Today I’m working to express only the positive.  Perhaps I’ll make that a new Friday thing.

Relaxing, Loving, Enjoying Life!
Interesting…when you try and emphasize positive things, you use lots of exclamation points…when you’re stressing negative things, you use all caps!

Being a retiree makes activities that I’ve done for a while even better and allows me to choose to do new activities as well.

Sleeping, eating, exercising, reading and knitting are all things I do with great joy and without having to worry about the interference of work, I can truly enjoy them all.

I get about 7 hours of sleep most nights and will take a nap in the afternoon when I feel I haven’t had enough sleep.

Thaddeus does most of the cooking at home, but we don’t have to buy pre-prepared food to save on time…we can actually by ingredients for food and fresh vegetables.  Our big meal is usually our noon meal and a standard lunch will be a large, fresh salad with hard boiled eggs, or beets, or garlic-sauteed asparagus and some kind of protein.  Or we will grill up a nice fresh rib-eye and have a sweet potato and broccoli on the side.  Or I’ll whip up some curried chickpeas or a spicy chicken stir-fry.  Food is good and plentiful and enjoyable.

Up to three times a week, Thaddeus and I will go to the local flea market and walk a couple of miles around all the tables.  If weather permits, we’ll also bicycle along the Delaware River Canal and towpath.

Typically we’ll go up on the Pennsylvania side of the River and cross over and come back on the New Jersey side.  Here’s a short time-lapse of a very small section of a ride.

I just finished reading a Caleb Carr novel called Surrender New York.  He also wrote The Alienist which was turned into a mini-series, which I enjoyed, but I have never read the book.  Surrender New York was not very good.  It was filled with laughable plot twists and ridiculously unlikely romantic scenarios.  And Carr did something I despise as a literary technique…at the end of a chapter, he’d allude to what would happen next, almost as a teaser…”Little did they know how correct their thesis would be.”  I find this kind of thing to be a lazy author’s way of creating a compelling story.

Finally, with knitting, you’ll note that in the next chapter I’m working on something exciting and new!  Sorry…that was cheap and lazy…but hopefully good for a chuckle.  After finishing the last baby blanket, one of my friends/former coworkers whose newborn son got a hand-knit baby blanket from me, sent me the following photo of his not-so-newborn son holding the blanket made for him years ago.

It clearly held up well!

Current Knitting

On the heels of finishing up the Heart Baby Blanket, and keeping with the theme of all things good and lovable, I’ve decided to start another baby blanket.

This is the Teddy Bear Baby Blanket.  It will be similar in size (although the individual squares are bigger for this graphic, so there will be fewer columns and rows of bears).  You’ll note I’m using the same yarn for this blanket…I thought it made a great fabric for a blanket.