Podcasts about Gorgeous

Finchy! Minnesota Timberwolves Chris Finch joins The Life Gorgeous and this is the momentum we need to have a great season. Finchy and Kilby discuss Julius Randle breaking out in the playoffs, the enigmatic Rob Dillingham, Terrance Shannon Jr attacking the rim, and what exactly did ANT add to his game. Plus, The Life Gorgeous Quiz - does Finchy know Kilby is a pure shooter? Probably not - he's a busy man. But he knows what his favorite sandwich is... and it's glorious. LET'S GO WOLVES! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back Jodi Wilding to OVERFLOW! Let's explore the concept of 'gorgeous goals' as a refreshing alternative to traditional SMART goal-setting.Let's brainstorm the importance of aligning goals with personal joy and emotional fulfillment, emphasizing the need to dream (even) BIGGER and create space for self-care. The conversation will highlight and encourage some fresh self-discovery, permission to wonder what you truly desire and a creative formula for reverse engineering Gorgeous Goals!What are gorgeous goals?Gorgeous goals focus on joy and emotional fulfillment.Creating space for dreaming... even bigger!Self-care is vital for maintaining energy and positivity.Visualizing goals with emotion increases motivation and follow-through.Celebrating small wins and cultivating a positive mindset and gaining momentum.Psst.... spoiler alert... The journey of achieving goals is as important as the goals themselves.and... if you are looking for an accountability partner, an empowering conversation for YOU and YOUR DREAMS, WISHES and GORGEOUS GOALS.... If you are ready for power pause to refuel and strategize ... stop just surviving and start thriving... We are here to support the journey! Your biggest wins don't come from doing more... we think, they come from thinking differently.Connect with Jodi Wilding:Website: www.jodiwilding.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jodi-wilding/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jodi.wilding/Kimberly SniderWebsite: https://peoplebrain.caInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/overflow_podcast/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimberly-j-snider/OVERFLOW Gratitude Journal:

We have Special Guest Cash Gorgeous Gucci talking his Last Minute Ball, Ball room culture etc. We also get into Diddy Predictions, Cardi vs Nicki, , and much more 

Alison Martino is back! Alison is the creative force behind one of the best Instagrams out there - Vintage Los Angeles. Alison and Kilby talk about their recent dinner at the legendary Dan Tana's and the history of the restaurant. And Alison tells a fascinating story, how her dad, singer Al Martino, somehow lost the song 'Strangers in the Night' to Frank Sinatra. Al Martino apparently had the song first and did a scratch track before the lyrics were written and where Al ad-libbed "doo-be-doo-be-doo." Hmmm...did Frank pull a fast one? Plus, LA Restaurant talk for your next visit to the City of Angels. Let's Go! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A new week, and a new great episode of Taskmaster for Jack and Jenny to digest. And this week they're asking whether or not Sanjeev does pilates, if Phil could feasibly be the first person to never win a task, and a dentist finally weighs in on the question about human teeth.Plus, Jack reveals his ranking in the Fantasy Taskmaster league - have you downloaded the app yet to play?Send all your Series 20 observations along to fans@taskmaster.tvIf you're in the UK you can watch all of Taskmaster on All 4 www.channel4.com/programmes/taskmasterAnywhere else, it's the Taskmaster YouTubeyoutube.com/taskmasterVisit the Taskmaster Store for all your TM goodies!taskmasterstore.com

Gorgeous dice, occult texts, and birbs, oh my! Shaun Duke, Jennifer Brozek, and Sandra Wong join forces to talk about why we collect and, more importantly, WHAT we collect. Each host shares some of their collectible objects, talk about why they matter, and more. This episode has a visual component, so checking out the video might be beneficial if you're able! Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoy the episode! Show Notes: Don't forget to catch our live format every Friday at 7 PM Central on Twitch at AlphabetStreams! If you have a question you'd like us to answer, feel free to shoot us a message on our contact page. Our new intro and outro music comes from Holy Mole. You can support his work at patreon.com/holymole. See you later, navigator!

Démar and Adriel discuss Doja Cat's latest album "Vie", how her singing might have eclipsed her rapping and Janet Jackson's indelible influence on her music.Démar's rating: 8.5 / 10Adriel's rating: 8 / 10The Love List: Cards, Jealous Type, Take Me Dancing, Acts of Service, Gorgeous, All MineTimecodes:3:03 - Last Doja Car Review7:30 - Best at Pop Rap8:36 - Démar compares Doja Cat to Kyrie Irving14:03 - Unpacking Jack Antonoff22:12 - Adriel calls the album ‘Timeless'26:34 - Lyrics28:27 - ‘Take Me Dancing'31:54 - Earl Sweatshirt featuring Doja Cat35:30 - Sidequest album38:49 - The Cover40:42 - The ScoreFollow us:TikTok: Album Mode: https://www.tiktok.com/@albummodepodAdriel: https://www.tiktok.com/@adrielsmileydotcom Démar: https://www.tiktok.com/@godkingdemiInstagram:Album Mode: https://www.instagram.com/albummodepod/Adriel: https://www.instagram.com/adrielsmileydotcom/Démar: https://www.instagram.com/demarjgrant/Twitter:Album Mode: https://twitter.com/AlbumModepodAdriel: https://twitter.com/AdrielSmiley_Démar: https://twitter.com/DemarJGrant ===================================Doja Cat - Vie / 2025 / hip hop, rap, pop rap, pop, R&B

I went VIRAL! I've been talking about entrepreneurship and the alcohol-free lifestyle on social media for years, but recently, something I said hit a deep chord: The universe hand-selected you to ditch alcohol because of how massive your purpose on this planet is.  Something in those words clicked for thousands of women — and honestly, I get it. Most women who feel called to this path are visionaries who know they're meant for something bigger. Before I quit drinking 7 years ago, I constantly battled writer's block, but the moment I took a break, it was like a creative floodgate burst open of ideas, inspiration, and energy.  In this episode, you'll discover how that decision unlocks life-changing gifts, from the obvious (like glowing health and renewed energy) to the unexpected (a deep well of confidence and razor-sharp intuition)! Gorgeous, you KNOW you were made for more. If going alcohol-free has awakened something powerful in you, it's because you're meant to guide others too. Join the next round of the Empowered AF 5X Coach Certification Program.    IN THIS EPISODE: Why I believe the universe hand selects certain women to reevaluate alcohol (because their purpose is colossal and world-changing!) The gifts that await alcohol-free living, from unstoppable motivation and deepened self-worth, to million-dollar ideas and unshakable intuition The truth about quitting forever and how to create new social circles and evolve old ones to fit your new life All the programs I offer to fit this new life, from Euphoric the Club to the Empowered AF 5X Coach Certification Program   LINKS/RESOURCES MENTIONED Join Euphoric the Club, the premier movement of successful alcohol-free women with access to all my alcohol-free programs, like Become Emboldened. If you know you're meant to help other people change their relationship with alcohol and achieve deep healing (along with their bigger dreams), apply for the Empowered AF 5X Coach Certification Program – and get 5x certified as a world class alcohol-free coach, mindset coach, success coach, NLP practitioner, and hypnosis practitioner. This program includes a four-month business mastermind and a business retreat in Southern California. Awarded the most empowering book in the sober curious genre, be sure to get your copy of Euphoric: Ditch Alcohol and Gain a Happier, More Confident You today and leave your review.  Follow @euphoric.af on Instagram. And as always, rate, review, and subscribe so we can continue spreading our message far and wide.

Isn't he GORGEOUS??????We chat about shrinkage, snuggly babies and tomato platters If you think you can help, call 5-SEINFELD-6 Be sure to follow us on social media and please, leave a five star review anywhere you can!You can also Join our discord and yada yada yada your brains out.All it takes is a monthly donation to our Patreon “The Human Fund”The link is in our bio https://patreon.com/Ruiningseinfeld?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=creatorshare_fan&utm_content=join_linkFind us on Instagram:John (@surrealfeld)Adam (@seinfeldepisodes) The show (@ruiningseinfeld)Another great way to help us out is by checking out, or even better, grabbing a fun Ruining Seinfeld tchotchke over at www.teepublic.com/surrealfeldwww.ruiningseinfeld.com Coming soon!Here's to feeling good all the time.••if for some reason you feel that we are on the wrong episode, that's understandable.While Netflix or many other platforms may list the episodes in airdate order,We follow the DVD (production) order.This ensures that the story lines make sense and there aren't too many more plot holes…We have provided a handy link below to a list of episodes in the proper order :https://thetvdb.com/series/seinfeld/allseasons/dvd

Sportscaster Ian Eagle joins Kilby for his annual appearance and they cover the nuances of play-by-play - the word choices, the inflection - and also what it's like having a son follow in your career footsteps. Plus, Kilby has some fixes for the Vikings offense after the loss to the Steelers. Shorter routes, quicker passes! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Garth Heckman The David Alliance TDAgiantSlayer@Gmail.com    Mark 12:30, 31  30 And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.' This is the first commandment. 31 And the second, like it, is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these.”   What if that neighbor is your spouse!      The Husband Store A store that sells new husbands has opened in New York City , where a woman may go to choose a husband. Among the instructions at the entrance is a description of how the store operates:    You may visit this store ONLY ONCE! There are six floors and the value of the products increase as the shopper ascends the flights. The shopper may choose any item from a particular floor, or may choose to go up to the next floor, but you cannot go back down except to exit the building!   So, a woman goes to the Husband Store to find a husband. On the first floor the sign on the door reads:   Floor 1- These men Have Jobs She is intrigued, but continues to the second floor, where the sign reads:   Floor 2- These men Have Jobs and Love Kids. 'That's nice,' she thinks, 'but I want more.' So she continues upward. The third floor sign reads:   Floor 3- These men Have Jobs, Love Kids, and are Extremely Good Looking.   'Wow,' she thinks, but feels compelled to keep going  She goes to the fourth floor and the sign reads:   Floor 4- These men Have Jobs, Love Kids, are Drop-dead Good Looking and Help With Housework.  'Oh, mercy me!' she exclaims, 'I can hardly stand it!' Still, she goes to the fifth floor and the sign reads: Floor 5- These men Have Jobs, Love Kids, are Drop-dead Gorgeous, Help with Housework, and Have a Strong Romantic Streak.   She is so tempted to stay, but she goes to the sixth floor, where the sign reads:   Floor 6- You are visitor 31,456,012 to this floor. There are no men on this floor. This floor exists solely as proof that women are impossible to please. Thank you for shopping at the Husband Store.   PLEASE NOTE:   To avoid gender bias charges, the store's owner opened a New Wives store just across the street.   The first floor has wives that enjoy sex.   The second floor has wives that love sex and love to cook   The third the woman enjoy sex, love to cook and have money.   The store has 6 more floors all the way up to the ninth floor… But no one knows what's on them because no man has gone past floor 3   Do you like a good mystery? Ephesians 5: 31 For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. 32 This mystery is great; but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church. 33 Nevertheless, each individual among you also is to love his own wife even as himself, and the wife must see to it that she respects her husband.   Marriage is called a “mystery” because it reflects Christ and the Church (Ephesians 5:31–32).

No rain is expected for at least the next week. Cooler air later this week.

We’re back live on October 6… but in the meantime, here are our best bits! From bathroom tap water and hatchback-driving blokes to a woman making tuna salad mid-flight, it was a week of things that are just “a bit” weird. We met the chef who can’t pronounce tortilla, the English village overrun by moaning Swingathon swingers, and a woman trying KFC for the very first time (spoiler: she loved it). Plus, we uncovered the surprising truth about drinking on planes — why champagne tastes flat, what laws actually apply, and why a Bloody Mary always hits at 30,000 feet.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bretman and Miss Kaaaye are back in the studio (AC on, birds off) and catching up on everything from Coachella lineup tea to the chaos of dapping up straight men. Bret shares wild stories about almost being in a music video, reconnecting with family friends who feel heaven-sent, and how the universe literally returned his lost wallet. Plus: Miss Kaaaye dishes on a Fiji concert, dating woes, and the eternal debate—clingy or cute? It's giving guided, grounded, and a little bit crunk.Produced by Dear MediaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

#gorgeousjoeyjackson #portlandwrestling #prowrestling #gmbmpwWelcome to Episode 100 of Give Me Back My Pro Wrestling (@gmbmpw) with hosts Jimmy Street (@jamesrockstreet), our action figure expert "The Plastic Sheik" Jared Street, and the Territory Wrestling Guru, Quinton Quarisma! Tune in as they join forces and tackle the world of Professional Wrestling!It's our 100th episode thank you all for 3+ years of support! To celebrate, once again in conjunction with Captain's Corner and the Portland Wrestling Expo 2, we welcome ‘Gorgeous' Joey Jackson! We're talking Portland, Len Denton, Don Owens, Rip Oliver, Roddy Piper, the Southern Rockers and so much more! See Joey with Captain's Corner on Feb 21st at the Portland Wrestling Expo 2! Enjoy!Visit our Give Me Back My Pro Wrestling podcast page! https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/gmbmpwFOLLOW & SUBSCRIBE:https://facebook.com/gmbmpwhttps://facebook.com/groups/gmbmpw/https://instagram.com/gmbmpwhttps://twitter.com/gmbmpwhttps://www.youtube.com/@GMBMPWCheck out Sheik's Shorts: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0oL-yrnIHtlaVHamAApDquYBXeGaHS8vCheck out the Live and In Color with Wolfie D podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/wolfiedVISIT OUR AWESOME SPONSORS!-Captain's Corner (Conventions, Virtual Signings and more!): https://www.facebook.com/captinscorner-T's Westside Original Gourmet Sauces: https://www.westsidesauces.comADVERTISE WITH US! For business and advertising inquiries contact us at gmbmpw@gmail.comVery Special Thanks To: -Sludge (@sludge_cast) for the "Give Me Back My Pro Wrestling" entrance theme!-Tracy Byrd and A Gathering Of None for the "Sheik Fell Down A Rabbit Hole" & "Name Game" theme songs! © 2025, jamesrockstreet Productions

