What day is today?

Posted on January 2, 2019 by

Happy New Year (on whatever date you celebrate). Here’s hoping your celebration was — or will be — filled with joy, peace and gratitude for waking up to another year.

Pope responsible for the calendar most of countries use (Wikimedia Commons {PD-US}

When I began this post, the subject was the calendar I’m creating for 2019. I didn’t intend to write about calendars in general, but as a result of several fascinating pieces I read about the origins of our current calendar, I changed my plan.

In the U. S. and most other countries, we’ve adopted the calendar that runs from January through December with alternating 30 and 31 days except in February, but in early Roman civilization — from which ours came — calendars had too many or two few dates.

Early Romans used a 355-day calendar. Astronomers working for Julius Cesar modified this in 46 AD and it was used — though not without confusion — for more than 1500 years.

But by the 1570’s the Roman ]– or Julian — needed replacing, because “it was a messy hodgepodge, with extra days tacked on in February every now and again…” Apparently politics also added chaos to the calendar. “Since the pontifices were often politicians, and because a Roman magistrate’s term of office corresponded with a calendar year, this power was prone to abuse: a pontifex could lengthen a year in which he or one of his political allies was in office, or refuse to lengthen one in which his opponents were in power.”

The ancients knew that the year was slightly longer than 365 days. By the 1570’s the problem caused by the average year adding up to 365+ days created a calendar that didn’t match the seasons. Pope Gregory commissioned a group to set up a replacement calendar, which involved moving the first day of the year from March 25 to January 1 to better fit the seasons. As someone said, at the rate the days were changing, in time they’d  be reaping before they sowed.

In 1582, the Pope also had to remove 10 days from the calendar — a one-time effort — to make up for all those partial days that added up to one full day every four years. He snatched the days from October.

Not all countries responded to the new calendar with enthusiasm. Catholic countries adopted it the same year it was born. The Protestant countries didn’t want a Catholic pope forcing them to change their calendars. And for various reasons related to their own religious calendars, five countries waited until the twentieth century to adopt it.

This means that most of the world celebrates New Years on January 1, but not all.  In 2019 the Chinese New Year will take place on February 5, in Iran on March 21 and in several southern Indian states on April 6.

In the contemporary world, our calendars come in different forms in paper and digital. They are less useful however to retirees. Without a work schedule we still have to ask, “Is this Monday?”

 

 

 

 

Posted in aging, changes after retirement, current events/themes | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Preparing for Christmas– a full-time job

Posted on December 21, 2018 by

It’s been a month since I last blogged, though not since I last wrote.  My November goal was to complete my first draft of my second novel. (When I say this to friends they always ask what happened to the first novel.  My answer: It reads like a first novel and it’s living in the cloud — or floating in the clouds — where no one else can see it.)

As soon as I met my writing goal, I began to consider Christmas preparations, which had not been on my things-to-do list for several years. Instead, my husband and I had chosen to escape the chaos of shopping malls, and the temptations of parties serving so much rich food that eventually drove us to the shopping malls to buy larger-sized clothing.

What could be more relaxing, we asked, than a December drive through blinding snow and ice storms, while facing the threat of closed mountain passes to reach quiet, snow-carpeted central Washington and X-country ski for a week?

After several years of spending a lot of money so that in addition to the terrifying drive we could awaken to seven degree mornings and ski in 19 degree temperatures, this year we decided to cocoon in our house and get our exercise at the local Y. We have little family left and none close by, so face no pressure to buy gifts for people we don’t know or fears of dinners where conversations begin with, “That President sure is doing a great job.”

However, now that we’ve gotten back into the holiday mode without family, we’ve rediscovered how much work is involved. Finding a tree with a small enough trunk that didn’t require a forklift to move it and thus avoid buying a Christmas tree stand large enough to hold an elephant’s leg was an early challenge.

