Blogged Down

Blogging is a bit like exercise, which is why not everyone does it. And why I don’t do it regularly, blogging.  I do exercise regularly, which takes up all my self-discipline, and motivation, and emotional energy and all the other things it can take-except fat, exercise leaves me with that for some reason.  

I have been “visualizing results” now for about 45 years. I don’t think visualization works, so I keep exercising, and I think if ever the results I have visualized show up, at my age I will be a walking miracle.  And maybe I won’t have to exercise. 

I have been with my kids and they have motivation to spare, so my daughter spared hers on me and we have been running every day.  And now my son has decided that his spare motivation will be for blogging, and we are doing it together.  That is, he is at his computer, and doing some research for his blog, and I am at my computer playing Spider.

The new year is around the corner and so people exercise and blog more. I will go out running tomorrow and there will be loads more people than those that ran before Christmas.  And I am glad they are out with me.  I help them not give up because I am still out there, even though I am not a runner.  I run so slowly I have to look to the side sometimes to make sure I am still going forward.  Thankfully here I run on a sidewalk so I can just see the cracks in the step going by. Also thankfully it is warm and sunny. When I get back to Colorado and it is cold and the oxygen is nowhere to be found and my daughter is far away I will need motivation, again.  

Also in the new year people will begin blogging.  And I like that too because it will give me something to read instead of exercising. 

But I digress, which surprises no one who has known me for more than two minutes. Blogging not only is like exercise in that it takes self-discipline and motivation, it also gets a bit easier with practice.  The first workouts of a new exercise routine always leave me feeling gross. My muscles hurt and the scales often go up instead of down.  With blogging my first efforts often require lots of time without stellar results.  That’s why having motivational helpers is so great.  My daughter gets water to soak my tired feet.  My son stares at me across his computer and his crazy smile or blank look inspire me to keep trying. 

I was with my daughter for ten days so I hope that gets the resolution to exercise back on track, and my son is with me now for ten days, so that should get the blogging back on track.

Blogging is also like exercise in that it keeps changing.  Remember leotards? and ok, leg warmers made a brief come back. There was aerobics and cross training, and now we have yoga and Pilates.  And when I started blogging we had one website, and now another and the software has changed. And I will have to change my picture, and tell all my friends to re-subscribe because I REALLY am going to blog regularly. 

So three cheers for our New Year’s resolutions. Here is my first blog and welcome to it. Now it is time to work on my flabs. (my personal name for my abdominal muscles) 

The Biggest Thanksgiving of All

Thanksgiving dinners have always been a big deal for me. I grew up around my great grandmother’s table with all my dad’s relatives.  Since our house was a castle with the draw bridge up, it was the biggest gathering outside of school that I experienced, and I LOVED it! 

This year I am greeting the holiday with some of my typical anxiety. Living in a foreign country there isn’t the same build up, and there aren’t relatives, which means the organization falls on me and that is a hard fall. 

I wanted a room filled with people, all my tables and chairs getting used, but not this year. I currently find myself without a large group of friends. Thankfully I do have people coming who are wonderful.

Last week I was at a leadership-training seminar surrounded by people.  I met new folks and old friends and we laughed and we cried and I immensely enjoyed being around ALL of them. 

We celebrated Communion together; the Lord’s Table.  The kids used to call it the Lord’s lunch.  Each table was green felt with a bowl of broken matzo crackers and a glass of grape juice, not very visually appealing.  I thought of a lovely Thanksgiving table, covered with expensive, delicious food, flowers and candles. What sharp contrast visually but spiritually, the Lord’s Table was much more. The price of the two items in that supper was incomprehensible, the meaning so much deeper.

We sang a song. One of the lines was about me, “Once your enemy, now seated at your table.”

The past two years we have had a guest at our thanksgiving table that probably won’t be there this year. We invited them and still hope.  Christ did everything so I, the enemy, could sit at his table.  I didn’t want to come, but he invited me anyway and paid for everything I needed so I could come.

This year as I prepare my thanksgiving dinner I will miss some friends to the point of weeping.  And yet I want to remember the price it cost God, the price of His only Son’s death, for me to sit at His table and that is truly something for which to be grateful.

A Late Winter Joke

On the way to class this morning I was thinking about a trip I took in Banska Bystrica by bus about this time of year.  The sky was dull and so full of grayness that it drooped almost touching the piles of grit-covered snow and ice laying piled on corners and medians.

The kids and I needed to get out. With two small ones and no car, it would be a project requiring determination and planning. Long underwear and socks, t-shirts, long sleeved-shirts and sweatshirts, hoodies up, ski pants, coats, scarves and mittens.  All of this, after I dressed myself, because the little ones got too hot if they had to wait for me.

“I have to go potty.” 

Reverse the process and after another pit stop start again.  “I’m thirsty.” We will have hot chocolate at Prissy’s.

Four little legs covered in snow pants don’t move very quickly, but quicker than a stroller over the ice covered walks so we scooted, climbed and slid to the bus stop and waited.  Thankfully we got two seats. I plopped the two kids on first, and looked around. 