The recent worker strike at a Monroe cheesemaker highlights a larger issue regarding immigration. This is according to Wisconsin Cheese Maker Association Executive Director John Umhoefer. Last month, workers at W&W Dairy went on strike after new ownership required employees to verify their immigration status through E-Verify. John explains that E-Verify is a national program required for dairy plants that make products for the government. But he says the situation is highlighting a larger issue: America’s immigration system and what it means for the future of food production.Weather's a little cooler today but things are improving for the weekend. Stu Muck says that temps will bounce higher by Friday.Harvest is slowing ramping up and Wyffels Hybrids is keeping an eye on the results. This week's "Wyffels Wednesday" features technical product manager, Dr. Brent Tharp. He speaks with Ben Jarboe about monitoring stalk integrity going into the harvest. Tharp says disease pressure mounted as that plant matured and it means prioritizing the harvest field by field. He also says growers should take notes on things like southern rust and tar spot for future management decisions. Paid for by Wyffels Hybrids.Cooler temps and ample moisture have really helped farms managing livestock on pastures. Jason Cavidini, UW-Extension Grazing Outreach Specialist says it's been just about ideal this year.The beautiful bovines are on their way to the Alliant Energy Center. Check-in for the traveling cows will begin on Thursday with a group of seasoned and beginning veterinarians from the UW-School of Vet Medicine. Kiley Allen finds out about the procedure and why it's so important for the state's biosecurity from retired vet, Dr. Sheila McGuirk.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Carson Wentz wins! Jon Krawczynski of The Athletic joins Kilby to talk about the big Vikings win including Carson Wentz, Jordan Mason, the defense and some love for Myles Price. Plus a Jeff George reference. Also, Kilby and Jon eloquently summarize the Jimmy Kimmel situation. These guys are so level-headed. Plus, they both fondly remember the greatness of Robert Redford. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode, my guest is Stephen Jenkinson, culture activist and ceremonialist advocating a handmade life and eloquence. He is an author, a storyteller, a musician, sculptor and off-grid organic farmer. Stephen is the founder/ principal instructor of the Orphan Wisdom School in Canada, co-founded with his wife Nathalie Roy in 2010. Also a sought-after workshop leader, articulating matters of the heart, human suffering, confusions through ceremony.He is the author of several influential books, including Money and the Soul's Desires, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul (2015), Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble (2018), A Generation's Worth: Spirit Work While the Crisis Reigns (2021), and Reckoning (2022), co-written with Kimberly Ann Johnson. His most recent book, Matrimony: Ritual, Culture, and the Heart's Work, was released in August 2025. He is also involved in the musical project Nights of Grief & Mystery with singer-songwriter Gregory Hoskins, which has toured across North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.Show Notes:* The Bone House of the Orphan Wisdom Enterprise* Matrimony: Ritual, Culture and the Heart's Work* The Wedding Industry* Romantic Sameness and Psychic Withering* The Two Tribes* The Roots of Hospitality* The Pompous Ending of Hospitality* Debt, And the Estrangement of the Stranger* More Than Human Hospitality* The Alchemy of the Orphan Wisdom SchoolHomework:Matrimony: Ritual, Culture, and the Heart's Work | PurchaseOrphan WisdomThe Scriptorium: Echoes of an Orphan WisdomTranscription:Chris: This is an interview that I've been wondering about for a long time in part, because Stephen was the first person I ever interviewed for the End of Tourism Podcast. In Oaxaca, Mexico, where I live Stephen and Natalie were visiting and were incredibly, incredibly generous. Stephen, in offering his voice as a way to raise up my questions to a level that deserve to be contended with.We spoke for about two and a half hours, if I remember correctly. And there was a lot in what you spoke to towards the second half of the interview that I think we're the first kind of iterations of the Matrimony book.We spoke a little bit about the stranger and trade, and it was kind of startling as someone trying to offer their first interview and suddenly hearing something [00:01:00] that I'd never heard before from Stephen. Right. And so it was quite impressive. And I'm grateful to be here now with y'all and to get to wonder about this a little more deeply with you Stephen.Stephen: Mm-hmm. Hmm.Chris: This is also a special occasion for the fact that for the first time in the history of the podcast, we have a live audience among us today. Strange doings. Some scholars and some stewards and caretakers of the Orphan Wisdom enterprise. So, thank you all as well for coming tonight and being willing to listen and put your ears to this.And so to begin, Stephen, I'm wondering if you'd be willing to let those who will be listening to this recording later on know where we're gathered in tonight?Stephen: Well, we're in... what's the name of this township?Nathalie: North Algona.Stephen: North Algona township on the borders, an eastern gate [00:02:00] of Algonquin Park. Strangely named place, given the fact that they were the first casualties of the park being established. And we're in a place that never should have been cleared - my farm. It should never have been cleared of the talls, the white pines that were here, but the admiralty was in need back in the day. And that's what happened there. And we're in a place that the Irish immigrants who came here after the famine called "Tramore," which more or less means "good-frigging luck farming."It doesn't technically mean that, but it absolutely means that. It actually means "sandy shore," which about covers the joint, and it's the only thing that covers the joint - would be sand. You have to import clay. Now, that's a joke in many farming places in the world, but if we wanted any clay, we'd have to bring it in and pay for the privilege.And the farm has been in [00:03:00] my, my responsibility for about 25 years now, pretty close to that. And the sheep, or those of them left because the coyotes have been around for the first time in their casualty-making way... They're just out here, I'm facing the field where they're milling around.And it's the very, very beginnings of the long cooling into cold, into frigid, which is our lot in this northern part of the hemisphere, even though it's still August, but it's clear that things have changed. And then, we're on a top of a little hill, which was the first place that I think that we may have convened a School here.It was a tipi, which is really worked very well considering we didn't live here, so we could put it up and put it down in the same weekend. [00:04:00] And right on this very hill, we were, in the early days, and we've replaced that tipi with another kind of wooden structure. A lot more wood in this one.This has been known as "The Teaching Hall" or "The Great Hall," or "The Hall" or "The Money Pit, as it was known for a little while, but it actually worked out pretty well. And it was I mean, people who've come from Scandinavia are knocked out by the kind of old-style, old-world visitation that the place seems to be to them.And I'd never really been before I had the idea what this should look like, but I just went from a kind of ancestral memory that was knocking about, which is a little different than your preferences, you know. You have different kinds of preferences you pass through stylistically through your life, but the ones that lay claim to you are the ones that are not interested in your [00:05:00] preferences. They're interested in your kind of inheritance and your lineage.So I'm more or less from the northern climes of Northern Europe, and so the place looks that way and I was lucky enough to still have my carving tools from the old days. And I've carved most of the beams and most of the posts that keep the place upright with a sort of sequence of beasts and dragons and ne'er-do-wells and very, very few humans, I think two, maybe, in the whole joint. Something like that. And then, mostly what festoons a deeply running human life is depicted here. And there's all kinds of stories, which I've never really sat down and spoken to at great length with anybody, but they're here.And I do deeply favour the idea that one day [00:06:00] somebody will stumble into this field, and I suppose, upon the remains of where we sit right now, and wonder "What the hell got into somebody?" That they made this mountain of timber moldering away, and that for a while what must have been, and when they finally find the footprint of, you know, its original dimensions and sort of do the wild math and what must have been going on in this sandy field, a million miles in away from its home.And wherever I am at that time, I'll be wondering the same thing.Audience: Hmm.Stephen: "What went on there?" Even though I was here for almost all of it. So, this was the home of the Orphan Wisdom School for more than a decade and still is the home of the Orphan Wisdom School, even if it's in advance, or in retreat [00:07:00] or in its doldrums. We'll see.And many things besides, we've had weddings in here, which is wherein I discovered "old-order matrimony," as I've come to call it, was having its way with me in the same way that the design of the place did. And it's also a grainery for our storage of corn. Keep it up off the ground and out of the hands of the varmints, you know, for a while.Well that's the beginning.Chris: Hmm. Hmm. Thank you Stephen.Stephen: Mm-hmm.Chris: You were mentioning the tipi where the school began. I remember sleeping in there the first time I came here. Never would I have thought for a million years that I'd be sitting here with you.Stephen: It's wild, isn't it?Chris: 12 years later.?: Yeah.Chris: And so next, I'd like to do my best in part over the course of the next perhaps hour or two to congratulate you on the release of [00:08:00] your new book, Matrimony: Ritual, Culture, and the Heart's Work.Stephen: Thank you.Chris: Mm-hmm. I'm grateful to say like many others that I've received a copy and have lent my eyes to your good words, and what is really an incredible achievement.For those who haven't had a chance to lay their eyes on it just yet, I'm wondering if you could let us in on why you wrote a book about matrimony in our time and where it stands a week out from its publication.Stephen: Well, maybe the answer begins with the question, "why did you write a book, having done so before?" And you would imagine that the stuff that goes into writing a book, you'd think that the author has hopes for some kind of redemptive, redeeming outcome, some kind of superlative that drops out the back end of the enterprise.And you know, this is [00:09:00] the seventh I've written. And I would have to say that's not really how it goes, and you don't really know what becomes of what you've written, even with the kind people who do respond, and the odd non-monetary prize that comes your way, which Die Wise gamed that.But I suppose, I wrote, at all partly to see what was there. You know, I had done these weddings and I was a little bit loathe to let go, to let the weddings turn entirely into something historical, something that was past, even though I probably sensed pretty clearly that I was at the end of my willingness to subject myself to the slings and arrows that came along with the enterprise, but it's a sweet sorrow, or there's a [00:10:00] wonder that goes along with the tangle of it all. And so, I wrote to find out what happened, as strange as that might sound to you. You can say, "well, you were there, you kind of knew what happened." But yes, I was witness to the thing, but there's the act of writing a book gives you the opportunity to sort of wonder in three-dimensions and well, the other thing I should say is I was naive and figured that the outfit who had published the, more or less prior two books to this one, would kind of inevitably be drawn to the fact that same guy. Basically, same voice, new articulation. And I was dumbfounded to find out that they weren't. And so, it's sort of smarted, you know?And I think what I did was I just set the whole [00:11:00] enterprise aside, partly to contend with the the depths of the disappointment in that regard, and also not wanting to get into the terrible fray of having to parse or paraphrase the book in some kind of elevator pitch-style to see if anybody else wanted to look at it. You know, such as my touchy sense of nobility sometimes, you know, that I just rather not be involved in the snarl of the marketplace any longer.So, I withdrew and I just set it aside but it wasn't that content to be set, set aside. And you know, to the book's credit, it bothered me every once in a while. It wasn't a book at the point where I was actually trying to engineer it, you know, and, and give it some kind of structure. I had piles of paper on the floor representing the allegation of chapters, trying to figure out what the relationship was [00:12:00] between any of these things.What conceivably should come before what. What the names of any of these things might be. Did they have an identity? Was I just imposing it? And all of that stuff I was going through at the same time as I was contending with a kind of reversal in fortune, personally. And so in part, it was a bit of a life raft to give me something to work on that I wouldn't have to research or dig around in the backyard for it and give me some sort of self-administered occupation for a while.Finally, I think there's a parallel with the Die Wise book, in that when it came to Die Wise, I came up with what I came up with largely because, in their absolute darkest, most unpromising hours, an awful lot of dying people, all of whom are dead now, [00:13:00] let me in on some sort of breach in the, the house of their lives.And I did feel that I had some obligation to them long-term, and that part of that obligation turned into writing Die Wise and touring and talking about that stuff for years and years, and making a real fuss as if I'd met them all, as if what happened is really true. Not just factually accurate, but deeply, abidingly, mandatorily true.So, although it may be the situation doesn't sound as extreme, but the truth is, when a number of younger - than me - people came to me and asked me to do their weddings, I, over the kind of medium-term thereafter, felt a not dissimilar obligation that the events that ensued from all of that not [00:14:00] be entrusted entirely to those relatively few people who attended. You know, you can call them "an audience," although I hope I changed that. Or you could call them "witnesses," which I hope I made them that.And see to it that there could be, not the authorized or official version of what happened, but to the view from here, so to speak, which is, as I sit where I am in the hall right now, I can look at the spot where I conducted much of this when I wasn't sacheting up and down the middle aisle where the trestle tables now are.And I wanted to give a kind of concerted voice to that enterprise. And I say "concerted voice" to give you a feel for the fact that I don't think this is a really an artifact. It's not a record. It's a exhortation that employs the things that happened to suggest that even though it is the way it is [00:15:00] ritually, impoverished as it is in our time and place, it has been otherwise within recoverable time and history. It has.And if that's true, and it is, then it seems to me at least is true that it could be otherwise again. And so, I made a fuss and I made a case based on that conviction.There's probably other reasons I can't think of right now. Oh, being not 25 anymore, and not having that many more books in me, the kind of wear and tear on your psyche of imposing order on the ramble, which is your recollection, which has only so many visitations available in it. Right? You can only do that so many times, I think. And I'm not a born writing person, you know, I come to it maniacally when I [00:16:00] do, and then when it's done, I don't linger over it so much.So then, when it's time to talk about it, I actually have to have a look, because the act of writing it is not the act of reading it. The act of writing is a huge delivery and deliverance at the same time. It's a huge gestation. And you can't do that to yourself, you know, over and over again, but you can take some chances, and look the thing in the eye. So, and I think some people who are there, they're kind of well-intended amongst them, will recognize themselves in the details of the book, beyond "this is what happened and so on." You know, they'll recognize themselves in the advocacy that's there, and the exhortations that are there, and the [00:17:00] case-making that I made and, and probably the praying because there's a good degree of prayerfulness in there, too.That's why.Chris: Thank you. bless this new one in the world. And what's the sense for you?Stephen: Oh, yes.Chris: It being a one-week old newborn. How's that landing in your days?Stephen: Well, it's still damp, you know. It's still squeaky, squeaky and damp. It's walking around like a newborn primate, you know, kind of swaying in the breeze and listening to port or to starboard according to whatever's going on.I don't know that it's so very self-conscious in the best sense of that term, yet. Even though I recorded the audio version, I don't think [00:18:00] it's my voice is found every nook and cranny at this point, yet. So, it's kind of new. It's not "news," but it is new to me, you know, and it's very early in terms of anybody responding to it.I mean, nobody around me has really taken me aside and say, "look, now I want to tell you about this book you wrote." It hasn't happened, and we'll see if it does, but I've done a few events on the other side of the ocean and hear so far, very few, maybe handful of interviews. And those are wonderful opportunities to hear something of what you came up with mismanaged by others, you know, misapprehend, you could say by others.No problem. I mean, it's absolutely no problem. And if you don't want that to happen, don't talk, don't write anything down. So, I don't mind a bit, you know, and the chances are very good that it'll turn into things I didn't have in mind [00:19:00] as people take it up, and regard their own weddings and marriages and plans and schemes and fears and, you know, family mishigas and all the rest of it through this particular lens, you know. They may pick up a pen or a computer (it's an odd expression, "pick up a computer"), and be in touch with me and let me know. "Yeah, that was, we tried it" or whatever they're going to do, because, I mean, maybe Die Wise provided a bit of an inkling of how one might be able to proceed otherwise in their dying time or in their families or their loved ones dying time.This is the book that most readily lends itself to people translating into something they could actually do, without a huge kind of psychic revolution or revolt stirring in them, at least not initially. This is as close as I come, probably, to writing a sequence of things [00:20:00] that could be considered "add-ons" to what people are already thinking about, that I don't force everybody else outta the house in order to make room for the ideas that are in the book. That may happen, anyway, but it wasn't really the intent. The intent was to say, you know, we are in those days when we're insanely preoccupied with the notion of a special event. We are on the receiving end of a considerable number of shards showing up without any notion really about what these shards remember or are memories of. And that's the principle contention I think that runs down the spine of the book, is that when we undertake matrimony, however indelicately, however by rote, you know, however mindlessly we may do it, [00:21:00] inadvertently, we call upon those shards nonetheless.And they're pretty unspectacular if you don't think about them very deeply, like the rice or confetti, like the aisle, like the procession up the aisle, like the giving away of someone, like the seating arrangement, like the spectacle seating arrangement rather than the ritual seating arrangement.And I mean, there's a fistful of them. And they're around and scholars aside maybe, nobody knows why they do them. Everybody just knows, "this is what a wedding is," but nobody knows why. And because nobody knows why, nobody really seems to know what a wedding is for, although they do proceed like they would know a wedding if they saw one. So, I make this a question to be really wondered about, and the shards are a way in. They're the kind of [00:22:00] breadcrumb trail through the forest. They're the little bits of broken something, which if you begin to handle just three or four of them, and kind of fit them together, and find something of the original shape and inflection of the original vessel, kind of enunciates, begins to murmur in your hands, and from it you can begin to infer some three-dimensionality to the original shape. And from the sense of the shape, you get a set sense of contour, and from the sense of contour, you get a sense of scale or size. And from that you get a sense of purpose, or function, or design. And from that you get a sense of some kind of serious magisterial insight into some of the fundament of human being that was manifest in the "old-order matrimony," [00:23:00] as I came to call it.So, who wouldn't wanna read that book?Chris: Mm-hmm.Thank you. Mm-hmm. Thank you, Stephen. Yeah. It reminds me, just before coming up here, maybe two weeks ago, I was in attending a wedding. And there was a host or mc, and initially just given what I was hearing over the microphone, it was hard to tell if he was hired or family or friends. And it turned out he was, in fact, a friend of the groom. And throughout the night he proceeded to take up that role as a kind of comedian.Audience: Mm-hmm.Chris: This was the idea, I guess. Mm-hmm. And he was buzzing and mumbling and swearing into the microphone, [00:24:00] and then finally minimizing the only remnant of traditional culture that showed up in the wedding. And his thing was, okay, so when can we get to the part where it's boom, boom, boom, right. And shot, shot, shot, whatever.Stephen: Right.Chris: There was so much that came up in my memories in part because I worked about a decade in Toronto in the wedding industry.Mm-hmm. Hospitality industry. Maybe a contradiction in terms, there. And there was one moment that really kind of summed it up. I kept coming back to this reading the book because it was everything that you wrote seemed to not only antithetical to this moment, but also an antidote.Anyways, it was in North Toronto and the [00:25:00] owner of the venue - it was a kind of movie theatre turned event venue - and there was a couple who was eventually going to get married there. They came in to do their tasting menu to see what they wanted to put on the menu for the dinner, for their wedding.And the owner was kind of this mafioso type. And he comes in and he sees them and he walks over and he says, "so, you're gonna get married at my wedding factory."Audience: Mm-hmm.Chris: In all sincerity.Stephen: Mm-hmm.Chris: Right.Without skipping a beat. Could you imagine?Stephen: Yeah.I could. I sure could.Chris: Yeah. Yeah.Stephen: I mean, don't forget, if these people weren't doing what the people wanted, they'd be outta business.Audience: Mm-hmm.Stephen: No, that's the thing. This is aiding and abetting. This is sleeping with the enemy, stylistically-speaking. [00:26:00] The fact that people "settle" (that's the term I would use for it), settle for this, the idea being that this somehow constitutes the most honest and authentic through line available to us is just jaw dropping. When you consider what allegedly this thing is supposed to be for. I mean, maybe we'll get into this, but I'll just leave this as a question for now. What is that moment allegedly doing?Not, what are the people in it allegedly doing? The moment itself, what is it? How is it different from us sitting here now talking about it? And how is it different from the gory frigging jet-fuelled aftermath of excess. And how's it different from the cursing alleged master of ceremonies? How can you [00:27:00] tell none of those things belong to this thing?And why do you have such a hard time imagining what doesAudience: Hmm mmChris: Well that leads me to my next question.Stephen: Ah, you're welcome.Chris: So, I've pulled a number of quotes from the book to read from over the course of the interview. And this one for anyone who's listening is on page 150. And you write Stephen,"Spiritually-speaking, most of the weddings in our corner of the world are endogamous affairs, inward-looking. What is, to me, most unnerving is that they can be spiritually-incestuous. The withering of psychic difference between people is the program of globalization. It is in the architecture of most things partaking of the internet, and it is in the homogeneity of our matrimony. [00:28:00] It is this very incestuous that matrimony was once crafted and entered into to avoid and subvert. Now, it grinds upon our differences until they are details.And so, this paragraph reminded me of a time in my youth when I seemed to be meeting couples who very eerily looked like each other. No blood or extended kin relation whatsoever, and yet they had very similar faces. And so as I get older, this kind of face fidelity aside, I continue to notice that people looking for companionship tend to base their search on similitude, on shared interests, customs, experiences, shared anything and everything. This, specifically, in opposition to those on the other side of the aisle or spectrum, to difference or divergence. And so, opposites don't attract anymore. I'm curious what you think this psychic [00:29:00] withering does to an achieve understanding of matrimony.Stephen: Well, I mean, let's wonder what it does to us, generally, first before we get to matrimony, let's say. It demonizes. Maybe that's too strong, but it certainly reconstitutes difference as some kind of affliction, some kind of not quite good enough, some kind of something that has to be overcome or overwhelmed on the road to, to what? On the road to sameness? So, if that's the goal, then are all of the differences between us, aberrations of some kind, if that's the goal? If that's the goal, are all the [00:30:00] differences between us, not God-given, but humanly misconstrued or worse? Humanly wrought? Do the differences between us conceivably then belong at all? Or is the principle object of the entire endeavor to marry yourself, trying to put up with the vague differences that the other person represents to you?I mean, I not very jokingly said years ago, that I coined a phrase that went something like "the compromise of infinity, which is other people." What does that mean? "The compromise of infinity, which is other people." Not to mention it's a pretty nice T-shirt. But what I meant by the [00:31:00] phrase is this: when you demonize difference in this fashion or when you go the other direction and lionize sameness, then one of the things that happens is that compromise becomes demonized, too. Compromise, by definition, is something you never should have done, right? Compromise is how much you surrender of yourself in order to get by. That's what all these things become. And before you know it, you're just beaten about the head and shoulders about "codependence" and you know, not being "true to yourself" as if being true to yourself is some kind of magic.I mean, the notion that "yourself is the best part of you" is just hilarious. I mean, when you think about it, like who's running amuck if yourself is what you're supposed to be? I ask you. Like, who's [00:32:00] doing the harm? Who's going mental if the self is such a good idea? So, of course, I'm maintaining here that I'm not persuaded that there is such a thing.I think it's a momentary lapse in judgment to have a self and to stick to it. That's the point I'm really making to kind of reify it until it turns ossified and dusty and bizarrely adamant like that estranged relative that lives in the basement of your house. Bizarrely, foreignly adamant, right? Like the house guest who just won't f**k off kind of thing.Okay, so "to thine own self be true," is it? Well, try being true to somebody else's self for ten minutes. Try that. [00:33:00] That's good at exercise for matrimony - being true to somebody else's self. You'll discover that their selves are not made in heaven, either. Either. I underscore it - either. I've completely lost track of the question you asked me.Chris: What are the consequences of the sameness on this anti-cultural sameness, and the program of it for an achieved understanding of matrimony.Stephen: Thank you. Well, I will fess up right now. I do so in the book. That's a terrible phrase. I swear I'd never say such a thing. "In my book... I say the following," but in this case, it's true. I did say this. I realized during the writing of it that I had made a tremendous tactical error in the convening of the event as I did it over the years, [00:34:00] and this is what it came to.I was very persuaded at the time of the story that appears in the chapter called "Salt and Indigo" in the book. I was very, very persuaded. I mean, listen, I made up the story (for what it's worth), okay, but I didn't make it up out of nothing. I made it up out of a kind of tribal memory that wouldn't quite let go.And in it, I was basically saying, here's these two tribes known principally for what they trade in and what they love most emphatically. They turn out to be the same thing. And I describe a circumstance in which they exchange things in a trade scenario, not a commerce scenario. And I'm using the chapter basically to make the case that matrimony's architecture derives in large measure from the sacraments of trade as manifest in that story. [00:35:00] Okay. And this is gonna sound obvious, but the fundamental requirement of the whole conceit that I came up with is that there are two tribes. Well, I thought to myself, "of course, there's always two tribes" at the time. And the two tribe-ness is reflected in when you come to the wedding site, you're typically asked (I hope you're still asked) " Are you family or friend of the groom or friend of the bride?" And you're seated "accordingly," right? That's the nominal, vestigial shard of this old tribal affiliation, that people came from over the rise, basically unknown to each other, to arrive at the kind of no man's land of matrimony, and proceeded accordingly. So, I put these things into motion in this very room and I sat people accordingly facing each other, not facing the alleged front of the room. [00:36:00] And of course, man, nobody knew where to look, because you raised your eyes and s**t. There's just humans across from you, just scads of them who you don't freaking know. And there's something about doing that to North Americas that just throws them. So, they're just looking at each other and then looking away, and looking at each other and looking away, and wondering what they're doing here and what it's for. And I'm going back and forth for three hours, orienting them as to what is is coming.Okay, so what's the miscalculation that I make? The miscalculation I made was assuming that by virtue of the seating arrangement, by virtue of me reminding them of the salt and indigo times, by virtue of the fact that they had a kind of allegiance of some sort or another to the people who are, for the moment, betrothed, that those distinctions and those affiliations together would congeal them, and constitute a [00:37:00] kind of tribal affiliation that they would intuitively be drawn towards as you would be drawn to heat on a cold winter's night.Only to discover, as I put the thing into motion that I was completely wrong about everything I just told you about. The nature of my error was this, virtually all of those people on one side of the room were fundamentally of the same tribe as the people on the other side of the room, apropos of your question, you see. They were card carrying members of the gray dominant culture of North America. Wow. The bleached, kind of amorphous, kind of rootless, ancestor-free... even regardless of whether their people came over in the last generation from the alleged old country. It doesn't really claim them.[00:38:00]There were two tribes, but I was wrong about who they were. That was one tribe. Virtually everybody sitting in the room was one tribe.So, who's the other tribe? Answer is: me and the four or five people who were in on the structural delivery of this endeavour with me. We were the other tribe.We didn't stand a chance, you see?And I didn't pick up on that, and I didn't cast it accordingly and employ that, instead. I employed the conceit that I insisted was manifest and mobilized in the thing, instead of the manifest dilemma, which is that everybody who came knew what a wedding was, and me and four or five other people were yet to know if this could be one. That was the tribal difference, if you [00:39:00] will.So, it was kind of invisible, wasn't it? Even to me at the time. Or, I say, maybe especially to me at the time. And so, things often went the way they went, which was for however much fascination and willingness to consider that there might have been in the room, there was quite a bit more either flat affect and kind of lack of real fascination, or curiosity, or sometimes downright hostility and pushback. Yeah.So, all of that comes from the fact that I didn't credit as thoroughly as I should have done, the persistence in Anglo-North America of a kind of generic sameness that turned out to be what most people came here ancestrally to become. "Starting again" is recipe for culture [00:40:00] loss of a catastrophic order. The fantasy of starting again. Right?And we've talked about that in your podcast, and you and I have talked about it privately, apropos of your own family and everybody's sitting in this room knows what I'm talking about. And when does this show up? Does it show up, oh, when you're walking down the street? Does it show up when you're on the mountaintop? Does it show up in your peak experiences? And the answer is "maybe." It probably shows up most emphatically in those times when you have a feeling that something special is supposed to be so, and all you can get from the "supposed to" is the allegation of specialness.Audience: Mm-hmm.Stephen: And then, you look around in the context of matrimony and you see a kind of febral, kind of strained, the famous bridezilla stuff, all of that stuff. [00:41:00] You saw it in the hospitality industry, no doubt. You know, the kind of mania for perfection, as if perfection constitutes culture. Right? With every detail checked off in the checkbox, that's culture. You know, as if everything goes off without a hitch and there's no guffaws. And in fact, anybody could reasonably make the case, "Where do you think culture appears when the script finally goes f*****g sideways?" That's when. And when you find out what you're capable of, ceremonially.And generally speaking, I think most people discovered that their ceremonial illiteracy bordered on the bottomless.That's when you find out. Hmm.Chris: Wow.Stephen: Yeah. And that's why people, you know, in speech time, they reach in there and get that piece of paper, and just look at it. Mm-hmm. They don't even look up, terrified that they're gonna go off script for a minute as [00:42:00] if the Gods of Matrimony are a scripted proposition.Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that with us, that degree of deep reflection and humility that I'm sure comes with it.Stephen: Mea Culpa, baby. Yeah, I was, I got that one totally wrong. Mm-hmm. And I didn't know it at the time. Meanwhile, like, how much can you transgress and have the consequences of doing so like spill out across the floor like a broken thermometer's mercury and not wise up.But of course, I was as driven as anybody. I was as driven to see if I could come through with what I promised to do the year before. And keeping your promise can make you into a maniac.Audience: Hmm hmm.Chris: But I imagine that, you [00:43:00] know, you wouldn't have been able to see that even years later if you didn't say yes in the first place.Stephen: Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I wouldn't have been able to make the errors.Chris: Right.Stephen: Right. Yeah. I mean, as errors go, this is not a mortal sin. Right, right. And you could chalk it up to being a legitimate miscalculation. Well, so? All I'm saying is, it turns out I was there too, and it turns out, even though I was allegedly the circus master of the enterprise, I wasn't free and clear of the things we were all contending with, the kind of mortality and sort of cultural ricketiness that were all heirs to. That's how I translated it, as it turns out.So, PS there was a moment, [00:44:00] which I don't remember which setting it was now, but there was a moment when the "maybe we'll see if she becomes a bride" bride's mother slid up to me during the course of the proceedings, and in a kind of stage whisper more or less hissed me as follows."Is this a real wedding?"I mean, that's not a question. Not in that setting, obviously not. That is an accusation. Right. And a withering one at that. And there was a tremendous amount of throw-down involved.So, was it? I mean, what we do know is that she did not go to any of the weddings [00:45:00] that she was thinking of at the time, and go to the front of the room where the celebrant is austerely standing there with the book, or the script, or the well-intentioned, or the self-penned vows and never hissed at him or her, "is this a real wedding?"Never once did she do that. We know that.Right.And I think we know why. But she was fairly persuaded she knew what a real wedding was. And all she was really persuaded by was the poverty of the weddings that she'd attended before that one. Well, I was as informed in that respect as she was, wasn't I? I just probably hadn't gone to as many reprobate weddings as she had, so she had more to deal with than I did, even though I was in the position of the line of fire.And I didn't respond too well to the question, I have to say. At the moment, I was rather combative. But I mean, you try to do [00:46:00] what I tried to do and not have a degree of fierceness to go along with your discernment, you know, just to see if you can drag this carcass across the threshold. Anyway, that happened too.Chris: Wow. Yeah. Dominant culture of North America.Stephen: Heard of it.Chris: Yeah. Well, in Matrimony, there's quite a bit in which you write about hospitality and radical hospitality. And I wanted to move in that direction a little bit, because in terms of these kind of marketplace rituals or ceremonies that you were mentioning you know, it's something that we might wonder, I think, as you have, how did it come to be this [00:47:00] way?And so I'd like to, if I can once again, quote from matrimony in which you speak to the etymology of hospitality. And so for those interested on page 88,"the word hospitality comes from hospitaller, meaning 'one who cares for the afflicted, the infirm, the needy.' There's that thread of our misgivings about being on the receiving end of hospitality. Pull on it. For the written history of the word, at least, it has meant, 'being on the receiving end of a kind of care you'd rather not need.'"End quote.Stephen: That's so great. I mean, before you go on with the quote. It's so great to know that the word, unexamined, just kind of leaks upside, doesn't it? Hospitality, I mean, nobody goes "Hospitality, ew." [00:48:00] And then, if you just quietly do the obvious math to yourself, there's so much awkwardness around hospitality.This awkwardness must have an origin, have a home. There must be some misgiving that goes along with the giving of hospitality, mustn't there be? How else to understand where that kind of ickiness is to be found. Right? And it turns out that the etymology is giving you the beginnings of a way of figuring it out what it is that you're on the receiving end of - a kind of succor that you wish you didn't need, which is why it's the root word for "hospital."Chris: Hmm hmm. Wow.Audience: Hmm.Chris: May I repeat that sentence please? Once more."For the written history of the word, at least, it has meant, [00:49:00] 'being on the receiving end of a kind of care you'd rather not need.'"And so this last part hits home for me as I imagine it does for many.And it feels like the orthodoxy of hospitality in our time is one based not only in transaction, but in debt. And if you offer hospitality to me, then I owe you hospitality.Stephen: Right.Chris: I'm indebted to you. And we are taught, in our time, that the worst thing to be in is in debt.Stephen: Right?Chris: And so people refuse both the desire to give as well as the learning skill of receiving. And this is continuing on page 88 now."But there's mystery afoot with this word. In its old Latin form, hospice meant both 'host' and 'guest.'"Stephen: Amazing. One. Either one, This is absolutely amazing. We're fairly sure that there's a [00:50:00] acres of difference between the giver of hospitality and the receiver that the repertoire is entirely different, that the skew between them is almost insurmountable, that they're not interchangeable in any way. But the history of the word immediately says, "really?" The history of the word, without question, says that "host" and "guest" are virtually the same, sitting in different places, being different people, more or less joined at the hip. I'll say more, but you go ahead with what you were gonna do. Sure.Chris: "In it's proto Indo-European origins, hospitality and hospice is a compound word: gosh + pot. And it meant something like [00:51:00] 'stranger/guest/host + powerful Lord.'It is amazing to me that ancestrally, the old word for guest, host, and stranger were all the same word. Potent ceremonial business, this is. In those days, the server and the serve were partners in something mysterious. This could be confusing, but only if you think of guest, host, and stranger as fixed identities.If you think of them as functions, as verbs, the confusion softens and begins to clear. The word hospice in its ancient root is telling us that each of the people gathered together in hospitality is bound to the others by formal etiquette, yes, but the bond is transacted through a subtle scheme of graces.Hospitality, it tells us, is a web of longing and belonging that binds people for a time, some hithereto unknown to each other is a clutch of mutually-binding elegances, you could say. In its ancient practice, [00:52:00] hospitality was a covenant. According to that accord, however we were with each other. That was how the Gods would be with us. We learn our hospitality by being on the receiving end of Godly administration. That's what giving thanks for members. We proceed with our kin in imitation of that example and in gratitude for it."Mm-hmm.And so today, among "secular" people, with the Gods ignored, this old-time hospitality seems endangered, if not fugitive. I'm curious how you imagine that this rupture arose, the ones that separated and commercialized the radical relationships between hosts and guests, that turned them from verbs to nouns and something like strangers to marketplace functions.[00:53:00]Stephen: Well, of course this is a huge question you've asked, and I'll see if I can unhuge it a bit.Chris: Uhhuh.Stephen: Let's go right to the heart of what happened. Just no preliminaries, just right to it.So, to underscore again, the beauty of the etymology. I've told you over and over again, the words will not fail you. And this is just a shining example, isn't it? That the fraternization is a matter of ceremonial alacrity that the affiliation between host and guest, which makes them partners in something, that something is the [00:54:00] evocation of a third thing that's neither one of them. It's the thing they've lent themselves to by virtue of submitting to being either a host or a guest. One.Two. You could say that in circumstances of high culture or highly-functioning culture, one of the principle attributes of that culture is that the fundament of its understanding, is that only with the advent of the stranger in their midst that the best of them comes forward.Okay, follow that. Yeah.So, this is a little counterintuitive for those of us who don't come from such places. We imagine that the advent of strangers in the midst of the people I'm describing would be an occasion where people hide their [00:55:00] best stuff away until the stranger disappears, and upon the disappearance of the stranger, the good stuff comes out again.You know?So, I'm just remembering just now, there's a moment in the New Testament where Jesus says something about the best wine and he's coming from exactly this page that we're talking about - not the page in the book, but this understanding. He said, you know, "serve your best wine first," unlike the standard, that prevails, right?So again, what a stranger does in real culture is call upon the cultural treasure of the host's culture, and provides the opportunity for that to come forward, right? By which you can understand... Let's say for simplicity's sake, there's two kinds of hospitality. There's probably all kinds of gradations, [00:56:00] but for the purposes of responding to what you've asked, there's two.One of them is based on kinship. Okay? So, family meal. So, everybody knows whose place is whose around the table, or it doesn't matter - you sit wherever you want. Or, when we're together, we speak shorthand. That's the shorthand of familiarity and affinity, right?Everybody knows what everybody's talking about. A lot of things get half-said or less, isn't it? And there's a certain fineness, isn't it? That comes with that kind of affinity. Of course, there is, and I'm not diminishing it at all. I'm just characterizing it as being of a certain frequency or calibre or charge. And the charge is that it trades on familiarity. It requires that. There's that kind of hospitality."Oh, sit wherever you want."Remember this one?[00:57:00]"We don't stand on ceremony here.""Oh, you're one of the family now." I just got here. What, what?But, of course, you can hear in the protestations the understanding, in that circumstance, that formality is an enemy to feeling good in this moment, isn't it? It feels stiff and starched and uncalled for or worse.It feels imported from elsewhere. It doesn't feel friendly. So, I'm giving you now beginnings of a differentiation between how cultures who really function as cultures understand what it means to be hospitable and what often prevails today, trading is a kind of low-grade warfare conducted against the strangeness of the stranger.The whole purpose of treating somebody like their family is to mitigate, and finally neutralize their [00:58:00] strangeness, so that for the purposes of the few hours in front of us all, there are no strangers here. Right? Okay.Then there's another kind, and intuitively you can feel what I'm saying. You've been there, you know exactly what I mean.There's another kind of circumstance where the etiquette that prevails is almost more emphatic, more tangible to you than the familiar one. That's the one where your mother or your weird aunt or whoever she might be, brings out certain kind of stuff that doesn't come out every day. And maybe you sit in a room that you don't often sit in. And maybe what gets cooked is stuff you haven't seen in a long time. And some part of you might be thinking, "What the hell is all this about?" And the answer is: it's about that guy in the [00:59:00] corner that you don't know.And your own ancestral culture told acres of stories whose central purpose was to convey to outsiders their understanding of what hospitality was. That is fundamentally what The Iliad and The Odyssey are often returning to and returning to and returning to.They even had a word for the ending of the formal hospitality that accrued, that arose around the care and treatment of strangers. It was called pomp or pompe, from which we get the word "pompous." And you think about what the word "pompous" means today.It means "nose in the air," doesn't it? Mm-hmm. It means "thinks really highly of oneself," isn't it? And it means "useless, encumbering, kind of [01:00:00] artificial kind of going through the motions stuff with a kind of aggrandizement for fun." That's what "pompous" means. Well, the people who gave us the word didn't mean that at all. This word was the word they used to describe the particular moment of hospitality when it was time for the stranger to leave.And when it was mutually acknowledged that the time for hospitality has come to an end, and the final act of hospitality is to accompany the stranger out of the house, out of the compound, out into the street, and provision them accordingly, and wish them well, and as is oftentimes practiced around here, standing in the street and waving them long after they disappear from view.This is pompous. This is what it actually means. Pretty frigging cool when you get corrected once in a while, isn't it? [01:01:00] Yeah.So, as I said, to be simplistic about it, there's at least a couple of kinds, and one of them treasures the advent of the stranger, understanding it to be the detonation point for the most elegant part of us to come forward.Now, those of us who don't come from such a place, we're just bamboozled and Shanghai'ed by the notion of formality, which we kind of eschew. You don't like formality when it comes to celebration, as if these two things are hostile, one to the other. But I'd like you to consider the real possibility that formality is grace under pressure, and that formality is there to give you a repertoire of response that rescues you from the gross limitations of your autobiography.[01:02:00]Next question. I mean, that's the beginning.Chris: Absolutely. Absolutely. Mm-hmm. Thank you once again, Stephen. So alongside the term or concept of "pompe," in which the the guest or stranger was led out of the house or to the entrance of the village, there was also the consideration around the enforcement of hospitality, which you write about in the book. And you write that"the enforcement of hospitality runs the palpable risk of violating or undoing the cultural value it is there to advocate for. Forcing people to share their good fortune with the less fortunate stretches, to the point of undoing the generosity of spirit that the culture holds dear. Enforcement of hospitality is a sign of the eclipse of hospitality, typically spawned by insecurity, contracted self-definition, and the darkening of the [01:03:00] stranger at the door.Instead, such places and times are more likely to encourage the practice of hospitality in subtle generous ways, often by generously treating the ungenerous."And so there seems to be a need for limits placed on hospitality, in terms of the "pompe," the maximum three days in which a stranger can be given hospitality, and concurrently a need to resist enforcing hospitality. This seems like a kind of high-wire act that hospitable cultures have to balance in order to recognize and realize an honorable way of being with a stranger. And so I'm wondering if you could speak to the possibility of how these limits might be practiced without being enforced. What might that look like in a culture that engages with, with such limits, but without prohibitions?Stephen: Mm-hmm. That's a very good question. [01:04:00] Well, I think your previous question was what happened? I think, in a nutshell, and I didn't really answer that, so maybe see how I can use this question to answer the one that you asked before: what happened? So, there's no doubt in my mind that something happened that it's kind of demonstrable, if only with the benefit of hindsight.Audience: Right.Stephen: Or we can feel our way around the edges of the absence of the goneness of that thing that gives us some feel for the original shape of that thing.So you could say I'm trafficking in "ideals," here, and after a fashion, maybe, yeah. But the notion of "ideals," when it's used in this slanderous way suggests that "it was never like that."Chris: Mm-hmm.Stephen: And I suggest to you it's been like that in a lot of places, and there's a lot of places where it's still like that, although globalization [01:05:00] may be the coup de grâce performed upon this capacity. Okay. But anyway.Okay. So what happened? Well, you see in the circumstance that I described, apropos of the stranger, the stranger is in on it. The stranger's principle responsibility is to be the vector for this sort of grandiose generosity coming forward, and to experience that in a burdensome and unreciprocated fashion, until you realize that their willingness to do that is their reciprocity. Everybody doesn't get to do everything at once. You can't give and receive at the same time. You know what that's called? "Secret Santa at school," isn't it?That's where nobody owes nobody nothing at the end. That's what we're all after. I mean, one of your questions, you know, pointed to that, that there's a kind of, [01:06:00] what do you call that, teeter-totter balance between what people did for each other and what they received for each other. Right. And nobody feels slighted in any way, perfect balance, et cetera.Well, the circumstance here has nothing of the kind going with it. The circumstance we're describing now is one in which the hospitality is clearly unequal in terms of who's eating whose food, for example, in terms of the absolutely frustrated notion of reciprocity, that in fact you undo your end of the hospitality by trying to pay back, or give back, or pay at all, or break even, or not feel the burden of "God, you've been on the take for fricking hours here now." And if you really look in the face of the host, I mean, they're just getting started and you can't, you can't take it anymore.[01:07:00]So, one of the ways that we contend with this is through habits of speech. So, if somebody comes around with seconds. They say, "would you like a little more?"And you say, "I'm good. I'm good. I'm good." You see, "I'm good" is code for what? "F**k off." That's what it's code for. It's a little strong. It's a little strong. What I mean is, when "I'm good" comes to town, it means I don't need you and what you have. Good God, you're not there because you need it you knucklehead. You're there because they need it, because their culture needs an opportunity to remember itself. Right?Okay. So what happened? Because you're making it sound like a pretty good thing, really. Like who would say, "I think we've had enough of this hospitality thing, don't you? Let's try, oh, [01:08:00] keeping our s**t to ourselves. That sounds like a good alternative. Let's give it a week or two, see how it rolls." Never happened. Nobody decided to do this - this change, I don't think. I think the change happened, and sometime long after people realized that the change had had taken place. And it's very simple. The change, I think, went something like this.As long as the guest is in on it, there's a shared and mutually-held understanding that doesn't make them the same. It makes them to use the quote from the book "partners," okay, with different tasks to bring this thing to light, to make it so. What does that require? A mutually-held understanding in vivo as it's happening, what it is.Okay. [01:09:00] So, that the stranger who's not part of the host culture... sorry, let me say this differently.The culture of the stranger has made the culture of the host available to the stranger no matter how personally adept he or she may be at receiving. Did you follow that?Audience: A little.Stephen: Okay. Say it again?Audience: Yes, please.Stephen: Okay. The acculturation, the cultured sophistication of the stranger is at work in his or her strangerhood. Okay. He or she's not at home, but their cultural training helps them understand what their obligations are in terms of this arrangement we've been describing here.Okay, so I think the rupture takes place [01:10:00] when the culturation of one side or the other fails to make the other discernible to the one.One more time?When something happens whereby the acculturation of one of the partners makes the identity, the presence, and the valence of the other one untranslatable. Untranslatable.I could give you an example from what I call " the etiquette of trade," or the... what was the word? Not etiquette. What's the other word?Chris: The covenant?Stephen: Okay, " covenant of trade" we'll call it. So, imagine that people are sitting across from each other, two partners in a trade. Okay? [01:11:00] Imagine that they have one thing to sell or move or exchange and somebody has something else.How does this work? Not "what are the mechanics?" That can be another discussion, but, if this works, how does it work? Not "how does it happen?" How does it actually achieve what they're after? Maybe it's something like this.I have this pottery, and even though you're not a potter, but somebody in your extended family back home was, and you watched what they went through to make a fricking pot, okay?You watched how their hands seized up, because the clay leached all the moisture out of the hands. You distinctly remember that - how the old lady's hands looked cracked and worn, and so from the work of making vessels of hospitality, okay? [01:12:00] It doesn't matter that you didn't make it yourself. The point is you recognize in the item something we could call "cultural patrimony."You recognize the deep-runningness of the culture opposite you as manifest and embodied in this item for trade. Okay? So, the person doesn't have to "sell you" because your cultural sophistication makes this pot on the other side available to you for the deeply venerable thing that it is. Follow what I'm saying?Okay. So, you know what I'm gonna say next? When something happens, the items across from you cease to speak, cease to have their stories come along with them, cease to be available. There's something about your cultural atrophy that you project onto the [01:13:00] item that you don't recognize.You don't recognize it's valence, it's proprieties, it's value, it's deep-running worth and so on. Something happened, okay? And because you're not making your own stuff back home or any part of it. And so now, when you're in a circumstance like this and you're just trying to get this pot, but you know nothing about it, then the enterprise becomes, "Okay, so what do you have to part with to obtain the pot?"And the next thing is, you pretend you're not interested in obtaining the pot to obtain the pot. That becomes part of the deal. And then, the person on the making end feels the deep running slight of your disinterest, or your vague involvement in the proceedings, or maybe the worst: when it's not things you're going back and forth with, but there's a third thing called money, which nobody makes, [01:14:00] which you're not reminded of your grandma or anyone else's with the money. And then, money becomes the ghost of the original understanding of the cultural patrimony that sat between you. That's what happened, I'm fairly sure: the advent, the estrangement that comes with the stranger, instead of the opportunity to be your cultural best when the stranger comes.And then of course, it bleeds through all kinds of transactions beyond the "obvious material ones." So, it's a rupture in translatability, isn't it?Chris: You understand this to happen or have happened historically, culturally, et cetera, with matrimony as well?Stephen: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.Yeah. This is why, for example, things like the fetishization of virginity.Audience: Mm-hmm. [01:15:00]Stephen: I think it's traceable directly to what we're talking about. How so? Oh, this is a whole other long thing, but the very short version would be this.Do you really believe that through all of human history until the recent liberation, that people have forever fetishized the virginity of a young woman and jealously defended it, the "men" in particular, and that it became a commodity to trade back and forth in, and that it had to be prodded and poked at to determine its intactness? And this was deemed to be, you know, honourable behavior?Do you really think that's the people you come from, that they would've do that to the most cherished of their [01:16:00] own, barely pubescent girls? Come on now. I'm not saying it didn't happen and doesn't still happen. I'm not saying that. I'm saying, God almighty, something happened for that to be so.And I'm trying to allude to you now what I think took place. Then all of a sudden, the hymen takes the place of the pottery, doesn't it? And it becomes universally translatable. Doesn't it? It becomes a kind of a ghosted artifact of a culturally-intact time. It's as close as you can get.Hence, this allegation of its purity, or the association with purity, and so on. [01:17:00] I mean, there's lots to say, but that gives you a feel for what might have happened there.Chris: Thank you, Stephen. Thank you for being so generous with your considerations here.Stephen: You see why I had to write a book, eh?Audience: Mm-hmm.Stephen: There was too much bouncing around. Like I had to just keep track of my own thoughts on the matter.But can you imagine all of this at play in the year, oh, I don't know, 2022, trying to put into motion a redemptive passion play called "matrimony," with all of this at play? Not with all of this in my mind, but with all of this actually disfiguring the anticipation of the proceedings for the people who came.Can you imagine? Can you imagine trying to pull it off, and [01:18:00] contending overtly with all these things and trying to make room for them in a moment that's supposed to be allegedly - get ready for it - happy.I should have raised my rates on the first day, trying to pull that off.But anyway.Okay, you go now,Chris: Maybe now you'll have the opportunity.Stephen: No, man. No. I'm out of the running for that. "Pompe" has come and come and gone. Mm.Chris: So, in matrimony, Stephen, you write that"the brevity, the brevity of modern ceremonies is really there to make sure that nothing happens, nothing of substance, nothing of consequence, no alchemy, no mystery, no crazy other world stuff. That overreach there in its scripted heart tells me that deep in the rayon-wrapped bosom of that special day, the modern wedding is scared [01:19:00] silly of something happening. That's because it has an ages-old abandoned memory of a time when a wedding was a place where the Gods came around, where human testing and trying and making was at hand, when the dead lingered in the wings awaiting their turn to testify and inveigh."Gorgeous. Gorgeous.Audience: Mm-hmm.Chris: And so I'm curious ifStephen: "Rayon-wrapped bosom." That's not, that's not shabby.Chris: "Rayon-wrapped bosom of that special day." Yeah.So, I'm curious do you think the more-than-human world practices matrimony, and if so, what, if anything, might you have learned about matrimony from the more-than-human world?Stephen: I would say the reverse. I would say, we practice the more-than-human world in matrimony, not that the more-than-human world practices matrimony. We practice them, [01:20:00] matrimonially.Next. Okay. Or no? I just gonna say that, that's pretty good.Well, where do we get our best stuff from? Let's just wonder that. Do we get our best stuff from being our best? Well, where does that come from? And this is a bit of a barbershop mirrors situation here, isn't it? To, to back, back, back, back.If you're thinking of time, you can kind of get lost in that generation before, or before, before, before. And it starts to sound like one of them biblical genealogies. But if you think of it as sort of the flash point of multiple presences, if you think of it that way, then you come to [01:21:00] credit the real possibility that your best stuff comes from you being remembered by those who came before you.Audience: Hmm.Stephen: Now just let that sit for a second, because what I just said is logically-incompatible.Okay? You're being remembered by people who came before you. That's not supposed to work. It doesn't work that way. Right?"Anticipated," maybe, but "remembered?" How? Well, if you credit the possibility of multiple beginnings, that's how. Okay. I'm saying that your best stuff, your best thoughts, not the most noble necessarily. I would mean the most timely, [01:22:00] the ones that seem most needed, suddenly.You could take credit and sure. Why, why not? Because ostensibly, it arrives here through you, but if you're frank with yourself, you know that you didn't do that on command, right? I mean, you could say, I just thought of it, but you know in your heart that it was thought of and came to you.I don't think there's any difference between saying that and saying you were thought of.Audience: Mm-hmm.Stephen: So, that's what I think the rudiments of old-order matrimony are. They are old people and their benefactors in the food chain and spiritually speaking. Old people and their benefactors, the best part of them [01:23:00] willed to us, entrusted and willed to us. So, when you are willing to enter into the notion that old-order matrimony is older than you, older than your feelings for the other person, older than your love, and your commitment, and your willingness to make the vows and all that stuff, then you're crediting the possibility that your love is not the beginning of anything.You see. Your love is the advent of something, and I use that word deliberately in its Christian notion, right? It's the oncomingness, the eruption into the present day of something, which turns out to be hugely needed and deeply unsuspected at the same time.I used to ask in the school, "can you [01:24:00] have a memory of something you have no lived experience of?" I think that's what the best part of you is. I'm not saying the rest of you is shite. I'm not saying that. You could say that, but I am saying that when I say "the best part of you," that needs a lot of translating, doesn't it?But the gist of it is that the best part of you is entrusted to you. It's not your creation, it's your burden, your obligation, your best chance to get it right. And that's who we are to those who came before us. We are their chance to get it right, and matrimony is one of the places where you practice the gentle art of getting it right.[01:25:00] Another decent reason to write a book.Chris: So, gorgeous. Wow. Thank you Stephen. I might have one more question.Stephen: Okay. I might have one more answer. Let's see.Chris: Alright. Would I be able to ask if dear Nathalie Roy could join us up here alongside your good man.So, returning to Matrimony: Ritual, Culture and the Heart's Work. On page 94, [01:26:00] Stephen, you write that"hospitality of the radical kind is

