Life in the Spectrum – Nature Photography vs. Travel Anxiety

16 Jul 2018 8 Comments

by Jo Price in Positive Energy Tags: , , , , , ,

***Originally posted on lifeinthespectrum.com.

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It’s no secret that I don’t do well when I have to travel solo. Despite my issues, my company is located out of state, so solo travel lands on my calendar multiple times a year. In order to redirect my nervous energy this past week, I opted for a series of random after workday adventures. A couple of those days included the coolest of activities. Happy hour? Chillin’ with my team at the bars? Dancing the night away?

snowy egret seafood - IG with logoOooooh nooooo. Think cooler. Much much cooler. That’s right.

Nature. Photography.

Aaaaaah yes. Haters gonna hate, but I couldn’t stop the unmitigated badassness that came with lugging around a lens so ridiculous that it made my forearms ache to hold it. As an added bonus, I was able to respond to inquiries from curious passersby who repeatedly asked, “Do you get incredible photos with that camera?” with my sly response of “It’s a hit and miss given that my limited camera knowledge is derived from the patient people at Canon customer support and Google.”

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I told you. Mad. Skills. My anxiety faded away as my native nerdiness returned to the forefront. But it made me happy, and it did calm me down. I send heartfelt thank yous to the many California locals who suggested several beautiful places for capturing lovely nature shots and to those who pointed me in the right direction once I arrived.

seal in la jolla - IGKindness is so very powerful. We often don’t realize that the people around us are struggling deeply, and the smallest of benevolent gestures can mean more than we could ever know.

As is the norm, I actually had a wonderful week. Despite a few questionable moments (to be discussed later), I survived relatively unscathed. And now I’m home once more. Back to Texas. Back to my people.

Back to me.

osprey - IG

Big hugs to you all!  Jo

*My instagram ID is @texasbirdnerd for any other nature photo nerds. Find me so I can see your pics, too. Those always make me smile.  🙂

acorn woodpeckers - IG

***I would love to know what you do to take down the stress level when you are feeling overwhelmed. Feel free to tag your relevant posts in the comments, but keep in mind that this is a family show. Please keep it G / PG rated. Sorry, but I don’t need to read any of your PG-13 and above ideas.  😉

Keto Catastrophe and Total Low Carb Loss

15 Jul 2018 20 Comments

by Jo Price in Positive Energy Tags: , , , , , , ,

seal in la jolla - IG

This is an actual photo of me taken on the last day of my work trip to California.

Fail fail fail. <— And that pretty much sums up my travel eating choices over the past week. Sigh.

I don’t know what it is about the food selections that I make whenever I travel. If I had to give it a scientific designation, I believe that it would find a solid home in the “crapus maximus carbus” category.

So. Sad.

Maybe it’s a travel anxiety thing. Or maybe I just turn into teen wolf when I’m away from home and family. My bed remains unmade. I toss my clothes around the hotel room. I eat ice cream for breakfast. And I buy food shiznet like churros. Chur-frickin-ros. What. The. Eff.

churros

Damn you available churros…

But now I’m back in Texas. Back and away from sad food choice travel time. There are no available churros here. Well…they can be found here in the state but not here here. My local food supply (a.k.a. items found in my fridge and pantry) is free of basically every unacceptable sugary carby item that was consumed throughout my California quest to morph into a human seal.

I’m carb detoxing once more. Breaking the sugar cravings. Trying to get my energy levels back up once more. De-crapping the bod.

That’s it for me for today. No further sad consumption confessions du jour. In a moment I will post a low carb sweet recipe as a follow-up tribute to anyone else treading the food walk of shame. I am there with you, but, as always, today is a new day.  🙂

Big hugs to all. Jo

Life in the Spectrum – Travel Anxiety Overload – Don’t Panic

09 Jul 2018 11 Comments

by Jo Price in Positive Energy Tags: , , , , , ,

***Originally posted on https://lifeinthespectrum.com/.

I could be scheduled for a flight to the moon, and I would be happy as a clam as long as my family was by my side. But the moment I have to take a trip by myself, I’m basically purchasing a first class ticket to Crazyville (because one should never book economy class when flying into insanity).

I blame my kids. I was normal before they came along. Clarification – I was normal-ish specifically with regard to travel (but absolutely nothing else at all). The moment the mini-Jos appeared – boom – separation anxiety mania. Again with the clarification – my separation anxiety, not theirs. My children are annoyingly chill when I’m away. Although my husband vehemently denies it, I firmly believe that he intravenously supplements their diets with a chocolate drip while I’m away. (Lucky kids.) There is also a strong possibility that’s he’s just an amazing father. (Lucky all of us.)

But I have no chocolate I.V. and am therefore significantly less copacetic about the situation. I just worry about… (insert any random / statistically improbable / impossible occurrence that your brain can conjur here). Burglaries (I can walk to the police station from my house), plane crash (stats don’t support that), car crash (my being there won’t change those stats), pool accidents (we have no pool), illness (and on the 8th day God created pediatricians), flash hurricanes preventing me from returning home (yeah so that’s not a thing in the Gulf of Mexico but there was a tropical storm that actually did appear overnight in Houston several years ago – Tropical Storm Allison – huge mess!), or alien invasions (of the off planet kind that will probably necessitate a space wall courtesy of our new space army).

