Posts Tagged ‘blogging’
Chopper Mittens
This morning, I tried describing a dream I just had so that Cyndie could share in the experience. Of course, the deep drama I had witnessed and felt as if it was actually happening was not adequately conveyed by my words. My struggle to express the dream’s intricacies revealed a glimpse of the monumental difference of what telepathic communication must be like. I quickly realized that each moment in the dream encompassed more impressions and thoughts than my words were able to recreate.
We think and feel a lot faster than words can express. It’s why a picture is worth a thousand words. Visualization is better than verbalization.
Have I described how phenomenally great chopper mittens are for the outdoor winter activities I undertake? If you are unfamiliar with chopper mittens, I could describe them to you, but let me offer this so you can visualize them:
I have tried a variety of other versions, but none compare to the perfection of the original, right down to the knitted inner mitten. I don’t know what makes that liner different (better) than any other new fandangled water-wicking Thinsulate® version I’ve experimented with, but, for me, it falls under the idiom, ‘some things can’t be improved.’
Somewhat counterintuitively, the floppy looseness of the mitten fit is a feature, not a flaw. Being able to pull my bare hand out quickly and easily to accomplish a task that requires ultimate dexterity, and then slip it back in with equal ease, is like having a superpower.
If the mittens get wet from heavy use in the snow, pulling the inner mitten out when I get back indoors allows them to dry quickly and be ready to go, as good as new in no time. If they get too wet, or I need to go back outside before they are dry enough, a second pair is more than worth the money spent.
If you aren’t able to telepathically perceive the unmitigated amount of satisfaction I get from the original chopper mittens, you are only getting a fraction of the perception of how great they are through my written words. Trust me.
Thinking about communicating in words, it occurs to me that, even though using words to describe something falls short of what our minds can do in an instant, I am fond of written communication because it gives me time to construct my thoughts more adeptly than I can do on the fly if I were speaking to you directly.
I suppose that is why, after some 16+ years, I have never felt an urge to transition from blogging to vlogging or podcasting.
Will we someday come up with a word for telepathically sharing our take on things and experiences? Telelogging? Telecasting is too conventional and already in use. It’s not wrong, though.
Since I’m already beaming love to you all telepathically, maybe you can tune in other intricacies my words are incapable of including. You won’t believe this dream I experienced early this morning…
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Love Letters
While walking back up the driveway from the road, rolling the empty recycling bin through the cold air under a bright sunny sky, I paused to confirm that Asher would come with me after finishing his task in the tall brush of our north loop. We had just accomplished an almost perfect interaction at the road with the mail van showing up just as we got there.
I got Asher to sit and stay while I stepped up to grab our mail as the postman rolled by, but then I spotted that the dog had released himself from his ‘stay’ and was planning to prance around the back of the van. A simple command interrupted his misbehavior, and he enthusiastically corrected course to join me for the trek back to the house.
It’s not obvious to me why that pause I made at the peak of the rise in the driveway triggered a thought that my daily blog posts are love letters I write for you. Maybe it was the mail in my hand, which consisted of three holiday cards, one of which was an ad from a steakhouse, disguised as a friendly card in an envelope.
Traditionally, at this time of year, people reach out to their friends, families, neighbors & associates with heartfelt greetings of warmth and appreciation via cards through the mail. I used to design a custom Christmas card every year after we got married and started trying to fulfill the “adulting” role.
After email started to replace snail mail for communication, and workplaces initiated campaigns to become “paperless” in their daily operations, I developed a complex about using so much paper to print and mail cards. Being naturally frugal, I was also unhappy with the cost of the number of stamps needed to reach our ever-expanding variety of people in our thoughts.
Now I use Relative Something to send Thanksgiving and Christmas greetings to those of you who might see them here. No trees are harmed for paper, and no additional postage expense.
But every day, I write something that reflects my experience in the world. It is what I would tell you if we were sitting together without the usual distractions of work, or surrounding people, or things cooking on the stove. It is a way to make a connection despite being great distances apart.
This may have been the intent of other social media platforms, but I long ago chose to avoid those. I am satisfied to have this space, devoid of advertising, bots, and algorithms, as my media method for sending love to those of you with an interest in checking in on what I will come up with next.
Thank you for allowing me to visit you through this blog. I get to see all the countries where readers are located, and I am well aware of the reach this WordPress blogging offers. It may be mostly a one-sided pen pal connection, but it is a thrill to be able to beam love to you all in the simple form of my narrative of *this* John W. Hays’ take on things and experiences.
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Early Return
Graced with a deceivingly pleasant October day of moderate warmth and plenty of sunshine, Cyndie, Asher, and I enjoyed a leisurely Sunday free of any responsibilities. I wasted some of it watching NFL football on TV, but when the game wasn’t going my way, I distracted myself with a jigsaw puzzle.
Cyndie rewarded me with photos from her first walk of the morning with Asher and their last walk of the evening.
When I took him exploring in the middle of the afternoon, I found the sunlight and the lake surface were far less captivating. During the weekend, we reached a point of successfully allowing Asher to romp off-leash, with the e-collar for prompts if needed. At the lake, since he hasn’t spent a lot of time here, we are cautious about how much freedom we are comfortable granting him.
Since the presence of other unleashed dogs is always a possibility that we don’t control, it’s a different gamble to have him running loose.
After dinner, while we were binge-watching the first few episodes of Season 3 of “The Diplomat,” Cyndie received a message that one of the owners of This Old Horse would be coming out this morning with a veterinarian to look at Mix. The cause of Mix’s occasional slight gimpiness in her hind end has yet to be confirmed. We both want to be there for the visit, so we initiated preparations for an early departure from the lake place before going to bed last night. The sooner we can get on the road this morning, the better chance we have of getting home in time for that.
It was a fun, uneventful getaway for a few days that gave us a chance to employ the two newest UWRF students who responded to our help-wanted post for feeding horses when we are away. Now it’s time to return to attend to all the activities on our weekly calendar of events.
Somehow, I have let the date of the anniversary of our move to Wintervale pass without fanfare. October 18, 2012, was supposed to be the day, but signing the paperwork was delayed by a few. We can now say we are entering our 14th year here.
It’s been a pretty good run. A lot has happened in the last 13 years, and it’s all been captured here in my ongoing memoir of a daily blog: the fun, the sad, and the embarrassing.
Here’s hoping the coming year will be filled with more fun than sadness. And lots of love, too!
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Not Exactly
Imagine my surprise when I was mowing along the fence line and came upon an unfamiliar sign attached to the top wire of the hay field fence.
To the best of my knowledge, we don’t have a donkey. This would be one of several types of wonderful surprises that tend to appear whenever we leave our property in the capable care of our friends, Pam and John. Such whimsical good fun.
Somehow, the eleventh day of July has arrived while I wasn’t looking. Minutes, hours, days, and weeks pass in a blink when you are having fun. I don’t have a clue how I coped with working a day job on top of everything else in life, since I am having trouble keeping up with daily life in retirement.
I’m on a swingset that goes all the way around, and all I get are glimpses of my surroundings as I sail past. My body feels older. Like it’s no longer mine. My mind and my body are on two different treadmills that roll along, each at a different speed.
Everything that I have learned over my lifetime tells me that the separation between opposites is so much more delicately thin than too many people are willing to accept. Often, things might not be exactly as they seem.
We don’t actually have a donkey, but if we did, I’m pretty sure it would be highly trained.
If I had a logical train of thought, you might find it easy to follow along to wherever it is I am headed. One thing that might help would be my having any idea where it is I intend to go. Quite honestly, I don’t. It’s not exactly a fine science.
It could benefit you to think of this post like the lyrics of a song. As you follow along, some portions might speak to you, and others just seem to fit the verse. Of course, this idea may only serve to detract from any sense of logic that may have existed before I started rambling.
If I were to somehow wrap all this nonsense up with a bow of intelligent thought, it might be this: I had no idea what I was going to write about when I started this post, and that does not exactly lead to a stellar composition.
