Christmas goodies made and ready to deliver

Yesterday, I made pumpkin bread, sugar cookie dough, and fudge. Today, with Ann's help I made snickerdoodles (which she shaped and rolled in the cinnamon/sugar) and finished up baking the sugar cookies, which she cut out and frosted (I frosted one and ate one). Then we got them on the plates. We are doing all the homes on our street this year, which we think is 12, plus a couple of other neighbors who have been kind enough to drop stuff off at our door.

I think the plates look kind of festive, don't you?

After the plates were all loaded, we covered them in foil and put our name tags on them so that if we end up dropping them off on the door step because no one is home, they will know who they got them from. Many of them won't even know who we are, so part of the plan was to introduce ourselves (we have been here three years and don't know everyone on our street of 12 homes). For that reason and more, it would be better if we could catch them home.
The only bad thing about making the treats is that I guess I aggravated my dormant plantar fasciitis, and my right foot really hurts. Ah, but it will go away, I think, with ice and rest.
Okay, now I've got to get to the store and back and after that, we'll take them around later so we can catch the most people home. It will be fun!

Fitness: It's much easier to get out of shape, than into shape

I have found, through sad personal experience, that it's much harder work to get back into shape, once I lapse and let myself get out of shape. Here's my real life example. I had posted some pics as I reached or nearly reached my fitness goals last fall. I was in very good shape, physically. As a mail carrier, last fall, like every fall in the history of the U.S. Postal Service, business picked up because of Christmas. Beginning about mid-November, I personally became so busy, that I was making it to the gym only 1-2 times per week, when prior to that, I had been going a minimum of three, and more usually four to five times per week. By December, it was down to 0-1 times per week.
As the only bread winner of our family, as the year ended, I found myself needing to get more hours at work to help with some upcoming expenses. So I signed up for the overtime list. I knew going into it that doing so would have an effect on my ability to exercise, but I felt that our needs were more crucial and that I could withstand the three months that I'd be on the list (we are able to sign up each quarter). My trips to the gym followed the same trajectory as they had done during the Christmas season.
Sometime in March, it became unbearable and I removed my name from the list with two weeks to go in the quarter (though we can only sign up on the list at the beginning of the quarter, we are able to remove ourselves from it at any time). I thought that this would create the opportunity for me to get back to the gym on a much more frequent basis. At first, this is exactly what happened. But starting the next quarter, I got back on the list for my own work assignment. There are basically two levels of O.T. that we can sign up for. One is to work only the O.T. on our own routes, and the other is to work O.T. on any route. Since I am a T-6, I do five different routes on their days off, thus, any one of those routes constitutes my own work assignment should there be a sick call, or one of them on vacation etc. Generally, when I have been on my own work assignment, I have gotten far less overtime than when I've been signed up on the other list. That wasn't the case this time.
Our office has had a veritable cornucopia of vacancies over the past few months and this has moved people who would generally have filled in the gap on sick days and vacation days to other routes, and left me (because I am on the "own work assignment" list) to do those routes when needed. The bottom line is, I'm still going to the gym quite a bit less than necessary to get back into shape, let alone reach the fitness level I had achieved back in October.
All these months of not being able to workout like I should be have taken their toll. I'm experiencing physical ailments that I should not be experiencing and wouldn't be if my health regimen was in place. It has not only physically effected me, but mentally, as I have recognized what's happening, but been powerless to change it. I spent several months a few years ago unable to do vigorous exercise because of a shoulder surgery that wouldn't heal properly. So I know all the signs of poor fitness.
I have a solution to that. I have put in a bid on another route, a single route this time. I will get less overtime if I get that route, but I will have much more time to get to the gym and I will take advantage of it. I should find out sometime next week if I get that new route. Likely, I will and I will need to make adjustments on spending and/or retirement withholdings in order to make ends meet. But the peace of mind I feel will be well worth the sacrifices.
Just so you know, my exercise of choice is walking or hiking. I do a lot of running only because of limited time and I can get a lot more calories burned and cardio done in a far less amount of time. Actually, hiking burns a lot of calories fast too, but I don't have mountains close enough to do it frequently enough. I don't like running, and never really have other than when I've been in really good shape, it was fun to run and test myself against other runners. So, I'm doing something I don't especially like, because of the results I get by doing it. It's quick, and it does the job. But if I had the time, I would walk or hike for fitness.
My advice is this. Find an exercise you'll do and do it. Get in shape and stay there, but if you find yourself in a situation like mine, don't lose hope. With determination, you too can get back in shape. I'll be waiting for your pics once you do.

