Month: March 2018

Getting in touch with nature naturally…-ish

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One of my favorite memories from my time in high school is the day where one of my best friends and I spent some time with nature during lunch.  In the front of our school, between two of the branches of buildings that stick out to the parking lot, there is an outdoor passageway/walkway.  It is like a courtyard, but that it only has buildings on three sides of it.  That being the case, it wasn’t exactly an ‘allowed’ place for having lunch.  However, the building on one side of it was brand new, and so no precedent was in place regarding it.  Essentially, I didn’t tell anyone that I went there for lunch, and I kept myself out of eyeshot while out there, whenever I went.

I only went on days when I felt really stranded inside the buildings.  Sometimes the whole artificial box and lighting can really get one down, and that is often the case for me.  Since the school had removed carpets from most hallways, while it was fancier-looking, it felt even more industrial and anti-nature.  So, while I had lunch in the actual courtyard most days, I occasionally snuck out to this walkway, because 1) it was rather isolated from people and buildings, and 2) it was filled with green, green grass (something of which the courtyard had almost none).

On the day of this beloved memory, I had told this friend of my intentions to go be one with nature during lunchtime.  She elected to join me.  And so, as I walked barefoot in the grass as part of my usual routine of grounding myself back to nature on these days, she walked alongside me.  I may even have lay down in the grass, or just sat in it, while she walked around and back and forth in it with the same goal in mind.  However, for whatever reason, while I was barefoot to feel the ground physically, she was getting in touch with nature while in her tennis shoes.

Gosh, I loved that silly lunchtime event, and still treasure it.  😛

When Weird is One’s Normal

The following is an excerpt from a casual phone conversation the other day with one of my best friends.

………………

Hannah: [in casual tone] Oh… I just realized that I’ve apparently been wearing my dress backwards all day.

Friend: [also in casual tone] That doesn’t surprise me.

………………

I love best friends.  🙂

 

Post-a-day 2018

 

Long-necked fun

Today, I saw coon mule jumping, I pet llama and alpaca, and I tied “Donald Trump”‘s tie, and they all were fabulous parts of my day.

Alpaca photo shoot.

Donald Trump won the popular vote, but earned only second place with the judges.

This little fellow genuinely just seemed to love jumping!

Alpaca fiber with which I got to play (for making yarn from the furry fuzz that is alpaca fiber).

Post-a-day 2018

Rocks with that?

I was reminded today of how I used to have a chunk of charcoal in my water bottle.  I haven’t thought much about that at all recently, (however, I might start doing it again) but apparently the lacrosse team I used to help coach thinks of it often.

First off, the charcoal in the water bottle is something I learned from Japan, though, via my brother before I moved there (and then it was emphasized while I lived there).  It has to do with cleaning up the water, essentially, from what I recall.  (Note: It is not drinking charcoal mixed with water.  It is a stick of this specific charcoal that sits in the water bottle, so that its pores can absorb unwanted stuff from the water.)

Anyway, so I had this stick of charcoal in my water bottle.  I carry my water bottle pretty much everywhere with me in life, so lacrosse practice was included back when I was coaching (and teaching).  Apparently, one of the girls has held on to the fact that I had ‘some kind of rocks’ in my water bottle, though I have doubts as to whether she recalls what the ‘rocks’ actually were (the stick had broken in half, so there were actually two pieces in the bottle, instead of one, but they didn’t really look like rocks).  In memory of my water bottle, in a sense, that particular girl regularly drops rocks into other people’s water bottles, telling them that it is healthy, and reminding them of how I did it.

Yes, my wonderful lifestyle rubs off in the best of ways.  😛  I guess it gives us a new meaning for ‘on the rocks’, now.

Post-a-day 2018

Horses and Shooting

Today, I watched some mounted shooting.  At this rodeo, anyway, mounted shooting means that an individual rides his or her horse across the arena, following a sort of zig-zagged pattern, and then back in a straight line, all while shooting, in a specific order, ten balloons that are placed around the arena.  The average speed for doing this was 12-14 seconds.  I’m not sure I could even have sprinted from one end of the arena to the other in that time, or even made all ten shots successfully while standing still in that time, and these people were riding all around it and back, knocking out balloons with their pistols along the way.  Somehow, things like this make perfect sense to me, and I love watching them.  It made me, even more than ever, want to ride horses every week in my life.

Though, I’m more of a Robinhood type, and so I would want to do mounted bow-and-arrow shooting, myself.

Post-a-day 2018

Maybe a cowboy

Tonight at the rodeo, during the invocation, I had a thought that surprised me.  First off, I enjoyed the fact that a stadium full of people was taking a moment for prayer before beginning events of the evening…, even though it was not a religious event, or even religiously-officiated event.  Second, I noticed how much I enjoyed the praying part myself as an individual and as part of the community.  And thirdly, the thought which then occurred to me and surprised me most, I wondered if I might not want to be somehow involved in this kind of thing.  Perhaps I really would love to be involved in cowboy-related stuff, country and ranch stuff.  A visually beautiful place, filled with happy, animal-loving people, and where God is a happy place (as opposed to a sensitive or nonexistent one)…, now that would be nice.  I, of course, do not at all know that I would enjoy such a setting.  I think I fall under the common category of individuals who would be considered to be ‘liberal’, and that might not roll so well for me in the cowboy world.  However, there’s a niche for everything, and it is certainly possible that I could slide in perfectly well in the ranching and rodeo world.  Who knows, aside from God, anyway?

It’s just a thought I had, but I like the idea of considering it some more.  🙂

 

Post-a-day 2018

Toilets self-proclaiming status

Tonight in the wine garden at the rodeo, we had a unique scene occur.  I was standing in line for the toilets – a very long line that doubled in size just in the time I waited in it.  I found myself wondering how the men’s toilets were.  They were part of the same trailers as the women’s toilets.  There was even a door on the inside that connected the men’s to the women’s toilets within a trailer.  Well, two guys come waltzing out of the men’s toilets in the trailer next to ours, and declare ‘Hey, we’re unisex here; you can use these, ladies.’ A small, but somewhat mad dash ensues by ladies that had been a ways back in our line.

“They say that…” I begin, but end there, for my conflicting thoughts couldn’t agree upon an end to the sentence.  It boiled down to the question of who would be liable for the issue of inappropriate bathroom use by the opposite gender – because I know that it is actually a thing – and the matter of 1) if anyone actually cared, and, if so, 2) who would be the one/s to correct/stop the behavior (aka enforce the gender rule of the toilets).

Sure enough, within moments after my statement, a grounds service person heads calmly up to the men’s bathroom and the line of ladies standing at it, and tells the ladies that they can’t use the men’s bathroom.  By the time I was going into the trailer, – by the way, these are fancy trailers with flushing toilets and hand washing and even paper towels – the man had almost persuaded the likely drunk final three ladies from the men’s toilets.  Though, I’m not sure he managed to get them out before they used the toilets.  We could see straight into the men’s bathroom while the door was being held open, and it cracked me up, because there were two women standing in the walkway-type area of the trailer, next to the stalls, the worked outside the trailer, failing to convince them that it wasn’t okay for them to be in there, and a man’s head and cowboy hat 100% clear above one of the stall doors, while he clearly was using the toilet within the stall, but still chatting with the people outside of his stall, who were standing in the bathroom (i.e. the ladies), plus the man outside the trailer.

The whole thing just cracked me up.

Also, there were only two or three stalls (I think two) in the men’s section, whereas the women’s section had five stalls.  I appreciated that fact.

Post-a-day 2018