I’ve always been a person who lived in my head.  Half of my life has been lived in my imagination and generally has no connection to what is actually happening in the life I’m living.  I’ve imagined a million futures for myself.  In my head I’ve been everything from a famous writer to a famous singer to a spy to a master criminal.  I like playing with alternative futures and speculating what might have happened if I’d gone right instead of left.   It’s kind of fun.

It didn’t take long for me to recognize the power of this imagination that I have.  I’m pretty big on visualization.  For me, it works.  I tend to imagine scenarios and try to work them out in my head before I play them out in real life.  I’ve imagined job interviews, speeches, presentations, meeting new people and a host of other situations so when those things happened in real life I was ready.   While I’m not a huge proponent of the whole affirmation movement, I do believe that visualization can help you be prepared for real life events.  I know it has worked for me.  That, sadly, is what has me worried at the moment.

Any of you who read here regularly know that one of the goals of my 40 Things Project is to go on five dates this year.  I want to meet someone and fall in love.  I want to have a supportive, loving relationship.  I just can’t imagine that happening.

Sure, I can imagine the romantic movie kind of love.  I can fantasize about ending up with George Clooney or Tim Omundson or any number of handsome men,  and have a lovely time doing it.  What I can’t do is fathom meeting an ordinary guy and falling in love.  I can’t envision having someone there for me day in and day out.  I can’t imagine some man picking me to love over everyone else.  I just can’t see it.

I have to confess that worries me.  I’ve always believed if I could envision it, I could make it come true.  I’m not saying it would be easy or quick, but I believed I could get it done.  Now I’m trying to imagine something that is really quite important to me, and I can’t seem to see it.   I don’t know how it will look.  I can’t decide how it will feel.  I’m not sure I even believe it could happen.

So I guess that’s the question.  If I can’t imagine it, can it happen?

I’m a bit of a control freak.  I’m a Type A personality and I like to know how things are going to go.  I want to manage my life so nothing bad happens and everything goes smoothly.   I’m not good with the unexpected and I’m awfully good at bargaining with a life that doesn’t accept bargains.  I keep trying to live up to my end of the bargain and then getting pissed when life doesn’t live up to it’s half of the deal.  As though life made a deal or even cares that I had expectations.  Still I keep banging my head against the same wall.

They say when the student is ready, the teacher appears.  In my case, my lesson about lack of control has been a little something called Afib.  For those who don’t know, Afib is a heart issue.  Basically the rhythm of your heart gets all screwed up.  Your heart races, you retain fluid, you get short of breath.  It’s not life threatening, unless left untreated over a long period of time, but it’s not fun.

Until last Sunday, it had been nine months since I’d had to deal with Afib.  I took my meds faithfully, right on time, every day.  I exercised.  I ate right.  I worked to minimize stress.  I got more sleep.  I did everything I could to live a heart healthy life and, in return, I expected Life to keep my heart healthy.  Except Life apparently didn’t get that memo.  This Easter saw me in the Emergency Room with a case of atrial flutter.  My bargain and all my hard work apparently didn’t matter at all.

I guess the Universe is trying to tell me something, and will keep bringing the lesson until I get it.  I can’t control my life or the people in it.  I can’t even control what my own body does.  All I can control is how I react to the circumstances of my life.   All I can do is go with the flow.

A lot of this year so far has been spent railing at the circumstances of my life.  I’m mad that I haven’t met the love of my life yet.  I’m bored with my job.  I’m angry that my body isn’t working right. I’m annoyed by this and depressed by that and generally grousing about things I can’t change.  Being the control freak that I am, I want to bend the world to my will, instead of bending to the will of the world.

The thing is, the world and the people in it, will do as they like regardless of what I want.  The only thing I can control is how I choose to react to what happens around me.  I can do my best to provide myself with opportunities to have the best circumstances possible, but I can’t make life work to suit me and my need for control.  All I can do is relax and swing at whatever gets thrown at me.   All I can do is live my life as positively and with the best attitude I possibly can.

My attitude, thankfully, is one thing I can control.

I don’t discuss politics or much of anything controversial on this blog.  Mostly I talk about my life and I leave the opinions out of it.  That’s largely because I know that it isn’t easy to convince other people to agree with you and a bit because I’m not generally the sort who goes on crusades.  I tend to keep my cards pretty close to my chest when it comes to what I think and what I believe.   I can, and do, lead, but I’m not so great when it comes to being a follower.

Still, ever once in a while something comes along that just gobsmacks me with its stupidity and I have to shake my head and wonder if we’re all really as dumb as this particular thing would make it appear.  In this case, the event in question is Earth Hour.   If you haven’t seen this yet, the idea is that everyone will turn their lights off for one hour starting at 8:30 p.m. on March 28.  Supposedly switching off your lights is a vote for Earth, while leaving your lights on is a vote for global warming.   There’s so much wrong with this idea I don’t even know where to start.

