Weeks 44, 45 & 46 : Farewell to My Fabulous Fifties – Quarantine Edition

Wow, thanks to COVID-19 the world is a different place than it was a few short weeks ago. I hope you and those you love are all safe and healthy and taking precautions to stay that way. (ie social distancing and wearing masks/gloves if you go out) We were home briefly, but decided to return to Florida once businesses were shut down in Michigan. So after Mike tended to some important details with his staff and practice, we headed out. Mike and key team members are able to do virtual appointments so thankfully they can stay in touch with patients and address needs as they arise. We did not fly, we drove down. We drove straight through and packed our own food with minimal stops for gasoline, using a glove or plastic bag when pumping gas and wearing a glove on one hand if we had to use the restroom. Some gas stations had placed out of order signs on their restrooms. I am assuming they were reserving it for employees and to minimize transmission to those cleaning the facilities. Thankfully, we were able to reliably find bathrooms in the rest stops. The day we arrived in Florida, the governor here finally issued a stay home order. Here at The Place, all amenities are shut down including the gym, pickle ball courts, pool and the take out they had recently instituted at the restaurant, which is fine as we are planning to cook at home anyway.

My goals for myself before turning 60 seem trivial in comparison to what we now face, however on the plus side, it has given me something to focus on other than the horrible state we all find ourselves in and something positive to do other than watch compulsively for updates and take our poor dog on yet another walk. With that said, here’s what’s been going on with the bucket list.

Here is the link to my original list. I am keeping up with my French classes virtually. They have actually switched all classes to virtual, but for now, I am still doing private lessons as my current level doesn’t seem to match with anyone else’s right now. I am continuing with Duolingo and am at day #960 today. I am still getting pleasure from learning French, however I’m ’bout to have a throw down with the French subjunctive. It’s a concept that is still a work in progress for me. I have also watched a movie in French (with subtitles) on Netflix, Un + Une and would recommend it.

Some of what I had deemed a goal will be undoable now given the world’s current situation. For instance, try a new restaurant every month has been suspended. And life has intervened with # 5, Do a 5K. While new health circumstances would require that I walk it instead, it is unlikely anyone will be holding any 5Ks soon. Also, no fun gathering for the ladies in the family, but at least we can do so virtually, though we may have to include the guys for this one too now.

However it has also given me time to tackle a few things that I was neglecting, such as organizing the basement storage room. It was long overdue! Also staying in contact with friends and family has been converted to virtual happy hours via Zoom. We are probably talking more now than we ever used to and it’s been awesome. Another positive, I’ve had more time to work on tricks with our dog Kobe which I will share on a later post.

Before, so you can see just how messy it had gotten!

After, maybe not perfect, but a lot less messy!

As far as my weight loss journey, it’s a hard fought battle. I am using Noom but certainly not to the best of my ability. I, like probably most of you, have been snacking more than normal. I am in the process of getting back on track. In the “unfortunate” column, I was recently diagnosed with arthritis and bone spurs in my hips and I have some stiffness in my lower extremeties which limits my flexibility so my doctor has instructed me to eliminate high impact exercises. While in Florida, I plan to walk, bike, swim and do yoga. All of which are all less stressful on the joints. I did manage to use my NordicTrack a few more times when we were home. I discovered a new workout series. It is lead by an Egyptian Archeologist who brings you on walking tours of several Egyptian pyramids. I also managed to do a warm up and a cultural walk set in front of Niagara Falls and some flexibility yoga in Kauai, Hawaii, making a grand total of 72 NordicTrack work-outs. My original goal was 50. I also plan to take advantage of the video workouts our awesome bootcamp trainer is posting with modifications.

Walking the pyramids of Egypt with an Egyptian archeologist.

I am guessing my reading will pick up a bit more. I am currently on book # 21 of my 75 book goal. I am reading the last book in a Nora Rogers trilogy, The Perfect Hope. It’s escapism at it’s finest. Since I last posted about my reading goal on February 26, I have read In A Dark, Dark Wood, The Turn of the Key, Evvie Drake Starts Over, Olive Again, The Giver of Stars, Turbulence, The Last Boyfriend, and The Chocolate Thief .