Then came the letter and card crisis.  Normally we write a letter, but I couldn’t think of anything to say this year and wrote one anyway. Then I decided to make a few cards for friends who had sent them to us.  Hours and many mistakes later, the thrill of sending handmade cards was waning, especially since they looked just like cards one might get from a young grandchild, perhaps a toddler. Yesterday, we bought cards, a little late in the season, but very presentable. But now we have run out of stamps.  Maybe if we get to the post office before it opens, and before people are lugging in boxes the size of a refrigerator and the postal worker tells them they have wrapped them improperly.

This year, another challenge involved baking.  A pie for this Christmas party, different cakes for others and now one on order for New Year’s. We never had to bake on our ski trips.

The gifts were the one easy part. We bought electronics for ourselves and books for everyone else.

Perhaps next year we should go somewhere warm, some place where they’ve never heard of Christmas, though a friend is blogging from the Middle East and posting photos of Christmas trees from Abu Dhabi.

Posted in current events/themes, personal reflections | 5 Comments

Spanish and the new me

Posted on November 20, 2018 by

Since returning from Europe I haven’t blogged. First came jet lag, then the cold and cough, and then all the other activities that make up an ordinary life, but don’t always inspire me to write. Three weeks passed, and friends tired of asking me what was my favorite part of the vacation, probably because my answers were as exciting as a summary of a trip to the dentist.  Ultimately, I pieced together different experiences and realized what made our two weeks in Seville special for me, namely, making connections with Spaniards. This means I have a couple more Spain blogs in me.

There’s something wonderful about knowing a language that’s not your own, even if you don’t know it perfectly. When you speak the other language you become someone else. What a shock to meet the new me shortly after take-off on the plane from Amsterdam to Seville.

I am only outgoing with people I know.  I rarely talk to strangers on an airplane. (An exception occurred when I sat by a white-bearded man on a plane to Honolulu, who was a professional Santa Claus. He even had a business card to prove it.)  On the flight to Spain I sat next to two men comparing the length of their thumbnails, which was all it took to get the conversation flowing between them. (My poor husband was stuck alone in the back row because we didn’t ask for seat assignments quickly enough.)

Right way I knew the secret club the men belonged to. But that doesn’t explain why I didn’t open my book and ignore them as I would normally. Instead, I leaned over and said, “Do you both play flamenco?”

They smiled and said yes. One man was Spanish and the other Dutch. The latter spoke fluent Spanish, and the former spoke little English, so there was only one language available to all of us. I’d picked up enough information about guitars, players, and flamenco from forty-six years of marriage to a guitar maker that I could speak comfortably about the subject. The Spaniard played flamenco and classical guitar and sometimes traveled to the U.S. to play at events for his sponsor, Bose. He even gave me his latest CD. The Dutch musician was going to Seville to play at a memorial. I asked him how much time he devoted to flamenco, expecting him to say he had a day job to support his habit, since Amsterdam isn’t a flamenco hub. Instead, he said that flamenco was his life. Imagine getting something that personal out of someone on an airplane. The old me could never have done it.

When I boarded the plane I assessed my Spanish skills as adequate. As we landed I knew I was better prepared than I realized. Both of my seat mates were kind, friendly and willing to engage in a long conversation with someone at least one generation older, if not two. This made for a good introduction to Spain. If they were representative of the rest of the country, we would be fine. And we were.

I just checked out a book on flamenco at my library. The old me is back, but the interests that came from my weeks as the new me are here to stay.

 

Posted in inspiration, personal reflections, travel | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Picture perfect

Posted on October 24, 2018 by

One day remaining in our two week experiment of living in a Spanish city on our own and I hadn’t found the perfect setting for my annual travel photo.  Yes, I must be in the photo, ideally with my hair combed, but more importantly the picture must tell a story about where I am. Last year’s, from our trip to Scandinavia, featured me and a troll, a perfect couple and symbol for that part of the world.

I was stuck on how to represent Seville. I didn’t want to pose under a taxidermied bull’s head in a bar, or be dwarfed by a bell tower as tall as a football field is long, or ask a male flamenco dancer with no hips and weighing what I did in high school to pose beside me.