This week on Geeks Out: Kogonada (Columbus, After Yang) directs a film that's visually stunning but emotionally uneven. Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell lead a stacked cast — but does... LEARN MORE The post A Big Bold Beautiful Journey – Gorgeous But Heartless? appeared first on Geeks OUT.

Last week I had the honor of giving a keynote speech at the IMBA Europe Summit in Boltaña, in the heart of the Pyrenees in Spain (a GORGEOUS riding area). In this episode, I share my biggest takeaways, how new research shows E-MTBs change riding behavior and keep more people riding longer, and why mountain biking is much more than just “send-it” culture. From inspiring projects in Nepal, Bhutan, and schools worldwide, to women like Manon Carpenter, Evelyn from Dutch Girls on Wheels, and many others leading the way — this summit left me hopeful and excited about a more inclusive future for MTB. Fact is: Trails connect us. Skills empower us. And inclusion sustains us. Here's the "Neuroscience of MTB Skills Practice" Video I talk about in this episode.    Here are some of the inspiring people and links I mention in this episode - but there were SO many more uplifting connections made! Dutch Girls on Wheels: https://www.instagram.com/dutchgirls_on_wheels Pinar Pinzuti: https://www.instagram.com/pinarpinzuti Manon Carpenter: https://www.instagram.com/manoncarpenter Dr. Lesley Ingram Sills - Research about E-MTB: https://mtbcos.co.uk/dr-lesley-ingram-sills  Mental Health Benefits of Mountain Biking - Research by Edinburg Napier University: https://www.napier.ac.uk/about-us/our-schools/school-of-applied-sciences/mountain-biking/mountain-biking-and-mental-health Julie Cornelius from Worldride: Changing Women's Lives Through Mountain Biking  Dr. Esther Walker at Outride - Bringing Cycling Programs to Schools Loren Rowney at IMBA - Meet the IMBA Europe Team here.  Start working on your skills for free and get my tips directly to your inbox: 

That was a rough one Viking fans. Let Craiggers heal the pain. He's got 10 wonderful observations from Sunday's loss that will help. Like...it's time to start Jordan Mason. And let's throw shorter passes to protect our qb. Let's go! Plus, some bonus movie talk at the end of this Gorgeous pod. You've earned it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Georgy-Porgy gets his wish, and more.by jane700bond. Listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories. It had started not long after the Double Necromancy lesson began. Only Slither-In alumni tended to take Necromancy, because of its dark reputation. It involves communing with dead spirits and summoning demons and the like. Unlike the Divinity classroom, which had tables and benches with enough room, as Ariella had discovered, for under the table Kama Sutra practice, the Necromancy classroom had modern writing tablet chairs. They were set in a curve in front of the teacher's desk.It is said that the reason the Necromancy classroom was gifted with modern furniture was that a couple of years back, the appearance of a particularly fiery demon had incinerated the old furniture in the room.Dr. Snake, former House Master of Slither-In, was the teacher and Lucille, who had already learnt much more advanced Necromancy from her evil genius father than Snake would ever teach, found her mind wandering back to her competition with Ariella, as to who would become ‘Sex Goddess of Briarwood College'.Lucille had been introduced to Defence Against Dark Arts, Snake (or DADA as he was affectionately known by his favourite students) when she had first arrived the previous day. However, there were so many new things to look at and take in that she had not taken much notice of this tall, languid, saturnine figure. Now, Lucille, already bored by the lesson, began to look at Snake properly and started to size him up. She knew she would need him on her side if she were to win the competition, but she was sure she had the necessary wiles and ways that would easily bind the teacher to her cause.There were only four pupils in the glass, two other gals and a guy and they sat with rapt attention as Snake stood and talked animatedly about demons and succubus and their dangers. Lucille sat to the left of the semi-circle.From the way his dark eyes seemed continually drawn to her, clocking the small amount of skin exposed just above her pert breasts and then looking away again, Lucille thought he was just the right sort of pervert who willingly, or unwillingly, could soon become another one of her slaves. All it needed was temptation to be strewn in his way. Therefore, deciding to be decidedly wicked, Lucille silently formed a glamour in her mind and, as she started to radiate her magical sex appeal, she slid her ass forward a little in her chair so as to extend the amount of leg she was showing. It was just by an inch or so, but the movement caught the teacher's eye and he appeared to be contemplating the dark depths under her kilt beyond the honey-toned skin of her knees and partially exposed thighs. “Naughty!” she thought.After a few minutes, Lucille lazily lifted a hand to the top button of her blouse and, making sure Snake was watching, deliberately undid the top button and pushed her taut bosom forward towards him, stretching the cotton of her blouse and exposing the dark crevice of her cleavage and the white of her bra. Snake, looked away and tried to concentrate on his other three students, but they were not any competition to Lucille's sun-goddess beauty and the force of the glamour.The glamour was a spell her father had taught her some years ago and was a way of becoming irresistible to her target. She had used it a lot since her father's arrest. The strength of her glamour was one of the main reasons she had managed to escape the clutches of the Gendarmerie Magique and seduce her way across the English Channel.Inevitably after a few moments cum-to-me DADA's eyes were drawn back as Lucille lifted a leg and crossed it over the other exposing an extensive amount of the smooth tanned skin of her thigh and a hint of the curve of her ass. Snake rallied with a question to one of the other two gals in the class, but they were no competition to the glamour Lucille was exuding into the classroom ever more strongly.Snake faltered in his speech and shuddered as Lucille winked sexily at him while she pulled her kilt still further up her thigh, uncrossed her legs and leaning further back pushed her nearly exposed pubis towards him. The other students could not help but notice and they too stared open-mouthed at the dame as she undid another button on her blouse and blew Snake a kiss. Lucille looked around the class at her fellow pupils to see if she had any natural allies among them. There were three, Henry, a tall big hulking guy with a scarred face and crooked nose who looked as though he had fought in more than just magic battles, most likely a Quidditch player she thought. With a little frisson of excitement, Lucille imagined that under his clothes Henry was probably both well-endowed and muscular.There were also two dark-haired coeds, Priti and Sabrina, both slim and young looking. Priti was the smaller, very underdeveloped with little showing in terms of breasts. Sabrina, was a little taller and probably a 32 b. They, in the same way the hulk was not the most handsome of guys, were also not the prettiest gals. They both sported a mono-brow over deep set dark brown eyes and had thin unsmiling lips. But Lucille reckoned that all three of them had the potential to make obedient disciples. She could tempt the dames with some magic beautification, it was amazing what you could do with a wand. Cosmetic surgery was in its infancy compared to her powers.“Miss l'Astique,” rallied Snake “are you too warm?” It appeared he could no longer resist and came closer to her, dark eyes peering at the exposed cleavage and the still hidden mystery covered with the white mounds of her bra.Not really wanting the teacher to make a pass at her as she sat in the classroom, she lifted her wand surreptitiously under her writing tablet and, when Snake was looking as though he might lunge for her, with a sweeping movement she flung a spell at him. “Tempus non-flugit!” she incanted quietly and Dr. Snake came to a halt arm half-way through a movement towards her.The others pupils were aghast and the hulk started to rise from his desk. “What the …” he started and stood up, but Lucille was pointing her wand at him whilst his own was still in his bag.“Quiet!” she commanded. “This class is dead-boring and I thought that I might liven things up!” She pointed at the hulk and incanted her favourite disrobing spell “Pantus expeliamus!” At which Henry's large kilt flew way leaving him exposed as even more as well-endowed than Lucille had imagined. The guy flushed and tried to hide his exposed genitals with his large hands.Lucille, could not resist the follow-up spell “Gorgeous giganticus.” She intoned and the Henry's manhood shot its way from behind his hands and stood a good sixteen inches out in-front of him, as straight as a dagger, and as thick as a cucumber.The two gals giggled and Lucille knew she had them on-side.“Oi!” protested the guy, “Fuck you bitch, what you playing at!”Lucille, pushed her tongue out from between her lips and said huskily with the full hit of her Gallic suave, “You said it! We are playing ‘fuck you bitch'! You want to fuck all three of us? What about it, ladies?” That silenced Henry who straightened and moved his hands away to let his manhood standout with pride.“Fuck all three of you?” Henry asked not believing his luck.Lucille started to undo her kilt fastener and then exposed her baby-smooth pubis to the guy, who stood still and rampant and breathing rather hard. She then undid her blouse and removed her bra to expose her perfect pert breasts.“Wow!” said the hulk as Lucille approached and took his massive manhood in both hands, giving it long strokes up and down the length.The other two dames stood astonished for the moment and then moved closer to watch, standing on either side of Lucille, fascinated by Henry's enormous dong, all four of them ignoring the frozen statue-lie Snake standing tall behind them.Priti, very short and petite spoke first: “How do you fit something so big inside you?” She wondered.Lucille smiled and replied: “It's amazing what you can do if you're well-lubed and really desperate for a fuck. The female of the species is amazing when she wants sex.”Priti looked disbelieving at the rock-hard monster and swallowed. She loved being fucked, but the thought of this whopper made her eyes water.“Want to feel it?” asked Lucille and the petite dame nodded eagerly, moved forward and experimented with moving her hand up and down the hulking shaft as Henry moaned in pleasure. The skin was soft and pliable and Priti started to play with the head, gradually pushing back the foreskin to reveal its glistening crown. Priti who's hips were barely 28 inches round and who only stood a little over five foot was both fascinated and attracted and yet horrified by the enormous dick.Sabrina, who was lesbian, really fancied the new French student. Standing on the other side of Lucille's naked body she nervously started to caress the witch's beautiful honey-toned skin. “You're so soft!” Sabrina exclaimed, “You skin is like satin and, wow, you are so beautiful.”Lucille's glamour was working on them all and she smiled to herself satisfied.Like an acrobat, Lucille suddenly cartwheeled into the air, twisted and landed legs astride of Henry's dick, feet on the floor with her back to him. She reached up and back and pulled his head down to meet hers and started to kiss him deeply while he bent forward, his massive arms pressing into her perfect breasts.The monstrous cock began to throb between her legs, but being so long, there was still the length of an ordinary big cock still exposed beyond Lucille's cunt and Priti again moved forward and started to massage it.Sabrina came and joined her. “It's so huge, I wonder if we could all ride it at once?” she asked quietly as her hand followed the length up until where it met Lucille's cunt lips which she nervously began to massage. The lips were beginning to open, leaving a glistening wetness where her slit moved over the soft skin. Lucille smiled encouragingly as Sabrina nervously put a finger into Lucille's flowing sex-juices and then lifted it to her mouth to taste the honey.The taste was instant magic and she knew she wanted to make mad passionate love with the beautiful strawberry blonde. Deciding that the opportunity was too good to waste, Sabrina quickly undressed and facing Lucille, put her leg over Henry's meat machine and pressed herself up to French bitch, enjoying the satin, silky feeling of the gorgeous dame's body against her own. She put her arms around her and grabbed and massaged Lucille's ass as the pair moved in unison along the shaft. The throbbing between her legs started her own juices running as she move her slit up and down part of the great length, deliberately pressing her clit against Lucille at each opportunity, each clit becoming harder and more sensitive with each encounter.Sabrina got her wish and Lucille shared her hot deep kisses with her too, massaging her small rosy immature nipples and teasing her to ecstasy.With two chicks now astride his dick and with being the most beautiful babe he had ever seen, kissing him passionately, Henry felt wonderful as the involuntary throbbing of his machine became more pronounced. His hips began to move and he started to thrust back and forth between the two gals' legs. Each thrust became smoother as the honey lubrication from their pussies massaged the shaft.Priti looked at the remaining six to nine inches that kept appearing and disappearing between Sabrina's cheeks as Sabrina's ass moved along the length. This size was a bit more manageable she thought and following the example of the other's stripped herself naked and with relish and mounting excitement at the thought of being fucked, took the head of the beast in her mouth and started sucking and teasing the cock.Sabrina was enjoying herself, the throbbing of the cock stimulating her clit like a vibrator and now being able to suck and tease Lucille's beautiful tits was a something she wouldn't have dreamed of before today.Lucille was smiling to herself as she knew she had gained three loyal sex slaves who were in thrall to her glamour. She reached out for one of Sabrina's hands and raising herself slightly got the lass to start on opening her cunt more with her fingers and to massage her clit with her thumb. Meanwhile, Henry thrust his hips back and forth under the two babe's slits and now, to his mounting excitement, the end went straight into Priti's warm welcome mouth.Priti may not have been pretty, but she now knew she wanted more than a suck. She wanted a fuck! She left her horn-blowing after one particular thrust hit the back of her throat uncomfortably and pulled a chair around in front of the pounding piston. She was still unsure any of it would fit inside her small body and so took her magic wand and used a spell to create an aromatic oil.Some of this she used to lube the head of Henry's corker and then she knelt on the chair. Inserting the wand into her own cunt and with its magic oil she prepared herself for the monster by using her fingers to probe inside, oiling herself deep within and widening her love passage as her excitement mounted.Finally, a little nervously, Priti exposed her fully-opened well-oiled cunt to the thrust of the machine. She moved herself backwards so the cock was pushing against her eager vagina. Then, gradually she wriggled and worked the huge head past her cunt lips and then deeper and deeper into herself, her hand now frantically masturbating her clit with more of the oil as her excitement built.After some minutes of increasing pleasure, Priti was aware of a sudden coolness at her backside as Sabrina deftly dismounted the cock behind her, leaving more room for it to press even deeper into her welcoming sex cave. Inch by inch, she pushed back with each thrust forward. Sabrina deftly used her tongue around Priti's cunt lips to ease its passage in. Priti could feel an orgasm growing as more and more of the monster worked its way into her tiny body. The throbbing and thrusting never ceasing in intensity as she whimpered with mounting excitement. Finally, she thrust herself back one final time and her ass met Lucille's hot naked body as the young witch still sat astride Henry behind her.Lucille was really turned on and enjoying the sight of the massive organ thrusting slowly and deeply in and out of the petite teenage body in long sensuous strokes. She could feel a wildness in her mounting excitement.Lucille leant forward and grabbed Priti's nipples from behind and twisted them roughly, making the lass gasp in pain and pleasure. Sabrina went under the lass and started tonguing Priti's clit as with hand over her mouth Priti issued a long silent scream of orgasm. After some minutes of delight as the orgasm subsided and shuddering in time with the still throbbing penis, she worked her way back up the massive length. The thrusting was lessened and using the back of the chair for leverage she felt the massive head slowly, sensuously moving back and out of her.Finally, she came off the piston with a pop and fell into Sabrina's arms who caught her before she collapsed on the floor and lay there panting, her heart throbbing like a wild thing and her love tube pulsing with delight.Then it was Lucille's turn to kneel on the chair and feel the giant member enter her from behind. Sabrina stood in front of her and massaging Lucille's breasts, offered her own nipples to Lucille's mouth. Sabrina loved being suckled by another gal and this time it was a goddess who was sucking her hard; her tits were turning red from the rough attention.Lucille began to shudder as Henry got into a faster and more urgent rhythm, her fingers fucking Sabrina in time with each enormous thrust. She was loving this wild sex and rode Henry with abandonment as he penetrated her more deeply and easily than with Priti.Unbelievably and with almost superhuman strength and agility Lucille lifted Sabrina bodily and turned her upside down so she could bury her face in the gal's wet, wet cunt. As Henry went into Lucille, Lucille's tongue went deep into Sabrina cunt, deeper than Sabrina could believe while Lucille's nose rubbed hard on Sabrina's clit. As Henry pulled out, Lucille sucked at the other gal's cunt drinking in the juices like a wildcat. Sabrina, had legs in the air on either side of Lucille's head, her sex clamped to Lucille's mouth by arms that grabbed her arse with seemingly superhuman strength. Sabrina's head was dangling below looking along the length back to Henry's enormous balls swinging wildly as his lunges became faster and more desperate. She started to spark with an emerging climax. One of Sabrina's hands found Lucille's clit and began rubbing the large hard bullet frantically trying to bring Lucille to orgasm so they could cum together.Lucille finally came in a frenzy of paroxysms, with her tongue deep inside Sabrina. This is what she wanted; this is what she lived for. Lucille the sex goddess of all the Earth. Henry, feeling the dame's orgasm pulled out rapidly just before losing his load. His giant dong sprayed sperm into the open mouth of Sabrina underneath Lucille, giving her the her first taste of jizz. He sprayed more over her face and on her red and engorged tits.Lucille desperate for the taste of spunk, clambered off the chair, letting Sabrina's legs fall onto the floor and then she was on top of the lass, eagerly sucking Henry's cum from a startled Sabrina's mouth, drinking it eagerly like a sperm vampire. Then using the cum from Sabrina's body she eagerly finger fucked the plainer lass to orgasm with a cum-oiled hand. Sabrina, couldn't yell as Lucille's tongue was deep in her mouth, but she bucked, her body jerking wildly as the orgasm finally hit her.There was some moaning as finally they lay still. The waves of pleasure and of pain gradually receding. Suddenly Priti asked “What about DADA!”.All of their heads spun around. The teacher still stood frozen in the same position; time seemingly had not passed at all for him. Lucille thought for a few moments and then said, “I know I'll trap him so he's powerless to do anything against us. Everyone get dressed and get back to the same position you were in when I zapped him.”The students quickly followed her instructions and then watched with horror and fascination as she undid Snake's zip and pulled his dick out. She massaged it until it stood erect and then worked it with her mouth and tongue, seeming to enjoy giving the teacher a blow job. Finally, with his dick hard and rigid, she sat down back in her chair, arranged herself demurely and took out her wand.She swept her wand before her incanting “Cum avex tempus flugit.” She then gave a mighty scream, as she hid the wand and Snake's snake let cum fly over her cleavage. “Sir!” she screamed “How dare you! What are you doing you perv!”A confused Snake looked about bewildered and took in the sight of his swaying boner spraying sperm over his newest pupil's neck and face and all the class screaming at him. Not believing what he saw, he packed himself away as quickly as possible and rushed out of the class as if all the demons of Hell were on his tail.“Sabrina! Priti!” Lucille called “Please come and lick this sperm off me.” Like supplicants, the two lasses came and knelt on either side of their sex goddess and carefully licked away the remains of their House master's cum. Henry smiled benignly at the sight and felt his manhood stretching again under his kilt as he watched. And then the bell rang for the end of the lesson.It was night-time and George couldn't sleep. His mind kept going back to the Divinity class when he had lost his virginity to Ariella. George had never really got on with females. He wanted to, but babes never seemed to like him. They called him Georgy-Porgy, even though he wasn't fat. They made up rhymes about him and laughed at him in giggling cliques, whispering secrets that he was never told. The problem was that George was a lech and the chicks all distinctively knew it. He was always looking at them with a leer that said he was mentally undressing them, which of course he was! He was a toucher, and took every opportunity to rub against a hottie in a tight spot in a corridor, or - as this morning - putting his hand in inappropriate places.But today had been different! Ariella had sat on his hand, but instead of leaping off, as he had expected, she had ground her wet sopping cunt onto his fingers and forced his thumb deep inside her. And if that was not enough, she had sucked and fucked him in class under the table. It was the first time he had fucked a chick; the first time he had even felt a chick's cunt and he now wanted more. If Ariella had fucked him once, surely, he could fuck her again. He wanted to fill Ariella with his cum; in her hot cunt, in her mouth. He wanted to cum all over her tits. He wanted to kiss her and rub his body all over hers.Georgy-Porgy couldn't sleep because his head was whirling with the fantasy he was creating and his cock hurt from having a constant erection. A wank was no good, he wanted to find her room and fuck her brains out.As he climbed out of bed and covered his nakedness with a dressing gown, he briefly wondered what had happened to Ariella after Miss Peacock had ordered Ariella to follow her from class.At the same time George began his night-time excursion, Ariella was not having difficulty sleeping. She was fast asleep in Dave's single bed with the guy's arms wrapped around her naked body. They had made love slowly and sensuously and now, after they had both cum in unison, slept the deep contented sleep of lovers.Earlier in the night Ariella had been in the study she shared with Lucille and could get no peace. Sabrina and Priti where there and they were simpering to Lucille's every wish as she used her magic to subtlety transform them from being just plain to her ideal of beautiful. The change to a curve of an eyebrow, the pout of a lip, a slight raising of a cheekbone, a finesse to the chin and the two gals were being transformed by Lucille, bit by bit to be worthy to be her acolytes, or, more likely, French courtesans.Ariella, could not cope with the oohs and ahs, the little screams of delight, the fights over the mirror, nor the fawning Lucille received from her slaves. She had sat on her bed alone for a bit thinking about what had happened when she had followed Miss Peacock from the classroom after she had fucked the awful Georgy-Porgy. She knew it had been a mistake, but his fingers and thumb under her ass just reactivated her seemingly unsatiable sex-drive and she just wanted to cum and cum again, whoever it was with.Ariella had been scared as the confident Miss Peacock marched along the corridors to her own private room. She had butterflies in her stomach and she was utterly ashamed of being caught having salacious sex in Miss Peacock's class, especially with the loathsome Georgy Porgy who was always trying tricks on the gals and was thoroughly disliked. It would mean expulsion!Ariella had been aware that the back of her blouse was somewhat damp and that the insides of her smooth thighs were wet and slippery from both her own sex juices and George's newly delivered large eruption of spunk that was now dribbling out of her cunt. If she had been wearing knickers it would not have been so much of a problem, but being naked under her kilt, there was nothing to stop the slow slippery descent of creamy gunk towards her knees.Miss Peacock's room, being an old dungeon, was dark with small high windows letting in a little sunlight from above. The walls were mainly stone, but with dark panelling around an enormous ancient fireplace, which had deep easy chairs in front of it. A few severe looking portraits hung on the walls. Sconces held candles and a candelabra was hanging centrally over a carved oak table which had four chairs, two down each side. There was also a desk covered in grimoires. There were two other doors which, Ariella assumed would lead to a bedroom and bathroom.Miss Peacock gave a wave of her wand and the gloom lifted as the candles sparked with a non-consuming magical flame from which a musky, almost sensuous scent, filled the air. She looked the rather dishevelled Ariella up and down and sniffed. “I think you may smell like a brothel,” she said “but I wouldn't know because I have never visited one. Rather you smell of sex, you randy little sex maniac, your aroma is all cunt juice, sperm and mating pheromones. Did you really think you could fuck in my class unnoticed?” She asked sternly stepping closer to the lass.Ariella thought for a moment that Miss Peacock would strike her and she backed up against the end of the table. But instead, Miss Peacock pounced forward and with fast efficient, almost desperate fingers, started undoing the top buttons on Ariella's tight blouse. Before the coed could object the teacher quickly pulled it up and over the gal's head, the movement pushing the Ariella's bra upwards so that her breasts came free of the cups. They dangled down as the blouse cuffs caught on her wrists and she had to bend forward as Miss Peacock struggled to pull the blouse off over her head.“Whaa!” went Ariella in surprise as the garment finally came free and she straightened up, trying to cover her breasts with her arms. But the young teacher just carried on oblivious of any protest and grabbing the loosened bra, also pulled that over Ariella's head in a swift motion.“Silence!” she said sternly to the buxom babe. “Gertrude! Here, now!” she shoute

