Sam’s Super Bowl De-Stress

So if you remember the recent post How’s Your Oxygen?, we’re sometimes featuring conversations with friends about how they “breathe” when things get hectic. Yesterday I was thinking about Super Bowl Sunday…the game, the so-so halftime show (glowing dancers notwithstanding), poor Christina, and of course the commercials (“Dog-Sitting” by Budweiser and Doritos “Best Part” being our personal favorites).   

Anyhoos, as spectators, for us it was mostly all fun, right? But for sports reporters, it’s gotta be one of the craziest days of the year. This recount just in from our friend Sam Crenshaw, sports anchor for 11Alive News in Atlanta:

I really needed to de-stress after Super Bowl Sunday. We normally pre-record our Sunday Sports Extra show, but because it was Super Bowl Sunday, we wanted to do the show live. We scrambled and found two former NFL players who had played for the Packers and Steelers to join us live on the news at 11:35 p.m. We also invited morning radio show host Jimmy Baron and 11Alive entertainment specialist Nina Brown to review the commercials. The stress of getting everybody there on time, and getting all the prep work done by 11:35, left me feeling pretty drained when it was done. So, on Monday I de-stressed at the gym with a big workout and rewarded myself with a massage. If weather had been better I would have hit the tennis courts as well. After eating all the bad stuff at our station’s Super Bowl party, I headed to Sweet Tomatoes yesterday for soup and salad. Much better!
Follow Sam on Twitter for all his sports (and sometimes life) updates.

Related Posts

Gena’s Farm Memories

Ten years ago, our free-spirited friend Gena moved into one very old farmhouse on 115 acres in Jonesville, Va. Her dream of living in the country was finally realized but, sadly, also short-lived, because she found it just too difficult to make a living in such a rural remote area. But her memories of that time are lasting. Here are a few of her reflections from that special time in her life. 
We bought 115 acres. I moved out of Atlanta because I thought that I could provide a better life for my little girl. We would bounce down the mile-and-a-half dirt driveway for our walk. We would walk up the mountain and pick berries. We laughed. We danced. We had a food co-op where neighbors, including a doctor and an ex-CIA agent who had also run to the hills from the city, traded produce and friendship. Our house was built in 1929. On the first floor, I once fell through some wooden planks in the kitchen and found dirt. It also took some time to figure this out, but remnants of fabric were left on a wall in the bedroom. Guess that was before wallpaper. In the beginning, I slept upstairs in a sleeping bag. Using the bathroom in the middle of the night was tricky, as you needed a flashlight and a piece of toilet paper to go to the hill. We bathed in the front creek and learned that we did, in fact, have neighbors. We enjoyed cows, daily deer, snakes, wild turkey and chickens…for a day. We quickly found out that chickens and dogs don’t mix. Lord, Lord, did we have blackberries. We love blackberries. To this day we have a difficult time buying them as ours were much better off the bush. I miss the farm.

Related Posts

Fab 5-0

Happy birthdays to our friends Catherine Powell and John Huss, who celebrated their 50th birthdays this year with a fabulous bike trip through Tuscany. Want to add this idea to your own bucket list? Here’s how: www.ciclismoclassico.com, or on Facebook.  

Related Posts

Aha!

A dear friend, Randy Siegel (who was also my boss for seven years), launched a new business this month, Your Internal GPS. Please check it out. Meanwhile, here’s an article reposted from Randy’s October e-newsletter. It’s so good, we just had to share. Have yourself a happy week!
Be Happy, Truly Happy
Do you ever read something and have a magical “aha moment”? Here’s one of mine.
Erich Fromm in To Have or To Be? describes a modern misconception. He writes that most of us spend our lives trying to:
Have enough (money, power, things) so that we can…
Do what we want in terms of work and how we spend our time, because then we can…
Be happy.
Unfortunately, most of us get stuck at the first step: we never “have enough.” As a result, we put living our lives on hold.
“Once I pay off the house, I will consider changing careers.”
“When the kids are grown, I’ll deal with my marriage.”
“When I retire, I will take up painting, golf or traveling.”
Fromm says that in order to have a rich life you need to invert the formula. First, you need to:
Be who you are. Know your strengths, weaknesses and your purpose. This self-awareness will lead you to….
Do what you love. When you use your unique strengths to be of service to others, you will be rewarded, and…
Be happy.  You’ll have what you need. That doesn’t mean you will have everything you want, but it does mean you will have what you need. Dick Leider says in The Power of Purpose, “There are two ways to be rich; one is to have more, the other is to want less.”
How can you invert the having, doing and being cycle? Stop making money your primary goal. Instead, follow your passion, heart and values. Stop measuring your success by your bank account. Measure your success by your happiness.
Happiness is a feeling that comes from inside; it cannot be bought. Sure, you can feel unhappy if you don’t have enough money to meet your basic needs, but after that, money will not make you happy. To be happy, do what you love to do and do it to be of service to others.
Aha!
Reprinted with permission from Randy Siegel. His new book, The Inspired Life, will be published next month.

