I have stayed up far too long, again, playing with the computers. Discovered a photo file I was looking for in the iPhone archive in the Cloud. Glad that I at least knew what date the photo was taken.
My blood oxygen level (SpO2) is 96%, but my pulse is even lower than normal (for me) at 56 bpm. No fever, but the allergic reactions are … annoying.
As a late supper, I had 114g of plain greek yogurt with 100g of thawed, sliced strawberries. My afternoon snack was 10g of very dark chocolate and a cup of Toddy coffee made with whole milk. I have been testing my blood glucose fairly closely while having allergy and sleep problems. While I got in 13 miles on the exercise bike, today (I’m figuring today as Wednesday, late), it was a mile short of Tuesday’s pace.
I don’t know if taking a nap in the late afternoon is helpful or irrelevant.
Woke up in the night (early Wednesday morning) and wrote a poem in response to the dream I was in. That was interesting. I know where it comes from. Similar themes have popped up in my writing, over the years.
Too late to get into it, tonight, but I remember taking a do-it-yourself classic depression inventory that had the most fascinating things to say about my thoughts on life. Huh!
I’m out of here. If I don’t get to sleep, tonight, I don’t get to wake up in the morning.
Nearby neighbors across the back fence make their telephone calls outside their back door. I suspect that they’ve siding on the house that interferes with telephone reception. Since they talk loudly, I have assumed that they are hard of hearing. I believe that they now have a speaker phone, because I was able to hear both sides of the conversation. Clearly and at length. Topic? Clogged drain pipes and what one can, should and should not do to clear them.
I am happy that when I am exercising in the gazebo with the windows closed, much of the neighborhood noise is shut out.
I must remember to keep my own voice and speaker volumes down while using my cell phone outdoors. ::sigh::
Most Monday mornings, the other of us gets up early to go off for a couple hours of volunteer work. I got to sleep in, since he lets the dogs out and then feeds them before he leaves. And after my five o’clock meal, when the dogs have their supper, I lay down for a short nap that lasted nearly three hours. And so I am up, still, and drinking “Himalayan Shilla” oolong tea.
The day was rainy with intermittent breaks between rain showers and thunderstorms. I managed to get in four miles on the exercise bike after my five o’clock meal, and then again after I awoke, just before nine-thirty, another four miles while reading a few more chapters in Imager’s Battalion, by L. E. Modesitt, Jr. The Scampers came out into the gazebo with me and lay about on the quilt on the floor, and I ran the space heater. It’s quite cool outside, these days.
I do not think that this is one of the years when my wildflower garden will continue to produce flowers into November. Or, possibly, not into October, either. I didn’t take a lot of photographs, today, although some nice ones of hoverflies on hawk-weed and wild flax flowers and a grasshopper sitting on the fence.
I also got my not-a-haiku poem written for the weekly Ronovan Writes Haiku poetry challenge. The prompt words were hero and coward. It is rare that I get a poem written to his prompts on the day the prompt is posted. A couple words I will change, once I think about it, for aesthetic reasons, but I’m pleased with the general tenor of the verse.
(For the most part, I post those prompt responses at QuiltedPoetry dot Net. A lot of my poetry also lands on TheWrittenWord dot Net, which was my business domain until I retired at the end of 2012, except for finishing up with long-term clients and projects.)
I think I can get to sleep, now. Leaving you with a photograph from September of last year, when we enjoyed an extra hatch of Painted Lady butterflies that hung around my wildflower garden and the entire back yard for weeks.
Rereading the poetry that I wrote during NaPoWriMo (April 2018), and came across “Tempted to Silence.” Called to mind a recent email from a friend, which, come to think of it, I should not remark on further.
Except to say that the friend wondered how (or why) I remain motivated. And I wondered, “how not?”
Now that I have reblogged it, I realize that I should simply have copied it here.
Tempted to Silence
as the years move on
as I move with them
or we go separate ways
I have less to say
there is less to hear
around me that inspires…
I don’t know what I miss—
words of kindness, uplifting
without self-serving thoughts
a different world, perhaps,
outside the door…with hope
for more than me and mine and yours
If I were alone, again
if there were no one to care
if I were there or here
I would take a lease
on a cabin in the woods
for enough years to die
listening to rain and bird calls
wind and ice and hearth fire
pencil scratching paper
Brewer: For today’s prompt, write a temptation poem. Nearly everyone is tempted by something: fame, glory, money, chocolate. Today is the perfect day to give in to the temptation to write about your (or “a friend’s”) temptation. Also, I totally understand the temptation to write about The Temptations today.
