No Heart Left Behind

Yes it’s true. I want to make sure that everyone gets a Valentine on FEB14. Remember when you were a kid and you got the big bag of Valentines and gave one to everyone else; along with those candy hearts that have messages on them!

Valentines Day can be about that kind of love again too, not just romantic love. So:

1. I am giving away 7 Day gift subscriptions to my site Greetums.com.

2. I have created the hashtag #noheartleftbehind for updates and tweetchats (this Wednesday, FEB10)

3. all you have to do is follow me and make sure I follow you too, then DM your email and I will send you details.

4. Once you redeem your gift subscription, every Greetum Valentine/Love eCard includes a 7 Day gift subscription for the Recipient.

These subscriptions are unlimited within the 7 days so you and your friends and family can share and send unlimited Valentines this year for FREE.

Contact me @Greetums for details and to get on the list.

What Makes Kat Caverly Run?

Special Announcement: I am running my first half-marathon (13 miles) on April 25th. Remarkable considering that as of today my personal best is 500 feet! Yes I was pretty lame, almost literally.

As a child I had to learn to fight because I couldn’t run. I think it was just because I was so damn skinny; no muscle. So my wee muscles would fail and I would fall. Boom! Eventually I just stopped trying to run and I built up a prejudice against running.

For the past 26 years I have taken fitness very seriously; swimming, weight lifting, hatha yoga, Feldenkrais, boxing, pilates and I built some serious muscle! I like being strong and a couple of years ago I decided I needed to “train” for some athletics, some activity. I decided I wanted to learn to RUN.

I had the perfect excuse NOT to run; I have two herniated lumbar discs. A neurologist and my last trainer said I should not run. But something told me that I HAD to run (maybe because someone said I couldn’t). I had just moved to a new area and a friend’s sister-in-law was an elite athlete, and a perfected runner.

I started to meet her at the local track and learned how to jog and started walking. I built up to a 5 mile walk and can walk faster than some people run! But still I was worried about falling, so I never broke a jog up to 500 feet before: I was just not breathing enough to feed my muscles but I could continue to walk at a fast pace. Fear was holding me back not my body! My back never hurt from this but my core did get stronger and stronger.

Last week my now dear friend Kellee made a proposal: do the Shamrock Run on March 15 (2 miles) and the More Run in Central Park (13 miles) on April 25th. Her faith in me buoyed my confidence and I got the needed boost to get through my fear and past it into the best conditioning I have ever achieved. I am ready to start.

The goal is to arrive at each race uninjured, so I need to train smart and promote recovery from my training sessions. I am on my 55th trip around the sun, so recovery takes longer. But I am hoping that I can support my body in the following way:

1. hydration, 8 oz of water every hour awake, 16 oz of Cytomax 2 hours before training and during.

2. eat healthy, get lots of lean proteins, drink a Muscle Milk shake within 1 hour after workout, and another before bed.

3. supplement with extra Krill and Flaxseed oil, keep down inflammation

4. Sleep 8-10 hours a day, take naps

5. Train smart, take time to fully recover between trainings; stretching, balance, and core exercises daily to prevent injuries.

I am ready! I have enjoyed working through my demons and over-coming other things that kept me from doing anything. The running is as much emotional as it is physical and I will benefit by getting the best conditioning I have ever been in, ever and that is very exciting. I am also looking forward to the endorphin rush!

Do you have any advice and tips? Please comment below:

The Patron Saint of Greetings

No Heart Left Behind – Give Every One a Valentine on FEB14

Who is this Saint Valentine and what does love have to do with it? The Catholic Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine, all of whom were martyred. According to one legend, Valentine sent the first “valentine” himself to his love from prison. It was signed “from your Valentine”.

Some believe that the Romans has a mid-February custom, that stems from the believe that birds chose their mates on February 14th. Pastors would substitute the names of saints to suppress such practices and February 14th became known as St. Valentines Day, but the custom of celebrating the chosing of a mate, like most old customs, stuck.

St. Valentine was executed in Rome on February 14, about the year 270. The oldest known Valentine, in England, dates from around 1400. According to Catholic.org, St. Valentine is the patron saint of “affianced couples, bee keepers, engaged couples, epilepsy, fainting, greetings, happy marriages, love, lovers, plague, travellers, young people”.

