valeriesbookofme

  I actually wrote the following in April, 2009, on a fitness blog I kept up with for many years. Ironically, I can't really remember why I was feeling so dispirited. Maybe because I was facing a hysterectomy, another move . . . I can't remember. And maybe, in another 10 years, I will read THIS blog and wonder why I felt so dispirited too. I can only hope. Inn of the Sixth Happiness Thursday, April 02, 2009 There's an old movie called Inn of the Sixth Happiness with Ingrid Bergman. A bit hokey but I always cry at the end. She plays the role of a woman working in a mission in China when the Japanese soldiers invade her area. She has to get 100 orphaned children across the Chinese mountains to another mission where they'll be taken to safety. 100 children of all ages, little food, across mountains crawling with Japanese soldiers.  Not surprisingly, they start to fall behind their schedule. They're following a map and she knows they're going to have a very hard tim...

  My Audible book for dog walking this week is "Factfulness" by Hans Rosling. Rosling, who died in 2017, was a statistician/physician, very popular on Ted talks, presented at Davos and to the WHO, etc. But I hadn’t heard of him before. I picked the book up because it was an Audible recommendation and because I feel a kind of responsibility to alternate my escapist fiction/thrillers with non-fiction. Rosling loved stats and, in my listening so far, has talked about how we tend toward negative thinking—something my mindfulness lecturer has also said—but, really, according to statistics from the United Nations, the world is getting better, not worse. He described how, since the 1990s, he has posed several questions to classes and audiences about issues such as life span across the world, extreme poverty, education, etc. He "proved" through his stats that so many of these issues HAD improved worldwide to a much greater degree than his audience had expected.  I admit tha...

  I just finished listening to Joan Didion's "Year of Magical Thinking," read by Vanessa Redgrave. It's become my morning ritual these past few months, to listen to an Audible book as I walk Mitzi. It helps motivate me to get out on these early mornings, when it's already getting hot, when part of me would just like to stay in bed all day. As I would think many of we elders ARE doing as somehow society has no call for our participation. As COVID shrinks participation of so many people. But getting out so early in the morning means that I get to witness the beautiful sunrises, the hummingbirds flitting, hawks hunting. And I get to meet briefly with Dick and his basset hound Shaggy, with Jeanie and her mutt Finnegan (some boxer in him but only in his nose, the rest is small), Joanne and her chocolate lab Kia, and Bev and her hound Penny. Lots of brief encounters with wide-ranging discussions about Trump and the state of the U.S. (bad, Dick and I agree), family histo...

 Eighteen years ago my daughter got married at Mount Timpanogos in Utah. It was a very, very hot day and because "Timp" was the IN Temple for BYU students that year, the only slot that was available for the sealing--Mormon-speak for the marriage ceremony--was at 5 p.m., when it was still very hot and the temple was mobbed. We were lucky that the photographer managed to get shots without swarms of people around.  The wedding photos show us all lined up for the official photograph in front of the Temple, sweating in our wedding gear, R wearing his weird cowboy shirt and odd tie in a sea of suits with the Mormon standard white shirts and ties. I think I will just share this one, with the four of us, Richard and I a little stunned.  It would have been so nice had we had the wedding in Canada, with friends and family from our own side. Instead, it was in Utah, where neither set of parents lived but which was where the bride and groom wanted it to be. CJ's family, whom we met f...