lookin good

i just looked at my calendar and i have great jobs lined up this week. teaching yoga monday. helping a lady purge her apartment tuesday. organizing a 12 year old's room wednesday. meeting a new client thursday morning. but wait...oh crap...thursday afternoon and all day friday i am working with a strange client. thankfully nicoll is going to help me on the job so will help.
yep, this looks like a pretty good week.

apprehensive

today i am driving down to san carlos to organize a play area for a 4 year old. the mom uses this space also as a home office and a guest area. next week the grandma is visiting from london so the mom wants the place to look nice and neat. now it is not a big space and there is not a lot of stuff so i imagine this job taking me less than an hour. now my apprehension is that there is not much for me to do. silly i know but i don't want them to think "oh we could have done that ourselves". i am playing stupid mind games with myself. i just need to go and do the job and stop worrying what my client will think.
happy sunday.

triggers

Do you have trigger foods? I have heard one friend describe bananas as a trigger food. For some this means then consuming everything in sight. I don't have a trigger food. I have a trigger place. My trigger is Walgreens. Pretty much you could say I go to Walgreens every day. I buy everything from coconut water, to Trident gum,  to health care products to garbage bags for my organizing clients and everything in between. Walking in that store I am also drawn to the sweet (candy) and the savory (chips). Yesterday I went in to pick up a prescription and saw two little girls with their Mom wearing head bands with spiders on them. Yep, it is Halloween time. Instead of going straight to get my prescription instead I started my shopping experience in the seasonal aisle browsing holiday candy. Thankfully I stopped and reminded myself of how hard I worked in TRX class that morning and that I really did not need a Skors bar. I got my prescription and headed out the door.
Oh Walgreens how I love you but for one day I resisted your charms.

guilty treat

once a month i bring in someone to do a deep clean of my house...floors, bathrooms, dusting. i know i can do it but after working all week long organizing people's homes, i just don't have the energy to clean my house. for the most part i keep my place pretty neat and clean so this deep clean just bring things back to that special post-spring cleaning feel. now it does feel strange to sit in my back room while someone else cleans my place. physically there is nothing wrong with me except i just don't want to do it. to add to it, i usually do more cleaning after the person leaves. strange right? it is like the person cleans and then i do the extra bonus stuff.
yep, i am officially a wierdo and i am totally ok embracing my inner weird!

positive feedback

it's amazing what a few encouraging words can do for your inner self. yesterday, i took my regular trx class ( www.trxtrainingcenter.com) and was positioned next to the guy, randy who invented it. anyway, it was day two back after being sick for two weeks. yesterday's class was brutal but having randy next to me helped to motivate me. thankfully, i got through the whole class. that in itself lifted my spirits. and then...randy told me "you are looking strong". yep, play the music. my smile went from ear to ear. i managed to get out a "thank you".
his 4 words made my day.
that's right i am strong. rock on people. rock on.

tonight

i just got back from dominican college in san rafael. i went to see the author elizabeth gilbert discuss her new novel the signature of all things. my main goal was to get the book and have it signed by the author so i could give it as a gift to my sister-in-law regina.
well getting there was a nightmare - traffic, traffic, traffic. what should have been a maximum 45 minute drive took almost 2 hours. so by the time i arrived, the auditorium was packed. i sat in the last row until...i noticed two older ladies come in and just walk straight up to the stage and were seated in a couple seats off to the the side. huh...interesting. so i picked myself up, walked down the aisle, asked the usher if i could do the same and voila i was seated  market VIP seat with a perfect view. and at the end of the lecture i was one of the first 30 people to get my book signed. yeah baby. anyway, the interview was fun, interesting and i learned a few things.
elizabeth was interviewed by a critic from the new york times. i wrote down a few thoughts that i am going to spin around in my head for awhile. here they are:

- not that many novels about women who love their work
- feed your passion and your passion will feed you
- live a full life devoted to your passion
- we get addicted to each others wrongs

and the most important to me...

- people want someone who can say "i have got the way to do that"

this last statement pretty much explains what i do for a living. most of my clients have chaos and clutter and want to know how to get out of it. then i come in and say, "i have got a way to do that". one client once told me that she liked the fact that i had opinions on organizing her home and vocalized it. she said most people are pretty wish washy and i just put it out there.

thanks elizabeth gilbert for the reminder oh and yes thanks for the signed novel!

this blog

i really need to figure out what the heck i am doing with this blog. it kind of has a little bit of everything going on ...some organizing tips, my random thoughts of life and just plain old babble. so what is the purpose of this? i did have an organizing blog attached to my organizing website and that kind of fell by the way side. i also have an organizing page and a yoga page on fb. basically i have a whole lot of on line components but truthfully they are all pretty random.
so what is the purpose of this blog? originally it was just to start getting me to write. and i guess that still is the case but what is my focus? i think it is time for me to narrow this down. hmmm...i think my focus will be "andrea's life observations". then on my two fb pages those can be focused to their specific themes - yoga and organization.
yeah i like it. that works. observations!