The garden tomatoes keep rolling in.
It's Friday, quiet and cloudy so far. The rain continued well into last night, breaking only long enough for my husband and me to walk about a mile with Dora around the neighborhood after our pub evening. Then, it was lovely and misty and cool, like a night in the mountains --- but after we got back and sat down to pray the rosary, the skies opened up again. Sometime in the night the ran stopped, and while we might get more today, I don't think it's as likely. The high is back up to 85F again, better than 95, but I certainly enjoyed 73 as yesterday's high and look forward to more of same in future, as the year wheels round toward its close.
Today is largely the same-old, same-old. I have one more essay to write for the current Poem of the Day schedule, plus plenty to contemplate for the next few weeks. And work, still, on the upcoming recorded courses: plotting out what to cover in class, what to assign for homework, what to include on quizzes and in power-point presentations. It's a lot --- more than I'd remembered, frankly --- and I'm relieved not to have to hit the ground running the first week in September.
What shall I wear today? What do I feel like? I'm sitting here still drinking coffee in my pajamas, late and lazy on Friday morning . . . but what shall I wear? The new month presents itself as a blank slate, almost, with so many things to choose from that I haven't yet put on in August. Granted, I don't have so many things that the choice is overwhelming, which is a mercy. And I know that whatever I put on, it'll be good. That too is a mercy.
While I'm deciding, I'll just share that I learned yesterday that Wool& is adding a new Fiona color: burgundy, still not available with model photos, but you can see the fabric here. It's very appealing, I'll tell you! I spent yesterday in my own Fiona dress, thinking how much I love it, how great I feel whenever I put it on, and how nice it would be to have . . . say . . . a red one. I'd been thinking about garnet, but burgundy would be nice. It would be wintry . . . no idea whether I'd wear that color at the height of the summer, the way I do my teal dress. And in any event, I'm (supposedly) in a purchasing pause, though we all know by now how that goes (cough *Birkenstock boots* cough cough). I doubt those would sell out fast, though. Fiona never seems to be a frontrunner, and unlike marionberry, for example, burgundy isn't a color that people flock to buy. So I feel fairly confident that if I decided I wanted that dress, it would still be hanging around on my birthday, if not into the new year.
But I thought that was a fun development. I do love my Fiona. Between wearings, I forget just how much I love her, but honestly, I put her on and feel fantastic. And I've done so even through the heat of the summer, which I didn't expect at all. I chose her on a whim as a birthday present for myself last year, and she was so much better than I'd feared that I really would collect more colors, if I liked more of the colors on offer (I love marine blue, but I already have a marine-blue dress already, so that's not a first choice). Burgundy is a pleasant addition, and I really might consider it, as a note of something completely different, but still cohesive, in the ol' closet.
I'm sort of wishing it were going to be cool enough again to wear leggings, but I don't think it is. Oh well. In the middle of winter, I'll long for nothing more than bare legs and sandals, so I suppose I can suck it up and enjoy bare legs and sandals today.
OK, here's what I decided to wear, because I could sit and dither forever, but I won't:
I was honestly surprised when Brooklyn wasn't one of my front-runner dresses for July. I think sometimes I reach past her for other things because I think she's too special or dressy for everyday. Today, in fact, my mind was all set on something that felt like a nightgown --- and then it occurred to me that Brooklyn is just as comfortable as a nightgown, but has a shape.
I like these elastic-waist dresses so much more than I ever thought I would. I've already overbelabored how little I expected to like either Fiona or Brooklyn, and how surprised I was to find that I loved them. And it is funny . . . I still like and wear my swing dresses a lot, but I find myself gravitating toward belts a lot more than I ever thought I would. It's even funnier in the sense that I'd have expected the opposite: as my weight has crept up (though I'm working to stop that trend), you'd think I'd shy away from defined dress shapes. Instead, I seem to crave them.
So today it's Brooklyn, and she's great. I feel great. Wearing her with my Pact cotton navy bralette/crop top and --- because it's still kind of wet out there --- Xero Colorado sandals again.
Weird poses, as always. But I can see how my dress hangs on my body.
Ran my damp hands through my hair, and I'm ready to go.
