7ToF: crone-y

1. Everyone knows about dry, chapped lips in the winter, but a few years ago my lips were so unusually dry and cracked that it was painful. After a bit of thought, it occurred to me that a couple of weeks before I had started taking a daily cranberry supplement on the advice of Somebody On The Internet. "UTIs are the cause of all kinds of trouble for older women, take a cranberry supplement to keep them at bay!" 

I stopped taking the cranberry, and my lips were back to normal in a few days. It is actually true that UTIs can be the cause of all kinds of trouble, but apparently a daily cranberry supplement is too much for me. Now I only take cranberry (or drink some cranberry juice) if I feel something coming on.

2. This winter, it happened again, but my painful lips were so painful that it was keeping me awake at night. Believe it or not, it was a couple of weeks before I thought about what supplements I was taking, and realized that the culprit might be an anti-migraine supplement I had spotted at the health food store a month before. 

The supplement had several different herbs/minerals that I had heard were helpful for migraines (ginger, feverfew, etc), so I thought I would try it. I have no idea which ingredient was causing the problem, but once again when I stopped taking the supplement, my lips were better within a couple of days, although it was about ten days before they got back to normal. 

3. Moral of the story: not sure, because I'm not going to stop taking all supplements. A couple of them seem to be helpful. How about this: if I'm going to try something new, be on the lookout for unusual symptoms for a few weeks so it doesn't take so long to figure it out.

4. Switching gears: thirty years ago, I believed that for the most part you were done changing and growing by the time you hit 30. At that age, I had a child, my spouse and I were both working and keeping ourselves afloat, we had even bought our first house--a shabby rancher in a 1970s subdivision. We were fully grown adults, right? But by my 40s I knew that wasn't true-- I was learning new stuff all the time. And now I'm surprised to find out how much I'm still learning in my 60s. It's not a small amount. I'm learning a lot these days. 

5. One of the many new-age teachers I knew back in the 90s when New Age was still a thing (I posted a bunch about this many years ago, here is the most interesting of them) said something that still comes to mind. If you open yourself to growth, you will grow. I hate to use the phrase "setting an intention," but she probably said, if you set an intention to pursue spiritual growth, the resources you need will find you. 

6. I get less and less woo-woo as the years go by, but I have to admit this has been true every time I've tried it. As long as I stay open to growth, the tools and information I need come to hand--in the form of books or newspaper articles or podcasts or even conversations overhead at the post office-- anything. To try it for yourself, just say, maybe even out loud, I'm ready to grow whenever you think of it. I was feeling kind of stuck a few weeks ago and tried it. It's such a relief to find out that I can still grow and change at age 61. 

Make of that what you will. Of course, it could be things that would have happened anyway, and the only change is my level of awareness. Be skeptical if you want, you have my blessing.

7. A few days ago, I was looking for a post I wrote years ago. Instead of finding that one, I ran across a half dozen other posts that said pretty much exactly the same kinds of things I've been thinking about in 2023. Apparently, I can grow and change, but yup-- also I'm still exactly the same. I think it was Karen Armstrong who wrote about growth being a spiral: you keep circling back around to the same issues, but you're in a different place each time you visit them. 

Wow, I wasn't intending to go that direction when I started this. We're headed south for a couple of weeks in search of (we hope) some sun, so I'm not sure if I'll post again until we get back. Have a great weekend and enjoy the rest of January, wherever you are.

7ToF: off we go again, with a detour into mental health

1. We've been on two trips recently. The first was to the Oregon coast, and it was our first trip with the new camper. The camper was great, although the drive was a little challenging since it poured, I mean poured, on all of our driving days. It was like the downpour was moving with us. But once we got there, the weather was beautiful and we had a great time. My boys played a lot of golf and I got to spend time reading and relaxing and recharging. Then it rained for the whole drive back.

2. The second trip was just me, going to Texas to visit my mom and my sister. One of my nieces was graduating from high school, so that was the centerpiece of the weekend, but mostly I was there to visit. It was so hot. That is the best thing about travel: it reminds me of the good things about where we live. I'm back at home now and it's beautiful -- everything is finally green and we're even getting some flowers blooming. And it is not 93 and 90% humidity.

3. Apologies for the pity party in my last post. I hadn't been out of town in months, and that always makes me a little nuts. I used to think there was something specific about this area that made it necessary for me to get out of here regularly, but over the years I've realized that it's just me. Wherever we lived, it would have been the same. I get all tangled up in my head and it takes removing myself from my normal life to be able to untangle. The good news is that getting out of town for even a few days usually solves the problem--partly because I get somewhere else and realize that however difficult certain moments may seem, I'm still lucky to live here and to have friends who put up with me.

4.  The older I get, the more I realize that my mental health takes some care and management. I don't know if this is true for everyone. It doesn't seem like it, but then this isn't something people our age talk about. Nobody who who grew up in the fifties and sixties was raised to think about how to manage their mental health. 

We were all about conformity back then, especially for women-- there was little diversity in how you could dress, what kind of job you could have, what kind of personality you could have, all of that. And you were not supposed to be depressed or anxious or conflicted. Back then if you weren't killing it (a phrase we never would have used), you just took valium and zoned out, I guess. I was a kid, I'm not sure how it felt to an adult.

Anyway. I think I developed a persona that I thought would make my parents happy (they, especially my mom, were certainly not happy with my nerdy, introverted self), and that would help me fit in. I spent my twenties and thirties shedding that persona, and then I think I spent my forties and fifties trying to make things work without a social persona at all. I thought that was being "authentic." 

But here's what I know now: you have to have a social persona, and if you shed a previous version, it takes work to build a new one. I hope the new one I'm working on is more true, more based on being confident in myself, but it's not something that happens on its own. At least, it hasn't for me. 

Defining terms: What I mean by social persona is: a part of you that runs interference between what you're thinking and feeling, and what you actually say and do. A part of you that can consider how your words and actions will affect the people around you, and modify them accordingly. My impression is that some people have this naturally, but some of us don't. It takes some effort.

Does that make any sense at all? I'm learning this right now. I don't know what I'm talking about. I haven't vetted that with a therapist, since I haven't seen one in awhile. I spent years going to therapy and I highly recommend it, but I haven't been recently. 

Hey, OK, this can be #5. I tried the advertised-everywhere online therapy website Better Help during lockdown. I didn't feel like I needed full-on therapy, but I thought if I had a few sessions and developed a relationship with a therapist, then when I felt the need for a check-in, I would be able to just get online and schedule an appointment. It sounded like a great idea. 

But I didn't read the fine print about how you pay, so I'll tell you so you don't have to waste (an amount of money I'm embarrassed to admit) like I did. Better Help operates on the "athletic club" model of payment-- you pay a set fee every month, whether you use it or not. At the time I tried it, there was no pay-as-you-go option. Like an athletic club, if you make full use of it, the fees are reasonable. But if you're only doing 3-4 sessions once or twice a year, it's ridiculous. So, I had two sessions (which were good, the therapist seemed competent), and then I figured out the payment thing and opted out.

This post has ended up not lending itself to numbered paragraphs, but I'm pretty sure you've heard enough from me. We're already heading out again--Doug's family's annual vacation together is in North Carolina this year, and as you read this we will be on our way. We always have a great time with his family, I'm looking forward to it. I have two other half-written posts, so if I get them done and scheduled, you might hear from me next week, otherwise it will be when I get back.

7ToF: what a drag it isn't getting old

1. I like being 60. My fifties were transitional, and I'm not someone who deals well with change. 60 feels like I have arrived at something, although my friends who are already in their 60s seem a little mystified by this. I've written quite a bit about coming to terms with being a senior citizen and of course I'm not entirely there yet-- but once I made some semblance of a shift to thinking of myself as an elder, a crone, an old person, I really like it.

2. Which is why I've twice recently gotten myself into (briefly) tense situations. A couple of months ago, I was watching a movie with friends and when we paused for intermission (ie, snacks), one of them said, I refuse to say that I'm old. I don't feel old. and of course I couldn't keep my mouth shut about that, and I said I am embracing being old. That's one of the reasons our society has such a fixation with youth, I went on, because those of us who are old continue to chase after youth. If even those of us who are old are saying, ewwww, being old stinks! why should younger people think any different? Unsurprisingly, she was not convinced.

