Pleasant moments...

Because I would have had to wait too long for an appointment with my regular hairdresser, I made one at a new salon that is also just a few minutes away from here. I called yesterday and had an appointment this morning. It is a brand spanking new hair salon and I was eager to try it out after having gone to the old one for 15 years. I do like a routine, but at the same time, I am more than ready to sometimes try something new and I felt that this was the time for it.

 

The young woman who cut my hair didn't really ask me how I wanted it cut, but made a suggestion that sounded good to me, and she added that she could always alter my hair if I was not completely happy with it. She then proceeded to give me an almost perfect haircut and really took her time doing it. When she was done, she asked me if I was happy, and I told her I wanted a bit more off the top, which she did. And then my hair was perfect.

 

I am glad I found a new person to cut my hair and from now on I will always have her do it. I also liked her sparkly personality and the way she looked so perfectly put together. The fact that she was so young added an extra pleasant dimension to it. That does help you get another point of view on life and other contents to your conversation. Both she and the other young woman in the salon are middle-eastern and that makes it extra interesting. I am always ready to be exposed to a bit of another culture.

 

I've got such easy hair now. It hasn't been this short in ages. I do want to wash it with the silver shampoo and get it a bit lighter, but that is something I will do this weekend when I have time to let it sit in my hair for a while.

 

Tomorrow morning I have to go to Tai Chi, which is in the same neighborhood the Exfactor lives in, so I will have coffee at his place afterwards. I told him I would only come if he still had windmill cookies and he assured me that he did. I can easily eat 4 or 5 of them and they do cheer me up. In the afternoon, I have to do the grocery shopping and before I go to sleep tonight, I will make a very detailed shopping list. This week I do have to stay under the budget. If I live very carefully, I will eek by this month. There is the sport in that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With a cat on my lap...



Gandhi has been trained to sit quietly on my lap when I sit behind the computer and to not touch the keyboard. This took a couple of efforts, but she caught on after a while and now behaves very well. She likes sitting on my lap so very much, that she is willing to go along with the program and also waits for me patiently to come back when I have to get up to get something to drink. In her advanced age, she is behaving more and more like a very settled cat, but more than anything, seeks out my company all the time. We have been doing an awful lot of bonding lately and even Tyke has come to accept it and does not get jealous. Gandhi and I must be having our golden years together.

 

I finished the book that I was reading at night before I went to sleep and I must say that it took me long enough. For fun, I am reading the footnotes in the back of it, but they make me sleepy quickly and I have another book ready to read. It is a book from the San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts and represents a selection of their collection. I got the book at the museum store when I was visiting it about two decades ago. I used to go to museums a lot and as a rule bought something from whatever shop there was. I can't afford to do that anymore.

 

I don't want to read a novel with a plotline and made up characters and I am going to stick to non fiction for now. Whatever is factual will do and I hope I have enough books like that on my bookcase. I may have to resort to borrowing reading material from the Exfactor now that I will be visiting him regularly, or have him bring books home for me from the library, where he is almost every day to read the newspapers. I can look up whatever interests me on the website and have him get it. That way I won't have to pay for a library card.

 

I am becoming more interested in reading, but for right now, mostly as a way of gathering and taking in information. I don't feel the need so much to become lost in a made up story about the fictional lives of other people. I learned a lot from reading 'A short history of nearly everything' and I hope to read more books like it. I wonder if having better glasses also makes a difference and having the book close to my face also does. And of course, having good enough light from the lamp on the nightstand. I suppose all these little things add up.

 

I wear my glasses inside the apartment and even when I do the dishes, so I know they get clean and sparkling, but as soon as I have to go outside I take the glasses off. I am too vain to be seen with them on, especially with my hair cut the way it is now. I have a hair appointment in the morning and I am going to have it cut quite a bit shorter because it is too long now and I literally can't do a thing with it. I know women always say that, but it is true in my case. I may have a lot of hair, but it is very straight and has no body, so it just hangs there doing nothing for me whatsoever.

 

I suppose I will go to bed now and look forward to a good night's sleep. Gandhi has deserted me, but she will show up again as soon as I have parked myself in bed with my book and my glass of lemonade.  

 

 

No matter how you look at it.

