Five things that made me happy today – 5/31/21

Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming.

Alice Walker

1. Another mid 50s morning with scattered clouds and blue skies. Much warmer this afternoon – 77 deg.

2. I managed to get my Intentions Review for May written this morning. I also did the NYT Crossword Puzzle with no hints!

3. We ordered lunch from the Dining Room because they had Barbecue Pulled Pork for Al and Fried Chicken for me. We both got sides of home fried potatoes and corn on the cob with Raspberry-Peach Cobbler for dessert.

4. The laundry is all washed, dried, folded and hung up. Whew!

5. With the good weather we are actually going to meet in the Gazebo for Gazebo Group Happy Hour today.

How about you? What made you happy today?

Intentions Review for May 2021

My Star Word for this year is “Affirmation”. The internet says an affirmation is a positive statement of agreement.

I am a child of God, holy and beloved.

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future nor any powers, neither height nor depth nor anything in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Here are my intentions for 2021.

(After the dumpster fire of 2020, you’ll notice I’ve pared down my intentions for 2021, and I intend to hold them loosely.)

Physical Health

• Eat real food. – Check
  • Eat more vegetables – Asparagus, fresh tomatoes, yellow squash and corn on the cob are “first choice” in my menu rotation. I hope to start adding green beans, and lettuce salads as the month progresses.
  • Be sure to get 25 grams of fiber every day – Check
• The itch that plagued me a couple of years ago came back, but I got to the doctor and got a prescription for the anti-fungal that worked in the past.
  • I return to the dermatologist for a check on my face later in the month.
• Big Al and I got our second Pfizer shots on February 13th, so we’ve been fully vaccinated since the first of March!
• Al’s and my Primary Care Physician is moving to a specialty. We’re sorry to see him go. We have an intake scheduled with a new doctor later this month.

Emotional Health

• Remember that I am a child of God, holy and beloved.
  • If I can say it for me, I must grant it to every other person on the planet, whether lovable or not.
• Continue to post “Five Things that Made Me Happy Today” every day on my blog – Check

Intellectual Health

• Expand my leisure reading.
  • Major Pettigrew ‘s Last Stand  by Helen Simonson – finished
  • Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie – finished
  • The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie – finished
  • The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie – finished
  • Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry – finished
  • A Great Deliverance by Elizabeth George – finished
  • How to Avoid a Climate Disaster by Bill Gates – finished
  • Stargazer by Anne Hillerman – finished
  • Standing in the Rainbow by Fannie Flagg – finished
  • Beneath a Scarlett Sky by Mark Sullivan – reading
• Keep up with the national news daily without obsessing over it.
  • Listen to NPR – Check
  • Watch Rachel Maddow – Check
  • Follow Heather Cox Richardson for perspective – Check
• Participate in Creative Writing classes here at Franke Tobey Jones – I quit the class on the Personal Essay. The teacher seemed to think we were all 18 years old.
• I subscribe to the New York Times and try to work the crossword puzzle and read several columns regularly, including the cooking column.
• I subscribe to the Seattle Times and read several of their newsletters.
• I subscribe to the Washington Post. and read several of their newsletters, including Travel, Fitness, and Cooking.
• Support aspiring writers via Patreon and Substack – Check
• Participate in Great Decisions here at Franke Tobey Jones – I facilitated the session on the Arctic. There wasn’t much to talk about because the materials were written a year ago and were very general.
• I subscribed to MasterClass. I finished the course on thinking scientifically from Neil deGrasse Tyson. I’m now working through a course from Doris Kearns Goodwin about Presidential Leadership.

