Flag waving

I seized an opportunity last night that I haven't in some time...  I seized the opportunity to let my freak flag fly and it felt awesome!  Several weeks ago a fellow dancer asked if I would dance for a fundraiser she was putting together for the local YWCA.  I agreed and began diligently practicing with my new sword because I wanted to debut it at this show.  I kept going back and forth on what costume I wanted to wear and I opted to wear one that parts are made out of fabric covered in flames. I decided that I needed to add some "sizzle" to my performance.  (We ended up raising just over $800 for this very worthy organization to put towards helping women.)

Spectators told me that I did a good job during my dance and that was good for me to hear.  The sword slipped once but I did this neat little shoulder catch thing (which was VERY unexpected but cool that it worked out) and my friend, who was in the audience, thought it was intentional.  I felt my performance as a whole was pretty good but because I'm a perfectionist I feel like I could've done a better job.  I have another performance this upcoming weekend and we'll see how that one goes...

While I would love to devote a lot of time to dancing this coming week, I have quite a bit on my plate work-wise.  I found out at the end of this past week that I will be headed to a week long training out of state and I leave next Monday.  I'm a little stressed out about it and I am trying to look more towards what I'm going to learn and not focus on the uncertainty of things.  As I've written about before, I don't always do really well with uncertainty but I'm working on it.  I've travelled by myself lots of times now but I've never done it on someone else's dime (because I'm traveling for work, everything is covered monetarily by them).  On the plus side, the hotel I'm staying in has a pool so I guess one way to look at it is for at least a little bit of the time, work will be paying me to play in the pool.  =)

I think my dogs are starting to sense that something is going on (even though they haven't seen my suitcase come out yet) because they have been extra clingy today.  Worrying about the two of them has been stressing me out in regards to this upcoming travel for work.  The person who usually watches them for me will be on vacation for part of the time so I had to find someone else to watch them for about a day and a half.  Luckily I was able to find someone willing to help bail me out and will watch my doggies for me while I'm traveling for work.  That helps definitely to take some stress off of my mind knowing that I have someone that will watch them so I can do what I need to do.

After a few things that happened at work this past week, it left me wanting to wave a flag other than my freak flag...  I wanted to wave the white flag of surrender.  I had to shake myself out of it, convince myself that wasn't the answer and keep plugging along.  I'm learning more and more that I need to start taking a break in the middle of the day to keep from burning out.  I was doing a pretty good job of going for at least a walk every day if I didn't take a full lunch break.  I have fallen back into old/bad habits and I don't even go for a walk everyday.  I make sure that each and every one of my staff get out of the building for their breaks but I don't do it for myself.  I need to start making sure I take care of myself, too.

I haven't fully determined how I'm going to do that yet but I promise you my dear readers that I'm going to give it some serious thought.  I hopefully will have a plan in place before leaving in my business trip in just over a week (that's so weird to be saying/thinking that I'm going on a business trip...).  Thank you once again for joining me on my quest, my dear readers and I hope you find someway this week to fly your freak flag!  =)