Author: robertjames1971

I'm wicked tall.

This is Going to Take a While

Daily writing prompt
List 30 things that make you happy.
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Damn, wordpress.com, or jetpack, or whomever comes up with these daily writing prompts… you wanted us to put some time into this one, eh? A list of 30 things?

Okay, let’s see what I can come up with. These will be in no specific order, though the first few are going to be the biggest hitters. Also, a lot of them are going to feel like repeats but they are more like different flavors of the same thing, know what I mean?

Okay… here goes nothing…

  1. My wife Jen
  2. My step daughter Bellana
  3. My step son Harry
  4. Playing the guitar
  5. Playing guitar in a band with friends
  6. Playing guitar in a band with friends on a stage in front of other people including more friends
  7. Visiting my father and having a moment or two when he seems happy
  8. Music. Almost all of it. Just not country music. Ugh, I can’t stomach that crap
  9. Good movies
  10. Good books
  11. Good TV shows
  12. Cooking dinner for my family and hearing them tell me it was really good
  13. Flake days at home. Just me and Jen and the kids (when they are here) hanging in the living room watching something on TV, just being together doing nothing much. I love days like that
  14. Traveling
  15. The drop at the end of Splash Mountain
  16. When you know you want to listen to some music but you don’t know what you’re in the mood for so you bring up your iTunes library and it’s 30,000 files and you hit shuffle and the first song it plays is exactly what you needed to hear, even though you didn’t realize you needed to hear it
  17. Closing all three activity rings on your Apple Watch. Yeah, that’s a silly thing but it gives me the warm and fuzzies
  18. Road trips to nowhere with Jen. Basically any long drives we take together
  19. Visiting with my niece and nephews
  20. I loves me a good board game with friends and family
  21. This is a post-gastric bypass thing that may not make sense to anyone who hasn’t had their insides rearranged. Feeling hungry, then eating a small amount of food, then not feeling hungry anymore. That makes me happy. It used to be I would need to eat a mountain of food to not feel hungry, and even when I stopped feeling hungry I would eat a second mountain of food just because I could. Not anymore
  22. Another post-gastric bypass entry, but this one might be understandable. Having energy makes me happy. Like, say, having enough energy to walk from one end of a Disney World park to the other without having to stop and rest every 50 yards or so
  23. Okay, eight more… you can do this Robert, just keep plugging away… Hockey, especially when my team wins
  24. Baseball, especially when my team wins which seems to be happening less and less often this season, though they do have a habit of getting into winning streaks that are fun
  25. Writing songs and recording demoes of said songs, whether it’s part of an internet challenge thingie or not
  26. Photography. Taking pictures, messing with cameras, lining up a shot and having it come out the way I hoped it would, getting film back and having the images look the way I had hoped they would look
  27. Photo-walks, as in going to Disney World with Jen and the kids and taking pictures of everything around me as we walk from one end of the park to the other
  28. Sunrises over the ocean. Also, less common given my geographical location, sunsets over the ocean
  29. Nazi or nazi adjacent candidates losing elections
  30. Meeting new people and learning that they are not nazis, nazi collaborators, or nazi sympathizers

And there you have it! 30 things that make me happy! Goodness me, I need a nap after this one.

Veggie Dinner

My wife is amazing.

Was it yesterday or the day before that I wrote something about being curious about vegetarianism and how that would work in a post-gastric bypass world.

My beloved bride saw that post and hit Google looking for some vegetarian recipes. Tonight we had one. It was a fried potato and eggs dish and it was excellent. The clear take away for both of us is, “yup, I’d have that again.” Now while it will never make sense to me that chicken eggs are considered vegetarian friendly, it was a really good dinner.

She also shared a couple more recipes with me. We might have those later in the week, or maybe wait until next week. Neither of us has any intention of going full veggie. Consider us veggie curious. Let’s see what happens next.

Do Habits Bring Joy?

Daily writing prompt
Describe one habit that brings you joy.
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Wait, a habit that brings you joy? That isn’t how habits work, is it? Also, didn’t we just have a question about routines? Isn’t that the same question we have here, more or less?

Habits that bring me joy… is spending time with my wife, Jen considered a habit? That’s the thing that brings me joy. Spending time with my step kids as well, but they live far-ish away now so I can’t call that a habit either. Not if I actually know the definition of the word.

Technically speaking, what is the definition of, “habit?”

noun

  1. an acquired behavior pattern regularly followed until it has become almost involuntary:the habit of looking both ways before crossing the street.
  2. customary practice or use:Daily bathing is an American habit.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/habit

Do things that are almost involuntary give one joy? I don’t know. I don’t think I like this question. Daily bathing isn’t something that brings me joy, but not smelling like rank B.O. might. Is that a good enough answer?

So Much Doctor

I flaked out in a huge way today. Apart from going grocery shopping and helping a tiny bit with cooking dinner, I didn’t do anything productive today. Well, I did add a few new song ideas to the fifty songs in ninety days challenge pipeline, but outside of that it was just a marathon of Doctor Who.

I watched a couple of episodes of season seven of the current series, and a shite tonne of episodes of season three of the original series. I haven’t gotten to the point where either of my current season doctors change actors, but I am getting there.

Tomorrow will hopefully be a little more musical, and I also kinda need a haircut before our wedding weekend next week. Maybe I’ll take care of that. We’ll see.

For now though, first doctor, season three, episode 40: The Savages Part 3. Let’s see what hi-jinx the first Doctor gets up to in this one.