And then there’s the whole general social anxiety thing. I fake it damn well, but I am actually completely overwhelmed when I am out of my personal zone and away from my people. The littlest thing will send me into an internal panic, and I become particularly nervous when I have to go into the office for the first time in months. As an embarrassing example, I typically try to fly in the evening before I need to be there because I dread having a ton of faces turn my way when I walk onto the work floor unexpectedly mid workday. I feel like Norm in that old show “Cheers” when everyone greets me except I have zero comfort with finding myself in the spotlight and wish that I could do a sneaky army crawl and pop up unnoticed behind my computer screens. But even that spotlight doesn’t hold a candle to the discomfort I feel with regard to the hug gauntlet I must traverse if I’m not there before most of the team arrives.

There are ten thousand people en route to my desk (give or take about ten thousand people), and I feel obligated to hug them all. It started years ago with a small group of people and has since grown to comical proportions as the team has become very large. Ironically I actually am a total hugger and genuinely love my team members, so it’s not the actual hug part of the show that unnerves me. I just have no interest in perfunctory hugs for the whole work floor and get seriously weirded out when I feel like everyone is watching (which in reality is not actually happening). In addition I am acutely aware that some people don’t like to be hugged ever but then they will look weird, too, if they don’t join in on the team lovin’ so bring it on in here big guy! Eck.

As I have made it to town already, I should be there early enough to evade the excessive team P.D.A. lovefest. There will be a hug here and there, but I will be able to skip out on the over-thinking of my emotions and whatever additional emotional story I create in my mind for the non-huggers. Crisis aversion TBA.

The world will keep spinning. It will be fine. I will be fine. And so will my kids and my husband. We always are.

Hugs to all! Jo

**I will update you on my wacky Jo work trip tales because they always happen regardless of my plans to the contrary. They work out every time, but I never seem to have bland travels. If you have any funny travel tales of your own, I would love to read them. Feel free to tag me and post a link to it the comments on https://lifeinthespectrum.com/. 🙂

There Is Only Room For One Lunatic In This House and I Called It First

21 May 2017 33 Comments

by Jo Price in Positive Energy Tags: , , , ,

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Remember pinwheels?  These cheerful little treats have been sold since the days when marketing departments felt that giving childhood goodies names like ding-dong and ho-ho was a good plan.  To be fair, they didn’t have urban dictionary, and I’m doubtful that those specific terms had truly spread their wings at that point.

Each morning, I drop the big kids off at their respective schools and then head with my smallest to her daycare.  We don’t put her in daycare because my husband and I both work to pay the bills and our companies prohibit toddler companions.  It’s strictly due to our shared love of strep throat, ear infections, and the judgement of other parents who choose alternate lifestyles. 

Our few minutes en route to said daycare consist of driving directly toward the rising sun, fighting with sunglasses that won’t stay on the face of a two-year old, and proving once more that there are zero placement combinations for my car’s sun visors that will cover the two-inch square of sunlight perpetually aimed at my child’s face.  Redirection is my technique of choice, so I make sure to have little snacks in the car to keep her occupied.  Thus enters the pinwheel onto the scene.

As with every cloudless morning, my toddler was angry about the sun’s ongoing assault on her retinas.  I reached back and passed a pinwheel into her small hand.  She was instantly appeased and my eardrums were given a momentary reprieve.  That moment was not to last because she went from sedate to hysterical one minute later.  She was so upset that I was concerned that maybe I had unintentionally handed her a roll engulfed in flames.  Thankfully I remembered that I had left that one at home.  But why was she so upset?  What in the world was going on?  She was so distraught that I had to pull the car over to stop whatever was terrorizing her.

I parked, jumped out of my seat and rushed to open her door.  There was no blood.  No broken glass.  No barbed wire.  Just a two-year old with tears streaming down her cheeks pushing a pinwheel into my face.

And then I saw it.

IMG_20170608_143538_01Someone had taken a bite out of my daughter’s pinwheel.  But who could have done this?  The other kids were already at school by the time I had handed her the freshly unwrapped treat.  No rogue animals were roaming the vehicle.  And given that my little daughter had a chewed on pinwheel in her hand, crumbs around her mouth, and sugar and cinnamon on her clothes, I knew that it couldn’t have been her.

Many people don’t believe in mother’s intuition, but I can assure you that it is a very real thing.  Mine snapped on in an instant.  I understood exactly what had happened. 

That twisted pinwheel had taken a bite out of itself.

For whatever reason, this particular pinwheel felt the need to pull a cruel prank on my child.  It had also tried to trick me into thinking that my toddler had taken the bite herself and then forgotten about it, but I would not fall into its trap.  I was no fool.

So I did what any rational mother with a limited supply of pinwheels would do.  I took the maimed roll from my distraught child, turned to face the other way, mashed the thing back into a shape moderately close to a circle, and placed it back into her little fingers.  She was elated to be given a “new” pinwheel and the world began to spin once more.

With the exception of the rare bowl of ice cream my husband and I attempt to tiptoe past our kids (with zero luck), I truly enjoy sharing all that I have with my children.  But being the craziest person living under this roof has always been my thing.  I am confident in my cutting edge techniques on making comments and choices that don’t just border on being nonsense – they are straight up bonkers.  But here she is infringing on my position as top lunatic, and she’s only two.  This kid has raw talent you just can’t teach, and her skills are increasing at an exponential rate.  Although I called it first, I think perhaps my reign is at its end.  I am being out-crazied by my toddler.

***MoJo***

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