Injured, but chipper

Apparently, on a recent hike, I re-injured a part of my body that I had initially injured while skiing in January or February. The pain of the ski crash had never fully gone away and I had already been thinking I would see a doctor about it. Today, I called in sick because it hurt to move my legs.  Lifting my right leg up, such as in putting on a pair of pants, or rolling around in bed, hurts like crazy. It was hurting yesterday and got increasingly worse. I couldn't imagine getting in and out of my mail truck as much as I would be doing today.
I'll try to schedule an appointment with my usual guru for injuries, Jim McIntyre, hopefully for today if possible. If not, I have a day off tomorrow, so maybe then. I'm thinking that if I can get in today, and it checks out as just something that needs time to heal, rather than surgery, I'll still go to the gym tomorrow, but not do any exercises that hurt the area affected.
I'm upbeat about it. I'm not dead or dying. I'm actually feeling great other than this particular wound, so I'm anxious to get back into the gym and continue my workouts, which have by the amount of overtime I've gotten over the past six months, been severely curtailed. This isn't really a setback and I'm thinking it's kind of minor, but the fact that it hadn't healed in several months tells me that it may have been a bit more egregious than I originally thought. I'm fairly certain though, that if I had the inclination, I could still do plenty of stuff today that requires upper body strength--you know, like canoeing or kayaking. Well, I could, but I never call in sick to go play.

Stay-cation time

I'm on vacation, which isn't really all that exciting because we can't afford to go anywhere. On the other hand, I spending a lot more time sitting around in these than I normally do:

Now, I really should be getting a lot of stuff done that has been accumulating for me to do. Then again, I kind of feel like I deserve to take some time off and actually relax for a few days. I plan on working, and in fact, I worked a bit today. I got the one end of our carport cleaned out that was driving me crazy. We have this immense maple tree that straddles the property line in our parking strip--actually 2/3 of the base of the trunk is in the neighbor's yard, and the thing was planted well before we ever set foot in our current locale. This tree has been our bane ever since we moved in, because, unlike most trees, its leaves don't all come down at once and they tend to blow around corners and through our gate and into our backyard even. So, for several months after they begin falling, it's a keep up game as they swirl in and around everything we have stored in our carport, or rather, that our daughter and family who live with us have stored in our carport.

Anyway, I got that done today, until the next time the tree decides to bless us with it's bounteous goodness.

I think for the rest of my vacation I'll do some cleaning of the kitchen, bathrooms, and computer room, and then maybe by the end of the week, when I go skiing and snowshoeing, I'll feel good about the whole deal. Of course, I'd probably like the skiing and snowshoeing even if I got nothing else done at all.

Stay-cations aren't all that bad as long as you don't spend all your free time working. Plus, part of my time off, I'm planning future vacations when we will actually be able to do something besides work. And that's a big plus.

