Results

Our exercising is paying off. After sleeping in the nice, flat bed at the hotel last weekend, I decided I could put up with the sag in our bed no longer. Not only did I roll towards the center, I slept in fear that it would collapse. We’d already tried to reinforce the center support with t-bars on its wooden legs. They just bent the other direction. While watching a video of building a deck on a house in the Canadian woods (as long as I’m riding the stationary bike, I allow myself to watch silly things), I learned about joist supports. Aha, exactly what we need to fix the bed.

A trip to Lowes for the hardware and 2x4s, and we were ready to go. Of course, the job didn’t go exactly as I hoped, which it never does, however, we fixed the bed. More importantly, I was able to get down and up from the floor fairly easily. All those sit-ups and leg lifts were worth the whining.

The next day, we had a second chance to use our re-found muscles when we wrestled with a quick setup tent/screen room. I tried to buy one last year, but none were available until July, after our summer camping trip. Thinking I was getting an early start this year, all I could find was a 12’ used one at Amazon. It arrived in a damaged box, but no mind. When we tried to put it up, it was too difficult for us. Then we tried to put it back in its carry bag. Somehow we had managed to get a side inside out, so we could not get it folded up. The next day, we tried to set it up again, crawling inside, crawling out, tugging, lifting, cursing, and being crabby with each other. Finally, I decided the only option was to remove the internal fiberglass poles from one area and pray we could get them back in place after I flipped the fabric around. It worked. We struggled and set the tent up again. We folded the tent carefully and got it into the bag, which had obvious sun damage, not “like new”, as the description indicated. That, plus our inability to set it up easily, and the fact that, even folded and in its bag, the tent was too long to fit into our truck meant we were going to return it.


Next project was to pack it into its shipping box which I discovered was a foot too short! No wonder the box was damaged. After much work, I was able to add another box on the end, taped precariously. Off to FedEx. The nice young man there said he would make sure the box held this time.

Grant and I kissed and made up, declared ourselves exhausted and gave ourselves permission to skip our exercises for the day. We laid down on our lovely strong bed and took a nap.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Month of Garden Club

Image
April seemed to be all garden club, all the time. I started with the zone leader’ walkthrough for Spring Fever on Friday, the 5th, then 2 whole days of that event. Whew. April 11th was the Windermere Garden Club’s monthly meeting, a field trip to Southern Hill Farm, a you-pick and wholesale blueberry farm. We were inspire to add blueberries to our garden. Friday, April 12th, I was the speaker at Bloom and Grow’s monthly luncheon, touting the value of becoming a citizen scientist, specifically, downloading the iNaturalist app and participating in the City Nature Challenge 2024: Orange County. I was pleased with my talk, the first one I’ve given in person in 5 years. I still attend EarlyBird Toastmasters, but we’ve been on Zoom since early 2020. Before that, we’d moved to Key Biscayne for a year, and I didn’t drive up to Fort Lauderdale often. On the 21st, we toured Jeanne’s almost-all native, completely grassless yard, a B&G social with the mandatory wine and lovely appetizers and d...
Read more

Relief

Image
I have been wild and exhausted with anxiety. Grant’s passport was stuck in limbo at the US passport agency, and there didn’t seem to be any way to break it loose. We had applied for renewal of our passports back in October, using a new online process: create an account at MyTravel.gov, fill in the form, upload a headshot from our iPhone, and pay $130 by credit card. Easy peasy. I finished mine October 15th, and got an email notification the next day my application had been received. Grant could not create an account at MyTravel.gov. I’m still not clear why, but after several days of his being very frustrated by numerous attempts to use his normal email address, he just couldn’t seem to make it work. I suggested a different email address. I ended up creating it for him using my address at Yahoo. Not really a big deal, except I don’t use that one much, and I can’t remember the password. Fortunately, I have it open on my cellphone, so I could check for any emails that came in.  On Oct...
Read more

Mindfulness

Image
Potato Vines   Using my preferred technique of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, I’ve gotten back to my ab workout now that I pulled my lower back while weeding. One would think that by the time one were 70, one would know that to keep one’s back from hurting, one’s abs need continual strength training, but one would be wrong. Two days of drugs and rest got me through the worst part, but not the frustration and embarrassment. Now, two weeks later, I’m in the habit of daily early morning ab exercise. What has made it easy is RPM, or Rise, Pee, Meditate. A benefit of our continued no-contact world is being able to attend the mindfulness-based stress reduction program presented by a couple from our former congregation. They had offered it previously but my schedule didn’t fit their timetable. Now...my schedule is more flexible. In addition to attending 8 weekly meetings and an all-day workshop, they ask us to meditate daily and listen to their guided body scans. ...
Read more