Having to decide what is important to blog about, I realize lots of things are not, although I very often, if not always, blog about the most unimportant details of my life. Today those seem not to matter and I want to talk about other things that go a bit deeper than that, the only problem is that I have to go deep inside of me to get to those subject matters. I do care deeply about a lot of things, but as a rule do not discuss them on this blog, which I try to keep as lighthearted and apolitical as possible. It seems to me that most bloggers do and do not discuss their more controversial points of views on their blogs.

 

You must know by now that I am a western European socialist and a humanist who does have a longing for some Higher Power. Not all of my opinions are cast in concrete and I realize there are in life lots of gray areas that we have to move in, in which nothing is written in black and white. The older I get, the more aware of that I am. But it is also true that with my advancing age, I do become more sure of some of my opinions, but do not want to force them on other people or convert anyone to them.

 

I realize that life is a process of gathering experience and that everyone has to go through that at their own speed. It is something that you can not force and you hope that everyone has enough smarts to learn from their lessons and gain wisdom quickly and not like I did by stubbing my toe on the same stone over and over again. I think you have to repeatedly go through the same experience until you have learned from it, and the moment that dawns on you, you have. You can't be aware of this in a superficial, laughing sort of way, but you have to have a real awakening and have a light bulb go on above your head. You have to have your 'eureka' moment.

 

In the end, it is possible that politically and socially and ideologically, you return to those values you had in your late teens or early 20's, but that they are more underbuilt and sophisticated now. Don't reject and belittle them. You probably had a very pure and honest point of view on the world when you were that age. Whatever sense of justice and injustice you had, was probably the right one.

 

Another thing you will come back to are the things you instinctively knew to be right and wrong when you were a child, because children can't be bamboozled. They have very strong instincts and they need those for survival, and it is only the adults around us that teach us to suppress and ignore them. Doing this is what gets us all into trouble and we learn to accept the unacceptable. We stop being indignant when we have every right to be.

 

I sign lots of petitions on line, and they all have to do with finding peaceful solutions to explosive conflicts, and for the preservation of endangered animals and natural habitats. I support Amnesty International and Greenpeace and the Dutch Environmental Defensive Group. If I run into a petition that I think is worthwhile signing, I do, and I don't do it anonymously like some people do. I don't have the money, but I do have my name to add to the cause. When I was 15, I marched against the war in Vietnam, and I suppose I would do that all over again. 

and don't forget the yoga cushion!

Much to my disgust, I am awake at a time when I was planning on being asleep, but you know about well laid plans. Well, I know there is some sort of saying about them, but I can't for the life of me remember what it is now. I don't really mind being up and if I use my imagination a little bit, I could even say that it is early in the morning and that any minute now, somewhere in the countryside, a rooster is going to crow. It is just not going to be within my hearing distance, which is a bit of a shame. It would have been the perfect wake up call for me.

 

It's a shame that I can't say, "I'll sleep until the crowing rooster wakes me up," and then very soundly do so. Maybe I have to move to a farm and sleep every night in a fresh stack of hay.

 

After my yoga class this morning, I am going to visit the Exfactor for the first time at his place. I have never been there before, because I never had reason to be in his neck of the woods and in my imagination, he lived at the end of the civilized world. I didn't realize how relatively close his house is to my apartment and had never really looked it up on the map. Both my yoga class and the tai chi class are very close to where he lives, so I can pop in for a cup of coffee often, but I will always give him ample warning so he can tidy up.

 

I am undecided if I am actually going to join the walking group on Thursdays at all and I heard somewhere yesterday, that if you have pain in your joints, it is better for your whole body to ride a bike than it is to walk. I am finding out that having two activities to go to, besides my usual commitments, is enough for me to handle and that I may not want to take on more. I think what I really have to do, is see how I feel about it this Thursday morning, and if the weather is good, decide then. I will have to let my instincts guide me because they will know best. I do have to trust myself to make the right decision. The last time I looked, I was still in charge.

 

As is usual, I am sitting here with a huge pain in my knee and I will have to take a paracetamol and stop sitting behind the computer. The advantage of getting up and moving about is, that I will get chores done before I have to go to yoga.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A humdinger of a storm...