3. The next time was a few weeks ago when we were at a dinner party where everyone was about the same age (early sixties), but technically, I was the youngest one at the table. It was the week of Doug's 61st birthday, so I teased him that turning 60 is cool, but turning 61 is just old. There was this frozen half-second of silence (during which we can pause and recognize that I am sometimes a complete bonehead), and then one of the other women said with a fair amount of heat, why do you always have to remind us that you're the youngest one here? 

Which honestly kind of stunned me. First of all, I think of us as being the same age, because I'm 60 and the oldest person at the table is 63. Who the hell is worried about a two-and-a-half year age difference? I am as old as they are. And secondly, it's not insulting (in my opinion) to be old, although I reserve the right to tease and complain about it. I am continually surprised that people are so touchy about this. Why are we so brittle and sensitive around something that is a) inevitable, and b) not so bad?

4. My conclusion (besides the one about me being an insensitive idiot) is that our culture is just flat-out weird about aging, which we all already knew, so why am I even telling you these stories. I don't know. I guess I have to write about something.

5. Another thing people can be so touchy about: when someone asks me if I've seen whatever the latest TV sensation is, and I say I don't watch much TV because I'd rather read, a perfectly appropriate response would be: oh, that's too bad, you're missing some really great shows. Because that is true, and I know it. I'd still rather read, but I don't say it to be a snob, it's just my preference. The immediate assumption is that I'm bragging because somehow reading has a reputation for being intellectual and grandiose, while watching TV is supposedly pedestrian and dumb. 

6. Anyone who follows along here knows that I hardly have high-brow taste in reading. Among other things, I read cozy mysteries and romance novels and sci-fi (I'm in the middle of a Star Wars novel right now) and all sorts of genre fiction, some of which is fairly literary and some of which is really, uh, lightweight. But it's impossible to say, "I'd rather read than watch TV," without people assuming you're being a snob. So mostly I avoid  talking about it. A friend: Have you seen Killing Eve? (which I understand is seriously well-written and -acted), me: No, tell me about it!

7. This week's worthwhile listens:
- "How to Lose a War" on the SmartyPants podcast- an interview with Elizabeth D. Samet, who teaches English at West Point and has a unique window into the minds of people in the military. I was fascinated. (SmartyPants is the podcast of The American Scholar magazine.)
- "From Evangelical Pastor to Buddhist Nun" on the Ten Percent Happier podcast- if you're interested in either Evangelicalism or Buddhism, this one is also interesting. Probably you need to have a little basic knowledge about Buddhism to follow the conversation, but the general outline of her movement from Evangelicalism to Buddhism is pretty clear.
- I'm hit or miss on Gretchen Rubin's podcast Happier, but their episode on Burnout was thought-provoking. There's a difference between burnout and exhaustion, and the solutions to each are different, too.
- And of course I always plug the only podcast that I've continually listened to since I discovered podcasts: What Should I Read Next? hosted by Anne Bogel, which is usually just Anne interviewing some normal person about what they read and why, and then she recommends three books she thinks they might like. It's so much a part of my Tuesday morning routine that when she skips a week (as she did this week for spring break), my whole day feels off. Darn it, Anne.

I just realized that this will post on April Fool's Day and I spent about 30 seconds trying to think of a way to prank you, but that's never been my thing. Be careful out there.

7ToT: I laughed at all of your jokes, my love you didn't need to coax

1. Since the last time I've posted a personal update, we flew down to Texas for a family wedding. It was the first time I've flown since February 2020. It seemed pretty safe-- I've had covid, and since there are many medical or medical-adjacent people in our family, most have been vaccinated. 

2. I don't think I told you that when I had covid last November, I didn't notice any changes to my sense of taste or smell. But then about a month ago, suddenly I could taste and smell again. It was subtle enough that I hadn't really noticed until it came back. Sort of like going from black&white to technicolor in the Wizard of Oz.

3. I've lived in Montana for so long now that I've lost the ability to dress the way people dress in other places. Around here, dressing up means you wear your new jeans. Or maybe your black jeans. I've never been to anything in Montana, no matter how fancy or formal, where there weren't people wearing jeans. Of course, if it's formal, some will dress up, but there are always jeans. 

4. The wedding in Texas was stated to be formal on the invitation, which is something I don't think I've ever even seen on a wedding invitation here locally. I ordered a couple of dresses from Nordstrom's, neither of which suited me or fit right, so finally I sent them back and pulled an old dress out of the back of my closet. Since I almost never dress up, even though it's an "old" dress, I'd only worn it once. It fit perfectly, and it was comfortable, and I had a pair of shoes to match, so I thought it was a total win. But there were no sequins or shiny bits, and I don't wear high heels. I didn't realize how under-dressed I was until I started looking at pictures after we got back. Oops. But I was only aunt of the bride, so probably nobody cared. 

5. This week's Interesting Listen: George Saunders (author of Tenth of December and Lincoln in the Bardo) has a new book out and he's been making the rounds of several of the podcasts I follow. He is always interesting. I was fascinated by his conversation with the So Many Damn Books guys. He is both a great writer and a long time teacher of writing (at Syracuse)(where Mary Karr also teaches, an embarrassment of riches), so if you're interested in Saunders or writing or teaching writing, definitely worth a listen. 

5a) bonus listen. I'm more cheap than I am vain, so chances are slim I will ever do cosmetic surgery or procedures (never say never, I guess). But if you're curious about what exactly people mean when they say they've "had a little work done," I thought this episode of Laura Tremaine's pod was fascinating.

6. This week's Interesting Read: Also if you're interested in writing or teaching writing, don't miss Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses. It's about reimagining the writing workshop, which has been hallowed ground in creative writing programs since the 1950s. He talks about the experience of being someone who is not a white straight cis male in a system that was designed for white straight cis males. Even when I disagreed, it was fascinating, but usually I was nodding my head. (for the record, that is not an affiliate link).

7. I got so tangled up trying to write part two of that last post that I punted. And because the problem was that I really, truly couldn't figure out what I was trying to say, it led to several days of deep thinking (danger, Will Robinson). Which in turn led to the not-very-surprising realization that I need some time away. I told you I was going to do this a couple of weeks ago, but then I kept on posting. It's hard to get out of the habit! Thanks for checking in. See y'around.

7ToF: Flatly I'll stand on my little flat feet and say: this post is all over the place. Good luck.

1. For some reason I had the urge to watch South Pacific this week, the 1958 version with Mitzi Gaynor as Nellie Forbush. It's an experience. My mom was a big Rogers and Hammerstein fan, so we listened to the soundtrack obsessively when I was in elementary school. Watching it again after not having seen it in at least 20 years was like being dumped right back into another time and place. 

It's often embarrassingly cringe-y. Bloody Mary, the white actors in full-body makeup playing Polynesians, middle-aged Emil creepily singing that he needs someone young and smiling-- Nellie can't be half his age. 

But considering the times, it's sometimes surprisingly sophisticated--that racism is carefully taught, not inborn; the hints of transgenderism; the moment between Nellie and Joe Cable, both of them madly in love with someone else, when they struggle with their pre-war small minds and the wider world they've encountered. (That's my favorite moment in the movie. Among other things to love--eg, the hauntingly bitter "My Girl Back Home"-- I can't think of another movie of that era that has a similar moment of pure friendship between a man and a woman. It's rare enough even now.)

2. But half the reason to watch it is so that you get the full impact of the Gay Men's Chorus of Los Angeles' ironic South Pacific Medley. It's priceless.

3. There are a million and one reasons to be upset with the GOP leadership for caving in to Trump for the past four (five) years. But one of the worst is that they have erased the path out of the QAnon lies and conspiracy theories. There's not a chance in hell that the people who have been sucked down that rabbit hole are going to believe a Democrat, ever-- after all, we're the ones who are colluding in a Satanic pedophile ring, right? And we're bringing on Armageddon and the downfall of moral society and the demise of the family and all that rot. But no one the QAnon folks would be willing to trust is saying, "Look-- we're conservatives and we agree with you about a lot of things, but Trump is lying to you. There was no election fraud." (I mean, if the Dems had rigged the election, why did they lose pretty much every contentious down-ballot race?) So the QAnon people have no path out. Maybe that is the biggest failure of the GOP right now.

