The Colors and the Bee in Everyday Ramblings

Just for a change I thought I’d share a glary peony. Is it too self centered to say I love the composition here? The colors and the bee.

Although the cold wind continued yesterday morning by midday we were having spectacular weather. It was warm and dry! In May! In Portland! Whoa baby. Folks were seriously giddy all over town.

I heard a podcast recently where the two young co-hosts said that we need to stop using so many exclamation points and issued a one month challenge to anyone willing to take it up to not use one in an email for thirty days. They, in collaboration with a writer on effective email communication, said that we could try to be more creative and actually use words to express what we are trying to say. Words. Wow.

I am taking pictures of the cats, I am, but they are gray and it is hard to get enough light to get decent shots of them and yes I do have a flash but… Carlo has filled out now that we have food parity in play but Diego is the same size. A little ten pound plus bundle of wild happy love. I know I keep saying this, but he is the most cheerful cat I have ever known. The area on his face where his eye was has healed up nicely.

No more sightings of scary men with shovels.

Saturday I managed to work my way into an irritable mood where I was wallowing in judgmental thoughts by the afternoon. I was tired and my weight was up a tad bit and the Weight Watchers meeting had turned into a digression about favorite indulgences I would never eat. These people know everything on every fast food restaurant menu and I never go to fast food restaurants. Snippy highfalutin princess that I am.

When I got home I needed to process all the abundance I had purchased earlier at the farmer’s market, rainbow chard and beets with greens, small sweet carrots and pears, snap peas, new potatoes, strawberries and prunes. Well, the prunes that come from a local organic farm are so good the problem there is not eating more than a few a day…

I didn’t want to but I just decided I am not going to do anything else. Just focus on the food, get it into condition to store it, no multitasking or listening to podcasts or the radio or working on something else as well and after about a grumpy hour I started to feel so much better.

And then I got slightly snockered on orange juice and vodka and retied early and slept incredibly well.

Sometimes on the rare occasion that I do drink, I drink mostly vodka and I can sense Mr. Finch looking on with approval. He knew he couldn’t drink it anymore because it would kill him (and in many ways it did) but he liked it that I could.

Grief memoirs seem to be all the rage these days. There is a review of the new memoir by the poet Elizabeth Alexander The Light of the World who lost her husband unexpectedly at 50 in the April 26, 2015 New York Times Book Review. One wonders now if Sheryl Sandberg will write one after the tragic loss of her husband this weekend.

While waiting for the lovely M. to finish singing at the second service yesterday I visited our small very selective church bookstore and was interested to see the memoir shelf was full, while many of the other shelves were not.

I had a lovely day yesterday with church, a hot chocolate with S. and a wonderful Chinese vegan meal with M. There was a trip to the grocery and more cooking (beets and carrots in ghee with a little maple syrup) and a trip to the gym!

At this gym they have those old fashioned rolling stair stair-master machines. It was fun to see how I did and I did just fine. I have never been able to do those in the past, as they were too hard.

There was an incredibly patient young woman working with a remote on a flat screen television with about a thousand channels helping this quite old man find something he wanted to watch. I noticed it was almost all men in the weight area. That is a shift. Maybe it is just this particular gym. But I wonder if outside of senior programs and folks working with trainers if women are not weight training these days.

I shall investigate and report back. :)

Last updated May 04, 2015