Spiritual Health

• Continue to participate in weekly Bible study, and weekly Worship – Check
• Continue with General Assembly Nominating Committee – No meetings yet

Social Health

• Tend the relationships I have at Franke Tobey Jones
  • Wellness Center – Gradually opening up, but no personal training yet. We are allowed to use the facilities WITHOUT masks if we are fully vaccinated.
  • Gazebo Group – We managed one in-person meeting at the Gazebo before the weather turned cold and rainy again. I have great hopes for good weather from here on out.
• Tend the relationships I have at Bethany Presbyterian Church Bible Study – Check
• Continue to connect regularly with family, virtually – Check

Social Justice

• Participate in Town Halls and face-to-face meetings with elected officials – Not much on this front (not too much need, either.) I follow my representatives on Social Media and send messages about things that matter to me.
• Support the Southern Poverty Law Center, the American Civil Liberties Union, and MoveOn – Check
• Support the election of officials who are champions for Social Justice issues – Check
  • Climate action
  • Racial justice
  • Health Care Availability
  • Wealth Inequality

Five things that made me happy today – 5/31/19 (Remembered)

1. Had a good breakfast with Bill, Sharon, and Daniel at the Lillian Pratt dining room.

2. They had never seen much of Point Defiance Park, so we visited the rose garden, the duck pond, and Owen Beach. There were a couple of seals fishing just off shore. Then we drove around 5-mile drive and saw the views.

3. They got all packed and headed out to take the car back to the airport and take the light rail to Seattle to join their tour headed for The Rocky Mountaineer train through Canada.

4. The Wellness staff took us to Owen Beach in the afternoon. I took it easy and just sat in the sun and looked at the water. The seals were still hanging around.

5. Got over 10,000 steps today for the first time since I got sick. And I feel pretty good.

How about you? What made you happy today?

Five things that made me happy today – 5/30/21

Chaos does not have to destroy us. The old world is certainly dying, but the shape of the new world struggling to be born is not yet determined.

Heather Cox Richardson

1. Mid 50s and hazy when I got up. It managed to be 70 deg. late in the afternoon after the sun came out. I had originally planned to sit on the back porch in the sun, but it was too cool to stay outside for long.

2. The fawns have been born and are out running around. One came bouncing down the fence line as I was drinking my tea. He didn’t look like he knew where his Mama was, but then he turned around and bounded back the way he came. They are so cute, but especially destructive to my flowers and bushes because they don’t know what they like and don’t like yet – so they taste everything and then spit it out.

3. Nice church service (still on Facebook Live) this morning. I have a love/hate relationship with worship service on Memorial Day weekend. Too often the preacher and/or the other congregants focus on the “sacrifice” for those who died, or on the evil of war in the first place. As the wife of an Air Force Officer and the daughter of an Army officer, I think there must be some middle ground between hero worship and hero rejection. The preacher did a good job of walking the line between them this morning.

4. Big Al and I went to Joseppi’s Italian Restaurant for dinner today. I had seafood fettuccini and Al had pasta with meat sauce. This is the first time we’ve been back since the beginning of the pandemic and we wondered if they were even open. They WERE and we enjoyed every mouthful.

5. I got the begonias planted after we got home. They look happy in their new pots.

Maybe I can talk Big Al into going to Watson’s later in the week to buy some decent looking containers for the dianthus.

How about you? What made you happy today?

Five things that made me happy today – 5/30/19 (Remembered)

1. Received beautiful “get well soon” flowers from the folks at the Wellness Center.

2. Started my 360 Wellness coaching today. Discovered that I’m floundering because I don’t have a purpose (project) right now. We’ll work on figuring that out.

3. Brother, sister-in-law and nephew arrived in the middle of the afternoon.

4. Early dinner at Boathouse 19. Chowder and calamari. Yum.

5. Good day with zero pain and no pain pills. I’m excited to get back to an exercise program once I’m released by the doctor (next Thursday).

How about you? What made you happy today?

Five things that made me happy today – 5/29/21

Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? …We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.

Diane Ackerman

1. Beautiful, sunny day this morning with temps in the upper 40s. We had a lovely, warm afternoon with the temperature in the low 70s.

2. I ran to Trader Joe’s this morning to get my sausages and found some mini blueberry scones. I got a package of 6 to eat with my afternoon mochas. They are very tasty. I realized I have zero self-control, so instead of giving up mochas and scones, I decided to decrease the sizes, thereby cutting 75-100 calories from my regular diet without depriving myself. It couldn’t hurt.

3. For lunch I made mini pizzas on 10 inch tortillas for Big Al and me. They were good and 1.5 tortilla each is about all we want.