4. At the end of Avengers' End Game, I declared that I was done with Marvel. I've told you before, I really enjoyed the Marvel movies, especially some of the later ones (Thor: Ragnarok, Black Panther, Captain Marvel, Guardians of the Galaxy). But it felt like they had their run and I wasn't willing to go back for more of the same. How many superhero stories can there be? I mean, when you get to the point where your superheroes are fighting each other (as they were in Captain America: Civil War), maybe the well has run dry. Enough already.

5. However. I keep hearing that WandaVision is really good. Hmmmm. Might have to try it. Let me know if you have.

Me, age 7

6. The photo is of me, as my ultra nerdy seven-year-old self. I'm putting it here this week because I've been thinking quite a bit about the blonde thing. I heard a black woman say in an interview last year that there is no more privileged person in the world than a blonde white woman. I wanted to object-- there's still the whole patriarchy thing going on, and you have to put up with blonde jokes and having your intelligence underestimated. But I also get what she meant. There are a whole bunch of men who are captivated by blonde hair. I don't understand it, and I don't buy into it for sure, but I also can't say I've never taken advantage of it. 

6a.  To be clear, I've never, ever, ever cried in front of a professor to get a grade changed, or to a police officer to get out of a ticket, or any of the other stupid things blonde women supposedly do. But I've politely accepted that certain older men are going to flirt or take extra notice, because even when it was annoying, it seemed fairly harmless.

7. You can see from the photo that I've been blonde for a long time. Sometime in my 30s, my hair darkened up enough that up until the pandemic shut down hair salons, I'd been getting it highlighted 2-3 times a year for ages. Once I couldn't get it done anymore, I decided that I would let it grow out and see what my natural color is at age 59. Honestly, I kind of liked it. It was a sort of caramel-y color, and in the summer when I was in the sun fairly often, it still had blonde-ish highlights. But over the winter, it really darkened up. So yesterday I went in, got an inch and a half hacked off (it was down to my shoulders), and got the highlights again. Mea culpa. It's the dumb blonde life for me.

Have a great weekend.

7ToF: There and back again

1. Since Doug (see below) and I are both post-covid, we have 2-3 months of immunity. It's the only good thing about the experience. And since our kids both work in hospitals, they were able to get the first dose of the vaccine fairly early. So we decided to take the risk and get together for the week after Christmas. It was wonderful. We drove south to a rental house and did our best to isolate there-- we went for walks and hikes, and there were a couple of rounds of golf (not me), but other than that and trips to the grocery store, we didn't go out. We got take-out or cooked for ourselves, and played games and watched movies (all three extended edition LOTR movies--not kidding--it took all week.)

I feel somewhat bad about this, because there are so many millions of people in the entire world who weren't able to meet with their family or get away for a vacation this year. But not bad enough to not do it. Mea culpa.

2. I was an internet early adopter. My first experience with email, online forums, and bulletin boards was in 1985 when I started a job in Research Triangle Park, NC, with a company that was on ARPAnet. I loved it--I loved the job, I loved the proto-Internet. Within months after being hired as a technical editor, I had moved onto their IT team. 

3. I'm telling you this to explain why I've never been forthcoming with personal info here in this blog. Back in those days, you weren't supposed to reveal your true identity online. I remember being told that you should never reveal your name and your birthdate, because that would pretty much hand your identity to anyone with nefarious intent. So when I finally signed up for Facebook, I used a fake birthdate and insisted that my kids do the same, which eventually caused all kinds of problems with their age restrictions and had to be sorted out by their tech support, back when you could still get to FB's tech support. 

4. Anyway. For the first fifteen years I was online, everybody had screen names and avatars and personas. You lived with the vague fear that a serial murderer was going to figure out where you lived and come after you and your family. All these years later, it's a hard habit to drop. I tried to stop using fake blog names for my family members a few years ago, but it just felt wrong.

But you know, it's 2021. Now it's considered poor form to use a fake persona on social media, because how are people going to trust you if they don't know who you are? And to my surprise, I'm finding that I agree. So, I'm trying again. My husband isn't Dean, he's Doug. And our kids are Melanie (Mel) and Sam-- although now that they are 30 and 23, respectively, they don't show up here all that often anymore.  We really do exist, and we live in Northwest Montana, where we moved in 1992 (still can't quite bring myself to say exactly where, but most of you know anyway). I haven't made as big a deal of hiding my own name, but I'm Barb. Just in case you were wondering.

5. The other thing that has changed since I started blogging (in 2003!!) is--well, blogging. No one does it anymore. Of all the blogs I followed religiously back in the early 2010s, only one is regularly updated anymore, and she has a team of people helping her create content. The others have either quit or moved on to podcasting or Instagram Live or something similar. But I don't want to do 90-second takes on Instagram Live (and lord knows I don't want to have to look at myself on camera), I want to write. So I'm still here, and even though I've (obviously) not been posting much recently, I don't really want to quit. 

6. I did seriously consider quitting, because it feels like I'm just setting myself up for irrelevance, and we've already talked about that. Yup, I'm still blogging, and I use proper punctuation in my texts, and I like my 1980s hairstyle, too. But I still have things I want to write about. I know I took kind of a long break over the past few months, but honestly, I just didn't know what to say. In fact, I had planned on posting earlier this week, but then things kind of went to hell, and it felt wrong to ignore it, but what was I going to say that a million Twitter users hadn't already said? 

7. So I'm considering a lot of things-- like pre-writing a series of posts on a particular topic, or changing up the whole thing with a new name and a new look, and maybe I will do both of those things. But for the time being, nothing is changing. Which begs the question of why exactly I'm going on and on here, but you know, I needed to catch you up after weeks of not posting. 

Hope you had a lovely and renewing holiday season, because good lord, things are already off to a crazy start. See you next week. 

7ToF: an update on my efforts to de-plastic and de-Amazon my life, and a brilliant travel plan

1. You remember my New Year's resolve to cut down on single-use plastic (see the end of this post)? I'd give myself a B- on this so far. I've found some replacement products that are working well, and I've found them at Target, so you know that means that the anti-plastic movement has hit the middle class mainstream. So now I can usually (not always) avoid using ziplock bags. I'm partial to these brown paper sandwich bags because I can toss them and not have to bring home a dirty bag, but MadMax likes the reusable bags better (see photo).

I'm pretty consistent about using reusable bags for shopping and carrying my own water bottle. But that's about all I've done. I need to get back to putting energy into this. I confess I bought some reusable produce bags that are still in the box.

2. I'm not doing so well on disentangling myself from Amazon (if you missed the post on why I'm trying to avoid Amazon, it is here). There are so many things that we just can't get around here even when there's not a pandemic, and the shutdown definitely made it worse. I buy local when I can, and I've ordered stuff from Target, Wal-Mart, etc. when I can't. But I've also ordered stuff from the Big A. ("A" can stand for whatever you want to insert there, depending on mood.)

3. On the other hand, I am doing much better about not buying books from Amazon. I think I've only ordered one physical book from them in the past six months. Bookshop.org is great, and they've become my go-to for ordering actual physical books. They redistribute their profits among independent booksellers. It's not as fast as Amazon, but I rarely need the books on my doorstep in 48 hours. 

4. I was so committed to cutting back on my reliance on Amazon that I bought a refurbished Nook, Barnes&Noble's e-reader, in an effort to quit buying new books for my Kindle. It works fine, but I have to tell you there is no comparison between a Nook and a Kindle. The Kindle is more thoughtfully designed, has better back-lighting, and feels about three times faster. So I'm conflicted about this. Kindle e-readers are a good product that I really enjoy and use the heck out of. I'm hoping that recent pressure from publishers and maybe even some thoughtful legislation will level the playing field so that I can keep using my Kindle without feeling guilty about it, because I do love it. It's complicated.

5. One of my Instagram friends posted a picture of a trip to Barbados that she took a couple of years ago, mourning our inability to travel. I was suddenly struck by an intensity of longing to go somewhere that was so strong it was almost physically painful. God, I miss traveling. SO. MUCH. But then I had a brilliant idea. For me, about half the fun of travel is planning the trip, so what if I go ahead and plan a trip? Maybe we'll never actually do it, but I can order the books and do internet research and make a plan. I'm so excited about this. It is actually pretty difficult to get to the Caribbean from here (as opposed to Hawaii or Mexico, which are two short plane flights away), so maybe I will even take advantage of the fantasy aspect and plan a trip to Barbados. Or Turks & Caicos. Or St. Lucia. I don't know. I'm just getting started. 

