Yesterday I went to Animal Kingdom with Christina and Greg and we had a perfect Disney day.

Elements of Disney perfection:

First, the weather has to be mostly nice, as in not sweltering, not chilly, not stormy. Yesterday was hot enough that I could get soaked on Kali River Rapids (and I did!) and still be perfectly comfortable wandering around the park in my soaked clothing, but it wasn’t so hot that there was ever a moment when I thought, “ugh, this is miserable.”

Second, the crowds have to be reasonable, and the lines, ditto. Yesterday was more than reasonable. We paid extra for the Lightning Lane pass for the Avatar ride, where you’re flying on a dragon over the Pandora landscape, but when we arrived we were about ten minutes too early for our time window. Meanwhile the stand-by line was only 30 minutes long, so we joined that line and wound up riding the Avatar ride — in Christina’s opinion, the best ride in all the theme parks — twice! (For context, back in 2018, when I took Rory and his girlfriend to Animal Kingdom, the line for Avatar was never less than 3 hours long and we didn’t get to go on it at all.) Yesterday, the line for the Safari ride was about twenty minutes, and the Everest roller coaster and Kali River Rapids were both close to walk-ons, ie you never really stop moving in the line. Not only was none of the lines long enough to get tedious, none of them even lasted long enough to start playing games.

Third, it helps a lot to be on the same wavelength as the people you’re with. Christina, Greg and I were like a well-oiled Disney machine, with exactly the same ideas about what we wanted to do and the appropriate order in which to do those things. We went Avatar, Avatar, Safari ride, snack (Dole whip ice cream for me), Everest, Kali River Rapids, ordered lunch, the Asia walk through exhibit with plenty of time in the aviary (the best part, IMO), a little souvenir shopping, picked up & ate lunch, then home. We were at the park from 9-2, approximately, which is about the perfect length of time in my opinion. Long enough to make it feel worthwhile, not long enough to feel exhausting.

Bonus points if the food is good, triple bonus points if the food is not just good, but excellent. My dole whip was delicious, but my lunch was amazing. We ate at the Satu’li Canteen quick service restaurant, aka the Disney version of fast food. I had a chimichurri beef and wood-grilled chicken rice bowl, with crunchy vegetable slaw, (the gluten-free version, of course) which was delicious, although helped a lot by the hot sauce Christina carries around with her, but for dessert I had this:

It’s chocolate mousse with raspberry on a tiny flourless chocolate cake and it was incredibly good. 10/10. Maybe 11/10. So good that the restaurant is my new favorite restaurant at Disney. Counter service! It cost $6.29! (Which I think is a really weird price, tbh, but I also think is an incredibly good price for a dessert that pretty and that tasty.)

More bonus points at Animal Kingdom, in particular, if you get to see some cool things. I posted a video of the baby elephant to Instagram so you can see it from the sidebar, but the lions, the anteater, the komodo dragon, and the birds in the aviary were also fun.

These two were hanging out right next to one another, belying the old “birds of a feather” cliche.

The Komodo dragon was, in fact, sticking his tongue out. It flicked it in and out just like snakes do.

The lion looked impressively comfortable on his rocky bed.

I worried, a little, before we went, whether Animal Kingdom was a park that held too much nostalgia for me. Last year, when I went to the Magic Kingdom, I wrote about how it was hard because of the time I’d spent there with Rory when he was little. Nostalgia isn’t grief, of course. It’s possible to remember the pleasant past without getting stuck in the pain of the present. But it can definitely trigger the pain. And Animal Kingdom is much more nostalgic than Magic Kingdom for me because Rory was so fascinated by animals, and once it opened, it quickly became our favorite park. Six-year-old Rory would have adored the Avatar ride. And I couldn’t pause by the anteater and the Komodo dragon without thinking about how thrilled he would have been to have such a great view of them. The anteater, especially.

But that was six-year-old Rory. And six-year-old Rory was already long gone when 25-year-old Rory decided to throw me away. Remembering that helped. And then I had a fun time remembering all the Rorys over the years. Two-year-old Rory was fantastic: solemn, earnest, curious, determined, with the absolute best laugh. Three-year-old Rory was a challenge. I read a lot of parenting books that year, as determination turned into obstinacy. Still a delight, but I had to learn a lot — and change a fair amount, too — to stop the endless power struggles.

Four and five year old Rory, I saw far too little of, IMO. During those years, I was working full-time, taking him down to Santa Cruz on weekends for visitation with his dad. Ugh. I remember the first week of kindergarten, when his teacher sent him home with homework. Worksheets. I looked at them and wanted to cry. Instead, I brought them back into school and told her, “No, we will not be doing these.” And then I mapped our schedule out for her: I got him to pre-care at the school by 7:45 so I could get to work by 9, I left work promptly at 5 — always! — so I could pick him up by 6, we made it home at 6:25, he watched Zoboomafoo for half an hour while I got dinner ready, we finished dinner at 7:15 or so, we did bedtime routine and bath and maybe played a little if there was time, and then I read him stories until he fell asleep. And then on weekends, I took him to his dad. The window in which we could do worksheets was so small, and was inevitably going to steal from the time in which we could actually enjoy our life. No. I was not going to do them, I was not going to make him do them. Fortunately, his teacher sympathized.

Ah, but six-year-old Rory! When he was six, we moved to Santa Cruz. I was still working full-time but remotely, commuting back up to Berkeley one or two days a week at most. He started first grade at the local public school and lasted approximately 8 days. Then I pulled him out. I wonder if I’ve ever written about that before? Talk about an agonizing decision. Talk about a decision that no one in my life remotely agreed with! It was insane. And those were some really hard years, to be honest, as I juggled home-schooling with a full-time job.

I remember them as full of sunshine, though. We had so much fun, we did projects and had adventures and read books and played & played, as I redefined “play” as education for the homeschool program. (It was educational, really!) And yeah, I was chronically exhausted, and always stressed, but he got to keep his sense of curiosity and wonder and… well, peacefulness. After two years, I did manage to get him into the alternative school, which was a much better fit for him.

