Adulthood is a Myth

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

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My sister sent me an awesome birthday gift this week.

A Sarah’s Scribbles 2020 calendar entitled Adulthood is a Myth.

I felt that one to my soul.

Not only was it strange to remember that next year is 2020, but the calendar also has the added advantage of making me laugh at myself. Because adulthood is a myth. And I love it.

This last week was all about adulting for me. Getting up early when I didn’t want to, plowing through meetings and checking tasks off my to-do list, procrastinating on my writing and having to scramble to make up for it later.

You know. The kinds of things we all do.

Also, my tire went flat on Friday night. At work. I may or may not have changed it while still in a skirt.

Actually, forget that. I totally changed it while still in a skirt. Because I am an adult and that’s what an adult does when they’re off work and have a whole weekend ahead of them only to find they have to start said weekend off with a flat tire.

My work clothes ended up looking a little worse for wear.

See, my spare tire is caked in dust. Because I live on a dirt road. And I never wash my car.

Arguably my own fault, but there it is.

A very sweet older man offered to help me. I told him I was fine and that I could handle it. While trying to turn one of my lug nuts the wrong way.

In my defense, he startled me and I was flustered. So I can’t be responsible for my actions.

I think the poor man was worried I was crazy. He sat in his car for an uncomfortably long time waiting to see if I would finish. I would have let him help, only I was already halfway done and the rest was reasonably easy. No point in two of us getting covered in road dust just because I never wash my car.

In the end, it wasn’t as bad as it sounds. Since I always have my jack in the car and a spare, it’s easily fixed and done with. And I’m no stranger to having to fix my tires myself. One does, you know, when one has no boyfriend/husband to do such things. But Friday night—and most of the week—really showed me how easy it is to finish a day, arrive home, and . . . have nothing left for writing. No time, no energy, no creativity.

It’s amazing how quickly it happens. Sometimes, as a writer with a full-time job, good intentions just aren’t enough. Things have to be cut out in order to give oneself the time that’s needed.

Since I’m still deciding exactly what things are going to be cut out, I will get back to you on what I eventually do. But don’t be surprised if I suddenly drop off the planet for a month or two. I’m not saying that socializing will be the first thing I cut out to give myself the time I need. Of course not. That would be silly.

It may end up being the second thing, however.

How do you make sure you have time for the important things in your life? Tell me about it in the comments!

Birthday Adventures

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

I have a surprise for you all.

Today is my birthday!

Woohooo! Balloons and party hats and kazoos and cake!

Not really. Actually, I have to go to work today, and my birthday weekend is already over. But I am a quarter-of-a-century-old today, and I felt the need to announce it.

So. There you are. I was born today.

Since I am an adult and adults still have to go to work on their birthdays, today won’t be extra spectacular or very different from my normal schedule. But! I had the whole weekend to celebrate, and my sister and I went adventuring. We house-sat for a friend, ate almost an entire carton of ice-cream, watched Zumbo’s Just Desserts, made shrimp scampi, and the next morning escaped the house to go hiking.

We were going to hike the Incline. (One of Colorado’s more extreme hiking trails. About a mile of stairs and sweat and hell.) But at the last moment, we bailed and went to Helen Hunt Falls instead. The trails there are a little tamer.

Okay, a lot tamer.

We lost our nerve.

But! We had a great time playing in the stream, taking pictures, and hiking the not-hellish trails. Since it is July, we found a couple of patches of very tiny raspberries. Like, enough to have maybe five each. We decided on our hike that if you were to get lost in Colorado and needed to live off the land, you would most likely starve. Colorado isn’t known for its bounty. I don’t think we saw so much as a squirrel.

But we did have raspberries. And just so you know, wild raspberries are the best.

Especially when you’re hiking in the mountains.

After the hiking adventures, we met the rest of my family for sushi at my absolute favorite restaurant ever. My mom made us wear funny hats. I am not going to show you pictures of that one. Thankfully, since we were celebrating my birthday, my dad’s birthday, and my sister’s engagement, I wasn’t the only one who had to wear the hat.

