No Idea

This has been a good week in some ways and a lousy one in others. On the plus side, I walked nearly 10,000 steps and did not collapse into a fibro flare afterward. In fact, this week has been harder mentally than physically.  Thursday was nearly a perfect day aside from getting lost on the way back from getting my sugar checked. Even that turned into a positive because I ended up walking over 9,700 steps and used my bus pass for the first time in a long while. But that was also when the bad luck for the week seemed to begin. When I got home, my key would not work in the front door, so I had to use my phone to get into the building. I assumed it was a one-time problem and just sent a message to Ruth to let her know. Friday I stayed home and did food prep using what I had left in the freezer. I managed to make enough dinners to get me through to Thursday, which felt like a small victory in itself. Other than being tired from all the walking the day before, it was not a bad day. ...

  The theme of May is nostalgia and memory. I chose it because Mother’s Day is this month, and while working through my poetry, my mother appeared once again, bringing with her something I had not fully realized before. A part of me that is also her. We shared a history that women of neither generation openly acknowledged or talked about. I wish that silence had passed with time, but it hasn’t. There is a statistic I have remembered for years, one that still makes me terribly sad. One in three women will experience sexual violence in their lifetime. It is called many things, but when it happens to a child, it is still violence. It is still a violation.  I have five granddaughters. Statistically, two or three of them may experience or has experienced some form of that harm in their lives. That thought weighs heavily on me sometimes. I am not entirely sure why this is where my mind went tonight. This week was supposed to be about “what stayed,” and at first all I could think abo...

Bit of a shift this week. I’m experiencing SAD symptoms even though it’s no longer winter, which is making today’s writing difficult. I did manage quite a bit after hearing from the radiologist that there is no recurrence of the cancer. Even so, it took me about a week to return to most of my usual routines. During that time, I spent a lot of it working with ChatGPT on pins for my Pinterest boards. I uploaded Awakening and Becoming Visible from Currents of Becoming a poetry book I’ve been planning and added a couple more lists to “Things I’m Learning.”   I also started a new board that I still can’t name in any coherent way. It began as Grandmacore (Grammacore), inspired by a set of pins that felt connected to the values I grew up with. An article called Grandma’s Rules really sparked things, and I spent time turning those ideas into pins and building the board around them. When I stepped back, though, I could see it had drifted off brand. I tend to prefer soft watercolor...

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...