Christmas in the mall, 1970s

Last night, on the way to visit my mom who lives in Murray, we drove past Fashion Place Mall. As I looked at it, I noticed the immense facelift it has had in recent years. I wondered, with all the outside facing stores, if there was actually an indoor mall there anymore with the long walking areas, lined with stores and food vendors. The last time I was in the mall, all the food establishments were located in one place. Not so in the 1970s.
I grew up right across the street from a field that would one day be replaced by Fashion Place mall. The field was a great place to play as a kid. Then, when I was about 13, construction began on the mall, and the construction site too was a great place to play. There wasn't a lot of security and I remember prowling through the place with my friends when it was still concrete and steel girders.
Soon, the construction stopped, the stores moved in, and it became another place to hangout. Gone was the field that I had enjoyed as a youngster, and now, here was the mall, a different, but still fun place to hang out.
I remember the year the roof collapsed and many of the stores had to steeply discount their wares because of water damage. I remember the smell of the nuts from the nut place, whose name I can't recall. I remember checking out any number of stores, and buying food and watching people.
It was also a great place to get my first "real" job. Okay, I had been a paper boy. That was real work and a real job, but it wasn't the kind of job you could only get after you turned sixteen. The mall opened up vast opportunities for employment. When I turned 16, I applied and got hired at Farrell's Ice Cream Parlour Restaurant, and said good-bye to delivering papers.
Farrell's was a great coming of age place to work. Some of fondest memories have to do with Farrell's.
There were races we had around the mall. One time I ran around the mall with a couple of friends and thought I was doing well because I was keeping up with my older friends all the way around the mall. Then, I stopped and they went for another circuit. Sure put me in my place.
Once I started working a the mall, the friends of my youth, though they were still my friends, receded into the background and the ones I spent the most time with were the people I worked with. Farrell's employees spent a lot of time doing things together even when we weren't at work.
I worked there for a couple of years, then moved on. I ended up working at Lafayette Electronics, and later the Cottage Restaurant, both in the mall.
One thing I'll always remember was the hustle and bustle around Christmas time. The mall would fill up with people and the restaurants, including Farrell's, would be packed, even when it wasn't a Friday or Saturday night. Even after I got married in 1980, I used to love to go to the mall during the Christmas season and people watch. I disliked shopping, and would try to be done well before December, but I always liked hanging with the people who were out there trying to find the perfect gift among all those other people trying to do the same thing.
I remember when Farrell's went out of business and Lenscrafter's moved into that slot. I went there to buy some glasses and it was so weird because in my mind I was saying things to myself like, "that's where the kitchen used to be," and "over there was the large room with all the signs," and "there was the player piano," and "right there is where the pay phone used to be that I used to use." Now, even Lenscrafter's is gone from that spot, or so it appeared when I drove past the outside of the mall a few months ago.
I haven't been there in several years. Ann's health pretty much keeps us from doing the mall walking thing, and I haven't gone by myself. I'd like to though. I'd like to take a walk through those immense halls and picture in my mind's eye the things of yesteryear. I'd like to picture what it looked like back then and remember. I recently found this quote from the television series The Wonder Years: "Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose."
And indeed, I want to forever keep some of the memories I have.
Perhaps one day, I will walk those hallowed halls of the mall again and those memories will envelope me like a soft, warm blanket. 

Morning takes

Sometimes, it's just tough to get up in the morning. Ever have that feeling? Right now, I'm so in need of a vacation. I do have one scheduled for the week following Memorial Day, but that seems a long ways off. I have no plans for that week as we have some money issues right now, but at least it will be time away from work.

And, I will most likely go and do some local hikes and some other outdoorsy stuff on some of those days, so even though I won't be doing a road trip that will take me away for several days, I will be doing some fun things.

I think we all need a break from the day to day routines we have. Well, most people do. I am a firm adherent to the "find a job doing something you love and you'll never work a day in your life" mentality. I still need to figure out how to get hired at a wage that will pay the bills, for doing something like hiking, fishing, or four-wheeling. And how that job being away from home will work with a spouse who is largely incapacitated.

Sometimes you just do what you need to do and take your breaks when you can get them.

Getting the garden ready

Yesterday on my day off, instead of going out and having fun, I did yard work. Yes, it's that time of year, and since I've sacrificed much of my time in the evenings to watching the NCAA basketball tournament, my time to actually do meaningful stuff is on my days off. Thankfully, March Madness doesn't last that long.

So Ann and I drove down to Riverton to IFA to pick up some blackberry plants. Just last week we had gone to the other IFA and they were out of them (they did have one left, which I bought). I made sure I called first. When I got there, they had a lot to choose from and I ended up purchasing two more blackberry plants, a boysenberry plant, and I was pleasantly surprised to find a huckleberry plant. I snagged that one right up, huckleberries being one of my favorite berries and all, though I'm thinking that I may not have success with it actually living. I remember quite a few years ago, Larry Sagers on the KSL Greenhouse program mentioned that it's very difficult to get huckleberry plants to actually grow in the home garden. Most of them are found in the wilds.

There's actually a place up near Bear Lake that has some huckleberries growing naturally. To the best of my knowledge, it's the closest place to my home that they are growing, and it's quite a drive, so if you don't time it right, you either find them still unripe, or you find that the bears have eaten all of them. If you really time it wrong, you find the bears still there.

