TheBrains Fulfill a Promise

Psst. Hey.
 Yes?
 I thought she was going to post about that camera.  Didn't she promise?
Yes. She did.
Well. Well?
Well, I think she has been too busy.
Huh. Not any busier than us.
Than we
 Pbbbtth  Not interested in a grammar lesson, you conjunctionist.
(grins) Okay. But I think she hasn't written about the camera because she's not sure if she plopped all that $$$ down for the wrong purchase.

    Fujifilm FinePix S1 16.4 MP Digital camera

 What? What? What?
And don't go all Brian Gavillan on me.  You know it's true.



 Well, weren't you just sick and tired of all that dithering she was doing? Gawd - she read so many camera reviews that every time we looked at TheInternets we were bombarded with camera ads.
Yes. I was tired of it and the truth is, I think she'd set herself an impossible goal.  I don't think there is a ThePerfectCamera - at least, not a perfect point and shoot one.
 And I HATED the old camera - I didn't even want to pick it up any more. And I resented not being able to take pictures.
You're right. I noticed we'd just stopped taking it with us. It was so tedious to have to hunt around for some background trees to hide the spots made by the scratches on the lens.  But I do think you were unfair with her, lusting after those super zooms.
 OMG - but look what you can do with them. drool city!

And I'm not sure the dog photos look right - something about the edges ...

Oh - I don't know - I think they look pretty good and the landscape photos are very nice

Hmmm. Well - they're okay. But they have such little sensors that it's hard not to get noisy pictures.
  Noise shmoise.
Well. did you like those first photos we took.



 (squirms a little) well. No. But don't you think ... it's not the camera's fault - it's ....
Yes. I do think that we are pretty ignorant photographers.  When you see photographers in action - you know, the real ones - they just seem to point and shoot.  But really that's not what they're doing. They're twisting dials and pushing buttons and setting things up so the pictures all come out right.   Point and shoot is never going to be National Geographic. It's like those ads that use thin models and show them eating cheeseburgers with huge big bites - you get to thinking you too could be thin if you just open wide and bite.


 LOL yes. you're so right. It feels like you should just be able to go click click click and have prize photos. But that's just stupid. Well. You know I love it when we know stuff and I love to learn new things.  We can learn how to take better pictures.
Yes. I think the more we learn about how photography works, the more we'll love that new camera.
 I'm glad we bought that beginner's guide to photography book.


I am too - already we've improved on those first shots.

 

 and don't you like that zoom lens? I mean - really - aren't you happy that you can get up close with those fragile wild life pictures? Did you even KNOW a frog had those mimicking camouflage teeth?


Nope. No. I think it was a good thing to get the super zoom. We live in an area where wildlife abounds. It would be a shame to miss out on good quality closeups.
 Besides - I don't feel like this is the last camera we'll ever buy. I mean - what if we get really good at photography - we might want a DSLR
LOL - you greedy puss you. Just looking for another opportunity for Retail Therapy.
(Grins) It's never too far away - but no. not any time soon. I want to become a better photographer and I'm ready to take that baby out and play with her.
So? Let's Go.
 Uh - and - uh ... let's just keep this between us. She'll never know - she can just think everything's hunky dory and never know we had this conversation.
You think?
 Nope. I just feel it's the right thing to do

Missing Mama in the Springtime

On Easter Sunday we drove to the city to spend it with precious cousins. The day was beautiful, the temperature just right, and the winding drive through Virginia back roads was long enough that once we were into the second hour, Mr and Mrs Chatty ran out of things to say.  This might not have happened had we not just taken a somewhat shorter drive down these same back roads the day before, but once we were nestled in the car-cocoon of silence, the tiny emotional crack in my heart had a chance to split wide open and I began to yearn for my mama.