Always good to have a few people with whom to share strange experiences.

This year has been a whirl of very different experiences and new directions. None of the things that I expected to happen came about, and the best parts of this year have been entirely unexpected. I am still finding my feet in a job I never expected to have, making friends in places I never expected to be, and thanking God that his plans are so, so much better than mine. He always seems to know so much better than I do where I’ll be happy and where I’ll thrive.

This year, I am so thankful for the unexpected.

What are some things in your lives that have taken you by surprise? Tell me about it in the comments!

Weekend Adventurers

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

My best friend in the whole entire world is finally home.

She was gone for a long time.

I missed her.

But now that she’s finally home and back in our beautiful tiny cabin, it has created a rather conflicting dilemma for me. A ‘I really want to hang out with you but I work 40 hours a week and also use all my spare time to write’ kind of dilemma.

Exhausting.

But, in the three weeks since I started my job, we have come up with a compromise.

So now, we are weekend adventurers.

Okay, Sunday adventurers. Because I write all day Saturday if I can possibly manage it. But! Sunday is our day off, and we have learned to use it to the best of our ability. Yesterday, that meant church, lunch at Chipotle, a whacking huge dark chocolate ice cream with gummy bears—yes, I said gummy bears—and raspberries at Cold Stone Creamery, and a drive/hike through Garden of the Gods.

It was exciting.

Mostly because we very nearly ran out of gas.

Like, coasting on fumes, man. Life on the edge.

We didn’t have much time to hike because it was hotter than the Sahara desert and so crowded that there were literally herds of people blocking the paths. Like, real herds. It was crazy.

So we snapped a few pictures and took off. Instead, we spent the afternoon at Glen Eyrie, in the cool under the trees and outside the bookstore.

It was lovely.

Now that we’ve started this weekly excursion, we are determined to keep it going. Next week, we are going hiking in the mountains, and we have a list of places we want to see this summer. IKEA (because IKEA is the BEST), the Denver aquarium (because fish are amazing), the zoo (mostly for the ducks and maybe to pet a skunk), and camping, too, if we get up the nerve.

I’m not much of a camper. But it’s worth a shot!

Having a regular, 40 hour a week job is a new experience for me, and one loaded with possibilities. Now that my schedule is set—instead of scattered and spontaneous in the extreme—I can plan a few small trips around Colorado and have some of the adventures I’ve been thinking about.

So, definitely stay tuned. There will be pictures of giant fish on this blog someday soon. Like . . . sharks. And maybe an octopus.

You have been warned.

What are some of the adventures that you have ventured on recently? Tell me about them in the comments! I’d love ideas and suggestions!

Surprise!

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

My sister is finally, finally home, after traveling about like a crazy adventure woman for six months.

I am so happy she’s here.

Don’t get me wrong, living alone is lovely. The house is quiet, I have my own space, and—and that’s the only plus sides I can come up with right now.

Now that my sister is home, I have someone to read with in the evening, someone to bounce ideas off of when I’m in a creative mood, someone who makes dinner when I am at work and has it ready when I come home, someone to grocery shop for, since grocery shopping for one person is no fun at all . . . 

Basically, I have about a thousand reasons to rejoice that she is finally home and isn’t planning to leave again for—some amount of time. Hopefully not in the near future. But we’ll see. World travelers sometimes don’t stay in one spot very long.

Now that she is here, I can tell you the secret I have been saving up since the beginning of May! Or was it April . . . or . . . never mind, it doesn’t matter.

Ta-da!

I painted my house!

As you can no doubt guess, it was badly in need of it, and this was my welcome home surprise for her. Thus the reason I didn’t post about it.

I started painting sometime around the middle of I-Don’t-Remember-Maybe-April when I was waiting for news after several job interviews.

So, yes, I was stress painting.

I got the first coat finished with the help of some semi-enthusiastic siblings and then . . . I got sick. So things paused for a few weeks while I laid around on my couch in a cold-medicine induced stupor and watched episodes of Winnie-The-Pooh on Youtube to keep my stress levels from crashing through the roof. Because obviously, I couldn’t stress paint anymore.

