I know I haven't been on forever...I've been enjoying myself far too much in my wonderful home state of Oklahoma...I absolutely love it here, and don't miss rotten Okinawa Japan AT ALL......I've almost got my sleeping pattern here down-pat, inotherwords, I've been making it the last few nights being able to sleep the whole night through instead of being up the whole night long and finally going to bed at 6am or something inbetween there....It's hard to believe that Christmas Eve is tomorrow...They have been predicting snow ever since I got off the plane here, and people were right on with me talking all over again...Very different attitude than what I got from stupid Okinawa...Everyone was always flaming mad, and frowning, and NEVER said anything to you, unless it was to run you down, or make some other snide remark...I am still saying over and over to myself and anyone else who ends up in front of me "how glad I am to finally be out of Okinawa..." I really don't miss it at all....HONESTLY I DON'T....It's turned freezing cold here all of a sudden overnight, and today I got up to find the sky a medium gray, like when it is about to dump snow down...These days are pretty slow now, since I just moved back, and Christmas is just 2 days away...not much to be done, or that can be done....So everyday right now is pretty much the same until the holidays are over with....It started lightly raining with bits of snow mixed in it tonight....I was soooo excitedddddddd I haven't felt that for I don't know how long....I braved it out there in just flip flops cause I have been around such sticky hot weather for so long, I don't even want to see pictures of it now....I hope that when I wake up tomorrow there will be snow covering everythingggggggggg....Instead of everything now being in English and Japanese, it's back to living in a world where everything is in English and Spanish..that doesn't bother me near as bad as Japanese so it's kind of a relief to see it again...Tonight I was waiting on dinner, and picked up one of the newspapers at the Greek restaurant that I was at all in Spanish of course, then I noticed a small section that was in English in a block and it caught my attention... "In a boxing ring, when a fighter is too battered and weak to go on, his trainer throws a white towel on the mat to show that he concedes. That's where the term "throw in the towel" comes from. We also use it to talk about a frustrating situation we don't want to battle anymore. It might be a relationship that's going nowhere, a dead-end job or a foreign language you're studying but just can't seem to master. Then you say, "I'm about to throw in the towel!" But sometimes years and even decades go by, and you're still clutching that same old towel.

Most of the time the boxers don't want to stop the fight, but the trainer knows letting it go on would be too dangerous, and could hurt the boxer for the rest of his life. In the same way, you should get out of the ring, in time to avoid serious emotional, mental and physical wounds that could do permanent damage.

Just like a boxer, it's really hard for us to give up. We think quitting something means we failed, we're weak. For example, if you "throw in the towel" after years of marriage, you feel like a failure, of if you're forced to close a business you started, you feel like a loser.

As a motivational speaker, I'm always encouraging everyone to never give up, since perseverance is one of the keys to success. But we still have to be able to recognize those situations when we really ought to say, "It is time to quit!" The question is: how do you really know it's time to give up: There are three reasons to "throw in the towel"; because you know in your heart something just isn't right for you, because you've lost interest, or simply because you've had it up to here!!

Stop wasting your time energy or money on something that's never going to get any better. If you gave it your best and did everything you possibly could to change things and still nothing improved, it's time to get out before it's too late.

Quitting doesn't mean losing, it's more like an act of courage when you admit that a certain relationship, dram or desire isn't working out and you should just let it go. Accept there are some things in life that are not going to work out no matter how much you beg and plead and struggle, but something better will come along.

Let go of what's not good for you so you can make room in your life for the things that really are meant to be. Only surround yourself with what brings you PEACE AND HARMONY."