Related Posts

Life Told Through a Grocery List

Friend Nancy Zintak has five children, all girls.  Her oldest, Sally, grew up with our Arielle.  Nancy describes the different phases of their life with five kids through the family grocery list.  Here’s her funny account from the AJC. 

THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION
May 23, 2010
(Nancy Zintak is vice president of marketing and communications at Georgia Public Broadcasting. She and her husband, John Zintak, vice president of Daniel Corp., have five daughters: Sally, 21; Polly, 18; Lily, 16; Daphne, 12, and Annie, 10. )

Read the (grocery) list, learn the life

You can tell a lot about people by what’s on their grocery lists.   In the ’80s, before kids, the list was short: ramen noodles, cheap vodka, dog food and coffee. These were the salad days of early marriage when I cut my nurturing teeth on our Lab retriever pound puppy.  Many women get their first taste of motherhood when they get a puppy. It’s a sweet way to ease into the rigors of being a mom.

I actually cut my “mom” teeth on radio talk show hosts. You haven’t seen colic until you’ve heard Neal Boortz rant about tax dollars going to performance artists — there isn’t enough chamomile to calm those nerves.  When I started down the road to motherhood, my “mom” skills were already honed from my career as a talk show producer.


I knew about sleepless nights from booking shows for the next day; I learned patience from watching talk show hosts saunter into the studio as their opening music hits the air.  I learned about spills from the talk show hosts, who daily spilled their coffee on the soundboard. I was ready for kids after this job.

And so they came, beginning in the late ’80s, at which point my grocery list changed dramatically: Similac, Pampers, Cheerios, Smirnoff vodka (a more discerning palate with age), pasta and dog food.  At this point I had a 2-year-old and an infant, and a talk show host.

They cried and cried and needed constant care and supervision, they needed this and that with a sense of urgency I’d never known. The baby and the 2-year-old were demanding, too.                                                        

Juggling work and kids was challenging. This was during the annoying “super mom” era.  Every magazine cover featured a snappy working-mom type with perfect hair and makeup, bragging about her Excel carpool spread sheets along with chore charts and business-trip packing tips. I was lucky if I brushed my teeth. Then I found out I was pregnant with baby number three.

The grocery list grew in size and cost: Similac, Pampers, Cheerios, chicken nuggets, sippy-cups, grapes, back to cheap vodka and now store-brand dog food. Three kids ages 4, 2 and 3 months presented new challenges. Sleep was the first thing to go: 4:30 a.m. wake-up call to read three newspapers and prepare the topics for work.  Make coffee, highlight news articles, arrange ballet carpool, call and wake up Senator [Sam] Nunn’s wife in hopes of booking the senator, pack lunches, warm the bottle, throw the load of pink laundry in the dryer (red shirt ran), wave to the baby sitter, run the pantyhose, spill the coffee, change clothes, off to work.

Baby number four arrives, grocery list: Clearasil, microwave grits, Lucky Charms, Absolut vodka (gravy years in real estate for my husband) and Boca burgers. (One embraces a vegetarian lifestyle.)  The new century brought the same old story: baby number five. We’re well out of bedrooms, we’re up to three dogs, and the grocery list has gone from $27 to $270: Similac, Pampers (still), Clearasil, Lucky Charms and Special K, birth control pills, vodka, Lean Cuisine, Boca burgers (it wasn’t a phase . . . she’s still a vegetarian) and cat food (bought by accident for the dogs — believe me, they’ll eat it).  In case you haven’t guessed, I go to the grocery store every day.  I am acutely aware of the 10 for 10 and Buy-One-Get-One-Free deals. I can be found at the grocery store at any hour: midnight trips for poster boards; 5 a.m. runs for cupcakes never baked; breakfast trips for milk and juice, and 2 a.m. runs for the Rent-A-Wet-Vac (don’t ask).

They all know me at the grocery store — they have held my babies while I wrote the check, held my groceries when I forgot to bring the check, and they have held my children at the front office when I lost them on aisle three.  I know the store by heart, I even write my lists in aisle order.  There’s a lot you can learn about me from my grocery lists. With two girls in college now, and the little ones getting older, the list has changed somewhat . . . the Pampers and Similac have been exchanged for designer hair products and free-range chicken. We’ve traded in our sippy-cups for six-packs of Vitaminwater and our vegetarian child has remained committed, but has switched from Boca burgers to actual food, like broccoli and salad.

The grocery store is really an allegory for my life — it is always open, it never sleeps, and where else can you get corn syrup and cash, sympathy cards and lice treatment 24 hours a day?  And thank goodness, they’re open on Thanksgiving and Easter, just in case I forget to put something important on the list, like the turkey or the eggs.



Related Posts

No products in the cart.