Of Eclipses, Loss, and Transformation

This month has been a tad rough, spiritually speaking. We've got this massive blood moon lunar eclipse coming up in a couple of days here on the 27th and it's had me feeling some kind of way. I've definitely been having one of those months where staying upbeat and excited about life in general seems a bit harder than usual. The same sticking points and problems I always have in my life have seemed more daunting somehow and the things that normally make it better have been less effective for no real reason. Typical me when something odd is going on with the moon.

It hardly helps that a friend of mine died in a truly horrific way last Thursday night. Her name was Angela Coleman and she lived in Indianapolis. She and pretty much her entire family were involved in the Branson, Missouri duck boat accident that's been in the news lately and the great majority of them died -- 9 out of the 11 Colemans that were on the boat.

Angela was an online friend of mine, so I only knew her but so well, but we talked relatively often. I converse with so few people these days, so I think it's fair to say she was one of my closer social media friends. We shared a lot of interests, particularly food and cooking. She signed up for ButcherBox because of how excited I'd always get about receiving and cooking with the things they sent. We traded recipe ideas often and even her son, Donovan, was getting into cooking. She was also a total "take no shit" type of person just like I am, so we bonded over general life stuff a lot too. She was most certainly someone I was always excited to hear from and talk to. She'd even gotten to know Seth over the years, so he knew her as well.

Her death really kind of messed with my head, as deaths tend to do. Although I've had some folks almost die on me a couple of times over the course of my life, I've never actually had to cope with losing someone that was a large part of my daily offline life at the time that they passed. A few old high school friends, online acquaintances, and coworkers, yes. But not anyone like a partner, a close family member, or a really close friend that I spent time with in person every single day. In a way, that is something I really don't know about myself -- how I truly deal with having my day-to-day life drastically changed in an instant by a death. If how I handle deaths like Angela's or even the deaths of famous people I looked up to is anything to go by though, it's not something I'm good at coping with. As usual, it's been really hard for me to grasp that concept -- that once upon a time, I lived in world that had an Angela in it and now --abruptly and suddenly -- she is no longer there.

Despite the fact that this month's been weird and rough though, I've continued to make steady progress with my ongoing fitness and grooming project. I'm proud of myself for that. To start with, I've been keeping up with my workouts like a boss. In particular, I've been noticing that my legs and arms have been looking a lot leaner and shapelier lately. There's still more body fat than I'd like covering up the muscles I've been working so hard to build and train, but it's no longer so thick you can't tell there's a real leg under there somewhere. I can actually see where one day I may actually have a body I'm proud to call mine again. I also finally got my poor, neglected hair back to a place where it's ready to be dyed, cut nicely, and styled again. I chose my color yesterday and everything. If I like, I can have it done as soon as this weekend, so it won't be long before I'm feeling much more like myself again at all. It's about time!