Category Archives: Westward ho!

Lisa and Jeff move from Florida to Arizona

Jeff gets his hair did

Posted on February 19, 2012 | 2 comments

Jeff and I were recently wandering the East Valley (east of Phoenix, that is) and found a Hurricane Simulator at a local mall. Well, what man in his right mind (or even Jeff!) could possibly pass up an opportunity to waste two dollars on a thing like that?

(Please note that I am not making any “two dollar blow job” puns … and that the fact that I bothered to mention the lack of “two dollar blow job” puns is not my sneaky way of fitting one in.)

So he paid his two bucks, stepped inside, shut the door and prepared for devastation. We just moved here after nine years in Florida, so we know from hurricanes. This machine, it appears, does not.

In essence, this giant hair dryer blows wind down from the ceiling and displays the wind-speed on an LED screen on the back wall. It went up to 80 MPH within a minute or so and then immediately dropped back down. Wheee! Just like a real hurricane, minus the flying lawn chairs and flooded living rooms!

After it was all over, he stepped back outside into safety. Uninjured, he waved away the FEMA reps that magically appeared, as they are wont to do. (On a side note, one of my favorite t-shirts is one I bought on Bourbon Street in New Orleans that says “FEMA Evacuation Plan: Run, Bitch, Run!”)

Doesn’t his hair look nice?

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Posted in Humor, Life is Fun!, Lisa and Jeff, Westward ho!

Stepping thru the veil in 2012

Posted on January 1, 2012 | 1 comment

Happy New Year! I’m excited to finally see 2012, the year it’s all supposed to change. What is supposed to change, no one knows for sure, but … whatever it is … I’m starting off the year with a new Shape Shifter’s Daily Diary.*

Yes, that’s a shameless plug, but it’s still true. After I wrote Shape Shifting–reclaiming YOUR perfect body, many readers  asked if there was a workbook. So I created the Daily Diary for them, and it really works! There have been times that I’ve had to put my Daily Diary aside for a while because things were manifesting too quickly for me to keep up with. (The cover art is of an androgynous person “stepping through the veil of consciousness” into a lighter way of being.)

Anyway,  because Jeff and I are moving from Florida to Arizona in just a few days, and I have so many things to keep track of and try to accomplish, I cracked open a brand new Diary to keep track of my Goals, Challenges, Intentions, etc (see * for explanation).

My primary goals for the next few months are (in no particular order, and starting after we arrive in Arizona):

1. Buy a house;
2. Finish writing Sink or Swim
3. Get Amnesty for Abuse off the ground
4. Start shopping my next book;
5. Get back in shape! (The past few months–with my dad’s death, the holidays and the move–have created havoc with my weight.)

And those are just the BIG goals! I didn’t even mention the everyday life stuff. As you can see, I have my work cut out for me. I hope you all will be my cheerleaders!

Here are today’s Challenges and Intentions from my Diary:

Challenges: We’re in limbo. It’s New Year’s Day (our third wedding anniversary), the house is packed and needs to be cleaned. We’re having a “happy hour” in the yard to say goodbye to our neighbors. We have lots of crap food and are both pretty frazzled. I’m having a hard time being excited about the future. I’m very tired of living like this.

Intentions: Only three more days and we’ll be in the truck. Our new life is beginning so I intend to focus on how exciting that is! Until then, I’m not going to worry about food too much. I intend that I enjoy Florida while I’m still here and have a great day today!

I’ll keep ya posted as the story unfolds!

* FROM THE SHAPE SHIFTING WEBSITE: Using five powerful creation components—Triumphs, Makeovers, Challenges, Intentions & Epiphanies—this Diary will help you to not only create and keep track of accomplishments (one of the most important parts of manifesting … feeling grateful for the good things in life), but to also recognize and reframe any roadblocks.

The Law of Attraction states that, “Like attracts like.” In other words, we can’t have what we want in our physical reality until we feel we already have it. You can not be rich if you feel poor. You can not be thin if you feel fat. You can not win if you feel like a loser. So how do you feel like you are what you are not? It is a frustrating paradox.

The Shape Shifter’s Daily Diary is not just a journal, it is a creation tool. While using it, you flow into a new “You,” in the same way that river currents reshape boulders. Every entry reshapes the contours of your life. By becoming conscious of who you are becoming, on a daily basis, you have more deliberate say in what your contours will eventually look like.

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Posted in Law of Attraction, Life is Fun!, Shape Shifters Daily Diary, Shape Shifting, Spirituality, Westward ho!