You do what you gotta do.

But eventually—after a very long wait—my cold got better and I was able to finish the second coat. Now that my beautiful tiny cabin is no longer an awkward shade of pink, it has turned into a sort of secluded hermitage. (For those of you who are extroverts, I just want to clarify that this is a good thing.) The green and brown blends into the trees, and when you’re driving up the road, you’d have to know just where to look to notice that there is a house hidden away up here after all.

Which, as a secluded sort of hermit, is just right for me.

Also, my sister loved it. So all my stress painting ended up all right.

Have you been working on any home improvement projects this year? I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

Finding Normal

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

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My new morning commute is forty-five minutes.

One way.

Does that sound a little crazy to anyone? That means every week I am driving about 7.5 hours back and forth to work . . . not including the time spent on the road if I happen to need a trip to town on a weekend.

I’m scaring myself just by adding up the numbers.

But do you want to know a secret?

I love it.

When I was first offered the job, one of my friends asked me if I was going to move into town to be closer to my new building.

I said no.

She understood.

First of all, I live in the middle of absolutely nowhere and have a tiny writer’s cabin tucked away in the middle of a pine forest surrounded by farmland and country roads. When I wake up in the morning, I hear magpies and bluejays and woodpeckers outside my house . . . not traffic and people and all the other city noises you can think of. I have deer and turkeys in my yard. I can go for walks at midnight down our dirt road if I feel like it. (I don’t usually feel like it.)

But besides loving where I am, I just . . . don’t hate my commute. In fact, as an author running a blog, writing books, and working full-time, my commute is some of the only time I have to really remember how much I love books myself.

Thank goodness for libraries that let me borrow 24 audiobooks at a time.

Really, my commute has been the saving grace for my reading habits. Thus far this year, I have read 66 books. Most of those have been audiobooks. With 7.5 hours of driving to do every week, I figure I can plow through at least a book a week. Maybe more, since I have lunch breaks too.

Finding out my library loaned out copies of audiobooks was a revolution for me. I have been devouring them while I paint for my mum, while I drive, while I work sudoku puzzles on my phone to keep my brain sharp . . . really just any time I have a few minutes of silence. I’ve been rediscovering some old favorites—right now I am listening to A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle—as well as discovering new treasures—Michael Hyatt’s Living Forward and as many of Agatha Christie’s books as I can find. As an author who still believes the best way to learn to write is to read, I am very grateful to have an unlimited library on my phone.

And plenty of time on my way to and from work to take advantage of it.

What are you reading these days? Any suggestions for me? I’d love to hear them!

On Your Mark . . . Get Set . . .

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

Panic!

No, not really. Nobody panic. Especially not me.

Although I do happen to feel a little panicky right at this moment.

Know why?

Today is July 1st, and also the first day of my new job, working as a writing assistant for Focus on the Family.

Are you shocked? I was. Also very, very excited. This will be my first experience with an office job and with working a nine-to-five, so I’ve been rushing around the last month to get myself prepared and brush up on my business casual knowledge.

Oddly enough, this meant buying a lot of clothes.

Like, a lot of clothes.

A whole wardrobe, actually.

How many of you knew I was a nanny before I got this job? Well, I was a nanny. And when you’re earning your rent playing hide-and-seek and going on trips to the park with little boys, you don’t wear business casual clothing.

You wear a t-shirt. And jeans.

Because when you hang out with toddler age boys, stuff happens. Stuff with water, stuff with mud, stuff with food.

And stuff with snot.

Yep. I said snot.

So, no, my wardrobe did not include anything remotely business casual.

Believe it or not, I loved being a nanny. I loved my boys and all the stuff we got to do together. We have many cookie memories. And jumping-on-the-tramp memories. And how-did-you-beat-me-at-this-game-you’re-five memories. I learned so much from those jobs.

Mostly that my memory is terrible and if I play matching memory games with a five-year-old, the five-year-old will win. Every. Single. Time.

