I have to say, there is some statement being made here: today is the last day that I am 70 and the day conspires to remind me that however much you have felt frustrations over the piddly things in your life as a 70 year old, they can get even more frustrating at any minute, so keep your whiny horses in the stable!
Not that I found it to be tough to be 70. It was an interesting new configuration of physical and emotional challenges. In other words -- just like any other year, only with wiser and kinder overtones!
But today! Oh my, it had so much going for it and yet, the frustrations piled high.
First, the pleasant walk in the morning.
And the equally pleasant time over breakfast.
("try my apple jam that I made and froze (and forgot about) eleven years ago!" Um, that's okay. I'll stick with standard strawberry!)
But here's the thing: it's COLD outside. I mean, capital letters cold. Yes, I had lugged the annuals into the mudroom so they are safe, but still, it's unpleasant to do anything outdoorsy. Neither Ed nor I felt like working, walking, staying outside. At all.
When we have an indoor day, we typically read a lot, often internet stuff. And I write some. Also on the internet. I settled in to frame the outlines of a post and boom! Blogger (my blogging platdform) crashed! The thing about platform crashes is that you never know the reason for it, or whether it's their fault or yours, and if and when their hosting services will be restored. Made worse by the fact that googling revealed no major outages that I could detect. So... I had to wonder -- is Ocean dead? A thing of the past? Did Google (the parent company here) kick Blogger in the butt and send it flying? Or kick me off for some misguided reason? Stuff like this happens all the time! Should I start setting up a new blog elsewhere?
These are not questions you ask initially. But as the afternoon progresses and you are blocked from accessing your posting page, you begin to wonder.
Ed suggested we go chocolate shopping and chicken feed buying. (They are on the same path.) That was the best part of the day! I was awarded 25 lovely chocolates (in anticipation of tomorrow) and at Farm & Fleet, we spent some time admiring the baby chicks and ducklings that had just come in. For your buying pleasure. Were we tempted? No, not at all, but we did ask a shopper a bunch of questions about the virtues of owning ducks. There are many, but still, we were not tempted! At all.
At home, I again fretted about the felled Blogger website and about the miserable weather. Our mudroom is packed with both the annuals and the arriving perennials that I surely for once had the time to plant, but it would have been too cruel to do that to them. They need a good start in life.
But by evening, calmness prevailed. Blogger fixed itself, dinner didn't quite fix itself, but I gave it a good nudge and so there was a lovely salmon with asparagus and believe me, asparagus is getting to be really delicious now. Not local yet, but I can tell -- these young spears are of the season!
And tomorrow? Ah, tomorrow! The testing of my patience and my ability to stay calm in the face of adversity, however big or small, is behind us. Tomorrow promises to be just fine!
