daily life – Page 78 – The Hermits' Rest

Birthdays and Fundraising

At some point next week, I will be an even older Baby Boomer! But I still don’t have to register for Medicare, so I declare I’m still middle aged. Why does this matter? Well, for the last few years, I’ve raised funds for a good cause rather than ask for gifts, so I thought I’d share it here, too.

WOO HOO MY FACEBOOK FUNDRAISER!

We got Carlton and Penney from the Cameron Touch of Love dog pound. Your donation will help pets throughout our rural county through the nonprofit Milam Touch of Love (MTOL) organization.

Some Fundraiser Considerations

I get questions ever year, so here’s why I do what I do. Maybe you can support an organization or group, too!

Why a Facebook fundraiser? I know some folks don’t like them, because FB no doubt makes interest on donations before they pay them out. But, they do pay every cent donated, and it’s easy to donate. Any reader who’d like to donate another way can go to the MTOL website and use their form or mails check. Please say it’s for my fundraiser, so they will know how to allocate the funds.
Why only once a year? I think people can feel bombarded by requests for money. I know I do sometimes. So, I tend to do my own donations privately, but I do give to birthday fundraisers for good causes and to honor people I care about. And once a year I choose a nonprofit to support. You’ll see that not all the donations are big, which comes as no surprise during these challenging times. It feels good to give to others sometimes, though.
Why Milam Touch of Love? The main reason is that I honor my commitments. When I was at my last MTOL Board meeting, I said I’d do another birthday fundraiser, so I am! The organization has done an incredible job rescuing puppies and sending them to places with plenty of adoption opportunities, spaying and neutering pets to help drive down unwanted births, and microchipping pets to make finding their owners easier. And the president of MTOL writes educational articles in the local paper each week. She’s amazing, and I want to support her hard work. She even got certified as an animal control officer, to better help the animals in our county.

I hope that all helps a bit. Since I’m not able to be an active member of MTOL anymore, it’s even more meaningful to me that I help this way. I always hoped that our mutual love for animals would keep the MTOL team diverse and mutually respectful, but that’s hard these days. Still, I encourage my friends and readers to put aside our differences and help those who can’t help themselves.

Things are hard right now. Believe me, trying to get a small business started during COVID has not been easy on my family’s finances. But, we still do our charitable giving, at a scale we can manage. I hope you do, too, and give to organizations like MTOL, who use you money to directly help others.

Carlton is giving his mommy a touch of his love. He also made it hard to write this, since he wanted to play.

We all need to spread a touch of love in this world.

Griping about the US Mail

I’m hearing a lot of complaints about the service people have been receiving from the US Postal Service. Now, of course, some of it is related to the weather issues of last week, when people where I live didn’t get any mail at all for a week or so. The weather is a good excuse, but doesn’t cover issues people are having elsewhere.

Carlton thins this new yarn smells amazing, since it went all over the country before it got here.

My example isn’t of anything critical, except to me. I ordered the yarn to finish out the table runner I’m making for Lee on February 3. I got the notice it had shipped on February 7. When did it arrive, you ask? February 25! That’s almost three weeks. Usually things take 3-5 days…well, up until recently anyway. Since the end of last year, when the election thing happened and the higher-ups at the USPS started cutting services, it’s been hard to get mail.

Look up at the top, February 7. It really takes that long to get from Massachusetts to Texas? Did they use a mule train? If so, I’d like to go see the mules.

I’ve had more than one thing simply not show up at all. An order of Christmas stuff from Doterra came mid January, which did not help with gift giving. But that’s nothing. One of my friends has had very expensive medicine delayed. She was okay, but there are others, like diabetics, who’ve had crises due to medicine being delayed.

Our horse supplements were also delayed, which wasn’t funny, even though they aren’t technically “medicine.” I’m still waiting for my turmeric tablets to show up.

Lee reports some of our clients haven’t received their bills in a timely fashion, too. That means money is not coming in. How many other small businesses that rely on the mail for billing have been adversely affected by the mail slowdown? This article shares some other consequences.

We need to be able to rely on postal mail, even if many of us pay our bills and do other transactions online. You need to be able to order something and have a vague idea of when it will show up.