Sure enough, all eyes were on us.  I wanted to think it was because we were such a lovely family, but it was hard to tell if we were even human under all the layers.  I asked several different friends what it was that made us stand out and people notice us.  Everyone replied similarly, “You glow.” Figure it out, I had turned it over in my mind many times and still wasn’t sure.  I know at this time we might have been the only ones smiling. After all, the sun wasn’t out to cheer us up and it was four in the afternoon, almost dark.  The bus was filling with people coming home from work.  I was tired and I had learned not to smile too much in public, but I am sure my eyes were smiling.  I was going to see a friend. I was getting out of the house with my kids and we were on an adventure. 

Which is when it happened. I looked out the window, over the heads of my children.  Ryan was shorter than I thought; it was easy to look straight over him. In fact, he was shorter than his toddler sister.  I looked closer. He looked like just a head sitting on the seat.  Albeit a cute happy head. He always had a way of wearing his hat that made one smile, a trait he inherited from his grandma.  And he loves winter, but his face couldn’t even reach the window. I could see that Ryan found a seat that had outworn its life and yet, because it isn’t “broken’ wasn’t being replaced.  If it hadn’t been for all the thick layers, we might have lost him down the hole, but there was his cheery head smiling at me and I couldn’t help but give a big huge smile and think, “All part of the adventure.”

100 or 12 Things I want to do before I die

No more dog food, please.

          Our dog turned 13 last week and I think has decided that life is too short to eat dog food.  I have to agree. I am thinking  the same thing about drinking green tea. But this isn’t about the 100 things that I don’t want to do before I die, it is about the several that come to mind that I do hope to do.

            Of course there are things I want to eat, but those are too numerous to list so I won’t include them. Ditto places to visit. And a million people give or take a couple that I want to see and spend time with. But here is the first shot at my list and hope it inspires you to think of your own.

100 things I want to do before I die

*Drive a red Vespa somewhere in Europe.

*See Scott perform his superman stunts on the Pilates ball.

*Take Julie Jones and Beth Anderson to Regents park in the summer.

Fulfilled the wish to go sailing.

*Take my niece on a history tour of England.

*Spend a weekend with Ben, Becky and my brother and a recorder to record all the funny one-liners.

*See the dance performance of my friend in Boulder.

*See my friend Mr. P in a play.

*See New York City with Dwight and Sue.

*Attend a real ball in a real evening dress with Doug in a real tuxedo, in fact, you can even forget the ball, that part might ruin it, I’ll just take the pretty dress and my man in a tux at a lovely private place.

*Try all the pastries at Café Central, and at Cupcake Wien, that interest me.

*Make Fakhri guacamole.

*Make Laz hot chocolate.

Mattress surfing, low brow, high fun

*Give Ryan a tour of Siberia (no really, not in the gulag sort of way, but because he wants to see it.

*Pass German 1. (third time's a charm I hear)

*Finish my book

*Go mattress surfing with my Stoner family

*Cook Hungarian Goulash over an open fire in my brother’s backyard with my Lewis family

Ok that is what came to mind. And writing this was an enlightening and fun activity. Let me know what you would add and why. Maybe my next list will be a few I don’t want to do, besides not eating dog food.

I can't decide but I think not

Cryptograms

Cryptograms

I think this means we have positive birds and negative birds in Austria from 1950

Don’t you love all the cryptic symbols that are used instead of words?  I need a Google Translate for symbols.

The most memorable experience translating pictures was in a bathroom in some village in Poland. We stumbled into a very small café, only to find out it had been a favorite of Steven Spielberg during the filming of Schindler’s List.  What this meant practically was a small place to eat bursting with customers.  Small wonder it was a favorite, I can’t remember having much to chose from. But the bigger dilemma came when we tried to use the bathroom.

Each restroom was one passenger and unoccupied, the only empty seats in the house.  On one door was a square and on the other a circle. Now I think I would have chosen a triangle for myself, but that wasn’t an option. I searched my intelligence and experience for any help. Anthropology in Mexico! The ancient columns, carved before blue prints and written explanations, were said to represent female soldiers because they were round, not square.  Polish Restroom Anthropology as it turns out, says that the female is a square.  I think.  What I do remember is that I guessed wrong.  No problem going in, but an embarrassing one coming  out.

So, with a history of making guesses as to the cryptograms across Europe, we studied the train map.  This diagram lets you know what type of train you will be taking and which cars are first class.  Or more importantly for me, which cars are for hoi polloi, us plebeians, the unwashed masses, or in the case of Austria, pretty well washed and in Eastern Europe well-oiled by Friday afternoon. 

The train diagram had extra information. The first of the second class cars was without any extra explanation.  The second one had the profile of a person, with three concentric circles coming from their face, and a finger in front of her mouth.  Either it meant, “Be prepared to sing, ‘This little light of mine’,” “Check your breath,” or “No talking. “ All the snorers and shhshh-ers would be in there, not fun!

The next car had a seat with a cross on top, which could mean, Christians, or  disaster victims or handicapped.  Probably either way, no dancing in that car.

The last car had a sign that said kino.  Sounds good on a long train ride, however, although it was a word, a description was in the key.  A kino- cinema in both Slovak and German, for children, three hours listening to Disney in German. 

Needless to say, the normal car was pretty well occupied.  But thankfully, the bathrooms didn’t have a square and a circle on them or any other cryptogram, but instead German, and English, something I can feed into Google Translate if necessary.