A lazy, recovering sort of a Sunday

I had a strange night last night.  Went out to see “Rachel Getting Married” with Anne Hathaway, which I really enjoyed, and would highly recommend.  On the way home, I was really shivering in my car — I thought because of the cold and the fact that the heater took time to do its work.  Then, when I took the dog outside to do her business, I couldn’t get warm despite my heaviest coat, gloves, etc.  When I came back into the warm house and was still shivering — whole body shivering — I realized it didn’t have anything to do with how cold it was outside.

So I put on my warmest PJs, cranked up the heat in my bedroom and climbed in under the covers with the dog beside me to keep me warm.  There I shivered away for quite a while until I fell asleep.  Then, at about 4:00 a.m., I woke up boiling and sweating and with a nasty headache — which was pretty much what I expected.  I got up, turned down the thermostat, changed into lighter PJs, took a few Motrin and went back to bed.  When I woke up around 9:00 a.m., I felt completely wiped but otherwise clearly on the mend from whatever it was.

My daughter suggests that it might have been my body’s way of fighting off some kind of virus successfully.  I find that I have this kind of episode every 4 months or so, but because it always passes within a day I never think to mention it to my doctor.  I like my daughter’s theory — it certainly does feel as though the body is working hard to sweat something unwanted out.

Today I didn’t feel ill, but I didn’t have much energy either.  So I have essentially — let’s see — read the paper, eaten, watched television, played with my camera and done some posting on Flickr, exchanged a few emails — and that’s about it.  I started to feel guilty about 2/3 of the way through the day, and then I realized that I should just revel in the sheer joy of doing SFA for a change.

Here are a couple of the photographs I took this afternoon — interior shots, obviously.

 

It’s been a while

Wow.  It’s been a very long time since I’ve made an entry in this blog.

My fall was filled with being there for other people and over-extending myself.  That, and a chunk of feeling sick on and off.  Had a couple of health scares that turned out to be nothing, but that made me reassess how I’ve been treating myself.  So I joined Weight Watchers, bought myself a pedometer and a heart monitor watch, and I’m on my way to taking better care of my body.  I’ve got a long way to go, but it really feels as though I’m on the road without any intention of turning back or veering off.

My meals now look like this, and emerge from my own kitchen instead of from a restaurant or fast food outlet.

Here’s my nifty pedometer, which works beautifully but is actually a bit of a pain to keep attached to my clothing.  It does have the effect of making one want to walk more, just to up the step count.

The little frowny face in the upper left hand corner shows up until you’ve reached your goal steps, which in my case is 10,000.  It turns out that on a fairly busy day I have no trouble making the 10,000, but on a day when I’m stuck behind my desk with no client meetings and no chance to go out and wander around at lunchtime, I’m lucky to make it to 3,000.  I can’t wait for the days to lengthen again so I can go for morning walks again before work.

I’m also going to concentrate on spending more time on my photography and my writing.  Should be good.  )

 

Family found!

I am so excited today I can hardly stand it.  I’ve found a cousin I didn’t know existed!

Now, this probably doesn’t sound terribly thrilling to those of you with scads of (or perhaps even too much) family in your lives.  However, I am family-deprived and so it’s a very big deal for me.

I was born in Scotland, and when I was a month shy of 2 years old, my parents moved to Canada and never went back, not even for a holiday.  My mother has kept in touch with her only sister, who now lives in France, and I know about my 4 French cousins.  I even met them once when I was 19.  My father’s side of the family, however, is a different story.  He had two brothers, the older of whom he lost touch with pretty much as soon as we moved to Canada.  The middle brother kept in touch, though, but only sporadically, and generally by telephone.  When he died in the 1990′s, my parents phoned his widow a few times, but eventually that stopped, too.  I knew that my oldest uncle had 2 sons, one of whom died in childhood, and that my middle uncle had 3 daughters.  I’ve tried, without success, to track them down.

Then yesterday I went to visit my friend, Gail, who was in town visiting from Ottawa.  The conversation, over coffee and sweets, turned to genealogy, and finding ancestors on the Internet.  Gail, within a few minutes, found my paternal grandparents’ marriage record details, and showed me where to look for more.

When I got home, I went to work and joined Ancestry.com.  There I began diligently building what parts of my family tree I could.  After I entered my paternal grandparents’ information, up came a “hint” about both of them.  It turns out someone else had also entered them into their family tree, and that someone else was reachable by email.

