Start me up
What I want to do with my blogs here is make them a bit more cohesive in their content. Over on Ragnar, I want to keep it mostly a commentary type thing, and here I think I want to just keep it a bit more personal. The idea, I think, is that if anyone likes to follow these (and there are quite a few, according to my stats - NOT bragging about that, please be clear), I don't want to mix up my personal stuff with how I see the world around me topically. Mostly anyway.
It's February 1st, Sunday afternoon as I write this. Nothing spectacular to report, but this is going to be kind of a record of the place and time that I'm speaking from. Snow is on the ground outside, just a light coating of a few inches. No six foot snowbanks like there was back when I was a young whipper snapper. But it's a cold winter for the first time in a long, long time. It's been a while since it was a rare event where there are plus temperatures in the winter (celcius here in Canada). It makes me realize how much I've grown to loathe the cold. I just don't find any joy in it! If I have to load up on clothes to merely go outside, it's already hindering the right to have fun, for me. I'm 60 after all, and I can't do the frolicking thing in the snow. Walking is also difficult with boots for me, where my right foot will rebel against whatever boots I'm wearing. I think ever since I broke that foot when I worked at the tissue plant back in '91, it's been a little frigged up. Man, what a year that was! Everything turned upside down in life for me over those few years, starting then. I got what I thought was the "big job" for a career in my life, and everything else around me was in place for a bright future. Then the puzzle was broken apart and left several pieces missing. Such is life. Who gets a free ride? Nobody. This was the stone on which I was to sharpen my blade, which would take decades. I had to start somewhere.
And here I am now, 35 years later. I can reflect a bit on those times in a very different perspective. Today I've grown to be grateful for the lessons life has taught me, though there are times that I need the clock to pass a few revolutions before I can see that clearly. I know today that everything I've gone through just prepared me for what was to come down the line. Life itself is education. It isn't punishment. I feel like suffering is a necessary part of life now, but you can learn how to deal with it. Without suffering a little, how do you appreciate the little things?
More than that, I think, is that I ponder how others feel, having gone through things that are similar, and I sympathize. Sometimes, I believe, we have to drive that long, rough, pothole-filled road so that we may warn others who are about to embark on it. And thus, the world evolves. Or de-evolves sometimes.
I'm looking at Marvelous Marbles Hagler, the legendary MMH, looking out the window under his BatCat persona. There's an old end table from my Mom's furniture set she had back in the 70's and 80's that he uses as this perch to peer out. This little guy is a necessary staple in our lives. He goes where we go in the house. We are a solid three person unit here. Yes, person - we talk to him, and we also supply his voice to talk back. This brings joy to us. Our little buddies who have passed, Rocky and Crocky, have their voices too, only we *channel* them in whispers. It brings comfort to us. We believe very much that life never ends. It just continues on somewhere else when we're done in this world. There are ghost stories within these walls where we could swear we hear our spiritual buddies roam around. Marbles has been with us for a full third of our lives. He'll be 20 this summer. Still as loyal as he ever was.
Janice, my lovely wife of 28 years, is doing spectacularly these days. When the new year hit, I thought I'd map out a new journey for us. That being cleaning up our diets. I'm pretty dedicated to help bring her inflammation down, and then mine in the process, although she's the one with issues in that regard, battling a host of things like chronic arthritis and fibromyalgia. Her weight is gradually dropping, and she's at the low 170's for the moment, like me. Today she's smaller than she's been in decades, and according to her, it's the best she's felt in recent memory at least. I've learned to bake our own bread, which is a sugar free, multigrain recipe that makes for a heavy loaf, loaded with protein, and great as toast with a little butter and honey. It's a daily treat for us, minus the honey which Janice isn't much for. We'll have some of that with a coffee often at the beginnings of our days. Yup, I drink coffee now, but only a specific type. Instant coffee with International Delight Vanilla Toffee Caramel flavor, lactose free. It's a real treat.
And I'm experimenting with recipes for meals and stuff too. We wanted to decrease drastically our sugar intake. We'll share some chocolate for dessert. The trick here is, we're engaged in intermittent fasting, where we allow a three hour window or so to actually eat, in the evenings. I like the Uncle Ben's Fast 'n Fancy rice a lot, so I went on Gemini the AI and asked it for a knockoff to make it myself, and wound up with something even better. We hiked up our vegetable portions and lowered the meat portions. We've ditched the deep frying and all seed oils. Eliminated our snacking mostly, allowing ourselves a treat every so often, but we hate breaking our fasts, which has gotten easier the more we do it. Rewarding, even. We do the gym three times a week, doing workouts in the hour to an hour and a half range. Janice's arms and shoulders are busting out of her skin - she's pretty fierce at the gym. Her legs are shrinking and growing at the same time, as the excess is being shed revealing the muscle underneath. We do not skip leg day, as much as we'd like! The hardest leg day workout is the simplest - body weight exercises work the lower body every bit as good or better than any machines or plates would. It's hard to walk for a couple of days after that! But the results are unmistakable. What we really miss right now is our walking. We'll do a fair bit of it at the gym, but it's the outdoor marathon walks that we really miss. I've talked about that over on Ragnar in a post called "It's Love". We actually feed off all the energy around us. With a serving of cannabis to accent our travels, of course. We walk and talk for hours at a time, then have a beer and sit on our back deck when we get home. It's really quite magical. I give thanks everyday for what we've been given, and what we've earned.
Currently, I've been thinking a lot about what we might do to get an extension built onto our tiny house. This place has become a very different building from when we first moved in! We've essentially re-built it. New walls, new kitchen, new supports in the basement, new floors, new appliances... the one stubborn thing we need to update is the friggin' bathroom. Finding a handyperson to do it has been quite daunting. But like I said, the focus is kind of on finding a way to build an extension onto the back. It would be great to have a laundry room, a half bathroom and a spare room, especially if we're to stay here. It would benefit us to have an accessible bathroom downstairs, and a spare room for a guest or something. Plus the house would be far more sell-able with another bedroom, where there's really only one functional one currently. I've been into the whole mystic tell-the-universe what you want thing; to put it out there and let it happen. Well, Universe, there it is! To me, the Universe = God. Having a foundation for this extension would be pretty incredible if we could make it happen. I'd finally have a comfortable place to play my drums, which I never did since we've been here. I love playing, but the cramped space in the basement makes it uninviting and not a lot of fun. An extension room would be awfully great. We're talking money here, I know, and our house will be paid for come Christmas. I've checked out the reverse mortgage thing, and don't think we qualify because your property needs to be worth a quarter million freakin' dollars. These reverse mortgages don't seem to favor the lower income folks like us. Who knows what'll happen though. I'm wide open to the possibilities. In the meantime, we have to support our deck for one more year; it's actually detaching from the house. Why it was "attached" to begin with is a question for another day. But I think if anything were to happen with an extension, we should pay off the house first. We're in a great position in that we have no debt besides the mortgage, so maybe we can plan. We will need advice from those in the know.
Switching gears a bit, I have to say how much focusing on controlling the ego has been a massive game-changer for the both of us. I got a message from my nephew Shawn today saying how he took inspiration from one of my "muscleman" poses back on my Facebook days. That shocked me actually! But boy that made me feel pretty good. Still... I can not take a "selfie" anymore, or post pictures of myself. I'll post a picture of me WITH someone, but in my own humble view, I find taking pictures of myself a little too self-aggrandizing. And funny even. When I stop to think about it, posing for a picture of myself is crazy funny. Like you might as well make it funny. I've seen my buddy Tim do that a lot, actually look to get a laugh out of a picture. That's quite different. But anyway.... EGO.... I'm learning to be careful not to be too proud of myself. Maybe look more outward and be proud of others. That's what brings that feeling of God in my chest. I haven't gotten full-bore into the chakra thing, but I'm aware of it, and I can actually feel it when I meditate from time to time. The key to finding and feeling God is to bring joy to others. Speaking of Tim... one of the more enlightened individuals I know, whether he believes that or not... I get what he says when he almost feels selfish in giving as much as he does, because of what he gets back in joy when he gives. That's the ticket, Laddie. Giving to receive. There's a lot of love involved there, and only good can come of it. It's a bit frustrating because when someone gives so much, you kind of feel a debt. But the trick there is, you can pay that debt by putting that energy out into the world around you and helping someone else. Maybe, just maybe, my writing on these blogs does some of that? I won't assume that, but I will hope that it's true.
There's a lot I want to write about here, because it's time-stamped, and I want to look back on it one day with a bit of clarity. I look back now on some of the stuff that I wrote years ago, and although I'm a bit mortified at my chain of thought back then sometimes, I can see today the growth I've experienced. And thus I look forward to what's ahead. The things I've learned since then are going to help shape what's to come, and indeed, navigate those potholes in the road that are still ahead.
Good day!
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