No naps for YOU! 🙄😂

Dec 16, 2023

Happy Saturday friends!

REMEMBER!:

For the rest of the year I've changed my pricing to a flat fee of $70 for everything I offer!

Want an hour of coaching? An hour of Reiki? An hour of neurofeedback? A gift certificate? Let's do it!

I made it to Pittsburgh and back! Whoohoo! I learned so much about the The Giant iPad Car, comfort, and new ways to travel. Before I left, I saw my physical therapist and she gave me some recommendations of how to keep my body relaxed on the trip. Ever since The Big Red Mare knocked me down in 2019, my body has been in chronic pain and I find myself clenching every muscle I have nearly all the time. Enter magical Blair Watson, PT extraordinaire who is helping my body feel human again, instead of a feeling like a pile of rusty bolts.

How could you not love this being?❤️

(She's in Cary, NC!)

Blair and I talked about ways to take stress off my body while driving, supporting my lower arms with towels so they weren't dead weight hanging off my always tense shoulders. I even used a little pillow behind my neck so it could relax! These changes and driving the Tesla on Full Self Drive made for a lovely drive up!

Disclaimer! Yes, the car can navigate for you, keep you at the speed you set it for, keep you in the lane, move out of the right lane to pass cars, enter and exit the highway, react to traffic lights and stop signs like a human, and make left and right turns. It avoids bikes and pedestrians on the road just like we would and a few nights ago when B-Rad was coming home from his pool league and had FSD on—it slammed on brakes for a deer leaping across the road—a deer B-Rad hadn't seen and would have hit! It's pretty darn cool.

AND

It is also a beta version, meaning, it can't and won't do all of that without your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road (and it knows because there is a camera inside so the computer can watch you lol) So, no, this won't be happening:

(In case you don't know, this is a Netflix movie starring Julia Roberts called Leave the World Behind. We watched it at my brother's house just because the trailer showed the scene above and it made us lol. The movie itself was...meh.)

AND ALSO: the car occasionally does strange things like turning the windshield wipers on when there is no rain or not turning them on when there is lol, phantom breaking which is just breaking for no reason at all (luckily much less with each software update), moving to the left lane and staying there unless you put the blinker on and tell it to move right, and on an on. The list of Tesla FSD (Full Self Drive) quirks are long but not, obviously, huge issues. The pros heavily outweigh the cons. To me anyway!

I always thought of having to stop to charge as a con.

Until this trip.

Almost every car trip I've ever gone on has been ruled by a man (grandfathers, fathers, husbands, uncles) who had a need to get to their destination as soon as humanly possible—a stressful and very unfun Goal Day.

During my ww kayaking years we would go to something the Carolina Canoe Club called Week of Rivers. (I feel like I've written about this in the past...) We’d spend 9 days in the mountains of North Carolina over the July 4th week and we’d all stay in a campground together. Every morning a couple hundred paddlers would gather under a huge tent and people would call out where they were planning on paddling that day and people would start to migrate into clumps to paddle the Ocoee, Tuckaseegee, Nantahala, Pigeon, etc. and before too long, the campground would be a ghost town.

Except for my area LOL.

It was my second Week of Rivers (I was 29 years old) where I realized that most people were heading out early, packing up gear while eating a granola bar or, if they were feeling fancy, a yogurt cup with granola poured on top. They took off in a flurry of what felt like stress to me, but to them was excitement I suppose. Their whole goal was to get to their river as fast as possible and get paddling. And then to get back as fast as possible to hang out.

But I had been trained in my early paddling days on the Nantahala River with a group of people who liked a calm and leisurely start. The Nantahala River didn’t turn the water on (it was dam released daily) until the morning and it took a few hours for it to arrive at the put-in at 11am. So, we’d head off to River’s End Restaurant and have a huge breakfast. Then we’d wander over to the Nantahala Outdoor Center for a browse of new boats, gear, clothes, and snacks. Finally we’d all head to the put-in.

