Aging Woo-sah

Good morning, world!

It's 6:15 a.m. as I sit down with my coffee to blog chat.
I've been getting up early, with the sunlight––5:30 a.m. today, though it's gray rain-light this morning.

It's been a dry spring, so the rain is welcome, but I hope it stops later because I bike home this evening, from a week of condo/cat– sitting.

It's as if I've had a week at an Airbnb, plus cat, with room to invite people over. Which we can do again--and UNMASKED! Everyone I know is vaccinated.

It's been a social week:
almost every day, a friend came over, or I went out with someone in the busy Uptown area, where this senior condo building is.
(I used to live near here, now I live in a quiet, residential area.)

(I could invite people over to HouseMate's house too, but she's almost always there, so I don't want to spread out like we did for Circus Day.)

Here's another photo of Costume Day, with humans:
bink, left, and my sister. (Marz came later.)

(Can you see ^ bink's shirt pattern is tiny terriers.)

bink and I are going to drive down to Milwaukee to see Auntie Vi in three weeks. We'd been to visit six months ago on Election Day; we'd stayed in an Airbnb down the block from Vi, and kept our distance.

We'll stay at that rental house again, rather than my auntie's, but we'll be able to show our faces!
She will be 96 in three months and said it's more relaxed not to host guests in her little house. Also, she doesn't go out much, so visiting us at the nice Airbnb is like a vacation for her.

Covid isolation was extra-hard on my auntie. She doesn't drive anymore, and she likes to walk (with her walker) the half-mile to the coffee shop, library, and stores which, of course, were all closed.

Winters are always isolating for her anyway.
I wish she lived in a senior complex, like this condo where I'm cat sitting, but she chose not to--I think she prefers the total independence.

For me, I think aging around other people (in the same building) would be better than being isolated, living alone or living in a quiet neighborhood with only one roommate.
I imagine at some point (when I'm eighty, in twenty years?), I'll move into a place for old people. Not an expensive one (like where I'm house sitting), but some place for low-income seniors.

Weird to contemplate one's decline. At this point, aging is more an idea than an impediment. I've had gray hair for more than a decade, so I'm used to that--and I'm lucky that I'm still healthy and strong.

The other day at work, one of my coworkers hastened to help one of the volunteers carry something heavy--this volunteer is not much older than I am.
My coworker never hastens to help me carry anything!
Ha. Not a bad thing, that I don't need help.

I could use some help losing 20 lbs, but not from Noom. A while ago that I'd signed up for a free trial membership on this weight-loss app.
I didn't like it at all.
It's designed for people who like pictures of lemurs on their kombucha = the communications are written in cutesey Sock Monkey Voice. "Let's say, Kale yeah!"

Ugh. When I canceled I suggested they write two tracks--one Cute-Speak, and the other, Just the Facts.

There are free food-tracking apps... I just... I don't know.
Food is all tied up with difficult emotions from my early years, and it is resistant to change. Intransigent.

I'd love to lighten the load––the weight weighs me down, of course––but I think I'll do best by focusing on other healthy things . . . like gym class!

I just read a book review in the New Yorker about how life expectancy in the past was thirty-five years old.
Well, actually, the article is about the end of life--dying well.
I'd like that--which is one reason I keep thinking about aging well--what is that, for me, trying to cultivate a good old age, a good death?

Aging (and living in general!) is bound to include dwindlement and pain and general annoyance. How to do that well?
Time to practice that now.

I get lots of practice with annoyance at work! 
Yesterday was zooey, and I was angry at the customers who were making messes and at some of my coworkers who weren't helping at all.
As I was wheeling away a load of dirty clothes someone donated (they go right into the trash), I caught a coworker's eye.
I could see he was in high-annoyance too, so I grabbed my earlobes and said WOO-SAH, and we both laughed.

(Woo-sah is what Mr Furniture always says--it's a made-up anger management mantra, a running joke in the movie Bad Boys II.)
It HELPS. (If only because it makes you stop and take a breath.)

Martin Lawrence demonstrates:

Anyway, in ten years, at seventy I'll have lived twice the number of years many people in history got.
Comparing yourself to other people isn't always that helpful, but in this case, it does give me some perspective:
My troubles are not too bad!