I just want to share how pretty my horse is…again. He looks extra Arabian in this photo.

It’s been pointed out to me that, back in the not-so-distant past we were used to waiting 3-5 weeks for packages, and that’s true. But, back them most people paid their bills by mail, and if you gave it a week or so, you’d be sure your payment arrived on time. And if you bill for services, you’d know that if you mailed the bill at a certain time of the month, recipients would have plenty of time to get the payment back to you on time.

That’s no longer true, and it concerns me greatly. I’m not alone, as the delays are annoying lawmakers as well.

Anyone have any insight or stories to share?

Hey, How about a Different Disaster?

I woke up this morning and walked to the front window, as I do every day, to check out the sunrise. Whoa, those are dark clouds, I thought.

I then looked to the right and saw fire! What the heck?

I was too shocked to get a photo with the fireball.

I told Lee something bad had happened. Sure enough, it had. By the time Lynn H and I talked we found out it was a horrible train/semi truck accident on the other side of Cameron in the Marlow community. You could see it all over the county. The photos were so scary.

The train cars had some petroleum products and coal in them. Luckily the hazardous material got quickly moved. The good news is no one died and not many structures were damaged.

I do have friends who will have a hard time getting to work until this is cleared up. it will be a while, apparently. The fire is still burning, too.

It was even on the BBC News! And the ABC news on TV!

Unfortunately they showed the wrong footage…

I was so shocked that I said to a coworker, “This is probably the worst disaster in Milam County since…uh…last week.”

I’d be fine if we actually did NOT have a disaster every week from now on. I was really out of it trying to do a presentation at work, because I wasn’t yet sure my friends who live near there were okay.

I tried to take a cheerful walk to see Apache and Fiona. When I got home, there was Vlassic running around with a dead baby bunny. GEEZ!

It’s a present for Jim. I hope he likes it.

I’m ready to chill out with no icky things. I’m gonna spend the evening coloring. My book is too scary and I’m too worn out to knit.

The Sun Is So Bright

That yeah, we need shades. Wow is ole Sol making fast work of the ice. Even though it’s well below freezing outside, the ice is crashing and booming off the roof, and clear patches are starting to show up.

The image doesn’t do justice to the shininess.

The trees had rainbow diamonds in them this morning, and just look at the Chihuly sculpture our rain chain made!

I couldn’t write or work much yesterday, because the cell towers weren’t working. So Lee and I watched movies on DVD most of the day.

I did make it out to check animals and see if we got any mail (no). Penney loved running and sliding on the ice. She went full tilt.

The layer of ice was over water in lots of spots. It was hard to find the right places to step. Neither Carlton nor I moved very fast.

Ice is now falling off the roof again and booming, so the dogs are close by me. Penney and Carlton are even getting along!

All the toting and fetching of water has been hard on Ralph, so Sara and I are taking over for him now. I’m pretty sure the driveway has melted enough to get out! Freedom! Of course, the water supply is spotty.

But, all in all, we see the light at the end of the tunnel, so I have my sunglasses ready. Maybe it will thaw out the water heater and heat pump and we can be clean and warm again inside!

Such a dreamer.

I’m hearing my friends and coworkers in Austin are getting heat and power back, too. I sure hope some of the infrastructure issues can be fixed.

COVID +1, Ice 0

Ice is zero, because that’s how cold it is in Celsius. COVID is +1, because I got my first Moderna vaccination today. I’m really relieved to get the process started, because it means I might be able to go back to my nice office in Cameron without being so paranoid about potential exposure from Hearts, Homes and Hands staff who work with so many clients (and we are glad they do). Anyway, that’s why I got to get the shot before turning 65 or 64 or whatever age it is.

The Vaccination

The County Health Department has the luxury of two closed hospitals to use in cases like this (thanks to all the rural hospitals closing down…moving on…). That meant there were lots of rooms for counseling and giving the shots. Everyone was SO nice. You could just see how happy they are to be doing this for our citizens.

Sad room, wishing it could be part of a hospital again.