First of all, neither the Earth nor global warming care which way we vote.  I’m guessing most of the people for whom we actually could vote don’t care whether we turn our lights off or on either.   I highly doubt our elected officials, or the elected officials for any country are going to be running around counting who has their lights on and who has them turned off.  We know our planet has climate issues.  It’s not like a lot of people have been in the dark about this.  Except perhaps those who will voluntarily be in the dark tomorrow night.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, this is another example of a program that makes people feel like they’re doing something without actually doing anything at all.   It’s rather like sleeping in a cardboard box for a night to dramatize the plight of the homeless and then going back to your comfortable home the next day, it’s all show and no substance and it changes exactly nothing.

I’m about as liberal as they come, and I believe that people can bring about change, but they only way to effect that change is to do something.  Turning off your lights or sleeping in a box or doing a pantomime in the town square doesn’t accomplish a thing.  If you want things to be different you have to roll up your sleeves and make them different.  Buy the homeless man a sandwich.  Help build a Habitat for Humanity house.  Plant a tree.  Install solar panels.  Help educate others about cleaner burning fuels.  Do the work and take the time and make a real differnce.

What scares me the most is the idea that there are people out there who believe that something like Earth Hour is really doing something.  I’m sorry to say that it isn’t.  If you want to preserve the planet or attack any of the problems that face us, you have to be willing to do the work.  Sitting in the dark for an hour tomorrow isn’t going to change the fate of the planet or stop global warming.

Going out into the light and working your ass off to change things just might.

Unlike my other blog, When I’m Thin, the appearance of this blog hasn’t changed too much.  The original theme was purple, lots of purple, and it pretty much stayed that way.   Purple is one of my favorite colors, but the theme never felt quite right.  I also thought the type was a little small and maybe it was hard to read.  It just didn’t feel like the look of the blog reflected the spirit of the blog.

Now those who know me, particularly the long suffering Steve from Vanseodesign, will tell you that I know just enough HTML to be dangerous.  I can generally make changes to my blogs, but we can’t always be sure that the changes I make will work out as I wanted them to work out.  Steve has rescued me from self created blog meltdowns before, so I’m always a bit hesitant about making changes.  I’m a writer, not a coder.  I generally like it best when I can write the words and leave the problem of making them look pretty to others.

Still Settling for More needed a change.  I needed a change.  So I went looking for a new theme, and found Scribble Scratch and a lovely selection of Wordpress themes.  There were several I liked, but this one just seemed to stand out.  I liked the colors.  I liked the bridge leading off into the distance.  It just felt warm and soothing and right.

So, the blog got a makeover.  While I have to admit I secretly hope that everyone who visits here stops by for the writing, I do know that appearance does make a difference.  I hope you like Settling for More’s new look as much as I do.

First things first, I need to congratulate Debbie Lynne of On the Banks of Stony Creek on winning the Cooking Light Annual Recipes 2007. Debbie, please let me know where I need to send your cookbook. You can e-mail me at kristines.25 at charter dot net.

Second, I’m proud to announce that I actually have a recipe to talk about this week. Yes, I tried something new! One of the main problems I have is finding side dishes I like that use vegetables. I’m a meat and potatoes girl, and I’m not prone to making a side of corn or peas to go with my meal. To get around that, I try to find side dishes that use veggies.

I found this recipe for Mushroom Rice Pilaf on Allrecipes. It’s very simple and quite tasty. I used orange peppers and fresh mushrooms. I also omitted the salt and used no sodium bouillon. This cut the sodium content quite a lot. I also added a bit of Italian seasoning, which I thought pepped up the flavor a bit. The dish cooked in about 20 minutes and made a nice meal when paired with a baked chicken breast. This was an easy recipe to make and was quite flavorful, so I’d make it again.

If you’re interested in trying Mushroom Rice Pilaf yourself, you can find the recipe here on Allrecipes.

Now that I’ve finally discussed a recipe on Foodie Friday, I have a question I want to ask all of you. What do you prefer when you read a post about a recipe? Would you prefer a link to the recipe online if that’s possible, or do you like to see the recipe written in the post that discusses it? I’m new to this whole food blogging thing, so some advice would be appreciated.

I recently found a new blog that I am coming to absolutely adore.  The blog came to my attention through the Outdoor Bloggers Summit, the blogging organization I run.  At first glance, I thought that maybe Henhouse Pottery was a mismatch for our organization, but the more I read, the more I came to see that the writer of the blog, Julia, got it.  She understood how important it was to conserve our resources and protect the natural places we all love.  She also understood that humans need a connection to nature, and she’d set about finding ways to make that connection herself.

