Update about blog

Dawn 7:01 Mountain Time Aug 15, 2026. Marking the sun coming over the mountains behind my apartment on the smoke stack of the Powerhouse.

Friday, August 14, 2020

Looking for inspiration in the laundromat



There's the smell of clean clothes, with overlays of those dryer sheets giving floral stink. I can't stand them, and usually start sneezing if they are too close. Fortunately I'm wearing a mask these days, so it's bearable.

Where is inspiration? Doing the mundane tasks? Or somewhere between the lines, maybe as I drive to or fro one of my many destinations...mainly just missing inspiration in my life these days.

My destinations include a lot more interaction with friends, as well as merchants. I'm learning a new way of shopping for my new life-style which has different vegetarian choices. I think I may break down and make a menu for a week. It's just too much confusion otherwise.

Twice a week I do get an excellent lunch of Ornish recipes at the Cardiac center, which then can be tracked onto forms which I fill out daily. But there are 7 dinners a week, of which I have many left overs from earlier dates.

Tonight I have some brown rice and some asparagus which are already cooked. Then there are 4 summer squash begging to be cooked. And the salad spinach is ready to turn into cooked spinach. Not exactly what a cook book would give me. But I think the 3 vegetables will work well topping a mound of brown rice. I'll probably pour some sauce or another over them all.

Well, I found another leftover - 2 little Gimmie Lean vegetable sausage substitute patties, which I broke up into the rice and then sprinkled a tablespoon of Teriaki sauce on them. The veggie of one squash was steamed with the spinach, and then the leftover asparagus was also heated with them. A vegetable medley is what I'm calling it. A nice pairing of tastes. And there's another serving left of each for tomorrow!

Today's quote (sorry, it's a bit long, but seemed to reflect some of my feelings.)

SINGULARITY
by Marie Howe
          (after Stephen Hawking)

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?
so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money — 
nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone
pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.
For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you.
   Remember?
There was no   Nature.    No
 them.   No tests
to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf    or if 
the coral reef feels pain.    Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;
would that we could wake up   to what we were
— when we were ocean    and before that 
to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not
at all — nothing
before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.
Can molecules recall it?
what once was?    before anything happened?
No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb      no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with 
is is is is is
All   everything   home. 

Thursday, August 13, 2020

Side effects of getting healthier

My brain is still not at 80% of what it was before the heart attack.  I keep messing up my appointment times, and even though I put them on my calendar, and look at it before going to sleep and when I wake up,  I keep entering dates and times wrong a lot. I have a lot of anxiety because of that.



Like my appointment for the eye exam was listed today on the calendar, but it was also listed for next week. And it was supposed to be next week. But since I went there today, they squeezed me in and did a couple of tests.  I passed and don't have to go back for 6 more months. My numbers in the glaucoma pressure test have gone down. Perhaps due to the change in blood pressure medications I'm now on. Whoopee.





I'm doing a lot of tracking. "Tracking" means keeping a food diary, as well as an exercise one, and how supported I feel, and something else that I can't remember! (Maybe something about stress and meditation.) This is to live in a different lifestyle than pre-heart attack. The Ornish program with its fourfold approach is quite sweeping. I'm going to be giving some of my food away that I thought was pretty ok to have. Dry roasted peanuts, peanut butter and jelly, for example. This diet is not only vegetarian but low fat. So those nice 7 grams of fat per serving of pure little peanuts is out.





I can have 9 grams of fat per day. Whew. And I'm beginning to see that this is how I'll be living the rest of my life. If I want to reverse the heart disease which I accumulated by the way I used to live. The answer is yes, and a commitment that is surprisingly hard to start. I'm glad I go twice a week to the program and they help with my struggles for a total of 9 weeks.

Today's Quote:
If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.
ROBIN WALL KIMMERER





Wednesday, August 12, 2020

Happy Birthday, Kendra

I'm so glad you've been partnered with Tai for 11 years, and you all finally got married.  It really makes me happy that you did the 'piece of paper' thing. I would have preferred to have a family gathering to celebrate with you...but maybe we still can do that after the virus has gone.