Don’t ask me how.

Leaving my nanny positions for an office job—albeit a writing position—has been a little tough. I’m going to miss those boys. I was there for a lot of memories. Learning to crawl, losing their first tooth, kindergarten, first grade, baseball games, and so many more. I’m not saying I cried a little bit when I left on my last day, but I cried a little bit when I left on my last day.

Okay. A lot a bit.

But the leaving is all finished now, and today I am starting something new. If you think of it, wish me luck! I’m pretty nervous, so any good thoughts or prayers are appreciated!

Anyone have any tips for the first few weeks in a new job? I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

Coffee Dates: Writing Alone

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

Good Morning, Creatives!

Sometimes I feel like I need a support group for introverts. Like, we can sit in a very small circle with only a few people who really understand us and say, “Hi, my name’s Abigail. Today an extrovert tried to sit down in my bubble and make small talk and I chose not to spill my coffee in their lap to make them go away.”

And then people would clap for me and it would be great.

Joking aside, I hate small talk. If you want to talk to me, I would love to talk to you! As long as we talk about your dreams and your fears and what makes you get up in the morning. Not how your great aunt’s hydrangeas are doing or why spring is late this year.

Part of being an introvert is abhorring small talk. Another—very strange—part is that, quite often, I like to be alone. I like eating in restaurants alone and going to the movie theater alone. I like walking alone and getting coffee alone. But—and here’s the weird part—I LOVE writing with people around me.

Thus, today’s question. Do you like writing alone? Or do you prefer having company?

My Process

I live with my sister. She’s an artist. So while I write at the table, she sits at the counter and does her wood-burning, or her ink sketches, or whatever else she happens to have a commission for at the moment.

And we don’t talk.

Okay, most of the time we don’t talk. Occasionally one of us will scream in frustration, break out into song, or make a joke that is funny to no one but the two of us. Then we laugh and go back to work. Because I have to push the buttons and she has to draw the lines and we both know it takes silence to do it right.

And it’s the best thing on this planet.

My Struggles Within That

She was gone for about five months. (I mentioned why here.) And I missed her. Dreadfully.

I don’t like to write alone. I like to have people with me who understand that I love their presence. I love being near them and having their soul so close to mine. Just the fact that they are there brings me so, so much joy.

But I don’t want to talk.

Most people don’t really get that. Introverts do. And other writers. Not many people can do it, though, and that’s why I treasure my sister and my writing group so, so much, because that’s how we all work. We understand that silence doesn’t mean I’m ignoring you, and conversations don’t always mean you’re connecting.

Your Thoughts

Do you need to be alone while you’re writing? Or do you like having select people around you? Or are you a coffee shop and train station writer, who feeds off of the hustle and bustle of the human race? Tell me about it in the comments!

Headed For Home

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

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I’m going to be honest with y’all.

I’m writing this while we drive.

I think we’re in Alabama right now. Somewhere near Birmingham, I think, although I am directionally challenged and it’s very possible that I’m wrong.

Guys. Alabama is hot. Like, ridiculously hot. Like, if it wasn’t so beautiful I would never come here again kind of hot.

But the trees have flowers and leaves instead of needles and the grass is lush and green, and everything is beautiful. Also, the dirt is red. And today is cloudy and misty. So I’m trying to ignore the heat.

We’re headed for Texas right now. Then, tomorrow, our wheels will be pointed toward Colorado and home.

I’m excited.

I miss my cat. And my family. And my house.

I can’t swear that anyone misses me, but I have a little—possibly vain—hope that my cat missed me. A tiny bit. A very tiny bit. Like, she went to sleep at night in my big empty bed all alone with no one to cuddle with and thought, “I wonder what happened to that one person who used to feed me and would whine back when I whined at her.”

I’ll admit, that’s a little bit of a stretch. But I can hope.

