Divorce will do that to you. Dividing up your children’s hearts will do that to you. And it hangs you all out naked in a blowing wind that you haven’t had to feel for years. Not since before you married and had children.

This blog didn’t used to be naked. It used to be safe, cozy, funny, and honestly, a bit walled up against the ravening forces of a slowly dissolving marriage and family. I used to hide behind it and write only the best of our lives in a way that I hoped, with a fevered pitch, would be how everything ended up. Wrote what I was very much trying to create for my family on a daily basis. I wrapped my arms around my young children, squoze my eyes shut, and knew with nothing but a force of will that my life and marriage were going to work out. And I blogged. Hard. From Creative Thinkery, to Janiel Miller: Life in Bits, then splitting off onto Three Gnomes, Smashing Stories, Mormon Momma, LDS Music Universe, and eventually The American Fork Citizen and Meridian Magazine. It was a solid effort.

But the imagery that I felt so hard, and wrote so hard, and tried to flow through my children’s lives didn’t save the actual reality of our lives. It gilded things, but left the center what it was. And now it is what it is: a bit more real. Larger-and-smaller. And not yet back into a safe rhythm. My now mostly adult children square up and move ahead. Because they are that way. But their hearts are hurting. And I helped do that, though not on purpose. I tried. We all tried. But the weight of all that trying broke it, you know? Not my children’s trying; mine and my ex-husband’s. It shouldn’t have been that hard. But it was. And it broke. And now we are something new.

Which is not the worst thing. I mean, we will heal. Are healing. Choosing the new. But for now, wow. We just need to feel it. And maybe not have such a veneer and so many walls and so much trying. Right now our lives are not social-media worthy, because they are real. I’m okay with that. So are my kids–who are so very good. And that’s not social-media glitz. They are finding their depth and choosing to pull it to the surface. I’m proud of them. And want to hug them into the next part of their lives. But that would probably bug the living shortcake out of them, so I won’t. At least not externally.

Meanwhile, we will just live. And cook. And work — hopefully. I’m still on the hunt for that elusive new career. And we will laugh. But it will be real, and it will be whatever we feel like, whenever we feel like it.

So, stay tuned if you want to come along. I’m not really sure what for yet. But honestly, I think it will be something good.

The post Well That Was Different: Living the Divorce I Never Wanted, and Being Just Fine. first appeared on Janiel Miller - We Got This. .

But . . . by show of hands, how many of you know what Labor Day is all about, besides sending summer off with a bang? Yeah, me neither. I mean, I know we don’t have to work or go to school. We can’t wear white after it. And Americans consume 800+ hotdogs per second in backyards across the country while celebrating it. Sooo . . . what’s the party for?

Well, I did a little Googly-ness this week and discovered that, in fact, Labor Day was instituted for the American Laborer, not Oscar Meyer or white pants. Because the American Laborer was getting fed up with their narsty hours and pitiful pay. So, to chill them out Grover Cleveland threw a holiday onto the books and sent everyone off to eat those 800+ hotdogs. Which apparently worked. Scary meat = Labor Rights.

Oohhkay. I still don’t get it. I just know I’m grateful I get to spend a day goofing around with my family a mere week after spending two-point-five months goofing around with them in the summer sun.

And I know I'm not the only one awash in gratitude. Talk to any emergency room doc and you’ll learn that Labor Day could be renamed “Cram In Every Activity You Didn’t Do Over the Summer Plus a Lot of Really Stupid Ones Your Mom Would Never Let you Do” Day. Because according to my Bro-in-law’s bro, that’s the day his ER fills up with more people who have power-nailed roof tiles to their hand, or embedded tire spokes in their calf doing half-gainers off a cliff into the swimmin’ hole on their bike, than any other. It pays the ER Laborer’s bills. Well that is worthy of celebrating! I am totally supportive of that! Especially as I’ve never done anything stupid this time of year to put myself in the ER with everyone else.

*cough*

Except for, you know, that one Labor Day I fell off my son’s bunk bed while tucking him in and slammed the living shortcake out of my left ulnar nerve. It put me in a medical wrap that totally did something weird to my hand.