Over time Mom and I began calling the two versions the Goal Days group and the Journey Days group and it stuck. People knew that for the most part I’d be having a Journey Day on the Nantahala with Mom and Dad and a bunch of others, everyone was welcome, the more the merrier!

Journey Days are good for my soul and slow down the part of my brain that is always running at Mach 3. Running the same beautiful river, eating breakfast, and hanging out appealed to the part of my brain that craved consistency. But my Mach 3 brain was also happy with spending 5 hours on the river and using my muscles, hard.

Somehow, I’ve never applied Journey Days to road trips. They are Goal Days and I’m supposed to get there ASAP.

Enter the Giant iPad on Wheels! As you know last weekend's trip was my first solo road trip in my Tesla Model Y. I learned a lot and reframed travel in a new way: solo travel has been switched from Goal Days to Journey Days.

In a gas car, you can stop and get gas, use the restroom, and be back on the road in 5-10 minutes. Yay!

Or maybe…yay?

I’m 54. I have some chronic stuff. I’m neurodivergent. And I’m driving the Giant iPad which means I will have to stop a little longer to charge than it takes a gas car to fill up. My stops were between 10 and 20 minutes. What to do with 20 minutes?

Nap. Walk. Talk to the lady who was bringing home a 10 week old, 1.5 lb Chihuahua puppy—OMGeeeeeee. Stretch. Get some water. Talk to another Tesla owner. Relax.

It was weird at first but quickly became so very nice!

I was happier. My trip went smoother. My body felt great! And because I was using Full Self Drive I was in what I call a “managerial position” while driving—just making sure the car was doing what it was supposed to be doing—I arrived both rested and relaxed. What an interesting feeling after driving for so long! On a Goal Day, driving a gas car, I would arrive exhausted and stressed.

Until now I've always thought: NO NAPS FOR YOU!!!

I found that I drank more water, because I knew I was going to stop more. I even stopped at the New River Gorge Visitors Center just to look at the view:

Could I achieve this in a gas car? Absolutely! But I never had. It took being forced to charge my car to slow down. I’m often forced to slow down LOL (the Big Red Mare accident, sheep accident, breaking my foot/ankle and sadly there are more!) The hyper part of my brain often rules the roost but I think as I pay more attention to the part of me that craves comfort, consistency, and calm—I’m slowly creating more sustainability in my body and life. How cool is that?

MEMORIES

Those were the days 😂:

December 2008 and 16 months old in the first one——December 2020 and 13.5 years old in the second—love this set of pics of ManChild!

The Blue Cloud Herd, Longmont, CO—back when my Raynie girl got to live on 25 acres with a dozen horses. Magical.

THE RANCH

I have a strange and small conglomeration of photos to show you this week, I have no idea what happened, the week flew by with only these three to show for it!

Nice that one of the donkeys left this here, preloaded for us:

Little Man is still helping out by carrying the hay bags in the morning. His reward is to be out loose to graze on odds and ends:

The story of the photo above and the video at the top (My mare Rayn is the smaller grey on the left, chowing down):

We moved Wynter's bucket of special old man grain to this spot in the coaching barn because it was raining. Normally it hangs over the outer fence and he's able to keep Rayn away from it with no problem. But he couldn't protect his food in this situation and Raynie is smaller, faster, and her brain works much quicker than his draft horse brain does. Or mine apparently, because it never even occurred to me that this would happen until it was too late! Lord.

Raynie doesn't get grain usually because she's an "easy keeper" meaning she can look at grain and gain weight. Same for me. Just look at a chocolate covered cherry and I've gained 5 pounds. Ugh.

At first Wynter was inside eating normally and Rayn watched him, I could see the wheels turning. Suddenly she trotted out and around and as soon as Wynter lifted his head to chew, she shoved her head in and wouldn't take it out. He went around the fence to the other side and body checked her out of the way and started eating again. Rayn was like, "Oh ho! You think you've won don't you?" and ran around to the above position, again waiting for him to lift his head and dove in when he did. She's naughty like that. It took Wynter getting BIG with his body for her to stop fooling around. Of course by that time she had easily eaten half his food so she was happy lol

THE MEMES

I'm going to do this: