Sonia Marsh - Gutsy Living

Sedona with a twist.

May 26, 2009 by Sonia Marsh

This is Sedona. Beautiful red rocks, clean air, mesas, yuccas, cacti, pine trees and spirituality.

When I caught my first glimpse of the majestic red rocks of Sedona, I knew this trip would be different. Gray clouds hugged the rocks like giant cloaks allowing the mind to “see” ghosts. This was the perfect location for a scary movie. Red mud flowed down the mountains puddling onto the one lane road. Cars crawled flinging bloody water onto the empty sidewalks.

This was the start of our two night stay in Sedona. My German friend, Inge, invited me on this trip, and our goal was to have fun and relax. After a lovely, “expensive” seabass dinner–I know, why order fish when you’re in the middle of the desert?– Inge and I were in the mood to listen to music. With the rental car’s windshield wipers in full swing–driving well below the speed limit–we squinted along highway 89A to

The Olde Sedona Bar and Grill supposedly the best night spot in town. The outside reminded me of an old western saloon, not exactly the techno-style night club, I prefer. A small group of heavy duty smokers leaned against an outside patio wall, puffing away as the rain pelted down.

Inge and I headed straight to the bar area where an alternative rock band was scheduled to play that evening. A little ill at ease with so many eyes scanning the room for the “catch” of the evening, I felt relieved when a couple of women joined our table for some lively conversation. Our waiter, an older version of Antonio Banderas with a tiny gray pony-tail, seemed to attract all three women at our table, except me. I haven’t been in a night club without my husband since we married 22 years ago, and I soon realized how alien I felt. Scared to look at men, I took every opportunity to latch onto one woman, and whenever she needed to smoke, followed her out to the patio smokers club. I hate smoke, but this was better than avoiding eye contact with the younger men sitting at the table, three feet away from ours.

The rock band started and my friends were in dancing mode. I froze. I pretended I needed the restroom and then followed the smokers outside for my third exposure to rain and coughing.

I could see Inge through the window, dancing and laughing, and wanted her to have some fun. She is single after all, as were the other women. I never expected to react this way.

It was then that I decided to…. (NEXT POST) Don’t want to bore you with too much text.

What about you married ladies. Have you felt uncomfortable in a bar with single people?

Who needs a vacation when you work in the U.S.?

May 21, 2009 by Sonia Marsh

I’m off to romantic Sedona, Arizona, on Friday for three days with my German friend, Inge. You may be asking, “Why not with your husband?” The answer is simple. I live in the United States where work comes first and relaxation is a four letter word.

My husband is longing for a vacation. The last one he had was in August 2007, and I can tell he really needs one. There are however three problems. First of all, his boss doesn’t want him to take more than one week off at a time, even though he’s been a pillar of strength at the same law firm for ten years, (minus the one year we lived in Belize.) Secondly, he’s supposed to bill the same number of hours whether or not he takes a vacation. This obviously means working twice as many hours when he returns from his vacation. How can you relax when you have to do that? Third, we shall soon have two sons attending University in the U.S. Our 18-year-old is starting UCSB, University of California Santa Barbara, this August, and our oldest is in his 3rd year of engineering, at the University of Michigan.

For those of you who live abroad, California is considered in-state for us which means the fees are around $22,000 per year, including the dorm, food and books. When your son/daughter studies out of state, which is the case of our oldest, tuition and books amount to $40,000, not including room and board. Multiply both those fees by 4, for a University degree. No wonder people have the work ethic here. Many young students start a new career with loans of $160,000. Some people say, “Get a scholarship, but what if your kid is one of the 99% who does not excel at baseball, football, etc? My Danish friend’s son is also in college, and he gets a set amount per month for lodging from the government, and tuition is covered. He will be able to start a career debt-free.

I love asking people I know at my local gym if they have any plans for the summer. 99% of the time, they say, “I have to work, so we’ll probably take a couple of 3-day weekends to Santa Barbara or Las Vegas.” I’ve never heard anyone say, “We’re off to Brazil, or Australia.” I envy Europeans for the amount of holidays they have and the amount of traveling they do. It doesn’t necessarily seem to be related to a highly paid job either.

When Duke and I visited the tiny island of Nana-Nu-Ira in Fiji, for our 50th birthdays, a lifetime dream of mine, we met a couple from England. Both husband and wife were school teachers in their 50’s, and every year, they take the whole summer and fly around the world on a special ticket where they can stop when they chose to. They also take a holiday in the fall which is usually to Greece or the Canary Islands. I’ve never met a husband and wife who are both school teachers in the U.S., ever taking a round the world trip, EVER.
I know the economy affects all of us, and times may be different now.

