SLACKER-  noun: a person who shirks their work or duty                ex. Beki Herrbach  That’s me. Yep.  A bona fide slacker. Do you remember a certain promise I made. A promise to Trim the Fat? Yeah. I knew I shouldn’t have opened my big fat mouth, or typed it, rather, with my chubby little fingers. I thought that by making my promise on here, in front of all of you, it would hold me accountable. I would have to get myself out there and do something. Well, that was before I knew. That was before I knew what a huge SLACKER I was. Ok. *Moment of truth* I already knew I was a slacker. Don’t hate me. That is why I had to make the promise to exercise publicly, but I’ll be darned if even that wasn’t enough to make me do it! Accountability. That is the key word. The problem with how I did it was that I thought by sending a promise out into cyberspace, I would actually follow through. Like, my readers would come through my computer each morning and yell at me to get my lazy butt up and exercise. Of course not! I need a REAL LIVE PERSON to actually make me do it. Every time I overcame a challenging obstacle, or accomplished some difficult physical goal, I had an accountability partner or group. When I ran my first half marathon, I did it with Team In Training. A year later when I tackled the Disney Full Marathon, I trained and ran with two close friends. I could not have finished without them. (they had to practically drag me the last 6 miles!) When I trained for and completed two Sprint distance triathlons,...

Food. Grocery shopping. Menu plans. Meals.  Every day things, right? Not a problem, right? Wrong. For some reason, I have struggled with the basic concept  of these four things for as long as I can remember. I don’t like thinking about food. I hate grocery shopping. Menu planning stresses me out. And the thought of three meals a day always comes as a surprise to me. You see. I’m a grazer. Like a horse, or a goat. I like to eat a little bit, here and there, all day long. I don’t necessarily need to sit down to a big meal at any time of the day. I feel the best when I graze throughout the day. My family, on the other hand, expects there to be food prepared at meal times. The nerve. Like I said before. I am always surprised when 5:00 comes around and they are looking at me expectantly like I should know what they want. WHAT? Um…what’s for dinner? Dinner? oh. Yeah. I guess you guys want dinner. Well…it’s going to be great! (as soon as I figure out what it is) Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not always so unprepared. I go through phases where I try really hard. I’ll use a new meal planner, or an online weekly menu plan. I’ve even tried  batch cooking and freezer cooking. But, like the best phases, mine come and go. Especially when things are extra busy around the house. Cooking seems to be the first thing to get chucked out the window. We tend to have a lot of YOYO nights. YOYO = You’re On Your Own The time has come for me to break this cycle!  July is going to be a very busy month for me. I...

I am about to do something that makes me very uncomfortable. Well, two things actually. Show you my messes, and then clean them. Let me explain myself. It doesn’t actually make me uncomfortable to clean my messes…I don’t specifically enjoy cleaning…but uncomfortable? No. It does however, make me extremely uncomfortable to have someone see those messes. I am one of those types who is really good at the ten minute tidy. I can pick up my house and make it look “company decent” pretty quickly. However…don’t look in my laundry room. Don’t open that door….and whatever you do…DON’T go in my bedroom. I am really good at hiding my clutter. I’m a closet clutter-er. Today, in an attempt to get the mess under control…I’m “outing” myself. Oh boy. This is going to be tough. I really don’t want to show you. But, if I show you, I know I will make myself clear out the clutter JUST so I can take after pictures and prove to you that I do know how to make it look pretty. You see. I can’t think amid a mess. I hate mess. If the house is cluttered, my brain is cluttered. I have to clean the kitchen before I can make a mess in the kitchen. Is anyone else like that? If I know I have a day off, I need the house to be clean, or I absolutely can not enjoy that day off. Otherwise, I will sit around looking at the mess and it will start to bother me. Then it will really start to irritate me. Then there is a festering somewhere in my gut and I get the creepy crawlies all over my skin. It actually manifests into a physical reaction. I almost need...

I am in a book club. I love being in a book club because I love to read. Well, I love to read good books. Ok, I love to read good fiction books. I love to read good, fiction books that aren’t so intellectual that they make my brain hurt. See, for me, the purpose of reading a good book is to take a break from reality. An escape so to speak. When I am reading a good book, I lose track of everything else.  I love getting lost in the story, getting to know the characters as if they are real. This is something that drives my husband crazy. I will start telling him about a book I am reading, describing in detail what is happening, or what someone is going through. He will be listening intently at first…and then, it will dawn on him. “Wait..Is this true?” He will ask. No, it’s in my book. “Then… why would I care?” He just doesn’t get it. This brings me to book club. A group of women who get it. We read the same book. We get to know the same characters. We feel their pain, we laugh with them, cry with them, sometimes yell at them. Then we get together and spend several hours discussing how the book made us feel. Whether or not the author did a good job. Who relates to which character. And we eat. We always eat. Sometimes if we all agree that the book was a flop, we spend our time discussing life instead of the book. I really enjoy that too. We then pick a new book, and hope for the best. My problem lately though is this. It is getting to the point where I have NOT...