And then, well… it’s pointless to look back over the years to try to see where they went bad. But it wasn’t awful yesterday to remember delightful two-year-old Rory and charming six-year-old Rory and highly entertaining twelve-year-old Rory and sixteen-year-old Rory who could make me laugh so hard I cried. I’m glad that boy existed in my life, I’m glad we had so many chances to admire the anteaters and the otters at Animal Kingdom. I hope someday he gets to go on the Avatar ride and appreciates it, if not the way he would have as a six-year-old, at least with an awareness of who that six-year-old was.

I did a deep dive into my archives this morning, though, looking for mentions of specific years, specific events, and stumbled upon this: “I’ve had enough practice with grief by now to know that the only way out is through. You don’t get to make the feelings go away by avoiding them. They only go away when you’re finished with them.” My own words from years ago, and what I’ve realized now is that you’re never actually finished. Never. But in the same way that nostalgia is bittersweet, you can miss someone deeply and intensely, and still have an absolutely perfect Disney day.

I woke up this morning in such a good mood. Cheerful, optimistic, ready to take charge of my day. Doing some stretching before I even got out of bed, grateful for the coziness of my space, charmed by my delightful dog. Just your basic happy morning mood.

In the spirit of my choosing happiness program, I knew that a few factors were influencing me.

1. I initially woke up at 5, decided it was too early, and successfully went back to sleep until just after 7. Two extra hours of sleep is a full extra sleep cycle — time enough to have some good REM sleep and maybe even some deep sleep — and that’s enough to make anyone feel good.
2. The weather has cooled down enough that I’m back on my Big Bowl of Possibilities breakfast meal plan (aka lots of sautéed vegetables), plus still sticking to my Salads+ summer menu, so the past few days have been rich with nutrition. Yesterday also included both chicken and hard-boiled eggs, so a lot of protein, too. I’ve also added sardines to my diet for the sake of the B12, which is an essential ingredient in the production of serotonin and dopamine, therefore a “feel-good” nutrient. (And one that many gluten-free eaters don’t get enough of.) The feel-good neurotransmitters are built with feel-good nutrients, and I’ve had plenty lately. It’s not surprising that I feel good.
3. Anticipation… I have so many nice things that I’m looking forward to right now. I’ve got the usual things going on, of course — writing time with friends, the farmer’s market on the weekend, hanging out on the patio of Celery City, spending time outside with Sophie in beautiful places. But my Disney pass is expiring in November and I’m not going to renew it (at least not right away), so I’m also planning a final set of theme park binging: Animal Kingdom next week, the Epcot Food & Wine Festival at the end of the month, maybe a solo short Magic Kingdom trip in between to say good-bye to Tom Sawyer’s Island. And the BBE is visiting next week, so I’m looking forward to that, too. I have found surprisingly little research-backed evidence for my deep belief that anticipation is a key ingredient in happiness, but my belief hasn’t wavered: expecting good things to happen and looking forward to them is part of being happy for me.

So in my happy mood, I get up, get dressed, and take Sophie for a walk. We are only a few houses down the street when Toby, the Australian Shepherd who lives on the corner, comes running out to greet us. I drop Sophie’s leash so she can play with Toby, which she happily does. Toby’s mom, Hannah, is putting her little one in the car, and calling Toby, who is not supposed to leave his yard, but Toby is ignoring her. So I walk over to Hannah’s car, Toby following me, and chat with Hannah.

Sophie pauses for a pee.

Alas, Sophie’s leash is not being held in my hand, as it should be, safely off the ground. Sophie’s leash is underneath her, and yes, she pees on it. Copiously. Ugh!

But it’s probably fine, right? It’s gonna be damp in the middle, but it’s not like I run the leash through my hands as we walk. As long as the loop on the end, where I hold it, is dry, what difference does it make?

The loop on the end is not dry. I am immediately faced with a dilemma. Do we go home so I can wash my hands right away and get one of Sophie’s other leashes? But Sophie is eager to go for her walk and I don’t want to get sidetracked and miss out on our early morning sunshine and cool temps, so I decide I will just finish the walk. Carefully. Not touching anything with my dog-pee hands.

We continue walking, around the corner, and down the sidewalk and between two trees and right into an enormous spider web. And I have the exact reaction that one would expect of a person who’s just walked into an ENORMOUS spider web — frantically wiping it off my hair and my face and my shirt and my arms, and OMG, yuck, yuck, and more YUCK.

I am simultaneously wiping off spider web and wiping on dog pee.

I am revolted and as I do my “get off me, get off me!” spider-web removal dance, I think, “This is not the day I was intending to have.”

Except… it still is. Sophie and I finished our walk. She got to say hi to Jack, a little gray terrier, while I chatted with his person, Armand. I got to say hi to Debbie, who didn’t have her dachshund, Ariel, with her today. We both got to say hi to Lisa and Lotara, a pittie mix puppy. We enjoyed the sunshine and the movement and the sense of freedom, and while I was quite aware that I could smell the dog pee on my skin, I also knew that I could get home and have an immediate shower with clean, hot running water in a bathroom with no bugs. (Campground bathrooms always have bugs, it’s just a fact of life in campgrounds.)

This past week, I went to the beach with Christina and a friend of hers, and somewhere along the way we got to talking about luck. I said that I didn’t really believe in luck, and I don’t, in the context of what we were talking about then. That conversation was about choices with bad outcomes. Yeah, that happens. A choice that seems okay can turn out to be really, really wrong. If I had chosen to go home and wash my hands and get a different leash, I might have missed that spider web entirely. Some other unlucky person might have walked through it before I made it back there. But if that had happened, we would have missed greeting all those people and dogs, too, and feeling like part of a community is one of the best happiness boosters there is. Maybe not quite as good as the WIN (Walk-In-Nature), but the WIN plus the community? A++. I mean I guess I could have had all the community and the WIN without the dog pee and the spider web, but I don’t feel unlucky. If anything, that spider web made me more aware of how much I am grateful for all the goodness in my life right now.