So what are your plans for holidays this year?
What is it like for you when you take time off work? Do you have to make up the extra hours when you return?
What about University costs where you live?

Do you care about your hair?

May 19, 2009 by Sonia Marsh

I admit, when it comes to hair, I’m just a tad vain. That might surprise you after all my previous blog posts, however, it does fit with my motto, “If they don’t have what you need, want what they have.”

For years, during my 30’s my hair looked like s**t, mainly because I let my husband color it every 3 weeks with L’Oreal extra light ash blond, from a box. He’d ask me to sit on a kitchen stool with a towel wrapped around my shoulders and then gently massage the color onto the roots, using his special brush– no, not a paint brush. He became an expert at dabbing each row with goop and after twenty minutes, I felt like I had Marilyn Monroe’s hair color, without the looks. Imagine what ten years of this procedure did to my hair. It turned white and cracked like uncooked spaghetti. The same thing started happening in Belize, after only two months in the surf and sand. You can see the beginning of wild sun-damaged hair in the photo above.

Now that I live in the land of great hairdressers, I’ve fallen into the trap of getting it professionally colored again. No more dry spaghetti hair for me.

So what about you? Are you vain when it comes to your hair? I don’t know if you can send a photo in the comments section, but if you can, I’d love a visual to go with your comment.

To the men. Have you colored your wife’s /girlfriend’s hair? I’m curious how many other men have done that.

Wants and Needs

May 15, 2009 by Sonia Marsh

“If they don’t have what you need, want what they have.”

This phrase became our motto in Belize. It was how we learned to live a life with less stuff, but more satisfaction. At first it didn’t sound right, but now I believe it.

I had the urge to write this post after reading Meredith Resnick’s great article, “Money complicated things, so spoil them.”

More is not better, often you need less to appreciate what you have. I’m not suggesting depriving your kids of the basics, I’m talking about the over-indulgence and the entitlement attitude of many in the developed world today. The two Russian girls that Meredith Resnick wrote about in her article felt overwhelmed and couldn’t fathom the need for so much stuff.

The only thing my three sons begged for when we returned to the U.S., was a glass of fresh milk. That’s how one year of powdered milk and our new motto, “If they don’t have what you need, want what they have, changed our kids. A big step in the right direction after “gimme, gimme, gimme,” and begging for a brand new truck, the year before we left. Their priorities, and ours, had changed.

The first time I strolled down the cereal aisle of my local U.S. supermarket, after a year in Belize, my head started spinning, and my knees felt weak. “Need help finding something?” a sales person asked. I looked at him and said, “There are too many choices. I don’t know which one to pick.” I could tell what he was thinking and stood there like a statue, way too long compared to the average shopper. The poor kid shrugged and left.

It’s a beautiful feeling when you, and your kids learn the difference between wants and needs.

Promoting is like breathing, you can never take a rest from it or you might die.

May 9, 2009 by Sonia Marsh

Over the last few months, I’ve spent countless hours listening to CD’s, reading books on book promotion and social networking, and I’m starting to feel like a bride who might cancel her wedding–just kidding!

In Belize, my days were filled with cooking everything from scratch, including bread, shopping for food, or perhaps–going out on a scavenger hunt for food is more like it— and boiling pots of stinky well water to (pretend) wash our clothes, which never failed to reek of sweat. Yet time went by just as quickly in Belize. I felt like I’d stepped back fifty years and my previous hectic life of the 21st century, was in the past. No one was in a hurry, not even the expats.

Now I’ve relocated to the land of continuous PR, where promoting is like breathing: you can never take a rest from it, or you might die.

Recently, at my friend’s book launch, all unpublished writers were hungry to learn the steps. “Should I be twittering? What is it really for? Should I be on Facebook? Should I be blogging?”

I listened to a literary PR agent talk about the need to start promoting your book, at least one year before publication. What’s all that about? If I still lived in Belize and wanted to promote my book, I’d have another rum and coke, listen to some Bob Marley, and say, “No worries Mon.”

So what I’m asking all you writers today (Yes, bloggers are writers since they publish online) Do you feel pressure to be a PR specialist? And to those of you aspiring authors, if you knew how time consuming book promotion would be, would you still write?

I know the arguments that we write because of a strong desire within us, and that not writing would make us sick. But being an author is so much more than writing. You become a business, at least that’s what all the conference CD’s, I’ve listened to recently, tell me. You promote yourself 24/7, you’re constantly selling, even on vacation.

Do you want to be doing PR 24/7?

I think it’s time for another rum and coke, under my palapa. Belize, here I come.

Please comment or I’ll feel like my PR and social networking have failed me and I’ll run and hide in my fishing boat in Belize. Oh my! That sounds tempting right now.