Goals

What are your goals in life?

Which is your most important goal?

What steps are you taking to achieve your most important goal?

It's never too late to ask yourself these questions, but the younger you are, the more relevant your answers will be. As you go through life, your answers may change, so you need to ask yourself these questions more than just once. 

I suspect that 95 percent of people don't have goals. They may have dreams; you may have dreams. But goals are what take you from where you are now to your dreams.

If you are not happy with where you are in life, go to your favorite internet search page and search "goals." Read a few articles about setting goals.

If you set goals and then act on those goals, you have a much better chance of living a happy life than if you simply allow the events of the day to push you this way and that way.

Remember, too, the adage: "What goes around, comes around." You can't achieve happiness at the expense of others. You may succeed in the short run, but your actions will come back to bite you in the long run. Choose your goals so that others can win, too. Karma is real.

A Day With Nuria

Time passes...

It's 8AM. I stand at the top of the basement stairs and watch Nuria, my Costa Rican house guest, descend the stairs to the basement while carrying a basket of laundry. I hate doing laundry, mainly because I don't like going up and down the stairs to the basement. The stairwell is spiral so the steps are odd-shaped, like wedges, and there is no handrail. I try to be extra careful, because a slip-and-fall could be deadly, but Nuria steps lightly down the stairs, seemingly with little effort. She puts up a fight if I try to carry laundry down the stairs. "Let me," she insists.

Nuria walks around my neighborhood for an hour every morning. At 6:45AM, my friend from tropical Costa Rica began her morning walk with the air temperature here at 33°F. She walks for an hour every morning. I used to do the same, but the task eventually became so boring that I quit. I'm glad she walks every day. When morning temperatures become warmer, I'll join her.

We ate breakfast and afterward I made 4 jars of vegetable juice: a blend of carrot, celery, and cucumber. A 16 ounce jar of juice is enough for two people, so we have a total of eight servings. I put the juice into glass jars with screw-on lids and put the jars into the fridge. Fresh juice will be good for two or three days.

Time passes...

It's 11AM and the day has warmed to 48°F. It's also breezy. The high today will supposedly be 60°F. The sun shines brightly as the noon hour approaches.

Time passes...

It's 4PM. I'm back from a long afternoon walk—my first (and only) walk of the day and Nuria's second walk of the day. I had got on an old treadmill I keep in a spare bedroom and walked a little and it put me into a mood to go for a longer walk outside. So we left the house and walked around the neighborhood. Now we're back and the temperature is 54° at 4:30PM. That's as warm as the day got. It's also cloudy, which makes the cool air feel even cooler.

Time passes...

It's 9PM. My friend has gone to bed. We did my Spanish lesson around 8PM. (Did I mention that she is also my Spanish tutor?) I have a fire in the fireplace and I'll wait until it is out, or almost out, before I go to bed. The outside temperature is 43°F now. The low is predicted to be 35°F tonight and there is a freeze warning, because some places will be colder. There will be one more cold night and then, for next week, the daytime temperatures will rise into the 70s. No more burning logs in the fireplace. Instead, there will be open windows and drapes moving in the fresh air. That will be nice.

Little by little, with bits of this and snippets of that, the day has passed. I enjoyed the day, not least because Nuria was here to share it with me. I will miss her when she returns to Costa Rica in May. But she must return. Her visa expires in May and if she is still in the U.S. she will be here illegally. She will not do that, nor would I want her to do it.

Time passes...

Covid Shots

I got my second Covid-19 vaccine shot on Sunday, twenty-eight days after the first shot. Both Covid shots used the Moderna vaccine. The first shot wasn't bad. It stung my arm a little as the shot went in, and on the second day my arm was a little sore at the injection site, but by the third day I was back to normal. 

With the second shot, the sting as it was pushed into my arm hurt worse but was tolerable. The next day the injection site was sore, as with the first shot, but more so. I felt tired and my body hurt all over. My muscles ached and my joints hurt. That was Monday.

By Tuesday, the symptoms were gone: no pain, no soreness, no tiredness. I mowed the lawn and used the string trimmer around the house and the garage. I cleaned the spare room downstairs and filled the trash can with odds and ends. I removed the sliding glass outside door from the spare room and lubricated the mechanism to make the door open and close more easily. 

In short, I got the second vaccine shot and after two days I was back to normal. The worst thing about the first vaccine shot was standing in line for 30 minutes to get the shot. The second shot made me feel not-so-good for a day and then that feeling was gone. I'm still alive, I'm feeling okay, and I'm glad to be fully vaccinated. I'm thankful my country has geniuses who know how to make vaccines and hard-working people who can manufacture, distribute, and administer the vaccines.

