Sonia Marsh - Gutsy Living

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Is blogging messing with your mind?

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For once, I’m determined to get my posts ready for the week. It’s Sunday afternoon and I’ve been glued to my office chair, staring at my computer for several hours. What the hell am I doing? the sun is shining and I’m inside my kitchen writing. (No need to tell me I’m crazy, I already realize that thank you.)

Fortunately, I find a blog post that resonates with what I’m thinking today and it’s called: “5 ways fear can mess up your blog,” by Tess Marshall from The Bold Life.

Tess points out “5 ways fear steals your joy and what action you can take in order to enjoy life and the blogging process.” Please hop over to read her great advice.

1. You obsess about the competition.
2. Your content Lacks pizzazz.
3. You Doubt Yourself.
4. You’re unmotivated and stuck.
5. You want to give up and quit.  
  
“Become aware of how many times in one day you wish for a better and bigger blog and all that goes with it?

Now estimate how many times a day you say to yourself,’My life is great just the way it is today!'”

Of course Tess is right, but once you get bitten by the blogger bug, it’s very difficult to erase it from your mind; especially when you’ve been asked to join a panel and speak about “Beyond Blogging” at the Orange County Branch of the California Writers Club.

A romantic dinner at home.

Last night I set a romantic table next to our fireplace. I had candles, roses in a vase, and champagne flutes ready for our dinner. With the kids gone, my husband and I can finally have romantic dinners at home. As we sip our champagne with some smoked salmon appetizers, I ask him, “Do you think I’d spend as many hours in front of my computer if we moved back to Ambergris Caye? (Photo at the top is from Ambergris Caye where we lived from 2004-2005. This is Victoria House, a beautiful resort on the island.) Before he has time to answer, I say, “I’m sure I’d blog and spend hours on my laptop.” In a way I’m scared Gutsy enough to admit that blogging and writing is my obsession, but since statistics show that women outnumber men in the social media world, perhaps society has created a new female disease that requires a new form of treatment.

So my question to you is: “Is blogging messing with your mind?” If so, in what way? 
This question is for men too. Please ask your friends and share.

Making Love in Paradise

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 HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY TO ALL
Laguna Beach, CA February 13, 2011

When my husband and I moved to Belize, I knew we’d found the perfect place for romance. The two of us would embrace on the powdery sand with the sun’s warmth caressing our bodies. After a couple of exotic coconut rum punches, passion would take over, right?

Wrong! A primitive hut on stilts is not the place for a fulfilling love life. There’s a limit to how many coconut rum punches you can knock back while ignoring scorpions, large spiders, sweaty odors and sand flies sharing your bed. Having a mosquito net made no difference; the critters appeared on-time, and uninvited.

We moved from a luxury California king-size mattress to a knobby double mattress in Belize. Duke’s feet stuck out a foot or so, but at least the mattress offered a separation between us and the floor’s ecosystem.

The ceiling fauna was exactly the same, but gravity caused numerous landings of critters and their poop, onto our protective mosquito net. I just prayed that a giant iguana or rat wouldn’t fall out of the palm-fronded, vaulted ceiling and cause the net to collapse over our faces.

Body odor was another distraction during romance. The humidity and lack of air-conditioning caused us to sweat like baboons. I tried everything to get our sheets to smell fresh, but our stinky well water didn’t help matters. I boiled pot after pot of water mixed with bleach on my kitchen stove, and sprinted outside to fill our washing machine located underneath our hut. A colony of dock flies resided next to the washing machine and pounced on my legs, like hungry carnivores. Within an hour, I’d have large welts. I finally gave up and sprayed my precious Chanel perfume onto our sheets, but this was only a three-second fix. Desperate, I sprayed some inside my nostrils, and screamed in pain.

On this special Valentine’s Day, please remember how lucky you are to have a comfortable bed with clean sheets. If you want some tropical romance, check yourself into a nice hotel with air-conditioning.


What about you? Any romantic or fun stories to share?

Is Education a Privilege or a Right?

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Big Sergio and his son, little Sergio, in Belize.

I am so lucky to live in a part of the world where my children can have an education.

Living in the developed world, I sometimes forget that education is a privilege, despite my belief that it should be a right for every child in the world.

Greg Mortenson, author of NYT bestseller Three Cups of Tea, is the director of the Bozeman-based non-profit Central Asia Institute (CAI), and has been building schools, particularly for girls, in mountain areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. As of 2007, he had built 64 schools which provide education to over 24,000 students, including 14,000 females.

I wanted my 15-year-old son Jordan to watch the special on CNN last night where children in Afghanistan and Pakistan were begging for an education. Kids sat cross-legged on dusty desert floors, watching their teacher write on the outdoor blackboard. The concentration and enthusiasm they expressed, was equivalent to U.S. teenagers being offered the latest, most expensive electronic gizmo. When asked what they wanted more than anything, “an education” was their first response.

When we lived in Belize, my three sons spent hours fishing with big Sergio, our caretaker and his son, little Sergio. One evening we had them over for dinner. Big Sergio, only twenty-one said, “You lucky. You go school, get books and computers. I work in sugar-cane fields at thirteen, to help for food. No money for books, only work for food.”

Big Sergio gave my family a gift. No amount of lecturing from me, could ever make my kids understand that in many parts of the world, education is seen as a privilege.

I know they were shocked to hear big Sergio had quit school at thirteen. During the year we spent on Ambergris Caye, my boys showed him how to use a computer and little Sergio how to read and speak English.

What are your views on this topic?

Do you have any stories to share about your kids and education or kids from other parts of the world?

Do you care about your hair?

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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

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“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.

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