Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to take a bucket-list trip to Ireland. It was my first trip out of the country (unless you count Canada for a high school band trip in 1988, which I don't), and every single second of it was sublime. Here are some photo highlights.

I’m super lucky I get to do what I love for a living, and I’m extremely thankful that I get to do it on my own terms. Every time my little marketing and public relations business successfully completes another 365-day journey around the sun, I consider it to be a major milestone.
 
Six years ago this month, I quit my last corporate job and went out on my own as a freelance writer and media consultant. It is still the best career decision I ever made. Read all about my big leap into entrepreneurship here.

Every single day without exception, I wake up happy to go to work. My heart positively overflows with gratitude for the life and career I have somehow managed to create for myself. (Gross, I know. Go ahead and roll your eyes. I’ll wait.)

Truth bomb coming in hot: Whoever said money can’t buy happiness was never $40,000 in credit card debt.
 
Yeah, yeah. I get the essence of that old maxim —if you’re generally an unhappy person, no accumulation of physical wealth will change that. Misery is a choice, happiness comes from within … yada, yada.
 
For quite a few years now, I’ve chosen gratitude over wallowing, and my life is pretty amazing as a result. I don’t do math very well (I’m a writer, after all), but this fact adds up for me time and again: The more I count my blessings, the better my life gets.
 
All that being said, I am here to tell you that when I made the final payment on my last remaining credit card, the balance of which had been hanging on by its gnarly-ass fingernails for nearly 20 years, I experienced a palpable wave of relief and joy the likes of which I only felt one other time in my life, and that was after the birth of my child.

I was enjoying the balmy fall weather one recent night on my porch, when some patrons from a nearby neighborhood bar ambled down my street to their cars.

One woman, well-dressed and probably in her mid-50s, had parked her SUV directly across from my house. My dogs, who were enjoying the unseasonably warm evening with me from safely behind a baby gate, boofed a few times as per usual, then settled. I was nose deep in a book on my iPad and wasn’t paying any attention to the action in front of me until I heard keys jangling, dropping, then jangling again a few minutes later.

This poor lady could not find the keyhole to unlock her car. And I am here to tell you that it may have been long past sunset, but between the street lamp above her and my porch lights across from her, it wasn’t all that dark.

I’ve often spent time in rooms full of like-minded people who are focused on their spiritual and emotional growth. In one of those rooms recently, someone mentioned a tendency that I am all too familiar with — the extremes of either being obsessed with or indifferent to people, places, things or events. 

I’ve been an extremist in many areas of my life, but particularly in romantic relationships — I think about you every minute of every day, or I completely cut you out of my mind and heart. There is no middle ground.
 
I’ve come to realize that this approach is more than a little nutty and certainly not emotionally healthy. (Perhaps this is why I am blissfully single right now. But I digress.)