Honesty

My one word for 2015 is “Honesty.”

Let’s see how I did with Honesty in May.

Lunch Bunch was a trip to the Tanglewood Grill in Gig Harbor.

I think I told you last month couple of months that the church is doing a capital campaign to raise money to bring the facilities up to ADA standards and to do some needed repairs on our 80-year-old building. We have commitments for just shy of $300,000 to meet our goal. That’s a pretty big goal for a little church of less than 100 members, but we are very healthy, if aging, and are committed to living out our faith with our pocketbooks.

The new activities director at FTJ took us to Watson’s Nursery and I was able to get some lovely red and white columbine that are going a long way to minimizing the dying daffodils (you have to let them die down if you expect to get blooms next year).

I also got two more foxglove, since the ones I got last year look so pretty (and the deer really don’t eat them).

They finally had a Joe Pye Weed (it doesn’t look like much now, but it will spread and cover the whole corner by the steps to the porch.) It smells divine when it’s in bloom.

Finally, I started dividing the ground cover that is in the bed at the base of the porch. I had the yard men dig out the old stuff that was in half of the bed, and I’m getting this to “expand”. The runners I transplanted have taken root beautifully and are beginning to put out new runners of their own.

I’ve started walking every Thursday morning with a group of folks from Bethany. We walk on the waterfront for about half an hour and then we drink coffee at a new coffee shop in the new construction.

Two Town is mostly a bar, but they have decent coffee, tea, and pastries in the morning and we are the only ones there.

FTJ has begun taking the bus down to Owen Beach a couple of Friday afternoons a month so a group of us can walk on the paved path and look at the sound.

A group from FTJ went to see the Georgia O’Keefe exhibition at the Tacoma Art Museum.

We also had a talk by a biologist who studied the wild life and repopulation of Mt. Saint Helen’s after the eruption in 1981. You can see pictures here.

I have a little raised garden plot in the FTJ garden that has been taking up a fair amount of my time. I am growing green beans, crowder peas, tomatoes, yellow squash, cucumbers, Serrano and jalapeno peppers, and onions (if they ever do anything). I gave up on the purple hulls, and put Walla-Walla onions in their place. I also got two artichoke plants to try out.

The squash and cucumbers are blooming and setting fruit, and this weekend, I spotted a couple of blooms on the tomatoes. The green bean plants are getting enormous, and the black-eyed peas have started trying to climb. Sorry I don’t have any pictures of the whole garden recently.

The Wellness Center had a “healthy” potluck lunch on Senior Fitness Day, Wednesday, May 27. My team won first place in the Fitness Jeopardy game.

I remembered my one word, HONESTY, when we were eating lunch in one of the dining rooms here. (It was Memorial Day and they were having barbecued ribs.) Anyway, one of the old men at the table was blathering on and on about how awful Obama Care was, and how awful Obama was, and I finally stopped him and “tactfully” told him that he didn’t know what he was talking about. He tried to keep on, but I finally said, “I just don’t want to talk about it.” He kept on, and kept on, and I finally said “I said, I don’t want to talk about it with you. I’m obviously not going to change your mind, and you FOR SURE aren’t going to change mine,” and we got up and walked out on him, sputtering.

A group here at FTJ are doing a virtual walk to the Canadian border (almost exactly 150 miles). We’re keeping track with FitBits or other GPS devices. I’m in the lead with about 60 miles since the 27th of May. I’ve gotten a FitBit for Big Al, and his physical therapist is making him walk. His goal is to be able to walk a mile. I told him he would have to be able to do that if he expected to have a good time on our trip/cruise this fall.

Until next month’s report on HONESTY you can follow along with my daily pictures.

 

 

 

Honesty

My one word for 2015 is “Honesty.”

Let’s see how I did with Honesty in April.

April started off with a bang in Holy Week – Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter. Very inspirational and spiritually uplifting. We had a Maundy Thursday Communion service in the evening, Friday we joined with the Episcopalians for a Tenebrae service, Saturday we held a prayer vigil at Bethany, and then Easter Sunday started with a Sunrise Service, a potluck brunch and then Worship. By that time I was ready to give church a rest for a while.

Lunch Bunch was a trip to Marzano, an Italian restaurant in Parkland, just a little southeast of Tacoma.

Very tasty, and a little more out of the way, so we hadn’t ever been there before.

The week after Easter, Franke Tobey Jones took a bunch of us to the Tulip Festival in Skagit County, WA. You can read all about it here.

I’m in a better place emotionally and mentally than I was when I wrote this post. Time and prayer are doing their work, both on me and on the situations that brought me to my knees last Tuesday.

FTJ hosted a dinner party for all the independent residents in the middle of the month. It happened to be on Barbershop Quartet Day (who knew there even was such a thing), and we had a really good Barbershop Quartet to entertain us.