6. A friend of mine told me recently that her GI doctor told her she should be taking a probiotic. I nodded along, half-listening, because I've been taking a probiotic off and on for years. I even buy the refrigerated kind. But then she said he told her it has to be a particular brand, Culturelle. And then she said, I've been taking it for a month now and it's like my metabolism is working again. Well, enough said, because we all know what it feels like to have your metabolism slooooooooow doooooown. Good grief. So I trotted off the next day to Target (they also have it at Costco, I haven't looked anywhere else), and I've been taking it for three weeks now, and I have to agree. I have no studies, nothing but my friend's anecdotal evidence and my own. But it's definitely worth a try. Also, it doesn't have to be refrigerated, so I actually remember to take it since it's in the same place as my other meds/vitamins.

7. This week's movie worth re-watching: Galaxy Quest. If you didn't like it the first time, re-watching won't change your mind, but it's one of our family favorites and it had been too long since we'd seen it. By Grabthar's hammer, what a savings. oh lord, do I love Alan Rickman. I could go on and on about lines that have entered our family conversations, sometimes without us even remembering where they came from. Those poor people. Could you fashion some sort of rudimentary lathe? Hey, I'm just jazzed to be on the show. That was a hell of a thing. And of course, Sigourney Weaver's classic, Look, I've got one job to do on this ship. It's stupid, but I'm going to do it.

Have a great weekend.

7ToF: changing my demographic, headaches, and my favorite Kind bar

The color of spring

1. Years ago, I realized one day that one of my best friends was the same age as my younger sister (i.e., less than two years younger than me). When my sister and I were young, twenty months seemed like a huge difference. But with my adult friends, I never think about age differences. It's always seemed like all women between mid-thirties and some unspecified older age were my peers.

2. But it has been gradually and then suddenly dawning on me that this is no longer the case. Finally at some point last week the whole idea burst into bloom in my head all at once: I'm in a different age bracket now. I think it's been evident to my younger friends for years now-- no, you are waaaay older than me, not just a little bit-- but it was news to me. After the initial shock of realization, I'm totally OK with this. I am embracing my inner crone. I envision rocking on the front porch with friends and a pitcher of vodka tonics and cackling over inappropriate jokes. I think it took me so long to figure this out because I was still a mom with a kid at home until I was 55. That's my excuse, anyway.

As you can imagine, there will be more on this topic in the future. Can this still be a blog about mid-life? Am I a senior citizen now? The AARP has been sending me stuff for years, so they certainly think so.

3. Since I may be offline for a couple of weeks, here is the headache update. I am way better, and same as the last time I tried an elimination diet, there weren't any foods that made a difference. Stretching and working with my neck and shoulders seems to be the key-- which means I need to avoid spending all day hunched over the computer or curled up with a book. DAMMIT. So I've been getting out more and reading less, and reminding myself to get up and stretch, etc etc.

4. Elimination diets are interesting. Since I've never done one unless I was desperate--three weeks of headaches will do that to you--I never do it in an organized enough way. There are so many variables, and unless you can go live in a convent somewhere, it's just impossible to shut everything down. Or at least, it is if you're me and you don't really care about it that much. I ended up going about two and a half weeks with no alcohol, sugar, or artificial sweeteners, and about one and a half weeks with no dairy and no grains (gluten or otherwise). I've slowly been adding stuff back over the past ten days or so, and since at the moment I've only been headache free for five or six days, I don't think it's any of the food items.

5. Over the last few days, I've added back corn-- I waited on that one since I was a little suspicious about it. The worst migraine I've had in a couple of years was after I had tamales for dinner the previous night. But I've had corn every day for the past three days, and I feel great, so I think that's ok. I still haven't had any peanuts or peanut butter, so that's the only thing left to add back in. But I think it's going to be fine.

6. The "no dairy" and "no gluten" evangelists, I think, would say I didn't give it long enough. And yeah, maybe they're right. But I know people who are gluten sensitive or lactose intolerant, and they can tell within hours if they've eaten something they shouldn't have. If that were me, I would totally get on board. It wouldn't take five minutes for me to sign on to that program if it made that big a difference. But if you have to avoid something for weeks, and then three days after you add it back in you still can't tell any difference, I'm not convinced it's a problem. The stretching and the activity level seem to make a much bigger, more noticeable difference for me.

The color of spring #2

7. But there are headaches, and then there's how I feel in general. And doing this did remind me how much better I feel (headaches aside) when I avoid sugar. I feel no need to become a zero sugar person, but I do feel better if I limit sugar, and if you want specifics, at the moment that means that I'm avoiding anything that has more than 6g of sugar, which I somewhat arbitrarily picked because my favorite Kind bar has 6g of sugar. I feel noticeably better when I'm not eating a sugary snack two or three times a day-- and that can happen if I'm not paying attention, because I have a definite sweet tooth.

On an entirely different topic: I've been learning a lot recently, and we've had a couple of significant life changes--like MadMax moving back home after college-- but it's not stuff I'm ready to type about yet. And also, we're headed out to our favorite lake for the holiday weekend, so I'll be out of range for at least a few days. And since I'm supposed to be spending less time at the computer, I thought I'd take advantage of the opportunity to be offline for awhile. So, not sure when I'll be back-- probably soon, I don't seem to be able to stay away-- but I hope you have a great weekend and a good start to your summer.

Things worth reading/listening to:
- This older post about writing and storytelling from Jenny Crusie
- Modern Mrs. Darcy's Summer Reading Guide (you have to sign up with your email address)
- Book rec: Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson (heavy on the profanity but sharply observed)
- Fascinating podcast episode of the week: An interview with Ezra Klein on the Ten Percent Happier podcast, episode #248. Klein dissects our polarization and what can (and can't) be done about it. I'll be thinking about this one for weeks.

7ToF: we're reopening around here

This got long. Save it for when you have time.

1. The governor of Montana has started a three-phase plan for reopening the state, starting with allowing non-essential businesses to reopen, but keeping in place all of the social distancing guidelines, limiting groups to no more than 10, etc. Montana has the lowest incidence of COVID-19 of any state (per population), and most of the cases have been in Bozeman and a senior care facility in Shelby County.

2. Montanans as a group are nothing if not stubbornly opposed to anyone telling them what to do, and some have taken the lack of virus as a sign that the whole thing was just an over-reaction by the liberals who are trying to take control of our country. And, you know what? If we follow the rules of social distancing and cautious public gathering, maybe we will be able to avoid an outbreak long enough for a vaccine to be developed, and they will be able to believe that they were right.

3. Which is a really strange thing about this whole situation (among about a million other strange things). There are all these people, one is tempted to say all these idiots, who in spite of the mounting numbers of cases and deaths, are determined to believe that it's not really a crisis. That this is just another in a long string of examples of liberals over-reacting and getting hysterical about something that's really not a big deal, and that if we'd just treated it like the flu, it would have gone away-- and I wouldn't have lost my job/had to home school my kids/had to cancel my wedding/etc.

As, one is tempted to say, a more reasonable person, you're left in the strange situation of almost wanting things to get bad so that you can prove to these people that see, it really is a real thing. We're not exaggerating. It's like the classic lose-lose situation: either you're right, and hundreds of thousands more people are going to get sick and some of them die (lose); or you're wrong (lose), and those idiots are going to say they were right all along.

4. Anyway. I hate wearing a mask, I hate having anything on my face, and always have. But I'm wearing one, because Dean is one of the faces of our medical community, and I'm trying to be as supportive as I can. Sometimes I forget, but for the most part, when I'm in a building besides our house, I wear a mask. I have a bunch of oversized bandanas that I bought to use as napkins last year when I was trying to cut down on our use of paper products, so usually I wear one of those, quadruple folded. But as it is becoming more apparent that we are going to have to stay masked at least in certain situations for a long time, I finally got on Etsy and ordered half a dozen homemade masks. Yet another time I've wished I could sew.

5. I don't think I've talked all that much about my never-ending sickness, which I've had for a couple of months now. There is a fair amount of evidence that it's not COVID-- I'm pretty sure I did tell you about Mel's negative test when she went back to work after spring break, and it hasn't behaved like COVID seems to behave. But still, once antibody testing becomes widespread enough that I can justify getting tested, I am looking forward to finding out.

