We’re renovating our Master bathroom, and it’s just as fun and exciting as it sounds. Mike is pretty handy, and I have some skills of my own, so we’re doing all the work ourselves. Obviously, we aren’t casting and pouring our new countertop and sink, and we’re not molding the tile for the floor one by one, but we’ll be tearing it all out, pulling off the enormous mirror that covers one entire wall (which I am THRILLED to be rid of, thank goodness), ripping up old linoleum, breaking off the gad-awful frosted shower door and throwing away every single piece of brass fixture in the room. When it’s done, the new tile floor will contrast nicely with Antique Blue paint,(formerly dark {DARK} teal green wallpaper <— [ugh] ), the Hollywood light fixture will be in the trash and a much smaller mirror will grace the wall. Plated nickel fixtures will soften the whole room.

Here is the BEFORE shot:
The walls had the same dark teal green of the countertop, which made the room feel so small and closed off. I should have taken a shot of that before we ripped it all off. That brass….. ugh. See that mirror that extends along the entire wall to the shower? That’s going away.   I don’t like that there isn’t a single spot in the bathroom to stand where you can’t see yourself in that mirror.

January is like that. There is renovation everywhere. Changing your life is hard. And it’s forever. The wellness journey I began when I was 33 is now nearly 17 years in process. I’ll never be finished with it. Each year that goes by adds another challenge, or change, to the equation. I’m OK with it. For you, in your process, please be OK that it will take time and a lot of effort, and don’t think that it will be easy. I’ve been often kicking and screaming my way to well-being, burrowing down in my bed making a million excuses why I don’t need to get up and go swimming at 8:00am on a Monday morning. But I only hurt myself when I do that. So I shake out the cobwebs and gather my swim bag. After I’m finished, I’m always, always glad I went.

I made a few decisions about my little space here on the web, too. There are a lot of words inside of me that are clamoring to be heard, and in past years, I’ve been focusing this space on just the foods that pass through my life, and not connecting the food with the thoughts, the life and the faith that also feeds my soul. Everything is entangled in one big web, and all of it is important, and if you come here for the food, you’ll still get that. But there will be so much more, pieces of me that, up until now I’ve pushed aside as irrelevant. There is so much more to feeding ourselves than just putting food in our mouths, and I want to be able to explore all of that.

One last aspect of blogging that I’m completely turning my back on is sponsored posts and product reviews. It seems that every PR company out there wants to send you a pitch for you to post to your blog [for free. Right.]  Why this is considered appropriate, I’ll never know. I’m not a successful blogger by any means, so I don’t get many product offers any longer, and a few that I agreed to try recently ended up being awful, and there was no way I could post about that. I received several wonderful cookbooks at the end of 2013, but never found the time to offer up even a minor review, and that just seems wrong to accept something for free and not give back.  So I’m done. I might talk about a product I love, but it won’t be due to anyone’s urging other than my own. I recall, with a deep sense of disappointment, that there used to be a time when blogging was fun, when it wasn’t all just pitches for products and sidebars jammed with anointed badges trumpeting accomplishment and I really long for that simplicity again.

It may never happen, but it doesn’t hurt to try. I’ve never been one to jump on the blogging bandwagon and be like everyone else. I hope that’s why you continue to come here, for a different, or refreshing perspective. I hope you continue to stop by for a chat.