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A Vision Board come true …

Posted on December 25, 2011 | 6 comments

From time to time I’ll make up a vision board (usually after the stack of magazines I’m saving for the project gets too tall to stand alone). A couple months ago, I finally got out my scissors and glue stick and made this:

The fun part of a vision board is watching for clues that the things you placed on the board are beginning to manifest. So far, there have been some interesting “coincidences,” like all of the houses I put on there. Jeff and I are moving to the Phoenix, AZ area next week, and are for the first time planning to buy our own house and not rent anymore. That was not in our plans when I made this board.

There is also a reference to Archangel Michael on the bottom, in the center. My son-in-law, Michael, who also moved to the Phoenix area recently with my daughter, is nicknamed Michael Archangel.

I could go on, but what caused me to actually sit down and write this blog is this little piece of humor that I added to the board, just for fun. I wanted 2012 to be when I get back to work on my novel series, so this tiny picture of a t-shirt is supposed to represent my desire to do that. Plus, I thought at the time, it was rather ironic that the first novel in that series is entitled “Be Careful What You Witch For!” and the shirt starts out with the phrase “Be Careful …” You can see this in the upper, right quadrant of the board, just above the shiny bubble.

Sooooo, imagine my surprise when I opened one of my Christmas presents, this one from Jeff’s brother’s family, and found this! Isn’t life fun?

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Posted in Law of Attraction, Life is Fun!, Spirituality, Westward ho!

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The end of an era

Posted on December 14, 2011 | 3 comments

When Jeff and I moved to Florida (nine years ago this January) we had a plan. Yes, it was a half-assed plan, but a plan nonetheless. We moved here to sell wire-wrapped crystals on Clearwater Beach. That’s the idea that got us moved from Point A to Point B.

At the time, I had just finished writing my first book and we were done with living in the snowbelt (Fort Wayne, IN). We were looking for some way to move nearer a tropical beach, and I “just happened” to meet someone in Fort Wayne who told me about the daily Sunset Festival on Clearwater Pier. I had been making jewelry for a couple years and selling it on eBay and at art fairs, but a daily festival was a way to make a living!

What I wanted, more than anything else, was to find a publisher for what was eventually titled Shape Shifting–reclaiming your perfect body, and to make a living as a writer. Making jewelry was a hobby that I loved, and I would enjoy doing this as a way to make money while I wrote. So I quit my job in the newsroom, cashed in my 401K and we started making plans.

One thing I learned from doing art fairs is that presentation is everything … it’s how you get customers to even look at your wares. So Jeff’s dad made me a sturdy vendor’s cart, from scratch, and my good friend Linda, an incredibly talented artist, painted it for me. She even made the Carnivale mask that hangs from the front. It was, truly, a work of art and it was a wonderful gift from two people who really cared about us.

We put most of our stuff in storage and headed south in this tiny little camper, where we lived for the first several months until we moved into a (slightly larger) fifth-wheel camper, and then eventually into the house we’re in now, which Jeff has dubbed his “Monkee’s Beach House.”

Unfortunately, selling jewelry on the pier didn’t work out, for many reasons, and that gorgeous cart became a lawn ornament. Meantime, I published three books and have now signed with Berkley to write my fourth. I strongly believe that “the Universe” brought us here, to this specific place in Florida, so I would meet and become friends with my co-author, Stacey Kananen. And now that my work in Florida is done, Jeff and I are being pulled elsewhere, out to Arizona, in much the same way we were pulled here … it’s just flowing like it’s “meant to be.” And today, we gave that gorgeous, old weather-beaten jewelry cart to our neighbor Terre, who is just hippie enough to love it almost as much as we do.

It’s heartbreaking to see the empty space in the yard where the cart used to be, but Jeff and I both know that it simply marks the end of this chapter, this era, in our lives. It’s as if the door has now officially closed on our Florida years and the cowboy call of the Old West is getting louder. I have a very strong feeling that our first Amnesty for Abuse House is waiting for me to arrive in AZ and roll up my sleeves.

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Posted in Life is Fun!, Lisa and Jeff, Westward ho!

I love moving!

Posted on November 27, 2011 | 4 comments

No, I don’t like the manual labor, but I do love a fresh start in a new house. Talk about spring cleaning! The big difference is that the question changes from, “Is this worth hanging onto just in case I might need it someday?” to “Is this worth packing and moving across the country?”