I also tackled # 15: Learn the alphabet in sign language. Here is the poster for the hand motions.

And here I am, signing the alphabet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjsEHqdjul0

I also completed another Masterclass(#30) while driving down to Florida. It featured David Sidaris on writing. It was highly entertaining even if you aren’t a writer. I am working on learning Silent Night on the piano(#34). Let me just say it’s harder than I thought it would be and now I am in Florida with no access to a keyboard, so this particular goal may be carried over into my 61st year.

My birthday is mid-May and as there isn’t much left on my list to accomplish, I will be posting just once more at this project’s conclusion. I thank you if you’ve stuck with me throughout the year and look forward to summarizing all that I was and was not able to accomplish.

Remember to embrace the things you love that you are still able to do and enjoy keeping socially close while physically distant. I hope you all stay safe and healthy and that my next post finds us all in a much better place. ((hugs))

Week 39: Farewell to My Fabulous Fifties

Sometimes I really do have to pinch myself to see if I’m dreaming. The weather has been fabulous all week here in Florida and the weeks go by so quickly. My days have been filled with appointments for the house, visits from friends and dinners out. It’s been a wonderful whirlwind that shows no signs of slowing down. It seems Wednesday has become my preferred blogging day down here. So if you happen to be following me, look for Wednesday posts from now on.

So let me dive right into my bucket list. Item # 20 (Entertain friends and family in our Florida retirement home.) We had a fabulous time with our friends from Michigan. They were staying with our friends Dave and Kim but we were able to spend a lot of time together. We had lots of delicious dinners out, fun girls’ shopping day and relaxing by the pool. We were sad to see them go. I also was blessed to have Sammi’s boyfriend Andrew’s parents over for a visit during their stay on Sanibel. It was great to meet their sister and brother–in-law and I had fun showing them around. I also had a visit from another Belleville family who is in the process of building a home in Florida so they popped in with Dave and Kim to check out our house and pool. I really enjoyed everyone’s visit. My daughter Jenna and her husband Kristianth are driving down and arriving on Friday evening. Kristianth will be flying back and Jenna will stay behind for a month with her two dogs. She works from home and she is about to “work from pool.” And bonus: Kobe will be so happy to have friends to hang out with. Mike returns next week and my parents will be coming for a long weekend as well. It has been so nice seeing everyone and I was happy to discover that I really love the way the house lives. The big kitchen island is nice for putting out appetizers and the large doorwall really makes the lanai part of the living space.

#16 (Decorating our Florida home.) Kim and I have done a lot of shopping in search of the perfect home accessories. I think we’ve canvassed most of southwest Florida! It’s been fun but I still have a lot of artwork to select. I did manage to find a nice vase for the front bedroom dresser and some cute desk accessories. I also ordered a digital photo frame online. Digital frames have sure come a long way. It has it’s own email address and friends and family can send photos that you can include in your frame. It can play music, tell you the date and the weather as well as showcase your photos. I plan to fill this frame with photos of friends and family that visit us here so it will be a rotating gallery of memories made in our Florida home.

#6 (Keep my Duolingo streak intact.) #10 (Keep attending classes at the Alliance de Francais.) I thought I would have a lot more time to devote to French here but it has proven to be the exact opposite. I have managed to keep my Duolingo streak intact though. I am on day # 909. My treat for making it to day #900 was watching a French film. I watched Sarah’s Key on Netflix, which was a combination of French and English. It is based on a book I read a few years ago by the same name. It was good but the book was better. Isn’t that usually the way of it? My FaceTime French classes continue weekly and I am enjoying conversing, however limited my abilities. What an awesome opportunity to have a native French speaker be able to answer my questions. The French that is taught and written isn’t exactly the French that you will find spoken if you are lucky enough to go to France. One funny thing I learned this week is the French term for a six-pack (the abs version) is le tablet du chocolat. I would much prefer a bar of chocolate to a six pack of beer, so I embrace and salute that terminology!