Easter Sunday was one of the days I would drive to the city to visit with Mama. Last year I took her daffodils. Every year I took her daffodils. Daffodils were her favorite flower and for some reason she never had very many. I, otoh, have thousands of them so I can be ... not just generous ... but lavish.  In the spring I would snip a cluster of them, wrap them in wet paper towels, pop them in a zip-lock bag, and head west - first to her home on the other side of the city, in later years to her assisted living apartment, and finally to the nursing home.

How her eyes would light up when I'd step through the door with my golden sunshine bouquet. Each enthusiastic greeting was completely sincere - as if it were the first time anybody had ever given her daffodils. I understand that. Every year, when they begin to open up along my lane, I feel like there has never been a flower before and now there is this swath of gold. There really is no flower quite like the daffodil.

She and I would sit with the bouquet between us and sniff its Easter scent. We'd touch each outer petal - the perianth - and praise it. We'd run fingers around the rim of the cups. We would discuss the color, the fleshy texture, the vivid eyes of the small flat ones. We would sigh.  One of us would say "Oh how I love daffodils."  The other would say "Oh, me too. They're my favorite flower."

Which is not exactly true since when the roses are in bloom, they are my favorite  flower, and the pansy! oh my - who doesn't love a pansy? And stocks, with their clove scent.  And gladiolas! Be Glad! And the snapdragon! How fruity they smell. They were the ubiquitous cut flower in bouquets sent to mothers of new babies back in my childhood, in my southern town. I can still remember Mama, in bed with the new baby in one arm and me, snuggled up close, beneath her other arm as she showed me how to pinch the sides of the blossom and make the dragon open and close its mouth.  Imagine that! A puppet flower!

It's odd that Mama didn't grow many daffodils since she had the greenest of green thumbs and could push a stick in the ground and a few weeks later it would blossom.  She was country born and bred - but at a time when country was actually within walking distance of town. She grew up in the tenant house down the slope from her grandmother's farm - not 2 miles outside of Johnstown PA - and walked to school all her life - in town.  Her dad was not a farmer - he was a mechanic - and an inventor - but her mother certainly had many farm girl skills.  According to Mama, her own mother didn't want anybody in the kitchen so Mama didn't learn to cook.  I say "according" because Mama wasn't at all above inventing a better story than the real one if it suited her. Neither did my utterly delightful mother-in-law. In fact, I once caught Grandma (M-i-L) in an outright fabrication and called her on it - to which she replied, "I know it's not true but it makes the story so much better!"

Well. I utterly adored both of those women - Grandma running a close second only to Mama - who really was the pinnacle, the shining star, the most beloved woman in my life.  I was doubly blessed.  Come to think of it - neither of them ever bragged about their cooking - and Mama would go so far as to look up with tears in her eyes when Daddy complained about one of her odd meals and say "You knew I wasn't a cook when you married me!"

I don't actually know if she really was barred from the kitchen as a girl or if her sisters did learn from their mother to become good cooks or if she just hated cooking or if she was too busy dreaming of her next painting to pay attention to cooking. We always had free reign in the kitchen so long as we cleaned up after ourselves. She assigned meal preparation to her daughters as quickly as they grew interested in it and by the time the last one had moved out, Daddy had retired and they ate reheated canned stuff in front of the nightly news.

Springtime memories of Mama all seem to pivot around naughty girl experiences: Skipping church to walk along the James River, where, she declared, "I'm sure God can hear our prayers just as easily as in church."   Or maybe taking a day off from school just to go walk the paths of Maymont Park.  Or a lunch in a restaurant - an extravagance in those days when restaurant meals were for special occasions only.

For all that Mama grew up in the country - she wasn't much of an outdoors girl. What she loved to do was paint - and draw - and mold things with clay. My house is full of her artwork and I have only a tiny sampling.  That was her life when she wasn't ferrying around 4 girls; to music lessons, school functions, rehearsals or interesting sites around the city. As only a come-here can - she explored her city constantly, tracking down parks and tiny museums and finding tours of local industries that gave away free samples. She honored where she lived more than anyone I ever knew.

