Weekend flowers

Busy morning

These may just look like oysters shared with a friend, but actually they represent a small restoration of myself.

Took advantage of the gorgeous weather yesterday with a short mid-day walk to what is possibly my favorite pandemic discovery in Baltimore, Druid Hill Park’s Zen Garden.

Some things happening now:

• Weight loss has gone well since returning to the gym in April 2021. I am about as fit as I’ve ever been in my adult life. I’m not feeling a lot of strain with keeping up with my physical health, so I’m hoping to keep this rolling, permanently. For whatever reason, this time everything is working.
• That vacation to Tulum was both great and terrible – we got away, we rode bikes, we hung out on the beach, and we ate some great food. It was nice to be active somewhere else. But for days during that trip I had a sinking feeling. Anxiety? Stress? I’m not sure. But I found the idle time challenging, and I think overall my feeling was, “Uh oh, that’s a lot of emotional weight from the past year and a half and I think it’s all catching up right now.”
• So this summer has been mentally hard. I’ve had good days and bad days. I’ve been meditating lately, and I think maybe that’s helping. But the whole pandemic has been hard and the delta variant snatching away what normalcy I was starting to feel has been devastating.
• We’re going on more vacations, and I’m quite excited, because I’ve learned the alternative is a greater risk to my health right now.
• I picked up the pace of reading this summer and it feels great.
• I’ve logged out and deleted the Twitter apps (and all tweets, which happens after 60 days anyway). I’ve reduced some of my RSS subscriptions. I turned off easily finding my archives on the blog. This is not meant to be permanent, just seeking some additional quiet. I need a reset. I am allowing too many things out of my control to impact my emotions.

Feel free to email me if you’d like to correspond and you don’t have my phone number.

Here are a couple of recent dog pictures.

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Really hard to capture how cool this shattered glass looks.

What kind of dog lays here like this?

Still thinking about that “salad” I had for lunch today.

Season. Your. Salad.

I have not yet taught her she will be ignored while I meditate. A few moments later, she had her head on my stomach. She stayed there while I was breathing for almost ten mins.

She’s in position again.

Local shop officially knows my order when I come in. Achievement unlocked.

Visited one of the spiritual homes of The Incomparable and can heartily recommend Stone The Dark Oats for your choice of beverage.

Ok, I didn’t sleep because of it, but I have to admit the churro ice cream sandwich was probably worth it.

Pretty cool to see when I’m lifting versus resting and that I can clearly identify what I was doing based on heart rate alone.

Hello darkness my old friend. I see it’s a new month of workouts again.

Oh damn.

I cannot go back to losing third spaces.

Just spent a paycheck on this haul from @atomicbooks.

Three hour flight delay is a real waste of a good hair day.

New cookbook day

Should have cleaned up before pictures. Missing: my amp, which is in the shop for as much as five weeks. Needed: more books, a light for the bookshelf, and probably another plant on the bookshelf. Overall, pretty happy with where things are about 16 months after I took over this room.