Empower Your Inner Architect: Building a Life of Epic Wellness

There is no doubt—May is upon us. There are increasingly more sunny days than cloudy ones, and there is suddenly a plethora of tissue boxes popping up in diverse places all over my house.  Yukon Cornelius, my cat with the paltry immune system, just sneezed seven times in my closet. And though I am comforted by my personal arsenal of allergy meds, I am left wondering if my stockpile of medications is now varnished with a sheet of feline boogers. But I digress… May excites me.   May encourages us to celebrate mothers everywhere. May 15 th is National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day and, in my opinion, by default, National Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Day. Why not celebrate your moms with cookie dough? Pure brilliance if you ask me. What would even be MORE brilliant is if my boys read this blog… National Hamburger Day (May 28 th ) could be celebrated just a little late when paired up with Memorial Day (May 31 st ) as you round out the month. I am grateful to those that sacrificed...

I’m fairly certain I have mentioned diverse variations of the word “poo” in my last three blogs. (Oops. There’s the fourth!) I am thinking I will spare you the excrement in this post, while I move on to a random personal health experience that I bet many of you can relate to. And let me tell you, my eyes have been opened. A couple of months ago, I started with a mild headache at work. “Headache” and “work” are SO often found in the same sentence; this was nothing new. I popped some Ibuprofen and commenced with my nursing duties. Within a 90-minute period, my headache had severely intensified, forcing me to my locker for the rest of the allowed eight-hour dose of Ibuprofen. In another hour, I was pan-handling for Tylenol among my coworkers but came up with zilch. A kind soul with whom I work offered to run to the convenience store across the street for Tylenol (Crap. Now that I think of it, I never paid her back! She’s probably talking about me. Right...now…) 1000mg of that was sure t...

My cat, Yukon Cornelius, is cool. He’s pretty darn special too—worth thousands and thousands of dollars. Yukon is helping me by contributing to April’s digestion discussion. Yukon has a mass in his small intestine. Before you all get angry at me, I usually deal with tense situations by using slightly incongruent humor. And before you all get upset, this finding is not a surprise. We knew, after a pretty expensive surgery with inconclusive results in November of 2019, that Yukon would most likely need future X-rays, that would lead to future ultrasounds, that would identify future digestive issues, that would require expensive prescription food and steroid treatments. What we didn’t count on was this—Yukon will probably never have another solid bowel movement, ever again. We really wish we would have known that before he decided his favorite potty spot was the $500 Litter Robot. Loose stools going through a Litter Robot is quite similar to any foreign liquid substance meeting the Room...

After inviting squeamish “eeews” and “uugghhs” with last week’s IBS discussion, I realized that even though everybody poops, people might not know the “end” from the beginning when it comes to digestion. I guess I started a little backwards, but it’s not the “end” of the world. After all, according to your Friday Financial Blogger, we shouldn’t leave any loose “ends” and always begin with the “end” in mind. I hope my never “end”-ing idioms haven’t left you at the “end” of your tether! Before we walk through digestion, it is important to know WHY we feel the urge to eat. Think back to the last show you saw at a movie theater. Who remembers the dancing hot dog? Or the rollercoaster that speeds between soda cans and candy bars as popcorn rains down on the track? We can’t forget the amplified sound of a soda can cracking open, followed by the sizzle of carbonation. Theater owners are no dummies; in fact, their brilliant advertising, as well as the smell of buttered popcorn, stimulate app...