Happy Eleventh of July!
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Twelve Years
Have you ever heard of a granuloma?
gran•u•lo•ma | granyə’lōmə |
a mass of granulation tissue, typically produced in response to infection, inflammation, or the presence of a foreign substance.
Twelve years ago, this happened to me:
“…I started to get careless and impatient. I stepped right into the needle-sharp point of a wood thorn on one tree branch. It punctured the side of my knee and left me in a lot of pain. I checked more than once to make sure the tip hadn’t broken off in there. It didn’t look like it, but it sure hurt like something was still in there.” – Relative Something: Day Off, July 23, 2013
The site of the puncture became reddened and eventually purple. On occasion, I was able to drain some pus or clear fluid. My doctor looked at it once and decided it didn’t look concerning. After a while, it calmed down and just remained a purple dot on the side of my knee that I lived with, unconcerned. I would have guessed maybe five years had passed. Possibly seven.
A couple of weeks ago, the site began to swell up anew. It became hard to ignore, and I picked at it a bit. The top dead layer of skin over the site would flake off. When I picked at the skin recently, it opened up and released clear fluid again. I told myself I would give it closer attention when I next had an opportunity.
That opportunity was Sunday evening. After I’d done some squeezing around the area, I noticed a dark spot. I grabbed a pair of tweezers and prepared to see what I could accomplish.
This was the result:
For twelve years, that thorn was poked straight into the side of my knee so deep it was not visible. Apparently, my cells had walled it off to isolate it, and the situation became a standoff. I am lucky that it didn’t interfere with the knee joint and became easy to ignore. The only reason I figured out it had been in there for twelve years was because I knew I had written about it in this blog when it happened, and found the post by searching for the words “thorn” and “puncture.”
As I attempted to grip it with the tweezers, I worried it would be mushy and break apart, but it was completely solid and hard enough to be easily grasped.
At almost 2 cm long, I could barely believe my eyes as it exited my knee in one long, smooth pull. I’ve been feeling giddy over having it out ever since. It’s kind of funny to me that I had grown indifferent to the purple spot for more than a decade, but now feel so overjoyed to have the cause of that dot extracted. I’m curious as to why my body decided it was finally time to push it to the surface. Maybe it was just so deep it took this long to do.
None of that matters now. It’s out! And I am incredibly happy that it is.
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Relatively Nothing
Asked: Now what are you up to?
Answered: I’m interviewing myself.
Asked: Why would you want to go and do that?
Answered: Well, umm… I don’t really know why. Maybe because, well, why not?
Asked: Don’t you already know the answers to questions that you are asking yourself?
Answered: That’s a really good question, and I’m glad you asked it. You see, for a long time, there have been rumblings that I’m just making this whole thing up. That, on days when nothing particularly noteworthy has occurred, I just wing it and pull some silly idea out of my butt and start typing about it. Sometimes, my fingers end up doing more work than my brain. Wait. What was the question again?
Asked: I think you answered it without even realizing it. Do you have an example of something that you just start typing about?
Answered: For sure. Just a second ago, probably while you were writing that question, I glanced out the door toward the tree branches beyond our deck, and something caught my eye. Some movement. It seemed big and up in the branches, so I imagined there might be an owl or an eagle in our trees. It’s always a thrill to see an owl, and my heartbeat quickened as I stared, looking for additional movement. I was soon rewarded with additional flashes of movement, and I recognized immediately what I was seeing. It was a reflection in the glass of the door whenever Cyndie moved around in the kitchen.
Asked: I don’t even know how to respond to that. Let me ask you this: What are you thinking about right now?
Answered: I’m wondering if my goal of posting something every day sometimes insults the intelligence of my readers when I wander off in some pseudo-creative endeavor in avoidance of admitting I just lolled around all day, rubbing sandpaper over a wood sculpture, watching comedic storytellers on Netflix, walking Asher around on our property, cleaning up after the horses, and taking a nap in the middle of the afternoon.
