Aging, Injuries, Yearning, and Skunks

I haven't been posting much here lately (or on any social media platform) because I've been struggling with life of late. I'm finding parenting teenagers to be more challenging than the younger years. The thing is, I have very clear memories of the way I felt at that age, so I fully understand where my kids are coming from. But that doesn't change the fact that it's extremely frustrating to know what is best for my children and have them refuse to hear me. I want to be a good mother, but feel like I frequently fall short of that goal, so I've been feeling pretty low. But I'm working on it, and trying to remember that I need to be a good role model so I have to overcome those feelings.

I still haven't finished losing the last 5 - 6 pounds that I need to shed in order to reach my final goal weight, but the good news is that I haven't put any weight back on in the interim. The team of co-workers that worked together to lose the weight is about ready to do a final push, so hopefully it'll take less than a month to lose those last few pounds once I get serious again.

I had a fitness goal that I thought would really help to keep me motivated. My cousin and his family come out to visit us every summer, and my cousin's wife asked me to run in a 4-mile race with her in August. I was excited to bump up my training for it and have it as a new goal...until I got shin splints!! I've never had them before, and am feeling really old now. It's been slow to heal, I think primarily because it's my left leg and I'm an idiot and drive a manual transmission vehicle. When I picked out my truck I thought it would be so fun to drive (and it is) and that it would be a good skill to teach my kids. But my daughter has zero interest so just isn't motivated to learn to drive it. I think if she was in an emergency she could do it, but she's not smooth because she doesn't want to drive it very often. So the upshot is that I made a frivolous choice and now I get to pay for it. Sigh...

This morning I went on a walk/jog (since I can't run right now) and desperately wished I had my camera and tripod with me. The eastern sky was just beautiful with the sliver of the moon and Venus lighting up the morning. I knew there was no point in trying to capture it with my cell phone because it would have just been blurs of light against a dark background. I was motivated to move pretty quickly though when I was almost home. I was jogging down the path in the final 100 feet to my house when I heard a sound and a noticed a slight movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked and realized I was rapidly approaching a skunk just off the path who was looking pretty bristly and nervous. I turned around and ran back up the path at a very good clip and took the long way home. Since this is now the third time I've seen the skunk this summer, I think I may need to run to Costco and stock up on tomato juice just in case.

Old Dogs and New Tricks

I’m going to be 41 years old in less than one month. I graduated from high school in 1992. We had a computer at home the entire time I was growing up since my dad worked as an aerospace engineer. My elementary school had a computer lab filled with Apple IIe computers. I took a class in computer programming while I was in junior high (yes, this was before it was called middle school). Yet despite all of this, I still learned how to type on a typewriter at the same school where I learned computer programming.

All of this is to set up the background for what I’m about to say. I’ve been typing incorrectly since I learned how to type back when I was 12 or 13. Remember how I said I learned to type on a typewriter? Well the convention then was to double space at the end of a sentence. So that is how I learned it, and that is how I’ve been doing it out of habit for about 28 years. I’ve read the articles that say it’s important to teach oneself to stop double-spacing because it can lead to age discrimination. But I just thought, meh, it just doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to me. Plus, I’ve got a fairly full schedule and being able to type quickly helps. I would actually have to slow down my typing in order to retrain myself to use a single space. Then I read this article: If you type two spaces after a period, you're doing it wrong.

I tend to want to follow style manuals because they provide consistency. So if most style guides today recommend a single space following a period, then I guess it’s time to slow myself down and type properly. In typing this, I’ve realized that it’s actually not too hard and doesn’t slow me down too much if I just pay attention. Hopefully it will quickly become a new habit and I can stop thinking about it though, because I definitely feel myself wanting to hit that space bar a second time. Now we'll have to see how many times I have to use the find and replace function to fix a period with 2 spaces (or a question mark or exclamation mark.)

When I was a teenager I used to think that older adults were so whiny and melodramatic about how much things had changed since they were young. Now I understand that when you’ve spent most of your life doing something a certain way, it really is difficult to change it. It’s official now; I’ve become just like my mother and her friends!

I had to share some photos of the winter clouds this morning as they were simply beautiful.

Just before sunrise

Just after sunrise