Hmmm, the patron saint of greetings?? What does Valentines Day mean to you? Please leave a comment below ☟

Visit Valentines Day on Greetums.com

How do I Thank Thee?

self-portrait of Kat Caverly, Miss Twitter Manners

I have been active on Twitter since the beginning of September 2009. “Active” is putting it mildly! After lukewarm forays in 2008 and early 2009, I made tweeting a full-time effort starting on September 8, 2009 but first I had to figure out how to do it “right”.

The first thing I learned was that there are lots of ways to tweet and although there are “wrong” ways for sure, there seems to be many right ways to engage using Twitter. But there is one important social activity that I don’t know how to do well on Twitter yet; saying thank you to my followers for sharing and promoting @Greetums every day.

I, for one, am totally confused by tweets that are mostly just @usernames. This makes #followfridays a bit awkward for me and I have been desperately seeking guidance on how to really make a difference in other people’s lives on Twitter. I truly am grateful and I sincerely want to help promote other people’s projects and lives, but how do I do that in a way that is really significant for others?

I have over 3000 followers now and I understand first hand how much time just acknowledging retweets and mentions can take if you plan to do so individually. But how can you really thank someone or recommend them to your followers in any other way? There is a habit of retweeting anything that mentions your username, but this really seems odd to me and I often cannot figure out who said what and who said it first. Such tweets and retweets lose all meaning, but I want to acknowledge the thought behind it somehow. I think this acknowledgment is important.

Twitter is not a medium of conversations. It’s not real-time and often unless you make reference I won’t know what you are talking about unless I spend considerable time trying to figure out what I said that inspired your response. Personally tweeting feels a lot like performance art to me and honestly what you think about what I am doing, saying and tweeting means the world to me. The idea that I might have missed your message or not acknowledged you really upsets me but I fear that it happens all the time.

What do people who have tens of thousands of followers do? What don’t they do? There’s a never ending stream of lip-service done to “engagement” but often these same pundits do not engage. There is an amazing amount of kindness and sharing on Twitter, but I still believe the most important thing I can do is tweet content that has value to my followers. The second most important thing I MUST do is show gratitude to those who share my content and take the time to contact me.

If you retweet my content or contact me by including @Greetums in your tweet, I go to your profile and learn more about you. I am looking for your passions, and what you are promoting about yourself. My first acknowledgment will be a retweet of your content. But sometimes I find that the past 20-40 tweets on a profile are all retweets of other people’s content or personal conversations. So how do I thank these kind folks in a way that makes a difference to them?

Celebrities or wanna-bes just do the SHOUT OUT and it seems that many will retweet anything that has their name in it. But I am frustrated by this habit and I no longer retweet such mentions, partly because I see it being used by accounts that not only I do not follow but they do not follow me either.

I am interested in your lives. I am interested in how I can help you celebrate life! I want to bring you joy and make you laugh. I want to help you promote your latest book, peformance, song, art. I want to share with my world the wonders of YOU. And I find to do that well I must take the time to acknowledge each of you individually. But I will no longer retweet group shout outs, though I do appreciate each and every one of you remembering me and keeping me posted.

I will be using DMs (direct messages) to acknowledge you in some cases. To me this is the most personal of ways that I can thank you. Regarding #followfriday recommendations, I have built a special list Sweetums of tweethearts who have made me smile, who are engaging and witty and wonderful. I add to this list on a regular basis and from now on will post a link to this list on Follow Fridays. Otherwise every day is a day I want to link to something important to you. Please contact me any time. It takes time for me to get to know you and I do want to help you in every way that I can.

42 Days of Gratitude: Day 60

I can’t believe that it has been almost a month since I posted on this blog! What happened?

Well between December 30 – January 3rd, Tom and I were setting up, rehearsing and shooting Father Time and Baby New Year. It was very complicated and ended with some very late shoots. But it was so much fun! At the same time I was starting my 365 Days of celelebrations. Talk about reasons to be grateful!!

It took me a few days, Jan 4-7 to get back on my regular schedule and int he meantime I started my battles with various viruses. I beat the first one without any other symptoms besides fatigue and nasal congestion and by the end of the week I had been invited to audition for the first time in like forever and I was so excited that once again I did not sleep properly (stayed up too late, got under 7 hours of sleep, blech) But I was just so happy about my enthusiasm. I really am grateful for that.

The following week I got really sick. This virus got me good for 3 days and it took another 4 days of various lead in and total recovery. I tried to be grateful for being healthy and strong. Getting sick is the body’s way of getting well and I was getting healthier, stronger. But when I get sick my energy drops. And when my energy drops, well I feel like an orphan; unloved and abandoned. This was the challenge. How do I feel gratitude when I am having a tantrum?