It looks more and more like the Covid vaccine may become an annual shot, like the flu shot. I can put up with that. This virus came from the animal world, either by accident or with human assistance, and humans are going to have to be smarter going forward. If we aren't, one day we'll meet a virus that will be more clever than us. That will be a bad day for humanity.

No Cheese

The time was early morning. I pulled the Jeep into what I thought was the House of Pancakes, though one person who was with me swears it was Wendy's. So now I think it was probably neither. I think it was Casa de los FlapJacks. It was closed due to Covid, but the drive-thru was open. I pulled up to the speaker box and a female voice asked what I wanted to order. I said, "Number seven with no cheese."

The voice asked, "Do you want no cheese on blah or no cheese on blah-blah?" Just to be clear, she didn't actually say "blah." She used a word I was unfamiliar with or perhaps she wasn't pronouncing it correctly. I'm substituting "blah" for that word. 

I replied as clearly as I could, "I want a number seven with no cheese." I don't want cheese in my food. No queso in my comida. NO CHEESE on my number seven. What could be more clear?

Now the voice was annoyed with me. With a sigh and an "Oh my God," the voice again asked, "Do you want no cheese on blah or no cheese on blah blah?

I was not only getting frustrated, I was annoyed that the woman behind the voice was annoyed. "I don't know what the flip you're talking about," I said truthfully and drove away. There are plenty of places to eat breakfast in a city of 99,000. I don't have to go in circles with a woman who cannot understand the meaning of the two words "NO CHEESE."

Is it me? I thought "no cheese" was self-explanatory.  Like "no spit." Do I have to explain exactly which items should not have spit on them? Maybe I'm doing something wrong. But I know this: when you have a disagreement with the order-taker, you don't want to take that order. It's time to drive off.

The Trip

It has been a tad over a month since my last blog post. What can I say?

I had to take a trip out of town. It was a fast trip—there and back quickly. I left town on a Thursday morning and returned on Saturday. 

It really started before Thursday. I drove to the Richmond airport on Tuesday and picked up two female guests who had traveled to the US from Costa Rica. (That's Costa Rica, not Puerto Rica. Costa Rica is a country. Puerto Rica is a territory of the United States.) Then on Thursday, we drove to Roanoke, Va. I live near Richmond,Va., so the trip was a three hour drive—each way. I've made the trip a few hundred times, but the last time I made it was 18 years ago. Things have changed.

I had a few worries about whether my 26 year old Jeep had another trip left in it. Most of the vehicle is original equipment, including radiator hoses and heater hoses, and it would take only a crack in an old hose to leave the Jeep disabled and steaming beside the road. But I needn't have worried. The Jeep got us there and back just fine.

Our primary mission was to spread the ashes of the husband of one of my lady guests. He grew up in Roanoke and his final wish, as he died from cancer, was to have his ashes returned home. We did that.

I have friends in Roanoke that I would like to have visited, but there was time for only one visit. I drove to a small rural community 45 minutes from downtown Roanoke and visited a friend I met many years ago and for whom I later worked at a robotics company that he launched in the mid-1980s. 

Of course, inasmuch as there were two women with me, there was much shopping to be done. First we went to a shopping mall in south Roanoke that, in my opinion, is a pitiful shadow of its former self. Then we went to another mall, near the airport, that appears to still be doing well but with ominous indications of trouble ahead. For example, the JCPenney store at that mall was running a huge discount sale with signs announcing "Final Clearance — 70% off." It looks like the store may be closing soon. The ladies scored some bargains there.

The next morning I gassed up the Jeep and we hit the road eastbound to my home city. There, more shopping was accomplished, as well as more restaurant meals and a nature walk beside a river that runs along the southern border of my city. The mall in my city is also doing poorly with many stores closing. Maybe the Covid is keeping people away.

One of the ladies has returned home. The other decided that my home needs cleaning and organizing from top to bottom and enlisted me in her program to remake my home.

My main impression from visiting Roanoke was how much the city has changed in 18 years and how little of the city I remember. It was easy to get lost while driving in parts of the city that were once very familiar. The traffic on major roads in the city was insane, not at all as I remembered.

I do have some stories from the trip, but after much thought I've decided they play better in my head than they will play on a blog post. Maybe I'll dribble out a few from time to time.