Welcome to 2019. I hope you are doing better than me – I’m currently fighting off a virus with the help of Tylenol Cold & Flu* (extra strength).
So, while the medicine is making it possible to sit upright and type, I thought I’d share with you what I’ve been thinking and planning for this next turn around the sun.
I’ve decided my word for this year is RECORD. I just don’t do enough of this and I’d like to see that improve in 2019.
To that end, I purchased this uber-cute Hobonichi planner, from Japan:
Hobonichi Techo A6 for 2019 – small enough to throw in just about any purse or tote bag. Filled with beautiful, fountain pen-friendly paper…
I came across a couple of booklets and packs of stickers at Michaels, and used them on the planner to help set my intentions for 2019.
Stickers decorating the inner cover.
And on the other side of the inner cover:
More reminders/inspiration on the flipside.
And here are my intentions, for 2019:
Turning the pages to a new year with new intentions…
My intentions are pretty modest, therefore do-able. I have realized from a couple of months of being on WW that I am not going to lose weight quickly. I was 9.9 pounds down just before Christmas and a bit chagrined to see the scale going down in 1/2 pound increments, week after week. But now I’ve come to realize that this is just how it’s going to be for my age and metabolism. And 1/2 pound per week is 2 pounds per month and that’s 24 pounds gone in a year. Which sounds pretty amazing to me, after all! Attitude: adjusted.
My other intentions include teaching myself how to paint with watercolours, racking up 10K steps per day on my Fitbit, making a record of each day in my Hobonichi (no matter how terse 🙂 ), and tracking my spending.
How about you? Any great plans for 2019?
Rock on,
The WB
*Not a sponsor of this post, although they could should be!
Hoo boy, it IS mostly dark these December days so I’ve been taking advantage of what daylight there is by hauling my sorry butt outdoors whenever I can.
Sun peeking over a riverfront building in ye olde Village on the River.Sun and shadow painting the path.
I’ve been noticing seed heads and pods and all manner of lovely wintery things on my walks.
Bullrushes caught my eye.And this: Blown milkweed pods at side of railroad tracks.
When it gets dark, it’s time to head home and throw on as much light as possible.
Let there be lights!!! Welcoming Yule…
Also: when it gets dark, it’s time to celebrate and visit with friends.
At my friend Mizzus J’s (far right) retirement gala party. Interesting story – Mizzus J and I met at work at a lab many years ago. Mizzus K (middle) and I met at work (another job, another lab) years later. Mizzus J and Mizzus K met for the first time at late hubby JD’s 50th birthday party and hit it off, resulting in Mizzus K working for Mizzus J (who now owned her own lab). Now Mizzus J has retired and Mizzus K has accepted the position of President. I feel proud and happy to have been a part of this!Visiting JD’s best man and his wife, who have become “lifers” in the Friends Department. Clearly my selfie game is not strong. Yes, M has been queried about playing Santa and is considering making it a post-retirement hobby, visiting nursing homes and such. And Mrs. M is not averse to becoming Mrs. Claus, and making it a duo.
I am not a night creature, anymore though. It’s damn hard for me to leave the house once the sun goes down, in the winter months. My natural inclination is to slip into jammies and wind down my day as soon as it gets dark. Like 5 pm. Seriously.
So no surprise here: I am ecstatic to welcome back the return of longer days and shorter nights, for my personal productivity if nothing else!
Getting too old for all these late winter nights. My eye makeup went the distance, even if I pooped out after several hours of dancing and celebrating.
The Changing Seasons is a monthly blog challenge hosted by Su Leslie, at Zimmerbitch. Check out her blog, to see how it’s done!
Wishing you all a happy New Year and a fantastic 2019!
As I am preparing to acknowledge and celebrate the Winter Solstice again, for the 2nd time, I’ve been watching a bunch of YouTube videos on the subject so I get an idea on how this was done historically as well as what people are doing now.