The nurse who counseled me was especially nice, and we spent a lot of time praising the County Judge, who has been quite the stoic through this whole pandemic. Half the county says he’s the Devil and half says he’s a Saint. Whichever, the job certainly has been more than he thought it would be when he ran for office!

The only part about the whole thing was that, because it’s truly cold and most of the people getting their vaccines are elderly, they had everyone wait inside rather than sitting in their cars and being called in. I truly understand why they did it, but GEEZ I felt claustrophobic waiting in a hallway filled with fragile people, where there was no way to get 6 feet away from anyone. I did double mask, though, and I’m sure most of those folks were like me and never leave their houses except for things like vaccinations!

They DID have chairs spaced out. The ones next to each other are for couples.

Now I just have to wait a month to get the other shot, then two more weeks and I’ll feel a bit better interacting with folks (with mask).

The Ice

One thing I realized when I was driving to Rockdale for the vaccination is that up here in Walker’s Creek/Silver City (or wherever I live), we got much more ice than only a few miles south of us did. Some of Rockdale’s trees looked perfectly normal. On the other hand, there are lots of trees down here (and my friends in northwest Austin really, really had lots of damage).

These poor trees just keep getting smaller and smaller every time there’s bad weather.

On the other hand, ice sure is pretty.

I love this ice-encapsulated beggar’s purse!

I’m glad the temperature is a balmy 32 F (0 C) today, since I need to load up on hay for Apache for the upcoming Polar Vortex. Sara and Ralph got blankets on all the horses, but Fiona is so fuzzy, she’s fine. Everyone has shelter and seemed just fine this morning, once I broke the ice in the water troughs, which I will have to do again this evening, I’m sure.

We are fine, and have hay. And all the cattle are munching away, happy as can be.

Enjoy some more photos of our icy time. By Sunday we should be getting snow or worse. It may get down to the OTHER 0 degrees! This is NOT normal Texas weather!

Celebrating All Wins

Along with Lee and two other business partners, I used to be a part of a real estate organization called FortuneBuilders. While it was an investment, the classes and networking ended up being well worth it. The leaders were a very positive bunch of human beings, and they brought in good motivational speakers and topics (I am a HARSH judge of motivational speakers, so when I say they were good, I’m not kidding).

Sometimes we had fun at those conferences

Anyhow, one of the things the FortuneBuilder folks stressed was that it takes a lot of small successes among even more setbacks and challenges to get ahead in whatever you’re trying to do. They encouraged us to “Celebrate All Wins” no matter how big or small (if you got a response to one of your annoying postcards offering to buy someone’s home, for example). They even gave out shirts emblazoned with CAW to people who shared their wins at conferences (ah, I remember live conferences).

They are also nice and comfy shirts. By the way, my closet is STILL organized and in good shape.

This morning, I was telling Lee about something that was challenging at work that I did a good job handling, and he said we need to make a bigger deal out of these things, like back in the good old CAW days. The idea works for home health agencies, software companies, horsemanship endeavors, fitness goals, and even interpersonal relationships. In other words, it works in all areas of our own lives!

Here’s Russell interacting with one of those motivational speakers

I’m going to take Lee up on it and celebrate my wins for the past day or two!

I started my bullet journal
I participated in that Bioblitz
I figured out a helpful process for working on our documentation at work
I reassigned two team members and they each like their new assignment better
The friend for whom I knitted the striped shawl received it and loved it
I got all but one chicken to sleep in the coop last night, rather than the garage (more on that in another post)
I made progress on my stepping off a cliff project. One step closer to flying.

I feel better already, just for writing all those things down! No wonder I have felt perky and chipper all day, even on day 5 of 8 AM meetings!

Just bullet journaling away for two whole days.

A Challenge

Here’s today’s challenge: Share your wins! Celebrate them! I want to know!

Stop and Pause

I came up with a goal today that I truly want to achieve. I want to stop my frenzy at least three times a day, pause, and notice what I’m grateful for wherever I am.

Yesterday I noticed the golden sun on swirling grass.