No, it did. My hand turned blue. The whole hand, fingers and all. And it was the middle of the night so I had to go to the ER and was probably going to need surgery to fix whatever the heck was wrong with me. I might lose my hand! And it was going to require all of the ER Laborers to figure it out—which none of them could. They even called my elbow doctor, but he’d never heard of that before. And holy cow was I going to die? Was I?

No. I was not. But I was going to dye. Turned out I was wearing new jeans and had spent the holiday resting my aching arm and fingers on those freshly dyed pants. The deathly hand disease washed right off the second I got back home from the ER, and about two seconds before I ate my hot dog. Awe. Some.

So maybe some of us aren’t quite mature enough to celebrate Labor Day yet. Honoring labor rights is important, but clearly the day is also responsible for removing some of our brain cells. Happy Back To School Day instead. ‘Cuz there’s irony in that.

The post Labor Day – Whattup with That? first appeared on Janiel Miller - We Got This. .

Or Chun Wei, whose concern for me is so urgent that she didn't even have time to write more than one sentence demanding that I click on the link and get in touch with her immediately. Oh Em Gee! Whatever is it? Could my two million dollar grant for studying tsetse fly biorhythms have come through? And all I have to do is click on that link and leave a credit card number so they’ll have a place to transfer all the free money from that one really rich village in China? Dudes! This makes total sense!

And then there's Neal Trotter, bless his heart. A philanthropist from the UK who chose ME out of all the people in America, to be a recipient of two million five hundred thousand GPB – part of the seven million he won in the lottery – just because his son Joe died, and Neal wants to make the world a better place. So he figured he'd start with me because I'm so awesome. And famous. You know how I'm so utterly famous that Neal from the UK knows who I am? And how very much I could use two million five hundred thousand GPB – which, by the way, I don't know what that stands for. I mean, I looked it up, and Wikipedia says "GPB" Stands for "British Pound Sterling." Um. Gosh, I hate to be a rude little famous person, but I noticed that "British Pound Sterling" starts with BPS, not GPB. Soooo. Maybe this is . . . a joke? Or something? Unless GPB is pronounced "Gritish Pound Berling" and I just never knew it.

Wow. I guess maybe I don't know very much after all. I am sort of ignorant. Maybe all of these good people aren't spammers at all. Maybe they really are concerned for my well-being. I mean, Neal is trying to give me some of his hard-won Gritish Berling, after all. And Chun, CHUN! Look at her! She trusts me so much she doesn't even tell me what she wants to get in touch with me for! She just asks me to click and knows I will. That's amazing. Especially in this world! Wow. And then there's Dennis, bless him. Dennis who knows, just from the way I use my Crisco, that I am the perfect person to invest in his Nigerian Oil company. Sight unseen. Credibility unchecked. Existence completely Non.

My friends, I am on it. The world is about to become a better place.

Gosh, I love autumn.

The post Have a Little Spam and Cheese first appeared on Janiel Miller - We Got This. .

And remember how, now that you’re an adult and have kids, or work with kids, or are related to kids, or occasionally see a kid on the street, summer break still lasts approximately 2.9 million years? And since you are peri-menopausal, that giant sun-drenched, face-melting, kid-filled swath of 100-degree heat drives you at a mad gallop toward the crisp air, falling leaves, gingerbread, and school-uniform-plaid of Autumn?

Fall is the season when finally, finally I can throw away all those bags of grape popsicles in my freezer — the victims of grape popsicle prejudice, poor little things.  (Popsicle companies totally know kids love the more expensive root beer and cherry flavored treats best, so they put three of them into a bag of one hundred grapesicles, thereby forcing delirious, face-melted moms all over America to  buy more bags in order to quell their children’s root beer/cherry-lust. It’s a coup, I tell you.)

Fall, quite frankly,  is the season when mothers the world-over secretly dance in the streets because the popsicles are gone, the house is emptying, and their kids are going back to school.

