2014 in Review

It has been a pretty healthy and happy year: I’ve been continuing my workouts, have done a wee bit of subbing, a ton of reading (currently halfway through Outlander series), and a fair amount of crafting – my favorites were the magnetic cookie-sheet calendar #1

 and my decoupaged door #2.

   I won a blue ribbon at the county fair for my fairy garden #3. (I won’t mention the paucity of competition!) Maybe this will be the year I figure out Etsy!

 My biggest trip was attending my nephew Brice’s wedding in April in Toledo. #4,5.

Parents of the bride, Lisa, Brice, bride's son Michael, bridesmaids, flower girl is my great-niece Cara.

My nephews and niece; Billy,Devin,Brice, brother Bill, Stephanie, Joel, Grant

On the way I also hung out with my cousins Denise and Trish & Mike in southern Ohio.

 Smaller expeditions included a trip to Glass Beach in Ft. Bragg with my friend Morag #7,

monthly museum visits with retired teacher friends Susan & Susan #8, helping my BFF Marylin with her English Fudge sales, and running away to beaches every chance I get.

 Visitors included Donna & Steve (feeling better after kidney surgery) from Arkansas. #9.
While they were here in June we went to see our old faves: Pacifica, the Redwoods, and new places: a cruise on the Chardonnay, Angel Island and a Giants game #10.








In September Jeffrey’s friend Jennifer #11 came from Maryland – they went to beaches, San Francisco, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and he cooked her pancakes almost every morning!

My largest purchase was solar panels! #12. (My electric bills now average $5.00 a month!) I love to watch that meter show negative numbers. I also had popcorn ceilings removed and walls repainted in half the house – chaotic but worth it.








Lifestyle changes: Jeffrey moved back in with me in July when diminishing roommates and continued unemployment made rent unaffordable in Redwood City. I really enjoy having him around. #13,14.

Just before Thanksgiving, Matt returned to the nest, too, after ending a three-year relationship with Noelle and her children. #15. 

At Monterey Bay Aquarium, photo bomber is Noelle's son Nathan

Sad but necessary. The house is beginning to look like an episode of Hoarding.

Felines Majesty and Inky are happily dashing from bed to bed and lap to lap, but Twinkletoes is still being a scaredy-cat.

I hope you are well and I wish I could see you as often as I think of you! Happy Holidays and a Great New Year!

Why is Candy Crush so addictive?

Why is Candy Crush so addictive?

I was talking to a fellow addict the other day and she said she'd read an article about this topic that said it was the fact that they only let you play five games at a time (unless you want to purchase more) which ensures that you never o.d. or feel you're sick of the game. You're always a bit hungry for more, in other words. This fits in well with the way I perceive it: I can always justify "just a few minutes" of game play (like every time I walk into the room with my computer). So far I have resisted putting the game on my iPhone (which gives you another track of five games at a time).

I'm sure there is a garishly decorated room somewhere at Candy Crush Central in which people with psychology degrees figure stuff like this out while sucking on peppermints. Here's a few more things I suspect they discuss:

The alternation between relatively easy and fiendishly hard games: I have gotten stuck once or twice in every "land" for weeks or even a month on a level I just couldn't figure out, and ended up waiting for a lucky break. I know there's a site for "cheats" but so far I've managed to resist going there. Damn you, semantics. After "solving" or lucking out, the next game is inevitably beaten in one or two tries, and the first thing that comes to mind is --" boy, I've gotten much smarter" even though I recognize that the level is just plain easier. That little pat on the back is addictive.

The illusion of progress: It's just a game, but in this game of life there is little enough evidence of progress, especially as we get on in years and the bigger numbers attached to birthdays no longer signal more privileges and possibilities, but rather the opposite. The knowledge that there are hundreds of levels ahead, just waiting for me to experience them, beat them, and that new candies and new sorts of explosions are coming-- that knowledge is addicting.

The pseudo-connection with friends: I used to feel superior to game addicts. Now I'm in the club. When I feel guilty about my addiction I can contemplate the list of friends who went there ahead of me. They're good people, so I must be too. I can "help" them get to the next level, and compete with them over high scores. They give me new lives! Every time I see that one of them has reached a new land, I feel a little kick of happiness. Many of them are people I haven't seen in years, yet the mutual obsession forges a sense of closeness that is "Sweet!" Still, when someone who doesn't play asks me if they should try it, I recommend "NO way!" This combination of sin and virtue is highly addictive!

I've tried to quit. When I'm on vacation I barely give it a thought. I realize that every minute I spend crushing candy is part of my life I'll never get back. I have a list of things to do that would greatly benefit from the application of those missing minutes. I try to be conscious of the choices I make in spending my retirement, and to enjoy the independence attained at such cost during Greg's illness. I am aware my feeling for this game is not true love -- it's just a crush!

Conclusions and Consequences

 

Conclusions and consequences

When I taught ESL I had a lesson about the conjunctions “so” and “because”, using arrows to show the direction of the causalities and when the various verb tenses work. For example “I have a stomach ache<---because I ate too much.”  Or: “I ate too much,--->so I have a stomach-ache.”

In one of my early morning “I-got-up-to-let the-cat-out-and-now-I can’t-get-back-to-sleep-so-let’s-see-what-I-can-worry-about-now” sessions, this struck me as a way of sorting out some of the cognitive distortions that sometimes plague me and certain people of my acquaintance.

