A sleepy roll out of bed, then into my gym shoes out on the living room floor for my workout half an hour later… in my jammies, haha. I’ve been enjoying working out wearing whatever. Work clothes at the end of the day. Jammies first thing in the morning. It’s all good to me, I’ve found. At least for now, in the winter. Why create more laundry for myself when I can stay cozy in what I’m already wearing?
15 minutes into the workout, I strip off my pajama top and finish the session in the sports bra I’d put on beneath it. 66F in the house and I’m sweating. Les Mills, my friends. You long-time readers have patiently listened to me rave about LM over the years, but I can’t help but continue to plug these workouts. Since 2014 I’ve only done Les Mills workouts, in the gym and here at home (Les Mills On Demand), and nothing beats them, I swear to you. You want hardcore? LM. It will kick your butts into the next century.
So 55 minutes of Body Combat and then into a hot shower, after which, finally, a steaming hot mug of delicious matcha-mushroom tea lands on the dresser to be savored as I get ready for the day. It’s a highlight!
The next hour involves the delving-into of a project involving papers spread out all over my kitchen. Music makes it less tedious, as does the feeling of satisfaction in finally getting around to it! You know the feeling. I need to create more opportunities to feel that feeling; there’s a multitude of such projects on the TODO list.
I spend time with a couple of wonderful friends in the afternoon, and we exchange wonderful, warm hugs. I’m Covid-weary. We’re vaccinated and boosted and masked, and while I know that these measures aren’t fail-safe, I’m not afraid to embrace my dear ones and to be embraced by them. You can die from Covid, and you can also die from lack of human contact. Tragically, people have ended their lives because of the pandemic and its impact on their personal lives. I will meet friends in a coffee shop and spend a couple of hours as mindful of proximity to the general public as possible and then come home to my cozy little nest and feel grateful for it all. And I do.
At the end of the day I’m ensconced in my office and I take an unintentionally goofy selfie wherein I look like I’m making a sales pitch for an ambulance-chasing tort law firm like The Eagle here in the Land of AZ.
29 Jan 2022
(Apologies to you who ask for selfies. My selfie skills continue to be lacking.)
I DoorDash dinner because all of my kitchen surfaces are still covered in papers while the aforementioned huge project remains in progress, and I don’t want to add cooking and clean-up to the mix. A falafel pita and turmeric rice arrive from the local Mediterranean place. I follow it with a flavorful and sweet organic honeycrisp apple and a handful of mixed nuts and bitter chocolate, and then I drink my nightly tall cup of apple cider vinegar in cold water.
Later in the night, I watch two episodes of Euphoria and talk to Mom on the phone and text with a friend.
The New Moon
The moon is in her waning crescent stage at 4.9%. She’ll rise at 6:23am and set at 4:21pm. I love the moon’s waning phases the best. Her next phase will be the dark one when she rises as the New Moon tomorrow.
Ideal areas of focus under a New Moon:
Planting seeds Personal improvement Renewal Release Love Setting intentions Manifestation Change
Whatever energetic/spiritual magickal workings we do under this moon will come to fruition by the time of the full moon in six months. Related events will unfold over the spring and summer, peaking during Leo season, as we’re now in Aquarius season (Leo is the polarity of Aquarius). Between the time of our January New Moon workings and Leo season’s full moon, it’s up to us to work to meet the Universe halfway to get results. After Leo season peaks, it’ll be up to us, again, to work to maintain the results. We create our own realities. The magick is just the respectful working with natural energies to guide us forward with our intentions set and sent out to the Universe for activation. (My go-to energy for all of my workings is elemental: fire energy.)
That said, my intention now is to go to bed. It’s 2:30am! Blessings and many thanks to you all, as always. Be well, friends.
Early this morning (as in last night but so late that it was actually today) I watched a video on YouTube that reminded me of the classic “A Day in My Life” (ADIML) posts of LiveJournal yore. These posts were so enduring on the platform that they were more of a style than a trend (LJ friends, you know what I’m talking about) back in the 2000’s.