What else could I find that typified this beautiful Andalusian city? The answer came to me last night. Every street in our neighborhood has at least one small shop dedicated exclusively to flamenco-style dresses, none of which appealed to my middle-class or life-as-a-retiree clothing tastes. But the dresses were ubiquitous, which made them the perfect symbol for Seville. The next question was how to put myself in a picture with them.

“I’ll pose in front of a rack of dresses,” I told my husband, feeling uncomfortable as I walked into one of the hole-in-the wall stores knowing I had no intention of buying a dress, or even looking at one. I hid from the shopkeeper behind a pillar, he took the photo, and we fled.

“That doesn’t work,”  I said as I viewed the shot from a safe position in the alley. ‘It’s just me in a dress shop.”

In store 2 we found a single dress for me to stand next to. “No good, It looks as if I am asking how it would look on me.”

As I looked into the next store, with the shopkeeper sitting at a desk facing the door, I realized that lurking was not getting me anywhere. I walked toward her, glancing at the racks of dresses on both sides of me.

She must have sensed my amazement at the size of her stock because she said, “Una semana, We wear these for only one week a year.” She went on to explain that the occasion is the annual Feria, the Seville Spring Fair, an event that occurs every April. She said that everyone — rich and poor, old and young — dresses up. Maybe not too poor, I thought, as she showed me price tags on the least expensive and most expensive dresses, 250 and 500 Euros, respectively. She works alone now but keeps the store open for Christmas shoppers looking for next year’s dress. Starting in February, the shopping season begins and she hires eight others to help out. I don’t know how the eight could fit in the shop. Where would they put the customers?

I asked if she’d mind our taking a picture of me in front of her dresses.  “Wait,’ she said as she came out from behind her desk and walked over to one of the racks.  “Here. Put your arms through it.”  She moved my hands to my waist and signaled to my husband that I was ready for the photo.

All of a sudden, the dresses didn’t look so ridiculous. “It’s really heavy,” I said, still wearing a t-shirt, jeans, tennis shoes and my multi-colored polka dot compression socks.
“Yes,” she added, “and harder to walk in when you’re wearing high heels.”

I was thrilled to have my photo, but it now seemed less important than having made a connection over an important element of Sevillana culture. “I hope to see you again,” she said. Today’s our last day here, but if there’s time I’ll drop by again and ask what they do during those seven days while wearing their heavy dresses in eighty-degree temperatures.

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I should have stuck with Spanish

Posted on October 20, 2018 by

Maimonides

It’s not a surprise that I don’t remember much of what my high school teachers tried to teach me. Perhaps that’s just as well, given what I do remember: the never-ending reminder coming from an unsmiling English teacher, a character straight out of the nineteenth century, always to use “forbad” instead of “forbade,” though I’m not sure any of us ever needed to use either form; an assignment to team up  with a friend in my twelfth-grade health class to research and report on syphilis and gonorrhea; and a U.S. history class taught by the Vice-Principal whose job duties including paddling misbehaving boys, whom he then assigned to his history class so he could keep an eye on them. (I always wondered why I ended up in his class.)

What is surprising is how much I remember of one subject: eleventh-grade Spanish. Yesterday, as we wandered through the former Jewish Quarter of Córdoba, Spain, we touched the sculptured bronze feet of the scholar Maimonides polished by the hands of so many pilgrims told they would gain wisdom (still waiting), and saw a statue of Lucio Anneo Seneca, aka Lucius Seneca the Younger, both of whom appeared in early chapters of my Spanish textbook. Later, I saw a road sign to Ávila and thought of Santa Teresa de Ávila, which then triggered the memory of San Juan de La Cruz, two more characters in the book. Along with these historical figures, artists Velázquez, Goya, and El Greco also appeared in our reading. And their names are still with me.

