I'm enjoying these winter mornings, quiet except for the crackling of the fire. It's been cold enough that the fire has not succeeded in heating up the room, at least, not as far as the recliner where I sit to write my blog after Dale Jr. has left for work. Even under a fluffy comforter and wearing a sweatshirt over my flannel night gown, and a knitted cap, I'm still not quite warm enough. Gazing at the tree, so pretty.
I had more photos to put on this blog, they seemed to have disappeared. The computer offered to scan my photo card and remove problems, all but one photo per day seems to have been removed and replaced by photos from the 25th! Very weird.
(Nancy, I have asked Sandy to save this week's New York Times for me, and to leave it on the bed in the office upstairs. So if you see it there, that's why. I like to go through it every year as there are sometimes articles I want to save, articles about the most important issues this year. If I ever write my life story, I would like to go back and refer to these articles.)
Monday I went with my friend Laure to buy her new tires for her truck. The 600 I had withdrawn from the bank covered their "good" tires, not their best. It felt good to do something to make a dear friend safer in her nightly, exhausted drive into Phoenix to do her four interning counseling hours a night (even though six months of her phone bill minus six months of my phone bill would have bought her the same tires).
I took a photo of Laure at Discount tire with a big smile on her face, but it was one of the photos which disappeared.
The day before yesterday, at Starbuck's, I had tried sending Christmas Day photos to the group Hodges-Mitchell-Gray Facebook page. When I left an hour later, they still hadn't finished sending. So I was very pleased, yesterday, to find that they had indeed gone through, and that there were lots of enthusiastic comments from the Grays, from Hamilton (who seems to be the only Mitchell who participates), and one from our Rebecca.
The afternoon I drove into Tempe for my Arabic lesson. I showed my tutor the Christmas photos on the slideshow and we wrote sentences based on the photos, such as "my mother is holding baby new (of) older son (of) oldest-her son". In Arabic there is a lot of use of "of" as a way of defining a noun, except they don't even use "of" rather if a noun is followed by another noun it means "of" that word. If a noun is followed by another noun you don't put the definite article before it, because the noun after it makes it definite. (I put that in for our linguist Kathy, who sometimes reads this blog.)
By the time I got home it was quite cold; I had stopped at Jo-Ann's to buy some indigo-blue cotton to make a jacket. (They have a nice selection of cottons there, my theory is that it's because the Mormon ladies make a lot of quilts.) I had planned to return to Starbuck's to finish checking my e-mail, but just felt like crawling into bed.
Yesterday I went to see the film "The Big Short" with my friend Merrill. She drove us both to the movie, which was excellent, really powerful, originally filmed with edgy fast-paced interjections of humor, and excellent acting to boot. I'm so glad I saw it. It feels good that even if those crooks in the real estate bundled bubble didn't end up going to jail, they will now find themselves re-installed in the dungeons of public opinion.
When we came out of the theater it was really cold. We went to dinner at the nearby 'On the Border' a Mexican food chain. The only time I ever eat in chain restaurants is when I'm with Merrill, or with Dale Jr. and his family.
I had kept my food intake at 1400 calories Monday, and the day before. Yesterday's dinner in the restaurant, even though I didn't eat the whole thing, was still much more food than I can continue to eat per meal if I wish to get rid of this larger stomach I've put on.
I've been keeping track for four days now. I will have to diet for five weeks if I wish to lose these ten pounds I've put back on, by the Berkeley High School fiftieth reunion.
Here is my "reality check" chart. The zeros are for exercise, as I haven't done any yet, and the other checks for meds and for water pik use.
I need to go buy some vitamins at the health store for Dale Sr. and me. We haven't taken them for a long time. Before this year, we were taking a natural daily vitamin plus a 2000 vitamin D pill and a Omega-3 oil capsule.
You may remember that when I was in Brussels in September I walked to the EU headquarters (a mile from the old town area) and had my photo taken proudly in front of it. I just was reading an article in the New York Times Magazine of the week before last, and saw a recent photo of that EU building with waist-high barriers all around it, perhaps from fear of someone driving a car-bomb into it. Very sad.
The article also had a photo of soldiers with guns on the Grand Place, the town center (where I enjoyed coffee at the Starbuck's outside tables while I planned what I would see that day) and where I also enjoyed the lively Green Day festival. So it was sad to see that photograph too.
You might be thinking, "Well, if I was in Brussels I wouldn't have coffee at Starbuck's." Well, all of the other outside tables on the Grand Place seemed to all be attached to restaurants where people were eating a whole meal, and that meal much more expensive than the restaurants on the little side streets. So Starbuck's turned out to be a nice inexpensive place to sit down for a while, rest my tired sight-seeing legs, and survey what was, at that time, a cheerful scene.
Love, Lennie
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