Look, I love my kids. You love my kids. I mean your kids. They came out of our bodies (a good portion of us), gave us stretch marks, influenced us to give up careers — or at least alter them — and made us forage through parts of our brain that would never have seen the light of day otherwise. They challenge us, bend us, shock us, amaze us, warm us, enliven us, and weird us out. What in the world would we do without them?

Just ask any mom who has sent her kid back to school after a long, hot summer. She’ll tell you what in the world we do without them.

We run errands in the quiet of our own company. Maybe listen to a little Christmas music in September if we feel like it. Or some ABBA. We get the whole house cleaned in one afternoon without having to access our Nag-i-fier even once. We think in complete sentences, actually getting to the ends of them! We take a moment at lunch to read a book, get a degree, go to work without worrying about who has tied whom to what and lit what on fire at home, grab lunch with some gal-pals we haven’t seen in ages, run to the gym, plan our meals for the entire month, and finish writing the novel we’ve been working on. We might even write a letter to someone.  A real one! On paper and everything!

And then, we who no longer have our kids charging around us at the end of summer, well, we . . . we . . .

Die of boredom. And a bit of heartache.

How long does it take for a hundred and eighty days to go by?

The post School Starts Again! Huzzah! I Think . . . first appeared on Janiel Miller - We Got This. .

One of my mini-me's is going to be taking a horseback riding course with his cousin in the next few weeks. And I have to say that I honestly didn't see that coming from this snowboarding-karate-nerf-dude-man. But I guess it's in his blood. I mean I totally rode horses when I was younger. Well, a horse. When I was first married. Practically the same thing. And speaking as a pro, I'm a bit nervous for my rather adrenalin-laden boy to hop up on some bronco and actually stay there without getting launched headfirst into the bushes. It's challenging. I would know.

My husband grew up on a farm in I-dee-hoe (that's how they say it up there. No really.) He spent long summers — much longer than the ones we have now — driving tractors, thinning beets, milking cows, bailing hay, and yes, riding his father's stallions. His dad loved stallions. There are pictures of that man sitting astride his steeds, gazing off into the Idaho Sunset, obviously dreaming of winning a triple crown. Or maybe even a quadruple. His were good horses.

So naturally, once I married into the family I was expected to at least try to get up in the saddle at some point and stay aboard the thing for a respectable amount of time. But I was terrified. Have you seen horses? They're forty feet off the ground, can crush a human being's entire skeletal structure with the tap of one hoof, and have nostrils the size of my head. But my first summer as a Miller I figured if I wanted to fit in with my huz's crowd, I'd better establish myself as a country girl instead of a woman who  grew up around air bases and wouldn't know a pommel from a P-39.

One day my lovely bro-in-law decided it was time for me to learn to ride. But I was going to learn to ride real. Like without a saddle. The boy was nice, though. Said he'd get up right behind me to make sure I didn't fall off. Filled me with confidence.

Well, we went out to the driveway, and there stood the flame-eyed, foam-flecked beast I was to take a trot around the pasture on. I knew that if I didn't ooze confidence I was toast. And the way that animal threw disinterested contempt at me from it's blood-red eyes, I knew I was going to have to ooze it hard. So I leveled a gaze at him that said, "Please don't throw me, horsey. I'll do anything you want!" And when he snorted and looked away, I knew I had him.

Bro-in-law sort of wrangled me up onto our ride, despite nearly losing a nose to my flailing knees. Then, once I was situated on the fat sweaty thing (it makes me feel better to call the horse fat and sweaty. It wasn't. It was sleek and completely justified in looking down its equine nose at me), the boy leapt up behind me. Then he began giving me instructions. Lots of them. Designed to keep us safely astride and dignified. But this is what I heard:

"Grab the buzzzzzzz bzzzzz hold on with your knees bzzzzzz bzzzzz won't fall bzzzzzzz bzzzzz long way down bzzzz bzzzzzz with your knees bzzzzzzzzzzz…"

Then we were off. Horseface took a step. And another. Pretty soon it got enthusiastic and began trotting. I started bouncing. Like, all over the place. WHOA! NOBODY SAID THIS THING WAS GOING TO BOUNCE! HOW THE HECK AM I SUPPOSED TO NOT FALL OFF?! I gazed down at the gravel forty feet beneath us and terror gripped me. I tried pulling on the reigns to slow the creature down, to no avail. BIL was yelling something but I think he was speaking New Jersey (which is where he served his LDS mission, and I'm pretty sure was fluent in the language), because I totally didn't understand him. All I knew was that I was going to die if this horse didn't stop rattling my brain against my teeth, and I hadn't had any children yet. It wasn't my time. I was not going down. So I did the one thing I remembered my instructor saying: I held the heck on with my knees.

