Tea and a nap

I am not doing as well with the breathing as I had hoped, and so I am going to try some light exercise and then take a bit of a nap. There is still English Breakfast blend in the pot from this morning for me to reheat.

I did finally find out what sort of flowers the mystery plant produces.

White flower in the south side garden

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#WeekendCoffeeShare Sept. 2 : Balancing Act

Flower & Flower Fly

A lovely afternoon for coffee or tea. Outside, the grass is green and the late summer/autumn flowers are blooming. I had thought for a while that there would not be any, but adding organic material along the house on the south side finally brought results.

I am still enjoying my new electric water kettle and as a result drinking much more tea. I have discovered that buying good tea in bulk allows for sifting out the dust and using just the reasonably sized tea leaf. So, coffee choices are drip or Toddy coffee, both medium ground Folgers, and Oolong, Green, and English and Irish Breakfast tea blends. White cheddar and bread cheese for snacking. We have not been to the grocery store for a while, since the other of us has started repainting the house.

This past week, I don’t seem to have written much poetry. I will supply links for the few that I put in my Quilted Poetry blog.

• • Getting on with Getting On for the weekly Ronovan Writes Haiku poetry prompt
  • Nighttime reassurances from I know not where, written in the middle of the night, and
  • something poetic, but different: Excerpts from Letters, some paragraphs from letters that my father wrote to Mother while they were stationed at different posts/assignments during World War II. Mom was in the Navy, and Dad in the Army, but both in the Pacific Theater. They married a few months before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

I ended the week by giving in and taking a dose of Albuterol, last night, because I found I was not well enough to be exercising. Breathing was bad, and congestion was beginning. The air was free of smoke (but not pollen) during a lot of intervals, during which I snuck outside with my camera to take photographs of the flowers and insects. (Some of them are on Facebook and posted as Public, although most have limited audience limitations. my url over there is ewbennefeld, preceded by the facebook dot com / ).

This morning, while the Scampers were exploring the back yard, I took a few pictures. Thanks to the mid-night thunderstorm (0.6″), many flowers that were growing vertically are now approximately horizontal…but still blooming and not lacking moisture.

It seems as though my day has started up, again. I hope you are having a wonderful weekend! I look forward to visiting, finding out what you are enjoying, looking forward to…whatever is important to you! Or just nattering, a bit.

Thanks to Allison, once again, for hosting the #WeekendCoffeeShare. Her post and the Links button can be found on her web site at EclecticAli at WordPress.com.

Best wishes!
Lizl

No tea, tonight

I have stayed up far too long, again, playing with the computers. Discovered a photo file I was looking for in the iPhone archive in the Cloud. Glad that I at least knew what date the photo was taken.

My blood oxygen level (SpO₂) is 96%, but my pulse is even lower than normal (for me) at 56 bpm. No fever, but the allergic reactions are … annoying.

As a late supper, I had 114g of plain greek yogurt with 100g of thawed, sliced strawberries. My afternoon snack was 10g of very dark chocolate and a cup of Toddy coffee made with whole milk. I have been testing my blood glucose fairly closely while having allergy and sleep problems. While I got in 13 miles on the exercise bike, today (I’m figuring today as Wednesday, late), it was a mile short of Tuesday’s pace.

I don’t know if taking a nap in the late afternoon is helpful or irrelevant.

Woke up in the night (early Wednesday morning) and wrote a poem in response to the dream I was in. That was interesting. I know where it comes from. Similar themes have popped up in my writing, over the years.

Too late to get into it, tonight, but I remember taking a do-it-yourself classic depression inventory that had the most fascinating things to say about my thoughts on life. Huh!

I’m out of here. If I don’t get to sleep, tonight, I don’t get to wake up in the morning.

Hope you’re having sweet dreams!

Lizl

 

 

Morning Tea

Time for Tea

Nearby neighbors across the back fence make their telephone calls outside their back door. I suspect that they’ve siding on the house that interferes with telephone reception. Since they talk loudly, I have assumed that they are hard of hearing. I believe that they now have a speaker phone, because I was able to hear both sides of the conversation. Clearly and at length. Topic? Clogged drain pipes and what one can, should and should not do to clear them.

I am happy that when I am exercising in the gazebo with the windows closed, much of the neighborhood noise is shut out.

I must remember to keep my own voice and speaker volumes down while using my cell phone outdoors. ::sigh::

 

Rainy Morning

One A.M. and Oolong Tea

Most Monday mornings, the other of us gets up early to go off for a couple hours of volunteer work. I got to sleep in, since he lets the dogs out and then feeds them before he leaves. And after my five o’clock meal, when the dogs have their supper, I lay down for a short nap that lasted nearly three hours. And so I am up, still, and drinking “Himalayan Shilla” oolong tea.

The day was rainy with intermittent breaks between rain showers and thunderstorms. I managed to get in four miles on the exercise bike after my five o’clock meal, and then again after I awoke, just before nine-thirty, another four miles while reading a few more chapters in Imager’s Battalion, by L. E. Modesitt, Jr. The Scampers came out into the gazebo with me and lay about on the quilt on the floor, and I ran the space heater. It’s quite cool outside, these days.

I do not think that this is one of the years when my wildflower garden will continue to produce flowers into November. Or, possibly, not into October, either. I didn’t take a lot of photographs, today, although some nice ones of hoverflies on hawk-weed and wild flax flowers and a grasshopper sitting on the fence.

I also got my not-a-haiku poem written for the weekly Ronovan Writes Haiku poetry challenge.  The prompt words were hero and coward. It is rare that I get a poem written to his prompts on the day the prompt is posted. A couple words I will change, once I think about it, for aesthetic reasons, but I’m pleased with the general tenor of the verse.

(For the most part, I post those prompt responses at QuiltedPoetry dot Net. A lot of my poetry also lands on TheWrittenWord dot Net, which was my business domain until I retired at the end of 2012, except for finishing up with long-term clients and projects.)

I think I can get to sleep, now. Leaving you with a photograph from September of last year, when we enjoyed an extra hatch of Painted Lady butterflies that hung around my wildflower garden and the entire back yard for weeks.

Dining at the Dandelion

Good night, and best wishes for the week!

Lizl