What I'm getting around to here is that I have had a lot more headaches than usual. In a good month, I have maybe 10-12 headache days, and about half of them will be bad enough to take migraine drugs. But recently, I've just had a headache all the time. I've had to not take migraine drugs, because I'm worried about running out. In the past month, I had maybe three or four days of feeling healthy and headache-free.

6. So I've finally decided I have to do something to make a change. And the only thing I can really try right now is changing the food I eat. I'm somewhat skeptical about this. Believe me, I tried all the things back when I was having a similar headache-intensive stretch in my 40s. I tried dairy-free, gluten-free, sugar-free, caffeine-free. Sugar and caffeine made a difference, although not a huge one--my headaches decreased in frequency, but were not "cured." Dairy and gluten made no difference at all.

7. But my metabolism has changed. It changed for the first time in my late 40s/early 50s as I was dealing with pre- and post-menopause. And now it seems to be changing again. For example: I've been drinking black tea with unsweetened soymilk first thing in the morning for more than a dozen years now, but more and more often, I come downstairs in the morning and the idea of tea is not appealing. Or coffee, but that's less surprising since my stomach dictated that I quit drinking coffee long ago. I've switched to green tea for the moment, but maybe it's time to get off caffeine again.

ALL THAT LONG RAMBLING MESS was just to tell you that I'm on an elimination diet at the moment. If it was for weight loss, my inner rebel would come out with flags flying and refuse to participate, but since it is to see if I can freaking feel better for a change, I seem to have sucked it up and gotten on board with the plan. I read about Whole30, but the logical inconsistencies in their theories made me nuts (don't get me started), so I just made up my own plan. No alcohol, which is easy because I don't drink much alcohol anyway, no dairy (not too hard since my only dairy is yogurt and cheese), no gluten (harder), and low sugar (which also comes under the heading of "don't get me started" but I'll save that for another post).

Who knows how long I'll be doing it. My initial commitment to myself was to try it for a week and see how I feel and re-evaluate. I'm five days in right now and although I do feel a bit better in terms of energy and general well-being, as I'm sitting here typing this I'm trying to decide whether or not this headache is bad enough to warrant migraine drugs. Ugh.

So in spite of that downer of an ending, other than physically not feeling well, I'm actually doing fine. I seem to have figured out a rhythm for sheltering at home, and my mental status is pretty good. Headaches are status quo for me, so having them isn't necessarily a sign that things are bad.

Have a great weekend. Sorry this got so long. It's about twenty things instead of seven.

7ToT: a few further thoughts on Amazon, and way too much about movies

1. Of course within days after I wrote that post about my Amazon dilemma, Dean told me his office was having a baby shower for one of his favorite co-workers. And guess what? We had four days to get a gift, and only one retailer could ship his choice in time for the shower: Amazon. So much for the purity of my protest.

2. When I mentioned the Amazon dilemma on Instagram last week, reader Julie responded, "It's just so fucking complicated," which is certainly true. But it was also the thing I needed to hear. My response doesn't have to be 100% fangirl OR 100% #notAmazon. I can use Amazon when it makes sense, and hopefully far less than in the past. I'm especially discovering if I want there to be independent bookstores, and I want there to be Barnes & Nobles stores where I can browse, I need to spread out my book buying. So I am.

(but p.s. Barnes and Noble seriously needs to update their site. I can't even get on it most of the time. Maybe it's just our awful internet, but I've seen some other complaints on social media.)

3. An independent bookstore posted a few months ago that one of the easiest things you can do to support non-Amazon retailers is to follow them on social media and like their posts. It costs you nothing, and it boosts their visibility.  So I follow all kinds of independent bookstores all over the country. It's fun, and often informative about upcoming releases, etc.

4. I guess I'm old enough now that I just don't understand why people get so heated up about things. The new Star Wars movie was fine--not my favorite, but certainly not the worst of the series. It had some really good moments in it, in addition to some moments that were head-scratchers (where the hell did they dig up that old fossil -ha). I didn't want Rey to end up with anybody, not Finn, not Ben Solo, and certainly not Poe, so I was not as upset by that part of the story as apparently a lot of other people were. Geeze. Can't she just enjoy being a badass on her own for awhile? I thought the one thing they got exactly right was the Rey-Ben plot.

5. It is light years better than either Phantom Menace or Attack of the Clones, and since we re-watched all eight of the Star Wars movies the week before Rise of Skywalker came out, those were fresh in our minds (we watched Rogue One last summer so skipped that one). I don't understand why it's getting so much criticism. My main objection wasn't Episode IX itself, but the lack of any clear vision for the 7-8-9 trilogy. Did they even have a plan? I am in total agreement with the guy at Forbes who can't understand why it's getting so much heat. Best quote from that column: "I’d give each of [the new trilogy] a solid B. However, I’d give the trilogy itself a C simply because Disney and Abrams and Johnson and everyone involved in producing these films failed spectacularly at creating an overarching, coherent plot that could tie them all together. Why even bother making a trilogy without a plan?"  That, exactly.

6. Loved Knives Out, partly because it was so unexpected. But we couldn't figure out why they put Daniel Craig (with an unforgivably bad Southern accent) in the role of the detective. I like Daniel Craig but casting him in that role made no sense. But that wasn't enough to keep us from being thoroughly entertained. (The inaccurate medical stuff bugged Dean but I don't know any of that stuff so it didn't bother me.)

7. And Little Women. Oh my word, is it good. It joins the ranks of the very few movies I think are better than the books. I liked the book when I read it around age 10 but didn't love it, and I don't think I ever re-read it until I was an adult, as opposed to other books that I read over and over. Long sections of Little Women (the book) are yawningly tedious, especially all the prose-y preaching from Meg and Marmee about how important it was for Jo to hold back her true self to measure up to some weird nineteenth century standard of what women should be. It just felt stifling. But the movie managed to be true to the moral tone without being so heavy-handed. Due in no small part to Florence Pugh, whose version of Amy is fabulous--the strong and capable counterpoint to Jo's fiery genius-- but only vaguely related to the vain, shallow Amy depicted in the book.

I could go on and on about LW, but I'll spare you. Just one more thing. The thing that takes a good, solid movie and sends it over the top is how Greta Gerwig took the autobiographical fiction of the book Little Women and merged it with the real biography of Louisa May Alcott at the end. It was brilliantly done. Just brilliant. Loved it.

That's all for me. Hope you're having a good week.

7ToF: BETWEEN TRIPS, which means I am both happy to be traveling, and also completely nuts

Very cool succulents at Desert Botanical Garden

1. We went to Phoenix last weekend for a trip that was business for Dean, and nothing but fun for me. I wish we could do that more often-- Dean's air fare, the rental car, and the hotel room were paid for, we just have to pay for my airfare, food, and all the books I bought. Then on Monday, I'm headed to Texas to spend a few days with my mom and then go to Dallas for the big mystery readers/writers convention, Bouchercon. I've never done anything like this and I'm really excited about it. I will report back.

2. Highly recommend Washington Black by Esi Edugyan. It's the story of Wash, a young boy who starts life as a slave on a sugar plantation. The brother of the plantation owner takes him on, and then the two of them are forced to flee when Wash is implicated in the death of a white man. It obviously has some parts that are difficult to read, but for those of us who are Highly Sensitive Readers (a title I claim with some embarrassment), it's readable. You can do it. Edugyan's writing is wonderful, the voice of Wash is mesmerizing.

3. But I was struck by something that I guess is a sign of the times. (Minor spoilers ahead) Wash starts a relationship with a young woman several years after his escape. Even though they are clearly living together, at no point do they worry about getting pregnant. I've noticed this in various historical romances, too. Even though there weren't really any effective methods of birth control in the nineteenth century, somehow the author projects her own lack of worry about pregnancy back onto her characters. It is so weird. In my generation, as soon as you became sexually active, you worried about getting pregnant. Even when I was married, I worried somewhat obsessively about getting pregnant when I didn't want to. But apparently, today's young women are so confident in their birth control options that they don't know what that obsessive dread of getting pregnant is like.

4. On the one hand, I'm really happy about this. Women will never achieve economic stability if they can't control when they get pregnant, and this tells me that we're getting there. These young women don't seem to know the psychic burden of worrying about getting pregnant. That is great. But on the other hand, it's so not accurate. The consequences of an accidental unwanted pregnancy back then would have been enormous.

