Marlene's Space
A journal of my life
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Grandma Can't Do It
Wednesday, March 27, 2024
First Amaryllis Bloom
I have been watching the first of my four amaryllis bulbs flower...
First a bud. Then after a few weeks, the first sign of a flower...
Day by day, it slowly opens...
A few days later...
More changes.
Why is it taking so long?! (Is our house too cool?)
This has taken weeks... But it's finally beginning to bloom!
Nothing is rushed in nature. (Why am I always so impatient?)
Tuesday, March 26, 2024
Home Show
Terry and I haven't been to a "home show" in years - ever since we had a major renovation done some 20 years ago.
Monday, March 25, 2024
Walking ... to Date
I've been counting my daily walking steps for a while now (using my cell phone health app to count my steps). I try to walk 10,000 steps a day.
To add motivation, last year I signed up for "virtual walks" - pretending I'm walking in different parts of the world - places that would be interesting to see. Via Google maps street view, I can see the scenery around me as I walk.
Trying to finish my virtual walks motivates me to walk a little farther every day.
As March draws to a close, I'm hoping to finish my 766 km virtual trek in India soon.
Recently checking my totals, I see that I've walked almost 2000 km since I first started, last spring.
As my current walk draws to a close, I'm already thinking about my next trek: Should I do a second Camino de Santiago trail? Or should I do one that's several thousand kilometres long, like Route 66? There are shorter walks too, but I don't want to finish too.quickly.
I'll have to decide within the next week.
Sunday, March 24, 2024
Spine Poems
My friend Kay recently mentioned that she had started writing "spine poems" by arranging books so that their titles make up a little non-rhyming poem.
Her book club did it one day with the titles of all the books they had read together. Then they went to the library and created piles of "poems" there with real books.
I was intrigued, so I looked "spine poems" up online.
One online article suggested piling books up in "spine poems" around the house.
A new way to look at book titles: as lines of poetry!
Saturday, March 23, 2024
Remembering...
My photo app sometimes reminds me of photos I uploaded years ago...
This series takes me back 17 years. My youngest son was studying in Germany for a year. I decided to visit him during Spring Break. I was still teaching at the time.
While I was there, he and I took a train to Frankfurt to visit three of my mother's cousins. I had met them before but he hadn't.
It was a memorable trip for us both!
What to do?! I had no cell phone and, in fact, had no contact information for my son except his email address. I didn't even have his dormitory address, though I knew the name of the university.
When I think back, I was really unprepared!
I begged the Air Canada agent at the Frankfurt airport to let me use his computer to email my son. He reluctantly agreed. I also switched my second flight to a train trip because they told me it was faster.
Arriving by train instead, I wrote in the email.
His first thought - Which train station?! (I had no idea there were 2!)
Fortunately he guessed correctly and was there to meet me! I'm so thankful that he was! Lots of adventures on that vacation!
Friday, March 22, 2024
Gardening Lesson
Let's go outside and pick up pine cones, our 4-year-old grandson suggested one day recently when he was spending the day at grandma's house.
Good idea!
He must have remembered from last fall when we first did it.
We each got our own garbage can and gardening gloves and got to work.
Eventually he looked up at the trees and said: There are lots more up there...
Yes, but we have to wait till they fall down to get those.
(But it was such a good observation!)