One way Julia, her husband Matt and her son Quinn connect with nature is through keeping bees.  I’ve never been a big fan of bees, but I’ve never spent a lot of time up close and personal with them either. Other than shooing them away when they get too close to me, I don’t think I’ve spent more than thirty seconds paying attention to bees.  Apparently, I’ve been missing a lot, at least according to Julia.

She’s written a book, which I was lucky enough to receive through winning a contest she had on her blog, about her family’s first year of beekeeping.   It’s called A Sweet Life, and it’s a terrific story of how one family learned to interact with nature and the lessons they took away from the experience.  The writing is funny and intospective and I walked away from the book with some new ideas, if only the idea that bees were my friend instead of my enemy.

The book is by turns funny and serious.  On one page you get the story of how a bee flew into Julia’s bee suit, or how she got stung.  On another page, you get thoughts like this, referring to a friend who was looking for meaning in a hard time she was currently enduring:

Maybe walking through the fire isn’t meant to change us into someone better… maybe the growth comes because we want it to, in our acceptance of the fact that there will always be a fire to walk through, and that the fire may never have a reason. We can either react to the things we cannot control or grow from the events that make us feel uncomfortable, uncertain, hurt and out of control.

There are a lot of terrific lessons in this book, and a great story.  You wouldn’t think something as simple as a glimpse into the life of a family learning to beekeep would be fascinating, but it is.  Julia has taken a lot of lessons from her journey as a beekeeper and she shares them in this book.  It’s a good read and I highly recommend it.

The manuscripts are currently up in the room designated as my office.  I started writing the first one, if memory serves, when I was in high school.  Others have followed over the years.  Some are no more than a few pages long.  A few are more substantial than that.  All are an attempt at talking about some portion of my past, of using words to bring sense and meaning to events that might well have neither.

All are unfinished.

When I started this blog,  one of the reasons that it came into being was to talk about the same subjects I had tried to deal with in the manuscripts.  Maybe it’s just me, but it seemed like there had to be a reason that the things that had happened to me happened to me.  If it was all random, if there was no rhyme or reason, if it was just bad luck or bad timing or bad karma, then it would all be that much harder to take.  Somewhere along the line, as a coping mechanism if nothing else, I decided these things were happening to me because I had the ability to tell my story, and maybe help others.  I was experiencing what I was experiencing so others could learn.

Yes, I have a lot of coping mechanisms.  Sometimes a messianic complex is one of them.

The only problem is that believing you’re supposed to tell your story and actually telling it can be two different things.  Lately I’m started to feel like my emotional striptease is never leading to the payoff.  I remove a glove, I slip off a shoulder strap, but I retreat behind the conveniently placed curtain at the end of the stage before you really get to see anything good.

Maybe some things are still to painful.  I know I still worry too much about what other people might think.  I’m always struggling to find a balance between what I owe myself and what I owe those who read these words.    Part of me thinks that telling my stories would be self indulgent at best and boring at worst and maybe I should just talk about cookbooks and rice pilaf.  Most of me knows that I think way too much.

In the end there is one fact that always remains.  I’ve been circling around some of these stories for 20 years or more.  The urge to write doesn’t stay with you that long unless you have something to say.

I’m just wondering if anyone would be interested if I decided to tell these stories.

Maybe I’m a little concerned the stories aren’t worth telling.

Mostly I’m just wondering how much is too much.

How much would you bare?

Inquiring minds, mine anyway, want to know.

I guess I’m in a giving mood this week.  First I decided to give away a Cooking Light cookbook on my other blog, When I’m Thin, on Monday.   Then, today, I decided to give away another Cooking Light cookbook on this blog in honor of Foodie Friday.  Heck, who cares that I don’t have a recipe story to share this week, I’m giving stuff away.

To give you some background on the cookbook I’m giving away, I have to first tell you that one of my favorite magazines is Cooking Light . This magazine has terrific recipes and has been a great help since I’ve been trying to learn to cook and eat in a more healthy manner.

If I have any quibble with the magazine at all, it would be that a lot of their recipes are still too high in sodium for my current diet. It would be nice to see more recipes aimed at specific dietary issues like gluten or sodium intake, but I do understand that the magazine has to appeal to as many readers as possible. Even with some of the recipes being outside my dietary restrictions I can always find one or two that fit right in. I’m actually building my own cookbook by keeping a binder of Cooking Light recipes that I’ve tried or want to try. Anyone who wants to eat healthy can learn a lot from that magazine.

Anyone who wants to eat healthy can learn a lot from their cookbooks too. Once a year they publish an Annual Recipe cookbook, which contains all of the recipes that came out in the magazine for that year. If you haven’t been getting the magazine, it’s a great way to get all the great recipes that you missed.

