Travel with a Small Dose of (Emotional?) Baggage

The husband will turn 65 on his next birthday, so our financial advisers had us complete a questionnaire about retirement needs, wants, plans, and such. Since he plans to work until he is 70, we're still talking "future," but we know all too well how plans can change unexpectedly.

One of the questions concerned "extras" that we'd like to have in retirement. We don't want a second home, a nicer car, or anything material. What we want is to be able to travel. We've enjoyed being able to do that now that the sons are out of college, and have no desire to stop, especially since we'll have more time and more flexible schedules then.

We already have a couple of trips on the horizon. I saw a great deal on a three-night trip to Reykjavik, Iceland in January. We'll be flying WOW Air. They're one of the new low-fare airlines where you pay extra for just about anything. You're allowed one carry-on weighing no more than 5 kilos (11 pounds). If you want to carry on a heavier bag, you pay. If you want to check a bag, you pay. If you want to check two or even three bags, you pay more. If you want a seat assignment, you pay. Getting an idea now of how the deal I saw was so great?

We've got our fingers crossed that we'll return to Hue, Vietnam in June 2016. It's the tenth anniversary of the start of the University of Virginia - Hue University connection, and it sounds as if they'd like the husband to do another class. As for people who tell me how hot and humid it will be in Vietnam in June, I already know that. The husband was the concerned one, at least until I pointed out that he would be living in an air-conditioned hotel, teaching in an air-conditioned classroom, and working in an air-conditioned office. I'm the one who would (will) be outside in the elements for long periods each day.

The limited luggage on WOW Air actually ties in with how I was thinking of packing for Vietnam. Ready? I say that because I realize that there are people who are going to tell me I am crazy, especially when I note that the list of things I'm thinking of packing includes what I would be wearing while travelling. Two pairs of light-weight cargo pants that can unzip into shorts (not that I plan to wear shorts in Vietnam); two t-shirts; two long-sleeved, collared, buttoned shirts; one skirt; one of my ao dais; one pair each of sandals and walking shoes; and socks and underwear in corresponding numbers. Except for the fact that some of the Asian airlines only allow one carry-on, that's a carry-on sized wardrobe.

The other thing I expect some people will see as crazy is that I'm planning that the husband and I each take a camera. Sounds fine, right? At least until I say that those cameras will be small digitals, the kind that can fit in a breast or a jacket pocket. Why? Largely because I'm tired of lugging a heavy (with longer lens) DSLR or even a mid-weight one with me. I never videotaped any of the sons' performances as they grew up because I didn't want to focus more on the taping and less on them. It's the same here. I feel as if I'm thinking more about a photo than I am about what I'm seeing. I will be honest and say that I can't recall the last time I looked at any of the photos from our previous Vietnam trips. Getting the lead photo here was the first time in a long time that I'd looked through the photos from our trip to Australia in May 2014. And I've only looked at the Vietnam 2012 photos or the Iceland 2010 ones a handful of times.

I wonder, though, whether this is just due to a felt need to jettison some baggage in more general, life terms. I occasionally have a Barnes and Noble coupon for which I can't find a use. (Older son always can, though.) I walk through a store to get one item in particular and see things that I might once have wanted but now approach with a "Meh." If I see something that will make a perfect gift for someone else, I still buy it. I just don't impulse buy for myself. I will continue to ponder this all as the Iceland trip approaches. If I change my mind and decide to take a larger camera, I'll so confess. In the meantime, I need to post this and get on writing about the sweater from Hell.

Coloring the Rainbow

I've always loved Harry Chapin's "Flowers Are Red" as a comment on our educational system. The young boy starts school coloring believing

"There are so many colors in the rainbow
So many colors in the morning sun
So many colors in the flower and I see every one"

only to be told by his teacher 

"Flowers are red, young man
And green leaves are green
There's no need to see flowers any other way
Than they way they always have been seen"

Eventually the young boy adopts the party line after which he no longer uses the many colors of the rainbow, at least not for flowers.