Jeff and I spent the weekend trying to get some prep work done. We’re not leaving until January, but we’re not going to wait until the last minute to get to work. We needed boxes and a place to stack them as we pack. So the shed needed to be cleaned and boxes gathered. We usually get all of our boxes behind the Dollar General store because they always have mountains of empty heavy-duty, perfectly-sized laundry soap and cleaning supply boxes. Those boxes have to be very strong and just the right size because those bottles are heavy.

They make perfect book-packing boxes, and I have tons of books, much to Jeff’s chagrin. He keeps trying to get me to throw them all away because he doesn’t want to have to be the one to lug them, but I told him that we’ll get along just fine as long as he takes care of throwing away his own things, and leaves me to throw out my own.  Believe me, I’ll be throwing puhlenty of stuff away, so back off from my treasures! Otherwise we’ll be having a chat about all of those video games just gathering dust over there …

I digress. We found out, the hard way, that Dollar General now has a deal with a local recycler and sells their boxes to them. So today, after we cleaned out the shed, we tried the Family Dollar store to see if they had any boxes. Paydirt!!!

Before ...

... and after!

Now my house reeks of cardboard–not necessarily an unpleasant smell, but it’s a little overpowering. Or is that the task ahead of us that’s overpowering? Either way, I’ve done enough for today. We still have over a month to go, so no point in rushing it, right?

By the way, my co-author Stacey Kananen and I finally got our finalized, completed contract from Penquin/Berkley books! Yay!!!

Stacey Kananen and me, holding our publishing contract from Berkley Books.

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Posted in Life is Fun!, Sink or Swim, Stacey M. Kananen, Westward ho!

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Westward, ho!

Posted on November 24, 2011 | 4 comments

The fact that I’m posting these words as a blog makes it irreversible. No backing out now. Jeff and I are moving to Arizona. And if you enjoyed my blogs about our “Here’s yew a dawg” trip, you’re gonna want to keep your eyes on this space because it promises to be fraught with typical Jeff and Lisa brand “good times and clusterfucks.”

There’s some sad stuff up front. My dad just died. What a horrible thing. I’ve had nightmares about this moment for years. I’d wake up from vivid dreams that my dad was DEAD and it was so real that I’d sit up in bed, wretching from crying so hard, and wracked with sobs for long minutes after I woke up because it was such an intense and horrific sense of loss. But when it actually happened, it didn’t hit me that hard. I was so relieved to stop seeing his body in that condition that I was blissfully relieved when we finally got that 2:20 AM phone call. That doesn’t mean I don’t fall apart in the grocery store or other inconvenient places, especially when they play Christmas music (which is starting insanely early this year). It does mean, however, that I’m able to be a lot more philosophical and Zen about his death than I thought I would be.

I have some pretty comforting spiritual views on this, which help. I’m sort of a “New Ager/Lightworker” type, but I don’t take myself as seriously as some of them do. Believe me, there are whacked out fundamentalist New Agers, just like there are in any other belief system. Some of us actually have our shit together and cringe when the fringe shows up in the news to make us all look crazy. Those spiritual views include the concept that death isn’t the end of life overall, just the end of life in the physical form. Life, free from the body, seems like a pretty groovy thing so death is only bad for those of us who are still alive and missing our dead folks.

Anyway, I have developed a pretty strong connection with my Dad, now that he’s on the other side. I didn’t expect that because I’ve never been very “lucky” communicating with the other side, even though I’ve tried for decades. Dad, on the other hand, thought psychic stuff was all “horseshit” so it’s surprising to see him so strongly reaching out from over there. But I know I’m getting messages from Dad, because less than a month after his death, I’m moving across the country to live near my mom because I think he’d really like it if I did. (I’d like it, too, or I wouldn’t be doing it, I’m just sayin’ … Dad is the one who nudged me into action).

I’ll maybe share a little about those messages in future blogs, but for now I don’t want to make this too long. It’s Thanksgiving Day and Jeff and I are relishing our last Thanksgiving in our Florida “Monkees’ Beach House.” (Jeff has, since he was a boy, wanted to live like the Monkees, in their groovy beach house. We have spent the last nine years living like that, in our own fashion, and it’s VERY hard to say goodbye to because it’s been delicious.)

But now that it’s been said aloud, let it be done. Here we go on another amazing journey! I hope you enjoy the trip as much as we will!

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Posted in Life is Fun!, Lisa and Jeff, Westward ho!

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