Hollywood Week Wrap Up

I could go on and on posting pictures from our trip (I took around 80 pictures). But I think it’s time to wrap things up and get back to the farm.

Whatever experiences in my life, big or small, I always try to reflect and take away something from them. A lesson learned, perhaps, or maybe a direction that God is trying to turn me in. A trip like this was wonderful, enough of a take away in and of itself. But still, a few thoughts have occurred to me.

~ONE~
I’ve got to stop waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I don’t even know what that expression really means.

Whenever something good like this happens, there’s a part of me wondering what bad thing is going to happen next to even things up. Think of a funeral where someone says, “It’s such a shame, this freak accident/disease/act-of-God that took Jim’s life. Thank goodness he and Margie took that trip when they did.”

So I’m wondering, what’s going to happen next that people will say, “Thank goodness they got that trip to Hollywood.”

And that’s crazy. It’s not the way to live life. So I need to be really emphatic about telling myself to shut up with that kind of thinking. (How crazy does that make me, that now I’m telling the voices in my head to shut up?!? That voice that just said, you shouldn’t have even typed that. Now something bad is going to happen for sure!)

~TWO~
As the above item alludes to, I’m a worrier.

And a fretter.

And Worrier + Fretter = Control Freak.

My schedule, my daily routine, my To Do List…all things that help me get done what I need to get done for the family, the farm, and the day job and still have a tiny sliver of time for myself now and again. But sometimes the routine can imprison me.

If we had been planning a trip to Disneyland, I would have spent hours on the internet researching. I would have had our itinerary planned to the minute. I would have known exactly what rides we were going to do at Disney, and in what order.

But this trip was so last-minute that there wasn’t any time for that. Whenever Ken (my boss, who lives in L.A.) would ask me what we had planned I’d reply, “I don’t know. We don’t really have a plan.” I had to roll with the flow. And consequently I was the most relaxed I’ve been in months. Years, perhaps. And it was good.

~THREE~
Sometimes, nay, oftentimes the dream of growing this farm into a living income, of expanding this farm or buying a bigger one, seems so out of reach and so impossible.

But really, if your chicken can take you to Hollywood, what can’t happen?

And that is my favorite take away of all.