2013-10-07; 8:00am, Monday.  High clouds, sun rising, day morning.


Diary:  About life’s stages, ethnic dinner, colouring, mandala and friends.

~~An early start opens with my take on the experience of aging from early on in life and lessons learned, followed by Michelle’s and my Ethiopian dinner experience, mandala colouring and starting something new, web photo albums and closing with exchanges between friends.~~

I impressed myself today!  It is eight as I start this entry and I already had Friday’s missed laundry loaded and churning!  And all this after breakfast of course.  It is quite amusing that I still find satisfaction in this, even though I retired fourteen (14) years ago and I fully realise that now my time is my own.  
	Apparently some of life’s pleasures are in accomplishing that what has been a standard of conduct over the years.  And I guess, at my age of seventy seven (77) there is the added aspect of ‘I can still do this’.  In this regard I have become more aware of that aspect as my body ages and I notice the increase of vulnerabilities and loss of ability when becoming older.  So, I give thanks for what I can do and take care to maintain that, as well as I can.
	I often compare growing older with its adjustments to the process of growing up as a youngster.  That was a process of about twenty years say and took a lot of ‘doing’.   So to me, aging is also a learning process, one of adapting to new circumstances and abilities.  
	Each stage in one’s life has  unique experiences to offer, child, youth, starting adult, relationships, family, professional life and this includes housekeeping for me,  just to name some obvious ones.  And to this I add aging, learning and understanding that process, because I keep in mind that even the earth ages and that nothing in this universe is forever, except for existence. 

Last Saturday night Michelle and I had our very enjoyable Ethiopian dinner, which we ate Arabic style using pita type bread tear offs to scoop up our food byte wise from the platter.  This takes skill some, just like the chopsticks do and I learned as munched.  This was just one aspect of the different environment, which included the varied other guests, the different decoration and the pleasant service.  
	And last but not least, the fact that Ethiopian Coffee is roasted from green beans on the spot, but takes half an hour if not longer, to prepare!  Order the coffee early is my advice!  
	Michelle and I decided to skip it this time, though I am going back to try it.  All together a unique dinner experience, well researched by Michelle as is her custom  and our always entertaining discussions.  Now, I am on deck for the next ‘ethnic’ dinner, which may be Mongolian.

Last night I coloured in two ‘tongues’ of the mandala doodle, making some progress, but slower than expected.  It turns out that once I’m out of my colouring routine, I have to overcome some resistance to start up again.  Yet, I do enjoy the process and results, once I get going.  
	This need to overcome some initial resistance, I also experience in other cases and have through out most of my life.  I remember my mother’s encouragements saying “give it a try, once you get going you’ll probably enjoy it”  and also my former wife Ina later on, would urge me in a similar way.  And I know from friends that this experience is not just mine, but is more general. [Laundry into the dryer till 9:45am] 
	It takes new and more energy to undertake something new, so in that regard it may just be that we have resistance to wasting energy on some thing that may not be beneficial.  But then, there is the saying from my student days “nothing ventured, nothing gained!”.  It is a valuable reminder of not staying put out of habit or worse, sloth!  After all, new success brings new energy and is stimulating, so we continue making our discoveries, enriching our experience.

I also did a bit of updating on my website’s image albums.  This was triggered by the posting of my new ‘Swiss Friends’ album, which still needs some small spelling corrections. 
	 Inspecting the existing albums, I discovered that none have been updated to the html5 level since their 2010 posting!  In addition, I suspect that most image files are unreduced, although I may have used Adobe’s ‘save for web’ feature.  No matter, a good going over of the albums, including archiving dated albums and adding more recent ones is now next on my web agenda.

Later today, coffee with Jack and soon also this week, a visit to Sharen.  Last Friday’s lunch with Herman ran into a third hour, which was unusually long.  We got to talking about our parents and our upbringing, an area where we have much in common.  
	Thomas was back on Sunday, with the trailer in Fairmont safely parked for the winter.  Don confided last night that he considers changing his trailer routine from going south to westerly.  Personally, I like some trips during the year, but the camping type activity has become less attractive to me.  Time spent outdoors and in nature I do like, but so I do my homely comforts! 


Writings:  None.

~~None~~