Rae Roy

Today, a colleague asked me how I was managing to work three roles right now. I said that sometimes I didn't know. The truth is that I've been here before. Years ago, when I was doing project management and/or project coordination, the place I was working at was being divested. For those who don't know what that means, a chunk of the company was being sold off. A number of people jumped ship and those left all took on extra duties. But the skills I learned for managing projects are ones I use time and again when life gets hectic like this. I create excel tracker sheets to help me keep on top of things because if it just stays in my email, it gets lost. My planner helps me too. I also place a more important role on eating healthy, so that I have the energy to withstand it all and to help prevent colds. Things like knitting, reading, TV, and music help lower my stress levels too. And because I'm doing so much, my writing isn't moving forward as much as I would

I've reached the age where my body has decided to have issues. Not constantly, but frequently. Sprinting for a bus can leave me with an injured ankle simply from using it, not from actually twisting it in ways it shouldn't move, just a fairly normal activity. I guess I need to warmup and stretch before walking to the bus now. About a decade ago, I was given a guard for my teeth due to grinding. And for the next month, I need to sleep with wrist braces because my doctor thinks I'm developing carpal tunnel. Really, I'm surprised it hasn't happened before now given my level of computer use. My mom had it years ago and had to have surgery. From reading books of all things. Anyway, he thinks if I sleep with braces on that it may be enough to keep it at bay because the nerves will get 7-8 hours of rest. After 4 days and nights, the tingling has been reducing, so I'm hopeful. "Your body is like an elastic." -Georges St. Pierre I recently stocked up on heal

I'm enjoying blogging again now that I've returned to Blogger. I can just write a post and choose to bold a few words or make some links without it being cumbersome. And I don't miss having both tags and categories. Having just tags is simpler. Sometimes I feel like this world has gotten feature heavy. I was able to get the vast majority of my posts automatically moved over. I cleaned up the tags. There are a few decisions to make, but largely I'm happy with it. The missing posts are all from 2019 as far as I can tell. I'll be slowly manually copying them over soon. Otherwise, I need to tweak my Poetry section. I think I can link to the tag. Right now, a lot of the poems were pages rather than posts, so I have a little work to do to have it all working how I envision. FITNESS I really enjoyed Iaido last Sunday. Class was cancelled today due to the amount of ice everywhere that has been covered with snow. Given how the rest of my week was, I'm not upset abou

A legend in the roller derby community is gone. How and why, I do not know. What I do know is that many are reeling from the news, myself included.  Hanna was known for big hits and a brilliant personality. I experienced her hits first hand as she sent me flying a number of times. Then she'd smile and make sure I wasn't hurt.  I stumbled onto this clip on Youtube from 2012 and I think it shows Hanna as many knew her. She was a force off the track too. As a cofounder of the award-winning Top Shelf Distillers , she gave much to the surrounding Ottawa Valley community.   Hanna was a relatively petite woman and it was she who taught me that I could be mighty despite my size. I wouldn't be the woman I am today if I hadn't had the pleasure and the privilege of sharing the track with her.  I'm shocked. I'm sad. I'm upset I'll never see her or speak to her again.  R.I.P. #10. Rae-Rae

I've been making a lot of changes lately around my home and some of them might seem a little odd, but they're making me happy. One thing I've done is taken apart my dining table. I never eat in there or have people over to eat. It was just another horizontal surface that would collect things like receipts, odd screws from various projects, and countless piles of paper. I had been frustrated because of the clutter it encouraged, but also because I didn't have a space for my Yamaha keyboard. I had been trying to use my keyboard in the living room, but it felt too cluttered and it wasn't sitting at the right height. With it now in my dining room, I was able to relocate my storage bench, which happens to be the perfect height to sit at while playing my keyboard. I now have much more breathing room. There is still a lot of mess to handle here yet, but I'm making solid progress. A lot of people suggest the bedroom is the place to start when decluttering, but I haven&#

I'm annoyed with Wordpress right now and have been since they introduced the block editor. I've been wanting to take a pen name anyway, so I'm trying Blogger out. Remember when I posted that pretty list of 20 goals , many of which were daily for 20 minutes? Yeah, well, there's not enough time in my day for them because I'm not a robot! I know. I'm shocked too. Anyway, I've had to tweak things for the round. There are two things I want to mainly focus on this year more than anything and those are writing and French. So here are my Round 1 goals with an update on how I'm doing so far: FINANCES - 260 minutes of budgeting: I have been working on this weekly. FITNESS - 60 home-cooked meal days (3 meals = 1 day): I have only had one lunch that I didn't make. I'm actually aiming for one 1 day of eating out per week versus nearly every day. - 60 workouts: 3/7 possible so far, but I've been doing a lot of decluttering. - 5/20 lbs l

Mostly, I’ve been planning for the new year, but I discovered I know Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. It was a recollection under the influence that brought this to light. I also discovered I still suck at drawing, but I’m okay with that. I used to think I had to be good at everything, and I’ve realized that’s just not so. Some friends and I recently hit up a local board game pub. It was a pretty fun night. The first game was Balderdash and I was terrible at it. Because I was the writer in the group, some of my friends thought I should be more embarrassed about it and hide the fact that I don’t spend all my free time learning advanced vocabulary. But I’m not upset about it. Why? Two reasons: 1. I now know what I don’t know. 2. If one takes a close look at the top selling novels on the market, the level of the language used is not the level of many of the words in Balderdash. Not that I’m comparing my own work to those, but audience is what matters in writing. To me, it is far better to e