I had a love-hate relationship with coloring and coloring books as a child. I remember finding it hard to stay within the lines even when they were lines I'd drawn myself. And having been a bit brainwashed myself, I looked at the neat, within-the-line coloring of other kids and thought how much better it looked than mine. I have no idea if that is what others thought, but it was easy enough for me to believe.

Coloring books are back and one of the new "in" things for adults. Supposedly meditative and calming, they're touted as a stress-reduction tool. I recently received a coloring book of mandala designs for my birthday and can say that there really is a meditative element to it as long as I make a concerted effort to stay within the lines. It takes concentration which makes other, unnecessary thoughts vanish into the ether at least for the time I am coloring. I should perhaps try color on a regular basis, especially since I've gotten better at staying within the lines.

Letting Time Go Lightly

I let time go lightly when I'm here with you, 

I let time go lightly when the day is through.

I keep a watch on time when I've got work to do, 

I let time go lightly with you.

- Harry Chapin

The men in my life gave me the watch shown above for my birthday. It has a 24-hour dial. Each number, from 1 to 24, has three ticks in between. There is one hand which makes one revolution per 24-hour day. I have seen it advertised as the "slow watch." It is impossible to tell a precise time using this watch. The norm becomes "It's between 3:00 and 4:00" or "It's getting close to 1600 hours" (4:00 p.m.). Using the watch to arrive somewhere at a certain time really only works if you're willing to get there early. 

The men told me that they hoped this would help me to slow down a bit, something I occasionally say I should do. Two weeks in, their plan may be working. Today, I put on my old watch so that I did not miss the proper time to leave to take the dog to a 3:30 vet appointment. As Harry said, "I keep a watch on time when I've got work to do." As soon as we got home from the appointment, I swapped the watches out. I'll put the old watch on again tomorrow morning so that I can time the run(s) I will be doing. After that, it will be back to the new watch.

I am enjoying letting time go lightly. 

Run-On Thoughts on Running On

Around 58 years ago, I learned how to walk. Now, some 58 years later, I am learning how to run. I have a mixed history with running. In high school, I was one of four girls to go out for cross country when the high school athletic league ruled that if there was not girls team then girls could run with the boys. I did pretty awfully, but I did it. For the most part, though, I have thought about running without really doing it. There have been significant periods in my life when I did not run simply because I did not want people to see me run. I was embarrassed to be seen running, because I felt so gawky doing it.

When I started working out with SEAL Team Physical Training, people there started to offer me advice about running, "Did you know that your shoulders hunch over when you run?" "You need to straighten your back." "Don't look down. That decreases the amount of air you can take in." "Don't swing your shoulders from side to side and cross your hands in front of you." I tried to do the things others told me I should, but there were just so many of them that I wasn't sure where to start. Almost a year ago, the gym to which I belong for martial arts, had a special with a trainer whose specialty was running. I did about half a dozen sessions with him before a shoulder surgeon told me I should not be doing any activity in which I could fall. People at SEAL Team were starting to tell me that my running looked better. It very occasionally actually felt better to me, but I still most of the time felt very clumsy if that's an appropriate way to describe one's running.

I was unable to run while recovering from shoulder surgery; there were people who told me I should not even be walking given the effect of the impact on the shoulder. The sources with whom I checked informed me that walking was quite okay and asked why was I emailing them instead of taking a walk on a perfectly good afternoon. During those walks, as well as the ones with the family dog, I tried to do all the running things I'd been told or instructed to do. I figured getting used to doing them walking would make them easier to do when I got back to running. Toes up to help land mid-foot rather than on the heel. Feet picked up as I walked, and no scuffling my feet. Back straight to help my airway stay as open as possible.

I tried to continue to keep those things in mind when I was finally able to start jogging and, even more so, when I went back to doing SEAL Team run options in which we run for an hour, non-stop. I also signed up for a running clinic sort of thing (the gym calls in "Running Club") led in part by the trainer I worked with last fall. I've done eleven one-hour sessions and have five more to go. The warm-up exercises really focus me on getting my feel up, keeping my back straight, and keeping my shoulders back and square on to the front.