Here’s a thing many religious traditions get right. So many ask practitioners to pause to pray, reflect, chant or perform a ritual at intervals throughout the day. Think of all those nuns, monks, and traditional lay people who rise to pray, bow to Mecca, ring a bell, or whatever. They stop what they are doing and appreciate what they’ve got.

I paused to watch the sun rise this morning, as did many of my friends.

Slowing down to the speed of life is so good for the soul. It’s a gratitude practice any of us can do. Or it’s a way to stay close to our Source, whatever we call it.

This afternoon I paused to be grateful for a very odd dog and her beloved possum skull.

One thing we’ve all become aware of lately is how quickly things change. It’s more obvious to me every day. So tonight I’ll appreciate the wool running through my fingers as a sweet, white dog curls up in my chair. I won’t have it forever, so I’ll treasure it now.

Chickens don’t live forever, so go ahead, Bertie, peck my shoe.

Every day, at least three mindful pauses! Go, Suna.

Late to the BuJo Party

Let’s see if I can get anything written today. I’ve been having technology issues, annoying bill-paying issues, and trouble doing what I set out to do today. Cows are mooing their asses off outside, too. So, I’m hoping a pleasant blogging break will help get me back on track to do some proofreading.

We seem to be lost. Update: not lost, separated so they can get some treatments. Still, unhappy.

Meanwhile, as I briefly mentioned last week, I have been looking more into how bullet journaling works, since my work book group friends all said they sort of do it, but would like to know more. You know me, I went out and bought the book, after reading up on two popular forms of bullet journaling online, the original bullet journal (by Ryder Carroll) and the Full Focus Planner (by Michael Hyatt), which is what Lee uses.

I might have ordered this because it looks cool and has cork on the outside.

Even though I have a nice-looking journal I use right now, in what turns out to be a semi-bullet journal format, I ordered another journal, because I forgot to check whether the book I’m using opens flat. It doesn’t, and that is more than a little irritating, even though it’s a pretty little book. I can use it for something else.

I know this journaling style is all the rage these days, but, as usual, I avoided looking into it, since I have my own system. But, one of my goals is to learn more, in general, so I’ll learn more. So far, I’ve learned how important BuJo journal proponents believe it is to write things down by hand. I’ve always agreed with their premise that writing helps cement things, which I why I was such a big note-taker in college.

Bullet journals use dots, not lines. I think this is for freedom? I’m not that far in the book. I like dots, though.

The handwriting fans maintain that typing is not as good for focusing as the act of writing on paper, mainly because typing goes so fast that you don’t necessarily really think about it. Hmm, no wonder my blog doesn’t make sense; my hands just go typing way ahead of my brain. I honestly find typing to be equally helpful, but I also think my brain works a little differently than some people’s.

Nonetheless, I know my handwriting has become a LOT worse since I stopped doing it so often, so maybe writing more intentionally in a bullet journal will help with that. You see, a LOT of people make their journals into pieces of art, which all sorts of colors, drawings, stenciled headings, and stickers upon stickers. That has to slow down the “rapid logging” process, don’t you think? Maybe they just do it as they prepare their monthly sections. Maybe I should read more of the book.

I think one reason I hesitated to look into this stuff is that before, I felt the way Lee journaled was very rigid, and that may or may not be right. It is very goal oriented, so you don’t get to do things that don’t contribute to a goal. There goes my fondness for random activities and plain old fun (so, one of my goals is to have fun…HA).

My practice. I even put in a sticker and used a template yesterday (blurred to obscure work notes).

I was happy to see that there’s a LOT of freedom in bullet journals. You can put in art, write stories, keep lists, track your food, or whatever you find important. The best freedom, though, is to get rid of things that don’t work for you. That’s very Agile, I think, as is the iterative monthly planning. Oh goodness, Agile project management is everywhere in my life these days!

Let’s see what happens once I get my journal actually going. I’m still using the old one and practicing BuJo style bullets and style. I need to finish the book and learn about all the components before I mess up the new one. I mean, use it however I want to.

Do you journal? Is blogging journaling? Memoir writing? Narcissism? Who knows.

Views of Home

Yesterday I took a few pictures as I approached the ranch on my walk.