Anyway, my mind thrown back to those ADIML posts got me feeling all nostalgic-like, and I thought I’d do one about the day that’d just passed, so yesterday, now. It was a mundane day, as most ADIML posts are. I love the mundanity of them. It makes the posts feel intimate. It’s like I’m peeking into your lives and also hanging out with you and getting to know you.
An old LJ friend reminded me (without knowing it) that photographed time-checks and other pics throughout the day are a key component of the ADIML post, as these pics show where/what’s happening, and when. Alas, I don’t have those important visuals, since I decided to do this post after the day was over.
I did take some pics yesterday that I can use here by happenstance, though. I’ll plug them in. One of the pics even has the time in it, so there’s that! And if I do remember any actual times, I’ll state them.
Ready for some mundanity? Let’s go!
A Day In My Life –Saturday, June 26, 2021
-6:30am: Woke up, looked at the clock, remembered that I wasn’t going to do a workout that morning, went back to bed.
-8:00am: Got up for real, brushed teeth, made bed, fed cats, went to get a bowl of cereal.
-8:30am-ish: Sat down with my cereal, took a spoonful, and almost spat it out. Something was horrible! It wasn’t the cereal. It was the milk. It was almond milk – not my favorite in the first place, but I have it because someone gave it to me – and it was VANILLA FLAVORED, which I didn’t know. I was already prepared to like and not love the cereal because of the almond milk, but I wasn’t prepared for the milk being vanilla-flavored.
[ASIDE: I love vanilla everything except as a flavoring in milks… not even in soy milk (my favorite). It’s weird. I love vanilla ice cream! I guess I just don’t like sweetened, flavored milk in my cereal.]
-Fleeting internal debate about whether to commit the sin of tossing out the whole bowl of cereal and preparing a new one. I have plain, unsweetened almond milks, too, given to me by the same person. (I didn’t buy more soy milk when I ran out because I knew that I had these almond milks to use up. I’m now planning to get soy milk, anyway. I can’t stand almond milk anymore, for some reason, and I really love plain, unsweetened soy milk.)
-Decided to go ahead and prepare a new bowl of cereal with the plain milk. I didn’t see the point in choking down the first one. Felt like a terrible person for wasting food.
-After eating, got ready to get into the shower to wash my hair so I could color it the next day (today).
-I was 98% undressed when I got distracted by something (don’t remember what) online, so I sat down in front of the computer and thought I’ll just sit here for a minute with this. Which I did, but then my eyes landed on the little blue work notebook that I was in the process of transcribing into a new, identical little blue workbook (because the old one was crammed full of notes and disorganized and also mangled for having been through the wash as I keep it in my back pocket and forgot to take it out one day.)
-Decided to take “just another minute” to copy a few more bits of info into the new notebook.
-10:05 am: The doorbell rang. I jumped in my seat and looked at the clock. It was after 10am. When did that happen?!GAH! Creepy Crawley pest control was at the door, and I’d totally forgotten that they were scheduled for a 10-12pm window. I was sitting at my desk IN MY UNDERWEAR.
-For the first time in my life, I had to do the ridiculous cliché and run to the door and shout JUST A SECOND! I’M NOT WEARING ANYTHING! (Yes, I had to explain why. It was hot outside; he had to know why I was leaving him standing out there in Arizona in late June.)
-Ran to throw on jeans and a t-shirt and almost didn’t take the time to put on a bra but then remembered that the problem with small boobs is nipples like headlights so I ran back to the bedroom to put one on. (I was wearing a fitted, pale t-shirt. That was not going to be okay.)
-Ran back to the door and felt like a terrible person again, this time for keeping the Creepy Crawley guy out there on the patio (though it was probably for less than five minutes in actuality).
-Chit-chatted with the guy as we walked through the house, then again on the back patio.