But the most precious springtime memory I have of Mama is of the day we planted gladiolas - a day I wrote down years ago in an essay called Love in the Garden - and here is the important part - the bit about Mama and how much she wrapped me in love in the springtime in the garden:

... when I seek love, and not just romance, in the garden I harden back to an afternoon - probably April, likely I was 8, and home from school on one of those oh, so precious and rare days when Mama would let me skip school for a time-out day. Mama was planting gladiolas. “GLAD- iolas” I thought. Glad to be out of school. Glad to be digging in the dirt. Glad to have Mama all to myself. In my memory there are no other people on earth.  The flat round corms, like turbans or the crown on one of the kings in the Christmas crèche, some of them with last year’s ghost shape still on top. The new ones that were a little more golden colored than the ones who had spent time in the ground in August, fattening for the following spring, feeling smooth against my fingertips.  But most of all I remember how loved I felt as we talked quietly, easily, unhurriedly, and prepared, as gardeners have done since the beginning of time, for summer’s bounty. When I plant gladiolas now, I always feel that warmth of Mama’s love washing around me. 

Got The Low Down Blues

At least, I had them this week - those mean old misr'y lovin' low down blues.  And I got to thinking about them - about where they come from - not the sadness blues that come when  your Mama dies or the sickness blues that come when you're in bed with the flu, but the mean old misr'y lovin' blues that just come when there are way too many happy things in your life but something made you think of the one thing you really hate about your life and from that moment you just got downer and downer, bluer and bluer.

And after I'd felt crummy for long enough (Thanks, Mom) I got to working on untying that knot. I got to asking myself, "What triggers that downward spiral. Why am I investing so much emotion, painful emotion at that, in something that is either in the past or I've been living with it for, oh, maybe 62 years, or it isn't really that big a deal? What makes me pick at a scab? "

Mind now - I had to wrestle with it for a few days but at some point yesterday it struck me.

I get the blues when I'm wanting to be RIGHT more than wanting something to WORK.

One of my mottos - one of the defining things I've always claimed about ME is that I would rather make things work than be right. It is why I am quick to seek compromise, delegate responsibility, give my trust - it is why I've adopted FAITH as my guiding word for this year - perhaps for the rest of my life! (though there are so many other words that describe concepts I want to embrace)

When it's more important for you to be RIGHT, you'll argue with someone who's doing what you want him to do, just not the way you want him to do it.  Or worse yet - you won't tell him how ticked off you are when you come home and find the dirty dishes are still in the sink.

I mean - if you wanted it to WORK  you'd just say "put the dishes in the dishwasher before I get home"

If you want to be RIGHT there are all sorts of things you can say. "Can't he see these dishes need to be put in the dishwasher? How selfish can he be to loll around here all day, and leave this mess for me to clean up? When I've been at WERK all day!  What does he think I am? His SLAVE?"

What?  Huh? Why would you think that's been going on at my house this week?  

The great thing about thinking about problems is sometimes you find an answer that can be applied to Other Things. Things like motivation to reach your goals. Try this idea on for size.

When you want to be RIGHT the most - you will be mad that you can't eat a bag of M&Ms and 2 slices of pizza and slurp down a milkshake and stay slim. You'll resent it and eat those things anyway and claim you were tempted beyond reason or everyone else was doing it or the American food advertising industry is out to sabotage you.

But when you want it to WORK you do things differently. You either say no to the nutrition-less food or you chose the nutrition dense food or you drive past the fast food stands. Those are actions that will fix something you don't like. It's not a judgement call. It's a deeply personal decision. You decide if you want to be RIGHT or if you want things to WORK.

And here is the secret, fun, added bonus:  When things  WORK .... you ARE right.

My Mesopotamian New Year

The earliest recording of a new year celebration is believed to have been in Mesopotamia, c. 2000 B.C. and was celebrated around the time of the vernal equinox, in mid-March.