It’s very eye-opening, how many beloved Christmas symbols and practices actually arose from earlier religious practices and were neatly folded into the Christian celebration of Christ’s birth (spoiler: most probably didn’t happen on December 25).
For instance, the following arise from pagan traditions, and were co-opted by Christians:
“Christmas” colours – red, green, gold, silver
Yule log
Wassailing
“Christmas” tree
“Christmas” lights and candles
“Christmas” wreath
Hanging of mistletoe
Don’t get me wrong. I am not knocking Christmas. I grew up with this holiday and have many fond memories of magical Christmases with family and friends. But I’m at a stage in my life where Christmas is more a remembrance of those I’ve lost and as such, more reflective and less celebratory. It’s just not the same anymore. I don’t have any little people in my life right now – and may never have and that’s OK – so Christmas is no longer all that and a bag of chips, for that reason either.
(Plus I’m not a Christian so there’s that. I guess you could say I grew up as a cultural Christian, rather than an observant one. Historically, the Christian religion has only brought strife, division and pain to my immediate family… only my one sister has found any solace in it.)
But celebrating the Winter Solstice really resonates with me. I am becoming more and more tuned to the natural world once again so marking the shortest day of the year and welcoming a new solar year just makes more sense for me than a Christmas or New Year’s holiday celebration.
So I’m busy working on my intentions for the Solstice, and also learning what I can about this ages-old tradition of humans (especially those from northern Europe – the bulk of my genetic background) marking this special time of year.
This week, I was watching a cute video in which a guy played himself and a long-lost Viking explaining how to celebrate Yule. Video ended and I dove into my journal to write some thoughts down. Meanwhile, YouTube cued up and started playing another video (as it does) that I had not selected to view. In it, a cute little 20-something blond girl (hair in a braid, even) is discussing the myths of Santa Claus, etc. Innocuous, right?
Wrong! This video, produced by something called Red Ice TV, quickly devolved into a neo-Nazi, white supremacist rant about how us (Us? Not sure I want to belong, now) “hard-working, resourceful Northern Europeans” have had our culture appropriated by “lazy southerners” (Huh? Code for people of colour and Jews, I think) and we need to take back Yule traditions and make Christmas WHITE again. (Which doesn’t make sense, I know, but that’s what little Miss Hitler said.)
HOLY SHIT! I couldn’t have been more shocked if the video had turned into some wild porn orgy instead. In fact, I could have handled that a lot better than what I saw and heard.
I can’t stop thinking about it and that stuff like that exists on Ye Olde Interwebs, to infect people’s minds with hatred. I mean, I knew intellectually that fake news and hate speech exists in cyberspace. I had just never searched it out or come across it in any way until this week.
And now I feel so dirty.
I’m not going to link to the offensive video, as I don’t want it to get any more views than it already has.
All I can say is: Be careful out there, gentle readers – I’d hate for you to come across vile filth like this.
Straight teeth again! Pleased is an understatement.
Last week I finished almost 2 year’s worth of orthodontic treatment on my poor old choppers. Due to my nightly gnashing, they had gone from being relatively straight, to a right mess.
This is how crooked they were:
Every which way but loose (and straight up and down). Pushed in, pushed back, pushed over top of each other…Photo taken by the Ortho before starting treatment, January 2017. During my (thankfully, short-lived) brown period…
Once upon a time, I DID have straight teeth:
As a young teenager. Check out the granny glasses! Yep, it was the early 1970s!
Forty-five years later, I love my smile again. My overbite was corrected too.
You can bet I will be faithfully wearing my retainer every night from now until the end of (my) time, to protect my investment.