Other quick things I want to remember from the past, ouch, three weeks without blogging:

Live music, The Ordinary Boys, at a local bar on a Sunday afternoon, so much fun. In a really weird coincidence, while I was listening to the music and watching people dance, I was thinking about what it would take to make a dance floor feel like a safe space for me and whether it was even possible. At the end of that exact song, the lead singer took a minute to say that one of the things the band stood for was creating a safe space for everyone to have fun, no matter what you wore, your skin color, who you were going home with, their music was for everyone, and he loved that their audiences understood that, too. Such an odd coincidence! The dance floor was still too crowded for me, but maybe someday soon, I’ll dance. Maybe.

The All-The-Birthdays dinner at Space220. I think I’ll remember the circumstances, the magical “luck” of getting a perfect reservation at a restaurant fully booked for months in advance, but I’ll probably forget the food. It was fun, though.

An overnight dog-sitting for Riker. He and Sophie are so adorable together. So much chewing on one another’s faces! This photo, where they are curled up together, (the brown is Riker) was taken a split second before Sophie tried chewing on his ear. You can see why she couldn’t resist.

Going to the Fall Into Fantasy Book Fair from Spellbound Books, held at Tuffy’s, and running into two women from the Spellbound Writer’s Group. I really need to start promoting my writing more seriously again, because I should have had a table at the fair, not just been a guest, but I loved casually running into people I knew. And really, there are so many indie writers here.

And speaking of writing — I have notes, dictated while walking, that need to get transcribed today, plus some breakfast to eat, plus a Japanese lesson or three to do, and somehow my quick blog post, just to write about spider webs and dog pee, has taken me far more time than I intended. Time to get the rest of the day moving!

I read a book about the laws of magical thinking recently (The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane) and I obviously didn’t read it carefully enough, because I don’t know which of the laws is the one that applies when you think that the turn of the calendar from one month to the next is magically going to change the weather. It’s September, which means the air is getting brisk at night and the leaves are falling from the trees, right?

Not really, no. 

I am trying to get more motivated, however, despite the weather still calling out for sitting on a front porch in a rocking chair drinking mint juleps, or long slow beach days. Yesterday I was doing useful chores, including some reorganizing of towels — more useful than it sounds, I swear — and I was pleasantly reminded that we can always make new choices. Always. It’s easy to get into a routine and then have that routine turn into a rut, but all we need to do is pause, step back, take a look at that rut, and then decide whether we want to continue in it or not. Any pattern that we can recognize, we can change if we want to badly enough.

And okay, yes, this pattern was technically about not having found a place to comfortably store my towels  — my desk chair has been serving as a linen closet for the last two months — but it applies to anything that I want it to apply to. If I’m just spinning my wheels, I can choose to stop spinning & do something else. I can make new choices! Such an obvious thought, and yet also so radical, and so powerful.

Of course, I haven’t actually managed to make those new choices yet — with the exception of taking over a shelf in the bathroom for my towels — but at least I’m reminded that they’re mine to make if I want to.

Unrelated, I fell in love with an author this week and I’ve been gobbling down her books like potato chips. Trying to do some of my own work and my own writing between books, but reaching for my phone (and its Kindle app) in every spare minute. My Japanese lessons have been getting short shrift and my meals have been mostly bagged salads. Oh, well, bagged salads are pretty healthy, right?

Anyway, the author is Katherine Center. I’d read one book by her before, The Bodyguard, and I enjoyed it, but not so much that I started binging. But The Rom-Commers was on my library wait list for weeks from some recommendation I got somewhere, it finally showed up this weekend, and it just delighted me.

A quote:

They’re romances and they’re definitely not plausible or realistic, but they made me want to believe in love again, which was extremely unexpected, ha. Anyway, I’m not sure which one of her books is going to be my favorite, but since I could be reading one now, instead of writing this blog post, I think I will go do that. And then maybe I’ll open up the file for the romance I was writing that I haven’t touched since sometime in 2023, and see if those characters would like their story to continue. Maybe they would!

My new friend, Mocha. Okay, friend is possibly an exaggeration. But he did hiss at me yesterday instead of running away from me, so we’re making progress. (I’m cat sitting while my neighbors are away, so I’ve been showing up twice a day. Maybe by the time they’re home, he’ll decide I’m okay, but right now, he definitely thinks I’m an invader. One who comes bearing tuna, though.)

I’m having a lot of trouble believing in today’s date. Where did August go? How did it slip away from me so quickly?

Ans: August in Florida is hot and sticky and slow and profoundly un-motivating. I haven’t even been eating my stir-fried vegetables for breakfast, because by the time Sophie and I get home from our typical morning walk, the thought of standing over a hot stove is so unappealing.

That said, August in Florida might be un-motivating, but if you give in to the lazy (as I have), it’s also languorous and lovely. Sure, I’m moving in slow motion, but I’m appreciating my slow movement.

A few photos, attached to a few memories:

Sophie, saying, “Why try to write when we could be playing in the backyard instead?” I love the crossed paws, something about them makes me melt immediately.

Riker was away for most of the month, so first playdate on his return included some face licking. And a lot of running.

Birds overhead at sunrise on the Sanford Riverwalk. 

I love the sailboats at the marina. They feel like adventures-in-waiting.

A great beach day. The water was bathtub warm, but the waves were strong. I didn’t worry about sharks for more than a minute or two, because it just felt so good to be immersed in water.

Plenty of other pleasant things have happened this month. Lunch with family, ice cream with my friend J, some fun thrifting, and so much time spent in the backyard with Sophie. Lots of reading, lots of organizing of notes on happiness, lots of peaceful quiet time. Lots of sudden rain showers that make for cozy afternoons snuggling with my girl. Not much in the way of writing, but word-by-word, it happens.

One random other summer note that I’ve been wanting to write about for days: the cicadas are insanely loud. So loud sometimes that I’ve had to go inside because it’s like sitting in a giant static noise generator. So loud they’ve set off my noise safety alert on my phone. Not consistently! And I don’t understand why they’re crazy loud in the middle of the day some days and not other days. The reason I haven’t written about them is that I don’t have anything more to say about them than that, but I want to remember them — they have been the sound of this summer of 2024, and as it draws to a close (where did it go?!?), I want to remember that it was a good summer, despite — well, and maybe even because of — and the humidity and the heat and the bugs.