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A French coed has her wicked way and gains some disciples.by jane700bond. Listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories.Ariella and the new French dame were enjoying some girl-on-girl exploration on the day they moved into the women's dorms at Briarwood College of Incanting Arts. The freshman coeds decided to make a contest of which of them would prevail as ‘Briarwood College Sex Goddess'.Suddenly there was a flash and the raucous sound of male voices cheering. “Magic!” one shouted and the gals parted and sat up quickly to view a neat hole in the wall that separated their room from that of the guys on the other staircase. “Magic!” he repeated “What do you think of that spell, ladies? We'll have to hang pictures or something over the hole when the rooms get inspected, but pretty neat, hey?”The guys climbed into the room and Ariella and Lucille, a little dishevelled, stood up in-front of them. They were two seniors, Tony and Dave, who Ariella rather liked; not the most handsome guys in the house, but fun and always up to mischief. “Wow its Ariella! Fuck you've grown-up.” continued Dave in his loud voice “and my god, who are you, beautiful?” he asked as he took in the glorious sight of Lucille.“This is Lucille l'Astique, daughter of the Marquis l'Astique le Grand,” explained Ariella “she's come over from France.”“Loose elastic?” Tony queried, fumbling the pronunciation - “I hope your knickers have loose elastic! Makes them easier to pull down! Ha, ha! And you dad's called ‘arse tickler?'. Fantastic, I cannot wait to get to know you better! He, he he!”“Huh!” shrugged Lucille, in a very Gallic way “And I suppose you think that is funny little guy! You will not slither-in your cock into me that easily!”Tony and Dave looked at each other and burst out laughing “Slither-in your cock, ha, ha, ha” laughed Dave, “Hadn't thought of that one! Ha, ha, ha. Mind you, not a bad idea if you ladies are that way inclined.” He smirked!Lucille without warning pulled her shift over her head and fully revealed her fabulous body to the others for the first time. Her golden skin shining in the late afternoon sunshine, her pert breasts erect, her pubis as naked and smooth as a baby's. “You little guys wouldn't know how to treat a lady! You are all noise and jokes. Look on me and become my slaves.”The guys stood in shocked amazement as the queen of the elves was revealed in all her naked glory and their jaws dropped open. Lucille went to her bedside table and picked up her wand. Pointing at each guy in turn she incanted “Pantus expeliamus.”Their trousers flew away and the guys were left naked from the waist, flaccid dicks hanging down. “Gorgeous giganticus.” Intoned Lucille and two large boners stood erect before her. Ariella was shocked again, this time at the way Lucille had used magic in this way to control the guys. Lucille then used a levitation spell on to the guys to lift and made them stand side by side on her bed their so their rock-hard erections were now at the same height as her mouth. “I do not bend my head to little guys.” She said mischievously.Lucille then taking Ariella by the hand, led her to Tony and curved the Moon Goddess's hand around his rampant dick. Lucille then went to Dave, whose dick was the same height as her lips, and took the shaft in her mouth rocking backwards and forwards with vigorous motions and with loud moans from the guy.Ariella was thinking that she was in danger of losing the Sex Goddess competition on the first day and began undoing her clothes while trying to continue to play with Tony's shaft. The front fastening bra soon came loose and putting Tony's dick in her mouth to cover it with plenty of her saliva took it out again began to rub it over her tits making both of them more and more aroused. The bulbous head exciting her as it circled around her nipples. She then grasped one of her breasts in each hand and pushing them together encircled Tony's cock in-between. Tony smoothly thrust up and down her saliva lubricated cleavage, as more dribbled from her mouth. In a few moments, pre-cum glistening at the end of the penis and Ariella first bent her neck licked this and then took the hard erection in her mouth again, thrusting back and forth as Lucille was doing.Ariella had not so much experience with guys, but was determined to learn more about their hairy muscled bodies and how they could give her pleasure. Lucille watched with a wicked look in her eye while she continued to gobble Dave's manhood greedily. And then she pointed her wand at Tony. She removed her mouth from Dave's engorged dick and incanted “Cumus atlanticus” at which Tony cried out as a sudden tremendous orgasm took him and cum spurted from his dick into Ariella's mouth. She backed away in surprise and as the cock swung out and free, more spunk spurted all over Ariella's tits and face, eyes and hair. It was a torrent and Ariella gasped as more sprayed out and into her mouth again which was still open in astonishment. She swallowed, but there was too much to cope with and she couldn't see with the white cream in her eyes.Lucille left Dave standing in shock on the bed and grabbed Ariella, pushing her own tits over Ariella's jizz soaked ones, the cum creating a fabulous lubricant. She licked Ariella's eyes clear of sperm and forced her mouth open with her tongue so they could share the fresh cum, greedily lapping up the salty fluid. Hooking her leg around Ariella's knee she then forced Ariella down onto the floor and slid her naked body over the other gal using her firm breasts to massage the still flowing cum into their skins. Tony's spunk worked like a delicious baby oil which Lucille now rubbed hard onto Ariella's clit and then used it to lubricate and widen her own cunt. With deep thrusting fingers she seemed to be trying to fill her vagina with Tony's magic sperm, while moaning in increasing ecstasy.The smell of sex was intoxicating Ariella and she screamed with delight as a red mist descended on her mind and the wild naked smooth body on body massage from Lucille continued with vigour and her clit hardened in anticipation.Lucille lubricated her own cunt with more of Tony's torrent of cum, using her fingers vigorously to push ever more the white creamy fluid into her own eager cavern and make herself as slippery inside as possible. Then as Tony's ejaculations finally subsided, with a groan he collapsed onto the bed. Lucille suddenly grabbed her wand again and pointing it at Dave shouted “Caininius penetratus!”She stuck her ass, high in the air as Dave, like an automaton, got off the bed and thrust his rock-hard pistol deeply and roughly into Lucille's now wide open, cum-lubricated, scorching hot vagina, doggy style. Lucille bucked as she still rubbed hard at Ariella's clit and sucked more cum from the overcome lass's burning nipples. Dave thrust hard and fast and it was obvious he would soon cum as the excitement was too much. Lucille's hand went to her wand again and she shouted “Orgasmus tremendicus”, pointing the wand at the point the two lass's sex mounds met and where Dave's shaft was deeply buried inside her own steaming cunt.There was an explosion in Ariella's clit and another in her g-spot and then there was a heavenly silence as the gals together left their bodies and danced in a red nebula of pleasure light years away. Colours swirled and a feeling of ecstasy overtook Ariella as she whirled away in space still holding and kissing her angel Lucille. The vision went on and then she felt orgasm after orgasm fill her ethereal body until there was nothing left to do but collapse into a wisp and disappear in the garden of pleasure that Lucille had created for her.After a while Ariella slowly wandered the long road back to consciousness, her spirit returning to her body as it cooled and she awoke to find herself lying on the hard wooden floor with Lucille asleep on top of her and Dave collapsed and spent above, his wilting cock half out of Lucille's still dripping cunt. Ariella felt very sticky and her eyes wandered around the room until she saw Tony back in his trousers sitting on a bed, knees hunched up, looking a bit like a gnome. He smiled wanly at her. “Fuck!” he said. “Magic!” she said and started to pull herself carefully from under the tacky bodies of Lucille and Dave. It seemed that the three were almost glued together with drying spunk.Abandoning the seemingly mesmerised Tony and grabbing her robe, she left her study and went into the shower room opposite. Here she stripped naked again and then stood under the warm water and started to rub the sperm away from her shoulders and breasts. Ariella noticed how wonderfully slippery and smooth the newly re-hydrated cum made the skin all over her body. With memories of what had just happened flooding back into her mind, her hand again found her clit and she gently massaged herself to another climax as she, surprising herself at the thought, imagined herself being fucked slowly from behind by the tall dark figure of Dr. Snake.Finally, satiated Ariella realised lumps of jizz had creating knots in her hair and they were going to be a pain to get out.Sexually satisfied for the moment, hair washed, conditioned and combed straight, Ariella thought seriously about what happened just now in the bedroom. “Nice! Clever! Exciting and magic!” she thought, “But far too quick. Lucille was too urgent and desperate. Poor Tony looked exhausted by his ordeal and Dave was a goner.”The orgasms were amazing, but there were other and better ways of achieving this surely, rather than using hypnotised guys and magic fountains of cum. There was, she thought, still a chance for her to become this year's Sex Goddess of Briarwood College, after all, if she could out do Lucille and make all the other students love her.First Day of ClassesThe next day, Ariella put on one of her newly bought bras and then her school blouse, realising as she did it up, that she should have bought new blouses as well as bras, as the buttons were straining over her now much bigger chest, revealing quite a cleavage.Then she found her kilt, which also being last year's, was probably a bit shorter than regulation, ending several inches above her knees!Lucille did not seem to be much of a morning person and moaned about the early hour, but eventually Ariella managed to get her into her new uniform and down to breakfast. Once fed, Ariella showed Lucille around the college for a bit before they both went to their Advanced Potions class. After that Ariella found someone else to take Lucille to her Necromancy class, a subject Ariella was not taking and Ariella was delighted she now had a free period and time to think.She went back to her room in the tower of Briarwood to consider the Sex Goddess competition seriously. The hole in the wall between her bedroom and the guys was hidden by a charm she had created the previous night and lifting it with a revealing spell, she climbed through to Dave and Tony's room.Considering that Lucille had rather abused them yesterday, even if they did get their rocks off, she thought she better be conciliatory. The sex, while exciting, had not been too kind or quite consensual as the guys had lost their free will under Lucille's spells. Once through the hole Ariella waved her wand and the gap disappeared again under the charm.Dave was sitting on his bed in his kilt, knees up balancing a large spell book on his thighs. “Hi Ariella.” He said warily. She sat down on the end of the bed by his feet. “Some friend you have through there! She's a bit over the top?”“Sorry Dave,” said Ariella, I had no idea she was going to do any of that stuff. Have you survived the experience unscathed?“.“Well, I can't remember much, except a massive orgasm blowing my socks off, but I'm sure some of those spells were illegal. Once I had woken up and got rid of the sticky mess in the shower, I found I was unscathed. Tony says that, despite the gallon of cum he ejaculated, his manhood still appears to be working fine. But, for goodness sake, whatever happened to foreplay and the guys also having some fun? We're not sex robots you know!”“Could have been my fault Dave,” Ariella said softly “we had already been through the foreplay bit by ourselves and I think Lucille was already overexcited when you and Tony arrived.” She laid a finger on Dave's naked shin and moved it up and down lazily through the light adolescent hairs.Dave sighed and said “Over-sexed that dame, and that's coming from me, a testosterone filled eighteen-year-old Slither-in alumnus!”Ariella started to play with the hairs on his legs, twisting them absentmindedly. “Ow!” said Dave and Ariella stop the twisting and put a hand carelessly on Dave's bare knee.“We are going to compete with each other for Sex Goddess of Briarwood College.” she said wistfully “But she seems to be so much more powerful than me and, wow, is she stunning to look at?”“Phew! Ariella, she does not stand a chance against you!” Said Dave.Ariella opened her eyes widely and she turned and looked at him, her hand descending nonchalantly from the knee an inch up the inside of his thigh.“You are stunningly beautiful! You're a natural and people like you. I like you and if we properly plan how to beat her wild bad magic, I am sure we can get you the crown.”With a dreamy look on her face, Ariella's hand carelessly caressed Dave's thigh and went further under the kilt. “Yeah!” She said with eagerness, “A Sex Goddess is worshipped, not feared!” Her hand went back to his knee.Then again, seemingly in a dream world of her own, Ariella's hand slowly started to explore again. Dave shifted with a sigh and moved the spell book onto the bed-side table.“Oh Dave,” she said “it's no good, I need more experience, especially with guys. She lent her head against his knee and, seemingly without conscious thought, her hand gently swept gradually onwards and inwards up the thigh until she suddenly met the tip of his shaft coming the other way which flicked up in salute. Dave moaned and as if suddenly realising what she was doing, Ariella's hand retreated.But as Dave was obviously not objecting to her exploring hand and feeling that now familiar horniness warming her cunt, she, more deliberately this time, adventured forward again and brushed the tip of his dick with her fingers.After a few tentative moments, Ariella's head slid down from his knee to his shin so she got a better view into the dimness under the kilt. "Everything in working order.” She thought as Dave's manhood pointed at her straight and hard. Carefully she reached forward and her fingers played around his bulbous head, pulling back his foreskin to release it. Finding pre-cum already forming at the tip, she carefully slid the oil around the top, gently massaging it. Dave groaned.As Dave sat still and breathless, her hand moved still deeper in and massaged the supple skin of his shaft. Then climbing up on the bed, her ass in the air, her head followed her hand under the kilt until she could kiss the tip of his now hot member and lick around the head.“Is this how you do foreplay?” She asked with a muffled voice.“Fuck yeah!” Said Dave and lifted his kilt back so he could see what she was doing. Slowly at first and then with increased confidence, up and down the length of his dick went her tongue, around his balls went her fingers massaging the ball-sack gently. His hand went his kilt buckle on the side to undo it. He lifted his backside off the bed to get rid of it which, somehow, caused his dick to pop neatly into Ariella's welcome warm mouth. He pulled the kilt away and dumped it on the floor.Ariella was gentle, she was caring and she loved massaging the straight hard shaft with both hands and tongue while Dave lay back in ecstasy, caressing the gal's head as she moved up and down.He lent forward and pulled up Ariella's kilt revealing her cute white ass sticking up in the air. He fondled it lovingly, hands massaging her bare cheeks as they explored the way round to her secret places.She moved further forward, slowly and sexily undoing the buttons of her tight blouse and then her bra to reveal hard and aroused nipples. She dripped saliva from her mouth onto her cleavage and slowly moved up Dave's body until she was in a position to use her breasts to massage his dick. Being closer now, Dave's hands could feel around her ass cheeks and find the aroused dampness of her cunt which he rubbed gently, probing with his fingers.After enjoying the sensation of Dave's massage for a few minutes, Ariella moved forward still more, now kissing, licking and nipping at his nipples and grounding his dick with her pubis, whilst he groaned with longing.Then she sat upright, her boobs proudly pointing in the air where he could grab and play with them. Slowly she rubbed her naked slit up and down the length of his broomstick hard shaft, cunt juices making her slow deliberate passage smooth and sensuous. His bulbous head found her clit and dick and clit danced together for some minutes in an erotic ballet of joy.Pushing herself back a little so the head of his penis was pushing at her labia and widening her cunt lips she sat up and holding the rod in one hand Ariella rubbed his dick up and down the length of her slit until with a sudden push and a gasp she forced herself down on it, taking the full length deep inside and then moaned with delight. She rose up and sank down in a slow rhythm, her hands massaging her own breasts. Then one of Dave's hands found her clit and using her fragrant cunt juices to lubricate it, started to rub her off.Feeling herself nearing climax and feeling the urgency in Dave's throbbing gun and trying to make the pleasure last as possible, she sat right up and released his cock before either of them came. Leaning forward and she rubbed her nipples into his much smaller ones. He loved it. Raising her ass skywards she slowly moved her tongue down his muscled stomach to again find his dick to play with it with her mouth and tongue.Ariella was still licking her own cunt juices off Dave's shaft when Tony quietly and unnoticed came through the door.Tony took in the scene quickly, Ariella with her fabulous ass in the air with her mouth clamped over Dave's member, whose eyes were closed in pleasure. With an instant erection he quickly climbed on the bed behind Ariella and lifted his kilt so he could plunge his boner straight into her wide-open pink wet cavern.Opening his eyes, at the sudden motion on the bed, Dave was surprised by sudden appearance of his friend, but Ariella was loving this new and surprising innovation. It was the first time she had had a guy take her from behind and after the first shock soon started to use her cunt muscles to clamp hard on the dick that was now ploughing deep inside her.She started copying Tony's fuck rhythm on Dave's cock, moving up and down quickly in time with Tony's urgent thrusts. She put one hand underneath her to reach back and find her clit and tweaked her nipples with the other whilst Dave bucked deeper and deeper into her mouth, catching her teeth with the head of his cock on each out-stroke.Shouting, Dave came first, shooting hot cum into her throat in a gush she could hardly swallow. His orgasmic cumming lit the fire in her clit and she started her first orgasm, tightening herself still harder on Tony's iron-hard rod that thrust deep inside her and she convulsed with shudders of desire. These shudders in turn released the sperm from Tony's balls and he filled her love tunnel with creamy white spunk. The feel of this red-hot release inside her then brought her vagina to climax and after quivering in pleasure for what seemed like minutes, she released Dave's dick from her mouth and fell spent and satisfied onto his chest, her tingling breasts resting on his taut muscular stomach. Her dive forward in turn released Tony from her tight cunt and he watched, still aroused, as his newly made cream pie begin to dribble out from between her legs.However, Tony was not finished, he still had more in him and he massaged his cum with his dick around her swollen cunt lips making Ariella moan. Then still using his hard cock, he spread the jizz over her naked arse, especially in the crease between the two ass cheeks. Then like a lion rampant thrust up and down between her well lubricated gap until a second spray of cum shot over her back. Finally, he sat down, on the end of the bed, and gently massaged the cum into Ariella's skin.“We were only discussing foreplay.” said Dave ironically.“Whoops!” said Tony, “Sorry Ariella, I saw your beautifully opened cunt and I couldn't help myself.”“It's no problem,” said Ariella dreamily from Dave's chest. “I enjoyed that.” She stretched herself out like a cat, her face coming up to meet Dave's and to kiss him gently on the lips and her feet moving back to rest on Tony's softening sticky manhood which she played with, with her toes.A bell rang to mark the end of period and the three jumped up knowing there were classes to get to in the next two minutes or points would be deducted. Hurriedly Ariella did up her bra, and her blouse buttons, then she pulled her kilt straight aware of the stickiness on her back, where Tony's cum was once again beginning to dry on her skin. She hoped it didn't show through her blouse.Then it was off to Divining The Future- 101, at a run, with Ariella aware of more cum slowly escaping from her cunt and dribbling down the inside of her legs. She hoped no one would notice any of the drips that were marking her trail along the campus corridor.The three arrived in the dungeon classroom just in time and breathless, with a heaving chest, Ariella chose a bench seat at the back, next to another Slither-In alumnus, called George. George smiled a wicked Slither-In smile at her and as she pushed her kilt back and sat down, he deftly managed to place his left hand, palm up, where she sat. Her cum soaked cunt came down on his fingers and she nearly yelped.George at first grinned at Ariella because of the trick he had pulled, but then started to frown as he realised that:Ariella was naked under her kilt,Her cunt was red-hot, andShe appeared to be smearing Tony's semen & her own cunt fluid over his hand.George tried to free himself, but Ariella was rather cross now and wanting revenge for this intrusion into her very personal space. She couldn't tell the teacher as she was still exuding Tony's cum, so she forced herself down on George's wriggling fingers trapping them and smiled an even more wicked smile back at George.She subtlety shifted herself so that George's index finger now met her still engorged clit and she moved herself with tiny movements so that George involuntarily started to massage it.She and George were having difficulty concentrating on the class and despite having sex so recently, Ariella was beginning to feel aroused yet again by this unexpected turn of events. She shifted herself slightly again and managed to find the tip of George's thumb, which involuntarily started to work its way between her hot cum dripping cunt lips. She slowly moved forwards and backwards as his thumb began to open her cunt once more and went deeper and deeper in.Meanwhile her small movements on the bench made George's trapped index finger rub her clit. Her eyes closed in pleasure.“Ariella!” came the voice of Miss Peacock, the Divination teacher “I'm glad to see you day dreaming with such a lovely smile on your face, but we haven't gone into trance yet. That's coming next.”Ariella sat up to attention, forcing George's thumb still further into her sex cave.

Live from the Battle Born Broadcast Center, Battle Born Injury Lawyers attorney, Justin Watkins, joins Cofield & Company to discuss the viral video of a fight taking place during the Los Angles Rams' match up against the Houston Texans, detail how game ticket prices lead to more fights during NFL games, and give his top NFL Week 2 picks for the Circa Survivor contest. College Football week 3 top betting picks. VSiN NBA Betting Analyst, Jon Von Tobel joins Cofield & Company live from the Battle Born Broadcast Center to talk about Barry Odom's Purdue Boilermakers taking on the USC Trojans, review the Jacksonville Jaguars' week 2 match up against the Cincinnati Bengals, and gives his top betting picks for the NFL Week 2.

JJ McCarthy wins in his first NFL game! Kilby does a late night pod to discuss the dramatic turnaround. Kyle Theige joins the show to add his expertise, his humor, and his love of Brian Flores. The Vikings D was great. What a comeback. SKOLLLLL!!! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chelsea garden designer and BBC Gardeners' World TV presenter Nick Bailey shares expert advice for creating a garden that's easy to care for. From resilient plants to plants that require minimal input, to plants that can cope with extremes in temperature and don't succumb to pests and diseases. Get ready to make a list of fabulous plant suggestions for your garden. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week's Connecticut Humane Society Pet of the Week is Bosley an 8-month-old mixed breed pup with a heart full of love and energy to spare! With his striking black and brindle coat, Bosley could have a mix of lab, shepherd, or pit bull in him, but what we do know for sure is that he's 100% adorable. Bosley came to the Connecticut Humane Society after his previous family could no longer care for him, and now he's looking for a new start. He's a sweet, playful dog who loves to be active. Since he's still young and growing, Bosley needs a family with adults or teens who can keep up with his energy, continue his training, and give him the exercise and enrichment he thrives on. If you're ready for long walks, playtime, and lots of puppy love, Bosley may just be the perfect match. He's available at the Connecticut Humane Society's Waterford location. To meet him, book an appointment at cthumane.org/adopt.

