Looking Forward to Spring

I love TCM's 31 Days of Oscar...so many great movies.  We usually record some of them and watch them later.

Today we watched "Harry and Tonto" from 1974.  Art Carney won the Best Actor that year.  It's the story of an elderly man and his pet cat.  It was a great movie, but it made me cry, a lot.

The part where he dances with his girlfriend from way back, and she has Alzheimers so she really doesn't know who he is.  Very poignant, the blank look in Geraldine Fitzgerald's eyes kind of reminds me of my mother.  Then at the end, the cat Tonto dies.  As Harry is at the vet saying goodbye to his friend, I just broke down.  I find myself so close to tears all the time nowadays over the smallest things.    

The weather is getting much better and soon it will be Daylight Savings Time...I can't wait!  One of my goals this year is to walk a lot more outside.  I used to walk all the time but since I started working out with a trainer 4 times a week, I don't do much else.  I think the fresh air would do me good and help me with the bit of depression I'm still feeling over Buster's death.

I asked my husband last night if he misses Buster, and he very honestly said "Not really."  I think he saw B's declining health as a real liability and felt as if B had not really been very engaged with him the last few years.  My first reaction was to be a bit offended, but the bottom line is that B was really MY dog.  He wasn't so much a companion to my husband any more, like he was when he was younger.  B would sleep all day in the back room, and what energy he did have left, he focused it on me when I was home from work.  So the fact that my husband felt less close to him in the last few years is natural, right? No reason to be offended.  But still, that made me sad too.   

On that note, does anyone have any suggestions (non-medication related) for how to deal with mild depression?  I feel as if I am doing everything right with diet and exercise and keeping busy at work.  But I still get overwhelmed with sadness a lot. 

I hope everyone is looking forward to the spring and that it starts "busting out all over" soon!

These are my tulips a few years ago.  

I planted new tulips bulbs in November, so I'm hoping they turn out as well this year.  

Where Have All The Bloggers Gone?

It’s been 10 years since I started this blog!  Back then I called it “55 Alive and Losing It”  I was still deep in my eating disorder and thinking my life would be perfect if I could just lose some weight.  A lot has changed since then. Back then there were many many people blogging about weight loss, eating disorders, mental health, and life in general.  It was easy to find interesting blogs to follow and like minded people to read. 

But something has changed.  Most of those bloggers I followed and who followed me originally are “gone.”  Stopped blogging, faded away, defunct, whatever.  I myself went through a phase when I wasn’t inspired to blog.  I stopped writing, posting, reading and following.  Now that I’m back, I’m having trouble finding interesting blogs.  I still have a few favorites from the olden days, but I’d like to have MORE! 

In search of new blogs to follow, I even did the “next blog” thingy button at the top of my blog page, which produces random suggestions.   Doing that, I found blogs in foreign languages, blogs written by people in religious cults, real estate blogs, blogs obviously written to keep family apprised of what the kids are doing.  My favorite so far has been “The U-Dual Modular Group” which had something to do with quantum physics (I think).   Not really, it scared me.

It seems like everyone is on Instagram nowadays, but how can you really tell people about your life by posting a picture with a few words and hashtags?  To me, it’s too trendy, too abbreviated, too simplistic.   A picture isn’t always worth a thousand words. 

So, if anyone out there has an interesting blog and you would like another follower, please leave me a comment after this post.  I’m partial to weight loss blogs, blogs of people who are struggling with day to day life, and happy blogs where people are talking about the fun stuff they do (except please no blogs about car racing or raising children...lol).  I’d love to have some more bloggy friends!

Still around

Well, here I am.  A few days before my 65th birthday.  It’s a cold but sunny and truly beautiful President’s Day.  Being a government employee, I have the day off.  Friday, I started to feel a cold coming on, so I spent the weekend a bit under the weather.   But I attacked it hard right away with Zicam and yesterday I started to feel better.

So far today I’ve taken the girl dogs to the park.  They just got haircuts last week, so they did have to wear their warm jackets.

I just realized I still refer to them as the girl dogs...vs when I had 3 and one was a boy

My dear husband gave me a leaf blower for Christmas (what a romantic fellow) so I’ve also blown off all the decks of the debris that fell yesterday in a windstorm.  And it’s not even 10 am yet.  

I feel as if I am in a good place emotionally.  Sometimes I still get very sad about Buster, but the grief does seem to be easing a bit.  At least I’m not crying over him every day anymore.  I’ve gotten rid of almost all his stuff, except for his bed and a few favorite toys which I’ve put next to the bed in our bedroom.  I imagine him sleeping there still, and occasionally one of the other dogs will get in it, so that gives me comfort.  Weird, I know, to be so attached to a dog.  But he’ll be forever in my heart. 

My startup disk on my laptop told me it was getting very full, so while being sick this weekend, I decided to cull out some stuff, starting with Photos…of course, the majority of everything was photos and videos of B.  Videos take up a lot of space and a lot were “almost” duplicates, so I decided to just keep the most special ones.

As I was going through them one by one, I came across one from about 3 years ago where I was recording B and me playing with a puppet.  My husband in the background says loudly “Don’t you have enough pictures of that dog???” 

For some reason, watching that video with commentary from my husband made me laugh so hard I cried.  Yes, I was a crazy dog mom and I probably did have enough pictures, evidenced by the fact that I'm now needing to delete some in order for my computer to function properly.  But in retrospect...it's a bittersweet memory.

Weight wise, I’m doing well.  Not up or down…just “THERE.”  I don’t even think about what I weigh most of the time, because it doesn’t matter, as long as my clothes continue to fit fine.

I’m working out a lot and apparently I’m very fit because the company who makes the heart rate monitor I wear just sent me an email that they were upping my max heart rate, based on the fact that while working out, I often get my heart rate up past the previous theoretical max.  (The “normal” max for a woman my age is 155, so my level of fitness is quite high.)

My trainer and I have been together for 3 years, so he knows how far I've come.  He is pretty proud of me and my progress and I think I’m one of his favorite clients because I do push myself so hard during our sessions.

Anyway, sorry for my long absences.  I've decided to keep blogging more regularly, even if no one reads, it's a good way for me to document my own emotional progress.

Take care, everyone.