I got those planted and also got the metal sheets for my raised beds cut. It actually wasn't as difficult as I imagined it to be--the saber saw worked well for the task. I'll still need to build the frames and fill them up with a combination of sandy loam and compost before they'll be ready for planting. Yeah, I'm thinking the cold season crops aren't going to happen this year.

The rest of the day I did just a few things, including moping because I hadn't actually taken the day off and done something fun.

Secretly though, I enjoyed getting those blackberry and that huckleberry plant in the ground. I'm looking forward to some good berries in a couple of years. And next week, I'm actually planning on getting out and hiking on my day off, so there's great things in store in the near future.

A time dilemma

I'm not good with adjusting to schedule changes. Saturday, my work schedule changed from starting at 7:30, to starting at 7:00. This may not seem like much, and over all, I like the idea of getting off work a half an hour earlier, but it puts me in a dilemma. The dilemma is when to write and when to get my exercise in. About a year ago, we changed from an 8:00 starting time to a 7:30 starting time, and I still haven't fully adjusted, and now, I have to adjust again. I do my best writing in the morning, mainly because there are too many distractions for me when it comes to writing in the evening. On the other hand, going to the gym after work is harder, because sometimes I work overtime and the need to get home outweighs staying until 6:00 at the gym to complete a workout.


My workout is generally completed in an hour, but there is drive time, and doing it after work puts me in the middle of rush hour traffic trying to get home. I'm thinking that I'm going to end up splitting my workout and running in the morning (I will have to anyway once it gets hot), and then doing my strength training after work. Running in the morning will still allow me to write for a while, so I think that may be the best possible solution. I'll need to be disciplined to do it, especially since I will need to get up at a consistent time, but that will be possible. The only thing I worry about is running in the dark. I haven't done that for years, and don't have the reflective gear for it. Of course, that can be easily purchased.


So there will be that, and I'll also try to get some cooperation around here with doing some writing at night. My computer just may have to be off-limits to the grandkids and others unless I'm watching a game or movie, or playing a board game with Ann. Of course, this time of year brings a number of things that take away time that could be used for writing—yard work that must be done, and of course the outdoorsy stuff that I always do and that nearly always takes precedence.


I'm glad my time dilemmas are only between things I want todo and not between things that I have to do.

It's great mailman weather

Spring is  here, and with it comes one of the best times of year for mail delivery. I should know--that's my job. There's nothing like being outside when the weather is nice, but not too hot. As an added bonus, I got to deliver an hour off of a walking route yesterday. Now driving around in a truck all day isn't bad in this kind of weather, but getting to do a walk in it is amazing. Walking all day kind of defeats the purpose of enjoying it, but just doing an hour? That I can handle. I used to walk all day delivering mail, up until five or six years ago. It kept me in great shape. The thing is, when I went to do the things I loved to do after walking all week, I didn't want to do them. Hiking doesn't sound fun after packing around mail for 27 miles in a typical week. I finally took advantage of my seniority and bid on a "mounted" route, which is basically another name for a driving route, and presto, my hikes became much more fun.

I never expected to be still delivering mail after this long. In August, I'll have worked for the USPS for 32 years. That's a long time. I'm not really a big fan of government jobs, in fact, I've supported legislation that would be detrimental to my own job, simply to cut down on governmental waste. I'm not a hypocrite when it comes to my ideals and how they apply to limited government. That being said, the need to put a roof over my family's collective heads, and food on our table kept me doing the job for longer than I'd planned. I'd always thought I could go back and finish my degree at the University of Utah, and never realized that there was some kind of statute of limitations on the courses I took. I actually went back to school for a few months to Salt Lake Community College, but again, the family needed my income more than I needed another job and I stopped attending. I learned a lot of math though, and some computer skills.

When all is said and done though, I have other options. I've got one novel completed (not a very good one), and another one that I've completed 58,000 words on. When I get that done, it may not make me rich, but it may help me to end my postal career a bit earlier than previously planned. I'm not counting on it, but I am going to try and finish it to see what will happen. Right now, it's a pretty awesome story line, with a lot of exciting scenes, although most of those scenes have kinks in them that need to be worked out. I'm estimating that it will be around 80,000 words long when completed.