But the wind and rain soon stripped the trees and I struggled to find whatever colour was left:
Berries in the gloom
And then it wasn’t long before this happened:
Winter wonderland drive to work, November 13
And I did manage to capture one spectacular sunset:
November 14 Red and Navy sunset
But the snow didn’t last, and we were back to dull skies, clouds and rain and a dearth of colour:
Mill Run Trail, November 25
Clearly I wasn’t the only one that felt November needed some brightening up:
Well, this is one use for a poppy after Remembrance Day I suppose…
I noticed many things on the trail that I just walk on by, when the foliage is rich and lush:
I walk by this all the time, but this time I really noticed this stump and the stump behind it.The shapes of these oak leaves caught my eye as well.The beauty of a feathery pampas grass head…This scene, although kind of desolate, speaks to me.I don’t know what these are, but I do like the look of them…also that they provide some welcome colour!
And while I was noticing all these beautiful and delightful things, I felt like something was noticing me as well:
Eeeek! The trees have eyes!
I went to the Orthodontist’s office on November 26. Soon I won’t need to visit them anymore as I am almost at the end of my Invisalign treatment (yay!). This time, it was full-on Christmas decor:
A tree dedicated to the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team, of course! (For the hockey-mad clientele.)A corner dedicated to the Nutcracker Ballet, with Nutcracker and Mouse King (For the rest of us?).A view of the main treatment area.
These were some of my impressions of this overall mostly dreary November.
Hope yours was more colourful!
The Changing Seasons is a monthly photo challenge that anyone can join. Please visit Su Leslie at Zimmerbitch, for more information, and to see what others are posting.
Not interested in being sexually appealing to anyone anymore, but am def interested in being stronger! Plus, it’s a cute shirt.
When I was reviewing my progress towards my goals way back in September, I realized that once again I had proclaimed I was going to take better care of myself, and once again, I was not doing the same. So I reflected a lot on why that might be so. I mean, I know what I need to do (lose weight and move more), and I certainly know by this time, how to do it. Yet, nothing was happening. Which means two things, to me:
It’s a problem with my head more than my body.
I need help to be accountable to myself, as I have proven over and over again that I can’t stick with it when I try to do it on my own.
I turned to the Tarot for guidance, using my new Simple Tarot deck. I drew a 3 card spread with this question in mind: What do I need to know about starting a weight loss/fitness program?
Card 1 – Do it
Card 2 – Don’t do it
Card 3 – How to decide
Tapping into my own intuitive processes, for clarity of thinking and decision making.
As you can see, the cards told me what I already suspected: I could change my fortune by taking better care of myself or I could anticipate unwanted changes in my health; and the way to proceed forward was by using my intellect to strategically analyze the problem and my options.
So I spent a week or more researching differing ways to achieve my goal. I even drew up a little chart, listing all the ways I could do this across the top (on my own, Noom, Weight Watchers, MyFitnessPal, SparkPeople), and the attributes of each down the side (things like cost, syncing with my FitBit, online vs. meeting options, food and exercise diaries, etc.). Setting up this chart helped dramatically, in being able to see and compare all my options.
After this exercise, it was clear to me that Weight Watchers (WW) was the best option for me, in terms of what I considered important (a physical meeting and weigh-in, syncing with my FitBit, an app on my phone etc.). I was able to tap into a 50% off sale, so I signed up for a 6 month’s membership.
I was kinda surprised by this because, going into this exercise, I was against going back to WW. Decades ago, I went to WW for a long, long time – a long time because I could not hit the lifetime goal weight they had set for me. It took me many months to realize that it was unachievable for my body type, and eventually I had to get a doctor’s note to have my goal weight range altered to be one that was suitable and healthy for me. That left a long-standing bitter taste in my mouth about this program.
Going through the strategic exercise and doing the research on what WW was all about NOW made it the obvious choice, despite my lingering feelings about my past experience.
Seven meetings later (6 weeks on the Freestyle program), I am down just over 8 lbs. It has been quite easy so far. I’m enjoying the app, which even comes with a barcode scanner that tells you the point values of a food product. All of the leaner, healthier foods are 0 points (fruits, vegetables, chicken and fish) and there is literally nothing I can’t eat, if I want to. Which makes the program very easy to stick to. Forgot lunch and need to pick up something through the drive-thru? No problem. Want a glass of wine? No problem. Want popcorn and M&Ms to munch on while attending a screening of Bohemian Rhapsody? No problem.