Lucius Seneca

Why do these figures from fifty-plus years ago still come to mind?  It had to be the teacher. I can’t recall his name, but I can remember his enthusiasm for his subject. Every day he demonstrated his love for Spanish. Now I wish I had let his excitement push me toward more study, but at the end of the school year I decided I’d had enough Spanish.  In college, I didn’t have to take any more language, because I had completed the obligatory two years in high school. How many of us took the route of choosing to stop language study, just when it could have made an indelible difference? Nearly everyone I know. We told ourselves we weren’t going to use a second language, so why bother.

Since retirement, my husband and I have been traveling to Europe regularly, where we have met so many talented Dutch, French, Scandinavians, Belgians and others who spoke three or more languages.  Yesterday’s guide, Enrique, led a tour through Córdoba while telling the history of Andalusia in Spanish, Italian and English…for a group of six. Of course tour guides represent a high bar that the average person might not reach. Still, I think about what it would have meant for the size of my world today, if I  hadn’t waited so many years to absorb my teacher’s enthusiasm.

Posted in humor, personal reflections, travel, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Tracking down the elusive medical test in Spain

Posted on October 16, 2018 by

Hooray! Today, after a 6.94 euro cab ride, my husband and I landed at a medical laboratory in Seville, Spain where I had a blood test. And the results were in the acceptable range.I needed this for my doctors back home to properly treat the blot clot I developed in August.

A few days after we arrived in Spain, I walked into a pharmacy and asked where I might take a blood test and get the results analyzed quickly.  “The only place is a hospital emergency room; otherwise, laboratories will take one to two weeks to do an analysis,” said one pharmacist.  Great.  Nothing I like more when on vacation than sitting for hours in an emergency room. Then, the first pharmacist checked with a second one who said he had heard of a pharmacy that offered blood tests with fast analyses. He looked up a name and number and wrote them on a post-it note.

Two days later, I called the number hoping for an English speaker on the other end of the line, but with no luck.  It’s not easy to talk about blood clots and anticoagulants in English, much less Spanish, but somehow my explanation was successful enough that the woman I spoke to could assure me her pharmacy didn’t do tests. Then, as an afterthought, she gave me another phone number, and that phone call led to a private lab – Rider Laboratory — that would perform the test.

At the lab, the receptionist and Dr. Rider were reluctant to show off their English skills, leaving me to bumble my way through the initial explanations.  My husband and I were an anomaly, a curiosity. I don’t think they see many vacationers there. But they drew my blood, and afterward Dr. Rider and I had a long conversation. He was curious about what state in the U.S. I was from. I spoke with some fluency, missing proper verb tenses, but able to blab away.  He spoke slowly, thinking before every word that came out and making no mistakes. Regardless of our different styles we understood each other completely.

As we left, Dr. Rider came into the reception area to look over the email address I had given them (last name Oxrieder). He pointed to his name on the wall.  “Like mine.  Are you German?”

My husband said yes and explained that we had heard that his family name was once Ochsenrider. Then I said that I too had an ancestor by the name of Rider who was from England. Dr. Rider ended by saying, “Maybe we are family,” and we all laughed.

I started this blog by saying how much we paid for taxi fare.  I mentioned that because of what we paid for my blood test: 6 euros, slightly less than the fare for a 20-minute cab ride. Later we noted that we had spent more time socializing with the doctor and his receptionist than we ever spent with our own doctors.

 

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Lost in the labyrinth of Seville

Posted on October 14, 2018 by

The Mushroom

If it weren’t for the mushroom (see photo), our word for what is known as the Metropol Parasol, we would be lost. It is our guidepost. We are staying in an apartment in an old part of Seville, Spain — not just a few years old but centuries old — in a warren of narrow streets accessible only on foot. Yesterday, while looking for the square where the off-site apartment manger to leave our trash — Plaza de Alfalfa — we discovered a shortcut to the mushroom, which was good to know but also in the opposite direction of the trash bins.

Five days ago, we arrived in Seville after dark.  The taxi driver let us off at the entrance to this street, called Calle Siete Revueltas.  “A la izquierda” he said.
“What do we do after we turn left?” I asked my husband, who shrugged.