To get to the point, I am now in touch with my second cousin, T. the daughter of my first cousin, R., of whose existence I was entirely unaware.  Seems my oldest uncle had a first marriage and a first child that no one else in the family knew about!  It’s a really tragic story that T. has been able to cobble together.  Apparently my uncle was in France in WW2 when my cousin was born, and his wife was told that he had been killed in France, and he was told that she and his infant son had been killed in an air raid.  And that was the end of that.  The rest of it gets a bit fuzzy, but we do know that my uncle eventually remarried (he apparently divorced his first wife) and had the two sons that I was aware of.

Anyway, as you can imagine, my cousin, R. has always felt deprived of family due to the unusual circumstances of his early life, as have I due to my family’s emigration.  T. tells me that she’s been searching for family information for 13 years, and here I go online and find her on day 1 of my search!  Unbelievable.

So far we’ve just exchanged emails.  I have sent T. my phone number and asked for hers, and I hope very much to be speaking to her and to my cousin soon.  I am over the moon about this, and am so looking forward to establishing a connection there.  I believe they live in England, but I’m not even sure about that at this point.  I just know they’re somewhere in the UK.  It sounds as though they’re as excited as I am, so hopefully I’ll have lots more information about them very soon.  Who knows — perhaps a trip to Britain may make sense in the not too distant future?

I love the Internet.  )

Here’s a picture of me and my Scottish (left) and Irish (right — how can you tell?) grandfathers.  It’s the Scottish grandfather that I share with my newly found cousin.

 

Returning from chaos

My world has been upside down for nearly 3 months now. I’ve done very little photography, and absolutely no blogging. The main effort was to keep treading water and hope to reach the shore eventually. At this point, I can feel the sand beneath my feet, so I’m taking the time, once again, to indulge myself with my writing and photography.

The aforesaid chaos has been the result of my mother’s very sudden decision that she was too lonely and bored to continue living in the suite in the house that we own together, and the subsequent decision to have my daughter and a friend move into the suite. All sounds very simple, but it’s been a lengthy process of things popping up that had to be fixed or replaced or purchased, of filling a sizeable dumpster that lived in my driveway for a couple of weeks, of managing the varying moods of an elderly woman and a teenager, and of bleeding money from my chequing account and my credit card balances. Oh — and I had to take 2 weeks of vacation time in order to get my mother moved and the suite cleared out and cleaned.  ‘Nuf said about that. The end result is that my mother is settled into a lovely retirement community and hasn’t been happier in this century, and my daughter’s roommate arrived today and they’re happily working on getting her settled in.

I’ve also had a couple of aging and health-related things happen during this time.  I worked so hard with the move, the cleaning and the clear-out that I gave myself a lovely case of sciatica in my left leg.  I’ve never experienced anything like that before, and it’s the first time in my life that just pushing myself physically harder than usual has resulted in actual pain and injury.  I was also told, during my most recent eye test, that I have narrow angle glaucoma, which is a rare condition in which the draining ducts in your eyes narrow to the point of possible closure.  Actual closure, untreated, can result in irreversible blindness within a few days, so that was a rather startling thing to be told when I was just expecting to need new glasses as a worst case scenario (which I was told as well, incidentally — just to add to the money-bleeding thing).  Of course, the worst may never happen, and I’ll be checked annually.  I also know what the symptoms of an acute attack are, and I know that I need treatment immediately.  So chances are, all will be well.  Nonetheless, it’s sobering when things like this come up and are simply the result of the old bod slowly wearing out.  Intimations of mortality.  Oh yeah.

I’m going to try to do several blog entries a week from now on.  A lot of the blogs that I really enjoy reading have frequent and often short entries, and I think there’s real value in consistency and the discipline of just putting fingers to keyboard on a regular basis.

TTFN.

 

It was a nice idea…

The idea about taking pictures of all my food. I loved it. It would be have been brilliantly self-revelatory. However, it was a huge pain in the ass. It takes quite a while to upload photographs onto my computer and then another while to load them into this blog. And when you’re talking about photographs of every meal and every snack, it was going to take WAAAAAY too much time. I ended up deleting dozens of fairly uninteresting food photos from my camera. It’s a shame, because I really did like the idea. And day one was definitely sobering. But there you go. Not every brilliant idea turns out to be very practical when applied in real life.