The worst of the storm seems to be over now, although the wind is still pummeling the apartment building. We only had code orange here in the south east, the rest of the country had code red. A woman in Amsterdam got killed when a tree got blown over on top of her as she walked down the Heerengracht. The man who walked beside her got wounded. I think she is the only casualty from the winds that had gusts of 135 km per hour. Lots of trees got blown over onto roads and rail tracks and roofs of houses. Roofs of houses got blown off too. Train traffic is stalled and European flights from Schiphol were cancelled.

 

The storm turned into a hurricane when it got to the island of Vlieland. I don't yet know what damage it did there. Here in the neighborhood lots of tree branches were blown down. It was a challenge to walk in, but lots of fun too. Whenever I turned a corner, the wind whipped around me and tried to push me back into another direction. I wasn't afraid at any time, and I think I had no need to be. I didn't actually think of it.

 

I have no hairdo left to speak of, and I think it's not important today. Any old hairdo will do. I just run my fingers through my hair when I come home from my walk with Tyke and consider that good enough until I go out next. It's a good thing I have short hair. You mustn't get any sort of idea that you are Farah Dibah, because that will only work if you are ensconced in a palace in Persia and protected from the elements in the loving embrace of the Shah. And we all know how that fairytale ended.

 

Tyke sat around staring at the window, trying to figure out what all that noise was about. It did last an awfully long time. He is only used to relatively short thunderstorms. I think the fact that he is so much at ease now must mean the storm has died down, and it is true that when I look outside, I do see that the trees are not shaking back and forth anymore. They are merely gently moving around. That means I can take him for a walk without being bundled up like an Eskimo. We'll go see how many leaves are left on the trees. The majority will have gotten blown of, I am sure. I will have to kick some around.  

 

  

 

 

Another one bites the dust...

Those of you who live in Britain will know what sort of weather we are having here and will understand why I didn't get on my bike this morning to go to the service at the St. Jan's Church. It certainly was stormy and when I took Tyke for a walk, I almost got blown off my feet. This morning it was also raining and I did not feel much like getting exposed to the elements. I will try again next Sunday, when hopefully Mother Nature will be looking on us more kindly.

 

I had not planned on being home this morning and had to find something to do to fill up my time. As it was, I had slept very well all night, but I had gone to bed at a reasonable hour and woken up early because we had set the clocks back one hour. I must say that I liked the way I felt when I woke up and decided I was done sleeping. I made sure I checked with myself and there was no doubt about it. I looked forward to my cups of coffee very much, but I did not sit there with an addled mind like I do when I have been interrupted in my sleep.

 

I now see how important it is to not force myself to stay up after I have gone to the toilet late at night. I always thought that I would be unable to go back to sleep immediately when I'd gone back to bed, but I need not have worried at all, because I do right away the moment I put my head down on the pillow. Tyke patiently waits for me to wake up in the morning and then scoots up from the bottom end of the bed to greet me. He does pin me down beneath the duvet so I can't get up and I have to forcibly remove him. He then very cozily goes back to sleep while I get up and he doesn't show up in the living room until an hour later.

 

Luckily, I did have a few chores to do and I did them mindfully, without the least bit of haste. It seems to me that I have been doing laundry more often, but then again, I have been looking for reasons to. It's a chore I enjoy doing because I like nothing better than wearing clean clothes and sleeping between clean sheets.

 

Doing the dishes is a very simple thing because I have the same ones every day and it has become a routine job. I don't have to think about it while I do them and they only take minutes. I do enjoy having my hands in the warm water and I think this is therapeutic for my joints. I do wish I had a bathtub because soaking in very warm water would be therapeutic for my whole body. Taking a shower is just not the same thing.

 

I take short naps in the afternoon after lunch and they are hardly worth calling naps. All I basically do is nod off over my book for half an hour or so and get a sore wrist from having leaned on my hand with my chin. It almost speaks for itself that I am somewhat grumpy when I get up and do not like myself, but the thing to remember is to drink a cup of coffee and those negative feelings will disappear as snow for the sun. I don't know if other people feel this way when they wake up from a nap, but it is a terrible thing and sometimes I just want to be dead. Thank god for caffeine.

 

While I am writing this, Gandhi is sitting on my lap, which is fine as long as she stays away from the keyboard and I think that is becoming clear to her. I had to push her away from it a few times and then she felt rejected, so she is doing her best not to be a bother now. Cats can be very stubborn, but they do learn things if you are persistent.