Tempted to Silence
as the years move on
as I move with them
or we go separate ways
I have less to say
there is less to hear
around me that inspires…
I don’t know what I miss—
words of kindness, uplifting
without self-serving thoughts
a different world, perhaps,
outside the door…with hope
for more than me and mine and yours
If I were alone, again
if there were no one to care
if I were there or here
I would take a lease
on a cabin in the woods
for enough years to die
Welcome to Weekend Coffee Share! While this is a good time to catch up with everyone’s news from last week, plans for the next, and current preoccupations (see our host Allison’s Coffee Share page for this week at her blog, Weekend Coffee Share), I must confess to being quite tired and feeling out of sorts. Accumulations of activities and commitments and expectations.
I finally got another electric water kettle, one with automatic shut-off and thermostat/temperature regulator, so that I can quit worrying about whether I turned off the burner, heating tea water in my larger sauce pan. This afternoon, I’m steeping an English Breakfast tea blend, ordered from Stash.
What’s burning?
I also replaced my two broken tea infusers and did some bulk buying of everyday teas (Irish and English breakfast tea), as well as smaller quantities of a good green tea and a variety of oolong teas in 50g and 100g packs. It’s been that long since I’ve indulged in tea. I mean, really indulged! I had been having Toddy coffee using milk instead of water for breakfast as well as a snack before going to sleep at night. Decided that I don’t want to spend so much of my carbohydrates allowance on dairy products.
I have been spending less time exercising, since the deterioration in Air Quality. My exercise bike is in the gazebo, but the building is not insulated, since we do not use it often in winter. We used decking for the floor, allowing air to come in from beneath and flow out through the open eaves, which usually keeps the structure cool enough to sit in. There are windows with screens all the way around that are usually open. Oops! Irrelevant!
I still am working on the “sort and toss” project to clean out my sitting room/former office. There are too many papers. I despair! 😀 I am getting outside with the dogs, each morning, and taking along my camera. The smoky haze does nice things for color saturation, and so I will have many, many photo files to sort through, this winter. I look forward to that.
Some of my favorites for this week are insects, whose photographs I will include here:
I have caught up on some correspondence, this week; that pleased me. I sent in reservations for a couple of homecoming activities, this week. Finally! Next on the agenda is to make a grocery shopping list, since I have put off buying food, most of this week. Mostly, because I don’t know what I might want to eat. But I’m running out of eggs, and I’ve eaten the rest of the ham.
There should be “go to” foods when one must eat, but cannot find enthusiasm for anything besides a cup of good tea.
Thanks for stopping by! The Scampers, having no trouble with their appetites, have decided that they need something to eat now…close enough.
Best wishes for your weekend and the coming week! I look forward to reading your Weekend Coffee Share posts, this weekend.
The year is 1943, Mom is in the Navy and Dad, in the Army. Dad is writing about the hypothetical house he and Mom will live in some day.
There will certainly be an open air porch of some kind in our house so we can watch and wonder at the stars at night. You seem so close to God when you are out under the stars. It gives you a funny feeling, a hollow feeling in your stomach, sometimes when you look at the stars and realize how small you are and how large the universe is. But someday man will discover all the secrets of the universe, but I hope not, I don’t know why I say that. But I hope he doesn’t.
And from another letter…
It started to rain this afternoon and it’s still raining at 9 PM this evening in a dispirited, disinterested sort of way. The aimless monotonous drizzle that reminds me of Minnesota’s mid-April when spring is a vague hope and winter is on the way out.
It’s the kind of a night you’d like to be with your favorite girl, her in your arms listening to the rain and the song of the wind in the trees. The nicest thing to be said for a night like this is that it puts you into the mood to imagine yourself someplace else, and when the morning comes, the weather has cleared. So weather like this isn’t so bad after all if you have any imagination.
The puppies are tucked into their kennels and sound asleep, the other of us is watching TV reruns in the other room, and I am enjoying my last pot of Stash’s Tieguanyin oolong tea. Not my favorite, I thought, but I note that it’s the first tea of that mail order that I’ve finished. Tea leaves are still wet, and there are extra teacups in the cupboard, if you’d like to try it.
If we were visiting together, this evening, I would tell you that I have felt much better, today, than yesterday and the few days previous. The air has, for the most part, been free from smoke. There was rain, and the morning was cold and wet, but I was able to get out to the gazebo and put in 7.5 miles on the exercise bike. Thanks to the space heater, which I turned to the “high” setting with the oscillator fan aimed at my feet and legs. If the smoke is not back before then, I would like to get out there and do it again. I am able to read while pedaling, thanks to my ebook tablet.
In addition to taking more photographs, today, I also dug out a photograph of last year’s Forget Me Not flowers in the back garden, and then I had to write a poem to go with it. ☺
Forget Me Nots
I would tell you that I found, later in the day, flowers with petals furled and folded in with bees tucked into them. I found several sites that reassured me the insects will hide away and wait for morning’s warmth if they cannot return to their hives or burrows because of cold or darkness. Mention was made of honeybees navigating by the sun. That makes sense to me. I will be sure to not worry when I come across them napping in my flowers.