AFTERNOON UPDATE:
*2.39 miles walked with Dora this morning --- I wanted to go the full three, but the humidity was something else, and she was anxious to go home. When we saw a guy approaching on a skateboard with a not-very-under-control dog, and I realized that if we passed each other it would be in a narrow space where I couldn't very well move Dora out of the way, we turned around and went home. She just about clawed her way up the back steps to get into the house. We're at Week 2, almost, of her fluoxetine, i.e. Puppy Prozac, so I am expecting to see side effects, including mood fluctuation. Vet says these will pass. I hope so.
*Essay written on John Erskine (of "The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent" fame), who had a rather nice poem in Harper's Magazine in 1920.
*Lunch eaten: cottage cheese with frozen blueberries. Did I mention that I'm actively working on the weight creepage? I really hate diets and the whole diet culture, but I've been gaining ten pounds a year for the last several years, and eventually, as I fear, that will start to add up. I'm right at the brink, in fact, of the place where it will add up in ways that I can feel. The heaviest I've ever been, at 5'4, besides pregnancy and immediate postpartum, was 167 pounds. I could feel that. That was when I first developed plantar fasciitis. I felt too heavy to run, even if I wanted to. I was hardly obese, but I didn't like how that weight felt on my frame, and I don't want to find myself back in that place.
So I'm watching my caloric intake and logging what I eat, a habit I have picked up a lot and also dropped a lot, but I'm generally glad I do it when I do it. What I ate for lunch was one cup of whole-milk cottage cheese and one cup of blueberries, which I know because I ate them literally out of the 2-cup measuring cup. This app I'm using keeps giving me bad grades for my food choices, mostly because it thinks I'm eating too much fat. I am paying it no mind: I know the nutritional content of what I eat, and eating a high percentage of fats, as part of the whole macros picture, means I get full and stay full longer. Two hundred calories of full-fat dairy is the same number of calories as two hundred calories of Cheerios, but I know which one is more satisfying, not to mention nutritionally dense. Meanwhile, sometimes I find that I just don't eat stuff because eating it would mean measuring it and then logging it, and ain't nobody got time for that. (I'm mostly joking here, but kind of not).
I'm sure it's the prospect of turning sixty in a year and change that makes these things seem urgent. A lot of things suddenly seem more urgent than they used to, but taking care of myself physically is right up there. There's a lot I can't control, but what I can control, I really should, because that will make some difference in how my whole old age plays out. I think about that far more than I used to. Good friends of mine are already there, ten or more years ahead of me, finding it difficult to do things that were easier a decade ago. Now seems like the time to lay down the habits, if I haven't already laid them down.
Right now I'm doing seated resistance-band exercises, which is about the most old-lady thing imaginable, but I need to do upper-body work pretty much daily, and this is something I will do: biceps curls while sitting on my band (it's broken, so it's not long enough to go under my feet, which is the real version of the exercise, but resistance is resistance). I can just do sets of reps between sentences. Write. Reps. Write. That's how I'm banging out this portion of this blog post. In a minute I'll turn to other work, but writing this blog post is easy work to do (i.e., not really work) while I also exercise.
Then I do a bunch of reps with the stretch band held in front of me, pulling my arms apart and then letting them slowly come back together (so resisting the snap-back impulse of the elastic band). With this little exercise, I can feel the burn in the backs of my arms and in my upper-back muscles, which I also want to work. Seems as though a strong back would be a powerful antidote to the spinal curvature of old age. And I just need more upper-body strength. I can walk a long way, but my arms are pretty wimpy. Anyway, I do a series of sets of 20 of those. Then more biceps curls. Etc.
*But now I had better turn my mind to work that I do really have to concentrate on. Enough exercise, and writing about exercise, for the time being.
EVENING UPDATE:
*I made cheese omelettes for dinner, with homemade salsa (way to use up five tomatoes and a bunch of peppers that needed using up)
*Dora and I have been for a short post-prandial perambulation: say that five times fast, why don't you? The sky is full of cumulus clouds and bats, but no rain.
*Drinking some water, thinking about what to read now, waiting for it to get dark so that we can take our longer nighttime walk.
Tried on a longline blazer I bought for $1 some years ago in the Good Neighbor Shop. It's a little small --- tightish across the back --- but okay, though not a high-quality clothing item at all. I think it came originally from Dress Barn, and I would not have bought it had it not been dark periwinkle and $1. I don't think I wore it at all last year, but the thought struck me that I might try it with the dress I'm wearing today.