I guess it's the same argument as using a Bible that has the pronouns updated to be more inclusive, or Hamilton, where we are reimagining the past the way it should have been. And I am entirely in favor of both of those, so I think I am deciding that this is a good thing.

5. You know what I am tired of? (this is starting to be a regular topic: things that make me grumpy) I am tired of obsessing about skincare. MY GOD. I have a skincare routine--it even has several more steps to it than it did when I was in my 30s and all I had to worry about was preventing breakouts. So it's not that I'm completely uninterested in the topic. But suddenly it seems to have become The Thing to obsessively listen to skin care podcasts and read blog posts and spend hundreds of dollars on trying out new products. It's ridiculous. There are no men who are doing this. It is just women. What is it with us?

6. But now that I've said that *blush* I have to confess that I did a three-week test of a new skin care product someone raved about on buzzfeed. The skin of my chest, which I think we are supposed to call our décolletage, is covered in moles, age spots, dark patches, and red dots (yes, the dermatologist did tell me the technical name and no, I cannot remember it). The dermatologist told me that it's just the joys of aging, and we have to claim our wisdom and our years and whatever other bullshit they tell you, and there was nothing to be done. The downside of a northern European gene pool, I guess. I don't very often envy younger women, except when I see someone with a perfectly smooth décolletage. Then I want to scratch her eyes out.

7. So anyway. I tried Stila's One Step Correct ($36 at Ulta) for three weeks. I even took before and after pictures so I could tell what really happened, and as you might be able to predict, there is not a chance in hell I am posting them. But you know what? While it made zero difference in the number of moles/spots/skin tags, it made a huge difference in how my skin looks. I was, honestly, kinda shocked, because I am a pretty big skeptic about skin stuff. I'm going to keep using it. That particular product may not work for you, but I guess I can't turn my nose up at people who are trying different things, because sometimes you find something that helps.

That's it for me. Have a great weekend.

7ToF: the days go by

1. Suddenly, right at the moment when I'm surprised to look up and see that it's already October, it is October tenth (eleventh by the time you read this). I have no idea how these things happen. Part of the reason I've been busier than usual is that I signed up for a creative writing class-- not necessarily fiction, it's for whatever kind of writing you want to do. Since it's hard to write a blog post after I've spent hours working on something for the class, I might post a couple of the things I've written. So if something strange pops up in your feed, no worries, it's just me, practicing.

2. I've been wearing the same power of cheaters (+1.75) for at least five years. Just in the last couple of weeks, it appears that it might be time to change to +2.00. Ouch. The downward spiral.

3. Paper towel update: I figured out that the reason I like using paper towels for cleaning is that you throw them out, as opposed to using dish/wash cloths, which hang around wet, dirty, and germ-y, waiting to be used again. Yuck. The solution seems to be having enough dish cloths that they can be single use. I use one to wipe down the counter and then throw it in the laundry. For some strange reason, in the past this has felt uncomfortably wasteful to me, which is weird because really it is way less wasteful than paper towels. For now, it is working. They take up hardly any room in the washing machine, so there's no increase in laundry-- which would be a deal breaker. Also, I've been having fun finding cheap cotton cloths.

4. In an effort to get out more, we've been going to more movies. We don't usually go-- in the past, we've been to the theater maybe three or four times per year. It seemed like the worthwhile ones were always depressing, and the fun ones always seemed to involve hours of car chases. Is there anything more boring than a car chase? Apparently that is one of my many unpopular opinions, because all blockbuster movies have car chases, even sci-fi or fantasy ones where they're not actually driving cars, they're driving some hopped-up moon rover or dune buggy or whatever. You just sit there and watch special effects chase around the screen until they're done.  /*rant over*/

4a. Sadly, though, even though we've seen more movies lately, I don't have any to recommend. We've seen some that kept us entertained for a couple of hours, but none that were knock-your-socks-off. Although I will say that The Goldfinch was way better than I expected, given its terrible reviews.

5. Am I the last person to find out about the phone app Serial Reader? You download it to your phone, pick a classic novel, and then every day a snippet of that novel appears in the app. So by reading 15-ish minutes a day you can get through Jane Eyre in 72 days, Frankenstein in 28 days, or The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in 5 days. It's mostly books that are in the public domain, of course, and the selection is a little limited, but he's adding new stuff all the time. I'm working my way through various Sherlock Holmes stories right now. The basic functions are free, or you can pay more to read more than one book at at time, plus other features. Love it.

6. That said, I've realized over the last few months how much self-imposed pressure I've felt to keep up with my TBR pile. One of the things I've lost is the joy of re-reading. I have always loved re-reading my favorite books. When I was a kid, I used to read the Narnian Chronicles every year. I've read Pride and Prejudice at least five times. But now I'm so aware of all the books out there that I want to read, I've allowed myself to succumb to reader FOMO. I don't have time to re-read! I've got to keep up! So now I've resolved to have at least one re-read going all the time. Right now it's The Thirteenth Tale, which I've actually only read once before, but I wanted to see if it's as good as I remember before going on to her new book, which came out this summer.

7. You know what I don't mind? I don't mind being referred to as a guy. When I'm sitting with a group of friends and one of them says, "What are you guys reading?", it just doesn't bother me. It's partly regional-- "you guys" is the midwest equivalent of "y'all." But it's also just not that big a deal. I've been treated with kindness and respect by people who use all the wrong, politically incorrect words, and I've been treated badly by people who said all the right things. I know which I prefer, and it's not the people who can check off all the correct buzzword boxes.

wow, two rants in one post.

Have a great weekend.

7ToF: If you want to destroy my sweater, hold this thread as I walk away

1. I told you awhile ago about my happiness with using microfiber washcloths instead of single-use disposable face wipes, and I am still happy with them (in fact, I just ordered some more). I am not as happy about my attempt to get rid of paper towels. I ordered bamboo towels that come on a roll just like regular paper towels, but you can run them through the laundry and reuse them for months instead of throwing them away. Unfortunately, before they were washed, they were stiff and hydrophobic, and once they were washed, they were very "linty," if you know what I mean. They left hairy bits on everything. So I am still working on a replacement for paper towels. I don't actually use that many, so I'm not sure how important this is to me. If you have any ideas, let me know.

2. Drumming update: I have progressed to Weezer's Sweater Song. The basic version of the drum part has to be the simplest of any top 40 hit ever, bless them.

3.  If you enjoy smart, thought-provoking conversations about books, try the So Many Damn Books podcast episode about the literary canon and how it has changed/should change (episode 120, Back to School)(episode 117, about Lonesome Dove, is also relevant). The Front Porch's episode #242 from this week is an unexpectedly interesting conversation about banned books. I am forever grateful that my parents, conservative as they were, never restricted my reading in any way. It was partly because back in the sixties, parenting was a much more hands-off activity than it is now. But it is also partly because they were really in favor of reading. Left to my own devices, I tended to pick books that were pretty tame anyway (see item 5).

Aside: a further shoutout to So Many Damn Books for recommending the book Dreyer's English in episode 119, which is so fun if you are a word nerd. Funny, literate, frequently deliberately provocative. Five stars. The interview the SMDB guys do with Dreyer is also interesting, and spurred me to re-read To the Lighthouse this summer.

4. I am, for lack of a better term, an immersive reader. When I'm reading, I'm in there, in the story, like it's happening to me. When I was reading Sing Unburied Sing, I had to put the book down at one point because I was so angry and upset that the mom wasn't feeding her children. It was several minutes before I pulled myself out of it enough to remind myself that it was fiction and it wasn't really happening right that minute.

5. And I can't read horror or suspense books because they (not kidding) give me nightmares. I remember not being able to sleep for several nights when I was in junior high and read 83 Hours Till Dawn, about an heiress who was kidnapped and buried alive in an oversized coffin for more than three days. I can't give you a more recent example than that because I never read a book like that again. Gone Girl, which I tried because I kept hearing about it, gave me nightmares. I can recognize her innovations, and the on-the-nose description of a marriage that's a mess, but I'm not reading anything else she wrote. Nope.

6. I'm starting to realize that reading like this really inhibits my enjoyment of what could be some great stories, but I have no idea how to change. If you have any ideas, let me know. I'm working on it right now. I was listening to a tense part of an audiobook yesterday and I paused it, made myself breathe and reminded myself this isn't happening to me. It's not even really happening to her, since it's a fantasy novel. HA. How ridiculous am I??