It was great to visit you all last fall and go to Mesa Verde together.

Thanks for letting me sit in the front seat on all our travels! It was a great vacation and I have such wonderful memories of it.

May you have many many years of happiness, good health, satisfying work, partnership in love, and abundance of all that you value.

Love,
Mom Barbara

Monday, August 10, 2020

Whew!

I've had trouble finding a place to walk these days...and I should be doing 30 min. every other day, or maybe 15 min. each day. The lake is nice to walk around, but sometimes crowded, and I noticed it had a small landslide from recent rains blocking the path. So I decided to start where I live. And it's on a big steep hill.

I start out in the middle, which is grand, and I walk downhill in the shade most of the way.

 This is Walker Rd, looking uphill. It's hard to tell when there's nothing horizontal to compare it to, but believe me it's also steep.

 I was grateful for the bamboo forest which provided a little shade.

After just making it half way this morning (my first try, after all), I turned and started back downhill. These sweet little yellow flowers caught my eye on the bank.


 A big old oak with many vines covering it stood in the forest.

 Going downhill, there's Old 70 at the bottom of the hill, but I turned off into our driveway.


And having gone uphill halfway, I stopped to take a photo and catch my breath.  This whole walk only took 15 mintues! But with the hills, I felt that was quite enough for today!

Today's Quote:
May we never forget the crippled, wind-beaten trees, how they, too, bud, green and bloom. May we, too, take courage to bloom where we are planted.
BR. DAVID STEINDL-RAST

August moon

(Or maybe July...)




This was about to become a full moon, and I really had mood and sleep problems that I attributed to its force upon my "mostly water" being. A lot of friends reported the same.

Today's quote:
People don't alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.

 -Terry Pratchett, novelist (Apr 28 1948-2015) 


Sunday, August 9, 2020

Midsummer at the Center

 Hydrangeas by the entrance to the Lakeview Center.



This corner used to always get slammed with water pouring off the roof 2 stories above it...each time it rained. I hope this little evergreen can keep that from happening. It's been really a headache for the landscape efforts.


Today's quote:

Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.
-Joseph Addison, writer (1 May 1672-1719)

Saturday, August 8, 2020

The Grove Park Inn in Asheville NC


The Grove Park Inn is depicted in a rare snowy scene on a post card which was mailed in 1914.  


(Note: I've switched back from new Blogger because my Mac won't open the page I've used for years to edit all my blogs. Didn't help. So I have a new bookmark for opening the editing page. Secondly the Labels place is waaay too slow to type into on the new Blogger. I hope they fix that, since they're saying that will be the only format soon. Maybe it's time to check out WordPress again. I've got a blog registered there, but it had some difficulties which I will have to go through again.)

And back to the Inn, which has red/orange shingles on its roof.

I've never stayed there! But I've gone visiting for several touristy things...it's such a beautiful place, and open to the public, mostly. There used to be free parking, but I've heard that's changed (a garage on the far side was built several years ago, to add to the parking lot that goes up the hill to the right behind this photographer.

Some more old photos of Asheville were on my blog More vintage photos of Asheville

One of the things tourists (and I) like to visit at the Grove Park Inn, is an area of arts and crafts cottages, including an antique car museum. I posted about them Antique cars anyone?

Eckerd College buddies from the early 2000s (Tai [on the left] graduated in 2001)

A weekend with my youngest son, before he moved on to new places, new friends, new activities, and did I mention, much further away?  Well, he could be going further I guess, but Colorado seems pretty far from North Carolina, to me at least! (This visit was in 2018)

Yes, we did the tourist thing at the Grovepark Inn.

A couple three or four (or five) Thanksgivings ago, my son, Russ and his family came down from OH to give me a family Thanksgiving, and I took them to see the Gingerbread Contest which is held at the Grove Park Inn.  I thought I posted a blog about it, but I'll see if I still have any of those photos in the cloud. Nope, they are probably on the external hard drive, and I wanted to just share the building, not my family. The girls enjoyed the Christmas decorations and some fancy glass mugs of hot chocolate.