Kilby is back from his glorious birthday celebration and all his focus is on THE MINNESOTA VIKINGS. Kilby previews the season opener at Chicago on Monday Night and is imploring Head Coach KOC to run the ball and protect JJ McCarthy. Huge first game for JJ - Kilby can't wait. Plus, some details from the California Coastline Birthday Bonanza. So much fun! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

268. Savvy Business and Health & Wellness Tips and Journey to Overcoming Infertility with Laura Jean Bell   1 Corinthians 10:31 NIV "So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God."   Today's episode includes some thematic material. I want you to be aware before you listen in the presence of little ears.    *Transcription Below*   Laura Jean Bell is a believer, storyteller, writer, wife to her high school sweetheart and mama to three miracle babies.   She is a published author of You Can Always Come Home by Laura Jean Bell, in addition to being a Business and Social Media Coach.    Laura also overcame stage 3 endometriosis by taking the road less traveled and now she spends countless hours helping other women take that road with her!    Connect with Laura on Instagram: @laura_jean_bell   Laura Jean Bell's Website   Questions and Topics We Discuss: What are a handful of practical tips you can offer others, especially as it relates to digital marketing? Will you share your research on Minerals: How do we even determine what minerals we need?  Will you leave us with a few more social media tips?   Thank You to Our Sponsor: Midwest Food Bank   Other Episodes Related to This Topic from The Savvy Sauce: 48 Pursuing Health, Not Vanity Before and After Childbearing with Blogger, Speaker, and Coach, Megan Dahlman 33 Pursuing Health in the New Year with Functional Medicine Specialist, Dr. Jill Carnahan 68 Hormones and Simple Changes to Feel SO Much Better with Functional Medicine Expert, Dr. Jill Carnahan 70 Energy to Spark Success in Your Business with Best-Selling Author, Speaker, and Podcaster, Christy Wright 76 Conflict Resolution, Infidelity, and Infertility with Licensed Psychologist and Certified Sex Therapist, Dr. Jessica McCleese 77 How 2 Questions Can Grow Your Business and Change Your Life with Author, Pastor, and Podcaster, Jeff Henderson 132 Pursuing Your God-Given Dream with Francie Hinrichsen 256 Gut Health, Allergies, Inflammation and Proactive Solutions with Emily Macleod-Wolfe 266 Female Sex Hormones, Periods, and Perimenopause with Emily Macleod-Wolfe   Connect with The Savvy Sauce on Facebook, Instagram or Our Website   Gospel Scripture: (all NIV) Romans 3:23 “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,”   Romans 3:24 “and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”   Romans 3:25 (a) “God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood.”    Hebrews 9:22 (b) “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.”    Romans 5:8 “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”    Romans 5:11 “Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.”    John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”   Romans 10:9 “That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”    Luke 15:10 says “In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”   Romans 8:1 “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”   Ephesians 1:13–14 “And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession- to the praise of his glory.”   Ephesians 1:15–23 “For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.”   Ephesians 2:8–10 “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God‘s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.“   Ephesians 2:13 “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ.“   Philippians 1:6 “being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”   *Transcription*   Music: (0:00 – 0:10)   Laura Dugger: (0:11 - 1:25) Welcome to The Savvy Sauce, where we have practical chats for intentional living. I'm your host, Laura Dugger, and I'm so glad you're here.    Today's episode includes some thematic material. I want you to be aware before you listen in the presence of little ears.    Thank you to an anonymous donor to Midwest Food Bank who paid the sponsorship fee in hopes of spreading awareness. Learn more about this amazing nonprofit organization at MidwestFoodBank.org.   Laura Jean Bell is my guest today, and she is a Jesus-loving author and also a business and social media coach. So, not only is she going to share some of her best savvy social media and business tips, but also the conversation takes a detour into health and wellness, and she has an abundance of wisdom to share there as well, even including practical tips that we can implement today for our own flourishing in health and well-being. Here's our chat.   Welcome to The Savvy Sauce, Laura.   Laura Jean Bell: (1:26 - 1:27) Hi, thank you for having me.   Laura Dugger: (1:28 - 1:34) I'd love for you just to start us off by giving us a snapshot glimpse of your current life right now.   Laura Jean Bell: (1:35 - 2:27) Oh, my goodness, my chaotic life. Actually, it's a sweet, beautiful thing, but I am a wife to my high school sweetheart. We have been married, this year will be 11 years, and we have three kiddos. Emmylou, who is six. She literally just turned six. My son Oaks, who is three, and my youngest is Lottie, and she just turned nine months. So, my life is very full. I own my business, I am a published author, and I have three very, very needy children, right? I'm in a season of life where I'm very, very, very needed, and that's a beautiful thing, but it can be a very overwhelming thing at times. So, that is a little snapshot about my day-in and day-out life.   Laura Dugger: (2:27 - 2:43) That sums it up well. Gorgeous kid names, by the way. Oh, thank you. But I'd love to hear more about your business, too. Would you mind just explaining the work that you get to do as a digital marketer and online income mentor?   Laura Jean Bell: (2:44 - 4:58) Sure. Okay, so, this has been such a fun journey for me, and just to maybe explain it in like a Reader's Digest version, because I think that there's so much on the internet right now that's like, make $5 million in four minutes. But what I do is actually help business owners.    So, like the average woman who maybe is wanting to build an income or find her place online, that was where I started. That's where I began, like really helping those women be like, “Hey, I can be a business owner, too.” I can actually have like a mark and a place in this space, which I think is often really hard for women to like grasp, because we're so inundated with influencer culture.    But as the business began to expand and grow, I really started to lean into how do I help business owners actually market their business and make it really profitable online? Because a lot of times there's business owners that have these great businesses, but they don't actually have the marketing piece to actually sell the thing that makes their business a business. And some of them have a brick and mortar, and they're brick and mortar as well, but they'd love to increase their income.    How do you do that? You get online; you make sales online. And so, what I do is I teach female business entrepreneurs how to scale their business using Instagram.    I do not focus on any other platforms. My main focus is Instagram and teaching them how to use their messaging to make sales consistently. And so, I help them figure out their messaging and then write it.    Actually, I write content for a lot of my clients. And then I teach them consistency and speed so that their life isn't just consumed by the internet, which is like what all of us feel, right? Like, once you get on, you're like, how do I do this?    And I have to create this, I have to edit this, I have to do that. Like, it becomes very overwhelming. And so, what I do is I just eliminate the overwhelm.    I simplify it and I help entrepreneurs really find their messaging.   Laura Dugger: (4:59 - 5:15) Wow, that's incredible. So, you clearly have a gift for communication and articulating different things. Is there anything you want to just give us a little peek into practical tips if somebody is running their own social media?    Any tips you'd have for business owners?   Laura Jean Bell: (5:17 - 6:59) I think that the biggest, the greatest understatement that's happening right now online is followers and views mean absolutely nothing. They are like the beginning of Instagram, the beginning of social media. It was all about like, how many friends do you have?    And then it was how many followers do you have? And you know, how many views are you getting on your stories? And you get all these interactions on your reels.    And like, while that is the mental game of social media, and that is the thing that everybody is going for, because it actually fuels this like dopamine hit in your brain. But the reality is, is that there are people with thousands upon thousands of followers that are making $0 on the internet. And what they need is the actual messaging that says, “Hey, this is how I serve this pain point, and give you the life you want.”   And so, the biggest thing is, if you have five people in one day that view your stories, and three of them actually buy from you, like, that's over 50%. So, you're looking at, while everybody is freaking out about the number, it really is about your messaging in order to convert to sales, you can have a bunch of eyes on you. But if you're not serving the people that are following you, and serving them towards a sale, it doesn't mean anything.    So, don't focus on the numbers, focus on your messaging, focus on your brand, focus on what it is that you are serving your people with. And you will make money, you just will. It's how it works.    So, I hope that answers your question. Well for you.   Laura Dugger: (6:59 - 7:26) But yeah, I love it, because it's so unexpected, I would have never known. And I've also heard you encourage people to share their stories rather than just stating facts. And you share your own story, both online and in your book, You Can Always Come Home: Following the Breadcrumbs of Your Past to Find the Hope for Your Tomorrow.    So, Laura, how can we all incorporate stories into our own work so that we can better serve others?   Laura Jean Bell: (7:28 - 8:59) That's such a good question. And I think the biggest thing is, what story do you want people to know? What story is it that like, you really think like, you've been pricked, right, by the Holy Spirit, like, this is the story that I need you to tell.    This is why you walked through this experience. This is why you're doing this thing. Because oftentimes, we can negate the things that we've walked through, and act as if like, those things didn't, weren't that big of a deal because you survived it, right?    Like, oh, well, you know, it wasn't anything, it was a big deal, right? And so, what are the things that you actually feel are important, they keep showing up, they keep becoming the things that people are asking you about? And how do you tell that story to where somebody hears the messy middle, and then the beautiful resolve, the beautiful ending to that story, because there is, right, the beginning, the middle, and the end.    And that's what makes stories so impactful. Facts tell, right? Like, anybody can tell you that, like, a carrot is orange.    But like, if somebody tells you the story of how the carrot became orange, or how this, like, what the soil does to all of this, and how it adds these nutrients, doesn't that make you like, appreciate a carrot more, want to eat a carrot more, want to go buy the carrots more, right? And so, the same goes with our story, like, what is it that actually happened to create this specific result?   Laura Dugger: (9:00 - 9:11) That's so good. Well, and speaking of stories, are you willing to walk us through a little bit of your own story with your health journey? Yeah, absolutely.    Ask me anything.   Laura Jean Bell: (9:11 - 9:16) I'm an open book. It might scare some people. I'm an open book about it.   Laura Dugger: (9:17 - 9:33) I appreciate that. Yeah, just, you're clearly a very healthy woman. But I know you've had a whole past that you've walked.    So, has health always been important to you? Or at what point of life did you start to make some changes because it wasn't working?   Laura Jean Bell: (9:35 - 14:24) Yeah, you know, it's so interesting. When I reflect on something like that. Um, you know, I grew up in a home, I always start with this, like, my mother was not a dieter.    Like she didn't diet all the time. She wasn't always like, on some workout trend or not eating carbs or not doing this. Like it was never that.    My mom is naturally like very, very, very thin. And so, like that wasn't a part of the conversation. My mom was always obsessed, though, with, like eating food that's good for you.   Like, and in the 90s, like that was really tricky, right? Because they were so many messages about like, what's good for you? What's not that is bad.    Like there's all these things. And while our household, I say was probably much healthier than the average household in the 1990s and early 2000s. I don't think that I ever like cared about my health.    I still ate the Hot Pockets and the Easy Mac and ramen noodles and every opportunity that my parents actually let us eat out like I was chowing down. So, when I reflect on like my years, like 0 to 18, all I cared about was just consumption. I was like, nobody could stop the amount of food that I could consume.    I'm five foot eleven (5' 11”). I was growing like crazy. You can ask my family like I could out eat anyone.    It was kind of unbelievable. So, that part of my life, like, that was not an unhealthy thing. College is when things began for me.    And when I went to college, I for most of my life, I was a competitive dancer. So, like, I was consuming but I was burning like it was like calories in versus calories out. I had no concept of that.    I did not know how to read a nutrition label on the back of a box until I was like, well into college, like, literally remember learning how to do it in a college health class. So, I go to college. And I noticed that I started gaining weight, right?    Like, I'm eating all the fast-food options that are in our student center. And then the cafeteria food. This isn't my mom's home cooked meals anymore.    This isn't the mostly healthy option anymore. And I start gaining weight. So, when that happened, I started hearing other girls talk about what they were doing.    Like, oh, well, you just eat less than exercise more. And like, I had no concept of like, what, what did that mean? Right?    Like, do you just not eat like I love to eat, right. And so, what I started doing, I didn't know how to like lift weights or do anything. So, I started running, because I thought, okay, I have endurance, I danced forever, like, you have to have that endurance with that.    So, like, I'll run. So, I start running. And I completely gave up meat.    I was like, well, I can just eat. I thought meat somehow made you fat. I don't know.    That was just some weird thing that I had in my head. And I stopped eating meat, and I ate less. So, like, I just kind of narrowed down what I was eating, and then ate less of it kind of thing.    And that was when my health problems began, was when I began doing that. Which is really interesting, right? I was probably eating roughly like 1000 to 1200 calories a day, but I was running four to six miles a day.    So, like, I was not fueling what I was burning. Although I was losing weight. So, like, calories in versus calories out, like the concept of like, just eat less than exercise more, it was working.    I was 19. Like, I was young, I had a like, everything was working right, you know. But all of a sudden, my body was like, you're depriving me.    And I'm not only being deprived of actual calories, I'm being deprived of nutrients. And what began to happen is it started to show up in my hormones, with my cycle, started breaking out in hormonal acne on my chin, I started having very short cycles. So, like, for any woman listening that maybe doesn't have a concept of this language, because oddly enough, so many women don't, and it's like about us.    But like, a woman has a cycle, your period isn't your cycle, it's the full month that's your cycle. And I was instead of 28 days, I was having 18 day cycles. And the pain during my period was excruciating.    It was so painful. And I'd never experienced that before. So, those were the things that began to show up.    But I just kept going with what I was doing. And just thought I just had bad periods. I had family members that had bad periods, this just must be genetic. And I just have to live with it and pop ibuprofen every 18 days, right. So, that was kind of where it where it started.   Laura Dugger: (14:25 - 16:04) Let's take a quick break to hear a message from our sponsor. Midwest Food Bank who exists to provide industry leading food relief to those in need while feeding them spiritually. They are a food charity with a desire to demonstrate God's love by providing help to those in need.    Unlike other parts of the world where there's not enough food, in America the resources actually do exist. That's why food pantries and food banks like Midwest Food Bank are so important. The goods that they deliver to their agency partners help to supplement the food supply for families and individuals across our country, aiding those whose resources are beyond stretched.   Midwest Food Bank also supports people globally through their locations in Haiti and East Africa, which are some of the areas hardest hit by hunger arising from poverty. This ministry reaches millions of people every year. And thanks to the Lord's provision, 99% of every donation goes directly toward providing food to people in need.    The remaining 1% of income is used for fundraising, cost of leadership, oversight and other administrative expenses. Donations, volunteers and prayers are always appreciated for Midwest Food Bank. To learn more, visit MidwestFoodBank.org or listen to Episode 83 of The Savvy Sauce where the founder David Kieser shares miracles of God that he's witnessed through this nonprofit organization. I hope you check them out today. Was that the point that led to what you call your year of rebellion? Or did that come later?   Laura Jean Bell: (16:05 - 23:39) No way that that was just the start of basically, roughly eight years of undiagnosed endometriosis. So, what started happening is in college, I would have these what I call episodes where I would be roughly like a day or two before my period would start. And I would have this unbelievable pain that would come over me.    And I could feel it literally my lower abdomen, so much pressure, so much discomfort. Oftentimes, it would involve vomiting, passing out, so painful. To this day, I've had an unmedicated birth.    And I'm here to tell you that the pain of pushing out an almost 10-pound baby, and that were roughly the same thing. It was unbelievable, excruciating pain. I would go to the doctor, they would not give me ultrasounds, they would not check anything, they would not even do my blood work, they did nothing.    They would just say you have really painful periods, and we'll give you birth control. That was every year from 2010 until 2017. This was what was given to me.    And so, in 2017, I was on my way to work, and I had one of those episodes. And I called the doctor, they bring me in, and I said, I want an ultrasound, like I will sit here all day, I need an ultrasound. And so, they did an ultrasound and found two cysts on one ovary, one on the other, and they were six and seven centimeters and six centimeters.    I mean, it was just crazy, these large cysts. And they were like, you more than likely have endometriosis. This is, you know, they started explaining all the things.    And fast forward, I ended up having two laparoscopies, which is the surgery to remove endometriosis in 10 months, the average woman can go 18 months between surgeries, and I had mine in 10 months. That's how reoccurring rapidly it was growing and spreading in my body. And I felt zero relief from the surgeries, which everyone promised, like, you'll feel amazing, you'll, you know, you'll get pregnant. I couldn't get pregnant. I was in so much pain, and I go through another cycle of it.    And it's like, these doctors are like, yeah, you're probably just not going to be able to have children. We recommend you getting on birth control, or getting a hysterectomy, like, these are your options. And so, what I did is I went to see a fertility specialist, like anybody would do like, I'm not going to just stick with my OB. I'm going to see if I can actually have kids. And so, I see a fertility specialist, I go through multiple, multiple, multiple rounds of fertility treatments, and I wind up getting pregnant with my first daughter, Emilu.    So, she is a product of folly stem stimulation and an IUI. And lots of trigger shots and lots of synthetic progesterone. I did all of it.    And after my daughter was born a year postpartum, I got pregnant again, and I miscarried that baby. That baby was miscarried March of 2020, which is when everybody went crazy, right? 2020, like who has their 2020 story, right?   And so, my daughter was little, I mean, she was like 14 months old, when I had this miscarriage. And I remember watching, I watched this video, it was called The Pandemic. And a lot of people like didn't actually see it because it was taken off the internet for misinformation.    And it was a woman that was explaining what was really happening with the pandemic, which is funny, because all of it's true now. But it was taken down like, she's crazy. This is a horrible pandemic, nothing was created in a lab, all of that.    And I was like, I went to watch it again, because I thought this woman must be crazy. Like there's no way that this would actually happen. And I went to watch it again.    And it was taken off the internet for misinformation. And this thought came over me, which is so bizarre now. Like, I know more about Kim and Kanye's divorce, than I know about what's happening with this pandemic.    Yet, Kim and Kanye's divorce information is there for me to see. And they're not letting me look at this. Why?    And it was this very strange thing that came over me. But everything that came out that was like, don't take this medicine to help COVID, don't do this, actually, like saturated fats are bad for you, like all of these different things that were popping up. And people were saying, it's misinformation.    I was like, I'm going to research that. I'm going to research that. I'm going to research that the fertility doctor that did my DNC after I had a miscarriage. They actually said to me, you will never again, have another pregnancy.    But if you do, you will not have a normal child. That is what they discovered and decided about me, according to the results from that DNC, what happened to that baby, why that baby wasn't developing, why I lost that baby. It literally like, and him saying that to me, I was like, why?    And it was almost like he couldn't explain to me the reasons why, but that I just never would. And this is what I needed to do next in order to stay healthy and keep endometriosis away. And so, I went on this journey for one year and I committed to one year where I was like, everything that is misinformation, I'm going to research it.    Everything that I have been told is good for me or is the best choice for me because of my condition. I'm going to actually look at what they're giving to me and like, why? Um, every time somebody told me like endometriosis is incurable.    Okay. But like, what is endometriosis? Nobody actually explained to me what it was.    They just told me I had it and that it caused what it caused, not actually what caused it. And so, when I went on this journey, I began to discover and unfold so many things that absolutely blew my mind, broke my heart, made me very angry because as I began to implement the things that I discovered, I healed and I got better. And all of a sudden I don't have endometriosis anymore.    All of a sudden I'm pregnant with a very healthy baby. All of a sudden, like everything is better. How is it that the things that the providers that were working with me, what they were doing for me was keeping me sick.    And as I branched out and did all the things that they said was absolutely crazy. I had one of them literally looking at me and he was holding topical progesterone and he was like, this stuff, like with all due respect to this functional doctor that talked to you, this stuff doesn't work. And unfortunately they sell things to people like you, young women who are desperate for answers.    They sell this stuff to you to make so much money and it's not going to do anything for you. Guess what? Topical progesterone changed my life.    So, anyways, that is kind of a little bit of like my year of rebellion and what happened. I'm happy to go into details for you, but I feel like I'm getting long winded with it.   Laura Dugger: (23:39 - 24:13) No, that's incredible. I do want to do a deep dive into it because I think it's such a blessing after you've spent over a year researching this and then living this for multiple years. I think it can be such a benefit to each of us.    And I'm recalling this story specifically about toxins where people were saying that means nothing. But in that fertility clinic, somebody told you, there was a sign that said their employees were not allowed to wear certain toxins because quote, it could inhibit the fertility process.   Laura Jean Bell: (24:14 - 24:14) Yes.   Laura Dugger: (24:15 - 24:16) Can you elaborate on that?   Laura Jean Bell: (24:17 - 26:18) Yes. You know, what's really funny is I went to the health department to get some paperwork and stuff for my kids the other day. And, um, there was a sign up that was like any and all women that are getting mammograms, if you're getting a mammogram, do not wear perfume or deodorant for a mammogram because of the radiation mixed with the toxins.    I asked the woman that was sitting there, I was like, why did they say that? And she explained it to me and I was like, oh, okay. So, why aren't you telling us to stop wearing it altogether?    Um, but when I went to the fertility clinic, I was going through fertility. I was like an avid Daisy by Mark Jacobs perfume where I don't know. I still love the way that smells.    It's the yummiest, but I would wear it all the time. And I went in and the woman that was there, she was like, you smell so good. And I was like, it's Daisy by Mark Jacobs.    She was like, I wish I could wear perfume to work. I'm not allowed to. And I was like, why not?   And she was like, oh, because like the people that are working on women who are going through fertility, getting their IU eyes. So, it's like when they're actually inseminating you, like we, it could inhibit the fertility process. She was like, have you ever noticed we don't have any candles?    Like we're not allowed to bring candles here, all of that. And I was like, why aren't you telling me to stop doing that? Is that not interesting to anyone?    Like why is no one paying attention to the fact that like, I'm walking in here with perfume on to get an IU eye that's going to fail because it inhibits the, for the fertility process, like the one that works. Uh, guess what? I wasn't wearing any perfume.    So, it's like, it's one of those things that like, when I heard that, I thought, well, what is it that messes with the fertility process? Like what, what is that? And this was honestly, when I heard this information, this was before my year of rebellion.    So, like, I remember her telling me that and I kind of stopped wearing it to the sessions because I thought, well, I don't want to get this messed up anyways.   Laura Dugger: (26:18 - 26:29) So, yeah, pretty wild. That's incredible. And okay.    So, from that year of rebellion, what other tweaks did you make small and large?   Laura Jean Bell: (26:30 - 29:38) Oh man. Um, some big things like I removed toxins from my home. So, that looked like removing Clorox wipes and, um, detergents that are just like your average detergents that you buy from the store.    Um, I stopped burning candles and started burning, not burning, but diffusing essential oils. Um, from there, what I really started focusing on was my protein intake. Um, I spent so many years vegan, vegetarian, refusing meat, refusing proteins.    And those were the years that things were really bad for me. When I started to reincorporate animal proteins and quality animal fats, my cycles went from 18 days to 29 days. I started having painless periods.    My hair started growing more. Um, my nails wouldn't break. Um, my, even my vision got better.   And so, what was really interesting is I started learning that if you are protein deficient, you will be progesterone deficient and progesterone is the pregnancy hormone. This is the hormone you have to have in order to conceive. I always tell it like this progesterone equals pro gestation.    So, if you don't have enough progesterone, your baby cannot survive the first 12 weeks. That's what the baby lives on before the placenta is formed. You have to have progesterone in order to balance out the estrogen progesterone balance.    If it's imbalanced, that's where you have pain, mood swings, acne, discomfort, the growth of endometriosis and PCOS. These things are really important. Progesterone is so important for your mental health.    If you are mentally low, like think about your progesterone levels. Think about how much you're sleeping. If you're sleeping in complete darkness, that raises your levels.    If you eat at least 80 grams of protein a day, it raises your progesterone levels. These are two really basic things. Like it's really simple.    It's not complicated. So, that was probably the biggest thing for me was learning how to eat because for years we're told, at least all of my life, like fat is bad. They would rather you eat hydrogenated oils and I can't believe it's not better than actually eat grass-fed butter.    Why? Why is it bad for you? When you really uncover the work that was done in the studies that were given for explaining that fat is bad, it was all paid for.    It was all paid for by the medical industry, by big pharma in order to push this agenda. They said that it was bad for our hearts, but get this, in the years after they told everyone that it was horrible for heart health, heart disease skyrocketed as people began to eat less animal protein and less animal fats. So, anyways, just to give like a little, some of the things that I discovered and changed, that's the main thing, which really and truly is like not that complicated.    Wow.   Laura Dugger: (29:39 - 29:45) Yes. Focusing on what you're intaking. What about cortisol? What did you learn about that?   Laura Jean Bell: (29:46 - 32:21) So, cortisol is like your get up and get crap done hormone. Okay. And when you are living in a state of fight or flight, where basically you get up in the morning, I'm going to give you an example of what a lot of women do.    And they end up having issues with cortisol and eventually stop producing it altogether. So, a woman gets up in the morning, she wakes up, she drinks a cup of coffee with no food on her stomach. And she goes and does a 30-minute cardio workout.    And then she comes in and she eats maybe like a protein bar, like a little, like some type of granola bar, another cup of coffee. She goes to work. She works all day or she's home with her kids all day.    And by the time she's got her work done, or she's taking care of her children and fed her children, doing all of these things, you're going all day long. All of a sudden it's three o'clock and you haven't eaten anything and you're in a bad mood and you're really tired. And so, maybe you go get a snack and another cup of coffee.    And then by the time you get to dinner, it's the only meal that you've really sat down and had for the day. Okay. So, what has that done to you?    Your body believes because your body and your brain don't know the difference between a bear chasing you or you running strictly on caffeine and doing too much cardio. And so, all of a sudden she is moody. She's exhausted.    She's running on all this tension. Her hair starts to fall out. She gets acne.    Her skin's doing some weird stuff. Her nails are kind of brittle. All this, you're always moody.   You're always in a bad mood. It's because your cortisol is doing this. It's like, and it's like on, it's like high.    And sometimes when you keep doing this, you actually can get a lot of energy. And then all of a sudden your adrenals, because your adrenals are what produced cortisol. Your adrenals are like, actually we're done.    Like stop running from the bear. Just die. Like literally it like can't do anything for you anymore.   And you go into what a lot of people call, or doctors call adrenal failure, which is where your body doesn't even produce cortisol anymore. And so, that is when you can't get out of bed in the morning. You're so exhausted.    Um, you can't lose weight. You, no matter what you do, you're winded. You're overwhelmed.   Um, but you don't have energy for anything. You have so much brain fog, um, so much bloat and inflammation. It's because your body's not producing cortisol.    So, you don't have the energy to get anything done. Um, does that answer your question?   Laura Dugger: (32:21 - 32:45) Yeah, this is so interesting because I feel like there's a whole health movement right now. So, there's a lot of buzz about all of this and people, I think, especially after 2020 people are waking up. So, love gathering perspectives as you're talking about inflammation then too, with cortisol, have you researched much about grounding, like actually barefoot on the earth?    Yes, girl. Are you kidding me? Absolutely.   Laura Jean Bell: (32:46 - 35:48) Um, so, something that was really interesting, I went to see a specialist, um, when I was really healing my adrenals, because a fun fact for you, like when your adrenals are just in overload, if you are experiencing high cortisol, you're constantly up here. Guess what? Your body's going to throw out the window fertility because what in the world is safe about a body that is running from a bear?    Like, no, your body is preserving you because it's not safe for you to host a life. So, I was seeing a doctor who was really helping me. Um, it's called muscle testing.    So, they test each organ according to how your muscles respond. And, um, I was in adrenal failure. And at this point I'd already had my second child and was experiencing a lot of inflammation.    I couldn't lose weight. I was like so tired. I was irritable.    And, um, I did this long session with him and I was in St. Pete, Florida doing this session. And he said, you have an assignment for the rest of the day. And I was like, okay.    And he was like, you need to go to the beach, like go somewhere and actually lay your entire body down on the sand. He was like, I know, like nobody wants to get sandy, but like lay on the sand. And I was like, tell me why.    And he was like, if you lay on the sand, it's your body touching the earth. And God gave you the earth as a battery pack. And this battery pack literally is going to shoot energy back into your body that your body has been deprived of.    And like, there's, he started going into all the studies for it, but he was like, don't you ever know the difference? Like, and how you feel when you've been cooped up at work all day. And then like, you go on a vacation to the beach and you sit on the beach and you put your feet in moving water.    He was like, it's literal living water. This living water moves and it heals and rejuvenates what happens to water that stagnant. It gets disgusting. Yeah.    It turns to mold, right? It actually goes toxic, but that moving water is healing. It's living.    It's rejuvenating. It's very biblical, right? And then you have the earth that God gave you is this battery pack.    There are people, this is going to sound crazy, but there are who have done LSD, like psychedelic drugs that talk about the vibrations of the earth. When they're on this drug, they are seeing the way. And they talk about there's a magnetic field.    They like, you can read, you can watch videos. You can see studies of people who did LSD, who literally can see the energy that the ground gives you. I mean, it's crazy, but isn't it like the Lord, right?    To give us what we need in nature, like magic.   Laura Dugger: (35:49 - 37:17) Yes. Where we're going back to the way that he designed, whether that's eating whole foods or getting outside in his beautiful nature. There's countless benefits, but I think it's just amazing that taking your shoes off and being on the earth, even for 30 seconds is beneficial.    When was the first time you listened to an episode of The Savvy Sauce?   How did you hear about our podcast? Did a friend share it with you? Will you be willing to be that friend now and text five other friends or post on your socials, anything about The Savvy Sauce that you love?    If you share your favorite episodes, that is how we continue to expand our reach and get the good news of Jesus Christ in more ears across the world. So, we need your help. Another way to help us grow is to leave a five-star review on Apple podcasts.    Each of these suggestions will cost you less than a minute, but it will be a great benefit to us. Thank you so much for being willing to be generous with your time and share. We appreciate you.    You had also talked about previously with your health journey, being deficient in minerals, I think you said as well, or just not getting the nutrients. So, are there any minerals that we all are likely lacking or any that you would recommend from your research and experience?   Laura Jean Bell: (37:18 - 39:36) Yeah, I would, I mean, every mineral. The most underrated mineral right now is potassium. The amount of women who are potassium deficient and need more potassium is unreal.    But magnesium is huge. You have to have magnesium for your body to even naturally produce vitamin D. Like vitamin D is a hormone, but you have to have magnesium for your body to produce vitamin D.    How many have gone to the doctor and they're like, you are very low in vitamin D, right? Well, get in the sunshine more, take the supplement, but like, where's your magnesium, right? And so, magnesium, potassium, potassium is huge, especially for your mental health.    This is really going to help you in like balancing out, like you're removing the brain fog, really. Sodium, which everyone's like, eat less sodium. You need less sodium chloride.    You need less table salt. You don't need less salt. Your body has salt.    Your body needs salt. Think about what your t-shirt looks like when you drenched in sweat. It dries and what does it have?    Salt. It's salty, right? When you're sweaty, it's salty.    And it's because your body actually needs sodium. It has to have it. And so, stop using white table salt, like iodized salt.    Go get some quality Celtic salt, like really simple, but put that in your water. Like first thing in the morning, drink some water with some Celtic salt, like get those electrolytes back in your system. So, potassium, magnesium, sodium, and calcium, like your body needs calcium and you can get calcium in multiple ways, um, multiple ways, but calcium is going to support your bones.    It's going to help support your muscles. Cause if you are working those muscles, your body needs the strength. And so, calcium is going to give you that balance as well.    It's fantastic. So, all of them, but like, I think the make sure you're getting magnesium, just like if you just need to start somewhere, just get a magnesium supplement. I recommend magnesium glycinate because it's kind of the overall magnesium.   Laura Dugger: (39:37 - 39:44) So, it's great. Okay. And you said you can get calcium multiple places.    Do you take that as a supplement or where do you get your calcium?   Laura Jean Bell: (39:45 - 41:04) So, I actually do adrenal cocktails. So, that is, um, coconut water, orange juice and Celtic salt. That's it.    And just do a little adrenal cocktail in the morning. And in the afternoon, make sure that you have had protein before you drink it, because if you're anything like me, it'll spike your blood sugar. Um, if you're not balanced, so, you need to be balanced.    Um, I've always been very sensitive to things like orange juice, apple juice. Like as a kid, I would feel really bad in the mornings and I just thought breakfast made my stomach hurt. And actually it was like, my blood sugar was dysregulated from the cup of orange juice and the cinnamon toast that my mom gave me.    Right. So, like, it's like butter, sugar, white flour, orange juice, like eat this for a nutrient dense breakfast. And I like would feel horrible after because my blood sugar was off.    So, um, make sure you get some protein on your stomach and drink the adrenal cocktail. Like my parents, my parents swear by it. My dad's like, this has changed my life.    I'm your mom's going to make me one of those little cocktail things that you tell, I tell her about all the time. It's hilarious. And I'm like, it's just juice and coconut water, but it's got the minerals.    That's why it makes you feel so good. It's because it's giving your body the nutrients that it needs.   Laura Dugger: (41:05 - 41:17) That's incredible. Are there any other biohacks, health hacks, even the role of light that it plays or movement or anything else that you want to recommend with your extensive research?   Laura Jean Bell: (41:18 - 43:19) Um, I'll give two things. Uh, number one: if you can get up as the sun is rising or a little bit before and actually go outside and stare at the red light. The actual, morning sunrise, and then watch the sunset. If you can get your eyeballs on just like the surroundings where that red light is hitting, that will do wonders for the production of melatonin in your gut.    It's going to help you sleep. It's going to help you sleep really good at night, which is going to help you with your progesterone levels. So, that is great.    Number two is weightlifting. If you can incorporate at least two days a week of heavy weightlifting into your routine, it's going to do wonders. And the reason I say that is that estrogen, toxic estrogen, not the estrogen that's good for you that you need to like make you female, but like the toxic estrogens you're getting from perfumes and food and plastics and all the things it stores itself in fat, in visceral fat.    And so, the best way to burn fat and build muscle is by lifting weights. And so, if you want to keep toxic estrogens out of your body, step number one, get rid of fat, like fight hard for like, I mean, I'm still postpartum. I'm still burning off like weight that I gained in pregnancy.    But the number one thing that motivates me is not like, I want to look better, which of course I want to look better. Of course I want to fit back into my clothes, like all of that. But like Laura toxic estrogens store themselves in this fat.    And so, what, when you are lifting weights, you are burning fat and building muscle to support your family and not be burdened by the imbalance of your hormones. Like right there. That is the reason why.    So, lift weights. It's so good for you. It protects you from so many other diseases, but like that alone, women do not understand the power of that.    It's going to do wonders for you.   Laura Dugger: (43:20 - 43:47) Okay. This is so helpful. And then I'm thinking it's beneficial to have a specific plan.    So, as we think about where you talked about laundry detergents or limiting toxins, will you share a few of your personal favorite products? And then also what are some recommended things we can actually eat? Like when you walk through a healthy breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack, what would you share?   Laura Jean Bell: (43:49 - 45:22) Okay. So, some favorite products. I started out using Thieves household concentrate.    Young Living sells it. And it's like $26 for a bottle of the concentrate. That concentrate can be household cleaner.    So, like it can clean any surface in your home. It can be used as dishwasher detergent. So, we use thieves instead of like pods in our, in our dishwasher.    And I'm here to tell you, I think Young Living just came out with dishwasher pods, like Thieves dishwasher pods. We don't use it. We still use the concentrate.    But we use that. You can use it in your laundry so you can wash your clothes in it. And so, we alternate with that.    Sometimes we use that. Sometimes we use Molly's Suds. Those are like little pods.    You can get them on Amazon. It's a non-toxic option. You can also wash your clothes and like baking soda and vinegar, like just be old school.    Your clothes won't smell like vinegar. Don't worry. Like the vinegar gets rid of the odor.    That's like how our grandparents did it. So, those are some really simple hacks. Just because that's inexpensive.    Like you can make 16, I think it's 16 bottles of household concentrate, like spray with the one bottle. So, like you buy the one bottle, it takes a cap full and then you fill the rest of the way up with water and it cleans anything. It's fantastic.    It smells great. You'll love it. What else did you ask me?   Laura Dugger: (45:22 - 45:28) Food? Yes, food. Like a sample menu. Okay.   Laura Jean Bell: (45:28 - 47:02) Something that I love to eat. I love to just really enjoy my food. Like if you're on the go, like I'll give it an example.    If you're on the go, I recommend like boil some eggs. Okay. Take like three boiled eggs.    Get like a chopstick to get your protein and like an RX bar. RX bars are going to have the carbs, but it's also going to have more protein. You'll get six grams of protein per egg and then about 10 grams in your chopstick.    So, it's like 18 grams of the eggs plus 10 is 28 grams plus the RX bar. You're going to get over 30 grams of protein and then you'll have some carbs. I do recommend getting a little bit more carbs, but if you're on the go and you're in a hurry and you need to feel balanced, that's a good start.    If you're home, like I love doing scrambled eggs and air frying sweet potatoes, peppers, and onions. It is delicious. Just trust me and season it with garlic powder and salt.    It's so simple. Some avocado oil and literally just allow, like think about all the carbs, all the protein, everything. The best hack though, that I learned with eggs is do two regular, like the full egg and then do two egg whites and then add cottage cheese to your eggs, blend it in a blender and then cook them and just thank me later.    So, you're getting extra protein, it's creamier, it's so good. And then eat that with sweet potatoes and peppers and it's primo.   Laura Dugger: (47:02 - 47:12) Okay. This sounds amazing. I love it.    And this is my post recording meal, the RX bar. I love it on busy days.   Laura Jean Bell: (47:13 - 48:27) Yes. For lunch, I mean lunch, I honestly, I keep like ground beef patties just ready. And my air fryer stays on. I literally use it for every meal.    Sometimes if I don't have it ready, I just pat it out, put it in the air fryer, it cooks. Do that with a bunch of veggies, get lots of fruit, mainly berries, like berries, apples, and just adding that in is your carb. You can do, if you need a snack, I highly recommend doing Greek yogurt and mixing in your favorite protein powder and mixing that up.    It's so good. The Greek yogurt gives you the carbs, the fats and protein, and then you add the extra protein in it. And so, it's excellent.    For dinner, our favorite meal, we eat a lot of grass-fed beef because we buy cow every year. So, we'll do bowls and we'll do like a bed of rice, sweet potatoes, peppers and onions, and then ground beef. And then we drizzle the Japanese barbecue sauce over it.    And we call it Japanese barbecue bowls. It's literally just like a bunch of vegetables and meat with sauce, but it's really good.    So, there's some meal ideas for you.   Laura Dugger: (48:28 - 48:49) That's incredible. Thank you for just rattling those off. We've got a plan now.    And I love how this conversation took a turn toward health. So, before we leave that section, any other healthy rhythms or best practices or ways you've simplified your life that you would recommend? Just sleep.   Laura Jean Bell: (48:49 - 49:34) I know that sounds ridiculous, but people aren't sleeping and go to bed without your phone. You're going to be okay. You really are.    If your kids can go to bed without their phones, without a phone in their face, you can do it too. It's not the best way to turn your brain off. So, go to bed.    When you lay in a dark room without any blue light, you actually are helping your nervous system reset itself. And it needs a moment to rest and digest. So, get in the bed without a blue light and close your eyes and go to sleep.    You can do it, but it's so simple. And try to get eight to 10 hours of sleep a night. Truly, it's so important.   Laura Dugger: (49:35 - 49:54) That's so good. And you're all about simplifying. You even help people simplify their digital marketing.    So, as we turn it back to business, I know you can't give away all of your secrets, but will you share just a few more business or social media tips with all of us?   Laura Jean Bell: (49:55 - 50:43) Oh, man. I think the number one thing that I would tell anyone who's wanting to do anything in the online space is don't spread yourself across every platform. It's not worth your time.    And the more you hone in on one thing, the more of that thing you will sell, like plain and simple. And you will make way more money. You will spend way less time working on it.    You will enhance the lives of the people that choose to work with you. That is what you will gain.    If you simplify your offers, number one, sell less. Just sell more of one thing and stop spreading yourself thin across all the platforms. It's just too much work.   Laura Dugger: (50:43 - 51:03) That's wise counsel. And will you also tell us, I mean, I'm amazed as I'm thinking of all this research that you've done. You're living a healthy lifestyle.    You're raising young children, consulting with others as their coach. Also, you wrote a book. Can you share a little bit about that?   Laura Jean Bell: (51:03 - 52:50) I wrote my book. I actually have it right next to me because I was like, if somebody is going to ask you what this book is about, it's a book of short stories. And it sounds really simple, but it's a book of short stories that really draws you back to who you are in the Lord and understanding your place, like your identity in Christ, your belonging, fighting against fear and really coming home to who God created you to be.    And so, this book is a compilation of short stories of my own life where these things were very disrupted. My identity, like a total identity crisis, like not just having so much fear, learning how to come back to who God made me to be, but really writing out the moments of when I was living in that season and the people that helped me kind of find my way out and the things that God really showed me in that journey. And so, have it right here.    You Can Always Come Home: Following the Breadcrumbs of Your Past to Find the Hope for Your Tomorrow. It's really what my heart was and I learned a lot when I left my hometown and I moved to small town, North Alabama. And although this is where my dad is from, this was not where I was raised.    And I walked into a total identity crisis when I moved here. And I write a lot about that and about the moments when I was living in that season. How the Lord would reveal to me, like, remember when this happened, or remember when this happened and how you handled it or what that person said to you. And I wrote those stories in here.    And so, the goal of this book is for anybody who reads it to know that God's on your side and everything's going to be okay.   Laura Dugger: (52:51 - 53:06) Thank you for sharing that, Laura. And we'll certainly add a link for that in the show notes for today's episode, but also what links can we give for your social media? And then if somebody wants to reach out and work with you, what would that process look like?   Laura Jean Bell: (53:07 - 53:47) Yeah, so, my Instagram is Laura_Jean_Bell and Jean is J-E-A-N. And if you want to work with me or reach out, you can email me at laurabellwrites@gmail.com, or you can literally go to my Instagram account and click the link in my bio where I explain what I do. And it offers an ability to hop on a call with me where we can talk together and see if we would be a good fit to work together.    So, those are the ways that you can contact me. I have a website, laurabell.co, and you can contact me through that as well.   Laura Dugger: (53:48 - 54:07) Wonderful. Thank you for adding that. We will make sure it's accessible for everyone.    And Laura, you may be familiar with why we're called The Savvy Sauce, which is because savvy is synonymous with practical knowledge. And so, my final question for you today, Laura, what is your Savvy Sauce?   Laura Jean Bell: (54:09 - 56:38) For life in general? You got it. Okay.    Well, I have two of them. And so, one of them is kind of silly and one of them is not. So, I'm going to go with the non-silly one.    Oh, share both. Yes. But I will say like this, there was this line that I heard, and I don't know who like trademarked this line, but it was very simple.    It said, “You are the CEO of your life.” And it was very simple, but it changed everything for me because for so much of my life, like if your knee jerk reaction to things not going your way is to blame someone else, you're not living as the CEO of your life. And I have spent a lot of my life, like when something doesn't go my way, I look for a person to blame instead of looking at myself and my own flaws. Being able to see that, “Hey, sometimes Laura, you're to blame and like, it's okay.”   You're the CEO of your life and you get to see what you did wrong, see how you messed up, see how you needed to shift something and then move on. And I think so many of us, whether we want to believe it or not, we can fall victim to that and live our lives so attached to this idea that somebody else is always to blame. Somebody else did this to me.    Sometimes things do happen to you that are not your fault. Sometimes you are a victim of horrible crimes and horrible things happening to you. But the question is, what are you going to do about it?    Who are you going to talk to about it? Are you going to go to the Lord and ask Him what it's actually supposed to look like for your life moving on from this place? Are you going to stay in a mindset that's small and traumatized, small and victimized?    Or are you going to say, “I'm the CEO of my life and I'm going to link arms with the Holy Spirit and keep moving forward.” And so, that was a huge thing for me to learn. And I feel like it's kind of been my savvy sauce in the last probably year, because 2024 was a year of a lot of things happening to me that weren't my fault.    And finally, one day I thought, you know, Laura, you can sulk in this, but it's not going to change your circumstance. What's going to change your circumstance is you saying, “I'm in charge of my life and I'm going to pick up the pieces of this and I'm going to ask God what to do with it.” And so, anyways, you're the CEO of your life and it's time to take charge of that.    So, yeah.   Laura Dugger: (56:38 - 56:42) I love it. And now you've got to share your silly one as well. You've left us curious.   Laura Jean Bell: (56:43 - 57:01) What is The Savvy Sauce? Let me just tell all of my, all of my geriatric millennials out there, you need to put castor oil on your face. Okay.    Just know that like castor oil, you need to look like a glazed donut when you go to bed and your skin is going to be, your skin will thank you. Just trust me.   Laura Dugger: (57:02 - 57:26) That's incredible. I was so grateful you shared. And Laura, I can see why clients are so drawn to work with you.    It is so delightful to have conversations with you. You are gifted in so many different arenas. And I think what really stands out is your generosity and just your willingness to share all of this with us.    So, thank you so much for being my delightful guest today.   Laura Jean Bell: (57:26 - 57:29) Oh, it's such a gift talking to you. Thank you for having me.   Laura Dugger: (57:30 - 1:01:12) One more thing before you go, have you heard the term gospel before? It simply means good news. And I want to share the best news with you, but it starts with the bad news.    Every single one of us were born sinners, but Christ desires to rescue us from our sin, which is something we cannot do for ourselves. This means there's absolutely no chance we can make it to heaven on our own. So, for you and for me, it means we deserve death and we can never pay back the sacrifice we owe to be saved.    We need a savior, but God loved us so much. He made a way for his only son to willingly die in our place as the perfect substitute. This gives us hope of life forever in right relationship with him.    That is good news. Jesus lived the perfect life. We could never live and died in our place for our sin.    This was God's plan to make a way to reconcile with us so that God can look at us and see Jesus. We can be covered and justified through the work Jesus finished. If we choose to receive what he has done for us, Romans 10:9 says, “that if you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”    So, you pray with me now. Heavenly father, thank you for sending Jesus to take our place. I pray someone today right now is touched and chooses to turn their life over to you.    Will you clearly guide them and help them take their next step in faith to declare you as Lord of their life? We trust you to work and change lives now for eternity. In Jesus name we pray.   Amen. If you prayed that prayer, you are declaring him for me. So, me for him, you get the opportunity to live your life for him.    And at this podcast, we're called The Savvy Sauce for a reason. We want to give you practical tools to implement the knowledge you have learned. So, you're ready to get started.    First, tell someone, say it out loud, get a Bible. The first day I made this decision, my parents took me to Barnes and Noble and let me choose my own Bible. I selected the Quest NIV Bible and I love it.    You can start by reading the book of John. Also get connected locally, which just means tell someone who's a part of a church in your community that you made a decision to follow Christ. I'm assuming they will be thrilled to talk with you about further steps such as going to church and getting connected to other believers to encourage you.    We want to celebrate with you too. So, feel free to leave a comment for us here. If you did make a decision to follow Christ, we also have show notes included where you can read scripture that describes this process.    And finally, be encouraged. Luke 15:10 says, “in the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” The heavens are praising with you for your decision today.    And if you've already received this good news, I pray you have someone to share it with. You are loved and I look forward to meeting you here next time.