One of my favorite things, in case you were going to ask me that, is when I hear an involuntary chuckle out of Cyndie when I ask her to proofread one of my posts. I rarely intend to be entirely serious in my writing, and eliciting even a simple smile in a reader’s response would mean I am accomplishing something I set out to do. I don’t set out to do all that much these days, so that ranks high on bringing me quality of life.
Asked: Are you trying to say you are getting old without saying it?
Answered: Hah! No. Okay, yeah. (That reminds me of a dear friend who was skilled at the art of answering to many things with, “Yeah, no.” For some reason, I found that to be very endearing.) Of all the many ways my aging is increasingly making itself known to me, there is one that is both appreciated and horrifying. I suppose it helps that I am now retired because I have no reason to make myself presentable every morning. I rarely shave or comb my tangled curls. By avoiding mirror time, which is a wonderfully rewarding thing for me, I reap the horrifying results of unsightly hair growth from my nose, ears, and eyebrows in amounts that make me recoil to see. That just leads to more avoidance of the mirror. It’s a vicious cycle.
Asked: Please stop.
Answered: Gladly. However, that reminded me of a story. Maybe I can tell it tomorrow if nothing interesting happens between now and then.
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Making Sense
One of the reasons I like writing poetry is because it allows for free-association thinking and lyrical syllable play without the constraints of forming logical grammatical sentences. When moved by global events, I aspire to communicate my visionary perspectives in as positive a light as possible. To achieve such a lofty goal, it helps if I feel I can actually make sense of what is going on.
It seems like it is getting harder and harder for me to comprehend global current events. As a result, you get a lot more posts about our weather, the horses, our dog, Asher, or how the grass mowing is coming along. The craziness in the greater reaches beyond my little world that does make sense to me lately is sports-related, as might be obvious from recent posts.
Results for my spectating yesterday didn’t go my way, except for one:
- Wimbledon: I was happy seeing Carlos Alcaraz claim his second straight title.
- Tour de France, Stage 15: I’m a big fan of Tadej Pogacar but I wanted Jonas Vingegaard to gain some time on him.
- Euro 2024: I was pulling for England.
- WNBA Lynx vs Fever: I wanted the Lynx to win.
- Copa America: I wanted the match to start on time.
I’ll be down to just one week left of Le Tour with the tournaments now completed.
At least there will still be weather to write about.
Not that I’m able to make any sense of the weather these days. At least it can be pretty to look at.
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Not Necessarily
Things are not always what they seem, especially when we allow our unconscious biases to run willy-nilly throughout our activities unchecked. Cyndie and I now think there may have been a flaw in our testing procedure last Wednesday that allowed for cross-contamination of our results.
She continues to try testing with kits that are beyond their shelf-life between occasions when using new tests. Last night her results were clearly negative. We both agreed that her symptoms that showed up almost instantaneously upon seeing that positive result on Wednesday could well have been psychosomatic.
In a parallel to that, last night’s negative result had her feeling surprisingly healthy. Her mind can be very persuasive.
So, if your gut has been telling you something a little different than what I describe happening in our lives, your intuition is worth acknowledging. If you have been reading my writing for some time, you may sometimes know me better than I know myself.
This morning, we finally have an appointment to retrieve Asher from the training kennel. After tending to horses, we are going to take fresh tests in separate rooms to find out if I should stay home and how careful Cyndie should be about contact with people at the kennel.
If she gets an all-clear, we will assume she never was infected. If I get a clean result, I will be baffled about how the virus works and how/when I have been shedding the virus at a measurable level. Granted, research we have reviewed indicated most people are no longer contagious after 10 days.
It is expected that my vaccinations would have significantly shortened my infection time, along with the length of time I was contagious.
I have no concept of how my sudden flare-up of a bulging disc and subsequent few days of head cold symptoms interrelate to the COVID infection that showed up in the middle of May.
I am ready to put all of it behind me. It is a new month and I am beginning to feel like my old self again, emphasis on old.