The epiphany, though, is that I am learning to run with my arms. I would have thought that the legs control how one runs. They are, after all, connected to the hips which constitute pretty major joints. The arms connect to the shoulders, which are not quite as major size-wise. There are various ways to think about moving one's arms back and forth while running. "Hips to lips" is the one that works for me. And it does work, in quite amazing ways. When I remember to start moving my arms hips-to-lips, my feet get lighter and no longer scuff the ground. I have played with this, and it is truly amazing. Move my arms faster, and my pace picks up. I can make myself run faster without thinking about it just by pumping my arms more. Who would have thought it?

I still enviously watch those people with long legs who make running look beautiful. I don't know that I will ever get to the point of thinking my running looks that way, but I at least no longer feel uncomfortable running with people watching. I still get advice at SEAL Team PT, but I also get comments on how much my running has improved. The moments in which I realize that I am getting it all done--feet, legs, hips, arms--are getting more frequent. I may never make my running look beautiful, but "pretty" isn't all that bad a way for it to look.

Hello, Birthday, My Old Friend...

I'm heading to the gym for some shoulder rehab and my post-workout shower. If you show up on your birthday, they give you a coupon for a free smoothie. After that, I could, if I wanted to, pick up a free pastry at Panera and a free coffee at Starbucks before heading to the quilt store for 20 percent off my entire purchase of regularly priced items. All of those are good all month long, so I don't need to pack it all into one day.

As for the day, I'm not at all sure how to interpret The Washington Post horoscope's "if today is your birthday" item. In case you don't get or read the Post, here it is:

This year you might find yourself on the fence. If you jump off it, you can see how to merge opposing ideas by focusing on the root of the issue. There will be a push-pull in relationships. You will need to establish your boundaries and deal with issues suck as resentment and guilt. You will appreciate the process when you look at the results. If you are single, you will meet someone of importance after August. Get ready! If you are attached, you will be sharing more of yourselves with each other.

Sounds like a pretty ordinary year to me, but ordinary can be good. So can adventures, but they run more of a risk than ordinary does.

I usually spend some birthday time assessing whether I'm meeting the resolutions I made seix months ago for the birth of the new year. I looked, and I didn't really make any, which means I'm right on track to meet all of them.

For my 49th birthday and the advent of my 50th year of life, I made a list of 50 things to do. I managed to accomplish most of them. I'm honestly not sure if I could come up with a list of 60. I decided, then, to go for quality rather than quantity. A dozen things, or one per month, seemed a lot more doable in both  creation and execution. Because the first dozen I jotted down were all in the artsy-creative vein, I decided I need to expand my horizons with four things in each of three areas: Artsy-Creative, Physical, and Not Artsy-Creative nor Physical. So here they are. Making them public makes me accountable for accomplishing them or having a good reason why I didn't.

The Artsy-Creative things are all things I haven't really tried before. While I have needle-felted and felted items I knitted or crocheted (technically, this is fulling, not felting), I have never wet felted. This means starting with fleece and finishing with felt. This seems like a good year to play with that. I would like to make (bind) a decent book. The few I've done weren't really bound; the pages came from folding and there was no binding. When I reorganized my studio, I realized just how many wine corks and labels I have saved over the years. I'm going to have to do something with them. I also have a box of things I have picked up, mostly on trips. A lot of them are spoons. I kid you not, I found a spoon in the street just about everywhere we went in our 2009 adventure in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Europe. I'm thinking I should make a sculpture.

The Physical areas is where I reserve the right not to do something if my shoulder will not permit it. The two that fall into that category are doing a pull-up, just one, though more would also be nice. I'd also like to climb a rope, which can be done mostly using one's legs. Still, if doing it would be shoulder-risky, it's not gonna happen. Younger Son suggested that I climb to the tallest point in the three states in which I've lived. Granite Peak in Montana is a technical climb and carries the warning of possible death. No, thank you. The one in Kentucky, Black Mountain, is on private land and requires a special permit. Too much trouble. I'll stick with Mt. Rogers in southwest Virginia. It's supposed to be doable as a day hike. Finally, I want to run the Charlottesville Ten Miler in the spring. That should be very doable if I can manage to run through the winter without injury.