SUBSCRIBE TO IMPOSSIBLE WAY OF LIFE ON PATREON TO ACCESS FULL EPISODEhttps://www.patreon.com/animpossiblewayoflifePlanes, trains, and a yacht? That's right we went full John Candy this week. James came in on a red-eye like a fugitive, while Johnny swanned in via yacht like a soft-rock Caligula. Whatever it took to make curtain call.We caught Tennis on their farewell gig, hearts cracked open, mascara bleeding and the cherry on the sundae, Real Estate stroll in to open the whole thing.So we hit record, stumbling through the crowd, talking to Bleeker and the gang, chasing nightcaps that turned into a full chicken dinner courtesy of a rider malfunction that could've killed a lesser band. Think Altamont, but with more poultry.Glorious. Gorgeous.And hey, support us on Patreon if you want an extra hit every week. Impossible Way of Life is built by musicians for musicians: the grind, the glory, and the deliciously unhinged mess that is making music.

New Free Feed episodes return Tuesday, September 9th! Until then, summer break continues with a look inside the Patreon Carriage House thanks to Yadvina. This week we're going back to July 2020 when we were all stuck inside during the pandemic. But we got through it with our QUIFF Film Festival Series. Here's a peek at what it was like! From 7/17/20: I mean, when you have a cliffhanger that's this dire, you have to dive right in! We waste no time dishing out our advice on what tools make masturbation a more fulfilling experience (a rechargeable wand and Toni Braxton go a long way, apparently). Then, after some reviews and a VERY interesting update from this week's Free Feed Twitter porn issue, we move on to #QUIFF! We had a fairly heavy festival a couple of weeks ago, so we're ingesting some lighter fare this week with STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN and RATATOUILLE. Montalbán's pecs! Shatner's pettiness! Garofalo's French accent! It's all here! When we say there are only a few tickets left to Ask Ronna Live in Boston, we mean it. Like, there are maybe 8 tickets left. If you want to join us on October 4th in Beantown, you better get on it NOW! askronnalive.com Sponsor: Ronna's Loro better get used to some company, because there's a new blanket in The Carriage House, and it comes from Lola Blankets. Get one of these GORGEOUS luxury blankets at lolablankets.com and use code RONNA at checkout for a massive 35% off your entire order! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

BEST OF KILBORN. Kyle Theige doesn't like Tuna Melts! But that's not the headline. It's all about our beloved Timberwolves and the upcoming draft and possible trades. Kyle and Kilby discuss Rudy, TJ, Rob and who might be the Wolves target in a trade. Plus, Kyle's Top 5 Movies of All-Time and The Life Gorgeous Quiz including sandwiches. Yay! These guys are fun. And don't forget to go to ⁠⁠https://OmahaSteaks.com⁠⁠ to enjoy their new Smash Burgers. And use Promo Code GORGEOUS at checkout for an extra $35 off. Minimum purchase may apply. See site for details. A big thanks to our advertiser, Omaha Steaks! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The first part of our collaboration with the brilliant Australian educator and broadcaster, Michael Murphy (recorded in July-August 2025) is the first episode of Michael's inspiring new podcast series “Dear Stardust”. Professor Phil Cummins was invited to write and read a letter to “Stardust”, sharing his hopes, dreams and concerns for the future. Phil then chats with Michael about the poem he wrote and the ideas, stories and personal history that sit behind it.

No rain this weekend, another dry Saturday too!

Family Reactions: Heartbreak and rejection draws Tim & Beth closer to each other.By neruval442. Listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories. We drove the few minutes to Beth's house, and Beth used her key in the door. "Hi, Mom, we're back."Her mother appeared from the kitchen. "Oh, hi, Tim."Beth glanced at me, then held out her hand to her mother. "Look, Mom, Tim and I got engaged."I watched, my anticipation suddenly turning sour in my stomach as her mother's face changed, her expression twisting. "Really? At your age?"She turned to me. "Don't think I don't know what you two have been doing up there, and I'm sure on this holiday of yours. I can tell when you wash the sheets, you know."Beth flinched as her mother continued. "Engaged, I don't think so. You've got her pregnant, haven't you, don't even know enough to be careful, and you think bringing her back here with some cheap trinket on her finger will make it right. Well, you can forget it."She turned back to Beth. "You can do what you like when you're out of this house, how are you going to get on at university with a brat, but while you're still here I don't want to see him."Beth's face was as white as it had been in the car, but she took a deep breath. "No. Nothing is like you've said. Tim's not like that, and, “ her face screwed up, tears forcing past her eyelids, "it hurts so much that that's what you think of me."She looked her mother straight in the eyes. "Either Tim's welcome here, or I'm not."Her mother's tone was uncompromising. "Go with him, then, I don't care."Beth was shaking as she turned to me. "Tim?""I'll work something out," I promised. "Do you need to fetch anything?"She shook her head. "I already have everything important."Beth turned back to her mother. "Call me if you change your mind. But you won't, will you, I know that from Grandad."Her mother's face showed unmasked rage. "You, he, “I took Beth's arm, and she turned her back on her mother, walking out of the front door. I pulled it closed, careful not to slam it, and guided Beth to the car, helping her with her seatbelt. I started the engine, driving just far enough to be out of sight of the house, and stopped the car.Beth came into my outstretched arms, sobbing uncontrollably, her tears soaking through my shirt. "I, oh god, Tim,”She broke down again, and I stroked her hair. Finally she looked up, face tear-streaked, eyes red. "Thanks for looking after me.""Let's get going," I encouraged her. A few minutes later I pulled up outside my parents' house, and Beth held my hand tightly as we walked up the path. Mom opened the door, looking at Beth with a concerned expression. "Are you two Okay?""I'll explain later, Mom," I offered. "But would you mind making up the spare room for Beth?""That's no problem."We went through to the kitchen, and Mom busied herself finding a pan, milk. "Whenever Tim had something bothering him, hot chocolate would always cheer him up a bit."She set steaming mugs in front of us and Beth sipped gratefully. "Where's Dad?" I queried."In the garden as usual, I'll get him."She returned with my father, and he sat down at the table without comment. Beth gave me an anxious look, then forced a smile. "Look, Tim and I got engaged while we were away.""Oh, that's wonderful," Mom exclaimed. "Let me look."She enthused over the ring, "I love the style, such a classic, “ while my father gave me an uncharacteristically warm hug. "Well done, no point in hanging about when you're sure."Beth seemed to relax. "I'm sorry to impose on you, it'll only be for a little while before Tim and I go away."My mother shook her head. "Whatever's happened, it'll be lovely to have you both until then."She turned to my father. "I'll make the bed up, can you make a start on dinner? I think these two would enjoy sausage toad, plenty of gravy.""I'll get our stuff from the car," I offered. "Then I can do the washing."The rest of the day was filled with mundane tasks like laundry and cooking, "Come and tell me what you think of the roses, Beth," Mom invited, and finally Beth suppressed a yawn. "Sorry,”"It's fine," Mom reassured. "Why don't you two go up? You don't have to get up for anything in the morning, do you, I'll make breakfast for you whenever you're ready."She glanced at me, and again at Beth's ring. "And if we happen to hear footsteps crossing the landing to the spare room, well, that's not really any of our business, is it," she smiled.House HuntingBeth was more herself the next morning, and I grinned at her as she pulled on her bunny rabbit flannel pajama pants and a t-shirt to go down for breakfast. "I think I smell bacon."Mom smiled as we sat down at the kitchen table, sliding heaped plates in front of us. "What do you think you might do today?"I glanced at Beth. "I think we have some things to talk about, don't we, love. Maybe we could sit in the summer house, on the back slope?""Of course," nodded Mom. "We'll leave you to it, you can come back across when you need anything."We made short work of our breakfast & went through the garden path, then over the slope, to the summer house.I pushed open the door, the sun spilling inside onto the old swing seat Dad had put there. "Oh, I love these," Beth enthused, sitting down and swinging her legs.I sat beside her, looking across at the tall hedge, mingled with climbing flowers, that hid this house from view. "So, where shall we start?"Beth took a deep breath. "Well, maybe we should think about what to do with Grandad's money. I know the wedding will cost a bit, but we should probably think of something more permanent first?"I silently blessed my sensible fiancée. "Exactly."I looked across at the house again. "There's one thing I thought of straight away. Instead of spending money on hall fees or rent that we'll never see again, why don't we just buy somewhere to live?"Beth's eyes widened. "You mean, “She leaned closer to me, pillowing her head on my shoulder. "That would be beyond amazing."She grinned. "Maybe we could even stretch to that hot tub."I picked up her iPad. "Why don't we take a look what sort of thing is available down there?"Beth chuckled. "Slow down a bit. What kind of place would you like? We might find we have quite different ideas."I mused. "If I could have anything at all, I've always imagined somewhere big, old but really well looked after, lots of rooms, high ceilings. Definitely an attic, I've always wanted a room with one of those windows that looks out over the roof."Beth blinked in surprise. "That's so weird. That's exactly the sort of house I always wished I lived in."She chuckled again. "Probably comes from reading so much Enid Blyton."I let her take the tablet from my fingers. "Right – real estate agents."She tapped in a search, scrolling down the list. "This one sounds posh, probably they have bigger houses, maybe out of town a little."She clicked on a link, and I leaned closer to look. "Hmm. That one's too modern. And this one with the stables, we weren't thinking of horses, were we."Suddenly Beth pointed at the next image, with a 'Just listed' logo. "Tim?"I read the description. "Large period house, own grounds. Recently refurbished in keeping with the original character." It's just a few minutes from town.Beth clicked through the photographs. "Look, there's the attic, and it has real chimneys, I love open fires."She scribbled in her notebook, and passed it over. "Tim, do you want to give them a call? I'd rather you did it."I pulled out my phone, taking a deep breath and tapping at the screen, dialing. The number rang twice, then I heard a pleasant female voice. "Farquarson's, how can I help?""Ah, my name's Tim Oakes," I did my best to keep my voice steady. "My fiancée and I have seen a property on your web site, “ I gave the reference number, "and we're very interested."I heard her riffle through papers. "Ah, yes. It's literally gone on the market this morning, we've not arranged any viewings yet."I flashed my eyebrows at Beth. "Could we see it?""Of course," I heard at the other end of the line. "It's vacant, sadly the previous owner passed away, so I could arrange to meet you today, perhaps five?""That would be wonderful.""Done, then." I heard a brief hesitation at the other end. "Have you already made your financial arrangements, may I ask?"I squeezed Beth's hand as I replied. "Actually this would be a cash purchase."A pause, then, "Of course, sir. That makes things much more straightforward if you decide to proceed. Til this afternoon, then."I ended the call, and I couldn't help my broad grin, which Beth echoed. "It might be the only time in our lives we ever get to say that," I chuckled, "but damn, that felt good."She nodded. "How long will it take us to get there, do you think?""Only a couple of hours on the new toll road," I reassured her."Lunch on the way? There's a really good truck stop on the toll road."An hour or so later we were in the car, Beth looking at the map. "It looks like the house has woods behind it," she said.We passed the toll plaza on the other side of the motorway, and I glanced at Beth. "The truck stop will be soon.""Goody, I'm definitely starting to feel like something to eat."I pulled off the motorway, and we walked hand in hand through the food court. "I fancy fried chicken for a change," Beth pointed.I ordered for us, then carried the tray over to a table. "Um," said Beth, picking up a chicken wing and nibbling. "I love this coating."She finished her piece and licked her fingers. "Put the straw in my milkshake for me?"I put the tall cup in front of her and she sipped, signaling her thanks with her eyebrows. "Mind you don't suck too quickly and get brain freeze," I teased her.We finished our lunch, and I waited while Beth went to the loo. "Okay?""Um Hmm."We set off again, picking our way through the motorway interchanges and onto the new road which struck out cross-country in an easterly direction. Beth looked up into the sky, shielding her eyes against the sun. "I think there are supposed to be kites on this bit."The road seemed to go on and on, but finally we started to see signs for the university town where we'd be spending at least the next three years. "It's the next exit," Beth indicated, and I slowed, pulling off onto the B-road. The countryside was much flatter here, and Beth pointed ahead. "That must be it, I can see the woods."A graveled drive left the road, leading to the front of the house. A shiny Mini was already parked, and a young woman got out as we drew up.She walked over to us, smiling. "Hi, I'm Sarah." She was not much older than either of us, with a beautiful face and long brunette hair past her shoulders."I'm Beth, and this is Tim," Beth introduced us."Shall we?" Sarah offered, taking out a set of keys and opening the front door. She let us go ahead of her into the wide tiled hallway, then stepped inside, closing the door behind us. "It's a late Georgian property originally," she began her obviously-prepared presentation, "but the last owner restored and refurbished it extensively, so there's nothing significant that needs doing in regard to the fabric or fittings."

Kilby welcomes back Randy and Jason Sklar. Comedians, sports fans, and dinner guests of Craiger's at Rao's Hollywood. The Big 3 discuss their dinner, stand-up gigs, which brother can drink more and somebody accidentally spit on a jogger. Plus, The Life Gorgeous Quiz. And Kilby used his laptop microphone instead of his powerful podcast mic. Why? Because he screwed up. But also, it lets his guests be in the power position. Self-deprecating Kilby. Yay! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lord Kilby reviews the Vikings first preseason game and really believes JJ McCarthy will be a better than solid pro. Kilby likes JJ's mobility and much more. He also thinks Jordan Mason is going to have a great season. Plus, some movie recommendations including Kilby's favorite Leo DiCaprio performance. They say you can't teach taste...Kilby disagrees. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, we cover two songs that bookend a love story in a surprisingly heartbreaking way: Gorgeous + Fortnight! FYI, we spend the first fifteen minutes or so talking about how Djo is coming to Rochester (!!!) and also the movie Pavements ... we promise we do stick to Taylor after that. We also have a special clip this week from the lovely Kay, host of The Swacket! We were lucky enough to be guests on her podcast a few weeks ago, and now she is returning the favor for us. Find The Swacket anywhere you stream podcasts, or give her a follow on Instagram @theswacket!PS: I cannot believe we got through this entire episode without talking about how Freakier Friday is currently in theaters, and also how in the OG Freaky Friday Lindsay Lohan's character notoriously says "YOU'RE RUINING MY LIFE-A!!" The girls that get it, get it. -Follow us on Instagram or TikTok @swiftlorepod for clips, polls, and other fun things. To join our ⁠Patreon⁠, subscribe at https://www.patreon.com/SwiftlorePodcast. Want to send us something? Here's our P.O. Box address!Swiftlore PodcastP.O Box 53Penfield, NY, 14526Until next time!