On Saturday, we decided to go out for a quick supper at the local Denny’s Restaurant, where we got a free meal on account of using the punch ticket (buy 10 and get one free, I think). I think it’s a seniors thing (over age 55). We stopped for a few groceries on the way home.
We have to settle on which events we wish to attend at our 50th College Reunion celebration. Homecoming weekend is the last weekend of September and begins with several events on Thursday. Our wedding anniversary is the same week, and both fall within the 6-week photography online workshop I’ve enrolled in, which will make the week a bit crowded. I should make my first appearance at the event I most want to attend, in case I become ill (second-hand fragrances and/or smoke) and must miss the rest of the weekend. Fortunately, our college is in the town just across the river from the town where we live.
Have you attended any college or high school reunions since graduation? I went to one of my husband’s HS reunions and knew more people in his graduating class than I recognized when I attended a reunion of my own HS class. College reunions (I think I’ve gone to half a dozen over the last 50 years) have not been so bad, but the people whom one had hoped to see again mostly did not show up, and others remembered me, but I often didn’t recall either the face or the name…or either. I confess to not being good at recalling faces. I am better with names, but only if I write them down.
My teacup is almost empty, and so I am going to try to get some sleep, now. This has been, all told, an enjoyable weekend.
Thanks for stopping by. I don’t know about you, but I’m finding that writing these coffee share posts is somehow therapeutic.
Good morning! I am glad that you stopped by for coffee and a visit. If you’d showed up when I started writing this post…I would have fallen asleep, which would not have been good. The other of us turned out the bedroom light; I woke briefly, around 1:30 in the morning, to say “good-night” and once more fell asleep.
The photos above are of the western sky at 7:30, last night. No clouds, but smoke carried by the winds from fires in Canada. Are there Air Quality warnings where you are, also? There have been entire years when I have not resorted to taking an antihistamine tablet. but I have taken one three nights in a row, now. We do expect rain after midnight, Saturday, which is expected to clean the air.
My outside visits have been short, this week, due to the smoky haze. The smoke makes for richer colors in some of the wildflowers, light waves filtered through the particulates. I have enjoyed playing with the photo editing software, fooling around with the color balances and saturation.
If we were visiting together, today, at our house, there would be some new beverage options. Two of my tea infusers broke, this past week, and I forgot several times that I had a pan on the stove, heating water for tea. I had saved enough money that I could buy an electric water kettle at my favorite kitchen-wares store, along with replacing the infusers with stainless steel ones.
I can now heat water to the preferred brewing temperature for the various types of tea in the cupboard: green, black, and oolong. My favorite teas are oolong, but I like a nice, strong “breakfast blend” in the morning, once I’ve had my breakfast of Toddy coffee (mixed with whole milk, rather than water) and 10g of very dark chocolate. That’s 200 calories, 15g of carbohydrates, for breakfast.
The Scampers have been fed and made a couple visits to the back yard; they’re now taking an after-breakfast nap. While I was outside, I got a snapshot of the “clear” sky and morning sun. There is a smoky haze, but the sky is cloud-free. I am destined to put in the majority of my exercise, today, on the elliptical machine in the front room. Yesterday, I put in 4.5 miles on the exercise bike in the gazebo, and in the evening, 5 minutes or so on the elliptical, which is more strenuous (and less aerobics time?).
Smoke Haze
This week, I posted my #RonovanWrites #Haiku on my The Moments Between blog:
“Fooling Around With Flowers” post. I also reblogged several of my poems from years past. As my brother’s wife is in hospice care, my mind turns to thoughts of my late mother and her passions, and so I donated the remainder of my allowance for this month to the local food bank. I’ve certainly got enough books on my “to be read” list to carry me through not just the rest of August, but through the end of the year.
If we were enjoying a cuppa whatever (I’ve moved on to Irish Breakfast tea), this morning, in the front room, I would confide that the isolation imposed over the past years since my (medically necessary) retirement has become wearisome. It came on gradually, as my energy lagged, but still… I have become unaccustomed to actual interaction with people. I may never be well enough to brave the human-made environmental hazards that affect my breathing &c. I remember the years when I exchanged letters with people around the world via postal service. We grew busy as life moved on, more insular, and those contacts inevitably faded away; life’s focuses changed, people died. The Internet seems to be more ephemeral.
Thanks for the visit! I look forward to reading your weekend posts throughout the coming days. Best wishes for your weekend and the week ahead!
Lizl
Weekend Coffee Share is a time for us to take a break out of our lives and enjoy some time catching up with friends (old and new)! Grab a cup of coffee and share with us! What’s been going on in your life? What are your weekend plans? Is there a topic you’ve just been ruminating on that you want to talk about?
All are welcome! Just add your link to the Linky-List, and be sure to visit others and join in their conversations! The link will be open from Friday August 17 th at 7am (Pacific Time) until Monday August 21 st at 7pm (Pacific Time) to give us a good range of “weekend”! — Allison, host, at eclecticali.wordpress.com.
The Moments Between 