Not Artsy-Creative nor Physical things start with reading (for the third time) George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire, aka Game of Thrones. I'll probably do this late in the year, though if a release date is given for the sixth book in the series, I'll time the re-read to lead into the new book. I am almost embarrassed to say that despite being a second degree black belt in Myo Sim kendo, I've never watched Seven Samurai, Sanjuro, or Yojimbo, three classics. We actually have all of them on DVD, so I'll be watching them this year. I do like writing but do not make time for it on a regular basis. I'm going to try to put up one blog post per week and include with it a photo I've taken. Yeah, we'll see how many weeks I make. Finally, I have The Art of Zentangle, a book with various zentangle exercises. I may not manage one per week, but I will manage one for each month. You can see what a zentangle is here. I know that these last two are perilously close to the idea of Artsy-Creative, but it's my list, my rules.

And now, after a quick proofing, I'm off to the gym!

If I Were a Business, I Might Celebrate ...

the fact that in a month I will begin my 60th year of life. I marked the 50th year by compiling a list of 50 things to do to commemorate the year. I did manage to do most of them; it just took me a decade. (I really should update that list to note the last couple I've managed to complete.) I need to be realistic here and accept that 60 things is a bunch too many to tackle. I want this to be fun, not something I feel that I have to, must, accomplish. I don't want it to become an obligation.

Having spent some time this past spring purging and re-packing my studio, work space, call-it-what-you-will room, I am thinking that a list of 12 things, one for each month, is much more do-able. It also means that I could commit (as much as I commit to anything) to working my way through all 12 before I say hello to age 60 13 months from now. I'm even open to having other-than-creative things on the list. Charlottesville Ten Miler, anyone?

Specific ideas? I discovered while re-orging that I have more wine labels and corks/stoppers than I thought. I also still have a large batch of papers collected on trips to Europe, Asia, and Australia. I have a box of things--spoons, eyeglass frames, bottle caps--collected on those same trips. I found my supply of sun-printing stuff. Somewhere in our garage is a someone-else's-garage-sale table loom I've never set up. Heck! I'm even open to obtaining any needed supplies and trying something completely new. If I'm going to do this, I just want to have the list of 12 developed by June 30.

Discuss.

A Is for Anniversary, Arctic, and Aurora

I wrote this yesterday aboard the M/S Midnatsol but am posting it from the Clarion Aurora Hotel in Tromso. Not much wireless connectivity in the Arctic Ocean. If the husband wants to nap when we get to Oslo tomorrow, I'll see about writing up the rest of the voyage.

Back to composing in Word. The husband cannot get an Internet connection even on one of the computers in the Internet café, so I might as well not even try. Given our distance from any real port at the moment, the lack of a connection isn’t surprising. I am writing this late Monday afternoon, and I expect that it will be Tuesday before I actually can post this. This may or may not help keep things in the proper time perspective.

Before I get to the theme of this post, I need to report a bit on yesterday morning and afternoon. The action (also starts with an A) didn’t really get going until evening. When we awoke, the ship was docked in Trondheim, a city we have visited several times in the summer. It was somewhat surprising how little snow there was and how not cold it was. That’s somewhat become one common thread on this trip. We passed on the excursion to the cathedral and at 10:30 welcomed the husband’s second cousin (who just turned 88) and her son (who is about our age) to the ship. We spent a quite wonderful 90 minutes catching up over coffee. There was plenty to talk about since our last visit was six years ago. Noon came too quickly, and we had to say farewell. We did promise, though, to come back in two years should someone be throwing a 90th birthday party for Ingrid.

Sailing out of Trondheim, we passed a shipyard and a quite interesting eight-sided lighthouse. 

As you can see, there’s not much land around the lighthouse, none in fact. 

All Norwegian lighthouses are now controlled automatically. Still, it was intriguing to imagine what life might have been like for this lighthouse’s keeper in the older days.

During the afternoon, we also went through the narrowest channel of the journey, a mere 42 meters from side to side. Oh, and there was an almost-right-angle turn in there as well. Unfortunately, I was unable to get a photo that illustrates just how close the rocks on each side were. There was nothing I could really work in to provide scale. Obviously, we did make it through, with added appreciation of the talents of the captain and crew.

