Weekly recap of my ritual of existence in this liminal space called life. (See here for more info.)
- Weather
High temperatures ranged from 53.3°F on Sunday to 31.6°F on Thursday this week, with an average high temp of 46°F. Lows ranged from 9.5°F on Friday to 36.5°F on Sunday, for an average low temp of 24°F. We got a little over 1/10 of an inch of rain between Tuesday and Wednesday, and about 3/4 of an inch on Saturday/Sunday. It was very windy on Thursday. No snow fell. There’s still some snow on the ground but it’s not covering the ground completely anymore. Seems like spring is about a month ahead of itself this year so far.
Inside & outside weather:
- Beginnings
Sort of? I delivered our tax information to our tax guy on Monday. There’s one more piece we have yet to receive but most of my effort on it is over.
Related to taxes, I completed the transfers this week necessary to add my 2023 max amount to my Health Savings Account. It’s a pretty painless process and now it’s there for medical deductibles and dental bills. I realised doing it this time that I have only a few more years to add this non-taxed income to an HSA.
I placed a small order for flower and veg/herb seedlings on Wednesday, for pick up in May from a small farm about 45 mins away from us. I’ve been ordering or picking up my seedlings — and buying annual flowers and large native shrubs, trees, and perennials — from her for about twelve years now. I also rely on excess seedlings friends that grow.
- Flora, Fauna, Fungi
- Wandering
I got in a walk every day this week for the first time in a while: Long in-town walk on Monday (to drop off taxes), walk around the pond (twice) in Hanover on Tuesday, 5.25 miles on the treadmill on Wednesday while Zooming the Botany in a Winter webinar, a couple of smaller in-town walks on Thursday, an hour-long in-town walk on Friday and a shorter one (with friends) on Saturday, then the three-mile walk around the lake on Sunday, when it was in the 50°Fs. Looking forward to more trail walking once the ground isn’t icy or so muddy.
Hanover – Occom Pond walk on Tuesday:
Walking around the lake on Sunday:
Merlin heard (and seen/heard by us) birds at the lake on Sunday:
- Curiosity & Discoveries
We took a 1.5-hour casual tour (pop into a space, ask questions, look at things, pop into next space) of a local farm’s greenhouses, something I’ve done several times during late spring or summer but never at this time of year. This week we saw many veg/herb/flower seedlings being grown in various containers and conditions, and learned about the new woodchip furnace and silo, and the semi-high-tech control devices and circuit board for the remote/automatic lifting and lowering of shades, the sliding back and forth of doors, windows, and other greenhouse pieces, and the monitoring and controlling of temperature and humidity in all the houses. Fascinating! So much work that’s not actually gardening — but is math, electrical and mechanical work, detailed planning and contingency planning, etc. — that goes on. Kudos to our local farmers. And their local barn cat, Cole.
- Creating
I wrote three more poems for my Write 28 Days challenge before it ended on Wed. And created new images to go with those.
- Repairing and Maintaining (everything but the house)
Body/Mind: I took another Covid rapid test on Tuesday – still negative. I started taking the Blis Throat Health lozenges on Tuesday, when they were delivered, and by Wed. evening I felt all better; I can’t attribute my healing to the lozenges since it might have just been a time-limited cold but for now I’m continuing to take them (they taste good!). I worked out 4 times this week (4 hours) and walked quite a bit.
Botany in a Winter continued on Zoom (while treadmilling) on Wed. — we started dicots! A whole new world! Many of these early genera and species are early flowering plants.
I attended via Zoom a Dharma Sunday talk and small workshop on Sunday, called Drinking Poison to Awaken, with Santiago Jiménez, a Colombian Zen Buddhist monk; we explored greed.
Cat: I cleaned the cat’s litterbox (scrubbed it, all new litter) on Thursday.
Yard: I cleaned out the heated bird bath on Wednesday. Yuck! It looks so nice now.