My, how quickly a few extra doses of sugar, suddenly becoming sedentary, and plenty of Cyndie’s lovingkindness in the form of “eating therapy” thickens my middle. I’ve got just two weeks to get into biking shape for the Tour of Minnesota week.
That’s not necessarily a hard thing for me to achieve, but past experience does not guarantee future results. Be assured, you will be able to read the play-by-play with each passing day.
Happy June Everyone!
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Our Realities
There are as many similarities between us all as there are differences. I don’t ever want to forget those differences when I write about my experiences. In the time since I retired from a day-job, my world has shrunk significantly to the 20 acres around our home for weeks at a time. A month can pass without a reason to drive my car.
That isolates me from lives that are dealing with issues that involve complications that rarely enter my mind. I don’t worry about where I am going to sleep at night. I don’t need to communicate with attorneys to solve spurious accusations. I don’t hear about problem bosses or annoying coworkers. I’ve yet to need to make doctor appointments for consultations about scary test results. I no longer struggle to get out of bed in the morning due to depression.
When I wax poetic about our experiences in the great outdoors with pets and nature at Wintervale, imploring others to seek health and cultivate love in their lives, I mean no disrespect to anyone who finds themselves struggling to cope with heavy demands consuming their precious energy.
We all have our own realities. I hope that on some level, the stories I post provide a brief escape to another place and a peek into one person’s life who strives for better health with a goal of inverting pyramids of dysfunction.
We watched the Grammy Awards Show last night and I got a heavy dose of reality about songs and performers whom I know nothing about. Those are worlds that are a mystery to me.
At the bottom of all things in our lives lies our commonality. In fact, one thing we all have in common is that we are all different from each other.
I recently found a quote about love from an interesting man named Wim Hof, a Dutch extreme athlete and motivational speaker:
Love is compiled by happiness, strength, and health.
If you radiate good energy because you are healthy, happy, and strong, that’s love.
Today, I am sending love to all who are experiencing stress that I know nothing about.
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Feeling Thankful
I’m particularly thankful on this final day of the US Thanksgiving holiday weekend. The good fortunes bestowed upon us by the universe, chance, choices, and a smattering of genuine efforts are beyond measure. As such, engaging in the exercise of naming a few that come to mind provides valuable perspective for a immeasurable phenomenon.
When I realized the automatic waterer for the horses in the paddocks was getting warmer than a hot tub, I looked up the temp control details online. Upon opening the access panel of the waterer, I found there was no thermocouple to adjust. After I got over the shock and traced wires several times, suddenly my fingers landed on the leads to the unit that was just dangling in air. I don’t know what caused it to slide out but I’m extremely thankful the fix was so easy and the water is now a reasonable temperature that won’t sting the horses’ lips.
- The surgical incisions on Cyndie’s ankle have a ways to go before the skin has healed fully. Still, already she is experiencing joyful relief over the absence of the screws and plates that once held the shattered bones together. They eventually became a problem of their own. I’m really thankful for the good work of the surgeon and staff of the hospital and Tria Orthopedic for their excellent treatment of Cyndie’s injury.
- This is an ongoing appreciation but lately, I’m feeling particularly aware of the mental benefits of successfully treating the depression that dominated much of my life from childhood through roughly mid-life. I am so very thankful for the doctors and therapists who guided and educated me, some of whom I can’t even recall names or faces. I guess I wasn’t focused on the guides but on the destination.
- Lastly, for this exercise, I want to tell you how thankful I am that you are reading the odd chronicles I decide to post here every day on Relative Something. To the worldwide audience of WordPress bloggers who happen upon random posts and end up returning for more and the friends and family who understand I don’t use other social media and keep in touch by reading me here. Even if I don’t know you are following along, if you are reading these words right now it means something to me and I am thankful internet stranger(s).
Maybe by exercising my thankfulness muscles in this way, I will continue to gain prowess in my journey toward optimum health. Mental “planks” as compared to the back-saving core exercise I continue to employ. Thankfully, those seem to be helping me to avoid prolonged repeated episodes of debilitating pain.
Happy last day of this (U.S.) holiday weekend!
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Relative Something 