This week, in honor of Foodie Friday and because I want to share a great cookbook with those who read this blog, I’m giving away a copy of Cooking Light Annual Recipes 2007: EVERY RECIPE…A Year’s Worth of Cooking Light Magazine. As the title says, this is a year’s worth of recipes from Cooking Light Magazine. Think of all the great meals you could make using these recipes.

To be entered for the cookbook giveaway, simply leave a comment on this post recommending one thing I could do to make this blog and/or Foodie Friday more interesting. It’s that simple. Leave a comment and you’re entered. The giveaway will take place next Friday, so you have a week to leave your comments.

I guess we’ll call this Why Worry Wednesday.  I’ve been pondering something for  a while and it has really been brought home to me in the last few days.  When I started this blog I made the decision that I would talk about everything and I wouldn’t use a pseudonym.  I’d be me and whoever came here could learn all about me if that’s what they chose to do.  I wouldn’t sugarcoat and I wouldn’t refuse to talk about things because they were hard or uncomfortable or cast me in a unflattering light.  The goal was to work through my own issues and to maybe put some stuff out there to help others.

I never explicitly said anything, but I guess in my own mind I’d kind of divided my personal life and professional life into separate categories. Kind of like the little kid who puts their head under a blanket and thinks you can’t see them because they can’t see you, I assumed that if I didn’t talk about my work on this blog, my professional life, and those I knew in my professional life, would stay separate from what went on here.   It quickly became apparent that was not the case.

If you’re wondering why I thought that was a workable plan, or why I even thought about it at all, I have to explain the weird combination of neuroses that is me.  In my professional life I’m calm, competent and in control.  I can lead people.  I can make big decisions, take on tough challenges and often appear to have most, if not all, of the answers.   As long as I have a task in front of me and a role to inhabit, I’m golden.

Sadly, my personal life doesn’t work quite that way.  I often don’t know who to be when I’m being simply me.  I tend to procrastinate about doing things that will benefit me personally.   As my little freak out about dating has aptly illustrated recently, I have some personal issues.  There have been times in my past, and still are occasionally times today, when I’m anything but calm, competent and in control.   There are also times when I really, really don’t want anyone to know that.

I guess I’ve reached a turning point.  Either I stop telling the truth here on the off chance that someone from my professional life, or a friend I knew twenty years ago, or some member of my family might read what I write here, or I continue to be me and do what I do and take the consequences as they come.  I guess what it comes down to in the end is whether or not people will think less of me for what I write here.

I suppose what it really comes down to is will I really care if they do.

If I’m proud of what I’m doing here,  does what anyone else thinks really matter?

It shames me to admit this, but I’ve been slacking when it comes to number two on the 40 things list.  I have good intentions, but there just doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day, and work has been quite demanding lately, so on the weekends I just want to make something fast and easy which doesn’t require a lot of thought.  My goal was to expand my eating habits and I still want to do that, so I figured it was a good time to pull out my cookbooks and see what I could find.

One of the things I have never been able to make is roast chicken.  I seem to have a deficient roasting gene or something.  Every time I try to roast a chicken it comes out overcooked and dry or underdone and awful.  I despaired of ever being able to roast a chicken, and then I found a recipe in Betty Crocker’s Healthy Home Cooking: Over 400 Fast and Flavorful Recipes .  Instead of roasting the chicken, you cook it with broth in a Dutch oven.  It comes out moist and flavorful and perfect.  Best of all the recipe is low in sodium and healthy for you.  I love it.

One recipe that I do want to try comes to me from my Weight Watchers New Complete Cookbook.  It’s a recipe for Tuna Noodle Casserole.  I do want to start eating more fish, and tuna noodle casserole is a nice comfort food in colder weather,  so I should give it a try before Winter goes away completely.  It sounds yummy and it’s got some extra veggies and stuff that you don’t normally see in tuna noodle casserole.

Mainly I want to start eating healthier again.  I was doing really well for a while, but I’ve been slacking off a bit lately when it comes to vegetables and fruit.  I’m trying to remember to keep those things in my diet, and to plan my meals that vegetables play a bigger part.  I getting better about eating fruit, but I’m still not great about vegetables.  I seem to do best when I make stir frys or other meals in which vegetables play a part.  If I try to have the veggies separately I usually end up leaving them out.  I’m not sure why that is, but it happens quite a lot.

I do promise that Foodie Friday will be a weekly event from here on out.  Even if I don’t talk about a new recipe, I can talk about recipes I like, cookbooks I’ve tried, and what I’m doing to eat a healthier diet.   Hopefully some of what I say here will be useful to others.