As much as I am excited to get back home, this has been a trip and a half. We’ve been through twelve states so far and have four more to go, and I have loved seeing the country change along the highway. We’ve crashed in hotel rooms, been hosted by wonderful friends, eaten way too much fast food, baked on beaches, swam in the ocean, in hotel pools, lakes, and backyard ponds. My brother made friends with a lizard, I found baby clams and ate my first Po’Boy sandwich, my dad drove us through the town where he grew up and showed us where his dad’s mechanic shop had been and the house he’d lived in. We saw flooded rivers, Florida swamps, the sea, and a telephone pole shaped like Mickey Mouse.

It was wild.

And now we’re headed for home. Tomorrow night, I will sleep in my own bed, and one week from today, I will start my first full-time office job and get paid to be a writer.

Life is crazy, y’all.

Anyone have any crazy road trip memories to share? I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

Road Trip

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

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Guys.

I’m probably lost.

Like, lost lost. Somewhere in-between Virginia and Florida. I think the GPS knows where we are, but I lost track way back in Missouri. This has been a TRIP. And it’s not even halfway over yet.

As far as I can recall (because I blacked out a few times and slept like a log), we have driven through Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia.

I’m sure we’ve been to more places by now. We’re driving just now, you see. Things are in progress. I shall let you know by the end of the trip where all we’ve been and what we’ve done.

Most of the time, we’ve just been driving. Seeing the world pass by. Cruising.

While we were in Missouri, I stayed with my editor and her family. We had a blast. I caught a frog. His name was Reginald. I did not kiss him, but I did almost accidentally squish him, which was mildly horrifying because he was so tiny. (No frogs were harmed in the making of this post, I swear.)

We also swam in a pond, played with paddle boards, and fished. My sister dropped her hook in the water and pulled one out immediately—like, within seconds. My little brother caught four.

Guys. I love fishing. I do. But guess who is the worst fisherman among the three of us?

You got that right.

Me.

I did catch one though. After waiting. And waiting. And losing my worm. And waiting some more. And giving up.

But I did catch one. Finally. I was so excited.

You know what else I saw in Missouri?

Fireflies.

I love fireflies so much. They’re like tiny fairies. We don’t have fireflies in Colorado, because it’s cold and dry and a desert. But Missouri has fireflies, and they made me very, very happy. I wanted to bring a thousand home with me, but I felt like they might die in the car, and it would have been weird to come home with a jar of dead bugs.

So I left Reginald and the tiny fairies/fireflies to enjoy Missouri and we kept driving.

We went hiking in North Carolina (on their cute tiny pretend mountains), kayaked in the bay in Virginia (and toasted on the beaches), and had way too much fun with my sisters who live there.

And now, we are on our way again. More updates to come!

Anyone else been traveling this year? Tell me about it in the comments!

Coffee Dates: Houses

Posted on by A.R. Geiger

Good Morning, Creatives!

Okay, all ya’ll are about to laugh at me. And not because I said all ya’ll. I’m allowed to say that because technically I was born in Texas and thus have the right to say ya’ll. And there are more than five of you, so it’s definitely all ya’ll.

I know these things.

Anyway, this week’s question is going to make you laugh at me. It’s silly and ridiculous and totally inconsequential, a question with no merit and no deep meaning.

I’m really excited.

Since we were talking about personality tests last week—specifically the Myers-Briggs test—this week, I wanted to ask about a different personality test. Specifically, Hogwarts houses.

My Process

I am pure Ravenclaw. I love books, I think too much, and I am not a biggest fan of having one ‘right way’ to do things.

Okay, ‘not a big fan’ is an understatement.

If there was one right answer to every question, no one would actually need to think.

My Struggles Within That

I have struggled deeply with this one. (Not really.) I wanted to be a Hufflepuff. I was so, so sure I was a Hufflepuff. My whole existence is a Hufflepuff kind of existence. They just seem like such warm-hearted, gentle, brilliant kind of people. The kind of brilliant that doesn’t quite make sense to most people.

But no. Knowledge is power. So I am a Ravenclaw.

Your Thoughts

Are there any Harry Potter fans out there? What is your house? Any other Ravenclaws around? Tell me in the comments!