#13 Meditate daily #18 Read 50 books in 2019. I am combining these two because I have been having trouble getting my meditation in and I am reading “10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works.” That is one heck of a long title. It’s by news anchor Dan Harris. He relates how he had an on-air melt-down and how he subsequently found inner peace, despite his initial skepticism. I am half way through and enjoying it tremendously. I am hoping it will re-motivate me to get my daily meditation sessions in as I definitely feel more focused and productive when I do. That alone doesn’t seem to be motivation enough though so I am hoping this little book will work some magic for me. This is book # 11 of my 80 book goal for 2020 putting me 2 books ahead of schedule.

#7 (Lose 10 pounds) I am sticking with Noom and am STILL 1 pound over that goal. I’ve been walking a lot, regularly exceeding my daily goal. I also squeezed in a work out at the clubhouse. I hope to do a lot more working out when Jenna comes down.

I promised to update you on the landscaping. It’s done! It was done in a day and a half. Here are a few photos of the job “in progress” and a few “after” photos. I added a couple of potted plants which I will plant outside once we close up for the season. The red plants on the side between the houses is Red Tie. It is native to Florida and will grow to be tall enough to provide us with some privacy on our lanai. We also will be adding lanai lights to finish off the space and make it more usable in the evening.

I posted this last week, but thought I’d repost for anyone who didn’t happen to see it.

I am going to wrap it up here because I have a little online shopping to do! One of my favorite home accessory stores, ZGallerie, is having an online sale. I hope to find a few things to share in a future blog. Have a great and productive week.

Week 28: Farewell to My Fabulous Fifties – Photo Archive Edition

Where has November gone? We are rapidly approaching Holiday Defcon 1 here. My home is decorated, the trees are up but sadly not a lot of shopping has been completed. In my defense, my husband, my dad, my best friend, my daughter and my son-in-law all have birthdays in late November and early December, so birthday shopping has taken precedence. Sorry, not sorry. Nevertheless, the holiday spirit abounds! On to the bucket list. For those that are curious, here is the link to the original list.

Language learning continues. My 830 day streak in Duolingo is intact at a crown level of 982. I missed class last week because I had a situation with my tire on the way to class. I turned around and headed back home but I did get this week’s assignment and homework done which I emailed to the teacher. I have class tonight. Wish me luck!

I’ve completed 56 NordicTrack workouts, going to geographic extremes with a walk through Alaska and then Hawaii. I also did a NordicTrack core yoga class set on a Hawaiian beach. I believe this workout has been recently added as I’ve never noticed it before. I really like it and hope to repeat it soon. It’s great for a recovery day!

I am still using the Noom app and am just 1/2 pound away from my initial 10 pound weight-loss goal. This has been a slow go but I am still enjoying using the app. To be honest, I am a little surprised that I was down this morning as we attended a couple of birthday celebrations over the weekend. Maybe that was what I needed to do to break the plateau. If that’s the case I would have started celebrating a long time ago!

The biggest project I’ve undertaken this week has been addressing bucket-list item #26: Organize and catalog all of the photos sitting in a jumble in the storage room. This is a work in progress that is still underway. I will say the anticipation of the project is far worse than the actual doing. My first decision was to decide if I was going to digitize these photos. I decided against that because I already have the photos and I already have so many photos in my online photo album. It would be less complicated and far less time consuming just to physically organize what I already have.

This is a very big container and it was filled to the brim!

Here is a laundry basket full of photos.

I should have shot this from the side so you could see the depth of the basket to better tell how much there is here. Of course I have been finding little caches of photos in cupboards, closets and cabinets to add to the stack!

The next decision was how exactly to do it. Should I scrapbook them (oh hell no) or perhaps put them in photo albums? I thought about the cardboard shoe box type photo boxes but ultimately I did what any sane person would do. I googled it. After a quick search, I decided to go with plastic boxes that contain other smaller plastic boxes that you place your photos in by year. This is perfect for keeping photos safe from flooding or water damage. But where to find these boxes? I started with the “easy” answer and hopped on to amazon, where I found this beauty for $25.99.