I have a little raised garden plot in the FTJ garden that has been taking up a fair amount of my time. I am growing green beans, crowder peas, tomatoes, yellow squash, cucumbers, Serrano and jalapeno peppers, and onions (if they ever do anything). I also planted purple hull peas but they don’t seem to be sprouting.

This picture is before I moved the plants out of the greenhouse. The black-eyed peas think they are climbing on the tepee, and the beans are at the back of the plot.

These are the beans just beginning to leaf out.

And here is what the garden looks like today with the plants from the greenhouse in the ground. The cucumbers will run on the big tepee with the peas and the squash should run on the little tepee.

I’ve got flowers in baskets on the back porch and in planters. The daffodils are finished and I’m trying to decide what to put in that bed. There’s a trip to the greenhouse in my future, I think.

I think I told you last month that the church is doing a capital campaign to raise money to bring the facilities up to ADA standards and to do some needed repairs on our 80-year-old building. Today we have a party for anyone who is ready to make a commitment now, instead of waiting for Commitment Sunday in two weeks. (oops, today is actually May…) Anyway, I hope to be able to report next month that we have raised our $280,000-$300,000 to meet out goal. That’s a pretty big goal for a little church of less than 100 members, but we are very healthy, if aging, and are committed to living out our faith with our pocketbooks.

Unfortunately, HONESTY may have gotten me in trouble, as my “honest” tongue can tend to run away with me. I’m afraid I was a little too honest with a friend, and may have offended her (not that I didn’t mean it because she is a gossip and a chatterbox.) I may not have been as tactful as I could have been when I told her to quit telling me what someone else did wrong and tell them instead, if she felt so strongly about it. I have a very low threshold for triangularization.

I press on with my walking and my diet. Slowly, slowly, slowly now, the pounds are coming off, but at least they aren’t going back on.

Until next month’s report on HONESTY you can follow along with my daily pictures.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Honesty

My one word for 2015 is “Honesty.”

How am I doing with HONEST this month? I think I’m doing pretty well – at least when I’m tempted to “forget” to count the several handfuls of cashews I just put in my mouth, I remember my word and I add them to my food diary.

Towards the middle of January, I fell victim to the dreaded cough and stuffy nose – no fever, just horrible congestion. I’m not sure whether it was a strange cold or an allergy to something, but I was very uncomfortable for a couple of weeks. I did skip my exercising for a couple of days, because I just didn’t feel like it. To be HONEST, I rocked my way to my steps on those days when I was felling so awful. (See note below about exercise.) I made them clean the filter on the furnace to make sure it wasn’t mold in the duct system, and I seem to have mostly gotten over it.

It helped that there were several day last week when the sun came out and the temperature improved to 60 deg. I took full advantage of the warmer days and visited the park and the waterfront for a couple of long walks. Like the rest of the country I’m ready for spring to be here, but I suppose we must wait another couple of months to really turn the corner.

I’ve been busy – mostly with church and exercise – but I’ve also started participating in a creative writing group here at Tobey Jones and next week I’ll start piano lessons again.

Since I’m on the session, I’m responsible for the Hospitality and Outreach Team, and we’re beginning a couple of new mission projects to do with education. HONESTLY, this is one of the places my heart lies. We will be meeting with the principal at the elementary school that’s a block from the church to find out how we can help them. I’ve also developed a relationship with the fellow who runs the “progressive” church college fellowship at the University of Puget Sound. We will be taking food to their dinner in March and perhaps we can expand our mission to them.

Another BIG project at Bethany is the beginning of a Capital Campaign to raise money to bring the building up to ADA code. It’s a nice old building, but it’s three stories and there is no elevator. It makes it completely inaccessible for any activities held on the third floor, and difficult for anything held on the lower floor which is where the fellowship hall, main kitchen and nursery are. Additionally, there is no bathroom on the third floor where the Sunday School rooms are. So our little congregation of fewer than 100 people need to raise $300,000. We’ve hired a consultant who assures us we can do it, but I wouldn’t be HONEST if I didn’t say I’m afraid we might be biting off more than we can chew. That’s going to be a major project for the next year.

On the exercise front, I’ve been faithful and mostly HONEST about getting my 10,000 steps a day on my FitBit (except for the two days I was sick). I will admit that sometimes I haven’t walked as much as the device has reported – it counts steps as I rock in my recliner in the evening watching TV – but I’m always careful to get the full 10,000 steps for the day before I sit down.

I did get some great news when I went to the doctor for my bi-annual type-2 diabetes check-up. Because of my obsessive exercise and food monitoring, I have apparently lost enough weight, eaten correctly and exercised enough that I am no longer clinically diabetic. My HbA1C was 5.9 (with no medication) and “diabetic” starts above 6.0. Of course, I have to keep eating right and exercising, and not gain any weight, but health-wise I’m fine. I’ve even been able to experiment with eliminating the statin I’ve been taking for many years. I particularly wanted to get rid of it so I could eat grapefruit again. The hurdle is my blood pressure medicine.

That’s been January – HONESTLY!