Read more: A History of the New Year 

I believe I want to channel my inner Mesopotamian and start celebrating New Year in mid-March. I will still clean out the detritus of Christmas and probably even buy me that new journal that always seems to hold such promise, but as for the New Year's Resolutions and the Goal Setting - well - this is the second year I haven't been able to get around to it no matter how many snow days I ended up with. Since I'm all about living a HAPPY life first - and since the pressure of setting goals and sticking to them is not giving me the Martha Beck Rat Park feeling - I hereby give myself permission to select March 21st as my New Year Goal Setting Resolution Get Your Act Together time.

Until that no longer feels like fun either.

Besides, I reached my goal weight about mid-March 2 years ago and the idea of being at goal each March does feel like a visit Rat Park.  (btw, Rat Park was an actual lab setting she described where rats who had been addicted to heroin were placed in an environment with every thing a rat could want, along with the option to stay on heroin and what do you know - they all quit lapping up the water with the narcotic in it and just drank fresh water. She recommends you only do things that give you that Rat Park Feeling.  I concur.)

So let's get down to goal setting.

Right now I am 1.8 lbs away from the top of Weight Watcher's range for being at goal. They give you a 2 lb wiggle space and for me that is 152 lbs. The number one goal then, for the month of March is to drop that 1.8 lbs. You would think that would be easy ... but it is not. It's extremely difficult because at 153.8 my clothes fit well, I like the way I look in the mirror and I feel great.

So what's the big deal about a measly 1.8 lbs?  A couple of things.

1.  Each measly 1.8 lbs I ignore pushes me deeper into weight gain territory. I know that at 155 I do not like how I look. I want more space between where I am and looking and feeling dumpy.

2. At my current weight my body mass index is greater than 25 and did you know that a BMI greater than that is one of the indicators for dementia?  Not something this 62 year old wants to toy with.

3. I truly value the WW meeting opportunity but those measly 1.8 pounds mean I have to pay to go - and that's getting old. Do the math.  I would much rather have the $700 each year to oh, say, buy a clothes dryer for Pete's sake, Bess!

(ooops. a little subject bleed there - the dryer is a different goal)

4. deep in my secret little heart I believe I ought to weigh less than 150 lbs.  I know, I know. but I really do believe I should weigh 145 lbs because I really am an inch shorter than I was when I set that original goal.

Okay - so. Goal #1 is to lose the 1.8 lbs by March 21.

Action steps to take:

1. Make 5 days out of the week 26 point days. This is good because to do that I have to be really careful about the food I chose to eat - it has to be nutritionally dense or I will be hungry and eat more calories.

   a.  Plan out and shop for 5 nutritionally dense daily menus each week

2.  Get in enough activity to make my activity monitor do it's sparkly thing every day. To reach the daily goal, 4 out of the 6 lights have to blink

   a. do the aerobic DVD for at least 20 minutes every morning at 7 o'clock
   b. Check my activity monitor at lunch time. If the third light hasn't begun to glow, take a walk at lunch
   c. check my activity monitor before dinner and if all 4 lights aren't lit up - walk the dogs before dinner.

3. Remember, and say out loud, at least twice a day, the following:

The healthy food choice is a REWARD. yay!

 psst psst - what about the camera?

  And the clothes dryer?

Oh. Yes. right. TheBrains remind me that I have two other goals that I must act upon.   Left Brain, I have told BH to smack me up side the head if I don't have a dryer by April 1. You know the road is a frozen mess of mud and ice so we can't get a delivery truck down here for a couple more weeks but I swear I will go down to Lowe's and order a freakin' dryer.

  When?

How about Sunday?

  Ok.


 And the camera?

I'll make my decision on Sunday too, Right Brain. A camera will have been ordered by Monday.

  Promise?

Promise.

  I'll remind her. I've got it on my calendar now.

  Okay. But you have to come back here and blog about it then, and over on the other blog too.

It's a deal, Brains. It's March. My Mesopotamian New Year. I'll get these things done in honor of the ancient vernal shift.

   YAY!