- Nesting
Food: Made a old standby penne dish with roasted asparagus, toasted pine nuts, parsley, chives, pecorino Romano cheese, chicken stock (chick-un stock in my case), and lemon juice on Tuesday after finding nice asparagus in a store that day. On Thursday I made another standby, one from our Ice Storm of ’98 days in Maine (7 days with no electricity or tap water), which is a combo of canned tuna, Annie’s mac & cheese, and green peas. We had it with a sliced raw red pepper for a few dinners and with a small salad of fresh (local) baby kale, arugula, cut carrots, and kalamata olives one night. Sunday night I made a Cajun cod recipe a friend gave me several years ago, which is just cod fish in an Old Bay/vinegar marinade, pan-cooked. Served that with fresh sautéed spinach. There are leftovers for tomorrow night, with garlic & herb rice pilaf and frozen Winter Blend veggies. I used the baby kale lightly in a lunch of leftovers (plain penne, pan-fried artichoke hearts, plus pecorino Romano) for lunch on Saturday:
Supplies: We received the (free) recalled replacement fire extinguisher this week and sent the old one back via FedEx. This week we also ordered a spare soft crate for the cat, to be kept in the bedroom for emergency situations, and another Winix air cleaner for the family room (we’ve already have one in the bedroom for the past 2-3 years).
Maintenance/Cleaning: I vacuumed the sunroom (full of birdseed and probably tracked-in bird and squirrel poop) on Sunday afternoon, which took an hour and there’s still another hour or two of work in there to make it spring-ready. Husband vacuumed the kitchen and set the robovac on the bedroom and family room this week.
- Sleeping & Dreaming
I slept an average of 7 hours and 39 mins this week, with a high of 8 hours 3 mins on Monday night and a low of 7 hours 19 mins on Tuesday night. My average sleep score was 85.9, which is somewhat low for me. I had a high score of 90 on Monday night and a low score of 83 on Wed. night. I don’t feel I am sleeping all that well lately, but then I was in a conversation this week about sleep scores (Fitbit and Apple Watch) and found out that other people get scores fairly routinely in the 40s and 50s, which I’ve never had in maybe a decade of wearing a FitBit. If I get a score in the 70s to low 80s I’m usually feeling draggy all day.
Dreams ran apace, the usual many and vivid, and I recorded only a few of them, which were long and complicated.
- Reading / Words & Ideas / Listening / Watching
LISTENING
On Friday, I listened to ‘Food, we need to talk’: Finding a better way to discuss our bodies and what we eat at “On Point” with Meghna Chakrabarti. Her guests were Juna Gjata, co-host of the “Food, We Need to Talk” podcast and co-author of the new book “Food, We Need to Talk,” both of which she created with the other guest, Dr. Eddie Phillips, who is also an associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School. Really interesting.
Some interesting bits:
One of the callers, Gloria Zuroff of Sun City, AZ, said: “I learned about how my body should look from Seventeen magazine. This was in the early seventies. At the age of 15, I decided I would just eat less and exercise more, and I almost died. I was hospitalized and continue to struggle with that somewhat now that I’m 66 years old.”
I think many women who grew up in the 70s probably have some degree of body dysmorphia; I can’t speak to other age groups but given current media (social media and otherwise) depictions of and comments about women’s bodies, I’d guess it’s still pretty widespread.
Dr. Eddie Phillips: “And the people that are exposed to fatphobia, to weight bias, actually end up more unhealthy. And I’m ashamed to share that the medical establishment is sometimes the worst at this, where we — people report coming in for something clearly unrelated to their weight — you know, their arm hurts or they have a headache — and they get told to lose weight and they get stigmatized and then don’t come back for the normal care. So it is pervasive in the society. Just one other comment picking up on the speakers is that weight is used as a proxy for health. It is probably one of the worst measures, worst single measures.”
READING
I read this on Tuesday and loooovvvvved it. I implore you to read it, all. This Is Not Your Beautiful House by Tom Cox in his newsletter The Villager. You can read it as one long essay (best choice) or a number of smaller ones, themed on houses but diverging in many interesting and unexpected ways — cat flaps, Grey Gardens, castles, old punk bands, ageing — that tickle my fancy. It’s also available as a 26-min audio.