However, I did not order it because I knew I would be out running errands that day and being the frugal person that I am, I thought I would take a look around first. The errands were local and I didn’t want to venture too far, so ended up at our local Walmart. I found an excellent option for just $10. It was a large plastic box with clip closure which contained 5 smaller boxes, perfect for 4X6 photos. Each smaller box holds about 250 photos, so the entire box holds approximately 1,250 photos. I bought 4 of them, thinking with 5,000 photos, that might enough – or at least I would be off to a good start.

I started by taking just one basket full of photos upstairs and began sorting through them. About a quarter of the photos had the date printed on the back or front. That made those easy to place. The rest became a guessing game. If my kids were in the photo, I could “guesstimate” how old they were pretty accurately and figure out the year based on their birthdays. I also know my niece Michelle was born 20 years after myself and I know how far apart she is from her two sisters. So I would determine Michelle’s age with the help of looking at her sisters for reference to date the photo.

Of course, physical clues helped as well. I would try to remember, what years we were in a certain house or office or what year we took a specific trip. It is a time consuming process and I felt like yelling “Jackpot!” every time there was an actual date on the photo. That being said, it hasn’t been as onerous as I anticipated. In fact, it’s been rather pleasant, giving me the opportunity to look at photos from when my girls were small, photos in some cases, I hadn’t revisited in years. I put on the Hallmark Channel and grabbed a cup of chocolate peppermint coffee and started sorting. It was easy to slip down the rabbit hole and linger a little too long over a photo or two. But it’s been quite a lovely way to spend a few afternoons.

As you probably guessed, I ran out of boxes. I needed to run errands in a neighboring community and decided to stop at their Walmart to pick up the same boxes. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the same ones. They did have these, which were at a much better price point than amazon. They were just $14.99. I bought two.

While I was out, I checked Michael’s just for comparison sake, and came across something very similar here, the dimensions are the same, but a much different price point, $41.99. I think I got the better deal.

I will say hindsight is 20/20. If I were to do it again, I would insist on getting all the same type of boxes. As I’m filling up the small plastic cases, I am labeling them with the year. However, some years require more than one box. That’s something I found out late in the game. My recommendation is to get all the same type of boxes, label them with a sticky note with the date until you are entirely done with the process. At that point, permanently affix the year on the box. Having used both types of boxes, the colored ones are prettier, but as I have so many photos, I think the clear with blue interior boxes work better for my project. There are fewer boxes but each box holds more.

When I was looking online, another source indicated that it was smart to take your photos out of the magnetic type photo albums as your photos can degrade. (Protip: You can thread dental floss behind the photo to remove it if it is sticking to the page.) I haven’t decided yet if I will be doing this, as I have a ton of photo albums. On the plus side, they are all dated so it would be an easy process to store them in the correct box. I will however, be putting the girls’ larger dance and school photos into albums.

I am deep into the process, but still have a long way to go. On the plus side, once I am done, I will never need to do this again, as nowadays all of our photos are digital! IN fact, archiving physical photos probably isn’t something anyone under 30 will every need to worry about. Not sure how much time this week I’ll have to tackle this as we have Thanksgiving, a Lions football game and I have jury duty on Wednesday (dang-right before Thanksgiving) of this week. Right now, I am going to grab that cup of coffee and sift through a few more photos. I will leave you with a couple of my sweet memories from when my girls were small and the hope that this Thanksgiving you make a few photo-worthy memories of your own. Have a blessed Thanksgiving!