-Creepy Crawley Guy left. I looked at the clock and saw how much later it was and remembered that someone else was coming over between late morning and early afternoon, and so now didn’t have time to wash my hair. I did my face and skincare routine as usual and decided to put off the hair-coloring to next weekend.
-Put in a load of laundry. Cleaned my bathroom and started to dust and wipe down furniture in my bedroom and re-organize the things on my dresser and in one of the drawers.
-12:15pm-ish: Stopped to eat lunch: a big plate of nachos followed by a bowl of fresh cherries. (Nachos: blue corn and flaxseed tortilla chips with Daiya (vegan) pepperjack shreds and sliced jalapeños.) Watched a Stephen Colbert video on YouTube as I ate.
-The doorbell rang again: friends arriving with houseplants to leave with me to babysit while they’re away.
-After they left, I cooked the three fresh ears of corn they’d also brought. Ate one immediately.
-Finished cleaning/organizing the bedroom. Finished the laundry. Put together my meds and supps for the upcoming week.
-Ate a peanut butter cookie Lara Bar.
-4:45pm-ish: Fed Nenette. Looked out at the backyard and didn’t see Salem, so covered her prepared dish in plastic wrap.
-5:12pm: Went to Tempe Marketplace to pick up one thing at Ulta and two things at Target; was proud of myself for picking up those exact things and not a single extra thing.
-5:34pm: Drove home. Took a quick pic of my dash at a red light because Spotify started playing this cover that I love, and I wanted to be able to quickly find it again to add to my current playlist. Surprise time-check!
I love this cover of Mr. Sandman
-Ate a plum when I got home.
I ate cherries and a plum yesterday. They’re divine!
-Fed Salem and rinsed out/refreshed her watering hole.
-6:28pm: Called Mom.
-Ate a bowl of nuts, seeds, and dried fruit.
-7:15pm-ish: Decided to do a late junky freezer clear-out dinner: vegan chick’n tenders and sweet potato fries with Trader Joe’s jalapeño sauce. Didn’t really want it, wasn’t really hungry, but I needed to make space in my freezer!
-Watched an episode of Katla on Netflix.
-Watched the YouTube video (don’t remember what it was) that reminded me of these ADMIL posts; started writing this post.
-Shortly after midnight: Went out to the backyard to stargaze, as I do every night. Bonded with the stars Vega (of Lyra), Deneb (of Cygnus), and Altair (of Aquila) – they comprise the glorious Summer Triangle – as well as Arcturus (of Boötes), Altais (of Draco), Antares (of Scorpius), and Polaris (North Star and Alpha star of Ursa Minor). Bonded with constellations Scorpius, Ursa Major, and Capricorn (my constellation)! Also connected with the planets Jupiter and Saturn.
I took pics of Jupiter and Saturn on both my cell phone camera and through my SkyView app. I take pics like these frequently, so it didn’t occur to me at the time that I could use them in this post. Surprise!
The bright point of light just left of center is JupiterJupiter as seen through SkyViewThe point of light above and to the left of the moon is SaturnSaturn as seen through SkyView. The moon is now actually in Capricorn! The full moon was a moon “in Capricorn,” but due to degrees, it was actually in Sagittarius at that time.
Have I mentioned how much I love SkyView?
Drawing down energy from the Summer Triangle and Jupiter and Saturn has become the highlight of my summer nights. I can’t wait to get out there at around midnight to view these and all the other splendid jewels of the cosmos!
ETA: Salem stayed with me as always, rolling on the gravel. My midnight backyard visits are my special bonding time with her, too.
-Came back in and took a shower.
-1:17am-ish: Went to bed.
And that was it! Nothing special happened yesterday, but it wasn’t a typical Saturday, either. A typical Saturday would start with a workout, and it wouldn’t include Creepy Crawley coming over, or people with houseplants.
That Asian-Looking Chick 