I'm Becoming My Grandmother

My mom's mom, Grandma V., introduced me to massages 14 years ago in Hot Springs, AR. Grandma always loved getting massages when she and Grandpa would go to Hot Springs, so even though Grandma was no longer able to go get one for herself, she insisted that my sister and I both go and be massaged. As I said, Marti, my sister, and I had never had massages before.

The place that we went to in Hot Springs was an old school "spa" with the mineral baths and hadn't really been upgraded since they opened in like the 1920's (I kid, but still). So we go down and check in and we are pointed to these little closets and are told to put our clothes on the hooks there and somebody would come and wrap a sheet around us and take us to the relaxation area. Mind you Marti and I are the only people in the spa area that are under the age of 50 in the whole place. Well, I'm in my little closet area and the person comes to wrap my sheet around me, what I didn't know is that I was supposed to turn around and face the wall, but I didn't. So, I'm standing there facing the little spa lady full frontal and she starts yelling me to turn around. That was discomfort moment #1. She wraps the sheet around me escorts me to the waiting area and then takes me back to this big room that has the mineral baths on one side and little cubicles with massage tables on the other. There are all these older women wandering around in their togas moving from salt scrub to mineral bath to God-knows-what. I lay down on my table and the wiry little masseuse starts giving me an old school rub-down. It was really not all that relaxing and very uncomfortable especially since I had to go to the bathroom the entire time.

I didn't go back for another massage for many, many years.

I was thinking about this today as I was having a wonderful massage at La Belle Spa by Donald and I started thinking about how much my Grandma would have loved this place. It started out with a nice foot soak with some crackers and nuts while I stared into a fire. Then Donald came and took me into a private room, with soft lights and soothing music being piped in...so very different than my first experience.

And as he proceeded to work the knots out of my back, I slowly began to relax and stopped resisting, and as I did so I tried to silence the running discussion in my head. I couldn't quite silence the voice in my head completely because as I lay there being kneaded like bread dough, I was thinking "how do I want to phrase this in my blog...."

2009...I'm promising myself more massages. They are SOOOO worth it!!

Obligatory Blog for the Week

I feel that I must blog at least once a week, but I'm having trouble finding topics to actually blog about. So, I'll talk about my plans for the coming year, but first my plans for the remainder of this year....

I only have 9 days before I am on a plane heading back to Texas. This is very exciting for me because I haven't been back there since February, which was also the last time that I saw my family (except for my wonderful sister who came out to California to celebrate my birthday in April). I know that many of you go for much longer periods of time without seeing your families, so nine months really isn't that big of a deal, but to me it feels like an eternity. Before I moved to California, I saw them monthly or at least every six weeks. I also know that my Mom is crazy excited about seeing me again. I am actually going to be staying with the Queen and King B for a couple of days, which I'm also very excited about. I haven't seen them since they stayed with me back in June, although I am in contact with the Queen practically every day. I'm really hoping that the King will cook for me. After two days with the Queen and King and a week with my family, I'm going to fly down to San Antonio and spend a couple of days with a bunch of my friends from college, who I haven't seen in two years. I then will be flying back out to California. Once I'm back out here, I'll be hanging around my own place for a couple of days and then my friend Vanessa and I are driving up to Cloverdale to spend New Year's Eve with her mom in a very quiet manner.

Coming January 5, 2009 I return to the office and am going to try and be very positive and up-beat and start the year off right. I'm hoping that I will pick up some great organization and planning tips from the Queen when I'm with her. With regards to my blog, though, I have purchased a great desktop planner (Do It Later!) with great tips for procrastinating and I plan to share all of those with my readers!!