No Idea

Tests, quiet fear, and the small ways I kept going while I waited.  The type of adventure I have been on this week is a little different than the others. It started with a pain in my left shoulder. I assumed it was just a simple rotator cuff issue and didn’t think much about it. I worked around it, took something for the pain, and carried on. I do regular self breast exams after my run-in with breast cancer a few years ago, and I noticed a strange texture along the skin that connects my underarm to my breast—on the left side, the side that was operated on. I noticed it, but I didn’t really notice it. I told myself it was probably just skin changing with age… but only on the left side. I didn’t go to the doctor until I put on a bra and saw the swelling on the outside of my left breast. That was the moment it shifted from something I could ignore to something I couldn’t. The doctor didn’t seem too concerned, but he sent me for a mammogram. The next day, they called and said there ...

This week didn’t go the way I expected. Not in any dramatic way—just small things. A thread stalled, a tool didn’t behave the way it used to, and I found myself sitting with a question I couldn’t quite answer about friendship. Nothing big, just enough friction to notice.   And that’s where this week seemed to settle. Not in fixing anything, but in paying attention to how I respond when things don’t go the way I expect. It turned out to be less about solving problems and more about noticing my habits around them. I noticed how quickly I want things to work properly. The system should behave, the routine should hold, and the plan should still fit. When that didn’t happen, my first instinct was the same as always: figure it out, adjust it, fix it. But this week offered something quieter. Sometimes the answer was to refresh, restart, or simply let it go. Not everything needs a workaround, and not everything needs my full attention. At one point, I caught myself thinking I had lost mome...

  Not what I planned. But I didn’t turn back. I’ve been thinking about this whole “small adventures” idea, and I don’t think it looks the way people expect it to. It’s not big outings or full days planned out. Most of the time, it’s me standing in my kitchen trying to decide if I’m actually going to leave the house or not. This week, I did. The plan was to go to the Wednesday Farmers Market. Easy enough. Fifteen-minute walk, nothing complicated. I talked myself into it, got out the door, walked all the way down there… and it turns out there is no Wednesday market anymore. I just stood there for a minute thinking, well… now what.   That would have been a perfectly good excuse to turn around and go home, and I was tempted. But I’d already done the hard part—the getting out the door part—so I kept going. I crossed the bridge into East City, stopped at Tim’s for a few minutes to rest, and then carried on to the spa where GD#1 works to check out those shower steamers she me...

 Doing what I can. Letting that be enough. As this month begins, I am doing well. I go to the YMCA once a week. I walk every day—no less than 2,000 steps—which, if you know me at all, you’ll understand is a big step forward. I’ve gone from 250 steps at the end of December to 2,000 now. My weight is finally below the 200 lb mark, coming in as low as 196 lb, but mostly around 198 lb. By the end of April, I hope to bring that to a steady 190.   How I’m going to get there is fairly simple. My plan is threefold: Continue my weekly Aquafit class and add some chair yoga at home Take a daily walk—sometimes as an adventure, sometimes just to enjoy the sun Prep and eat only what I prepare (no takeout), including a weekly trip to the local farmers’ market I’ve created a system for food prep, a realistic budget, and a journaling structure that allows me to be both practical and artistic. That part feels steady now. So this month, I’m turning my attention outward—mainly toward my ...

This is the last post for March, and spring has started to show up in small ways. I saw a robin at the beginning of the month. This week, the geese came back. Now I’m waiting for the buds and the dandelions.   It doesn’t happen all at once. And I think that’s what this month has been like for me too. When I started this series, I didn’t expect it to be this hard—or this revealing. I thought I would see progress clearly, something I could point to and name. But what I’m noticing instead is quieter than that. The days don’t feel quite as heavy. There are moments where my energy lifts just enough for me to notice it. Not a big change. Just something beginning. This month didn’t go the way I planned. I thought I could handle more—two Aquafit classes, a couple of studio classes—but it didn’t take long to realize I wasn’t there yet. One week of that was enough to put me out of commission for the next. So I adjusted. By the end of February and into March, I was down to one class a week. N...

🌱 Steady Growth I didn’t think this week was steady. After effort, I expected steadiness to feel clearer. More structured. More predictable—something I could recognize right away. I had a plan for this month: one class per week, a 5-minute minimum movement rule, protein after classes, prep day consistency, and a weekly reflection entry. Small inputs, visible progress. And in many ways, those pieces were there. I showed up. Not perfectly, not in a straight line, but often enough to count. The 5-minute rule held, even on the harder days. I made it to class. I moved regularly. I followed through in small ways that don’t look like much on their own, but add up when repeated. What steady looked like, it turns out, was not dramatic. It looked like writing things down so my thoughts didn’t loop endlessly in my head, and paying attention to what I was thinking so I could understand it, and then returning to the plan after a rough patch instead of letting everything fall apart. It looked like ...