Last night, I woke up around four or so, needing to use the bathroom, and when I came back to my room, I had a text message from my brother, saying, “Got time to talk?”

Okay, it was 4AM, so yeah, I had time to talk. But could I? Did I want to? Really, I wanted to go back to sleep, but the Best Brother Ever wouldn’t text me in the middle of the night asking to talk unless it was important.

But if I called him, I’d have to talk in complete whispers or else I’d wake Jamie up. Our rooms are adjacent and it’s really easy to overhear conversations between them: I can basically ask him a question in a normal speaking tone and he’ll answer (during the daytime, obviously.)

Still, important, right? So I could go outside to talk to the BBE. But yesterday the side edges of Hurricane Debby were just skimming Sanford, so it had been rainy all day long. Also, of course, it would be completely dark and there’s no way Miss Sunshine would let me go outside without her. At nighttime, though, I put her on her leash, mostly to avoid wildlife interactions that might make both of us sad (aka skunks, rabid raccoons, coyotes). So I’d be juggling my phone, Sophie on her leash, in the rain and the dark… ugh, it sounded so unappealing.

And his message wasn’t, “Call me, please, it’s urgent,” so was it really so important that he would want me to be standing in the rain and dark to call?

But then it occurred to me — there’s a back room in the house that’s not currently being used. I don’t think of it as usable in the same way I think of the kitchen and living room as usable: it’s not shared space, it’s a bedroom waiting to be rented. But I could probably call from there without disturbing Jamie and obviously, I don’t think my landlord would mind if I used the spare bedroom to make a middle of the night phone call.

Perfect. Although I really would have preferred to go back to sleep, I would drag myself out of my comfortable bed and go call my brother.

And then I woke up.

The whole thing had been a dream, and I still needed to pee.

SO WEIRD! It took me a minute to convince myself that yes, I had just dreamed the bathroom visit, the text message, and the entire problem-solving thought process, but in fact, I had. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a dream that felt more realistic, and that had less of an aura of unreality about it when I woke up. I was literally dreaming that I was in bed, thinking. It felt like I’d slipped between multiverse worlds or something, that maybe in some parallel reality, the BBE actually had texted me to ask if I had time to talk.

I was honestly really tempted to call him. Or at least text him. But I didn’t, because it was 4:30 in the morning and I didn’t think he’d really want to talk to me right then either.

Instead, I went back to sleep and when I woke up, Sophie and I went for a beautiful walk down on the riverwalk. Some photographic proof:

I thought this bird looked so much like the night heron I posted last week that I was excited to discover that we had night herons here, too. But the Apple photos info says that it’s a limpkin. That is a word that you will have to fight with auto-correct to type. I type limpkin, auto-correct says pumpkin. Over and over again. Yeah, right, auto-correct, that bird sure looks like a pumpkin to me.

On the other hand, in an extremely cool piece of trivia, the limpkin call was used as the sound of the griffin in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and that is a fact I would never have learned if it had been a night heron. (Speaking of auto-correct, it also wants to say “heroin” every time I type “heron” and… what? I really think I’m a person more likely to write about herons, or even heroines, rather than heroin, but apparently I’m unusual enough in that for auto-correct’s default to be the hardcore drugs. Strange!)

Moving on, the construction project across the street is — oh, wait, have I mentioned that? If not, short version, they’ve taken the lovely green space and are turning it into a retention pond, which is exactly the kind of tragedy that turns people into NIMBYs. I understand the reasoning and approve in principle of proactively planning for more intense storms and potential flooding, but in practice… much sadness.

And more sadness because of the NOISE. Beep, beep, beep… please stop backing up your trucks. Just… stop. Don’t back up anymore! Go forward instead! Turn in circles!!

I strongly suspect that it’s only going to get worse, but I’m also mystified by the hours that they work. They show up, they do something, and then they disappear for two weeks. I’m not complaining, because I do think that I’m going to yearn for those disappearances long before they’re done ripping up the space and the surrounding roads, but I feel like it would be much easier to cope if I knew when they planned to work and could plan my own life accordingly. So far my coping strategy is loud music, which is good and bad, I guess, depending on the music. Not all music motivates me to work harder, but that’s what I need to find.

Speaking of which, I should get back to it. I’m jumping around all over the place in my course creation/book creation, with lots of processing of notes right now. I’ve got so much information, but it’s a struggle to keep from sounding like a term paper. I am entertaining myself with mixed metaphors, though.

In my latest section, I was writing about thinking of nutrition as basically a recipe for your body. If you want to bake chocolate chip cookies, you really can’t skip the chocolate chips. You’re not going to get chocolate chip cookies if you do. If you want to create a happy brain, you can’t skip the omega-3s and the olive oil: they are literally the ingredients that provide your brain with the building blocks to create neural connections and grow your hippocampus. No nutrients -> no connections -> shrinking hippocampus -> depression and dementia. If you want to be happy, you have to give your brain the ingredients it needs to thrive.

Here’s another one: iron is an ingredient for creating hemoglobin and hemoglobin carries oxygen throughout your bloodstream. Low iron = lower oxygen distribution = lower energy. You’ll never want to run around and have fun if your iron is low, because your body will be conserving its resources, and your conscious mind telling you to go out and get some exercise can’t win against a cautious body knowing that it doesn’t have the resources to do so.

Like I said, term paper. And probably a scientist would say that I’m oversimplifying. But simplifying to make information easier to digest and remember is where I’m at right now. (Oh, and my mixed metaphors are — is this ingredients, and a cooking metaphor? Or foundation plus building blocks, a construction metaphor? Or fuel and energy, an engine metaphor? Or maybe just all of the above, in their own places and times.)

But now I really am getting back to it!

I spent the weekend with four of my oldest friends, in Isle of Palms, South Carolina.

This is an activity I highly, highly recommend. And a place I recommend, too. What a great weekend it was. I sort of feel like I’ve been coasting on the high of good times with old friends ever since.

I was not the organizer, and, in fact, I might have missed out entirely due to never opening Facebook, but one of said friends (Lauren) reached out to me a few months ago and said, “Hey, we’re planning another mini-reunion on FB, if you want to come.” I immediately jumped into the messages threads and offered my two cents (Napa Valley in July: absolutely not. South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, all lovely possibilities.)

A friend more organized than me (Beth) found an airBnB in Isle of Palms (which is right near Charleston) with enough beds for six people, a swimming pool, and walking distance to the beach; all votes were yes, a reservation was made, and four friends flew in — from Vermont, New York, Michigan, and Wisconsin — while I drove up. It was a long drive, and totally worth it.

We did a couple obligatory tourist activities — shopping at a market for a couple of hours, visiting the night heron rookery and seeing the beautiful row houses in Charleston — but mostly we floated in the pool and talked, and talked, and talked some more.

A young night heron, eyeing me skeptically.

And ate good food, of course. The first night was grocery store salad for me and sandwiches for the others; the second night was deep-dish pizza and salad at a restaurant owned by Lauren’s family (cauliflower crust pizza for me, but the company made it excellent); and the third night was unsurprisingly, my favorite, at a restaurant that takes GF seriously, and had so, so, so many options including a really delicious chocolate cake for dessert. I had to eat the leftovers for breakfast the next morning, which was delightful. Chocolate cake for breakfast, two thumbs up.

I went swimming in the ocean a couple of times, and loved it. I’m not a huge fan of ocean swimming, because the ocean is enormous and powerful and filled with uncertainty. Also, you know, despite lots of practice in managing my anxious imagination, thoughts of sharks and riptides and jellyfish always pop into my brain when I’m in the ocean. But it was so incredibly nice. The water was a perfect temperature, the waves were a perfect height — lifting me off my feet, but never knocking me over. The second time I went I was in the water by myself (although with friends on the beach) and the sun was just rising, and it was so spectacularly gorgeous and vivid and serene. All senses fully engaged, all of me completely present in the moment I was in.

That was the morning that we were leaving, and when we got back to the house, everyone was packing up. But I was in my bathing suit still, and we had plenty of time for the limited amount of packing that needed doing, so I headed for the pool, and then everyone else came outside too, for one more hour of pool floating and chatting, much of which was spent focused on when and where we were going to meet again.

Next month, or maybe at the tail end of this month, it will be forty years ago that I met these women. We lived together for one year and then our lives veered off in different directions. On the surface of things, I’m not sure we have a lot in common. But it turns out that the bonds formed during that one remarkable year are stronger and more sustaining than I realized. It’s been five years since we last saw one another and they were hard years, in their own ways, for all of us. (Honestly, the COVID years were hard years for everyone, weren’t they?) But it felt so rejuvenating to share the stories of those pains & fears, and then to move on to appreciating the moment we were in.

Now that I’m home, I’m back to the usual stuff: playing with Sophie, writing with my writing buddies, mowing the lawn, laundry and unpacking, grocery shopping and cooking, and, of course, working on my Choosing Happiness projects. But among the things that I am definitely going to get to will be uploading lots of photos, and making everyone else share their photos, too. I took some beautiful sunrise pictures, but I was never the person who handed my phone to a stranger to take a picture of all of us, so I don’t have a single group photo. Birds and sunrises are nice, but I do want the reminder of the people, too, because the people were what made the weekend so special.

So here’s the long story about how I wound up responsible for mowing the lawn:

Last time the landlord’s dad (Mike) went away for a few months, he asked the neighbor to mow the lawn in exchange for using the lawnmower on his own lawn. The neighbor seems like a nice guy. He also seems like a person who has kind of an overwhelming life. Four kids, (maybe), a couple dogs (the bigger one of whom is clearly not trained at all, and not exercised, either), and more yelling at the house than I would ever be comfortable with. Recently Mike repaired three broken windows at their house, because he was worrying about their AC bill and because he is a super, super nice guy. Me, I was curious about how three windows get broken. One, sure, accidents happen. Three?

But moving on… also last time he went away, Mike texted me regularly asking me about the lawn. Had it been mowed? Was it getting too long? And the answer was usually, “Well, no, and, ah, maybe.” But I hated being the lawn police. Really not my style. And, to be blunt, there are no circumstances under which I am ever, ever going to tell that neighbor that he needs to get his a$$ in gear and mow our lawn. (Incidentally, he is not the one doing the yelling, although he is sometimes the one being yelled at, so this is not because I’m afraid of him. That would be a different issue.)

When faced with the question of how the lawn was going to get mowed while Mike was gone, I therefore volunteered to mow it. It’s not a big lawn, nor a major chore. I can tell you from personal experience now that it takes 25 minutes to mow. Even in Florida weather, that’s a reasonably trivial amount of effort, not exactly hard labor.

But, OMG, do I hate lawnmowers. As you may recall, the first time I tried to mow the lawn, it took three tries, because the lawnmower kept dying on me. Mike replaced that lawnmower with another lawnmower — not a new lawnmower, but the one from his own house. I’m kinda gonna guess now that in order to transport the lawnmower in his car, he took the handle off. Just a guess, I don’t know that for sure. It could be entirely random that the screws holding the handle in place on one side were so loose that they fell out, making the lawnmower impossible to steer.

Urgh. I spent about ten minutes struggling with it, before the problem became excruciatingly clear to me. I then spent another ten minutes, maybe more, carefully retracing my steps over and over again, looking for the lawnmower part. Did I mention that it’s not a big lawn? It’s not a big lawn! (I know I told you that already: the question was rhetorical.) But I couldn’t find the piece at all. The best I did was to find a chopped up piece of black plastic that might have been part of the handle cap. So, so, so annoying. It was, of course, 90+ degrees outside while I was doing this, so I finally gave up, put the lawn mower away, and went back inside to start researching the problem.

I did what people do these days when confronted with such a problem: two minutes of research and then a quick purchase of lawnmower replacement parts from Amazon. Then I waited for the parts to be delivered. In the interim, I did the things one does, including taking the trash out. Lo and behold, sitting next to the curb, a black plastic thing that was clearly the missing lawnmower part. ARGH! I hadn’t had the lawnmower over there at all — on that specific day — but it was where I’d finished mowing a week earlier. It hadn’t even occurred to me to look on the street.

Still, the handle was missing the piece that would hold it in place (a black plastic piece that presumably got chopped up) so I comforted myself with the knowledge that I needed my Amazon order after all. It arrived with all due speed, and I tried to put it on and… No. Maybe the universal bolt wasn’t so universal as all that, or maybe I just wasn’t strong enough to screw it into place on a handle that was slightly corroded from a week sitting in the sun and rain, but there was no way I was getting that handle back on with that handle top. Also, the two pieces that needed to be held together — the actual lawnmower and the metal handle — needed to slide smoothly into place, and also, No. I just could not make that happen. Jamie tried to help, but he couldn’t get it, either, and the frustration level was rising dangerously high, so I finally just said, the hell with it, and did a crappy job. Will it last until Mike gets home? Probably. Is it good for the lawnmower handle to be kinda loose and wobbly? Probably not. Is it good enough? Yes.

The top piece should fit nicely inside the bottom piece, with a bolt/handle holding the two parts tightly together. Best I could do was get them close enough that the bolt is holding them in place, with a gap.

But at that point — remember, 90+ degrees — I was not going to mow the lawn.

So this morning, bright and early — although not too bright and early, because I do like to be kind to my neighbors — I set out to mow the lawn. I managed two rows… and the lawnmower died.

All this to say, next time around, I will be the lawnmower police and nag the poor neighbor whose life is already overwhelming. Because I’m fine to mow the lawn, but I am really not at all fine to manage lawnmower maintenance and repair.

As for the dead lawnmower, I didn’t think it should need gas, because Mike filled it right before he left, but I added gas anyway and lo-and-behold, it started up again just fine. I spent my time mowing worrying that maybe gas was leaking and maybe the whole thing would explode, because yeah, that’s where my mind goes, but eventually reconciled myself to the idea that maybe all the times I started and stopped it yesterday while I was trying to figure out what was going on with it just used a lot of gas.

And now my lawn is mowed and I get to feel all triumphant and tough. Shine on, self, shine on. Go, me! A good start to a hopefully productive Monday.

My July has continued on its trend of delightfulness. Although I just got thoughtfully stuck on that line for about ten minutes, because perspective is everything, isn’t it? But my perspective is that my July has continued to be delightful, and the small bumps along the way are just that, bumps.

Delightful exhibit #1:

A terrible picture of a very happy dog. I’m going to upload some video to Instagram, because the video shows the happiness in action. There’ll be a link in the sidebar on my actual webpage or if you follow me on Instagram, it’ll probably show up in your feed. Hmm, maybe I’ll try to include a link here for those of you who read via email.

Puppy Play Date at Gemini Springs

Anyway, over the course of the past few months, as I’ve chatted with other dog owners on my morning walks, we’ve more than once mentioned that it would be nice if our dogs could romp. After a recent solo visit to Gemini Springs, I decided it should happen, collected people’s numbers, and invited four or five other dogs to join Sophie and me for a morning adventure at the dog park.

She had SO much fun! Her friends — Ariel, Bella, Jorgi, and Riker — had a good time, too, but Sophie was definitely in doggie paradise. I did say afterwards, somewhat wryly, that if the dogs were graded on energy levels, Sophie would have gotten an A++. Her desire to move, explore, chase, run, and play is… well, to be fair, that of a border collie, not a more mellow dog. She’d make a great working dog. Her friends are content to be relaxing dogs, ha. I do love her just the way she is, though!

Other delightful activities of the week: wandering around downtown Mount Dora one day, checking out the art galleries and gift shops; swimming at my dad’s swimming pool another morning (the water was perfect); the Spellbound Writer’s Group and an exercise on dialogue using tarot cards; and some delicious meals, including really good Mexican for lunch one day as well as an excellent GF sandwich and fries another day.

An entertaining, although maybe not quite delightful, activity: mowing the lawn. The background is a long story, with tedious details, so I won’t bore you, but I’ve taken over the job of mowing for the next few months while Mike, the person who usually mows it, is out of town. I suspect that after a couple months, I’ll be happy to give the job back to him, but after three tries, I successfully made the yard pretty. Shine on, self!

The three tries were not my fault. Try #1: the lawnmower died. Mike had to take it apart and filter the gas tank to discover that a dead spider was blocking the line. Try #2: the lawnmower died again. Mike took it away with him and returned with another one and a new gas can, one with a cap over the spout. Try #3: success! It was 95 degrees out, and our AC was dead, so my sense of satisfaction was high — yay, me, persisting in the face of adversity — but boy, was I grateful for the delights of running water afterwards. Not, for once, hot running water, which is a pleasure five years of van life has engrained in my gratitude center, but cool running water, which is also awfully nice at the right moment.

Speaking of things nice to have — air-conditioning. Another long saga, and I won’t bore you with the details, but I spent a day sitting in the house watching the temperature rise and hoping the AC repair people would appear. I wasn’t happy about it, but mostly because it was interfering with my plans for the day, which could have been a lot more fun. The no-AC part was fine, though — I closed the blinds, turned on the overhead fans, and tried to pretend that I was living in the tropics somewhere. Thailand, maybe? Vietnam? Somewhere where life would just be lived a little slower when it got hot and sticky. Jamie was a lot more unhappy about it than I was. He bailed and went to stay with Christina, who offered the same for me, but I was actually quite content in the toasty house. And now the AC has been repaired, albeit with warnings and caveats, so we’ll see what happens. It’s good to be reminded to appreciate the things we take for granted.

I’m expecting this week to be quieter, which is probably good news, because I really do have lots of work that I’d like to get done. I spent a few hours working on a piece of my first chapter/module the other day and then threw it all away. It was actually useful work, in that writing helped me organize and process my thoughts, but I basically decided after I’d done all that writing that I was wrong about the central statement I was trying to make. So, yeah. I changed my mind. Which is good, really, better to change my mind now than later, but it was still somewhat vexing.

Super short version: do you have to change yourself in order to change? I started out saying yes, you have to be willing to change yourself if you want to be happier/choose happiness, but by the end of that writing session, I’d argued myself out of that opinion. You’re fine just as you are. So am I. Choosing happiness may mean that you have to change your habits, of both body and mind, but you — your core self, the person you are inside, the one you’ve been as long as you can remember — you’re great. You’re exactly who you’re meant to be. Our habits & thought processes don’t define us, they just determine the quality of our lives. Which is plenty, really. And hey, that was maybe not the super short version, but so it goes!

Amazon has been sending me reminders about Amazon Prime Day for weeks, since my blog is still an Amazon affiliate site, even though I don’t often use affiliate links, so I spent a little while browsing my recent purchases, wondering if I had anything to recommend for you.

Honestly, of all my recent purchases, this is my very favorite: Off clean feel insect repellent

And it has apparently been so long since I posted an affiliate link that I no longer know how to post the ad style links. Weird! But I’m not going to spend any longer looking for it, because… well, because it feels like a waste of time. But if you need insect repellent, this stuff is great. If you need anything else on Amazon & you have Prime, right now (or possibly tomorrow) is probably a good time to buy. And if you follow my bug spray link, you’ll be making a tiny, tiny donation to the Sophie Treats & Toys fund.

Thanks for reading!

I had a rather delightful 4th of July. It started, really, on the 3rd of July when instead of writing with my friend Joyce, which we do most Wednesdays, we went thrift-store shopping. Have I raved about the thrift stores in Sanford yet? Obviously, if you’ve been reading my blog for longer than a few months, you know I like thrift stores, but Sanford has particularly great ones. The cute little local one, just down the road, is probably my favorite, but on this specific day, J & I went to the big thrift stores first.

I was looking for light capri pants, because all my pants are denim and denim is heavy when it’s 90 degrees outside. I found a pair, in a nice light blue, $5, with the $36 Kohl’s tags still on them. I have no idea why the person who bought them didn’t just take them back — even if they didn’t have the receipt, Kohl’s would have given them a store credit! But I am not complaining. I am complaining even less about the silvery tank top from Banana Republic, also with its tags on, ($8), or the rose-colored Simply Vera Wang ruffled shirt ($5) or the other $4 shirt I bought.

A slightly weird picture, because I was looking at Jamie instead of the camera, but I love my new thrift store outfit. So comfy, so cute, and so satisfying when worn to my stepmom’s birthday lunch the next day. It’s not often that I want a picture of myself because I like my outfit so much, but I did this time. Sorta dressy, sorta casual, very very me. (And I adore my pink shoes, and am always happy to find an occasion to wear them.)

So 4th of July then was a lovely lunch and good conversation at the birthday celebration over in Mount Dora, then a return home for a quiet afternoon. Around dinner time, though, I was hungry and had no plan for what I was going to eat. Bah. Fortunately, I had plenty of ingredients. I’d picked up frozen mahi-mahi at Costco earlier in the week, I had fresh tomatoes and spinach… and voila.

It was so delicious! It’s tomatoes, sautéed with capers and pine nuts, then the mahi-mahi seasoned with salt, pepper, and smoked paprika, with spinach added at the last minute. Then I discovered that I’d forgotten to add the diced red onion while cooking, so I just threw it on at the end. Yum, yum, yum. The pine nuts (more or less toasted, I really just cooked them in the pan with the tomatoes, because I was not going to turn the oven on for any reason, much less to toast pine nuts) went so surprisingly well with the sharpness of the red onion. Hmm, I’m making myself hungry.

Anyway, post-dinner, Jamie & I had talked about going down to Sanford’s 4th of July celebration, but we were both feeling too lazy. Until 8:45 or so, that is, when we could hear the local fireworks starting. We hopped into the car, with Sophie, and drove down. Parking and traffic were insane, of course, but we stayed away from the center of town and parked on a side street that was a straight shot to the waterfront. We walked down to the water and got there approximately 20 seconds before the fireworks started. We stood on a grassy hill on the inside part of the street, comfortably away from the crowds, and watched as all the communities around the lake lit off fireworks, some in the distance, some up close. They were quite impressive!

I got a few dirty looks, I think for bringing a dog to a fireworks show, but I ignored them, because I was exactly right about how it would go for Sophie: she was uncertain at first, definitely worried, borderline distressed, but once she’d seen the fireworks with Jamie and I being relaxed and interested, not tense, she was fine. Not particularly interested in fireworks, more interested in the people, but not at all worried about the loud noises.

We left a few minutes before the end to avoid the crowds, and the above photo was taken on our walk back to the car, timed pretty perfectly so that the grand finale was happening as we got there, and we beat all the traffic home. A perfect fireworks show — I think we were back at the house by 9:20, which is exactly how much time I’m actually willing to give to fireworks. Less than an hour!

I had a quiet Friday, working on various things, but Saturday I drove to Merritt Island and spent the day with my friend Lynda. We usually claim we’re going to write, so I did bring my computer, but it had been a couple months since we’d seen one another and she has a lovely swimming pool, so we didn’t write. We talked, talked, talked, floated in her pool, talked, talked, talked, ate lunch, talked, talked, talked.

Sophie was with me and very well-behaved: we stayed outside on the back porch and she explored everything, then found a comfortable place to sleep and napped. I’d hoped she’d come in the water, and maybe if I’d brought a ball, she would have. But I forgot to bring one, so she had no motivation to try swimming and therefore didn’t. Still, she did an excellent job in that new situation: no barking because her person was in the water (a habit Bartleby needed to overcome), no running around the pool frantically, no stress. She found herself a nice patch of grass where she could see the front yard and waited patiently for something interesting to happen.

