M.J. Compton's Blog, page 34

Road Trips and Friendships

I love a road trip with the right people. I’m lucky enough to have the right people in my life. On a recent journey, the driver had picked up several music CDs from the library. One of them was Awesome Mix Volume 1 from the Guardians of the Galaxy  movie. While singing along and chatting, […]

#UpbeatAuthors Don’t Dwell

One of my brain’s favorite past times is reminding me of every stupid thing I’ve said in a social situation (as an introvert, I’m socially awkward, so this can go on for hours!), every mistake I made raising my children, things at various Day Jobs I could have handled better, and so on. Sometimes I […]

Quirk Question

One of life’s quirks that annoy me: The 10-key calculator/adding machine has been around for a long time. Touch-tone phones came around in the 1970s. Why aren’t the key pads the same? The numbers 4-5-6 and 0 are in the same position, but the others are not. My guess is because alphabetic characters were assigned […]

#UpbeatAuthors: Tips for Making It Through Hard Times

A Day Job co-worker and I were talking the other day. We’ve both been through some rocky patches in our lives. Different stuff, but life-changing events. And we both said the same thing: staying in the normal helped. No matter what happens to you, life continues. Jobs, families, bills. Too often, the grief, the panic, […]

Hydration

The last time I went to the doctor, he told me I was dehydrated. I try very hard to drink water throughout the day, but am not always successful. My solution to that is to keep several insulated containers of cold water at my desk. Doing this has helped. At home is another story. I […]

#UpbeatAuthors: Positive Indulgences

I do tend to indulge myself. I can, so why not? That hasn’t always been the case. One of my more recent indulgences is attending the (almost) monthly writing retreats at Thistle Dew.  For many years, other obligations prevented me from attending.  Times change. Commitments change. These writing retreats come in handy. They’re a great […]

Cast Iron

I hang out on Facebook a lot. I like it there. It’s a great way to stay in touch with people. One of the things I see on a regular basis is a photo of a cast iron frying pan and the question, “Have you ever used one of these?” My answer: the only thing […]

#UpbeatAuthors: Self-Help Books

I’ve read a lot of self-help books in my time. Most of them haven’t stuck. Oh, there was one–I can’t remember the title or the author–where the author said if one more person/article/guru suggested getting up an hour earlier in order to accomplish whatever it was they were selling, she was going to do damage […]

#Baseball

It’s baseball season. I like to accompany my husband to the local Triple A team’s games.  But I always feel like a pack mule. We need to take this, need to shlep that. So, even though there are probably a hundred tote bags in our house, I finally broke down and bought one just to […]

#UpbeatAuthors: Next Step on the Ladder

I am currently in a strange state of waiting. Or maybe it’s a holding pattern. I’m facing retirement from my day job within the next five to ten years. Hard to believe the time has come to start thinking about that, but there you have it. Another rung on the ladder of my life. I […]