remember this post? well, it seems FedEx caught wind of UPS’s coolness … so they staged three of *their* trucks to be in front of me at a light today. so i had to oblige them and take a picture.

i have to admit i still love that people notice i’m losing weight. it’s weird to hear people calling me “skinny” and “the incredible shrinking woman”, etc. i was always heavier than my sisters - so in my mind, i was always fat. looking back at pictures of myself in high school, i was really far from fat. i’m still 20 pounds away from my goal weight range but i’m not discouraged that the loss seems to have dramatically slowed down. i like how i look, how i feel, and i feel good about my progress. its just nice that other people notice too.

i’m reading Eat, Pray, Love. so far i really like it. it has made me realize that a short story i’m writing would do much better in first person. so now i have to go back and rewrite the entire thing!

i have some of the coolest friends in the entire universe. yes, i’m talking about you. thank you all for reminding me of who i am when i get so stuck in my own stuff that i get close to forgetting. i love you for it and can’t thank you enough. (and my sweetie gets this sentiment to the power of 10.)

i am now a full hour late in starting my day and i feel very peaceful about it. time to hit the shower.

The only way to achieve maximum openness is to arrive at every moment without a single preconception. Otherwise, we resist what doesn’t fit our model. Regardless of how much we know, or how evolved we’ve become, we must put every bit of that aside. We must step into the mystery naked and undefended.When we truly hate what’s happening, our instinct is to flee from it like a house on fire. But if we can learn to turn around and enter that fire, to let it burn all our resistance away, then we find ourselves arising from the ashes with a new sense of power and freedom. Sometimes, without any answers to hold onto, it seems like we’re nothing at all. Other times, overwhelmed by life’s roaring torrent, it seems like we’re everything at once. These two impressions are actually flipsides of the same coin. They’re a taste of what happens when the barriers of our personality become porous. We encounter life directly, without anything to mediate its intensity. We see clearly, in those moments, how the self we carry with us is no more or less than a tool of our organism, a system that allows us to function, but that also, miraculously, we have the ability to step right through.
–from 365 Nirvana, Here and Now by Josh Baran

from Tricycle.com - Daily Dharma

Now I have photographic evidence that Cleo is really Evil.

yesterday, joe & david met sweetie and i at the park by the beach. sweetie always carries a baggie of nuts in her car. a curious squirrel got to benefit.

and lastly, but not least, the four of us went to Saffon for dinner last night and were entertained by Celeste, a belly dancer! note: the food was incredible.
(go to the set on flickr for notes & descriptions)