Stubby Update

We have learned that Stubby the Iguana came through hurricanes Katrina and Wilma unscathed. Nobody's exactly sure where he went or how he weathered the storm, but he's back most afternoons, just as always, happy to take a free handout of vegetarian grub if you've got some to spare.

Although the office building where our Ft. Lauderdale friends work will take more than a year to be restored, Stubby did not lose so much as a fingernail in all the hubbub.

Now, if that doesn't give you the properly perky post-holiday perspective (and how can you not feel perky in the presence of alliteration?) take this nifty little quiz to find out your personality type expressed as a Christmas Tree, Hanukkah Bush or Kwanzaa Shrub:

You Are a Minimal Christmas Tree

You're not a total Scrooge, but you feel no need to go overboard at Christmas. Less is more, and your Christmas reflects refined quality.

What Christmas Tree Are You?

Immortal Befuddled

This is me, passionate hater of gym step-climber machines. What am I doing? Climbing, climbing, climbing. Like most humans, I can make myself do just about anything, if motivated enough.



















This is the payoff for all my huffing and puffing: the view at the ladder's end.







Ok. I really will get back to this topic...you are hanging on the edges of your seats, aren't you my throng of devoted readers? (I think that means chainsaw yogi, my one loyal reader. "One" probably does not constitute a throng, but it's one who counts with me). But I have another post first and then back to this one.

Enlightenment--that magnificent escape from anguish and ignorance--never happens by accident. It results from the brave and sometimes lonely battle of one person against his own weaknesses. -Bhikkhu Nyanasobhano, "Landscapes of Wonder"


We have met the enemy and it is us.

Pogo

Tense? Women are used to it

In a recent study, researchers discovered that men who experienced high levels of tension suffered higher rates of heart disease and atrial fibrillation and had higher mortality rates compared to men who did not experience chronic feelings of tension. Tension did not appear to have the same effect in women. http://www.realage.com/news_features/tip.aspx?dat=2_12_2005

Yeah, we know. If women had not evolved over millions of years to handle tension and still outlive men, the species would have been deader than the dodo.

The researchers suggest 10 minutes of deep breathing, meditation, listening to soothing music. I guess the researchers are just too realistic to add to that list, "go tell your boss to commit a physical impossibility upon himself," or "avoid all viewing of Victoria's Secret Christmas advertising," or "use your credit cards until the raised numbers on their faces are rubbed down flush with the cards' surfaces." These are some of the ways I for one would like to manage-- not tension, which we women are supposedly less damaged by-- but anxiety, which makes women and men equally ill.

Apparently, tension is dealing with the stress of what is. We can handle that. Anxiety is the stress of imagining what horrible thing lies waiting just around the corner. Or on the other end of the telephone line when your boss tells the receptionist you will answer the client who had asked for him instead. Tension makes your lips thin and causes vertical lines between your eyebrows. Anixety kills you.

I'll just take a few deep breaths and think about that while you administer this stress test on yourselves. http://www.jokefile.co.uk/quizzes/stresstest.html