Yeah. Did you know horses have a bucking button? They do. And if you forget where your knees are and hold on with your heels instead, you'll totally press it. Up and down up and down! Neck snapping, arms flapping, bro-in-law trying to grab me around the waist and save my life, and suddenly . . . air! A brief flash of sunshine and . . .  Bam! My husband's brother's knee in my kidney and my skull cracking on the driveway. So. Far. Down.

Pain.

Horse made some sort of snotty comment, then walked away to find lunch. I rolled off BIL's knee with a groan to look for my kidney and the back of my little white shirt, which had shredded off in the gravel. Someone stopped their car to ask if we were okay, and I stumbled into the house, glaring my husband's amused look right off of his face.

And that was the last time I rode a horse.

Hmmm. Summer is incredibly short this year. I'm pretty sure my kid doesn't have time to learn horseback riding. Think I'll sign him up for speed-walking instead. At least then when he falls it will only be a few feet. And the ground? Ain't got no bucking button.

The post Horses, Me, and my Kid. Not So Much. first appeared on Janiel Miller - We Got This. .

Age. Happens. The first time you stand up after having sat on the ground with your legs crossed, and you cannot do it without making some sort of involuntary vocal noise, you will know you are heading down the path to Old-Fart-hood (and I could write an entire post on that phenomenon.) Would you like to take a moment to find out if that's you?

Sit down. Now just hang out for a bit. Maybe hit up "Once Upon a Time" or "Psyche" on Netflix. Make a sandwich. Drink some Mylanta. There. You done? Good. Now stand.

Hah! See? I heard that! You "ooofed." 

Did too.

Neener. Now you're like the rest of us.

The thing is, the reason we "oof" like that when we move, and as the years progress actually experience temporary paralysis — you know, where you get up from your funky cross-legged, hunched-over, lean-to-the-left position on the couch and have to spend the rest of the day with your knee up near your armpit — is because our bodies realize that life is really a lot more relaxed than we used to think it was. Nothing matters as much or is as critical as our young fearful brains used to tell us. So why put out all that extra effort to stay loose and limber and ready to spring into action when truly, there ain't gonna be no action into which to spring? (You will notice that as I've aged I've also learned better grammar with which to speak with.)

So really, as you gradually move into your faded twilight years, all you have to worry about is getting up slowly. That's it. And also the pain. But hey! I have  a technique to deal with that too! When you are in pain — the deep annoying inexplicable type of pain that sort of randomly happens as you go about your wrinkly day — just take a moment and focus on a pain-free part of your body. Something far from the discomfort. Express gratitude for it. Breathe in. Breathe out. Feel the lightness and peace in that part of you. Let that No-Pain-Ness fill your body. Fill your soul. Then pick up a hammer and slam the shortcake out of that pain-free body part.

I guarantee you, what used to hurt will seem like nothing now.

You're welcome.

Don't get up.

The post The Only Pain Management Technique You’ll Ever Need As You Age! first appeared on Janiel Miller - We Got This. .

Are you tired of back pain? Of being unable to pick up a piece of lint without throwing your back out the window? Of having to make up stories about how you got your injury while rescuing an endangered Rocky Mountain South China Sea Manatee because you're too embarrassed to say it was all about the lint? Are you dead sick of having your hips fall down around your ankles every time a song from the '80s comes on the radio and you sort of lose yourself in an MC Hammer moment?