The thing is, delivering mail has its perks. For one thing, the nice parts of the year and being outside. Another advantage to being outside is to not have to hang out with the managers. There are very few with whom I'd like to hang out--too much watching you--you know, the kind of feeling you get when the boss just walked into the room? I know that feeling from both sides, btw. "GG" was the last manager with whom I actually liked hanging out. So "GG", if somehow you're out there reading this, let it be known that you were a cool person to hang out with.

Okay. It's another spring day today, with temps in the low 70s. I think I'm going to wear my mailman shorts today.

Life is an adventure

“Life is an adventure”. So true. There are things in our lives that challenge us to the very core of who we are inside. And there are joys so high that they almost cannot be measured. The thing is, one never really knows when each of them will come.


That's why, we must learn to cope with anything that happens. Why we must be able to not just survive, but come out a victor in the end.


As Charles Swindoll has said, “I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. And so it is with you...we are in charge of our attitudes.”


We can decide how to react in any given situation. Sometimes it's easier said than done, but it can still be done, no matter the circumstances. As Denis Waitley said, “The losers in life let things happen. The winners in life make things happen.”


So take off the tie, roll up the sleeves, and get going at making your life what you want it to be. As the old ranch hands used to say, “we're burnin' daylight”. Saddle up.

Writing challenges and how to overcome them

I found a solution to the schedule change dilemma I mentioned in my last post. I found a timer I could download and put on the desktop. I can set it for any length of time, so, what I've done is set it for 10-15 minutes. This allows me to wake up as I peruse Facebook or other things like that. When the timer goes off, I switch it to 30 minutes and do some kind of writing for that length of time. Now writing can mean revising a scene, posting on this blog, thinking about how to change a scene to incorporate all the info I need it to have--you know, anything to do with writing. I'll even use it to study a writing book. As long as I'm focused on writing.

As for finding more time in a day to write, I'm afraid I'm just out of luck. To be a writer when you have an eight hour job, you need to either write only for a short time per day, or abandon other things that need doing, such as keeping up the yard, working out, etc.

One idea I'm toying with is setting aside a specific night per week to write for a longer period of time, say two to three hours.

Contradictions in liberal thinking

Just contemplating today that liberals rarely make sense. One liberal point of view is that there should be light-rail trains and high speed trains everywhere in America, replacing cars, trucks, motorcycles and the like. But this idea would never work. The reason why? Other liberals would stop it. Yes, liberal environmentalists would find a gopher burrow, or a rare aphid colony--years of study would need to be done to figure out the environmental impact, new routes would need to be changed, involving more studies of the impact on the newly proposed routes, on and on and on. But wait a minute...it just might work. I nearly forgot that the environment can be overlooked as long as the liberal agenda is pushed forward. Just look at how many windmills around the country went up without a thought in the world about the displacement of kangaroo rats, jackrabbits, or horned toads.

Kind of like...

Liberals are in favor of equality. Take from the rich, redistribute to the poor. In favor of equalizing the money supply. In favor of taking from the haves and giving it to the have-nots. Yep, in favor of equality. So in order to get it, they'd like the rich to pay 30 percent or more of their income in taxes, and the less fortunate to pay next to nothing. How is that equal treatment under the law? So, as long as equality means what they define it to mean, then they believe in it.

Another thing is...

Work. Many liberals believe that traditionally low-income jobs, such as dishwashers, or parking lot attendants, should be getting paid a lot more, like twenty dollars an hour. I heard that from one of the Occupy Wall Streeters. And NBA players should be getting a lot less. The liberals want to take from the NBA players, and Oprah (wait a minute, Oprah is one of the rich that they don't want to take anything from because she agrees with them), and give that money to those on the low end of the financial scale. Sound like a nice concept, only can't we ask the wealthy to help the poor voluntarily? But it's not only that. Liberals would like those who refuse to work to be subsidized  in their efforts by those who do the work. That's you and me. As Dennis Miller says, "I'm fine with helping the helpless. I just don't want to help the clueless." Equal work for equal pay, how about that? If you can play a sport well enough to draw thousands to watch you, employing hundreds if not thousands of other employees to sell snacks and beverages, show you to your seats, provide security--well if the job you are doing provides so many jobs for so many other people, maybe you might be worth a little more on the job market than the guy who stocks shelves at Wal-mart for a living.