From around Aug 30, 2010:

This week I was challenged to think about what my life would be like if it was ideal and all my hopes and dreams were being realized….as if God himself walked in my door and said, "Catie, I feel for you and I have chosen to grant all your desires and needs."

So, as with all things I have forgotten about it and procrastinated all my time to think on this at a leisurely pace and am now cranking it out the morning of… Well, there are a lot of things I desire and dream about…I crave adventure and new challenges all the time. A lot of things in my life are fantastic! I enjoy a wonderful relationship with my husband, and a beautiful home that I can work on and decorate. My husband and I have had some wonderful trips to Las Vegas, San Francisco, the Cayman Islands, Boston, New York, and Victoria, B.C. We are able to pay our bills and get the groceries we need. I have sweet pets…sometimes too many pets. I have a fantastic circle of friends who I love, respect and admire. I volunteer at a local non-profit once a week. I\'ve had a job for three years working for some people who I have really grown to love. My siblings are getting married to great people and having handsome babies! My husband\'s family is awesome and I love them. And I just got a huge party together and a bunch of donations for my parents so they can finally live their dream of going to Hawaii. So…with all these wonderful factors to my world, where does my dissatisfaction lie?

It\'s not that I\'m ungrateful because I truly realize all these things in my world and appreciate them so much. So, I\'m guessing that the things I would change are all about me. My wishes, shortcomings, visions of the future…etc. I have so many great things around me and I can\'t see my purpose and destiny…something more is waiting perhaps? Lately, I\'ve been a little depressed, pensive, irritable, stand-offish, nostalgic, restless, etc. I have general dreams about what I\'d like to learn and experience, but none of them seem that they would fill a deep burning hole in my psyche. Is it a spiritual hole?

Well, there are two days left at my job at Clogs-N-More. So, my schedule will be opening up and I will be taking on Mary Kay part-time. I imagine myself having more time to clean my house and work on home improvement projects that I have been scheming about for months! I will have Sundays off for spiritual endeavors and family time. I\'m hoping to get outta town and go camping and explore in the great outdoors. I am considering the possibility of going back to school. I\'m doing things to shake myself up a little like jogging and physical labor.

I dream about having a little cottage with a woodstove, near a body of water (river or lake) and living a simpler life. Swimming, fishing, boating, baking, gardening, painting…all these things…which doesn\'t make it sound simple at all, but it\'s my life, my choices, things that I enjoy. I think I\'m massively failing on this homework, but it was good to write all this down and reflect. Gotta run!

So, On the way to my appointment I thought about a lot of things.  Religion: how I’ll never be satisfied by other religions besides LDS because I’m all biased and other seem juvenile or incomplete.  And LDS seems too “perfect” for me so I never feel “good enough”.  I need to find camping friends to go outside with REALLY bad.  On an unrelated note, I miss the rush and anticipation of meeting someone new and having long, amazing, exhausting sex.  I miss whatever that amazing pheromone match is that makes me CRAZY(in a good way).  

Last night I was crying for my friend/ex-husband who just had a baby.  He doesn’t have lots of good friends because he has a tendency to burn bridges almost as fast as he makes them and now he’s a dad.  His biggest fear is happening and he’s acting like it aint no thang. He really used to fear being like his father and he’d have a melt down every time one of his friends got pregnant.  We were kids together and now he’s a thirty-something daddy with a wife he just remarried.  I wish I could be there for him. I feel a little awkward that I’m not a mom yet…and I miscarried his baby about 10 years ago.  It was horrible and he dealt with it horribly.