7. At our house, all of us have... well... ummm.... lucky underwear. Is this just us? When you have something especially scary or stressful happening on a particular day, you wear your lucky underwear. For me, it also extends to socks. I have several pairs of socks (like the ones with pink and purple stripes that my friend Susan gave me, or the ones with goldfish on them) that help me feel brave when I'm feeling intimidated. You can't see them, but I'm wearing my lucky socks! For some reason this week it occurred to me to wonder if we are just as weird as we could possibly be, or if everyone does this.

So, that's it for me. Have a great weekend.

7ToF: keeping the beat

1. Last time I told you about my foray into playing percussion, I was in the early stages of learning to play the concert bells. I'm way better at it than I used to be, but still not great-- probably I'm at about the skill level of a high school sophomore. We've had two concerts this summer, one on the Fourth of July, playing patriotic tunes at a local historic landmark, and the other one was this morning at the Northwest Montana Fair, playing some of the same patriotic stuff plus medleys of Sam Cooke and Tijuana Brass, etc.

Bells' eye view of 4th of July concert

2. Aside: I love the fair. Dean is not a fan. He thinks it is dirty and the people who work there are a bit questionable and it's often hot and dusty. But I grew up going to the fair and it is so fun. I used to take the kids every year, and we'd visit the draft horses and the goats and the chickens, and then go to the arts and crafts building to see the quilts and the photography. And of course there's the food. How can you not love fair food? Corn dogs and elephant ears and huckleberry milkshakes, barbecue sandwiches or noodles crisped up in a wok-- and that's only scratching the surface. Totally miss having kids the right age for going to the fair.

3. I'm still the only person in our community band that's willing to play the bells, so that is my main job. But I've also been drafted by another group to play the actual drums, so I've been learning-- snare drum and bass drum, and most intimidating of all, the drum set. I am not a good drummer. Or at least, not yet. I've been working my way through various rudiments, and I'm probably about as good as the aforementioned high school sophomore on snare. On drum set, I am kind of a disaster.

Last week, the dog. This week, the cat.

4. It is entirely different than playing a melodic instrument. In fact, it requires not just different physical skills, but an entirely different way of listening to music. Since I was a flute player and a member of a choir, I've spent my entire life listening for melodies and harmonies. PellMel played the bass, so I made a stab at learning to listen to a bass line, but even so, that is different than listening for the drums. Try it sometime. Drummers are amazing-- frequently their hands and feet are doing entirely different things. Sometimes it's hard to believe it's one person.

5. Honestly, every time I sit down at the drum set I am terrified. (We bought an ancient set for $250 that had been sitting in someone's garage and it is crappy, but sufficient for learning to push foot pedals at the same time that you are playing snare with one hand and high-hat cymbal with the other). I'm so afraid of the damn thing that it's hard to make myself practice. Progress has been slow. I think the people who asked me to play drums with them are starting to regret it-- even though I told them! I told them I was a rank beginner! I think they thought I was just being modest.

6. But I have come far enough that I no longer think of myself as a flute player, and that is cool. I'm not quite to the point where I think of myself as a drummer, but the days when I sat under the director's nose in the front row seem like a distant memory. There I am in the back with the drummers, hanging out in the percussion section. I love that.

Cool nest spotted right at eye level

7. OK, I think we've exhausted the topic of my drumming skills. Or lack thereof. What else can I tell you about for one more thing? Best books I've read this summer? Well, that's easy: The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai, is probably going to be my top book of the year. It's a heartbreaker (in the best sense) about the AIDS epidemic in Chicago in the mid-80s. It's a slow start, but once you get immersed in the story, it's terrific. My other two five-star reads probably aren't going to be for everybody-- The Friend by Sigrid Nunez will probably only work for people who have taken a creative writing class or hung out with creative writing students (??? not sure about that, I just know that reviews on goodreads are pretty evenly divided between people (like me) who found it thought-provoking and occasionally hilarious, and the people who thought it was a dead bore). And I just finished Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, a time travel novel published in 1992 that feels a bit dated (she couldn't imagine cell phones in 1992?), but still has Willis's trademark lovable characters and absurdist humor, even though reading it is sometimes like wading through jello.

OK, that's more than you wanted to know. Drum up a storm this weekend. (Not literally. Dean and MadMax are on a three-day float trip, so no storms allowed.)

7ToF: it's hot and I'm in a gripey mood

Black-eyed Susans
 from our garden

 1. Do you remember the months when I was griping about how cold it was and when would the weather ever get better? Yeah, well, now it's hot and I'm griping again. Dean says I have a two-degree range of comfort temperature-wise, and I suspect he's right.

2. A few weeks ago, when the weather finally got nice, there were a bunch of movies that I wanted to see, but it was so beautiful out after that long winter that we couldn't stand to spend our precious summer hours in a dark movie theater. Now that it's beastly hot and I would actually enjoy sitting in an air conditioned theater, there's nothing I want to see. Darn it.

3. I'm completely opposed to piracy of music, movies, books, and any kind of art. Use it legally. Pay for what you want to read or watch or listen to, or rent it or borrow it from a library. I've said it here before, and I'm saying it again.

4. But you know what makes me gripey? The assumption on the part of people who are outraged about piracy that every time someone illegally reads a book or downloads a movie or a song, it's a lost sale for the artist. I don't know that I've ever illegally downloaded anything, but back in the dark ages when we were making mix tapes on cassettes and passing them around, I wouldn't have bought that music. If I didn't have the tape, I would have just not had the music. I couldn't afford to buy that stuff. Sometimes I even recorded things off the radio, and I would be so mad when the DJ talked over the beginning or the end of the song. But I wouldn't have bought it. A pirated copy isn't always a lost sale.

Can you see what Sadie is staring at?

5. Speaking of legally listening to music, my kids convinced me to abandon Pandora and move over to Spotify. It's way better, mom, they told me. So I cancelled my Pandora membership and transferred over to Spotify. And I tried to like it, I really did. But either I never really figured out how to use it (entirely possible), or I am just a Pandora person. So I am back on Pandora.

6. Pandora lets you start a channel of music by choosing an artist or a song that is in the style you want, and then it magically plays other similar songs. If it plays one that you don't like, you press "thumbs down," and if there's one that you especially like, you press "thumbs up." So over time, Pandora learns what you like, and really it is kind of astonishing the way it chooses music to suit the channel you've created. For example, I have a channel that I started with James Taylor and Bonnie Raitt that plays 70s/80s soft rock, one that I started with the Oasis song "Wonderwall" that plays all my favorite 90s music, and one started with Lorde's song "Royals" that plays a really surprisingly good mix of music from when MadMax was in high school. #Pandoraforthewin

View through the binoculars

7. Back in the 80s, independent coffee shops and sandwich shops were springing up in college towns and tourist towns and it was something new and different. The menu was always on a chalk board, and there were quirky things on the menu that you'd never tried. Now that kind of place is practically a cliché, but once upon a time, they felt cutting edge. Anyway. Once in about 1985, we were at a café in the mountains in Vermont, and the chalk board menu described a sandwich called the "Four Fat Sandwich" that had bacon, cheddar cheese, avocado, and mayo. Possibly the best sandwich I've ever had. Thirty years later I still think about it --although now I would sub deli mustard for the mayo. #foodmemory

Huh. Well, that was a strange mix of stuff. What weird things have you been thinking about? Have a great weekend!

7ToF: Catching up, reunion version

1. Remember how I smugly told you in my last post that I never buy books from amazon anymore? Yeah, well, less than TWELVE HOURS later I bought a book from Amazon. I didn't even realize the horror until several hours later. *rolls eyes at self* But I also said the exceptions were gifts and Kindle sale books, and it was a gift to myself. That's my story.

2. It was a gift to myself because yesterday was my birthday, so I am now 58 years old and sixty is looming ever closer on the horizon. I can't quite believe I'm this old, but other than that, it feels pretty good. I don't think sixty will bother me the way fifty did.

aside: I think the age I feel is mid-forties, maybe 46? Some days it's even mid-thirties.

