Trade Offs in Everyday Ramblings

I send out a reminder every Sunday morning (my time) to the people participating in my classes and I front it with a photo that I have usually taken within the last week. I normally try not to repeat it here as a couple of you get said reminder, but I love this rose picture and thought I would share it with you as well. It makes me happy, and I hope it does you too.

If you look carefully, you can see ants. That and the slightly lopsided petal arrangement means It wouldn’t make the Chelsea Flower Show, but I think it is perfect as it is. I have been watching the flower show coverage from last week on demand on Prime. I find it soothing and inspiring. I am about halfway through. Who knew that Joe Swift’s mother is the novelist Margaret Drabble and that he knew Judy Dench when he was a kid.

I did talk to someone else who has a plot at the garden, and he says the pink ribbons around the old oak trees are a message to the Parks Department that she feels that the trees are unstable and potentially dangerous. She owns the duplex next door and if one of those trees comes down there could be damage to her property as well as decimate our allotments. Not knowing this I did email the community garden people about the ribbons. I will be interested in the response.

Yesterday I traded vegetable starts for a hair trim. It was a beautiful afternoon. My acquaintance who lives down by the garden offered this. We were getting to know each other a few years back but she was trying to sell her house and got all wrapped up in that but lately we have renewed our budding friendship. She paints as well as cuts hair and the only works I had seen of hers before were abstracts but yesterday I saw more, and she is very good. She did a good job on my hair.

Walt’s partner, who has been trimming my hair for the last couple of years is also a gifted painter. Interesting.

I was kind of hoping to have the League transition to the board position not kick in until after my birthday, which is in three weeks but no dice. It is a Presidential election year, and we have lots to do. Many meetings are being scheduled. And I have so much to learn. I am trying to stay calm about it all. We will see how I do in that regard. We applied for a $15,000 grant and ended up with $5,000 to help defray costs of helping older voters understand ranked choice voting, which we will be using for the first time here in November. There are layers of non-profits involved in all this and understanding how that works is going to be a challenge.

Saturday, I did a practice to build strength for pushups and oh baby I am still sore. These are the practices I started last year but got deflected from because of the displacement. I think I may need to modify things a bit, so I don’t get as stiff as I am today. I am learning though.

We had a new woman come to coffee with the guy’s last week. She gets bonus points from me as she didn’t know anyone, other than Walt who met her while they were both waiting for a colonoscopy of all things. Walt can be quite charming, and he knows a lot of people and somehow, he inspired her to try hanging out with us.

With the inclusion of more women, the new one is a retired lawyer, there is a shift going on in the group that is quite interesting. It makes the guys slightly uncomfortable. We got to talking about goddesses, and in particular Ishtar (also sometimes merged with the goddess known as Inanna) and her remit as the goddess of many things including contradiction. The new woman said she was struggling with contradictions as she was facing many transitions including her children leaving home and a cancer diagnosis. This is why the subject came up.

Well, that and the fact that I am taking a class on the ancient poem Gilgamesh and that one of the painters in the group is doing a series on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Nurse Ratched and his leap to thinking about Kali the Indian Goddess as a kind of backdrop to the story. We talked our way through all that. It was fascinating.

If you are celebrating or commemorating the Memorial Day holiday I hope it is meaningful for you and if not I hope you are having a good day no matter how it unfolds.

Last updated May 27, 2024