Tag Archives: travel

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Bee love

I love the simple roses the best, with fewer petals. The bees in the Point Defiance Rose Garden agreed with me. I think they reach the pollen more easily if there are fewer petals. Also, I notice that the roses that have the most amazing fragrance are the old fashioned ones! Not completely, but mostly. I love this one.

For Cee’s Flower of the Day.

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Age-defying

I get lots of quasi and fringe medical emails. I subscribe to some so that I know what they are “pushing”. The current trend is online “classes” where you sign up and then they have hours of talk and interviews and stuff. The talks can be three hours or more for a week. I am offered a bargain daily to sign up to be able to access the talks over and over. Hmmm, not today, thanks. I have very low tolerance for videos and television.

Currently I’m getting notes from an “age-defying” one.

I am skeptical about “age-defying” as they are describing it. However, there is a study that I think is very convincing about how to stay healthy as you get older. It was done in England. They looked at five habits: excess alcohol (averaging more than two drinks a day), inactivity (couch potato), addictive drugs, obesity and tobacco.

They had people who had none of the five, people who had all of them and people who had one or two or more. The conclusion was that for each one added, the average lifespan dropped by about four years. That is, the people who did all five tended to die 20 years sooner on average than the ones with none of the bad habits.

Recently in the US, the news said “Gosh, it turns out that any alcohol is bad for us.” I thought, how silly, when various studies made that clear over a decade ago. There was a very nice study from Finland, with 79,000 people where they looked at alcohol and atrial fibrillation. Atrial fibrillation increases the risk of strokes. They concluded that lifetime dose of alcohol was directly related to atrial fibrillation. That is, the more you drink, the sooner your heart gets really grumpy and starts fibrillating. Alcohol is toxic to the heart, the liver, the brain. Tobacco is toxic to the lungs, the heart, the brain and everything else. The addictive drugs: well, you get the picture.

So the anti-aging prescription is pretty simple to recommend. It just is not always simple to do. That is why we still have doctors. For chronic bad habits I am part mom/cheerleader/bearleader/nag/kind helper. Here is the prescription. Feel free to send me money instead of buying that seven day set of twenty one hours of lectures:

  1. Minimal or no alcohol.
  2. No addictive drugs (that includes marijuana and THC and we have almost no studies indicating that CBD is not addictive.Remember that THC and CBD and the other 300+ cannabinoids produced by the marijuana plant were not studied because it is illegal at the federal level.)
  3. No tobacco.
  4. Exercise every day: a walk is fine.
  5. Maintain your weight, which means as you get older you either have to exercise more or eat less or both. Muscle mass decreases with age.

The last anti-aging piece is some luck. Born into a war zone? Caught in a disaster, flood, fire, tsunami? Born into a family with trauma and addiction and few resources? Huge stress in your life? Discrimination or abuse? If you have had none of these, help someone else, because you have the luck. Pass it on.

The header photograph is all family members: two are my aunts and one is a cousin of my father’s and they all play church organ! Music sustains that side of the family. I took that in 2017 in Baltimore, Maryland. We had the uncles along too!

This is my grandmother on my mother’s side. I took this in the early 1980s at Lake Matinenda.

I will try to dig up the links to the two studies.

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my current trolls

I am getting some Facebook trolls. My favorites right now are two who requested that I friend them, ostensibly guys, but both said how beautiful I am and charming and etc. The picture that they put the request on is the poster for the last concert. The picture is of a sea lion.

Heh. Guess they think she is beautiful. I replied, “Uh, guys, that’s a sea lion.” They do not acknowledge this.

I am also getting peculiar friend requests. Often there is one friend in common. I contact a friend in Virginia to ask about one. She doesn’t remember the name, so I don’t reply. I also take a look at their home page before replying. If there is nearly nothing there, I think it’s a fake account. Pretty weird.

I am not answering WordPress’s daily questions, either. I think that is feeding ChatGPT or Big Data or someone. Nope.

Ok, let’s feed something random to the algorithm: Al Gore rhythm! I hope that confuses things. How is Al Gore’s rhythm anyhow? Can he dance? Can he shake it? Does he twerk? Work the twerk, Al! As usual, I would like to thank my personal AI, whose initials are MM. She knows who I mean. Sending you love, MM.

Now I will get Al Gore and twerking in my Facebook ads. Are there YouTube videos on How To Twerk? Inquiring minds shy away with horror, though it’s probably decent exercise.

Have a lovely day, trolls! MM, would you go mess their feeds for me? Give them Al twerking!

The photographs are from a museum in Europe in March 2022. Which is a troll? Maybe neither.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: troll.

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Rescue

A friend stops speaking to me. Nearly a year ago. I particularly mind because this person said, “We will always be friends, no matter what.” I am skeptical of always/never statements, but I want it to be true.

I run across him and he is in trouble. He has boxes, cases, six by four by six feet. Stuff he finds valuable, though it’s not anything I value. He is outside with the cases and is being threatened, told to hand them over.

It’s not a dramatic rescue. I just walk up and say “Hi,” to him. I am there, I am a witness, I look over my shoulder. There isn’t anyone else with me, but the implication is there. The threatening person leaves.

The former friend looks at me. “We’d better get the boxes inside,” I say, “Until you can move them.” We are by my house. “You can have upstairs and I’ll take the basement.” He looks uncomfortable, but he can’t leave his valuables on the street. “Or I will take upstairs and you the basement.” He still looks awkward. “Ok, or we can both be on the same floor, I don’t care.” He looks away. He says, “If we are on the same floor, I will want to kiss you.”

“Oh,” I say, and wake up. It’s a dream. It’s not him. It’s what my brain thinks he could/should be? Good luck with that.

Still, I decide that we should be on different floors. He has not spoken to me for a year and I don’t trust the friendship and certainly no kissing. I want him out of my house as soon as he can arrange transport for the four boxes. If he wants to renew the friendship then, he can contact me.

However, there is a shift in me. How odd that a dream can do that. I feel less upset about the whole thing. I like the version of him that my dream brought me, even though it isn’t real. It’s real in my dreams. Maybe that is enough. I feel more comfortable and happy.

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I took the photograph two days ago at Rialto Beach. The Hole in the Wall rock looks like a giant elephant. My daughter and I hiked the beach and camped for a night near by.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: karma.