Today, I spent the morning puttering through my course notes. So many notes! I have such a variety of things that I’ve written, things that I’ve learned, and I’m starting to put them together. So I think I will get back to that, maybe after some lunch and some outside time with Sophie Sunshine. Summer is really not my favorite season in Florida — it’s easy to love it here in winter, but harder in July. But we’ve really been managing surprisingly well. Sophie’s not getting nearly as much exercise as she used to but, as I probably should have expected, she seems fine with it. It turns out that a dog with a heavy fur coat doesn’t actually want to spend 30 minutes at a time running after a ball when it’s 90 degrees outside. Who knew?

On Sunday afternoon, I went with Christina & Co. to see Ordinary Boys, a Smiths cover band, at a bar in downtown Sanford. Actually, we thought we were going to see two cover bands, the first called New Dawn Fades, a New Order cover band, and then Ordinary Boys, but it turned out to be one group of musicians with two identities, a concept that I appreciated. So first we had New Order music, then The Smiths music, and interspersed at the end — in a move that had most of the bar crowded onto the dance floor and singing along — a few random 80s songs, including Tears for Fears and Simple Minds.

So much fun!

I am really glad that people don’t smoke in bars anymore, because in the midst of my nostalgic trip, I did notice that key difference to the bars of my early 20s. I’m also glad I don’t drink anymore, because we got there around 2:45, left at around 6:45, and four hours of drinking in a fun, boisterous, musical environment would have killed me even back then. Instead I got to thoroughly enjoy the music, then come home and play with my dog and eat a healthy quinoa bowl for dinner: win-win. And a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

Ordinary Boys, on stage

It was not the only nostalgic event of the weekend. On Saturday, we went to see a live version of the Rocky Horror Picture Show at a local Sanford theater. Wow! I’ve only seen Rocky Horror once previously (hmm, maybe twice, another memory just popped into my head of a movie theater on Castro Street in San Francisco), and never a live version, and that was back in my Clarkson years, eons ago. That show is so weird! There was no throwing things at the actors, fortunately, and the audience was quite tame, but the cast was energetic, enthusiastic, and looked like they were having a great time. Also really good. I did wonder about auto-tune, tbh, because the voices were so great and the technology — lighting, video, music, mics — was all top-notch for a small theater, and it’s certainly possible that technology was helping the musicians a bit. But the acting and the dancing and the having fun was all real people doing a great job.

Watching people perform always leaves plenty of room for my brain to wander, though, so it spent a lot of time wandering through the past. As it happens, I’d done a fair amount of that on Friday, too, and much less happily, because on Friday, I went to Costco.

You might think, Costco?! Nostalgia? And you’d be right. Except this Costco was achingly familiar, from a period so long ago that it hurt. I used to drive near that Costco 5 days a week, taking R to-and-from school, back when he was in a private middle school for kids with learning disabilities. It was not the happiest time of my life. I was commuting two hours a day (half an hour there, half an hour back home, 2x a day), working hard and entirely remotely while trying not to think about how much I hated my job, and living in a place that was more house than we needed in a neighborhood that would never feel like home.

But oh, how I loved my boy. Every day we listened to the Zombie Survival Guide on audiobook in the car — over and over again, multiple times, we just got to the end and started at the beginning again — and discussed our own zombie survival strategies. Of which Costco was a huge part, actually! We’d decided that the best plan was to move into the top shelves at the Costco aisles. Use height to our advantage in fighting the zombies, with plenty of supplies right next to us.

He wasn’t happy there either — neither one of us were happy — but I had decided that my priority in life, our priority, was for him to overcome his learning disabilities. That was how we wound up in Florida. The public school in California, where we’d been living, had made it clear that middle school was going to be a sink-into-mediocrity experience for him. He couldn’t go to the middle school where most of his friends would go — an excellent charter school — because they didn’t take kids with learning disabilities. And even though he wasn’t “remediated” to the extent his intelligence suggested was possible, he was no longer far enough under grade level to qualify for support. Our options were limited. The one private school in CA was insanely expensive, nothing I could remotely afford. I looked at schools in Washington, in Massachusetts, finally in Florida. Florida won. But we didn’t love it here, especially back then.

But, oh, I loved him. I would have done anything for him. Giving up my cute house within walking distance to the beach so that he could learn to read was a sacrifice I was willing to make. Giving up my career ambitions, the possibility of achieving the kind of corporate success I’d unthinkingly expected, was a no-brainer. He was my everything.

And now, of course, he is not a part of my life. I think of him with love, I try to only send the typical loving-kindness energy his way (may he be well, may he be happy, may he be loved) when his name crosses my mind, but I also think of him as someone lost to me.

I don’t think I’ve ever shared this story here, but I actually had a major breakthrough in coping with our estrangement when I started thinking of him — the real him, the R who still exists in the world — as a zombie. Someone who had been bitten by zombies, hopefully against their will, and was no longer the same person. Because no one wants to become a zombie. No one chooses to get turned into a zombie! And yet once they’ve been bitten, you have to say good-bye. You can’t keep trying to get someone who wants to hurt you, who will eat your brain, into your life. You have to let go, and let go with love and grief and sorrow, but also by choosing to save yourself.

So yeah, I went to the Costco we used to go to, back in the days when we listened to the Zombie Survival Guide every day, and planned to save ourselves by moving into the Costco, and my heart just broke. All the pieces so painstakingly held together with the duct tape of my choices for happiness and health, just… broke. It was not a good afternoon.

But I did my best to breathe and to let myself feel my feelings, to remember that young R with love, and to forgive the zombie R who exists in my imagination, and to get through. And I did. And the next day I went to Rocky Horror, and remembered the me that existed when I was 17, wide-eyed and confused, and the day after I went to Ordinary Boys and remembered the me that existed at 21, the smoking-drinking-dancing me, and I remembered those past selves with love and amusement and compassion.

And it made me remember that 30-something self with more love, too. I tried so hard. If I had known where trying so hard would take me, I would have done things differently, no question about that. But there is no rewriting the past.

Anyway. Today I’m going to choose to be happy, and that means it’s time to walk my poor patient dog and live here in the present for a while. I’m grateful, though, that I got to have some really good nostalgia this weekend. Two thumbs up for live music and time with friends.