I decided to give you all a temporary reprieve from my trip recap! Don’t worry, there are still TWO more heavily flying focused posts coming!

• First, here is the mani I got for the AC/DC concert! I love how matte polish looks.

• I am excited I found a vegan chocolate bunny! And that it wasn’t broken – all the ones around it were. Sad face.

• A few weeks ago I accidentally called the foyer of our house the “lobby.” So now we are jokingly calling it that.
• What’s it called when you brain creates expectations for things you didn’t even realize it was creating until after the thing happens? It’s been happening to me so much lately. I purposefully try to go into things (events, interactions, life) without expectations, but then when it’s over I realize I had still imagined something. So weird.
• Steven is such a good cat dad. Snow Jr was missing for 24 hours from Sunday to Monday night and Steven went all over in the woods looking for him. Of course, while he was doing that, Snow Jr came sauntering out of Dragonstone – which Steven had checked several times. Maybe Snow Jr just went in there while it was open and was somewhere else the whole time. What a stinker (Snow Jr, not Steven).

• Steven was also very concerned when we were out of town this weekend and our next door neighbor told us Penny showed up there (she has to travel a bit through the woods – or on the street! – to get there). We asked the sitter to go get her if she wasn’t there by the time she came, but Penny had thankfully returned home.
• Speaking of Penny. Sigh. This girl. She is still rushing into the garage when we show up and leave. Here is a view from my camera as I was pulling into the garage this week.

• I really like this snippet from this article about how flying disconnects you from the world and makes you super focused on the task at hand:

I didn’t learn to fly so I could be alone with my thoughts, but I quickly discovered it was a nice side benefit. Flying forces you to leave your everyday worries on the ground and focus on the job of pilot in command, the way a good book or concert can make the outside world disappear temporarily.

• And one more article I stumbled across – Cognitive shuffling: A mental trick to help you quiet racing thoughts and fall asleep. The idea is that you pick random meaningless words and think of corresponding words with the same first letter for a bit then move on to another letter, to get your mind off your racing thoughts. It’s kind of worked for me?

Cognitive shuffling typically involves mentally conjuring up random, impersonal and non-emotionally charged words. For each letter of a word you pick at random, you think of as many corresponding words as you can for five to eight seconds each before moving to the next letter, Beaudoin said.

For the word “piano,” for example, you might think “Pear, parachute, Paul, pirouette … Item, intention, immature, igloo …” and so on.

While the technique may not sound calming, it “takes your mind off of your problems and your issues, and helps you get into a more relaxed state of mind,” said Dr. Fariha Abbasi-Feinberg, a sleep medicine physician and neurologist at the Millennium Physician Group in Fort Myers, Florida.

Link to Random Thoughts Thursday 493