Week 9: Farewell to My Fabulous Fifties

Monday already? This week has just flown by! The highlight of our week was a long weekend in Mackinac Island. If you are not from Michigan and are unfamiliar with the island, you are missing out! This is a tiny island, with a coast of 8.2 miles, perfect for biking around the perimeter. It covers 3.8 square miles and much of it is preserved as Mackinac Island State Park. No cars are allowed and travel is done exclusively by bicycle or horse and carriage. It is an area rich in history and serves as a popular tourist draw, attracting both day trippers and those visiting for a few days. My extended family has been coming here for years. My parents stay in their boat at the marina and family members either stay with them or at nearby resorts. Once we arrived, I was excitedly looking forward to checking off a long-awaited item on my bucket. As many years as we’ve been coming here, we’ve never eaten at The Woods, which is a lovely restaurant associated with the Grand Hotel (another popular tourist destination). This Bavarian influenced restaurant is tucked away in the woods (hence the name) and requires a 30-45 minute carriage ride to get to it. My husband, myself and our daughters had six o’clock reservations on a Friday evening. After a leisurely carriage ride, we arrived right on time. Our waiter, Michael, was amazing. He has been working there for over 20 years and his experience and warmth made our evening even better. I ordered a grilled New York strip steak, done perfectly. My daughter Sam enjoyed her spinach Florentine ravioli and my older daughter, Jenna had roasted free range half chicken. My husband ordered the crispy maple duck breast. All of our entrees were delicious and even the sides were yummy. I especially liked the red cabbage. We ordered 3 desserts to taste, a mango cheesecake, chocolate hazelnut tart with dark cherry jubilee sauce and vanilla cake donut topped with Mackinac Fudge Ice cream. All were wonderful. It was a bit of a splurge, but the experience was memorable and worth it!

We were on the island from Thursday to Sunday morning, arriving by ferry and staying at The Harbour View Inn. It is possible to fly in, and we’ve done so if we are just staying the day. My husband pilots an older Mooney but the airstrip is even large enough to accommodate a small jet. We’ve stayed at various hotels over the years, but Harbour View Inn seems to be the one we come back to the most. It’s a short walk to the marina and depending on your room, you may get a little view of the harbor. We requested a suite which has 2 beds along with a siting area with a pull out bed, giving us plenty of space if we have an extra guest or two. Breakfast is included. I did manage to bike the island 4 times, in preparation for that ride to Lake Eerie. My husband Mike and daughter Sam actually ran the island, all 8.2 miles, while my daughter Jenna and I biked it as their support team. I was so proud of them both as this is not a typical run for either of them. This trip is always a memorable one and I am so grateful to be able to continue to make these memories with my family. If you ever have the opportunity to go to Mackinac Island, I highly recommend it. Hiking, kayaking, bicycling, shopping and dining, there’s something for everyone!

My family, (minus my sister and her husband). They only visited for one of the days this year.

Just a little bit of the Grand Hotel. Sadie’s is a family favorite for ice cream.

Another flower garden on the grounds of The Grand Hotel.

As for ongoing items, yes, I am still working out on my Nordic Track. I am at work out 22 with a goal of completing 50. I have maintained my 698 day streak on Duolingo. I always manage to get a lesson in, even on vacation. Our Florida home has broken ground and walls are up, so one step closer to decorating. (hurray!) I finished “Summer of 69” by Elin Hildebrand. It was a great light read. I always enjoy reading her books in the summer and this one did not disappoint. I think I particularly enjoyed the setting of 1969 as it was very reminiscent of my childhood. I am now reading “The Education of Dixie Dupree.” This is our book club meet-up book and I am looking forward to sharing insights. That puts me at book #40 out of my goal of 50 by December 31. I am 74% of the way there, 13 books ahead of schedule. I try to have a safety cushion in the summer when there is a little more time to read. Meditating via the Headspace App continues and weekly yoga is a thing, though just via Youtube this week.

Our bathroom is essentially complete, we are just waiting on some paint touch-ups, and some artwork that I’m having re-matted as well as the glass shower door that is currently being made. I will be excited to share the before/after when the project is complete!

And you guys…guess what? It’s happening and I am so excited! I’ve made my skydiving reservation for August 17th. I am doubly excited because my daughter Jenna wants to jump with me! If anyone else is game to give it a try, feel free to join us on the 17th. Absolutely looking forward to it!

That’s it for this week. We head to Boston next weekend so I hope to have some cool things to share. If you’re curious and you want to check out my original bucket list, the link is below. Make it an awesome week! Geronimoooooo!

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