Hi Mom and family,
Written Friday morning:
It's 7:30 AM, and I'm sitting in bed with my coffee, looking out on the garden outside. Dale Sr. is still fishing at Roosevelt Lake. While I certainly would not like to live alone most of the time, it's been nice to have the house absolutely quiet for a couple of days.
It's really something to realize that 26 years ago today I had just had my first baby, who of course was Dale Jr. I was sitting in the hospital room and no one came to tell me why they'd taken him away and not brought him back (he was in the ICU unit because of fluid in his lungs). Things have changed a lot since then!
Yesterday morning I finally got on the scale, and as I've feared, I had gained five pounds more during the fun but stressful time of Lyssa's visit and the pizza party. I now weigh 194, almost twenty pounds heavier than I was when I went to British Columbia for Waylon's birth. This was upsetting, but it was a relief that I'd finally get the courage to "face the music." Getting on the scale again is always the first step which puts me back on the road to eating a healthy amount of food.
I still felt very tired, all around the eyes. There was a mound of dishes in the sink, and I still hadn't finished the beds to plant the squash seeds and pepper plants.
I was still very upset about Republican candidate Ted Cruz' comment about cordoning off Muslim neighborhoods in the U.S. It had been my one hope that the Republican convention would somehow not nominate Trump, but apparently their runner-up is of a similar xenophobic turn of mind. I have that sinking feeling I had in 2003, and remembering that that horror turned out so much more tragically even than I feared does not help at all.
At that time I wrote many letters to people in government, saying that the war they were embarqing on would be a disaster and would sow the seeds and breed many more terrorists. They didn't listen to me, and though some political commentators refer to the Iraq war as one of the causes of the so-called ISIS, it isn't discussed much.
David Brooks, the Republican commentator who regularly appears on both NPR and PBS, said that the reason that he and other Republican strategists were taken by surprise by the Trump candidacy, was that they made the error of not conferring with all classes of Republican voters. He said that the white working-class vote, which they have depended on but not understood, has now made its anger and frustration loudly heard. He vowed that in the future he would mix with a larger variety of people, so that he would have a more complete understanding of what the population thinks.
Yesterday morning I did some much-needed watering, mostly in the lot across the street. Everything was still alive, but the baby ocotillo had lost half of its leaves, so the watering was just in time. Later I drove to Tempe for my Arabic lesson, and back out for drama club rehearsal. Spent about an hour in Starbuck's on the way home, doing the blog.
An e-mail from my friend Laure said that she had got a paying job, full-time, from the Jewish Family and Children Services of Phoenix, where she has been interning. She will be starting in early June. I am very excited for her, and the job offer is a validation that her late-in-life career change was the right one. By taking this job and quitting her teaching job, she will be losing up to 20% of retirement money from the school system. But by taking it she will be counseling full-time, which is what she so wants. (Many of her clients are Spanish speakers, primarily, and I'm certain that her fluency in that language was a factor in her obtaining both the interning position and this job offer.)
My plan had been to get a lot of things accomplished yesterday (Thursday) and do an eight-mile walk today. But except for going down to CostCo to order some prints to take to friends at the Renaissance Festival, all I ended up doing was a little digging in the garden and a lot of lying around. It was very pleasant to sit reading with a cup of coffee on the patio after my shower, so peaceful with no TV on in the house.
In the evening I watched Learning to Drive, a movie which I'd bought at CostCo. I liked it very much, Ben Kingsley was great as the Sikh driving instructor. I forget the name of the actress who played opposite him, but I was very taken with her also. And we can sure use anything which portrays the situation of immigrants in a sympathetic light.
Written Friday evening:
In contrast to yesterday, I got quite a bit done today. I actually finally unpacked the shredder from the Office Max box (which it came in when I bought it two months ago!) and used it to go through 12 inches of papers. Actually only a small percentage of those papers had information that needed to be shredded, most of it could go right to recycling.
I have at least half a dozen boxes of papers which need to be gone through/shredded/recycled. When I've done that, there will be a place to put some of the stuff which at the present time is sitting on the floor of my so-called guest room. So it felt like an important step to finally start on that process.
I planted squash seeds in one bed and sunflower seeds and wildflower seeds in another. First I flooded the sunken beds and used the water to level them. I sure could feel the extra stomach where the twenty extra pounds are situated, bending over to plant the seeds in the sunken beds! All that remains is to buy pepper plants and get them planted.
The rest of the afternoon was also spent in a useful manner. I washed almost all of the "mound of dishes" still left over from all that entertaining. I bought tickets for the weekend of April 1st-4th, for Berkeley. (That's Friday to Monday, because Tamika is going out of town that weekend.) I picked up the photo prints I'd ordered in CostCo yesterday.
Love,
Lennie
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