You saw a magazine cover. Gorgeous. Flawless. Totally fake. A magazine recently published what looked like a professional photo — until AI detection software flagged it as entirely AI-generated. No credit, no disclosure… just quietly passed off as real. And this isn't an isolated case. From GUESS running AI models in Vogue to massive brands using synthetic beauty to set impossible standards — it's time to ask: Should magazines be forced to tell us when it's fake? In this episode, I'm breaking down: The poll I ran (93% of you said AI should be disclosed) How photojournalism and ethics are being tested Will the FCC step in? What this means for perception, beauty, and trust Is this the future of media — or the death of authenticity? https://jamespatrick.com/ 

This week on the podcast, I'm joined by my friend and fellow practitioner Esther Blum;  integrative dietitian, best-selling author, and someone who knows what it actually takes to feel better in perimenopause.   We get real about all of it - from postpartum hormone shifts, to the mental weight of motherhood, navigating HRT, and why women are done with being dismissed.   Esther shares what helped her reclaim her energy and identity (hint: it wasn't just supplements or sleep hygiene), and we talk through the deep nervous system shifts that so many women don't even realize are affecting their hormones.   Here's a peek at what we get into: How postpartum depletion can carry into your 40s The shame women feel around burnout and needing help How libido, confidence, and self-trust are all connected The difference between “doing all the right things” vs. actually feeling better Why midlife women need to be informed about perimenopause and HRT   Esther Blum: Esther Blum is a Menopause Dietitian and Keynote Speaker. In the past 27+ years she has helped thousands of women master menopause through nutrition, hormones and self-advocacy. Esther is the bestselling author of See ya later, Ovulator, Cavewomen Don't Get Fat, Eat, Drink and Be Gorgeous, Secrets of Gorgeous, and The Eat, Drink, and Be Gorgeous Project. Known as Gwyneth Paltrow's menopause mentor, Esther has appeared on the Today Show, ABC-TV, and Good Day NY and is frequently quoted in Forbes, goop, Well + Good, Ben Greenfield Life, Time Magazine, and The New York Post. Esther received a Bachelor of Science in Clinical Nutrition from Simmons College in Boston and is a graduate of New York University, where she received her Master of Science in Clinical Nutrition. Esther is credentialed as a registered dietitian, a certified dietitian-nutritionist and a Certified Nutrition Specialist (CNS), the certification from the Board for Certification of Nutrition Specialists (BCNS). Esther lives in CT with her family where she can be seen fixing a mocktail, taking long walks, and singing karaoke by the fire pit. Instagram: @gorgeousesther Website: https://estherblum.com/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/estherblum The Midlife Realignment™ Podcast: https://estherblum.com/podcast/ Make Menopause Your Bitch: https://makemenopauseyourbitch.com/ Macro Reset: https://makemenopauseyourbitch.com/join Watch on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/C4bXjGzux9U Mentioned in this episode: EQUIP PRIME PROTEIN – Click HERE to grab yours and use my code: TARA to get 15% off. When you sign up for a subscription via my link, you'll save 30% on the first month & 15% on any subsequent months! HERBATONIN - Click HERE to visit the shop. Save 10% when you use Tara's code: Tara10 PIQUE TEA – These are some of Tara's favourite teas! They're crystal form, which makes them super unique and easy to transport in your purse, (they come in single use satchels!) and higher in polyphenols. They're made from high quality ingredients with triple toxin screening, (super important when it comes to your tea). Click HERE to visit the shop. HRT Made Simple™ - Learn how to confidently speak to your doctor about the benefits of hormone replacement therapy so you can set yourself up for symptom-free, unmedicated years to come without feeling confused, dismissed, or leaving the medical office minus your HRT script. Hair Loss Solutions Made Simple™ – This course will teach you the best natural, highly effective, and safe solutions for your hair loss so you can stop it, reverse it, and regrow healthy hair without turning to medications. The Perimenopause Solution™ – My signature 6-month comprehensive hormonal health program for women in midlife who want to get solid answers to their hormonal health issues once and for all so they can kick the weight gain, moodiness, gut problems, skin issues, period problems, fatigue, overwhelm, insomnia, hair/eyebrow loss, and other symptoms in order to get back to the woman they once were. [FREE] The Ultimate Midlife Perimenopause Handbook - Grab my free guide and RECLAIM your confidence, your mood, your waistline and energy without turning to medications or restrictive diets (or spending a fortune on testing you don't need!).   [BOOK A 30-MINUTE SESSION WITH TARA HERE]

Alison Martino is back! Alison is the creative force behind one of the best Instagrams out there - Vintage Los Angeles. Alison and Kilby talk about their recent dinner at the legendary Dan Tana's and the history of the restaurant. And Alison tells a fascinating story, how her dad, singer Al Martino, somehow lost the song 'Strangers in the Night' to Frank Sinatra. Al Martino apparently had the song first and did a scratch track before the lyrics were written and where Al ad-libbed "doo-be-doo-be-doo." Hmmm...did Frank pull a fast one? Plus, LA Restaurant talk for your next visit to the City of Angels. Let's Go! And don't forget to go to ⁠⁠⁠https://OmahaSteaks.com⁠⁠⁠ to enjoy their new Smash Burgers. And use Promo Code GORGEOUS at checkout for an extra $35 off. Minimum purchase may apply. See site for details. A big thanks to our advertiser, Omaha Steaks! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join me, Danielle Ireland, on this week's episode of Don't Cut Your Own Bangs as I chat with Jeanine Bobenmoyer, the founder of City Moms. Jeanine shares her journey from feeling isolated in a new city to building a thriving community for moms that is expanding nationwide. We dive into the power of community building, the importance of saying 'no,' and how City Moms grew from a local network to a national movement. This conversation is filled with heartfelt moments, laughter, and invaluable lessons on self-trust and service to others. Tune in to learn how Jeanine's mission evolved and how you can connect with this incredible community of supportive moms. Don't miss Jeanine's own 'Don't Cut Your Own Bangs' moment—it's a story of transformation you won't want to miss!   00:00 Introduction and Guest Overview 01:11 Jeanine's Background and City Moms Origin 02:46 Early Challenges and Community Building 04:39 Meeting Sarah and Business Growth 10:32 Drew Barrymore Show and Indianapolis Love 13:54 Content Strategy and Community Engagement 20:59 COVID Impact and National Expansion 23:05 Expanding the City Moms Community 24:17 Building a Female-Led Team 26:15 Listening to City Moms 28:50 Storytelling Over Sales 36:02 Launching a New Membership Experience 38:32 A Personal Story of Change 50:11 Conclusion and Final Thoughts   RATE, REVIEW, SUBSCRIBE TO “DON'T CUT YOUR OWN BANGS”  Like your favorite recipe or song, the best things in life are shared. When you rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast, your engagement helps me connect  with other listeners just like you. Plus, subscriptions just make life easier for everybody. It's one less thing for you to think about and you can easily keep up to date on everything that's new. So, please rate, review, and subscribe today.    DANIELLE IRELAND, LCSW I greatly appreciate your support and engagement as part of the Don't Cut Your Own Bangs community. Feel free to reach out with questions, comments, or anything you'd like to share. You can connect with me at any of the links below.   Connect with Jeanine: Website: www.thecitymoms.org Join our membership waitlist: https://thecitymoms.org/join-waitlist  Instagram:@thecitymoms TikTok: @thecitymoms Pinterest: @thecitymoms  Connect with Danielle: Watch the show on YouTube Instagram The Treasured Journal Wrestling a Walrus Transcript [00:00:00] [00:00:08] Hello. Hello, this is Danielle Ireland and you are catching an episode of Don't Cut Your Own Bangs. [00:00:13] And today I have the opportunity to sit down with city moms founder, janine Bobmeyer. Janine is a mom of teens, a yoga addict, a Michigan native, and an avid reader. Her dream vacation includes hiking in national parks with her family and a cup of hot chai. And do we get into the tea in this episode? [00:00:34] But RT is super heartfelt, heart led, and based on community building and vulnerability. If that's the stuff that you're into, then oh, you are gonna love this conversation. Of all the things I took from this episode, what Janine embodies and what you are able to learn from as well is what it means to trust yourself, and that in the process of honoring yourself, giving a wholehearted loving no or saying yes to adventure, it is leading you to something that is not only in service of you. [00:01:09] But in service of others. Janine has founded a community city moms and started as a local community that she built based on her own need in Indianapolis. But it has grown and it is popping up in cities all over the country. We get into the early days and please stay tuned if there was ever a, don't cut your own bang moment to really not wanna miss. [00:01:31] This is a good one. It actually, it bookends the episode perfectly because we start by talking about her business and the community and company that she started, but we understand the why, the deep, profound, heartfelt, why that inspired it all. What I believe to be true that when we act in service of ourself it ultimately rises everybody up with you. [00:01:56] Everything we have leaving up to it is also just equally beautiful, sweet, funny, and endearing. [00:02:03] Thank you for being here. Thank you, Janine, for this beautiful conversation. And I can't wait for you to sit back, relax, or put in your AirPods and go for a walk however you like to listen and enjoy. ​ [00:02:18] Danielle: Janine Bobmeyer. It's such a pleasure to have you on the Don't Cut Your Own Banks podcast. You are the chief executive officer and co-founder of City Moms, and it is the largest growing lifestyle brand in the Midwest. [00:02:31] So I am just so honored to spend some time with you and share all of what you do and what you offer women and mothers in the Midwest, to the Don't Cut Your own Bangs. Listeners, thank you for being here. [00:02:43] Jeanine: Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here. [00:02:46] Danielle: Yeah, so fun fact on how we connected, if I'm remembering this correctly, a couple of years ago, city moms reached out to me to feature Don't cut your own bank podcast in, one of your, articles or newsletters just featuring local podcasts in Indie. [00:03:03] And that was so lovely. That was at a time where I was just starting and didn't know who was listening. It was such a, it was so validating and a real confidence boost for me. So I first wanna just say thank you. [00:03:14] Jeanine: Oh my gosh, I'm so glad I remember that article. We were. [00:03:18] Pulling, I think it was the top 10 podcasts you should be listening to in Indianapolis. Specifically founded by females. And you were one of the first that came to mind, because I know you were just launching at the time. You were like, well, hello. Of course you need to be listed on this. [00:03:32] Danielle: When you're just getting something off the ground, there is such a. There's so much space between where you are, right, where you imagine yourself to be or where you wanna be. [00:03:43] And whatever you can do to just keep getting one foot in front of the other, or even getting started takes so much energy and it's vulnerable. And so you and your best friend and business partner Sarah Hawker, are sitting on top of this really beautiful community that you have built. I think community building is just a magic skill. [00:04:06] And so I wanna go back to the early days of City Moms. You have some language on your site that I love. You need a village. We have it. Yeah, I was thinking that we don't need super women. We need supported women. Right. [00:04:20] I've also learned that what we offer others usually starts with the healing we need it. And so you're a mom of teens now? Yeah. So can you tell me a little bit about like the origin of city moms and how you went from I'm imagining having a good idea with your girlfriend to sitting where you're sitting today, being featured on the Drew Barrymore show. [00:04:39] Jeanine: Yeah, I was new to Indianapolis in 2011, so we had moved to the city from Detroit. I'm originally from Michigan, but my husband's from Indy. And in moving here to be closer to his family, I didn't know anybody. And you know, my husband wonderfully, having grown up here, has a lot of friends that are still here, but he's like, let's go out with Davis and let's have, lunch with Johnson. [00:05:02] I was like, I don't wanna do any of that, like . I'm a mom and at the time I had a 1-year-old and a 4-year-old. So you're just trying to keep, your life together in those moments of motherhood anyway. So to be in a new city, and just not know One Soul was really, I mean, just adds more challenges on top of what you're already facing. [00:05:20] Danielle: Mm-hmm. [00:05:20] Jeanine: So we had been here and just before I moved, a friend of mine in Detroit said, have you checked out Meetup? And I was like, no, what is this? And so she's telling me about Meetup and you can go on, you can kind of filter based on your interests and find a local community. And so I did and I found a couple moms groups that were in the Indianapolis area. [00:05:43] I found that, most of the majority of moms communities that we find really across the nation, even today, are tied to one of two things. It's churches [00:05:51] Danielle: or it's schools. [00:05:52] And we [00:05:52] Jeanine: didn't have either. I decided that that was the moment to potentially launch, my own community. [00:05:58] One that was just open to all moms across Indianapolis, that didn't have those specific kind of school or church affiliation, and we had a hundred members sign up on the first day. [00:06:09] Danielle: Whoa. I I have to pause for just a moment. Yeah. So you were seeking to meet your own need. Yes. And I find that so interesting that's really telling about you. [00:06:20] Just as a person and how you move through the world is you saw a gap for your own experience and then immediately connected it to what? Like, how do I expand this beyond me? Yes. As opposed to like, how do I find my community? How do I find my people? You're like, oh, there aren't people or communities, so I'm gonna build one. [00:06:40] That's really interesting. [00:06:42] Jeanine: Yeah. And for me it was because, I desperately needed community. I desperately was seeking that out. I had never been, shy to creating that myself in prior iterations. I was coming out of the advertising industry in Detroit and even in this really large advertising agency, had found my little corner of people. [00:07:04] At the time, had founded a tiny, I forget exactly what we called ourselves, but we were almost like our cheerleading community of the agency itself, where we started to put on little events for this large agency. And it started just because, we saw that at the workplace, it was just constant go, go, go. [00:07:21] In advertising. And there wasn't that pause to connect with, you know, your your desk mate or a team member. And so that for me, is just something that I've always loved doing. [00:07:31] But in coming to Indianapolis recognized, I also needed a community here and without kids in school, without having a church home, without even having, a neighborhood that I was close to. Just that gap existed and I realized it was something I needed to fill. [00:07:48] Danielle: Yeah. And not only did you, it sounds like fill that for yourself, but then you met a need that many other women in the community had too. Now, how did this, so was Sarah somebody that came with you from Michigan? Did you meet her here? How did that connection happen? [00:08:04] Jeanine: Yeah, so Sarah, my business partner and one of my dearest dearest, I actually met her. [00:08:08] We've known each other seven years now. [00:08:10] Danielle: Hmm. [00:08:10] Jeanine: The city moms community. And membership was running for years. [00:08:15] Danielle: Oh. [00:08:15] Jeanine: I was introduced to her, through a mutual friend. It was such a funny experience because we were at this mutual friend's house for a dinner, and immediately upon meeting her I was like, well, this is someone I obviously need to know forever. [00:08:30] She just has one of the most dynamic personalities. She's so engaging. She just pulls you right in. And she asked me a question about, a dress I was wearing. It was from anthropology. And she was like, oh yeah, I have that dress. I think I have that in black. And you're, you wearing it in like a green. [00:08:45] And I was like, boy. Yes. [00:08:47] Danielle: Yes. It's like that scene in stepbrothers, it's like 1, 2, 3 anthropology. [00:08:51] Jeanine: Yes. Exactly. [00:08:52] Danielle: Exactly. And I [00:08:53] Jeanine: was like, oh, well, we're obviously besties. Yeah. Yeah. At the time, she was in the process of, quitting her nursing job. [00:09:02] Danielle: She said, [00:09:02] Jeanine: yes, I'm really, I think my last day is going to be August 31st, and that happens to be my son's birthday. [00:09:09] And she said, I'm just, I've been working so hard, I making this change. I'm going to start my own company. And I just, I've needed this push for a long time. And I said, I am going to text or call you on August 31st and find out how it's going. And she was like, are you really? [00:09:27] And so there we are two months later. I texted her and I said, how's it going? Did you start your own company? Are you making this next move? And she was like, yes. And this is amazing that you remembered. And we just have been close ever since. So she's one of my absolute favorite people, and as the city moms has evolved, so has her role. [00:09:47] First as a member, then she was a member of our content team, which I'm sure we'll chat about here a little bit. And now she's, my business partner. [00:09:55] Danielle: Wow. That's so beautiful. I find that, women who work together, play together, raise kids alongside each other, it's like in the way that women can change hats in life. [00:10:08] They can do that within relationships. I've just seen really well, is it, I think that there's that old paradigm of which I've never really bought into, which is, check your feelings at the door or leave work at the door. It's like we're all one person. The day where we have all these different parts and that's so beautiful. [00:10:26] How. That sounds like this friendship has grown as well as the business growth. [00:10:30] Jeanine: Yes. [00:10:31] Absolutely. And, you've hinted at the Drew Barrymore Show which was an opportunity that came out in COVID complete surprise. [00:10:40] Danielle: Yeah. [00:10:40] Jeanine: To receive an email from the producers in set by, actually this was like end of July, 2021. [00:10:46] And they said, with COVID having really tampered down, a lot of the programming we're able to do for this show, we're not allowed to travel as much. We are launching a new kind of mini segment inside the show itself. We would love to chat with you about the one that we would like to do in Indianapolis. [00:11:02] We noticed that you're based there. Would you have any interest? And of course, Sarah was my first phone call because [00:11:08] I just like, ah, I need someone to scream with for a moment. Yeah. And because we had no idea or context what the segment specifically was about. And so I called and scream with her and then, immediately called the producers. [00:11:19] And they said, well, what we're looking to do is have two best friends in the city showcase the city together. And what makes your city unique? [00:11:28] Danielle: I mean, who better to do it? [00:11:30] Jeanine: And we were like, Indianapolis is such a incredible city and community to begin with. In just the 14 years that we've been here to see the growth that this area has had. [00:11:40] Just all of the changes downtown, all of these incredible like national events that they bring in, like this weekend being WNBA All Star Weekend. [00:11:49] The city has just shown up for this. They've had the final four. They've had US Olympics pre swim trials. This city knows how to put on, a really incredible display on a national level. [00:12:01] Danielle: Do you know, what you're making me think about is, so in the work I do in therapy, particularly when I'm working, with someone on their relationship, that the longer you've been with someone, or, and you could even, insert really any topic, a job, a place you live in this case, a relationship, it's easy to take for granted what you think. [00:12:23] About them and you lose access to maybe the curiosity and the wonder that allows you to continue to discover. I have lived in Indianapolis my entire life. You mentioned living here 14 years, but when I was preparing for this interview and seeing all the places that you're highlighting, there are places I have never been, and I've been here my whole entire life. [00:12:44] Just because I think I know, like this is where I live. Of course, I know there is so much that I don't know and we're talking about community and we're obviously highlighting City moms, but I think that there are takeaways that can be applied to so many walks of life, which is just when you think you know something, for sure. [00:13:02] Allow yourself a little bit more space. There's this little bit room for a little bit more wonder and curiosity. [00:13:09] Jeanine: Yeah, absolutely. I think that takes it back even to the origin of the city moms, in a big piece of that mission was I wanted to get out and explore this new city and community that we were in. [00:13:21] Just didn't have the roots quite yet to do that. And I wanted to do it alongside people [00:13:25] as opposed to on my own. And, we're talking about all these big events that the city puts on. But the other beautiful thing is that the real fabric of the city lives in its people and those that are here, we see so many that are coming in from other communities. [00:13:41] We see a lot like you that have lived here for forever. But there's such an incredible mix of people in this city that really make it as special as it is. And I love that. [00:13:51] Danielle: Thank you that's such a great response. And your love for the city is so felt. And I, I'm curious about when you're in your content, which by the way, for any, everyone listening, everything is linked in the show notes, all the social media platforms, city moms, where you can join the wait list for their membership program. [00:14:09] All of that is accessible to you in the show notes. So press pause, sign up, follow all the things and then come back. 'Cause the other thing I love about your content is you layer in a lot of humor and, even though it's not maybe spoken this way, there's this quality of, yeah, girl, I've been like, this is messy. [00:14:28] And I'm also wiping up my own mess. I also have coffee stains. I also have food in my teeth. Can we just laugh at the ridiculousness of how hard this is sometimes? And I'm curious about how intentional is it? [00:14:39] Are there like pillars that you try to hit when you put content out? Like it must hit these notes and if so, I wanna know what they are. [00:14:47] Jeanine: Yeah, we really do because I think you're absolutely right for us. And I'll just share a little bit behind the scenes for the city moms, in terms of the tone and voice that we are always after in virtually every piece of our content. [00:14:59] I think this also comes out of my marketing and advertising background, but, the voice and the tone in the brand that we are always aspiring to be. Is your best friend growing up and your best friend growing up was the person you confided everything to Similar to me, screaming at Sarah about Drew Barrymore. [00:15:18] This is the pers there's your first call, that's your first call, your first text. But your best friend's sister, her older sister growing up was the coolest girl that you ever met. She was the girl that had the full pull out posters on her wall. She had the Dr. Pepper lip smackers, she was watching the Hills, and she was the girl that you're like, I wanna be her when I grow up. [00:15:40] She's the person that is just a few steps ahead from where you are , in your current life. [00:15:45] Danielle: Yeah. [00:15:45] Jeanine: stage. And you are constantly keeping an eye on her. That voice, that older sister is the one that we always aspire our city moms brand to be. Because we have been there, we have sat in those shoes. We have experienced a lot of the mess. [00:16:00] But that doesn't mean that we are completely. Removed and away from it. It means that we are just a couple days ahead of where our city mom might be and all of our content will always ladder into that voice to say, yeah, we know it sucks 'cause we've been there. [00:16:17] For us, I think what's so critical when we're selecting what content we wanna put out, so the humor that you see in a lot of our Instagram content . Is something that really is a great way to be super relatable and just, share a lot of those similar moments. The one we posted yesterday, [00:16:33] but, in case anyone wants to go back, either the reel that we posted yesterday is from a creator named Sam, and she's sitting on her bed thinking and speaking aloud saying, why did I say that I was so busy before I had kids? What was I even doing before I was a mom? And I think all of us in motherhood and truly in adulthood [00:16:55] Danielle: mm-hmm. [00:16:56] Jeanine: Have had that moment where even like, what did I do with my time? Like, what on earth was I filling my hours with? [00:17:02] That to be able to have kind of those humorous moments, I think is really critical to making sure that we're connecting with our City mom followers and, prospective, members too. [00:17:14] Danielle: That type of humor makes you feel seen. Yes. It helps you feel seen. And I think some, especially someone who like will grab the shovel and help dig into like the pits of experience with clients, some having the levity. If there was ever a myth I wish I could bust about therapy and community, whether it's group or a community like city moms or any extension when you find that type of connection, yes, you can have like with a best friend or a best friend's older sister, you can have those moments where it may be a tear or two are shed, but when somebody sees you. [00:17:51] There's laughter that happens in every therapy session that either I've participated in my own therapy or have led somebody else through. There is something about the truth, especially the truth that you try so hard to avoid or that this is the one thing I just need to keep tucked in my drawer and never let anybody see. [00:18:07] But then you see somebody else has it and you're like, oh, , you have that dress too. Oh my God. Yes, [00:18:13] Jeanine: yes, yes. Absolutely. And I think too, what's, really critical in doing that is just knowing that you are not living a path that is completely unpaved. [00:18:25] It is so hard in. Those moments when you've had two hours of sleep. It's so hard in those moments when you're like, are we ever gonna get past this phase? But I think what brings so much comfort along the way is knowing that there are other women that have done that. [00:18:38] And for us, that's why it's so critical to have a community that is supportive of each other and really allows you to be in those vulnerable moments with others. [00:18:48] Danielle: What do you think attracts people to you and to your organization? [00:18:51] Because like anything that you're highlighting could also be Googled. Yeah. But there's a way that you offer it and there's a way that you present it that is, it simplifies. It's reliable. There's like this bubbly, sparkling champagne effervescence to it. It just makes it a little shinier. [00:19:09] Jeanine: That's such a good question. I don't, there's some days when I'm like, I have no idea. You're like, we've been doing this for so many years, what are we doing? I really think it's because, and to use your phrase, feeling seen. [00:19:20] And feeling seen and being a part of an club that is all, inclusive and allows everyone to be a part of it. Even in some of our content where we're sharing events that we might have put on for just our membership, so not even just our social media, following our, editorial readers, the people that see us and broadcast and tv, but we do have this community of members as well. [00:19:42] So when we put on these membership events, that are a little more exclusive, we love to share those out with the phrase, steal this idea, because then it becomes less, this is only available to these specific women or these specific members and make it a, this can be your idea too. So steal this idea. [00:20:02] We ordered pizza and we set up a really fun style party, or picnic set up in a park and we didn't invite kids. It was just moms and we gabbed for the entire evening and we had a blast. Yeah, and you should steal this idea too, because it doesn't need to just be ours. [00:20:19] Danielle: I can feel now how that falls. [00:20:20] So in line with your idea of, we wanna be your best friend's, big sister, because that's what they would do. Listen, just take the shirt. You can keep it. It doesn't fit me anymore. I love that. Not only is it generous, but it speaks to, I think with time and experience you realize, oh, there's always gonna be more for me. [00:20:36] So why gate keep it like there's always gonna be more. So you just have some of this. You can share some of this magic. That's so beautiful. Has your mission changed? Since you first started, has it grown or is it kind of the same? [00:20:48] Jeanine: It's evolved. I mean, initially the mission and the focus was always just to create this membership community. [00:20:55] And that would be it. And we just had this, community of women here in Indianapolis. The change happened and evolved in COVID because as everyone knows, COVID forced so many of us home. That ability to connect in person no longer existed. In COVID, we held for our membership a daily call at four o'clock on Zoom that allowed our members to just get on and just have people. [00:21:20] We had moms that were like, I've been in my backyard all day. We had moms that were like, I cannot play with Play-Doh anymore. I just need to have an adult to talk to. It started. With the realization that we couldn't be together in person any longer and we needed to make a shift. [00:21:37] And in making that shift, what we found was that our brand exploded nationally. So it went from we are moms in Indianapolis, to, we are moms that everyone across the nation can now connect with because we are all living the same life together. And it never slowed down. So when we look at the breakout of our following in our audience right now, about 30% of that is in the Midwest and very quickly growing. [00:22:03] But the other pockets are New York. Texas, California. And, it just is such an incredible realization that, what started as this very local idea became a steal. This idea, let's all do this. [00:22:17] And on a much bigger scale. So, now we have this wonderful platform. Our number one driver is certainly Instagram because that's where we, I mean, as almost all women in our age group. [00:22:30] Yeah. We live, we love it. Yeah. So Instagram's kind of our number one. A channel, I would say our second is, broadcast tv. [00:22:38] Danielle: Mm-hmm. [00:22:39] Jeanine: So in COVID, a lot of broadcast stations around the country, also had to shift to a Zoom model and Yep. Desperately needed content. and started reaching out to us because we provided a lot of lifestyle content. [00:22:51] The here tips for keeping your kids, safe in the new COVID world. Here are tips for planning kids being at home during back to school. And it, we grew from that and we are now in nine different TV broadcast markets around the Midwest. [00:23:04] Danielle: Wow. [00:23:05] Jeanine: In addition to segments we do across the country. [00:23:07] Danielle: Those segments. I mean, not only are they, fun to look at, but they also provide great information. So when everybody listening goes to city moms.org, you'll be able to see all the media outlets that they've been on. [00:23:19] All those clips are saved there. It's like in this beautiful little library bank that you can watch. So it sounds like it's changed, it's grown rapidly. Beyond, or I would say even within the container of the community that you've created in Indianapolis, there's also a growing community for the business itself. [00:23:35] There's many direct reports and people who are working within the city moms organization, and also supporting in other ways. So I'm curious, just from a business owner standpoint, how has that, 'cause that, as your community expanded, it's also like the call's coming from within the house, there's growth happening inside too. [00:23:53] What has that been like? [00:23:55] Jeanine: It's been incredible. , Because again, we really thought that, in initially creating this community, we were going to live as a micro kind of nano events community would probably be the best way to put it. Or we put on events for our members and we would just keep putting on events for members. [00:24:09] And we had our social channels to share out some of that information. But I thought for a long time that it was just gonna be isolated in this teeny circle. And now, we have a extremely popular blog. We have a digital editor, an entire writing staff that works under her. We have a completely female, based staff. [00:24:28] Every member on our team is female. We've got this digital editor writing staff under her. We have a content team separate from the writing staff. They are the ones that go out and gather a lot of the content that we put across social and broadcast. We have project management team for all of our brand sponsorships that we work on. [00:24:47] Our newest hire is a Pinterest expert, which has been so fun. Pinterest is one of those sleeper cells that, not a lot of emphasis gets put on for lifestyle media brands, and we've decided to invest a person in that. She does a wonderful job at getting our editorial and our broadcast out in Pinterest. [00:25:06] And then, there's Sarah and I who provide leadership Sarah has been a co-partner now for, four months, or we're going into our fourth months together. So we're still figuring out those little funnels right now. We're just having fun, overlapping, and living everything together. [00:25:21] And where she was that first call, I made for the Drew Barrymore show, she's now my first call literally for everything. We've got this big event coming up on Saturday. We need to figure out, the backdrop we're gonna have behind that. [00:25:31] She called me yesterday and I said, Hey, work wife, because that's, we've definitely become for each other in addition to Best Friends. [00:25:38] Danielle: Yeah. Is it an instinct? Is it research? Is it a combination thereof of how you stay connected with what moms really need? Yeah. Is because , I'm a mom of littles. I have a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old and almost 2-year-old. He'll be two later in August. And I, I know my experience, but you seem to have a really strong sense based on the way people are really connected to this community, of staying connected with what mothers specifically really need. And I'm curious how you stay current with that, or is it more that the needs really haven't changed? [00:26:15] Jeanine: No, I think that, for us, because we have such a large staff, [00:26:20] and for the most part, the majority of those women are mothers. [00:26:24] Danielle: Yeah. [00:26:24] Jeanine: All of us are living a different little phase of motherhood. [00:26:28] I have teens, Sarah has 12, 10, and eight. Our photographer Brittany has four and two just like you. So everyone is living in a different stage and I think not only do we have each other from our team perspective but because we have our membership community who is most certainly living all of this. [00:26:47] We are able to lean on their experiences in addition to our own. [00:26:52] And then, one of the biggest things that I really implore our team to do is listen and constantly listen about what city mom and we call our avatar is city mom. And, regardless, again, if she's a member or if she's a follower of our brand and another channel, we call her city mom. So I'm always pushing to listen to city mom, listen to where city mom is right now, what things are the hurdles in her life, what she's up against. [00:27:19] And listening is the most important thing because the last thing that I wanna do in managing and running a brand and spearheading a brand is to not listen and just assume. I think when I also talk about voice, one of the biggest things that, we've talked about as a team as well, is I'm hearing a lot of we [00:27:39] and I'm not hearing enough of you. And by that I mean. We can't come out and say, we know that you're so tired. We know that you're doing all of these things and say, you're telling us that you're tired. You're telling us that you need some space or you need some tips on this. And by making that switch in kind of that voice that helps city mom understand that we are listening, [00:28:02] Danielle: Ooh. [00:28:03] That is a, that's a really powerful language shift. And it's amazing how adjusting a word from a we to a u can really make something washed and vague to very specific and like straight to the heart. I think that there's something too. The language of clarifying what is a really a we what is a you and it speaks straight to the heart of what I think we want, which is to be seen. [00:28:30] There's something about your community that doesn't beat you over the head with messaging. That's one thing that I was really impressed with , is that you get the sense of the essence of what you're saying, but there's not like a slogan. But the sense of the community is so clear. [00:28:47] Jeanine: Yeah. [00:28:47] Danielle: Which I find really beautiful. [00:28:49] Jeanine: I appreciate that. I think, one of the things that we've forever wrestled with was, is really that idea of sales. [00:28:56] I am, I and my team has heard me say this a number of times. I've always been a bigger fan of storytelling over sales and, storytelling kind of an experience as opposed to, you should buy in today. Deadline is this day, you gotta get in now, join here. This is the link. Because we get sold on almost everything across our lives. [00:29:18] And it's, something as little as, the gym to making a donation to a school, your kid's school to just, everything else you can think of under the sun. To me, it's important to continue promoting the essence of a community that you belong to as opposed to an idea that you need to buy into with dollars. [00:29:37] And, that's one of the reasons that we transformed the city moms into a completely free membership. [00:29:43] That also came out of COVID and hearing a lot of city moms say, I have to make some concessions right now. We had to shut off Netflix. We're not doing our Netflix subscription anymore because we're just so worried about budget. [00:29:56] And, that 9 99 a month that we were initially charging for membership, I was like, no. Done. That's out. [00:30:03] Danielle: Never [00:30:03] Jeanine: We will never go back to a paid membership. It will always be free because it needs to be accessible to everyone. [00:30:10] Danielle: So taking away a paid membership that sure, that money was budgeted and allocated for you to operate what you do, it sounded like it was absolutely the right call for your community and your business, but how did you know that that would work? [00:30:26] Or did you [00:30:27] Jeanine: It didn't. No. For a little bit it didn't work, and I'll say that because I think. A lot of us are parts of, Facebook communities that are very, spirited, maybe in some ways that, bring a lot of entertainment. And we were nervous that that would essentially be the transformation that we would undergo. [00:30:47] But, we have all members incoming. Agree to specific member guidelines. And, the number one guideline that is in there is every mom, parents in her own perfect way. And we use that specific language because, in some of similar to a lot of things that we've talked about, the fact is we're all doing our absolute best that we can. And you need to be able to have some space held for you to do that. [00:31:13] Rather than us identify our community based on your specific parenting model, we said, Hey, everyone is welcome here and we're going to honor you for being the parent that you are because we are all parenting in our own perfect way. [00:31:26] Danielle: Yeah. And nobody knows. Yes. No one has any, nobody knows. [00:31:31] That's always the gift of captain Hindsight, who comes in after a crisis and it's what should have happened? It's you know what studies are showing now. You're like, where were you before? I, I, so you talked about, advertising and with all of the products and content and methodologies that are targeted to parents, but more specifically moms, what are the values that you look for when you're filtering through? Who do you partner with? Who do you highlight? Who do you say yes to? Like, what's the value that you're really looking to offer? [00:32:02] Jeanine: I'm so glad you're asking that because, I think the space that we sit in. We often are, seeing a lot of influencers and content creators that they are really working hard to grow their brand and do that by signing with any partner that they can. And you find that there can be a real, I don't wanna say a moral gap because again, I'm just coming off saying everyone parents their own perfect way. [00:32:25] So everyone pulls content and creates content in their own perfect way. But, in, looking and evaluating the partners that we wanna work with, it's really critical to us that they offer a strong, supportive, product or experience for our members and for our followers. We do a lot of partnership with tourism, with attractions, that offer something for you to really be highlighted as the queen of your family. [00:32:51] 'cause you're like, Hey. We're gonna go to Nashville for the weekend, and I've been able to put together a whole itinerary, thanks to the city moms maybe tipping me off about a couple things. But now I've gone out and sourced this great itinerary, or I have been able to enhance our nursery because we found this one product that the city moms recommended. [00:33:09] All of that to say it's really important to us. We spend a lot of time vetting the products that we suggest we spend a lot of time working with or having conversations with the brands that we bring in. That's never just a, Hey, we want to, compensate you X and you guys promote us, and we'll be like, okay, perfect. [00:33:25] There's a lot of time that we spend really making sure that is going to make a lot of sense. In fact, one of my favorite things to say is, no, Sarah will tell everyone this. [00:33:33] Danielle: Tell me more about that. [00:33:34] Jeanine: Yes. Just did this yesterday. I love when we are being, approached by a particular brand or a client or prospective partner. [00:33:41] And I love going through that vetting process and saying, you know what? We spent some time looked into this and this isn't gonna work for us. Case in point, the brand I turned down yesterday is something that we actually use a lot. Sarah and I are big fans of a couple of their products. [00:33:57] Danielle: Mm-hmm. [00:33:58] Jeanine: And they approached us about a new launch they're doing and said, we would love to ship you, two of the new products, but we want all of this content, you need to send it to us for review. [00:34:08] You can only post on the dates that we want. You need to release it all to us that we can use it for our future advertising. By the way, the cost of the products that we're sending you in total is $300. And, the amount of media that was gonna be attached to that from our side was about $5,000. [00:34:26] We have a staff I need to pay, we have a team that, relies on us. We have a full following that relies on us to make sure that we're being authentic in what we are bringing forward. I talked to Sarah about it a little bit and I said, I'm gonna tell them no. And I'm gonna say there's a big value gap here. [00:34:41] Not just from the official bottom line kind of payment side of this, but also because I never wanna put someone into a brand consideration when that brand's not considering them. Just considering their own needs and their own drivers. [00:34:56] Danielle: Oh, that's so strong. And not an answer I expected, but when I so appreciated on a personal level, a professional level. [00:35:04] I don't know, if you've ever done Myers-Briggs, it's a test that Oh yeah. There's so many beautiful like personality assessment profiles, but I'm an extroverted, intuitive feeler perceiver, so I'm all the, ooey, gooey side, the mussies. And, when I see people who maybe from the outside seem to have a very discerning methodology for how they make decisions. [00:35:23] I find that so appealing because I'm such a heart led gut check, first kind of person, I don't always know why it's a yes or a no yet. It's like I feel it first, and then it works its way up into my brain and then whatever reasoning is sort of filtered through will come from that. [00:35:41] But I love that you saw value in yourself, how you believed in the value of what you offer, and you also saw the gap in representing that product or that brand, that didn't fully appreciate the value you were. I just, I love that answer so much. I'll be thinking about that after this, so thank you. [00:36:01] Jeanine: Yes, absolutely. [00:36:02] Danielle: Absolutely. You have a new membership experience starting. [00:36:05] We do very, very soon. This episode, I believe, will be being released mid-August, so, we could safely say it's live, what do you want people to know about what's coming and as far as what you can say, what do you want people to know so that if they wanna participate, get involved, they can. [00:36:23] Jeanine: So our new city moms membership is, officially launching to our, we will be, rolling it out to our existing members starting August 1st, and then it will be available to everyone starting, early September. [00:36:34] Danielle: Awesome. [00:36:36] Jeanine: So we are shifting into a different platform than we have used previously. It's called Circle and it's a wonderful space where we not only can have our full national city mom community, you're gonna find chat groups where you can connect with other city moms across the country there, because, me having like toddler woes in Indianapolis is no different from something having toddler woes in Seattle, Washington. [00:37:01] So why shouldn't you have access to that mom and her, lines of recommendation and such. So we'll have these national chat groups. We also have an opportunity, we'll be doing a lot of lives inside the community that are member exclusive, that we can connect you to some of these, brands and partners that we work with. [00:37:17] And then we are doing nano communities inside of that so that you can hyper connect with women inside your own city. So Indianapolis obviously will be our first big pilot there, but we have Dallas and Cincinnati that are also existing inside, that nano community area. And we have, three other cities that we think are going to be quickly following in 2026 as well. [00:37:40] Danielle: That's so incredible. Congratulations. It sounds like your own city mom social network. Yes. Yes, it totally is. I'm excited for everybody who's an existing member to get to benefit from that. And then the new members who continue to join to get involved in that. [00:37:55] That's incredible. [00:37:57] Jeanine: Thank you. Yeah, it's been one of Sarah's biggest passion projects as she's been getting her feet wet and she's done an incredible job with it. The other really exciting benefit is there are perks, not only for our national members, but then in your hyper local communities too. [00:38:11] So, here in Indianapolis, we've got some great perks with, the Ile Jordan Museum, with the Children's Museum, even dry bar, face Foundry, 'cause we need space for us too, all of those exclusive perks will be part of that too. [00:38:25] Danielle: Beautiful. So not just stuff for the family, but also like ways for moms to take care of themselves too. Exactly. Gorgeous. Yes. Well, Janine, I would be remiss if I signed off without asking you about your, don't cut your own bangs moment because I, it is good. So if you are good taking it away, I would love to hear [00:38:43] Jeanine: yeah. I just wanna tell you, I love this so much. I've listened to so many of your other podcasts and these are the moments I just feel like really are the ones that sit with me the most so I'm so thrilled that you have this as kind of just, that final vehicle to the podcast content. [00:38:59] But mine's a little different because there is, a little sadness tied to it, but it brings a great lesson. [00:39:05] Danielle: Yeah. [00:39:05] Jeanine: So I had mentioned that I worked in advertising for 10 years. I worked on the agency side and I was working in Detroit at the time. And I had a newborn. My daughter was a newborn, and then I had my son who was three years old at the time, and my client was based out of Germany. [00:39:25] It's a very large grocery chain that happens to be based in Germany and they have a lot of outputs here in the US And at the time, we were all going through just a horrible recession in the world. And I was working about 60 to 70 hours a week. Advertising is one of those, especially on agency side. [00:39:44] It's one of those industries. It is go, go, go. And it is never stopping. My husband also works in advertising. It's actually how we met. He at the time was doing about 90 hours a week. We never saw each other, we rarely saw the kids. So my day normally started around 3:00 AM because that's when the German, office was open. [00:40:03] And it normally coincided with the time I was feeding my newborn in the middle of the night. So I would have my phone with me, feeding her, scrolling through email and catching up with the German team, put her back to sleep. Then, I would get up around six when my toddler was awake and finally get the two of them off to daycare. [00:40:18] And I made the decision, which a male boss of mine later told me was selfish to go work out at a gym that was halfway between daycare and, work every day. So I didn't get into the office until around 8 45. Technically our office started at nine. I would work absolutely all day and then race out of my office at 5 51 because if I could leave at 5 51, I could literally run down the street to our parking garage, get in my car, drive as fast as I could at daycare and be there before the seven minute grace period was over. [00:40:50] Danielle: You had it down to the minute? [00:40:52] Jeanine: Down to the minute and. It was coming at a time where it was just, I was so burnt out. My husband was so burnt out this one day I got to daycare. My kids were always the final ones getting picked up. And I had a phrase for my toddler at the time where I'd always say, mommy always comes back. [00:41:11] I would say that to him every morning when I dropped him off. And I ran into daycare this day and my son was crying. I could hear him in the toddler room. So I grabbed the newborn. She was already in her carrier. And then I went in to pick him up and he's crying. And I said, honey, I'm here. [00:41:26] And I got down and gave him a hug. And I said, sweetie, what do I always say? Mommy always comes, Ooh, this makes me tear up. Even think about all this years later. And he goes Last, mommy always comes last. And that was the most soul crushing thing I had ever heard in my life. And I cried the entire way home. [00:41:47] Danielle: Mm-hmm. [00:41:48] Jeanine: And we put the kids down to bed after dinner and after their bath, and I turned to my husband, I said, we cannot do this anymore. I'm done. We're done. We can't keep this schedule going. This is just, this is not gonna sustain us anymore. And we made the decision that night that was the end of this work experience for us. [00:42:08] And, we immediately put resumes and feelers out and that is what made, the transition to Indianapolis possible. It took months, but we eventually found ourselves here and it was the best decision that we ever made. [00:42:21] And what it all came down to was in my don't cut your own bangs moment, was it is okay to say no. It is okay to take that stop. And is it okay to invest in yourself and your family if that's what really matters to you? I think maybe that's what the critical note is. It's okay to invest what matters to you. [00:42:39] To me, that has always been the moment that I have seen as a turning point and, has really been probably the most critical thing for me. [00:42:48] Danielle: Thank you so much for that story that my whole body, it was waves and waves went through, with that and you, when you said it earlier in the interview, but I can really feel the truth of that in a different way. [00:43:05] That you love saying no. Yeah, because I think what I hear in that is it's a fully embodied no is also a yes to something else. [00:43:17] Jeanine: Yes, [00:43:18] Danielle: it is its own. Yes. Like I'm saying no to this offer to position your brand. And I'm saying yes to my integrity. I'm saying no to the needs and the demands that this company and this industry has for me and my life. [00:43:35] And I'm saying yes to my son. Yeah, my infant, like I'm saying yes to me. Oh, I, that reminded me, I hadn't thought of this in so long, but it brought me back to when I. Made the decision to start my, when my husband and I made the decision to start to try to get pregnant, the journey was, knowing what I know now, far less complicated than it is for many. [00:44:01] But it didn't happen the way I thought it would. And that is almost always where suffering comes from me. When there's an unmet expectation and I could, you're taught your whole life. It's like if you look at a penis or sit on a toilet seat wrong you never know how you're gonna get pregnant. So when you first start trying it like, what do you mean it didn't happen right away? What do you mean? My first pregnancy I was a new-ish therapist. I think I had been practicing for, I'm gonna say two and a half, two and a half-ish years, three, maybe three. [00:44:28] But I had, the process of going back to grad school, finding I didn't have the credits I needed to even qualify to apply to the grad program. All of this work and effort. It was like once I set my sights on, I think this is something I want for myself, there was almost immediately after, oh my God. [00:44:46] But I figured that out so late in life and I gotta go, go, go, go, go. So I burnt myself to a crisp getting through all of the hoops I needed to get through to do the job. And I didn't realize the grind on my body, on my mind, on my life. I just didn't see it. I joked that it felt like the road runner and coyote running off the cliff and you didn't realize you were over the cliff until you looked down and my moment of looking down and falling was when I lost that first pregnancy. [00:45:14] And, I don't blame myself for it. It's not that. But there was a clarity in the grief and I think the grief I felt in my own body. Yeah. Your son spoke his truth to you. I felt like my body was, the grief in my body was revealing a truth to me that I wasn't willing to see, which was [00:45:36] there's no room for me in this life that I've built and I have to cut back. And it brought up like being a good girl, being a strong woman, being a strong feminist, being a diligent employee, being reliable, all of these roles and these external things that I was chasing in the pursuit of being really good at my job. [00:45:58] Mm-hmm. That loss was just, oh, actually none of this matters as much as I thought it did. Not that it doesn't matter, but it didn't matter because I thought it did and my hours cut dramatically back and it didn't work for the practice that I was working for before the hours that I would be willing to do. [00:46:18] But then I realized with my husband's support that, oh, I actually can go out on my own. And life has unfolded. It wasn't like magically overnight any more than city moms was created magically, overnight. But it got you to Indianapolis. Mm-hmm. It's like the breadcrumb trail that you were following to freedom led you to something so beautiful that you probably couldn't have imagined at that day at your son's daycare picking them up. [00:46:43] Jeanine: Absolutely. And I think, it's kind of the power of listening and that's one of the things I love so much about your podcast is being able to listen to the other stories that come from your guests and really, that you have the ability to tease out such a gift and clearly the path that you have followed has allowed you to be there too, in, that space of, [00:47:05] beauty and it's just, it's wonderful. [00:47:08] Danielle: Thank you. Thank you, Janine. Thank you so much. I'm going to bring us to a close 'cause we can't get any better. That was so, great. I will definitely encourage, again, for everybody listening to please visit the show notes before you click back into your life and take your AirPods out or, get off of your walk or wherever you are in life. [00:47:29] Like to hop over the show notes, check out city moms, follow them on social media. They make it very easy to find what you need to know, so all the places you can follow them. [00:47:37] But thank you again. Thank you. Thank you Janine. And, [00:47:40] Jeanine: Thank you so much for having me. [00:47:42] ​ [00:47:42] ​ [00:47:44] ​ [00:48:52] ​ [00:50:11] Thank you so much for joining me in this week's episode of Don't Cut Your Own Bangs. I hope that you enjoyed listening because I thoroughly enjoyed making it. Before you hop away, please check out the show notes, everything that we mentioned here in this conversation, as well as links that you can stay connected with me. As well as everything needed to connect with city moms. Please remember to rate and review and subscribe to the podcast. It helps the podcast grow. It helps other people find this that could benefit from it too. Thank you so much for being here. [00:50:37] Your attention means the world, and I hope you continue to have a wonderful day.

