Time marches on

 * I was going to take today as a rest day, but during the day I felt achy and uncomfortable and decided after I got home for the day to pull out the exercise DVD (of "dance aerobics" - mostly fairly low impact but a bit more than a half hour of being on your feet and moving, and some of the moves use your body weight to work against - like, I think it's called, isometrics?) Anyway, I had not done it in AGES - perhaps as much as a year - because it just seemed easier to put on one of my Pandora stations and push away on the cross-country ski exerciser.

But it's good to change up exercise - it was really sore at first to do it, and I can tell I used muscles I have not used as much. But by the end I felt better and I think, yes, I need to start mixing this back in to my routine, maybe twice a week to three times a week on the cross-country ski exerciser. I remember my abdomen seemed less squishy when I was doing the dvd more regularly (a lot of the exercises target the "core").

And it's a change. I do want to get back into better shape. They are offering pickleball in my town now and if I can ever make the time I would like to learn to play because it looks fun - I played tennis back in the day (high school) but I'm not sure my knees could handle full-on tennis these days; you stop too fast or pivot wrong and you blow out an ACL.

* Today was Pancake Day (the version of Mardi Gras closest to my heritage and background). So I made pancakes, using the small recipe from one of my cooking-for-one cookbooks (1 T oil, 1 T sugar, 1 egg, 1/4 cup milk, 1/2 cup flour, 3/4 teaspoon baking powder). I had some leftover blueberries so I put them in to get at least a little fruit in

 Tomorrow evening there's an Ash Wednesday service at church. I will probably go. I don't think I'm going to give anything up for Lent (optional in our denomination); I feel like the past couple years have been pretty darn hard, and I remember going - early in 2020 "I'll give up online shopping for Lent!" and then the pandemic hit and the ONLY way to get certain things was to buy them online, so. 

Maybe I try to fight a little against the despair that's crept into my psyche in the past couple years - or I make an active effort to knit more and be online a bit less. And if I knit more - well, maybe I could make items to give away, or that could go to raffles or whatever to support causes I support. 

* I did receive a couple gifts from friends. This first came from across the Atlantic and actually arrived a couple days before my birthday:

Sparkly yarn (I had been talking about wanting more sparkly sock yarn) and a pattern that was given away free with it, and a book of William Morris stickers. (Even better: the sock yarn is West Yorkshire Spinners, which is my new favorite yarn brand)

And then - well, this one had a bit of a journey, for a different reason. I saw that a UPS package was coming to me,but it took kind of a peripatetic route, and finally it looked like it would arrive yesterday. First they said "by 3:45 pm" but I knew better than that, then it said "by 7 pm" but I knew better even than that. 

But 9 pm rolled around, the truck on the "tracking map" was shown to be stationary for 30 minutes, and I debated going to bed. 

Then I got an e-mail: "Your package will arrive tomorrow." Okay, fine, but they maybe could have led off with that? They also claimed a "weather delay," which, lol, I took to mean "the package wasn't actually ON the truck today" because our weather here was FINE - it was in the 50s and didn't even rain. 

So I went to bed. But then, about midnight, I woke up to use the bathroom and checked the time on my phone (I can't see my alarm clock from my bed) and there was a notation: "A package has been delivered by UPS."

Yeah, apparently it came at about 11:15. I mean, I'm glad it came, but really, the guy didn't need to work that late, he could have just brought it today. But I did retrieve it, just so it would be safe (there are a couple roaming tomcats who like to mark things, and porch pirates are not unheard of, though a small flat package of books would be unlikely to attract attention)

It was two books from my Amazon wishlist:

As I said yesterday, I like knitting scarves because even when you're using a fancy stitch pattern, they're not HARD in the way that sweaters can be hard, so I should find some new interesting designs in there. And the second book is piano pieces from many of the Studio Ghibli movies - there's one I remember from  Spirited Away, for example. They're more complex than what I currently play but maybe if I work on them (especially at some future time when I have more time and energy) I can get them to work.