Eat. Pray. Love.

No, not the movie, which I probably will see, depending on the rating and the reviews. I remember that I enjoyed reading the book last year.

Not-so-much eating has been going on here. I’ve lost 18 pounds since the first of the year, without dieting. I eat what I want, when I want it, just a little less of it, and more fruits and veggies, plus there is all that lovely splooshing at the pool.

I’m still not swimming, just walking and/or trotting back and forth in the water, generally about half a mile a day. I love the recumbent bike, which gives me a bit more of a workout, and I am pleased to report that I now walk the treadmill (when I do walk the treadmill) without holding onto the side rails, at a steeper slope and a faster speed, if for less time than I was at first, most of the days that I get that far (i.e., if time permits).

I still do not like peeling out of sweaty clothes to get into my swimsuit, though it feels so good when I step down into that water. I am marginally amused by how difficult it is to pull a swimsuit up over a sweaty body. It hangs up at various rest stops along the way, shall we say, and while I love the cherry-red color and the drape of the bodice, I miss the shoulder straps on my old suit that I loved to death. This one ties at the back of the neck. I feel all Dorothy Lamour in it, but it’s not the best-fitting suit I’ve ever owned.

The big news is still my upcoming dinner with the new guy [and his kids the Doll Folk]. She is bringing dolls. I will take some of mine. I will also be giving the new guy line-dancing lessons, and if the kids poke too much fun, we will make them get up and dance as well. Thankfully, he loves C/W music, so he will have stuff we can dance to.

He gets major props from me for his comportment at last weekend’s dance. He does not know how to line-dance, but he got up and tried, and he smiled throughout. So yeah, still impressed with what I see and know of him, and still no idea what to call him.

I attended the singles’ temple night on Wednesday. He was there. We sat together in the chapel beforehand and whispered quietly in the celestial room afterward. I got a little weepy, praying for my kids, some of whom have made or are making choices that distress me. So we’ve gotten over the hurdle of him seeing me cry now; and he did not walk away as fast as his legs would take him, just sat there quietly in the chair next to me until I was done, then leaned over and whispered how hard it had been for him to go back to the temple after his wife passed away.

Good man.

While I was not-blogging, I managed to acquire my first speeding ticket in over 30 years thanks to completely missing *two* clearly posted signs on the eastbound service road for I-30 in Grand Prairie. Here’s the first one, right at the entrance to the freeway.



And here’s the second one, about halfway between there and where I was pulled over.



But the cop was easy on the eyes and just about ma’amed me to death. It will be ramen noodles and/or PBJ’s chez Ravelled until my budget has recovered.

Though there has been a wee bit of shopping. I found this on my way to the temple on Wednesday night. A small box from India, painted in the Shekhawati style and featured at World Market, which has a huge Eat Pray Love theme going on right now. I wandered in, hoping to find a doll-sized decorative chair that might do for one of the resin kids. Instead, I found this footstool for the big girls / hassock for the little ones. [I also rediscovered my tiny terracotta pot that begs to be filled with a miniature ficus or geraniums or something.]



I have been puttering a little. All four light bulbs in the ceiling fan in the living room had burned out. I got up on my stepstool to see if maybe they were just loose; they were not. (I had been lucky in la boudoir; I only needed to stand up on the bed and tighten them gently.)

Two of the bulbs had unscrewed themselves from their brass bases, leaving said bases in the sockets. So I turned off the ceiling fan, and believe me that was no small sacrifice given how warm it is outside and in. I was able to get one of them out easily. The other one was as resistant as a two-year-old at bedtime.

I used my round-nosed pliers (the ones that have been AWOL since I moved, which necessitated the purchase of a second pair; I also found the two AWOL rechargeable batteries for my camera, all of them in my toolbox, go figure!) to crimp one edge so I could get a purchase on it, and out it came. My living room is now all lit up like Vegas.



Last night, after an unsuccessful attempt to write a difficult letter, I hauled my spinning wheel out of the studio and set it up here in the living room. I am spinning from a cheese of pencil roving which my friend Rebecca gave me some time back. Here’s what we have so far:



There are bits of straw and other vegetable matter in it. And I’m spinning it as it comes off the cheese, without drafting it any further. So I have no idea how fat the plied yarn will be, but I think I may try my hand at Navajo-plying.

I just wish it were possible to run my tightly-spun traps and neck through the orifice of my wheel and reverse some of the tension. I am wound tighter than a tick. Not only was I weepy at the temple on Wednesday night, when I drove home from work last night I was channel-surfing because I was so very, very tired.

On the new guy’s favorite country station, they played Alan Jackson’s “Small Town Southern Man,” which reminds me so much of Dad, who was a Colorado farm boy but of the same high caliber as the dad in the song. That started the waterworks again. He’s been gone 20 years, and last Friday would have been his 105th birthday. And I thought, “I haven’t cried this hard because of a song since the first time I heard ‘That Summer’.” [Which I heard when I had gone away to Galveston for my birthday weekend ten years ago, for some crying time because of the then-current family drama, during which I had spent a couple of weeks being Seriously Supportive.] Guess what they played next?

Half an hour later, I was perfectly fine again. It was just one of those summer cloudbursts that washes everything clean (and makes the flowers happy).

There have been moments in the past month when I really wished that I were married, so I could go to my spousal unit and say, “Hold me. Please, just hold me. I don’t need you to fix anything, I’m not sure its fixable, I just want to be held.”

Today, thankfully, is not one of those days. But then I have been careful to avoid the radio. And I got a nice, long nap after the well-woman stuff.

@ Francis: Had lunch at Fuzzy’s with my best friend today. Seriously oversalted.