Out and About in Everyday Ramblings

I took this midmorning today up in the hills. This is the side yard of the castle house, the folly house that had the giant chocolate Easter bunny in the yard a year ago. I have been doing a lot of walking in the last few days. Making up to some extent for the downtime after this last dental surgery.

Things I currently do not take for granted…

*Mail Delivery to my residence. (Someday this will happen again)

*Putting out my trash without having to unlock the bins. (Someone has already made off with one of the locks)

*Being able to chew. (I am eating a lot of cherries and grapes and bananas still but oatmeal was a good suggestion that I hadn’t thought of.)

What I am thinking about…

*The new trash pickup and disposal system in Taipei.
article link here

The new book: Siddhartha’s Mukherjee’s The Gene: An Intimate History. I am listening to the audiobook as I wander around town. It is very good. He makes all this complicated stuff accessible and even slips in a little joke now and then.

The fact that not only did my poem not win the poetry contest, it didn’t even place and how having absorbed this discouraging news for the last few days and telling S. as we were walking this morning about it she said, “Get over it!” That made me laugh. She’s like that.

“Maybe the winning poem was better than yours. Read who won and figure out why and keep writing and submitting.” Easy for her to say. She is right of course.

My Monday class on balance. How do I entice folks to try things that make them wobble (in a safe entertaining way) and feel unstable to build awareness?

I finished The Iceberg.

I have Big Magic Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert from the library too and only a week to read that.

Weight Watcher’s is testing a new app that connects people who go to a particular meeting to each other. I have a regular meeting I go to and there are lots of folks who have lost a great deal of weight that go to it as well as a number of folks who are in the middle of the struggle. This is Weight Watchers and their technology is really not all that great so it was a struggle figuring out how to get into the Beta version today. Plus the cats were trying to help. We had to take a play and snack break. I am in though.

It is good to have access to these folks all the time when food decisions are being made in a private forum. Facebook was just too public for me to talk about my challenges. It might even motivate me to cook more once I can chew.

I got the coolest nesting glass prep bowls last week. I like assembling all my ingredients in an orderly way before I start cooking something.

I signed up for a meal in a Mason Jar class in a few weeks. It is short but hopefully will be inspirational.

My New Year’s Eve First Run companions have invited me on a day hike and barbeque somewhere I have not been before with this intrepid group of older women next weekend and I am going to go, this is all part of the slowly evolving preparation for a seamless move into retirement in four years.

It has been fun to watch S. make her much feared but relatively smooth transition over the last 18 months. She is going on a bike trip with Road Scholar through Amsterdam in September. Her biggest worry is the bike seat and making a few connections on her own to Bruges as the friend she was going to go with had to cancel. She is an excellent role model, as is Kes.

All of these people are retired nurses. Interesting…

Last updated May 22, 2016