it's a lazy saturday. i've been telling the story of my hearing loss on my music blog and the story of raising a DMDD kid on my cloudcroft blog; i'll make you find that last one but tell you it's fairly easy to find. neither story is pretty. but i'm at an age where i reflect on all the things i did well and not so well.

my own dad tried to hike the appalachian trail at the age of fifty-five. it was too late already. we men are at our peaks in our twenties and it goes pretty much downhill after that, and he probably should have realized it. he was stubborn though. the first time his ankles gave out somewhere in pennsylvania, an extremely rocky part of the trail, and after a significant period of recovery, he went and tried again. this time he made it maybe to connecticut. but the second time they gave out they gave out for good, and he was in pain literally for the last thirty years of his life.

it was partly because i had experienced that pain through him that i am very cautious about doing the same kind of thing. on the one hand, i remember going down to virginia and hiking about thirty miles of it with him. at one point we took a picture which i believe i have lost, at least i haven't found it for years, and in that picture (of him and me) he was the happiest i ever knew him. he was fit, he was smiling, he was glowing. he was unshaven. he had traded three-pound cameras for two-and-a-half-pound cameras and on down until he could live entirely with what he was carrying. but the pain of his last thirty years also will stay with me. he drank too much sherry off and on in his life but toward the end he'd given it up entirely and then some of that happiness came back. but i never denied that he'd had plenty of good reasons to drink a little to much, i just maintained that the drinking in the end didn't help. or at least it caused some other problems, even if it helped with the chronic pain.

these days i have a hard time getting up out of my chair. the pressure from the kids has gone down a little. we've trained them so that they don't always need constant rides all over creation. we ourselves manage our rides so we do as much as possible in a single trip. i've come to prefer the small honda, with a stick shift, for various reasons, but i believe i have clutcher's knee and the ailments pile up. i need a lot more exercise. in fact i'm about to go get a little more now, and sweep the upstairs maybe or just move some stuff. spring is here, time to clean things out a little.

when i feel pain in my joints sometimes i blame the driving, or sometimes my shoes, none of which fit perfectly, but mostly i know it's just old age. i'm not reaching for the sherry. i'm just going to gradually walk enough to find a balance, lose some weight, and keep on keepin' on.

it's miserable cold here, really only about twenty-seven, but it feels terrible because it had been warm for about a week. it was so warm, we'd stopped heating the laundry room to keep the pipes from freezing, and i was getting used to wearing socks and sandals, which is really my only comfortable shoes. now it will be cold for about a week. and i shouldn't complain, it's kind of to be expected for late february, but i'm complaining anyway because that's what a diary is for.

yesterday was garbage day but they didn't take a bag of leaves that i'd left out, which this morning was only about half full, and turned on its side in the street. they'd taken the rest, garbage and recy, and i'd brought in the bins but didn't know what to make of the leaves and left them 'til this morning. now i'm a good neighbor and i went and got them. late february is the classic stray dog holiday in illinois since the feds take presidents' day, the state takes lincoln's birthday, the garbage people follow one or the other, not sure which, and therefore a lot of bins are left out there too long or never make it out there and the garbage ends up blowing around, as it's windy, cold, a little snowy, not nice out there. it will warm up. it will become green.

i make affirmations because what else can one do. i will resist drinking a third cup of coffee before lunch. i will do something about cleaning the house. i will do enough walking to work the pain out of my knee which could be there from having to wear stupid shoes. i will sweep my room and i will get back into the quilt which is just kind of sitting here waiting for me to get started again. i will finish my book.

sometimes the more pressure i put on myself the more it backfires. that's definitely true with my weight.

i enjoy my upstairs window though. over my shoulder cars go down or up broad street at about thirty mph and because it's brick, i hear it pretty well and even feel it when my hearing aids are out. one thing i like is that they could care less about what's happening in an upstairs window, on a street with lots of houses and a lot of space between stop signs. a bag of leaves would have annoyed them though.

i wait for the ncaa's for some reason. i need to fix my printer so i can print a bracket. i will get to that printer.

late at night and i've finally finished my blog report which wraps up the numbers of visitors on blogs like this one. this is the king of my blogs; it got over eight thousand last month, and has over four hundred thousand total visitors in history. why? no idea really. i just blab here, say whatever i want, don't even put caps on anything, ramble about my various travels. i make a point of not worrying about grammar or organization though my keyboard is doing some pesky period-drop these days and i am rooting those out...mostly i don't put much up here, i think people visit because it has a cool name and draws a lot of google traffic. out there?...yeah people have a thing with out there, it has a place in our brains. this is one famous blog that glorifies out there...

thank god it's feb, i was getting sick of jan. jan is a death month, too long, too cold, too dark, but at least i lived through it. i don't care what happens to the groundhog, only hope for the usual - eventually spring will come and take over. i've gone to iowa and to brimfield, repeatedly in some cases, but i'll say one thing for illinois, you get out on those interstates, and the farm fields go back into the horizon, and make you feel like there's lots of fresh air out there. in fact it's kind of windy, bleak, snowy, and miserable, with lots of pesticide dumped out there, so even spoon is not fit to drink, better go home and have cadillac water.

which we pay dearly for.