3. The book was Evvie Drake Starts Over, which had been recommended as a fun read at least half a dozen times recently. Since it was my birthday, I let myself read a lot longer than I usually do and I finished it late last night (with some time out for a) boring errands and b) birthday fun betwixt). It is indeed a fun book, and even made me laugh out loud once or twice. It's fairly short--less than 300 pages-- and that is both part of what makes it fun and part of what makes it a little thin. There were a few things that felt under-developed. But you know, fun reading isn't supposed to be dense and heavy. I gave it four stars on Goodreads.

aside: I decided after typing that that I am going to make a push to bring back the use of betwixt. Great word.

4. So, I think I told you that I had three reunions in a row during my two week vacation. There was a week in South Dakota with us and 30 of my cousins and their families, my mom, and an aunt and uncle. Fun and relaxing. Then there was the one night 40-year high school reunion, which was also fun, but since it involved four plane flights in about 48 hours to make it happen, it was a little stressful. Maybe I will write more about it later. It was fun to reconnect with people I hadn't seen in decades, and also to see a couple of friends that I do see more regularly. In fact, that was the best part.

5. Then the second week was here locally-- we rented a place on a lake near here and Dean's siblings and their families and his dad and wife came and spent the week. We weren't really officially hosting since we've all known each other forever and we don't really need a host. But still, it's our home town and we felt responsible-- and the weather was not good. Unlike our usual pristine July weather (which coincidentally we are having this week), last week was rainy and windy and cool. No one --including us-- wanted to hang out and swim at the lake, which was pretty much all we had planned. But we managed to come up with things to do, and I think everybody ended up having fun, even if it was a little disappointing.

6. All of that meant that when things finally calmed down this week, I felt like I needed a vacation from my vacation. I was worn out, and you know-- introvert with two solid weeks of fairly intense socializing. Ouch. I plowed through the mountains of laundry, dealt with leftover food from the rental last week, unpacked, ran errands, paid bills, etc etc and then yesterday for my birthday, I gave myself the day off. It was great. I don't usually do much about my birthday because I've never seen the point of big birthday celebrations-- it always feels like just another day to me-- but it was pretty nice yesterday.

7. So, back to it today. I shouldn't even be sitting here typing this! Hope you have a great weekend, and that you get to relax and read a fun book.

7ToF: dispatch from my igloo

1. At some point every winter, I am DONE. I hit it yesterday. I'm like a toddler that just plops down in the middle of the floor and throws a temper tantrum. It doesn't help any that we have had snow almost every day for what seems like WEEKS. The roads are treacherous, you have to tiptoe everywhere in case you step on a patch of ice, I am so over shoveling, whine whine whine. (honestly I've hardly done any shoveling compared to how much Dean has done.) And to top it all off, it's supposed to be -12 on Sunday night. Sunday is March 3rd, mind you. Winter is supposed to be OVER by March.

2. Unfortunately I'm not a weather witch and there's not much I can do about it. Except whine and complain, which you just witnessed.

Moving on.

3. Like some of you, I'm making a serious effort to read more diversely. Fortunately, even if you start out choosing books because the authors are of different race, nationality, or orientation, most of the time you end up reading because they're just good books. I've read some great books by diverse authors recently: Exit West, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, Purple Hibiscus, Becoming, Pride-- all good reads. Let me know if you have any recommendations.

4. I'm in the middle of Colson Whitehead's first novel The Intuitionist and it is like strapping in and going along for a rollercoaster ride. It's a satire based in the world of elevator maintenance and it is as inventive (in terms of language and style) as anything I've read in awhile. The only thing is that I can't quite figure out where he's going with it. But I'm a little less than halfway, so we'll see.

5. Occasionally I hear from people who wish they read more. To which I say, Why? I mean, if you want to read more, great, but if it's just guilt, a feeling that you "should" read more, don't worry about it. There are plenty of books that are a waste of time, and there are plenty of movies and TV shows that are excellent. There's no reason to automatically assume reading is more valuable than watching TV/movies.

*steps off soapbox*

6. One of the main reasons I prefer reading is that I am, uh, hyper-sensitive --i.e., high maintenance-- and if I watch something riveting, it's hard for me to wind down from the sensory overload and go to sleep. TV has the visuals, the music, the sound. Reading is much less stimulating (although I'd argue that it's equally immersive). I don't think most people have this problem, so if you'd rather watch television, you will get no pushback from me. Do what you want to do. Be free.

7. Which isn't to say I never watch TV. I already told you about Doctor Who, and we watch a lot of sports. We've got some episodes of the Durrells on Corfu recorded, and I used to watch Sherlock (will there ever be more episodes?). If you've got some recommendations for calm, fun TV, let me know.

Bye. Have a lovely, warm weekend, and think of us shivering here in the frozen North.

p.s. I published this late so that I could take an up-to-the-minute photo of the snow on our back deck.

7ToF: Dooooo Yooooour Ears Hang Low, do they wobble to and fro?

Can you tie them in a knot, can you tie them in a bow?

It's possible I spent too many years at camp.

1. This is a No-Shame Zone (NSZ) for people with weirdly shaped ear canals. I can't possibly be the only person that can't keep earbuds in their ears, can I? I look at people wearing $200 airpods and think, well, that would be $200 down the drain for me. I'd lose them in twenty minutes. Maybe five.

2. But you know-- bluetooth listening is pretty appealing. I like listening to audiobooks and podcasts while I'm doing stuff around the house, and it's a lot simpler with something I can wear rather than something I have to carry around from room to room. So, as long as I'm not being too active, these work (they're wired to each other, but not to my phone). The rubber inserts keep them in my ears in a way those slick airpods can't match (and they're one-tenth the price, too). The link is to Amazon, which I know some of you don't like, but the only other place I can find them is on eBay.

(For the record, I am not an Amazon affiliate, I've never had the patience to sit down and figure out how to set it up. In other words, I don't make any money when you click on a link in my blog.)

3. Let's talk about Amazon. The more I find out about their business practices, the more disturbed I am about supporting them. But on the other hand, I can't tell you what an amazing resource Amazon has been for someone who loves to read but lives in a town without a bookstore (I've talked about this before, here). When my kids were little, and Amazon only sold books (remember way back when?), it was a miracle for me to be able to get online, scroll through a practically infinite number of books, and have what almost felt like a conversation about books by scrolling through reviews.

4. But I get it. Amazon is changing retail on a global level, often in ways that are destroying other legitimate businesses. I stopped buying anything from Amazon that I could get locally over a year ago, and I check our library website first for Kindle books. I do my best to support independent bookstores whenever I can (including the snobs at the bookstore in the town to our north, and the used bookstore here in our town, neither of which ever seems to have the books I want).

5. TV report: I've watched a few Dr. Who episodes over the years, but I've never really qualified as a Whovian. But we caught the pilot of the new series last fall, with Jodie Whittaker as the first female Doctor, and really liked it. So I set our DVR to record any Dr. Who episode it could find, and we now have over 140 episodes to watch. We're slowly working our way through them and becoming bigger fans with every one. I need a Tardis.

6. I went to Texas last week for my mom's 83rd birthday and my older sister's 60th birthday. I'm only two years younger than my sister, so 60 is definitely on my horizon. I can't say I'm exactly happy about it, but I don't think it will bother me as much as 50 did. If you've been around for awhile, you lived through that with me so I don't think we need to go there again. Anyway. The trip was fun and it was nice to be out of winter for a few days. It wasn't exactly tropical down there but there was no snow and the sun came out enough times to make me happy.

7. One midlife topic we haven't discussed much around here is caring for aging parents, and it's because I haven't had to do much of it. My dad passed away in 2011, well-cared for by his wife. My mom still lives independently, and although I can tell she's slowing down a bit, she's still sharp enough to be writing books. She's getting ready to self-publish her fourth novel. She's amazing. But she's not very mobile. She can still walk short distances, but she uses a cane. And I think she's in a lot more pain than she lets on. The last morning I was there, I asked her what hurt the most, since I know she's had trouble with her ankles, knees, and hips. She paused a minute, and then sort of laughed a little and said, "Well, you know, really I'm just kind of miserable." I'm a little self-conscious when I'm with her to be able to stride along, moving fast, walking and walking and walking with no conscious effort.

So our moment of gratitude for this week is for walking. If you can still walk with ease, don't take it for granted. Enjoy every minute.

Have a great weekend. It's good to be back, although I'm not promising to post regularly.