The other side of the building with the additions (on the left is the parking structure below more rooms. This renewal happened about the time the Inn became an Omni Inn.

 I don't know the year, but the cars give a good hint.

I don't think there was snow for this...just a very light exposure. I don't know when they stopped doing horse drawn tours, but I don't think they do any more.


Today there's a little waterfall below all the terraces where you can enjoy a cocktail while watching the sun set over the golf course. There are many restaurants, very posh, all needing reservations. We had appetizers for lunch at one.

And did I mention there's a spa? It was also added recently, and its skylight is right by the waterfall outside. It is a bit pricey, but I did pick up a brochure when I walked through, thinking of how much I'd saved!

I'm sharing again with Sepia Saturday this week. I've shared about a hillside Inn, though I don't have any Tramways here. I hope you all have a great weekend. Come over to see what old photos might have been shared.



Today's Quote:
That's the terrible hypnotism of war, the brute mass-impulse, the pride and national spirit, the instinctive simplicity of men that makes them worship what is their own above everything else. I've thrilled and shouted with patriotic pride, like everyone else. Music and flags and men marching in step have bewitched me, as they do all of us. And then I've gone home and sworn to root this evil instinct out of my soul. God help -- let's love the world, love humanity -- not just our own country! -Christopher Morley, writer (5 May 1890-1957) 


Friday, August 7, 2020

The great blue ball


The Space Station captured the far side of the moon.

And then the 2 American astronauts came home in the Dragon capsule and landed in the Gulf of Mexico. I watched spellbound for several hours.

The capsule had been bobbing in the water about half an hour, then was hauled by cables onto the small vessel to take it to land. There had been a lot of interested smaller boats belonging to private citizens and maybe reporters, circling around and then sometimes zooming in closer. Apparently they were somehow managed to stay at a greater distance, but they still remained there.

I waited about half an hour more, hoping they'd be opening the door...but they kept finding some kind of gas fumes around the outside (that's what they said, with some letters like MBCDT though not those) to define what it was. Something to do with the booster rockets or the things that sent the various parachutes out to slow down the capsule before it hit the water.




I guess I reached my limit of sitting and watching a TV reality show. But I did like that it was "real time."

Today's quote:
Buckminster Fuller defines a Sphere as “a multiplicity of discrete events, approximately equidistant in all directions from a Nuclear Center.
Ever since we discovered that Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning top, we have understood that reality is not what it seems: every time we glimpse a new aspect of it, it is a deeply emotional experience. Another veil has fallen.

But the leap made by Einstein is unparalleled: spacetime is a field; the world is made only of fields and particles; space and time are not something else, something different from the rest of nature: they are just a field among the others.

—Carlo Rovelli Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity
as posted in Love is a Place


Wednesday, August 5, 2020

Some wind and rain at the beach...

Tuesday Aug 4, 8 am.
I just watched a drone level video of the area of the Outer Banks island that was the landfall for the center of Isaias early this morning...or maybe last night.

I'm glad I had a pill that helped me go to sleep last night, while thinking of how my son and his wife and children had driven from their home in Ohio to the Outer Banks of North Carolina this last weekend. Just in time for a hurricane.

I haven't spoken to them. I just saw a couple of posts on Facebook that that's where they went, at this particular time. It's a good thing I didn't speak with them, because I would have blown my top. As it was, my anxiety level was right off the roof.  And fortunately none of the roofs were blown off literally.

I remember how long it took to repair the one road which was the only route to towns around Orakoke...after another hurricane.

Here's the video, where you can see all the sand that was washed up with the storm surge at Oak Island. And the cars just swished any which way, as well as washing machines...moved by waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch

I hope the three grandchildren enjoyed the beach. I am so grateful that they were alright. I really don't know what I'll say to my son when I finally speak with him. It's going to take some alcohol probably to help me get through that conversation.

Then a friend of mine said she included this adventure on her bucket list, to go to the beach during a hurricane.  Oh dear. I'm a bit amazed that people would risk their lives for this kind of terrible thrill...or is it just seeking horror?  Thrill by the terrible destructive force of nature...geese, no thanks.