I'm Back

I have been out of town for the past 10 days. During that time the following things happened:

1. Rode the Staten Island Ferry to Staten Island and back.
2. Walked across the Brooklyn Bridge.
3. Visited the Lower East Side Tenement Museum for the 2nd time.
4. Visited the American Museum of Natural History for the first time. Spectacular.
5. Saw the apartment that my Dad lived in in NYC for 10 years on East 11th Street from the outside.
6. Walked up the Gorge at Watkins Glen NY.
7. Tasted many good and some not so good wines in the Finger Lakes, NY.
8. Traveled through 7 states.
9. Saw someone eat a two pound--maybe more--hamburger at Denny's Beer Barrel Pub in Clearfield PA.
10. Got another class at Oakton for the fall, so now I am teaching 2 1/s classes next semester.

Indiania and Carrie

Two movies in a week! That's a new record for me.
Sunday night I saw Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull with my husband. The movie was very entertaining, loaded with special effects, light on character development. Actually it was more like a cartoon, Indiana was similar to Bugs Bunny, he was hit, and he got up again to fight and was hit again. The fights occurred about every 5 minutes, so there was a lot of hitting and getting up. Every character had amazing recuperative powers: being beaten to a pulp, blown up, diving over waterfalls, attacked by killer ants, surviving car chases in the rain forest and being betrayed by a colleague. It was very easy to sort out the good and bad people. There were no surprise or plot twists and turns. The outcome was very predictable, still it was a satisfying movie night.
Sex and the City was the second movie of the week. I loved it, not because it was a great drama or comedy, but because it tied up the stories of the characters I enjoyed watching on TV. Like Indiana Jones, the characters encountered setbacks--of the romantic type, and miraculously, all were resolved by the end of the movie, and everyone lived happily ever after. I do want to see this one again, so I can study the outfits more closely.
Both of these films were exactly what I expected, and that was what made them so much fun to see.

Small battles--or maybe skirmishes

There are two wars going on in my life right now. One is the war against critters in my garden. By critters I mean rabbits and weeds. Alma is not as effective as she once was in ridding the garden of rabbits, so I have resorted to a spray called Liquid Fence. This stuff really smells bad. But it seems to be effective, since I have not seen any rabbit action for a few weeks. On the weed front, this is actually a guerrilla war. I don't think that there is any way to totally exterminate weeds, the gardener just has to be vigilant. I have a new tool that I found at Smith and Hawken. It is a Japanese weed tool, and so far it has worked well. I had to sharpen it with a file, and then I just scrape it on the soil and it disconnects the weeds from their roots. Creeping Charlie is my biggest weed pest, and this is a weekly or even daily chore to keep it under control.
The second war is controlling my weight. This war seems to be a low key one right now. I am maintaining my weight, but a few pounds too high. My Weight Watcher leader gave us a goal sheet. Set a goal for 4 weeks from now--which is the 4th of July. Where should I be by the 4th? I know that I have to spend more time on cardio and go to the gym more than I have been doing. I also have to watch what goes into my mouth. I haven't been writing that down for the past few weeks and I am paying the price. So what should my goal be? Going to the gym and journaling? That is actually a goal that I can achieve. I hesitate to set a goal that involves a specific weight loss, that type of goal hasn't worked too well for me. So, working on my goal is the next thing to do today.
A quote from my meeting: "Always concentrate on how far you have come, rather than how far you have left to go. The difference in how easy it seems will amaze you" Hiede Johnson

Later I'm off to see Sex and the City. I'm really looking forward to it.

At last, Warm Weather

And hopefully it will last more than 3 days. So, in celebration of early summer, here are some pictures of purple flowers--actually a bluish purple, from my garden.