The joy of a glorious sunset

I have had a fascination with sunrises and sunsets for much of my adult life. Maybe it stems from being a painter in my younger years, maybe it's the love of nature instilled in me as a child or maybe it's just because they're pretty. Lately, I have taken quite a few pictures of the sunset near where I live. A local company even asked to use this matted one on its website.

I never consciously think "Oh, it's about time for sunset; let me go see." What happens is that I will be walking from one part of my condo to the other and I'll catch a glimpse of color out of a window. I stop long enough to think about whether I'm wearing appropriate clothing to go outside in (because I often sit around the house in garb that is not appropriate to go outside in), then grab the camera and run out the door. Unfortunately, by the time I clear my building and get far enough down the street to get a good shot, most of the light and the best color of the sunset is gone, but I've still been able to get some nice shots.

Back when I was a regular visitor to this area and not yet a resident, I used to love to go to Lake Gerar (what I call "the pond") and write poetry or journal. For years, my favorite sunset picture was this one that I took there. The thing I loved about the pond is that it, though it was just steps from the beach, while you were sitting there soaking up the peace of the place, it felt like some sort of private retreat.

This one was taken from the patio of my apartment in Alexandria, VA where I lived for many years. I still get a little homesick when I see that skyline--I saw it daily for 32 years!

The one on the right was taken on Amelia Island in Florida at the fishing pier near Brett's Waterway Cafe, an excellent restaurant where I had my birthday dinner in 2006.

I am a big fan of the website Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/), a free photo-sharing website. You can go on there and search for just about any thing or any place in the world and find that someone has taken pictures of it. There are some amazingly talented photographers on Flickr. However, one trend in photography that I see there a lot which saddens me is all the digital trickery that is performed on photographs to make them look extra special, extra vivid, extra colorful, etc. To me, they end up looking surreal and, while they are often beautiful, they also look fake. I hate to get all sappy here, but I think God does a pretty good job of making sunsets (and just about everything else) beautiful without having to fiddle with it. As a result, none of my sunset photos are digitally enhanced in any way. I like to remember the real thing--the way I saw it with my own eyes. That's pretty special all by itself.

The joy of new experiences

While I was a big fan of putt-putt golf in my younger years, I never had a desire to play "real" golf; I thought that the only way to do that was to play on an expensive regulation 18-hole course where real golfers would be hurling curses at a totally green newbie like myself. A friend who is newly and passionately into golf told me about a Par 3 course near me that would be a great introduction to golfing. A par 3 course is a much easier, and smaller, course than those courses you see Tiger playing on TV. The cost is much more reasonable than a big course (this one was $13 per person), and they even had Sheri-sized clubs I could use. I thought "Why not? Aren't retired people supposed to golf?" :)


As with any new experience, there is a learning curve. Those first several holes, I was maxing out on strokes for every hole and not coming anywhere near par 3. My ball didn't even catch air until maybe the third or fourth tee--it's kind of hard to get to the green if you can't get your ball up in the air. :) I tend to be a perfectionist, so of course I was grumbling at myself every time my ball veered off course (though I only hit the trees once and never lost a ball). Because of my putt-putt history (though it's well in the past), I was generally better at putting than driving.

The experience reminded me of learning to bowl. I love to bowl, but I can be quite bad at it. I have a congenital bone defect in my arms that causes them to be off-angle at the elbow. It's not something you'd notice to look at me, but can be a challenge for me in carrying heavy objects or in sports or skills that require precision with your arms--like bowling, golf or billiards.

When I learned to bowl, I threw gutterball after gutterball until I learned to angle my body in a way that compensated for my "crooked" throwing arm. I started going through the same process the day I played golf for the first time, but it will take several more tries at golfing before I find "the sweet spot"--the right place to stand to get the ball to go where *I* want it to go.

Toward the end of the 9 holes (I figured 9 was enough for my first time!), I was really enjoying it and had improved in strokes. Did I ever get a par 3 in 9 holes? Hell, no! But I did get a couple of par 5s...and I was quite happy with that for my first time. It was good exercise and the course grounds are lovely (and thankfully shadier than most courses). I really enjoyed the experience and expect to be trying it again.

The joy of nesting

Before you get the wrong idea (oops, some of you already have), this has nothing to do with babies ("I don't know nothin' bout birthin' no babies, Miss Scarlett!"). People, please! :) When I say nesting, I mean making your house a home--filling it with things that you love, painting it, decorating it, mixing old things with new things--making it "you."