So what I did instead was buy a really nifty little logbook, that had space to record information about food, and exercise, and even habits that you’re trying to form. That was about a week ago, and I seem to have misplaced it already, without a single word having been written in it. Sigh…

Sometimes I think that what I really have to do is just pick something, no matter how arbitrary, and just DO IT. Just pick a sensible cookbook and make most of my meals out of it. And cut out, except for birthdays and Christmas and Mother’s Day and such, the things that I already KNOW go straight to my belly — like chocolate, cakes, cookies, fries and ice cream. (Boy, if I just cut all of those out of my life, I’d be sure to lose weight on that alone.) And then decide to see my personal trainer twice a week and walk at least half an hour on at least three other days.

Okay. It sounds like a plan. Chocolate, cakes, cookies, fries and ice cream are VERY occasional treats. Special occasion treats, in fact. And I’ll scout around my house among my huge variety of sensible cookbooks (I’m not kidding — I’m one of those people who thinks magically about buying such things — i.e. that the mere purchase will change things for the better) and just pick one to be “it”, for at least the next month. And on top of seeing Paul twice a week, I’ll walk for no less than 30 minutes on 3 other days. That sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? Perhaps simplicity is what’s needed after all. In a busy life, the fewer choices there are around the hard things, the better.

Here goes. Now where was that healthy cookbook I saw the other day?

 

The endless struggle to lose weight

I am overweight. Quite a lot overweight. At the moment, I weigh almost 100 pounds more than I did when I was in my 20s. Because of the way the weight is distributed on my body, I don’t tend to look quite as overweight as I am, but I don’t kid myself. I am not svelte. And when I was a younger woman, I certainly was most definitely svelte. Of course, since I was so sucked in by the dieting mentality of our culture, I didn’t realize I was svelte. I thought I was a fat pig. I remember once being horrified that I weighed 127 pounds (excuse me a moment while I finish laughing hysterically), and I devotedly dieted myself down to 113 pounds. Which was way too small even on my frame. And that was the start of the three decades long yo-yo game. Up and down, each time more up after the diet. And then there was the relatively late in life baby, which didn’t help. I gained 50 pounds during my pregnancy and essentially never really lost it. I was about 25 pounds overweight when I got pregnant, and I’ve gained another 25 since my daughter was born (nearly 19 years ago), so there you go. 100 pounds. It really didn’t take much effort.

The other day I stumbled upon a very funny, useful book. It’s called Our Lady of Weight Loss, and it’s by Janice Taylor. Check her out — she’s very funny: http://www.ourladyofweightloss.com/.

Having been raised Roman Catholic (and exposed to nuns in a convent school for years and years), her premise makes me giggle. She prays to Our Lady of Weight Loss, and receives messages from her. The primary message Janice got from Our Lady of Weight Loss (while she was about to weigh in at a Weight Watchers meeting) was this: “If you think you’re never going to make it, you never will. You’re an artist. Make weight loss an art project.” So Janice became a weight loss artist, and went on to lose 50 pounds. I would be thrilled to lose 50 pounds. I’ve already lost about 25 pounds since last August, and another 50 would be perfect.

Anyway, I started to think about that notion of making weight loss an art project (Janice has numerous art projects in her book), and it occurred to me that my two artistic endeavours are singing and photography. It’s a little tricky to sing about weight loss in any significant way, so I thought that photography would be a better route. One of Janice’s projects involves taking photographs of what you eat and putting it together into a little album. I know that keeping a food diary is often touted as a beneficial tool for weight loss, so I have decided to try out a visual food diary. Starting yesterday, I’m not allowed to eat or drink anything unless I take a picture of it. (I’ve made a solemn vow to OLOWL.) And, in order to keep myself honest, I’m going to post my food photos here in my blog.

Yesterday was pretty embarrassing. Quite a lot of chocolate was involved. Chocolate is one of my main weaknesses. As you will no doubt come to know. So, anyway. Here goes. Yesterday’s not so gourmet food experience. Starting with lunch, which was when I got the idea to do this.

There really was quite a shocking amount of chocolate consumption yesterday. Truffle Pigs, chocolate macaroons, chocolate digestive biscuits. Only the chocolate ice cream bar (a Skinny Cow) was low cal. Everything else was full fat, full sugar, full everything. Oh my. Something tells me this is going to be a very enlightening undertaking.

 

Enjoying my city through the lens

Today at lunch I went for a little walk with my camera. I live in a lovely tourist destination city, and I don’t get out enough just to relish the beauty of the place. I found that I returned to the office energized and more relaxed than when I had left.

I took a typical tourist shot of the area we call the Inner Harbour. Here it is.

I also took some interesting shots of the water, without the touristy background. My attempts at being artistic, doncha know.

I also took a photograph of my office building from across the street, which I really quite like. I altered it to take away the colour and substitute sepia tones. I think it brings out the architectural features better.

