❤️ SPACE!

Tuesday was dry! It was wonderful to be able to walk without worrying about rain. And it’s so warm, walking Her Highness is a treat.

I was reluctant to leave home through the day because my Tezspire is due today, but it often comes a day early. So, I after our walk, I read a while and napped before my meeting with Aidan at 14:00. And what a meeting it was! I am practically in love with Aidan. He is so dedicated to helping us stutterers, and he is smart and very articulate, and he is often sending me lovely messages of gratitude for my contributions. He and SPACE have given me such a wonderful sense of fulfilment, pride and joy.

Then Her Highness and I went walking late in the afternoon when I was certain that Fedex wasn’t coming with my Tezspire today. We took a short walk in Rollo Park and then we went to Nester’s so that I could get more fresh fruit and veggies for another batch of curried rice salad. I make mountains of it. 

I’ve become a massive fan of brown rice. I’d put a load of it on in my rice cooker before leaving for our walk and shop, and when I came home and opened the door, the smell of the rice cooking smelt quite like popcorn at a movie theatre. It is such a wonderfully pleasant smell. I’ll never go back to white rice.

I have a ton of homework to do today for SPACE, and I could not be happier to have something to occupy my mind that is practical and that helps Aidan. The Tezspire will come today, so I must stay home and I’ll have my homework to do while I await its arrival.

It’s still amazingly mild outside, and we’re getting sunshine for the coming four days, and then the rains return. But better than mild temperatures and no rain is the fact that there’s still no snow predicted. This is often the coldest month of our year, so the risk for snow is high. But so far, so, so good!

I noticed that I have jobs the need attention in my garden. Sheesh, everything is budding like mad and I didn’t so some essential pruning, so I will do some during this good weather. But not today; today is a SPACE day.

More of Same

Monday morning was a wet one, but wonderfully mild. We met our friends to walk in light rain, and then Her Highness and I went into the village to get some groceries and to pick up a prescription. Then we came home so Sheba could rest and I could putter until lunch. 

I Zoomed with Steve who left last night for New Zealand and Australia for a month. He turns 70 today, and as he does every time he enters a new decade, he goes off to an exotic location. On his 60^th, he went to Easter Island and on his 50^th, we went to South Africa together.

In the afternoon, I did work for SPACE. Aidan wanted me to develop some text for the project I’ve been hired to be part of, drawing the ideas from a STAMMA questionnaire about bad communication experiences experienced by stutterers. I’m proud and happy to be working on fixing problems that people who stutter have. 

A great many people who stutter (PWS) are ‘covert’ stutterers. Covert stutterers can pass as fluent speakers. They avoid words that cause them problems to achieve fluency. Being covert is not possible for me. I, and all severe stutterers, cannot hide our disfluency and it’s us who have the worst problems with AI generated voices and impatient clerks and customer service people.

Our afternoon walk was short because there was still light rain, but we’d had a good long morning walk. And then our we both enjoyed our regular evening routing together.

Today is warm and wet again. We’ll walk, I’ll Zoom with Aidan, I’ll read and tonight will be like every other Winter evening. It looks like the coming three days will be bright and dry for a change. We’re in for some good walking weather.

My Day

Sunday, My Day, began slowly. Fred ensured that I was up early. He was howling in the bedroom just after 4:30! I fed everyone and lit the fire and then I watched two of my favourite vloggers weekly post of videos about their renovation of the derelict homes they bought. Jude is renovating a cottage in north-eastern Scotland, and Martijn is renovating two old stone homes high in the Italian Alps.

I waited to walk Her Highness late so that after our walk we could go into the village to do some grocery shopping. When I was a kid, people around us shopped once a week. They did huge grocery runs at a time when I was eating vegetables out of tins. I didn’t really learn to cook until I moved in with Marie-Claude and Guy in Nice. Marie-Claude taught me recipes, and she taught me to shop daily so that everything cooked was fresh. That was in 1974-75, and my inclination to shop almost every day is still with me, some fifty years later. 

We went to walk the Ricki Ave. trail, but Sheba was limping and so I checked her feet and found a wound. We came home and I cleaned, medicated and wrapped her wound and then we went shopping. 

Not long after getting home, it was lunch time and then it was chaise time for me. I’m reading a Martin Walker crime novel. I read every book in his Bruno series, and this book I’m reading is his latest. It feels good to be back to reading about the Dordogne area again. Mr. Walker’s books are full of writing about food and I love that!

I revisited some old posts. I noticed that it took several days for me to not mention being scammed after the event. I could count the days it too for normalcy to return. I was shaken for about five days. And then I looked at posts following my breakdown on April 9, 2016. I didn’t stop writing about my speech and seizures for 3.5 years! My breakdown required on hell of an adjustment that is still going on, but it’s not my obsession anymore, it’s just something that continues to require adaptation. Re-reading the posts certainly put the scam in perspective. 

And guess what. I got another scam call. It was the same story as last time, only this time I hung up on the asshole by slamming my phone handle down on the disconnect button. It was especially inappropriate on My Day!

It was a timpanic awakening this morning. It is pouring rain out there, and it’s loud in the house, but I don’t care because it’s also 9° and it ain’t snow. It’s going to be a very mild week with afternoon temperatures reaching 13°. And it’s an easy week for me, uncluttered with obligations.

It's My Day

I didn’t light the fire until 8:30 yesterday. That’s how mild it is now. I dawdled through the morning and so by the time came for us to walk, it was raining hard, so I went back to dawdling hoping that it would lighten up so that we would be comfortable during our morning walk. Mornings are the best time for a long walk because my foot is not as painful after a night’s rest, and it makes it easy for Her Highness to rest through the early afternoon and our second walk.

We had to walk in the rain. It did not let up and there was no bright sky in the west to give us hope that it would. Our walk was short. We went to Rollo Park where there is a gravel walk that lets me keep my feet dry and Sheba roots about in the edge of the forest. She does her duties, and then we came home to chill a little before lunch. And then I read.

In the early afternoon the rain stopped, so Sheba and I went for a long walk in the wonderful warmth of the Pineapple Express that was blowing rainwater off the trees as we walked. When we got home, it was already starting to get dark even though it was only 15:30. Sheba rested and I read until it was our early dinner time. I feed the brood at 16:00 because we have breakfast at 5:00 and lunch at 11:00.

Last night was like every other night of the past four months.

And now it’s My Day again. Not that it means much anymore. Now that I don’t eat sweets, My Day is just another day, but I shall thoroughly enjoy it. We’ll walk this morning, likely in light rain, and we’ll hopefully take a longer walk in the afternoon if it isn’t pouring rain. Life is very, very good.