4. After lunch I went to the Wellness Center and polished off most of my steps for the day. On the way home, I went back to Tacoma Boys (where I got the hanging basket last week) and got two more small hanging baskets that I took the hangers off of and put them in some flat pots I have on the back porch.

I also got three begonias to put in the planters on the front porch (the ones I said were too much trouble to take care). I should get them planted this afternoon or tomorrow.

5. When looking at the front porch flowers, I realized one of the pots that I inherited from somebody (I forget who) had cracked and a big chunk had broken off, so I’ll have to get a couple of new containers to put the dianthus in. The dianthus is so satisfactory – virtually deer proof and very forgiving when I forget to water it. It’s also comes back after the winter (as long as its pots haven’t cracked).

How about you? What made you happy today?

Five things that made me happy today – 5/29/19 (Remembered)

1. Good night last night. No pain at all.

2. No pain pills today and no problems. I think I’ll avoid the pills when I go to bed tonight.

3. Cooked my first meal in a couple of weeks – ham steak, asparagus, and baked sweet potato. Big Al did the dishes.

4. Got a haircut today. I always feel better when I have a fresh haircut.

5. Excited to see my brother and his family tomorrow.

How about you? What made you happy today?

Five things that made me happy today – 5/28/21

In the dew of little things, the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.

Kahlil Gibran

1. Cloudy and cool (50 deg) early this morning. By lunchtime the sun had come out and it was pretty. Still too cool to sit outside, but it looks nice. “They” are promising warmer weather through the holiday weekend.

2. We seem to be lurching from election cycle to election cycle. No wonder nothing gets done to move the country forward. <Sigh>

3. We had bratwurst and sauerkraut with a boiled potato for lunch today. That also seems to be on a repeating cycle.

4. I’m a little melancholy today because Facebook and my blog keep reminding me that we usually travelled to see family during May Maybe that time will come again, eventually.

5. I’ve run out of the series I’ve been watching on Netflix and I haven’t found another one that I really like. Maybe I’ll run through The West Wing again to take the bad taste of politics out of my mouth.

How about you? What made you happy today?

Five things that made me happy today – 5/28/19 (Remembered)

1. Slept well last night.

2. Only one pain pill today – about 3:30 this afternoon. I’ll probably take another one when I go to bed tonight, just to forestall any problems.

3. Al and I had lunch at the Bistro. I had a “talking” appointment with my personal trainer, and she will do some wellness coaching with me until I can get back to exercise (she needs to have case studies for her continuing education.) She focuses on the balance between Happiness, Life Satisfaction, Diet, Exercise, and Belief in a Higher Power.

4. We had a Great Decisions meeting today. The subject was Nuclear weapons, and “What Now?” We didn’t solve anything but we were able to talk about the problems.

5. I don’t feel as wobbly as I did earlier, even though I still tire pretty easily. (Came home after being out of the house for four hours and took a nap for an hour and a half.)

How about you? What made you happy today?

Five things that made me happy today – 5/27/21

Honor the space between no longer and not yet.

Nancy Levin

1. It was actually raining when I got up – not drizzling – not threatening – actual rain! We need it. It has alternately stormed and cleared with bright sunshine all day, with temperatures firmly stuck in the 50s.

2. The continuing news from the oil and gas industry that shareholders and owners have stood up and are requiring the three major companies (Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, and ExxonMobil) to cut back on emissions is making me really happy.

3. This morning Big Al and I dropped $5.4K on hearing aids for Al. He seems pleased with them, and I’m pleased that we won’t be getting a divorce because I think he’s ignoring me. He has 30 days to decide if he really wants them, and if he can’t get used to them he can take them back – no harm – no foul.

They are rechargeable, programable, with blue tooth to his phone, and a 3-year warrantee.

4. We stopped on our way back to FTJ at Mandarin Japanese restaurant for lunch. I had spicy tuna roll and sashimi, and Al had ramen with chicken and vegetables.

5. I facilitated our Great Decisions lesson on Zoom this afternoon. We talked about The Arctic and decided, once again, that we were having a hard time with the material because it was written a year ago when nobody knew who was going to be president, or what kind on government we would have.

How about you? What made you happy today?