All a Bit of a Blur in Everyday Ramblings

Yes I know it is blurry. Think of it as painterly. For days there hasn’t been enough light but I wanted to get a shot of the upper track next to the lilac garden where I often walk when the public track is either too busy or like yesterday morning when a mentally ill homeless woman was unpacking her suitcase in the middle of it and yelling.

Late this morning we started to get clearing and it is warm and summery and gorgeous out now.

I am doing well. Today is the first day my stomach doesn’t hurt from all the drugs and lack of solid food. I was thrilled and excited to have scrambled eggs, polenta and a little Parmesan for lunch.

Considering how many stitches I have you would think I would have more pain but so far so good. I haven’t needed to take anything for that today. I have never been so grateful for steroids in my life. I can tell the swelling would have been over the top without them.

The cats have been paying a lot of attention to me. They have been excited to have their servant around for days. There has been much sleeping in a pile.

I picked up a sturdy thistle cage today for the finches but so far I have only attracted some curious chickadees and a whole gamboling mess of house sparrows.

Plenty of finches were coming to my tube feeder but so was Mrs. Squirrel and some of her cohorts and a lot of seed was ending up on the patio floor and that means I need to sweep it up every night because of Mrs. Raccoon and her one kit this year. They are huge. Three times the size of the cats.

Otherwise the sparrows and the jays and the juncos and the squirrels themselves would be back to clean it up but I absolutely do not want to encourage the raccoons. Not with windows open to screens. They are coming in daylight too.

I finally finished a murder mystery by Cara Black I started almost three weeks ago yesterday. It takes place in Paris and I did enjoy all the place descriptions but it was dark in a way that I found difficult to read. I guess, dark in a real way. This was the latest in the series but takes place both during WW II and in 1989.

In audiobook format, when I walk, I am listening to the Self-Compassion book and she gives an excellent and compelling explanation of the difference between self-esteem and self-compassion and how this whole idea of bolstering children’s self-esteem that we have been focusing on in our schools for the last how ever many years is just giving young people an inflated sense of their actual abilities and not helping them deal with disappointment and failure. Something we all need to be able to do to be well-rounded social animals.

She also talks, in a very timely way, about the rise of narcissism.

I personally have had about enough of that lately.

Kes is also reading and listening to this book so it is fun to be able to talk to her about the exercises and the insights we are having about this material.

I am also listening to the Great Courses Mythologies of the World lectures. This morning it was about Persian myths and poetry and was fascinating as I don’t know that much of that mythology.

I am watching (slowly) the beautiful action epic The Assassin from last year. The fabrics alone are worth seeing and the sound track (so far) is full of drums and bird song. It won Best Director at Cannes.

And I spent part of the day catching up on Performance Today. I am always behind on that.

Tomorrow it is back to work. I am so lucky to be able to work from home and I don’t have any meetings either so I can sort of captain my own ship.

And then I teach. It will be fabulous distraction from mouth remodel land.

I am holding that thought.

Last updated July 24, 2016