Obviously I need to be making healthier choices on the regular, but it’s nice to know I can do these other things occasionally (and I have) as well, and still be achieving success in working towards my health goals. Because nothing gets my inner rebel activated faster than telling me I CAN’T do something. 😉
I’d like to need to lose more weight in order to be my healthiest, but for now I am just taking it day by day, week by week, month by month. I’m on a learning journey, I have decided. I haven’t set a goal weight yet – although at my last appointment my doc very kindly and without prompting gave me a note stating what SHE thinks is my healthy weight range – she must have run into the same problems with WW, at some point! I’m prepared to unpack any psychological hurdles that come up as I continue on this path. I’m journalling as these things come up.
For fitness, I am exercising every day via YouTube videos (mostly JessicaSmithTV), walking, and hiking.
And best of all, I’m having fun doing all of these things. There is no hardship involved, this time. Not at least so far. 🙂
So sorry I’ve been neglecting you of late. I’ve been uber reflective this past while (with no signs of stopping), and haven’t felt like/ready to speak of any of this on ye olde you. Which, although a little early, is not out of character for me, at this time of the approaching solstice.
Anyways, this post will be kinda short, as I did something to my back yesterday and I can’t stay comfortably in one spot for too long. Yeah, I was moving an empty shopping cart in the Costco parking lot and every muscle in my lower back seized. Weird. Both my parents had back problems (and Mom underwent several surgeries) and I thought I had dodged that particular bullet, but maybe that time is over? Hopefully not. Robaxacet and ice are my 2 new best friends.
So this week marked my 5th year as a widow. That’s 2 years longer than I was married (although we were together for 11 years, in total). To mark the occasion, I did this:
Tossed in the garbage can, finally. After 8 years.
Yep. Right after I got back from my honeymoon, I hung up my wedding bouquet in my office to dry it out, and there it has been every since. Over the years, I’ve kept looking at it and thinking I really should take it down, but then the phone would ring or someone would walk in, and after a while, you just don’t even see it there anymore.
So this week, on November 14th – the 5 year anniversary of JD’s passing and my entry into widowhood – I finally got up on a step stool, removed the bouquet from the ceiling hook it was suspended from, and tossed it in my trash bin.
I mean, what else am I supposed to do with this thing?
Nothing really means anything to me anymore about this relationship, since learning of his infidelity after his death. All my formerly wonderful memories have been tainted by this discovery, so I don’t even have those to comfort me. So why hang on to any reminders of that time?
At this point, I just feel meh about the whole thing. So many good things have happened since November 14th, 2013 that my married life feels like another, far distant life entirely. And that in itself, is a very good thing.
It’s been hard for me to blog this Fall. October is the month you realize there are not many days left you can head out with bare hands and a bare head. So that puts some urgency into my outdoor activities and causes me angst when I’m stuck indoors (looking at you, work!) on a beautiful day.
Luckily there have been some stellar weekends (although this cold, blustery, rainy one is not one of them) and I was out on the trails with my trusty iPhone camera in hand:
Fiery Foliage peeking through the treesWho says you can’t wear purple and orange together? Not Mother Nature, that’s for sure.
I don’t know if this was an exceptional year for fungus or not, but for some reason I noticed fabulous fungi everywhere I looked, this fall.
Brilliant Bracket FungusAptly-named Turkey Tail FungusI don’t know what this is (and neither does iNaturalist for sure, apparently). Way too many suggestions and none looked quite like this.I’m lichen this Wrinkled Crust lichen 🙂This one is called Bears Head Tooth. And it’s edible, though I didn’t try it. One of my fellow walkers did, and I see he is still posting on Facebook so that means he survived. 😉
As it’s almost Halloween, I thought I’d share some of the wild decor I saw at my latest visit to my orthodontist.
When one looks up…Where you end up when you don’t floss, I guess.