I first learned the adjective “revuelto” in Mexico in the context of “huevos revueltos,” scrambled eggs.  In this case the street name means “seven turns,” but scrambled describes it just as well.

One nice thing about this neighborhood without cars is that it’s dead silent. Back home, we live near a freeway and we’re used to car traffic and planes flying overhead. I woke up the first night here and wondered what was wrong.

Within the streets of this maze and everywhere else we go, strangers are not safe…from us. Asking for directions of people just stepping out their front doors, resolutely crossing a plaza, or sitting quietly on a bench in a public square occupies much of our days. Today, on our own, we discovered several new shortcuts, successes which always give us moments of rejoicing.

many carriages and horses for                         tourists to  choose from

Our Spanish is improving quickly.  It has to, because few people seem excited to test their English out on us. I’m thankful that Spanish words buried deeply in some storage bin in my brain are popping out. Usually these words make sense to the hearer. However, today, a man I was talking to kept backing away. He was trying to sell me a ride through the city in his horse-drawn carriage. I told him I’d taken this ride  years ago, and it had rained (llover) during the entire ride, just poured down on us. A few hours later I realized that the word I used wasn’t quite what I intended to say. I was talking about water falling, but didn’t mean to say I was crying (llorar) during the carriage ride.

I really need to get my Spanish straight tomorrow when I have to call a pharmacist to explain that I have a blood clot and need a blood test with an immediate analysis of results.  If this doesn’t work, it’s off to a hospital emergency room to ask for the same procedure, another potential scramble in this labyrinthine world. So far everyone I’ve asked for help has come through, except for two teenage girls who didn’t know where they were and even they tried.

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How not to pack

Posted on October 8, 2018 by

PACKED AT LAST

What to wear? What to wear? I’ve been packing a suitcase for nearly a week, which makes me well qualified to speak on the topic of how not to pack for travel. Today marks my fourth round of taking everything out of one suitcase, hanging one or two items of clothing back in the closest, removing one or two new things from said closet and repacking. I should mention that while I’m still repeating this shuffle, it’s not with the same suitcase I started with.

Ah, I loved that first suitcase I packed, compact, easy to wheel around, seemingly roomy enough for everything, and best of all, purple. After four days tucking, squeezing, and flattening my clothing with my hands, followed by jumping up and down to close that purple beauty, I transferred everything to suitcase two.

Why is it so hard to decide what to put in a suitcase?  Our more recent trips have taken place in cool climates among cultures that value the outdoors life. These lend themselves to easy packing decisions: one pair of clean jeans per week, a few sweaters, a coat and an umbrella.

Our upcoming destinations start hot and dry and end cold and wet, which makes planning more difficult. But I can’t blame my indecision entirely on the change in climates. I hold up this blouse to these pants, these pants to those shoes and this tank top to that pair of shorts and ask myself, will I be pegged immediately as coming from the U.S.?  The answer is almost always yes. I remind myself that these days clothing may not distinguish one traveler from another throughout much of the world. Who doesn’t wear jeans?

Maybe what’s more worthy of examining than whether my fashion sense matches anyone else’s is what our other suitcase contents say about us, either when we’re leaving home or returning. For example, I’m taking a Spanish language book to Spain, where you’d think I might happen upon something to read in that language. Last year, my husband and I bought brown Norwegian goat cheese (gjetost) to bring home, only to find it in our local grocery store. What I should remember when I’m packing is that the world is smaller than we realize, and I am bound to blend in with at least a few of the 11 million tourists who visit Andalusia each year or the 17 million who go to Amsterdam. And, hey, if I’m too cold in Amsterdam, I’ll take a wild guess that they sell sweaters there.

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How to stop watching TV

Posted on October 2, 2018 by

shot from a PBS documentary

In my last post, I mentioned wanting to eliminate TV watching as a way to pare down habits that interfere with accomplishing… not sure what, but accomplishing something.  At least it would offer a way to keep me out of a mindless stupor a few more hours a day. We already read at night, but surely there’s something else we can do.

