Yep!! It’s May already and at last, the sun is shining having failed to turn up for spring thus far. Spring is my favourite season of the year, but like the sun, I am guilty of being absent on parade this year for various reasons some of them even legitimate. That being said, progress has been made in some key areas one of which may be evident from the picture at the head of this blog but more of that later.
My attempts at leading a healthier lifestyle continue to yield mixed results although a definite plus in this respect is that I appear to have given up alcohol. This wasn’t intentional and started with my decision to quit for Stoptober last year to give my hard working organs a chance of some well deserved R&R. They appeared to have enjoyed this to the extent that it now feels rude to burden them with anything more than the odd zero percent beer on occasion, the quality of which, has improved considerably from that of earlier prototypes.
The down side, however, is that I seem to have developed an uncontrollable craving for sugar often skipping straight to dessert whenever I can get away with doing so. The struggle is real. It’s weird how even the most innocuous household items can take on the persona of cake when you can’t find an edible source of sugar at 1.am in the morning. This ironic effect of sobriety, in that I have never really possessed a sweet tooth until now, has meant that any advantage calorie wise has been negated by, and is directly connected to, the recent surge in the profits posted by Ben&Jerry. This has obviously had an adverse impact on my attempts to lose weight so I decided that other more drastic measures would need to be employed to help redress this.
Reluctantly I started walking this week. I say reluctantly, because whilst I try to enjoy exercise I just flippin’ don’t. I am in a lot of pain most of the time (yes weight loss will help to improve this) but the thought of making it worse before it gets better holds no particular appeal for me. Despite this distinct lack of enthusiasm for movement, I have managed to put together a series of steps that took me outside of the house and even past the car on the drive on two occasions this week. I intend to build on this achievement if only to stop the in app purchases on my pedometer recommending the services of various undertakers.
My intentions in respect of becoming more productive, I am pleased to report have been more successful, albeit this too occurred as a result of an non intentional set of circumstances. The death of my old laptop, which took with it all the stuff I should have saved and didn’t, meant that I was forced into a swift rewrite of my second book The Funny Thing About Being a Widow?-On A Dating Site. The discipline required to do this,okay you can stop laughing back there in the cheap seats, proved to be a good thing and my second book is finally out of the state of procrastination in which it has comfortably resided for longer than it should have.
This new volume will be released in June of this year on Amazon and the exact publication date will follow shortly on the Book Updates page here on this website and all the other usual social media ways of announcing such things.
As I seek to take full advantage of this unexpected productive streak, my third book in the Funny Widow series is already well underway. Charting my continuing journey through loss, reinvention and the negotiation of a new and different life as a result of both, this volume examines the subjects of re-marriage and retirement. Given that I couldn’t write a Recipe-Book with a straight face I am pleased to confirm that my emphasis remains firmly focused on the humour I find daily in both these situations.
Before I wrote my first book I was often advised to live in the moment but back then I had no idea what this meant. The moments leading up to me becoming a widow and learning how to live my life as one, in a way of my own choosing, could never be fully understood or appreciated by someone whose focus was always the future. As life continues to present its challenges I have learned, somewhat late in the day, that sometimes there are simply no solutions or answers available to meet those challenges in the way we would like.
I think that I am finally starting to see the value of all the moments that exist in the here and now as opposed to those that may or may not be found in the future. Who knows what tomorrow has in store, and whilst I have by no means abandoned my hopes and dreams for what I might find there, I no longer feel the need to orchestrate the minutiae of that as I once did. I wonder if this means I grew up at last?
But then again…maybe not!!