The prophecies (PLURAL) foretold it all. And he believed it. And then... he made them ALL believe it.Not only does Madi tell you the story of how "The Lonely One" united the Hawaiian Islands in one lifetime (and ALL OF THE DRAMA that brings... you have no idea), but we also talk about Hawaiian warfare, the return of an ancient Hawaiian artifact, AND Hawaiian burial practices.Kamehameha was a force, and his story deserves to be heard. Raised in isolation into a warring island nation, this man was put on this planet to bring them all together. Listen to it all unfold against all odds in this first-but-not-last episode of Hawaiian History.Brook Kapukuniahi Parker's Lecture (Part 1/4) on Kamehameha the Great https://youtu.be/oGX6dUAikFQ?si=KGzhK0GCGlMIHGZ0Keoni Kealoha Alvarez's Documentary "Kapu"https://www.youtube.com/live/2MLWBLmpSOI?si=4moM8LxEOEP2pQPuThe link to the GORGEOUS video by The Office of Hawaiian Affairs Hawaiian Chief's Cloak and Helmet Repatriated After 241 YearsJoin our Patreon for extra content!https://www.patreon.com/c/spillthemeadYou can purchase Spill the Mead merchandise https://www.etsy.com/shop/SpilltheMeadPodcast/Find us on Instagram, and Facebook @spillthemeadpodcastFind Madi @myladygervais on InstagramFind Betsy @betsy.hegge on InstagramFind Coco @spill_it_coco on InstagramFind Gabby @so_dym_gabulous on InstagramFind Chris @chrisrileyhistory on InstagramFind Taylor @tjonesarmoredamma on InstagramMusic is composed by Nicholas Leigh nicholasleighmusic.com

Comedy Writer Mike Gibbons | Ozzy, Colbert, & Clint | The Life Gorgeous DESCRIPTION:Gibby is home! Mike Gibbons joins Kilby for some summer fun including Gibby's love of Ozzy Osbourne, Neil Young and The Allman Brothers. They also discuss the Stephen Colbert situation and then Kilby remembers the old CBS Late Movie and has scheduling ideas. Plus, they talk slow-paced movies in this fast-paced podcast. Let's Do It! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Want a beautiful, ready-to-go knitting journal? I finally got my hands on the one from Twice Sheared Sheep and it's GORGEOUS. Thoughtfully designed, spiral-bound, and perfect for tracking every cozy project. Take a peek here →https://twice-sheared-sheep.myshopify.com/twwcpa (affiliate) Welcome back to the Knit Your Stress Away Summer Throwback Series—your weekly cozy reset with a round up of our best episodes of the last year and a half. This week, we're revisiting one of your favorite episodes all about how to actually stay motivated and celebrate your growth as a knitter—with a simple but powerful tool: your own knitting journal.   Whether you're a paper-and-pen type or prefer something digital and fuss-free, this episode is packed with inspiration for tracking your projects, capturing your creative milestones, and building a keepsake of everything your hands have made.  

There's a new ESPN 30 for 30 podcast series called "CHASING BASKETBALL HEAVEN' and it's about the life of a basketball analytics genius named Martin Manley. Martin was an eccentric character who only drank Pepsi, only listened to James Taylor and loved the NBA. Ladies and gentleman, in this new 6 part podcast series, Martin is played by...Mr. Craig Kilborn! Kilby is joined by the two writers and podcasters behind "Chasing Basketball Heaven" - Rich Levine and Nick Altschuller. Listen and learn, young people. Plus their Top 5 Movies of All-Time. Jam packed. Let's Go! And don't forget to go to ⁠⁠https://OmahaSteaks.com⁠⁠ to enjoy their new Smash Burgers. And use Promo Code GORGEOUS at checkout for an extra $35 off. Minimum purchase may apply. See site for details. A big thanks to our advertiser, Omaha Steaks! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

He's only 18 years, French, 7 feet, and athletic. The other athletic - Jonny - aka Jon Krawczynski, joins Kilby to talk about the Timberwolves new rookie Joan Beringer and how good he's looked in summer league. Plus, the pressure is on Rob Dillingham, Kilby still wants the Wolves to add a point guard, and a special mention of Becky's lasagna. Wolves Pride. Summer Fun! And don't forget to go to ⁠https://OmahaSteaks.com⁠ to enjoy their new Smash Burgers. And use Promo Code GORGEOUS at checkout for an extra $35 off. Minimum purchase may apply. See site for details. A big thanks to our advertiser, Omaha Steaks! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The humble crew of the LIttle Snail could not have known what they were getting into.  A simple, kindness had led them towards danger and mystery unknwon. A fallen tower. Undead dragon cultists descending on them in the dark. An ancient prophecy written by the light.  And a sanctimonious solivagant stolen into shadow Yet faced with this chaos, they continued. Making their way north, first to the bridge they'd rebuilt only days ago and then turning towards the seaside city of Calstega Bay in search fo answers. All around them, Perpetua awed with its beauty. The sea breeze sweeping across Tidaline's plains. Life all around them, blossoming and chirping. And the daytime sky giving way to the stars. And so they were on the cusp of unexpected discovery: Because though they did not know yet, what we do about the Stars, they would soon find out just how they echo…. Redolencia. Alteros. Ichoria. Springsong. Armidirge. Imago. Genesika. KosmoKairosis. It would be the first of these—Redolencia, announcing itself with buzzes and yelps—that they would encounter on that journey to Calstega Bay.  On its face, it may have seemed like a distraction from their primary task—but in truth, it was their first glimpse into a world beyond—or a world before—the Perpetua they knew. A lesson here, for those who study their journey: It is only a fool that sticks to the charted course. One never knows when a hill is worth the climb, a dance is worth a stumble, or a rose is worth its thorns.   This week on Perpetua: Journey to the Bay Pt. 1 Perpetua Guide [In Progress v.03] Celestial Echoes [CECH] So far, Celestial Echoes seems like they're a series of side quests, but I have a feeling they're actually really important—like either late in the campaign you'll have to go around to do all of them or else maybe the true ending is locked behind doing them? In any case, they come in two versions: Unstable and Stable. Both are a part of the map affected by “Celestial Laws,” which change some basic gameplay rules in BIG ways. What separates them, then? Well, Unstable Echoes are normally mini-dungeons or miniboss fights, while Stable Echoes (which you can make by completing the “Ritual of Stellar Restoration” in an Unstable Echo), tend to just be lore-focused map locations. Both offer a lot of unique loot, plus unique music and character interactions! Oh, also, supposedly if you don't do the ritual, Unstable Echoes can “spread” across more of the map, but I haven't tried to let that happen during this first playthrough (obviously). While I'm including the basic stat blocks for all the Celestial Echo enemies, NPCs, and bosses in the NPC & Monsters section (search for PNMS but with brackets around it!), I'm keeping their longer entries here because I think most people will turn here to learn about the Echoes! Redolencia [CERD] Redolencia is probably the first celestial echo you'll find (though you could go around it and reach Capstone from the Prelude if you were willing to grind a little). As such, it's got a mix of combat (a pretty cool boss fight) and dungeon/puzzle gameplay. And its Celestial Laws are pretty basic. It's sort of like playing a game with wayyy less focus on spells. The level and enemy design here is so weird It's like someone swapped the game palette with a sicker one. All the colors are like *too* colorful, but also too dim? I don't know anything about art, I just know it feels weird. And the music is SO intense given that it's just a bunch of flowers and bugs. Anyway, here's what you've got in store: Celestial Law: Alchemical Tilt: Spells heal half damage. Skills and Items heal twice as much. Celestial Law: Unstable Magic: When casting a spell, you fumble when 1s or 2s are rolled as a pair (i.e. rolls of 2 or 4, but not 1+2 or 2+1) Scalewings [NMSCW] Typical Traits: fluttering, territorial, lover of beauty, scientific  Stats: DEX 10, INS 8, MIG 8, WLP 6 Attacks: Beetlehorn Spear Special Abilities: Scale Shower, Flying In-Game Description: An echo of a butterfly-like person, attendant to the Vampire Orchid.  Flutters like a stuttering shadow. They're more like colorful moths than butterflies, in this FAQ-writer's opinion. They have big gross wings, and can spread poison with their Scale Shower ability. I'd love to know what the rest of their world was like, given that they use a huge beetle horn as a spear! Do you think the whole world was smaller or that everything small on it was bigger? Did humans even exist there? Starter Tip: Simple! Use fire!  Vampire Orchid [NMVOR] Typical Traits: Rapacious, Hungry, Gorgeous, Fragrant Stats: DEX 8, INS 6, MIG 10, WLP 8 Attacks: Vine Drain, Pollen Dusting Special Abilities: Plant: The Vampire Orchid is immune to dazed, enraged, and shaken. In-Game Description: Tendrils of green, petals of black and yellow, and a column of deep red. Though one might wonder where the latter color comes from. A giant hungry plant—where have I seen that one before! On one hand, its weakness to both ice and fire means that your party should be able to do great damage to it! On the other hand, the Celestial Echo that increases the chance of spellcasting fumbles means that it's easier to have things go totally off the rails all at once. Starter Tip: Remember: Elemental Shards don't require any sort of spell casting roll! A cheap way to get a TON of damage during this fight. Hosted by Austin Walker (austinwalker.bsky.social) Featuring Ali Acampora (ali-online.bsky.social), Art Martinez-Tebbel (amtebbel.bsky.social), Jack de Quidt (notquitereal.bsky.social), and Andrew Lee Swan (swandre3000.bsky.social) Produced by Ali Acampora Music by Jack de Quidt (available on bandcamp) Cover Art by Ben McEntee (https://linktr.ee/benmce.art) With thanks to Amelia Renee, Arthur B., Aster Maragos, Bill Kaszubski, Cassie Jones, Clark, DB, Daniel Laloggia, Diana Crowley, Edwin Adelsberger, Emrys, Greg Cobb, Ian O'Dea, Ian Urbina, Irina A., Jack Shirai, Jake Strang, Katie Diekhaus, Ken George, Konisforce, Kristina Harris Esq, L Tantivy, Lawson Coleman, Mark Conner, Mike & Ruby, Muna A, Nat Knight, Olive Perry, Quinn Pollock, Robert Lasica, Shawn Drape, Shawn Hall, Summer Rose, TeganEden, Thomas Whitney, Voi, chocoube, deepFlaw, fen, & weakmint This episode was made with support from listeners like you! To support us, you can go to friendsatthetable.cash.

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