On Saturday, I read 5 Pranayama That You Should Make a Part of Your Daily Life, I can’t remember how I ended up there but now I want to practice Bhramari Pranayama, also known as the humming bee breath!, and Bhastrika Pranayama, also known as Bellows Breath. Pranayama is “the practice of controlling one’s breath, is an essential component of yoga.”
I’m about halfway through Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life: A Memoir (2005) by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and really enjoying the format and content. Here’s one entry that struck me:
Finished the last book (?) in Elly Griffith’s Ruth Galloway series this week. Ruth is a middle-aged archaeology professor in North Norfolk UK who’s multiply involved with the local police, including DCI Harry Nelson, his second in command Judy, and Judy’s partner, a druid named Cathbad. This one takes place in the 2nd year of the Covid19 pandemic and that virus is referenced a bit (spoiler: for one thing, Cathbad, who almost died at the start of the pandemic, is experiencing Long Covid symptoms). The mystery begins when the body of an archaeology student last seen 20 years ago is found behind a wall in a building, previously The Green Child café, being renovated. These are the coziest of the cozy for me, without being the least bit saccharin.
WATCHING
We watched the 1949 film A Letter To Three Wives this week; it “tells the story of a woman who sends a letter to three women, saying she has left town with one of their husbands without revealing which one.” It stars Jeanne Crain, Linda Darnell, Ann Sothern, Paul Douglas, Kirk Douglas, and Jeffrey Lynn, plus Thelma Ritter and Celeste Holm (in voice only). I enjoyed it.
- Connections & Community
Local Support: Shopped at the regional co-op on Wednesday. Bought about $50 in greeting cards from a local gift shop on Friday and, also on Friday, I donated money to Laudholm Farm in Wells, ME (once local to us) for repair of their beach trail after the Jan/Feb storms, and made a small donation to Maine Audubon for six upcoming webinars on various Maine animal species. Shopped at local farmstand on both Friday and Saturday this week. I did not buy these beautiful fungi:
Relationships: Ran into a good friend, whom I don’t see often, in a parking lot and caught up for 10-15 mins., on Monday. Wrote a long catch-up email to a friend on Tuesday. and exchanged longish emails with a few other friends. Mailed two birthday cards and a sympathy card on Thursday. My sister sent me a sweet and unexpected card this week thanking me for supporting her and her husband while he’s been so sick the last six months or so. My other sister called on Friday and left a message but we couldn’t connect over the weekend.
Salon met in person on Friday afternoon for 2 hours with five of us (so much laughing!), and permaculture group met via Zoom for an hour on Thursday morning with seven of us, discussing the chapter on wild joy. On Sat. morning, another couple and we walked to and from a greenhouse tour in town together. On Sat. afternoon, I watched a memorial service live-streamed on YouTube for someone I knew when I was in my late teens and 20s, who died recently (my sister attended in person, as she lives nearby).
- Endings
My Write 28 Days: Dream Poems project ended on Wednesday. I’m glad not to be writing a mandatory poem almost every day but I also miss doing it and am thinking I will continue writing them — or writing something — after a short break to catch up on other things.
What I really got from the practice this time is that when I sit at my desk with computer or paper in front of me and not a thought in my head about anything to say, I don’t have to wait very long at all before words and writing come pouring out of me. It’s actually always been like that for me, when I wrote poems and other pieces as a child, teen, and young adult, but I thought perhaps I’d lost that non-conscious connection with … my self? with my body or heart or soul? with the communal self or the interdividual self? with the cosmos? Who knows, but whatever it is, it’s still there, waiting to be accessed, and that’s comforting.
The cat enjoys the afternoon light in my office.
My Real Happiness Challenge meditation practice, via Sharon Salzberg, also ended on Wednesday, and I also miss that. I think I will start (revive) a daily meditation practice.
- All This Useless Beauty
I really like this artist’s bird paintings. Especially this one of oyster catchers, a beautiful bird I look for every day when we’re at Jekyll Island.
Featured image: primrose seedings at local farm