WELL. I have a solution for you: Deep Tissue Massage. Also known as The Wrecking Ball, The Elbow of Death, or Let-Me-Just-Take-A-Jack-Hammer-To-That-Skinny-Little-Glute-Muscle-of-Yours.

Yeah. I hurt my  back last week. I've hurt my back last week for the past twelve years. But this time it's hit critical mass. Turns out I have boatloads of scar tissue all through my buttal region from years of dancing and running on a wonky hip and uneven legs, and then throwing my back out during pregnancy. And now all that mess has thrown its hands up in disgust and is just sitting there, forming knots around itself and preventing my sacrum from remaining in the upright and locked position.

I've been to doctors, sports therapists, physical therapists, chiropractors — and they've all helped. I've got some new medical consultants who are keeping me mobile. However, it is time my friends for something new. Something alarming. Something butt-aclysmic.

Deep. Tissue. Massage.

That's what I said.

In fact, it is time for this thing yesterday. Which is when I went and had it done. To my very person. Oh. Em. Gosh. Have you had deep tissue massage? I have. And what I had before wasn't this, baby. What I had before was to this massage as a sneeze is to an atomic blast. Not. The Same.

I knew I was in trouble when I hobbled in and was greeted by someone much smaller than I. Smaller vertically. Horizontally, this woman had curves where I have only ever had corners. She was more womanly than I've  been in my entire life, including pregnancies. And the curves, I would come to quickly find out, were the curves of straight-up muscle mass. Straight. Up. Deltoids the size of hams, traps like steel bands, and biceps the size of my head.

I was going to die.

But hey. If I was going to die, I should get on with it. So I did. I voluntarily (and quickly, and with tremendous self-consciousness, as my body carries the carnage of four childbirths along with nearly fifty years) disrobed and scuttled myself between the two little sheets on the massage table. Then I lay there, face in the towel-wrapped-face-holder-thingie, listening to a funky celtic playlist that did not make me feel any less naked and ready to be body-slammed by a female Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson mini-me.

After a few minutes, during which I began to relax and tell myself that it probably wasn't going to be that bad, my macerator — I MEAN MASSAGE THERAPIST — walked in, asked if I was ready, slathered her hands with lotion, and attacked. Oh, she started out benignly enough, just rubbing my back, lulling me into a false security. Predatory creatures do that, you know. And right when I was about to slip into a sort of fluffy-unicorn-and-skittles state of bliss,

BAYum!

Whoa! What was that?

"Oh, just a little knot on your ribcage. I'm going to have to work it out. This might hurt a little."

ZING!

OWWW-FREAKITY-OWWW!

"Yep. You've got a lot of scar tissue down here on your glutes too, where the psoas comes across. I'll just dig in a bit. There may be some agony . . . "

Jeesh! Swearword! SWeArwOrd! SwEaRwoRd! (As I have established, I don't swear. At least not out loud. Most of the time. So this was in my head.  And it was probably just "crap!" No, for reals.)

But I couldn't let on that it hurt so much. I mean, what was the norm? Did people usually scream during deep tissue massage? Was I just a wimp? Was wrenching the towel-wrapped-face-holder-thingie from its post and using it to knock the knees from beneath this woman an appropriate response? Who knew?

So instead I raised a finger and said, "Um, excuse me. Is this (OW) level of discomfort (AARGG) normal? (YEEOWCHIEWOOWOO)"

"Oh. Is this too much? I could drill in a little less if you want me to."

"Um. Yes. Maybe that would be good."

"Right."

Annnnnd . . . . *cricket* Was she drilling in less? I couldn't tell. In fact, I was pretty sure that if she didn't hurry up and drill less she was going to strike oil.

That's when I began to sing: "OWWWWW WHAT A BEAUTIFUL MORRRRNIIIINGGGG! OWWWW WHAT THE CRAP ARE YOU DOOINNNGG BACK THERRRRRRE?" You know, from Oklahoma?

Well. That was embarrassing. But she was nice about it. As she carefully pried my gluteus minimus from from the bone and made an origami crane out of it, she explained that most people who come in for deep tissue massage make noise. In fact, often there is so much noise that when she walks out of the chamber to give her clients a chance to recover and see if their clothes still fit, the entire office is staring at her, round-eyed over what that had sounded like. But I was fine. I was hardly making any noise at all.

As little furry animals do when they know they are near death. They just . . . submit . . .

Finally when we got to the end, and I was this close to repeatedly slamming my hand down on the table and crying like a WWF fighter, she said, "Well, we're almost done. Next time maybe we'll use a scraper. That'll really clear all this scar tissue out of there."

Next time? Scraper? NEXT TIME?!

Right. If it involves something called a "scraper," which I don't even want to know what that is, I ain't showing up. Me and my scar tissue? We are going to make friends. We are going to start going to movies together and getting drunk on Advil Liquigels and not letting anything remotely resembling a "scraper" anywhere near us. The only "deep-tissue" anybody is going to access around me is the kind that comes in a box and has a drop of lotion added to it. And even that is questionable. A drop of lotion is how my little Rock-woman started the whole thing.

In fairness, I will say that I am walking better since that twisted experience. And I am in a lot less pain. But my face has looked like this ever since, and I can't get it to stop:

So I'm thinking . . . no "next time." I'll keep you posted, though. Especially about changes in my face. 

The post Back Pain? It Might Be Your MASSAGE THERAPIST!. first appeared on Janiel Miller - We Got This. .

Do you know what it takes to make my Middle Girl happy? Puppies. Plus cute little old people and adorable children. The other day I told her the story of my older brother finding out what the word "Infinity" meant. He was four years old. Someone had said the word "Infinity" in my bro's presence and he ran and asked my mom about it. She explained "going on forever and ever" to him as best she could. He nodded, then wandered off to think about it. He thought. And he thought. At the end of the day he came up to my mom with tears on his cheeks and said, "I hate 'finity!"

Awwww. Seriously. My Middle Girl died of "awww-ness" for the rest of the day.

My older two kids have happy-inducing favorite things that are about as simple as the younger two. My husband . . . well now. We've pretty much established that there's something wrong with that boy. Dude runs hundred-mile races and has installed the Jolly Green Giant's clothesline up above my house. Calls it a "HAM" radio antenna. Right. Like pigs talk on radios. (Oooh, so many jokes that I'm going to let go.) My huz doesn't count in this survey.

But me? I count. And I will tell you that I'm figuring out something by watching my little family-people. (Except my husband, who, as I mentioned, is slightly whacked. I say that with love.) Happiness can be very simple. It doesn't need to be complex. It doesn't need to be something elusive that I'm constantly searching for. It doesn't need to be something epically exciting, or even something new. Happiness is. It simply is. It's all around us, in every part of our lives. We have it, we just have to notice it.

Except that you can't notice anything if you are ripping along at 90 miles per hour. Have you ever tried that? Watched passing traffic and tried to pick out small details as the cars blow past? I tried that once. Went to the Indy 500 timed trials. Those cars were screaming by at 200+ miles per hour. If I tried to follow them I got eyestrain. If I just sat there and let them pass in front of me, they were reduced to race car colored smears. If I wanted to actually see any detail on those vehicles, they were going to have to slow the heck down. 

Same with life. If we want to see the happy, we've got to slow down enough to get it in focus. There's a reason people say you've gotta "stop, and smell the roses." How you gonna wave your nostrils around above those buds if you ripped past them 10 minutes ago? You're not. And as long as you're not, you'll fail to notice the nuance in their color too.

Notice the good stuff. The little stuff: the weather, the timing of things, the people around you, your health, parts of your body that still work, the ways in which you've been able to use your talents to bless yourself and others–even if you have never been famous. Notice the moments of peace and grab onto them so you can really wade in and enjoy them. Lock onto the good in life. It will grow.

And then, you'll wonder why you ever thought you were unhappy. Believe me, this is the best way to deal with life's distresses. I spent a LOT of years not doing this. Doing this works better. 

Lecture over. And just so you know, I'm saying all of this because I needed to hear it today.

Thanks! As you were.

The post What Makes You Happy? first appeared on Janiel Miller - We Got This. .

So, okay. I tried this the other day when I completely slammed my pinkie toe against the bottom corner of the bench my mother-in-law painted that sits in my kitchen. Swear.Word. No, that’s what I actually said because I don’t swear “Oh Swearword!” Then, with my pinkie toe throbbing, filling up with blood, and slowly turning purple, I remembered my husband’s professor, and I said to myself, “This doesn’t hurt. What is pain, really? Is it just coldness? Or hotness? Or freaking body ripping misery like my whole entire leg is going to fall off and I’d rather give birth on Pitocin with no epidural than slam my pinkie toe on that swearwordy bench again! My mother-in-law is trying to kill me! How stupid is my husband for giving me that mother-in-law so she could give me that bench?!”

Yeah. It didn’t work.

But I thought, in honor of Valentine’s Day, that I’d give it another shot. Relationships are hard. I mean, yeah. They’re full of joy and fulfillment and blah blah. But also, they’re hard. You have to give things up for the other person, like: leaving your hair in the shower when you’re done. You can’t do that. Or growing your winter-leg-coat instead of shaving once the temperature drops. You totally can’t do that either.

When you’re in a relationship, disciplining your emotions is paramount to success. And maybe the best way to be able to do that for your significant other is by using these pain-management techniques taught by Professor NerveLessNess. i.e.:

“Hi. What’s that I smell? Is that dinner? Smells weird. Is it liver?”

(Okay. A little irritating. My meatloaf does not smell like liver. But . . .  what is irritation? Just a sensation. Like a tiny flame on the end of a stick. No big deal.)

“And by the way, I didn’t have time to stop by the store for the cream cheese you needed. So when I was at the gas station I picked up some cheese whiz. Want a sip of my slushie?”

(Juuuust a tiny flame. Oops, now it’s caught the other twig on fire. That’s okay. I can blow it out. Blow. Blow. Blowhard.)

“And hey, I actually don’t have time to stay for dinner because I have a club meeting I forgot to tell you about. So, see you! Kiss the kids goodnight for me.”

UTAH   A kitchen mysteriously burned to the ground this evening around dinner time. No one was hurt, since one of the two residents was being chased down the street in his Honda Civic by the other, who was on foot. And quite frankly, was keeping up.

The post Valentine’s Pain Management first appeared on Janiel Miller - We Got This. .

Yeah.

Who the heck's idea was it for us to set a rack of guilt-inducing goals every blessed new year? I'd like to speak with that bright young thing. You know it had to be a bright young thing, because us slightly smudged old things don't think that way. We've been through the goal posts a few times and have learned to skulk around the edges of life trying not to be noticed. I mean, we're not stupid. As a religious person, I no longer pray to gain fine new attributes in life. I've lived what happens when you do that. Nope. I pray to learn from other peoples'​  lives. And trials. And "goals." It's so much easier that way.

Besides, if I just hang back and don't set any goals for the new year, then I already have a fresh unused set for the next year, and don't need to bother with it at all. I can just drink my alcohol-free eggless eggnog and watch the Times Square ball drop in peace. My psyche feels so much better that way.

And if it doesn't, if I start to feel the pressure of all the gleaming lives being lived around me, I have another technique: portable New Year's goal sheets. I carry a fat stack of them loosely in my purse so they can be dropped at opportune moments in front of people whose lives seem more on track than mine. Then I can titter and say, "Oops! I've dropped my New Year's resolutions again! I just can't seem to keep track of them all. I guess I'll need to get a trailer hitch for my purse so I can keep them with me at all times. Whoopsie! There goes my cultural refinement folder containing my recipe for Squid Ink Soufflé, along with instructions for how to milk a Caspian Sea Squid. Wouldn't want to lose that! The President would be so disappointed!"

Yeah. I totally got this. Happy Old Year, my friends! And if you just can't live without goals, call me. I've got a few extras hanging off the back of my cross-shoulder bag in their own little Airstream. You're welcome to a few.

The post Happy 2014 Dears! Don’t Put Yourselves Out. first appeared on Janiel Miller - We Got This. .