To get back to the stomach ache, if you take the because side back a few notches – I have a stomach ache because I ate too much. I ate too much because I don’t pay attention to my body signals. I don’t pay attention to my body signals because I hate my body. I hate my body because it’s fat. It’s fat because I eat too much – a total vicious cycle! The only fact in all of this is the stomach ache. The rest are all conclusions requiring various degrees of leaps.

If, on the other hand, you take the so or consequential side and follow it up, you move toward the future and are able to make better choices down the road –I ate too much so I have a stomach ache, so I’ll take some antacid and next time I’ll watch what I eat so I can stop just before I feel full or I’ll limit what’s on my plate and not have seconds, etc., etc.

Let’s try it with the old “Nobody came to my birthday party” scenario:

Conclusions: Nobody came to my birthday party because nobody loves me, because I am unlovable, because I’m a terrible person, because my parents screwed me up, because God hates me…if you tack a so on the end of this string of leapt-to conclusions, you get a consequence not based on fact: so I might as well go out in the garden and eat worms, or so I guess I’ll leap off the nearest tall building.

 Consequences: Nobody came to my birthday party, so I guess I’ll have to find another way to celebrate; maybe I need to find some new friends, or figure out a better way of issuing invitations next time…It’s all geared at acceptance of the actual fact (nobody did come), and moving on.

At this point, my “Because/So” self-therapy is just an easy-to-remember way of working through a bad bit by becoming aware of the “because-because-because” self-defeating chain and the “so-so-so” focus on possibilities.

Because it works; so go and try it!

I'm told some people can't access my blog. Try it and let me know!

Rockin' out

Is this horizontal or vertical?

Aerial view of something

I have always loved rocks, but I can't remember schist! Igneous, metamorphic, sedimentary I get, but then I hit a cliff at Cambrian, Permian, Ordowhatever. I have given myself permission to like rocks without knowing or understanding geology. I guess this could be called appreciating.

There's probably an app for identifying the rocks you look at, or the scenes that pass below you on a plane. The aerial view on the left was somewhere between Dallas and San Jose. Narrows it down, doesn't it?
 

Nature's gift-wrap

When I go to a beach known for its pebbles I just plain enjoy it -- the sights and the sounds of the waves shusshing among the pebbles. Every rounded stone is a work of art, sculpted and painted by God and all the angels. I want to bring them home with me -- I sometimes do smuggle a few.

ladybug on a rock on a hand at the beach

arrangement by tides

Shiny objects

What's the scale?

There's a lady in my neighborhood whose whole front yard is towers of graduated-sized rocks, balnced with no mortar. She's also the one who planted trees and inscribed paths on the flood-plain and rearranges the rocks in the creek so it will babble more! I haven't gotten this bad yet.


 

Here's how I classify my photos of rocks:
Rocks that stick up

lava tree Hawaii

Walnut Canyon AZ

Pescadero penis rock - now gone

 Rocks you can look through

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Window Rock AZ

 

        natural bridges Santa Cruz

 

 

                                            Rocks that stick out

 

Santa Cruz

Rocks that look back at you!

 

Rocks that look like maps

Rocks that look like cakes

   
 

Taking pictures of the mesas, buttes, and canyons on my trip was a case of "Look! There's another neat rock!"  And another, and another! The colors, the way the sunlight hit and reflected and shadowed; the wish again, like my pebbles on the beach, to take them all home with me. Some places did not allow photographs of people or cultural remains, but scenery was OK. It's not easy to shoot from the back seat of a van or from a jouncing 4WD!

Walnut Canyon

Canyon de Chelly overlook

I think White House is in the niche

Lichens at Canyon de Chelly

Driving along Chinle Wash into C. de Chelly

cat rock

natural bridge

Near the Zuni Reservation, NM

Why do they always change things?

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I just get used to doing something on the computer and then they go and "improve" it to the point where I feel I'm starting all over. This may be an advantage to some people, I'm sure, but not me. Isn't there an app or something called same-old-same-old, where you don't have to re-familiarize yourself with the formatting, the design, the functions, the settings every few months (or even weeks, it seems). Is it just me?Am I really an old dog? Facebook -- this means you! Blogger, you too!

When is a vacation not a vacation?

Ordinarily when I am on vacation I watch as little news as possible. Part of getting away from it all is getting away from politics. But this vacation was different because government shutdown happened on the second day. Everyone on the trip kept hoping for an eleventh hour Congressional sanity attack, and then we all hoped there would be work-arounds: Maybe OUR national parks would be exempted. Rumors flew: somebody would find a back door in. The organizers at Road Scholar held meetings on Plans B, C, D.

The first day, the first canyon (Walnut Canyon outside Flagstaff) was still open when we got there.

The Hopi Mesas were, of course, not part of the park system, so our day there was as scheduled.

 The next day Canyon de Chelly was visible from the state highway overlooks, but the gates were down; the visitors centers were shut. Luckily, the Navajos who live and farm in the canyon were allowed in, and the four-wheel-drive rides they guide were in operation, so we did get to see this magnificent place.





















But on days four and five we were unable to visit either the Hubble Trading Post or Chaco Canyon -- the latter being the main reason I came on this trip. We made do with Navajo Museum and Code Talker Memorial at Window Rock, and visited the Zuni Reservation, and shopped in Gallup NM.

It was a good trip, but disappointing. I know the Park Service employees and the local people who make their living from tourists were much more adversely affected than I was. I seriously need to go back to see Chaco Canyon, but when?