My husband and I watched TV as a way to relax after work. Now that we’re not working, do we need this particular form of relaxation?  One evening a week ago, we didn’t turn the Tube on. The next evening I went to a meeting and he stayed home, and, again, didn’t turn it on.

Two consecutive nights: it felt like a record that needed breaking. I was thankful that we had recorded the last episodes of two series we’d been watching, and since we had to find out how they ended…well, you know what happened.

I decided to seek friends who might have solutions to breaking the TV watching habit. My informal survey proved that my friends are not normal.  Two of them have no television sets. In response to my question about how they spent their evenings, one said she did housework. A third friend said he watched sports, our local Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) channel and news on three stations.

“That’s a lot of news,” I said “especially these days. Do you have to drink after the news is over?”
“No,” he said, “I begin drinking before I watch.”

Watching three news programs as an evening pastime ranks right up there with housework: not an option. His choice of PBS, however, is a good one.  It does offer programs that help keep the synapses firing and is often our second choice, if not the first. Maybe if we limited ourselves to one channel?

Since friends were no help, I turned to the internet for advice, which, by the way, is another habit worth breaking, especially when it adds up to more daily screen time. What I learned about how to kick the TV habit was to begin by recording how many minutes we watch every day and then cut back. No need to go cold turkey, but watch for fewer minutes, then fewer days. Next, we can limit the number of shows we see, which means stopping before watching any more reruns of M*A*S*H* or Raymond or the Big Bang Theory.

The fall TV season has begun. With each new season, television has gotten darker and darker, airing shows mostly about  satanic cults, serial killers, or alien takeovers of our planet, none of which inspire or work well as sleep aids. Not only can we save time, but also avoid nightmares by ignoring the new fall lineup altogether.

I’m now feeling more confident that we can gain a few more hours a day by cutting back on television series.  I am taking a blood thinner that does not permit drinking, so more than one news program a day is not in the picture.

 

 

 

Posted in changes after retirement, health, humor, inspiration, personal reflections, seasons | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

Paring down

Posted on September 24, 2018 by

A sign of the times: a recent issue of “Cooking Light” magazine gives tips to improve readers’ ability to handle stress. These include 1) moving your focus away from undone tasks, 2) limiting your fretting to situations you can control, and 3) not aiming for perfection.

The article directs readers to several sources, which I checked out from my neighborhood library. The one I’ve skimmed is, “SHED Your Stuff, Change Your Life.” As I opened the book I thought, here we go again. Another useless guide to cleaning out my closets, useless because I never do anything the experts prescribe for getting organized.

But reading about shedding turned out better than I expected. Yes, the clutter focus is here. Author Julie Morgenstern lists ten  example of “physical burdens,” two of which I know I’ll be able to shed. “Excessive memorabilia” is the first on my list of contenders for tossing, old recipes is the second. And this morning, after trying to find something in my kitchen “junk drawer,” I decided that will come next.

What’s more interesting, is that the book also speaks to shedding “time burdens” and “habit burdens.” Both made me stop and think. Under the former, I admit that more often than not, when asked to volunteer, I may mouth the word “no” but no real sound leaves my lips. My problem is worse than just saying yes. Recently, I finished a volunteer project for an organization I belong to and within minutes came up with ideas for two more.  Luckily, I didn’t share them with anyone, so I’m safe…for now.

The list is shorter for habit burdens — for which I’m thankful — but eliminating some of the behaviors on it will require serious work. I’ll start with “mindless escapes,” which includes “TV, email, internet.” I imagine “internet” applies to Facebook, Instagram, and checking news websites daily to learn what new perils our national leaders are dragging us into. My husband and I started talking about giving up on TV. I’m investigating that option by interviewing friends who have made the break, while I still keep up my nightly TV watching schedule. Meanwhile, I’ll work on the other stress reducers in the Cooking Light article.  I’ll start with avoiding attempts to do things perfectly.  That should be easy.

Posted in current events/themes, personal reflections, stress | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments