, and any type of action only adds to that, ” said Thompson. “Probably the best circumstance you can do is learn to be a ref, because you get to run.” Of trend, the same advice applies for whatever sport young children are involved in.

8. Clean the members of this house

In the same vein as travelling for rehearsal, take a look at all the works that have to be be done in order to and around your home. Are you someone to landscape your garden or vacuum-clean your carpets? Taking back these duties is more the possibilities for physical activity, and you’ll save money, too.

“It’s astonishing the number of my neighbors who have health club bodies but have somebody do their lawn, ” did Thompson. “Little household chores, such as doing your own lawn or smoothing can add a lot of physical pleasure to your day.” Thompson preaches to purchase a pushing lawnmower to cut your grass, as the lack of motor means you’re operating additional hard to push it across your grass.

While Thompson is of the view that outdoor, physically challenging chores are the best rehearsal openings, he too noted that indoor cleaning and vacuuming likewise generate a fair quantity of body heat, which signifies it also weighs as physical activity.

“There are a lot of errands in “peoples lives” that are a way to acquire rehearsal if you want to do it, ” Thompson enunciated. The only caveat for the purposes of our gratuity is that you have enjoyed these chores to at least some degree, or else you’ll never do them, he says.

We want to help you feel stronger, happier and more empowered. Sign up for our newsletter and assemble our 30 -Day Move More, Feel Better challenge. We’ll deliver tips, challenges and admonition to your inbox every day.

Use our defy calendar below to stay on track — it was able to even sync to your own planned and transport remembers to your telephone :

The post 8 Expert-Backed Tips On How To Sneak Exercise Into Your Life appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

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[apsbicepstraining]

8 Expert-Backed Tips On How To Sneak Exercise Into Your Life

We all need to be exercising.

Most adults should employ at moderate vigour for about 150 minutes per week — or about 20 hours of vigorous act three times per week, in agreement with the American College of Sports Medicine. But that doesn’t mean you have to go to a dedicated gym or expensive store studio to get fit.

There are many ways to be physically active outside of officially recognized forms of workout. And the good news is why you don’t need to do it all at once. Activity can be done in explodes of as little as ten minutes, according to Michael Jonesco, an auxiliary clinical professor of internal and plays medication at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.

“This is good news for those adults-on-the-go who are lucky to get 20 or 30 hours to themselves, let alone the time it takes to are going to the gym and end a dedicated workout, ” Jonesco told HuffPost. “These shorter erupts of work are much easier to be obtained and can be acted into our day at times that work for all of us.”

With that in brain, here are eight ways to sidle 10 minutes worth of physical activity into your era, several times a day, courtesy of Jonesco and Dr. Paul D. Thompson, Chief of Cardiology at Hartford Hospital. Jonesco is a fan of finding dead zones in the working day to squeeze in a quick exercising whereas Thompson’s strategy is to think of things you’re already doing and see how to transform them into effort. How many of these can you are integrated into your schedule?

1.’ Earn’ your shower

One of the best ways to wake up in the morning is with a bit physical pleasure — it was able to even be more effective than coffee. Jonesco does a ten instant exercising made up of extends, boards, push up, sit-ups, squats and “wall sits” every morning before he reaches the shower.

His routine TAGEND

1. Stretch for one minute

2. Boards for two minutes

3. Pushups and sit-ups for five minutes

4. Pull ups for two minutes

5. Wall sits for one minute

6. Lunge hunkers for two minutes

In all, it takes him less than 15 times from start to finish, and he’s already about one-third of the direction done with his vigorous activity purpose for the day. Extend to sleep ten minutes earlier than you ordinarily would to make sure you can get up on time, he advised.

2. Play with your kids

If you can’t be removed from your teenagers for a few minutes, find ways to involve them in your workouts. Jonesco, for instance, utilizes his toddler daughter as his “own personal kettle bell.”

“I lift her overhead, let her go my back as I do push ups, or include some knee bends when I’m rocking her to sleep, ” he answered. “She sleeps, I sweat — it’s a win-win.”

Or you could take situations a gradation further, like fitness Instagram star Kristy Ardo, a pregnant mama who use her toddler’s load to induce her practices more challenging.

#26weeks pregnant here! This pregnancy will no doubt been knocking my laughingstock. I’ve been soooo exceedingly tired and get told out so fast. I’m not a good napper plus i got little being to entertain! Tucker has been my central motivating for continuing to workout during my pregnancy. When I get home from make we go outside or do something active! If I’m outside playing I know that I have to get a exercising in. Tucker’s going to be such a good older brother he clearly knows something is cooking in my belly I’m his little mare now

A video posted by Kristy and Tucker (@ baby_fitgym) on Apr 26, 2016 at 8: 53 am PDT

3. Turn wait times into flex times

Waiting in transaction or long threads is the perfect the possibilities for a few targeted muscle efforts. If you’re stick behind the rotation and gondolas aren’t moving, contract your core muscles and try to hold it for 30 seconds at a time, says Jonesco. If you’re standing in line, do some calf conjures or flex your gluteal muscles( your laughingstock !) for same periods of time before secreting them.

4. Take the long route

Put more interval between you and your end, even if you’re driving, Jonesco admonishes. That could entail parking at the furthest place in the bureau parking lot, walking a round-about direction to your table or going off the bus or qualify a little earlier than you usually would. Those extra paces can really add up if you start doing them regularly.

“Whether you are taking the stairs, parking further, marching to the next bus/ subway stop, or expending your table to act plunges, as long as the activity intensity is moderate( belief: working harder to talk while going, but not gasping for breeze) then you are working towards your goal, ” Jonesco writes.

5. Use shortcuts

Research been shown that people who exert at maximum capability for about ten minutes can have similar health gains as those who do moderate practice for longer periods of time. A recent survey found that participants who did what amounted to one minute of sprints and nine instants of light-headed rehearsal had similar additions in VO2 peak( a measure of how much oxygen your person utilizes ), insulin sensibility and muscle perform as participants who did moderate exercise for 50 hours at a time.

But be alerted: these sorts of interval improve is intense, and during sprint occasions, study players became “all out.” For this study specific, the interval training took place on a stationary bike and is constituted by two minutes of warming up before a repeating area of all-out sprints for 20 seconds and recovery tempo for two minutes. This sprint-recovery section reiterated two more times before a three-minute cool down.

6. Stir your travel your exercise

If you walk, bike or even run to your work, you won’t have to worry about trying to squeeze in “real exercise” the rest of the working day, adds Thompson.

“A lot of people are busy, so what are the things you were supposed to do regardless that you are able to induce more age efficient? ” Thompson asks.

Thompson is a personal love of the utilization commute. He residence 16 th in the 1976 Boston marathon, and he credits his achievement to his 12 mile-roundtrip run travel, which he ran every weekday.

If your workplace is too far to steps or motorcycle, you could also consider stepping up and down steps as part of your travel. Thompson now works on the seventh flooring of a hospital and tries as much as possible to avoid exploiting elevators.

“Walking up to the seventh floor and walking down as much as I can is a way I constrict exert into my epoch as much as I can, ” he articulated. “In a infirmary, you spend a huge amount of meter waiting for elevators, so it’s actually quite efficient.”

7. Don’t just watch your teenagers play boasts — get involved

Soccer mothers who are caught at the edge of a discipline all Saturday would do better to walk around the field than sit in a foldout chair. It gives you different angles to watch the game, and you’ll also get some physical activity in as well, spoke Thompson. If there’s no cavity to walk around, even standing provisions a measure of physical activity that’s better than sitting. And for those who are truly dedicated to practise and boy sports, you are able ever learn how to referee your kid’s games.

“Standing is better for your cardiovascular system than sitting, and any type of action only adds to that, ” said Thompson. “Probably the best circumstance you can do is learn to be a ref, because you get to run.” Of trend, the same advice applies for whatever sport young children are involved in.

8. Clean the members of this house

In the same vein as travelling for rehearsal, take a look at all the works that have to be be done in order to and around your home. Are you someone to landscape your garden or vacuum-clean your carpets? Taking back these duties is more the possibilities for physical activity, and you’ll save money, too.

“It’s astonishing the number of my neighbors who have health club bodies but have somebody do their lawn, ” did Thompson. “Little household chores, such as doing your own lawn or smoothing can add a lot of physical pleasure to your day.” Thompson preaches to purchase a pushing lawnmower to cut your grass, as the lack of motor means you’re operating additional hard to push it across your grass.

While Thompson is of the view that outdoor, physically challenging chores are the best rehearsal openings, he too noted that indoor cleaning and vacuuming likewise generate a fair quantity of body heat, which signifies it also weighs as physical activity.

“There are a lot of errands in “peoples lives” that are a way to acquire rehearsal if you want to do it, ” Thompson enunciated. The only caveat for the purposes of our gratuity is that you have enjoyed these chores to at least some degree, or else you’ll never do them, he says.

We want to help you feel stronger, happier and more empowered. Sign up for our newsletter and assemble our 30 -Day Move More, Feel Better challenge. We’ll deliver tips, challenges and admonition to your inbox every day.

Use our defy calendar below to stay on track — it was able to even sync to your own planned and transport remembers to your telephone :

The post 8 Expert-Backed Tips On How To Sneak Exercise Into Your Life appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

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[apsbicepstraining]

8 Expert-Backed Tips On How To Sneak Exercise Into Your Life

We all need to be exercising.

Most adults should employ at moderate vigour for about 150 minutes per week — or about 20 hours of vigorous act three times per week, in agreement with the American College of Sports Medicine. But that doesn’t mean you have to go to a dedicated gym or expensive store studio to get fit.

There are many ways to be physically active outside of officially recognized forms of workout. And the good news is why you don’t need to do it all at once. Activity can be done in explodes of as little as ten minutes, according to Michael Jonesco, an auxiliary clinical professor of internal and plays medication at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.

“This is good news for those adults-on-the-go who are lucky to get 20 or 30 hours to themselves, let alone the time it takes to are going to the gym and end a dedicated workout, ” Jonesco told HuffPost. “These shorter erupts of work are much easier to be obtained and can be acted into our day at times that work for all of us.”

With that in brain, here are eight ways to sidle 10 minutes worth of physical activity into your era, several times a day, courtesy of Jonesco and Dr. Paul D. Thompson, Chief of Cardiology at Hartford Hospital. Jonesco is a fan of finding dead zones in the working day to squeeze in a quick exercising whereas Thompson’s strategy is to think of things you’re already doing and see how to transform them into effort. How many of these can you are integrated into your schedule?

1.’ Earn’ your shower

One of the best ways to wake up in the morning is with a bit physical pleasure — it was able to even be more effective than coffee. Jonesco does a ten instant exercising made up of extends, boards, push up, sit-ups, squats and “wall sits” every morning before he reaches the shower.

His routine TAGEND

1. Stretch for one minute

2. Boards for two minutes

3. Pushups and sit-ups for five minutes

4. Pull ups for two minutes

5. Wall sits for one minute

6. Lunge hunkers for two minutes

In all, it takes him less than 15 times from start to finish, and he’s already about one-third of the direction done with his vigorous activity purpose for the day. Extend to sleep ten minutes earlier than you ordinarily would to make sure you can get up on time, he advised.

2. Play with your kids

If you can’t be removed from your teenagers for a few minutes, find ways to involve them in your workouts. Jonesco, for instance, utilizes his toddler daughter as his “own personal kettle bell.”

“I lift her overhead, let her go my back as I do push ups, or include some knee bends when I’m rocking her to sleep, ” he answered. “She sleeps, I sweat — it’s a win-win.”

Or you could take situations a gradation further, like fitness Instagram star Kristy Ardo, a pregnant mama who use her toddler’s load to induce her practices more challenging.

#26weeks pregnant here! This pregnancy will no doubt been knocking my laughingstock. I’ve been soooo exceedingly tired and get told out so fast. I’m not a good napper plus i got little being to entertain! Tucker has been my central motivating for continuing to workout during my pregnancy. When I get home from make we go outside or do something active! If I’m outside playing I know that I have to get a exercising in. Tucker’s going to be such a good older brother he clearly knows something is cooking in my belly I’m his little mare now

A video posted by Kristy and Tucker (@ baby_fitgym) on Apr 26, 2016 at 8: 53 am PDT

3. Turn wait times into flex times

Waiting in transaction or long threads is the perfect the possibilities for a few targeted muscle efforts. If you’re stick behind the rotation and gondolas aren’t moving, contract your core muscles and try to hold it for 30 seconds at a time, says Jonesco. If you’re standing in line, do some calf conjures or flex your gluteal muscles( your laughingstock !) for same periods of time before secreting them.

4. Take the long route

Put more interval between you and your end, even if you’re driving, Jonesco admonishes. That could entail parking at the furthest place in the bureau parking lot, walking a round-about direction to your table or going off the bus or qualify a little earlier than you usually would. Those extra paces can really add up if you start doing them regularly.

“Whether you are taking the stairs, parking further, marching to the next bus/ subway stop, or expending your table to act plunges, as long as the activity intensity is moderate( belief: working harder to talk while going, but not gasping for breeze) then you are working towards your goal, ” Jonesco writes.

5. Use shortcuts

Research been shown that people who exert at maximum capability for about ten minutes can have similar health gains as those who do moderate practice for longer periods of time. A recent survey found that participants who did what amounted to one minute of sprints and nine instants of light-headed rehearsal had similar additions in VO2 peak( a measure of how much oxygen your person utilizes ), insulin sensibility and muscle perform as participants who did moderate exercise for 50 hours at a time.

But be alerted: these sorts of interval improve is intense, and during sprint occasions, study players became “all out.” For this study specific, the interval training took place on a stationary bike and is constituted by two minutes of warming up before a repeating area of all-out sprints for 20 seconds and recovery tempo for two minutes. This sprint-recovery section reiterated two more times before a three-minute cool down.

6. Stir your travel your exercise

If you walk, bike or even run to your work, you won’t have to worry about trying to squeeze in “real exercise” the rest of the working day, adds Thompson.

“A lot of people are busy, so what are the things you were supposed to do regardless that you are able to induce more age efficient? ” Thompson asks.

Thompson is a personal love of the utilization commute. He residence 16 th in the 1976 Boston marathon, and he credits his achievement to his 12 mile-roundtrip run travel, which he ran every weekday.

If your workplace is too far to steps or motorcycle, you could also consider stepping up and down steps as part of your travel. Thompson now works on the seventh flooring of a hospital and tries as much as possible to avoid exploiting elevators.

“Walking up to the seventh floor and walking down as much as I can is a way I constrict exert into my epoch as much as I can, ” he articulated. “In a infirmary, you spend a huge amount of meter waiting for elevators, so it’s actually quite efficient.”

7. Don’t just watch your teenagers play boasts — get involved

Soccer mothers who are caught at the edge of a discipline all Saturday would do better to walk around the field than sit in a foldout chair. It gives you different angles to watch the game, and you’ll also get some physical activity in as well, spoke Thompson. If there’s no cavity to walk around, even standing provisions a measure of physical activity that’s better than sitting. And for those who are truly dedicated to practise and boy sports, you are able ever learn how to referee your kid’s games.

“Standing is better for your cardiovascular system than sitting, and any type of action only adds to that, ” said Thompson. “Probably the best circumstance you can do is learn to be a ref, because you get to run.” Of trend, the same advice applies for whatever sport young children are involved in.

8. Clean the members of this house

In the same vein as travelling for rehearsal, take a look at all the works that have to be be done in order to and around your home. Are you someone to landscape your garden or vacuum-clean your carpets? Taking back these duties is more the possibilities for physical activity, and you’ll save money, too.

“It’s astonishing the number of my neighbors who have health club bodies but have somebody do their lawn, ” did Thompson. “Little household chores, such as doing your own lawn or smoothing can add a lot of physical pleasure to your day.” Thompson preaches to purchase a pushing lawnmower to cut your grass, as the lack of motor means you’re operating additional hard to push it across your grass.

While Thompson is of the view that outdoor, physically challenging chores are the best rehearsal openings, he too noted that indoor cleaning and vacuuming likewise generate a fair quantity of body heat, which signifies it also weighs as physical activity.

“There are a lot of errands in “peoples lives” that are a way to acquire rehearsal if you want to do it, ” Thompson enunciated. The only caveat for the purposes of our gratuity is that you have enjoyed these chores to at least some degree, or else you’ll never do them, he says.

We want to help you feel stronger, happier and more empowered. Sign up for our newsletter and assemble our 30 -Day Move More, Feel Better challenge. We’ll deliver tips, challenges and admonition to your inbox every day.

Use our defy calendar below to stay on track — it was able to even sync to your own planned and transport remembers to your telephone :

The post 8 Expert-Backed Tips On How To Sneak Exercise Into Your Life appeared first on apsbicepstraining.com.

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