With Banjo Comes Change

Moving to Florida and buying a fixer upper has brought a lot of renovation work, and a lot of adjusting to a new way of life. We were getting tired, stressed out, overeating and sitting a lot. I'm a go-getter by nature, I quickly realized that we were forming bad habits and we needed to make changes.

First thing we had to do was get up and get moving. I dusted off my bike and hit the trails with Mi Miguel. But that wasn't enough. So, we added going to our favorite beach six times in the last two weeks. Long walks on the beach does a body good.

Second order of business meant eating healthier. I'm no fan of high dollar commercial diet shakes, pills, or any kind of prepackaged meal plan. Like I've said before, there's always a catch, a gimmick and a high price to pay and usually with poor long lasting results. Instead of looking for a quick, easy, "aint never gonna work" way of getting into shape, we simply drug out our juicer and blender and started making our own fruit only smoothies for breakfast, soup and salads for lunch and all-vegetable juice with our juicer for supper. A plain and simple change in lifestyle approach is always more attainable.

Mi Miguel and I were going full throttle on the exercising and healthy way of eating. But we noticed that we've come to a screeching halt on our fixer upper. We've owned our home for nine months and have worked really hard to get to the point that we're at right now. But, we're in a fixer upper rut.

Relaxing in our backyard, fishing and contemplating on what to do next took up several of our evenings. And we realized that there had to be a third thing on our agenda of getting ourselves out of this rut.

We figured out that we needed something long lasting and loyal that would keep us up and moving. While walking on the trail last Saturday, we come to know that we needed a dog. In my previous post I wrote about how we came to get Banjo specifically. We can honestly say that for the last three days this little girl has had us on our toes.

We were doing great with her as long as we were in our own yard or inside the house. Then we took her to the doggy beach. It was great exercise for Banjo and for us. Man o' man, she gave us a work out like no other. The trail to the beach was loaded with people and other dogs. We learned real quick that it was too much too soon. We only made it to this little patch of water and then made the grueling walk again on the path past more dogs, more people and eventually back to our truck. 

Banjo can sit, stay, lay, come, chase a cat up a tree, heel and go to her rug all on command except for the cat up the tree, she does that all by herself. You do remember the cat that likes to hide in my garden? Well she doesn't hide out there anymore. Banjo is becoming territorial that way.  

The good news is that we're out of our rut, Banjo insisted upon it. All that's left on the list is for me to find a job. Banjo can tell you that we are definitely out of the rut though. 

We just have a tad bit more exterior painting to do and hopefully we can drum up the gumption to get that done this week. Once that's complete we will have to find the motivation to move onward with the pergola. Before I can even think about getting anything done this morning, I should probably relax with my daily half cup of coffee first.

Now where's my cream and raw sugar. Sit Banjo, Sit.