Pear Tree Oh So Pretty With Sun in Everyday Ramblings

This is one of the three pear trees behind my place. What is remarkable here in this shot I took Sunday afternoon is the late light. We have this blissful glorious light and that creates shadows. They go together. It is quite cold but this is more like I have heard other folks describe winter in other places as it moves into spring, clear and cold with periods of snow and hail and rain. Instead of heavy miasmic damp cloud cover always and forever. Well…we do have high haze this morning and I missed watching the big old full moon set.

I actually went to the gym yesterday! This is the replacement gym for the one across the busy street from me that closed 18 months ago and now sits empty. It’s been months since I have been and I was pleasantly surprised to find it nice and clean with piles of fresh towels everywhere and cold water and cups and new aerobic equipment and practically deserted. This is my kind of place. It can’t last, won’t last, so I need to take advantage of it while I can.

Ever since early February and our celebratory dinner out for Kes’s birthday I have had trouble reining in my desire for comfort food and am up a couple of pounds. It has been so frustrating because I know how easy it is to put the weight one has worked hard to lose back on.

Yesterday I found out that in conjunction with our local community college the place I work (in the Women’s Health Center up the hill behind me) has healthy cooking classes. They have one next week for easy to prepare dinners for one or two.

Sadly, the dietician that teaches it says these classes fill up really fast so I missed my opportunity to register. Early next month she has a class on cooking fish. I need to eat more fish but it is so hard to know what is healthy. I love the oven steamed wild salmon I made a couple of times last month so I could have that while I wait for the next class.

This is the final frontier for me, planning and shopping for actual meals. Go ahead, it is okay to laugh at me, but since Mr. Finch there hasn’t been much meal planning or sharing going on in my life and I plain old need to find time for this if I am going to maintain the weight loss over the rest of my life.

I am not sure if it is spring or just the natural whacko fluctuations of an older body but I have also had some hormonal stuff going on that has increased my craving for chocolate and sweet things. It is all very strange but then the older body is like a creepy dark foreign landscape at times, at least mine is. Things grow on and out of one in weird haphazard ways, like a long dark hair just is there out of nowhere! On a leg, on the chin!

The same sort of blood blister I had biopsied a few months ago has appeared again in a few places randomly. It hangs around for a few days small and dark and scary looking and then falls off. Luckily I’ve had none on my face or hands so far.

The reviews of this new memoir by Helen Macdonald H is for Hawk have just been spectacular as I have been known to pour over and photograph very old books on falconry from the library and am fascinated by raptors I thought I must get this.

The audiobook version by her just became available here in the U.S. two days ago and I am listening to it with much enthusiasm. It is gorgeously written and there is a whole chapter on T.H. White who wrote The Once and Future King, one of my favorite books. It is not an easy book but it is a fantastic one so far.

I resonate with her inexplicable desire to live with a challenging animal. :)

It is so refreshing to be fully engaged in a book again after my experience lately with mysteries that are just kind of meh, and ones that are so dark, one dreads going on with them.

Anyway, I need to get back to work here from my lunch break. I hope you like the picture.

Last updated March 07, 2015