The Changing Seasons is a monthly photo challenge hosted by Su Leslie, of Zimmerbitch. Please stop by her blog to see the Changing Season, down under in New Zealand.
My sister is down visiting me this lovely Thanksgiving weekend, so this post will be short and hopefully mostly sweet.
I haven’t made any further progress on my mermaid painting, in case you were wondering. The weather has been good again and I’ve been going out on many a fall walk, to enjoy it. I hope to post some progress made by next weekend.
I occasionally dream about my late husband. They are not nice dreams. In the dreams I am anxious that he will find out I threw out (almost) all his stuff and completely overhauled his building since he died. A couple of nights ago when he appeared in a dream is the first time that I actually spoke up and told him that I knew he cheated on me. Which left me wondering what this means, when I awoke. I usually wake up and wonder why I didn’t confront him with this in the dream, so I guess this is improvement and healthy on the part of my psyche? Any dream interpreters out there with thoughts on this?
Like every other sane woman on the planet with internet access, I am disgusted by what is happening in the US right now. Looks like the patriarchy is not going away anytime soon. I had thought we were making (infinitesimally) slow but steady progress towards a more just world (for anybody, everybody…not just white cis males) since I was a child, but looks like any progress that was being made can be wiped out in an instant. Since Trump, the bigots, racists and misogynists feel free to come parading out of their closets and fly their freak flags openly. And this has spilled over to Canada too. WTF?
I could be (and maybe should be) losing my shit over this but I am just so tired of it all. Just. So. Tired.
I was a fierce crusader against injustice when I was a preteen/young teen and I got burnt out at a young age. My mother told me once that she and Dad were happy I was born too late to be a “hippy” because they were sure I would have run away to join Greenpeace to save the whales, the planet, whatever they were saving at that time (I forget). I probably would have too.
(Back then, one of my teachers at junior high told my mother that I carry the weight of the world on my shoulders. No wonder I need regular massage therapy for that area…hehehe.)
But not any more. I just want to be left alone to enjoy what’s left of my time here in peace. And Trump et al are fucking that up for me. Bringing back all the memories and the feels of what I have endured as a woman in a patriarchal society, and yes, #MeToo.
Anywho, since I can’t pretend I can save the world anymore, at least I can put on a kickass Thanksgiving dinner and enjoy the simple, satisfying pleasure of feeding, and spending time with, my family. Those that can make it to dinner, that is. Which is my plan for this October Sunday.
I wish the same for all of you. Give thanks today for what you can control, and – just for a moment, at least – forget about what you can’t.
September started out still blazing hot but now the weather is reasonable again, and perfect for heading to the woods.
Head to the woods I did, with a local group that took me to a brand new area, right off the trail I usually walk. I’d known of this side trail for years of course, but because it looked overgrown and in denser brush I was leery of going too far in by myself. When the group advertised a guided walk into this area I jumped at the opportunity.
We followed Chilligo Creek for most of the walk.Heading to a crossing point at the creek.One of our group refers to this oak as “The Mother Tree” 🙂The forest floor is full of fungus-y finds like this one.Fall is the time when the wild asters are the most beautiful.Another purple fall flower. According to iNaturalist, it is a knapweed.Beautiful bright red foliage of the Virginia Creeper spotted in the meadow.View of Chilligo Creek as it come out from under the highway. Taken from the side of the road, above.My pants were covered in “travellers” at the hike’s end. Another sign of the fall!Heading back from the walk, I took a moment to appreciate the beauty of the plantings downtown. They are putting on a show as well, as we cruise into fall. Hydrangeas are changing from white to pink and bronze.A few steps further, I took in the riot of chrysanthemums planted to celebrate fall in our downtown.Home again. Sipping wine and picking seeds outta my pants…a perfect end to a perfect walk in the woods.
Sublime. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have wild areas close at hand, with which to restore my soul.
This has been a Changing Seasons Post. The Changing Seasons is a monthly photo challenge, hosted by Su Leslie of Zimmerbitch.