I have to confess that I’ve purchased a new camera. I’m such a camera whore. Nothing makes me happier than a camera-related purchase. The new baby is a Canon Powershot G9, and all these photographs were taken with it. I’m entranced so far. It’s a point and shoot as opposed to a single lens reflex camera, but it has most of the features of a DSLR. It can take photographs in RAW format, for example, and it’s also got the capacity to let you set the aperture and shutter speed manually, or use shutter speed priority or aperture priority. So it’s a camera that you can do a lot of advanced things with. So far, I am very impressed by the clarity of its images, and also the ease of use — it’s knobs and wheels and buttons make instinctive sense to me, which isn’t the case with many digital cameras.

I’ll be taking a lot more photographs with my new precious in the near future. Stay tuned!

 

Spring has sprung and all that

I am finding my spirits rising on a daily basis now that it’s sunny most of the time, and there are blossoms on the trees and crocuses and daffodils and bluebells springing up all over the place. All this wonderful emergence caused me to go outside and play with my camera a bit over the weekend. Here are some of the captures. These first two were taken on a jaunt to my local grocery store.

This next one is from my back deck at home.

My bulldog, Ruby, seems to be getting spring fever. Whenever I take her outside to do her business, instead of just getting on with it, she wants to smell things and try to wriggle out of her collar and escape. She did just that earlier this morning, and thank goodness, instead of running out towards the busy road she ran back up the lane that connects our house with two other houses behind it. My neighbour, Steve, who lives in the house furthest from the road, was out in his yard, so I yelled at him to please call Ruby. Sure enough, because she loves people so much, she made straight for him. He caught her and I was able to tighten the noose and put it back on her fat little head. Oh, for a fenced yard that I could just let her romp around in. Unfortunately, our yard is oddly shaped and distributed, and there’s no obvious part of it to fence off. I think I’ll work on it, though. Maybe get a fencing company out to take a look and let me know what could be done for how many arms and legs.

 

Not the kind of day I planned

I am WAY behind on some fairly crucial things at work. So I worked it out that I could work at home today — free of all the little “have you got a minute?” interruptions I face at work. Well, my daughter called me last night to say that she was feeling very ill, and that she’s got a paper due for one of her university courses on Friday that she has yet to write. And could she please come home and stay overnight for a couple of nights so that SHE could have some uninterrupted time? Oh, and could I please pick her up and then tomorrow (you know, my sacred, set-apart work at home day) drive her to her two doctors’ appointments (one for her current sinus infection and the other a specialist appointment for some gastrointestinal problems she’s been having)?

Being the kind of Mum that I am, I said, “Of course, darling.” The result of all this is that I did manage to get some good work done this morning, but between the 12:30 and 2:45 appointments and the related trips to the pharmacy and the lab, my afternoon was SHOT. Now I have to decide whether to work all evening to try to be in the same place I wanted to be in by tomorrow, or whether I should just wipe my hands of the whole idea of getting caught up and start afresh tomorrow. I’m leaning rather strongly towards the latter.

Which means not much scratched off the old to do list…..  But I’d do it again in a flash, for the kid.

 

My new blog home

I tried Blogger, which is a great site, but I wasn’t conversant enough with HTML to make uploading photographs and suchlike activities easy enough. I then tried Vox, which is fun, but a little too busy and active and interactive and not quiet and thoughtful enough for a woman of a certain age like me. So, inspired by a Flickr friend of mine who migrated from Blogger to WordPress for the same reasons, I have decided to see if WordPress will be a good fit for me.

I’ve called my blog “Diary of a Mid-Century Dilettante” for a couple of reasons. First of all, I find that at my age (54 until September), one’s age seems to figure largely in how one interacts with the world. Some things get harder and others get easier, but it’s hard not to notice both ends of the spectrum. Secondly, I have decided to embrace the term “dilettante” in my life. I’m pretty good at lots of things, but not outstanding at many. And I think that’s just fine. My late father used to bemoan his dilettante status, to the point where he didn’t let himself enjoy all the activities that he was really very good at, because he was so conscious of how much better some others were. I always thought that was a real shame, and I have decided to revel in my amateur activities. I’m a pretty good cook. I have a nice singing voice. I play the piano fairly well. I’m a decent photographer. I’m a good lawyer. And I try to be a great mother, daughter, girlfriend and friend. Those are certainly the most important roles in my life.

And now, since it’s nearly midnight on a work night, I must drag my mid-century butt up to bed.