Until I moved into my current home this January, I had lived in rental apartments my entire life--I even grew up in one. I think that many folks are so driven to own their own home in early adulthood because they grew up in a house and they think of it as something you are supposed to do when you grow up. It's not that I wouldn't have liked to have owned a home at a younger age; but being single and living in a major metropolitan area where real estate was mind-blowingly expensive, a home that I would want and where I would want to live just was not within my financial grasp, even though I made a pretty good living.

Being a rule-following kind of gal, when my apartment lease said "No painting.", I didn't paint. Hence, my blog post on Labor Day about learning to paint a wall at age 55. A friend asked me "Why do you want to paint your bedroom? Do you not like white walls?" And my answer is that I forcibly lived with white walls my entire adult life; and, now that I own my own home and I can do with it what I damned well please (within limits), I want something other than white walls.

To update those who read that Labor Day post (The joy of independence), I did ask my friends for help in finishing the bedroom painting and it is now done. Mike is so experienced that he painted the whole darned room (2 coats) in the time it took me to tape, trim and paint just the alcove portion of the room (1 coat). I still helped--well, he may not have thought of it as helping, to be absolutely honest, but I wanted to be a part of the experience. I cut in around all the switchplates and did some of the painting around windows/doors/corners.

So once the bedroom paint was dry, I put all the furniture back, hung some new art and mirrors and did some decorating. Below is what the "new" bedroom looks like. Yea, I know, it still sorta looks like white walls, but it isn't. The color didn't come out exactly as shown on the paint card, but at least it's warmer than white walls. I was going for a light-but-rich cream color. It looks like that in some light, but in other light has more of a pink undertone to it.







I have been furnishing and decorating my place on and off for nearly the entire 8 months that I've lived here. It has been a true pleasure and so much fun. I watch for the sales and I do a little bit at a time to keep the financial expenditures under control (I'm living on a pension now, after all). This recent nesting process reminds me how passionate I was about interior design/ decorating in my 20s, when I got one of those mail order degrees in the subject. I never had the confidence at that time to actually get a job doing it, or strike out on my own doing it, but now I'm thinking "Hey...I'm not so bad at this."

Sometimes our passion for something and our confidence to take it somewhere don't coincide at the same time in our life. That's okay. All I know is that I'm having a ball doing it now!

To quote my friend Pam, "Nests are best!" Happy nesting from my nest to yours (with apologies to Paula Deen).

The joy of independence

My 75-year-old mother has come to the realization that she shouldn’t do everything for herself (like being up on a tall ladder washing her house). Being that my siblings and I live hundreds of miles away, the fact that she has acknowledged the need for occasional assistance is of great comfort to us.

I understand my mother’s desire to be independent, though, because I am the same way. Like my mother, I have lived alone for many years; until just the past few years, I rarely asked for help with anything, even though I am barely 4’6”and am not physically able to move, carry or reach a lot of things by myself.

When I was in my 20s and 30s, I refused to ask for help—I was Miss Independence. I did things by myself that I shouldn’t have done—things that my back aches just thinking about now. I remember buying my first microwave (back when they were new technology and half the size of my tiny kitchen). I moved that box (which was much larger than the microwave due to the packaging) from the car, up the stairs, into and through my apartment, unpacked it, and then hefted it up onto the kitchen counter. That could have been accomplished in 5 minutes if I'd asked for help; but it took me forever to go one painstaking inch at a time because the box was not only very heavy but way beyond the reach of my tiny arms to carry.

This past Monday—Labor Day, appropriately—Miss Independence re-emerged. I decided it was time that I learn to paint—walls. I have two close friends who live nearby and are very good at interior painting; one of them, in fact, painted my master bath for me. But I wanted to see if I could do this by myself. Armed with an 8-foot ladder for my 9-foot ceilings, I began in a small alcove that leads to the bathroom. I did all the taping first and then the edging and then the painting. It took me hours just to do the alcove, esp. since the paint roller pan only fit my ladder in a few locations, so I couldn't move it to the level where I was painting and had to reach through the ladder to load my roller/brush. When I finally descended the ladder for the last of what felt like hundreds of times that day, my feet ached horribly, my neck was stiff and I was spent.

The difference between Miss Independence at 25 and at 55 is that the 55-year-old can admit when she’s beat. I’m going to ask my friends for their help to paint the rest of the bedroom. Did I fail? Oh no. The joy inside me when I lay in bed Monday night looking at the newly-painted alcove was so full-to-bursting that it far overcomes any feeling of failure. Miss Independence just wanted to see if she could do it—and she did. The fact that she didn’t do it all by herself is of no importance. The fact that she tried when she was afraid to try (and fail) is huge.