So for the last two weeks I have been practicing smiling. Mostly I have been smiling for no reason and since I have had genuine times when there was no reason to smile I was able to actually feel the effect of just the physical act of making a smile with my face…and holding it for 20 seconds, like a stretch. The effect is subtle and brief, but it is warm and feels great.

I have been approaching smiling and laughing like a yoga practice, along with daily gratitude and celebration it has been amazing. Getting mildly sick during this time, this beginning of a new year filled with smiles, laughter and celebration every day was auspicious. Life is not often easy but I can still be grateful for the challenge. And I have learned that my most prized possession is my energy!

42 Days of Gratitude: Days 23-32

The last 10 days have been about daily celebrations and it is something that I really want to get use to doing every day. On December 20 I was grateful that tom was coming upstate and would be on hiatus from the TV show for 16 days. This was reason enough to celebrate.

On December 21, it was the Winter Solstice and the beginning of Yuletide. I made Wassail; the taste of tradition!

I am so grateful for this time to explore the meaning of and place for celebrations.

Saturnalia starts on December 17 and continues through the 23rd. Yule starts on the Winter Solstice, around December 21 and continues for some weeks. The first day of Christmas is December 25th and Twelfth Night was used as a setting by Shakespeare. Christmas Eve has always been special to me and Little Christmas, Jan. 6th is also delightful.

I am grateful that since Thanksgiving when I started the Gratitude project I have had a chance to continuously celebrate. Life truly is an occasion and I plan to celebrate each day from now on!

I’m the Angel
on the Christmas Tree

On December 28, 2009 Tom and I did all the shooting and recording for our 2010 Christmas video. Thios is a project that has been in pre-production for a few years. We shot the background (the tree) In January 2009, wrote the script just last week, after I finally decided what the musical theme was going to be (O Tannenbaum). We created the music and started to build the suspension rigging back in 2008 but production was thwarted when my back went out!

This year I am in “ornament” condition. I spent all of the last 12 months preparing for this shoot physically and although it turned out that I couldn’t do very much in the harness we used, It was quite the workout. And I really had the best of times.

Work can be a real gas!

Getting the padding for the harness just right took some doing. After all I was going to be hanging for 30-60 minutes. We didn’t use a Peter Pan rig since that takes at least two operators and Tom wanted to try to see what he could do alone. Once I was in costume, I could no longer help. Tom was a one-man movie making band!

I love the life I live and live the life I love!

And after hours of work: harness, padding, make-up, wig, costume, accessories, viola:

photos by Thomas Hudson Reeve © 2009

I think I really like being an angel!

Kat Caverly as the Christmas Tree Angel

photos © Thomas Hudson Reeve for Greetums.com

42 Days of Gratitude: Days 20, 21, and 22

I have had another huge breakthrough this week; a revelation about being judgmental. I have worked on this character trait (read: flaw) directly for over 30 years. I made a wee bit of progress but it seemed to be part of my personality (according to the Myers-Briggs tests). I was off the charts with J (=judgment).

And in the midst of a diametrically opposed situation I found myself unable to pass judgment. For 54 years I couldn’t help BUT pass judgments; quick and fast. But now my mind was so open my brains fell out! And that felt delicious. Now after five days I still cannot bring myself to take sides, nor condemn anyone (except for perhaps the media whom I hold more than just a little contempt).

So my attitude of gratitude seems to be running in a 3 day cycle. I am not doing an empty daily exercise. I find myself being truly grateful in new ways. I am grateful for this transformation.

Zos Hanukkah 2009: the Last Day of Hanukkah

At nightfall today. December 19, 2009 Hanukkah ends and the eighth day of Hanukkah has special significance:

First a Rabbinical lecture:
Zos Hanukkah: the significance of the number Eight

According to Chabad.org, “The eighth day of Chanukah is also known as Zot Chanukah (literally, “this is Chanukah”), after a key phrase in the special Chanukah Torah reading for this day (Numbers 7:54-8:4).

And finally a Hanukkah chuckle:
The Chipmunk Hanukkah

Hanukkah 2009:
the beginning of Day 8

Dreidel Dreidel Dreidel

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a beautiful guitar solo by Chris Leap, NoEvil Productions
produced by Kat Caverly

Interactive Dreidel game on Greetums.com

In observance of Shabbat this live Dreidel Cam will resume at 5:30pm EST Saturday, Decemer 19, 2009