It’s a mid-winter view only a property owner could love. There’s last year’s evil Georgia cane, some fencerow trees planted by birds, ugly power lines, and my house way in the distance. But, seeing that bottom land makes my heart swell, because it’s home.

I see dead trees and pretty live ones. I know the trees provide habitat and cover for wildlife, like the cottontail I saw yesterday and all those sparrows (yesterday I saw gorgeous Harris’s sparrows, chipping sparrows, yellow-throated sparrows, vesper sparrows and more). I love this winter landscape.

When you get to know a place, you see it’s beauty and unique features all year round.

Rooster Digression

Late yesterday afternoon, Lee and I took a walk around the house area, looking at the winter life. When we came back up, we saw the chickens, but heard some loud cackling from inside the garage. Lee said it sounded like someone had laid an egg. But, all the hens were nearby. It had to be Bruce.

How did I get up here? How do I get down?

We walked in and found that, yes, Bruce was making the noise. He was sitting on top of the garage fridge looking confused.

He does like high spots, like Gertie the guinea did. He just seemed to be having trouble figuring out how to get back down. He did, eventually! He was all cozy in the coop when I went out to shut their door.

I hope your home brings you some joy during this bleak midwinter. Some of my US friends are getting pretty snowfalls!

Your COVID Precautions Are Perfect for You

Hey, so we’re all living through this pandemic, right? We all listen to our preferred news outlets, discuss it with family and friends, have our own experiences, and then decide how we are going to cope.

Very few of us are hiding and ignoring what’s going on, unlike Cozy Carlton here.

I know a lot of people, in Cameron and Austin, but also around the world. They sure differ in how they decide to live their pandemic lives. Here in Cameron, I know people who haven’t changed their lives at all, except having to deal with store closures. I also know people whose underlying issues and financial means make them most comfortable not leaving their house at all.

Most people are somewhere in between. My children have to work. Many people are in that position, so they do what they can, wearing masks and washing hands a lot. Some people go grocery shopping and such, but limit their trips. Others figure out what shops or services are not crowded or taking precautions and use them.

Nearly all of us have our mask collections, since we can’t go places without them, but some are more careful with their technique than others.

Why are you telling us this?

The point is that, as with so many other things, there’s no one right way to deal with the COVID outbreak. People choose to make decisions based on information that matters to them and act accordingly. There are a LOT of factors involved, like personal philosophy, your risk factors, and your comfort level.

Harvey points out that his comfort level is high.

Because of all this, I’ve made the choice to not judge people on their choices, even when I disagree or am not comfortable with them. I don’t know their reasons much of the time, and when I do know them, I figure it’s their business.*

What’s the issue?

I was a little surprised that when I shared my recent hair update, most of the comments were from people who seemed uncomfortable with going to salons. I felt a bit judged, I have to say. Of course every single commenter had higher risk factors that me (age, illness, immune system stuff, etc.). If I was in that group, I might have made a different decision, myself.

I can sure see how people who can’t get their hair cut might wish they could! I don’t blame them. I wish I could travel as much as some of my friends have. And I know people weren’t thrilled when I did travel. Yep.

I completely respect those of you who haven’t cut your hair in a year. You are doing what works for you, having evaluated the risks. But, I also evaluated the risks. I chose a small salon that has made many modifications in the last year. They require masks at all times, don’t let clients near each other, and sanitize like crazy. I know the hairdresser. I took the risk based on my comfort level.

We are all under so much stress these days. Let’s consider giving others a break and assume they are making their decisions based on what works for them, even when it’s not what you’d do.

Anyway, now you know why I didn’t mention my previous two haircuts! And yes, if I was under one of the endless quarantines I’ve been in, from being exposed to someone who’s been exposed to someone, I’d have canceled.

I like you! Unretouched photo of morning face.

Note that I love you all and want you safe and healthy. If you think I’m talking about you, know that I understand where you’re coming from, which is from concern for my well being. I appreciate all you readers, wherever you land on the precautions continuum.

* I realize that people choosing to take few precautions do endanger others. I’ve seen the results in my community. I still can’t MAKE people who disagree with public health policy make different choices.