You Have a Guest

I don't know what came over me, but I volunteered to be one of eight guest bloggers on my friend Natalie's blog while she spends the week in Buenos Aires and Mexico City.

It was actually a lot of pressure to deliver. If you've read my blog before you know I'm not overly concerned with the quality of content I post here. But I didn't want to tarnish her blog's good name with tales of dropping kids off at the pool and homeless men urinating in milk cartons. I mean, she's legit! People other than her family members comment and she has lurkers revealing themselves left and right.

Again, pressure to deliver.

It was difficult, but I came up with something. And by 'something' I mean 'a novel'. If you're interested, you can find it here.

PS - She's one of my favorite bloggers so you should add yourself to her long list of lurkers.

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It's coming down to the wire on my assigned day of guest blogging - in fact, for you East Coasters it's already Tuesday and I've missed the boat - and I'm feeling the pressure. Who knew blogging on a schedule would be so hard? Lucky for me I rock the West Coast, Seattle to be exact, and still have time. But I guess I wouldn't be me if I didn't sprinkle every assignment with a little procrastination. By way of introduction, I'm stephanielynn and am a friend of Nat's from her Utah (post-college) days. We first bonded in the workplace and over many, many baskets of rolls at The Texas. The bonding continues from afar over things like Friday Night Lights, RW/RR Challenges, SYTYCD...you know, the finer things in life.

This morning I was thinking about how habit rules my life without me even realizing it. And I would imagine that I'm not alone. This thought came to me today after I had some laptop trouble at work. Between the hours of 8:30 and 10:00am I received the blue screen of death upwards of seven times always followed by my computer automatically restarting. Not exactly ideal in terms of productivity. After my new IT (best) friend took a look he announced, "I think you might have a virus".

Perfect. My computer caught the swine flu.

Thirty minutes later and I had my very own "loaner laptop" to get me through the day. I had my email. I had the Internet. I should have been set, right?

WRONG.

I may as well have been my 85 year-old grandfather trying to figure this thing out. I had no links saved as favorites. I struggled to remember passwords. There were no contacts auto-populating in my emails. My shortcuts to files were no longer on my desktop. Not to mention the loaner introduced me to the world of Vista.

Oh boy. I was lost.

And this led my mind to wander through all of the habits I've fallen into on a daily basis and marvel at how my life could get so turned upside down by the slightest unbalance in my routine. Like the time a weekly report at work got delayed by ONE day and it felt as though the world would end. What?! You mean I have to analyze this data on THURSDAY? But that's what I do on WEDNESDAY! Can. Not. Compute. System. Crashing. And then my head exploded.

So I've decided to give myself a challenge - feel free to join me. The challenge is this: To simply be more aware. To live consciously instead of just going through the motions. And to possibly throw myself a curve ball every so often.

We'll start off slow. Maybe tomorrow morning I'll buy a different flavor of Vitamin Water. Or I might just sleep on the left side of the bed tonight instead of the right. Or if I'm feeling really crazy, I'll analyze that data on Friday instead of Wednesday.

But let's not get too carried away.

You can find me here: http://thehardestthingandtherightthing.blogspot.com/
(And let's not judge the name of my blog, okay? We'll just let that one slide.)