Last evening, the parade of A’s started.  First were some sightings of the aurora, our first on this trip. There are no photographs to verify this because I didn’t even try to take any. Five years ago, in Iceland, I did and afterwards didn’t really feel as if I had watched the aurora. My attention had been centered on the tripod, the camera, the proper exposure time, and so on. This time, I wanted my attention on the experience.

The first sighting was in the evening, before most people had retired for the night. It was not a strong aurora—it never varied from green—but it lasted for quite a while. We watched on deck 6, one of two open-air decks until the bitter wind drove us in and up to deck 8’s floor-to-ceiling-high windows. After it had faded significantly, we headed to our cabin for bed. We had been warned that should the aurora appear during normal sleeping hours, there would be an announcement over the loudspeaker. That announcement came at 2:15. We quickly dressed and headed up to deck 6. In the rush, I had forgotten to pull my hair back or grab a hat, so the first while outside was frustrating not to mention dangerous. I really couldn’t see anything, and the deck was slippery in spots. I couldn’t get the hair to stay put even under my coat’s hood. Fortunately, the husband had worn a hat which he gave to me and used his jacket’s hood instead. It was still only a green aurora, but it seemed to be everywhere. We saw it to the right. We saw it to the left. We stepped out from under the eaves and saw it straight overhead. The husband is Canadian with numerous aurora sightings under his belt, and he said he’d never seen anything like it.

The husband has been monitoring the Norwegian aurora forecast and says that there is supposed to be active aurora both tonight and tomorrow night. That makes viewing it subject to Mother Nature’s weather inclinations. Right now—late afternoon—the sky is quite cloudy. We have learned that that means nothing. We shall just wait and see. We have tonight on the ship, at least once we return from our three-hour Viking excursion that includes dinner, and tomorrow night, on shore in Tromso. There is an “aurora safari” there if the conditions are favorable.

This morning, we crossed the Arctic Circle. There was a contest to see who could most closely predict the exact time of the crossing. Needless to say, one of us did not win that contest. The exact crossing time was 7:17.1 am, and both of us had entered times right before 7:00. Crossing the Circle is marked by passing a small sculpture of the world sitting on a very small island.

There is a larger version of this sculpture at the northernmost point of land, but we will be leaving the ship before it passes there. Various posters and pamphlets suggest that it might be possible to have your photograph taken underneath this sculpture, but perhaps those are just publicity shots.

The crossing was marked again mid-morning by the appearance of King Neptune.

He came—in peace—to baptize those of us crossing the Circle for the first time. Actually, “baptizing” is probably not the right term for having ice cubes and ice water poured down your back with your shirt having been pulled open at the back of the neck. The first person to get the treatment was the winner of the crossing time contest.

Her prize is in the left pocket of her coat. It is a Hurtigruten flag signed by the captain and various other people with the crossing time noted.

I am not sure why, perhaps they liked that in response to the question of “where are you from?” I replied, “Virginia,” but I got two scoops of ice and water down my back. It actually was not as bad as it sounds. Still, I welcomed what came next which was being handed a shotglass of liquor. It was quite warming and made removing the ice cubes a bit easier. A couple actually made it all the way through and ended up falling out of my pants legs. After all who wanted to be baptized and a few who didn’t had gotten the treatment, there was time to pose with King Neptune to mark the occasion. I took this as an opportunity to publicize the existence of SEAL Team Physical Training, the people with whom I work out when I am not hindered by a bum shoulder.

As for the last A, today is our 30^th wedding anniversary. This trip is our gift to each other, though I did cheat and bring along a card for the husband. It’s from a new Hallmark line and featured a Venn diagram of “you” and “me” circles with the intersection labelled as “the perfect amount of stupid.” I think that’s a descriptor we’ll remember, maybe for another 30 years. “The perfect amount of stupid” sums up the intersection of the husband’s rational and logical thinking with my flights of fancy—ooh! A shiny butterfly!—better than any other descriptor that pops to mind. It’s been a good 30 years, and here’s to 30 more.