Resurrected peace lily ~

I have a Peace Lily that I resurrected. At least that's how I think of it. It's a potted plant that my wife was given when her mother died. A bunch of her sisters in the spirit pooled their money and bought her a really big pot with a really big Peace Lily in it.



It was really beautiful. My wife is not the greatest with potted plants. She does okay, but she tends to put them out in direct sunlight after they've been inside and used to being inside for months and years.



She'll put them out to get the rain and then she'll forget for three days and they get baked in the sun. She's an irregular waterer, which is okay with some plants, but not okay for the majority of the ones that we have.



Plants like a constant environment with a constant flow of water, even if it's a little bit each week. They adapt and live according to what they're getting on a regular basis. If it's not regular, they don't do well in my experience.



My wife did good with her Peace Lily at first. It was too big to put on the deck with the other plants that I had and so she had it on the front porch. It got beat down by afternoon sun for six hours or so and I told her during summer she would have to water it every day. I helped her by setting up an automatic drip solar system that would water it every day between certain hours just to keep it moist. I think that helped a lot and it flourished on the front porch.



Winter came. It got cold. It dropped to 10 degrees which is very different where we live. It dropped to 10 degrees three or four times and the peace lily died. All the leaves turned black and everything just looked really bad and dead.



She brought it in after it had been beat up by the cold she dropped it in our big bathtub. When spring came and nothing grew we put the pot under the deck and left it.



I went under the deck for some reason and was scrounging around for something. I saw this big pot and I remembered how big the peace lily had been. I was starting a new thing with lemongrass. I bought lemongrass at one of the asian marketplaces near us and rooted them, then put them in tall pots on the deck. My hope was that the lemongrass would repel mosquitoes. It helped a little but I love the smell and I love the look.



But I looked at the peace lily pot. I scraped the top of it and scraped all the dead stuff off. I thought to myself that with the root system that that big peace lily plant had there had to be something down there that might come back.



So I put the pot up on the deck. I let it get beat down by the Sun every day, but I watered it every day, too. An entire jug of water.



It sprouted leaves and it sprouted more leaves and it started growing and doing its thing. I was happy to see that the peace lily came back!



In the fall I was crabby about it because I really didn't want a big plant like this inside. I also knew that watering it inside would be a pain because it's a big pot, I mean it's two feet across. And heavy! So I bought a tub and put some pavers in the bottom of the tub. I put the pot on top of the pavers and rigged up something so that we could dump water in the pot and it would drain, but not stay in the pot. It would go in the tub of water underneath. And then I bought one of those battery operated siphoning pump things and I would use the drained water to water the peace lily every other day or so.



The plant flourished over the winter! I was amazed. The plant flourished during spring. I kept rotating it so that the leaves would have to tilt to get the sun from the windows, but we've decided to keep the peace lily inside and let it keep growing.





My hope is that it will bloom sometime this year. I'll keep using my little siphon pump thing to recirculate the water in my little watering system I've set up.



It's fun to bring plants back like that, especially when they have meaning like this one does.



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Water Music ~

I've always enjoyed Water Music by Handel. I remember hearing it in college in a music appreciation class. His Music for the Royal Fireworks is right up there with it, especially since they tend to be packaged together on albums by orchestras and symphonies.



But I love listening to it when I'm driving or when I'm doing things and I want to just think differently. It cracks me up that this classical music was sponsored and paid for by kings and nobles and now I get to play it whenever I want instead of having to hire a quartet to sit in the corner of a room while I do my thing. I just play it on a smart speaker or even better in my headphones so I augment my reality with music for the nobility.



If you've never listened to Water Music you should give it a try, I highly recommend it!



Here are a couple of links:



YouTube

https://youtu.be/mAyiidg25uE?si=23yj_2bl2Slato35



YouTube Music

https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lQO1WV0uMAbb4FNLy8Qqc0KMssKPPUP6c&si=Oi_9VdhbYJCW5YFZ



Spotify

https://open.spotify.com/album/0cxRAewBpYrtxOYH5fius3?si=wScHFP_0TUi78YsSKGWTPw





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Tried to make glowing bubbles ~

It's funny, I finally gave in and tried an experiment that I've been seeing pass by in my streams on the internet. Recently I went out on my deck around 10:30pm. I got a bottle of bubbles. And I cracked a glow stick and got it glowing.



Then I cut the glue stick open and poured it into the bubbles. Then I blew bubbles to see if the bubbles would glow as they floated away.



Sadly, they did not glow.



I blew a lot of bubbles in the middle of the night. My wife and I thought we saw a couple of them with a little bit of a tint of glow in the reflection, but they did not glow.



It was a fun experiment and I got to check it off my to-do list so that's always a bonus. But you've got to be careful with that stuff on the Internet, some of it's a little bit crazy. Like the balance beam thing that I'm doing in the basement. But that's a different story.



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Dangerous internet things ~

I enjoy surfing the web. I don't feel like the Silver Surfer but I do have certain places that I haunt. I enjoy certain news sites, that way I get a filtered view of the world. I enjoy Instagram, although I use it less and less because of the every-other-post-is-advertising thing.



I actually look at Pinterest almost every night when I'm at home, but I'm more just mindlessly scrolling and grabbing screenshots of memes that I think would be fun to see in the future when I'm sitting on the couch or wanting to post something but don't know what. Encouraging memes, stuff I can use on postcards, that sort of thing. I also get ideas from Pinterest. I built a rain capture rig that was modeled after something I saw on Pinterest.



But anyways, a few weeks ago some of the fitness guru people that drift through my feeds. They were talking about how squats and horse stance exercises will extend your life. So I now have my phone remind me to squat every couple of hours. Fully clothed, mind you, but squat down and hold that in a resting position for at least 10 seconds, sometimes up to two minutes.



I do horse stances infrequently but when I do them my thighs burn and my body says, what are you doing? Another thing I saw was people balancing on boards that were on wobbly bases. The main wobbly base that I saw was a PVC pipe that was two and a half or three inches wide.



It was almost like they were skateboarding, but there were no wheels. They were just balancing and wobbling back and forth. They claimed that the wobbling imbalance helped them strengthen their core and their lower extremities and improve their balance overall. And that seniors and people close to being seniors could benefit from doing balance exercises like they were doing.



I've seen the boogie boards. I've seen the balance strap deal like you're walking a tight rope, but it's two inches off the ground. So, I was convinced about the pipe and board.



I went to Home Depot and bought a handle so I could stabilize my grip. I positioned the handle inside of a door jam in the basement and then I positioned the pipe in the middle of the door. It was a double door frame, so plenty of room. Then I positioned the board and put one foot on the side leaning down. Put the other end of the board down. other foot on the other side of the board and promptly fell down after I got up I figured out that I need to hold the handle before I get on this thing so I hold the handle and got on it again it was a fun imbalanced exercise I enjoyed wobbling back and forth and pretending I was skateboarding or surfing very limited space and I was afraid that if I fell a certain way I'd cut my forehead on a filing cabinet or worse bang it on the concrete floor of the basement and then have to be rescued by my wife again.





But I've successfully done this wobbly exercise for a while and I am noticing some tightening and muscles that I wasn't really aware were there for a while. Now I am painfully aware of them.



I love the internet!



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Superchick song ~

There's a song in my playlist that I really enjoy, but it doesn't mean the same thing to me that it meant when I first listened to it. SuperChick is a Christian rock band that my daughter turned me on to when she was a teenager.



They had some good songs and I enjoyed them. The one that I enjoyed the most was "Rock What You Got".



When I first started listening to that song I was in a position at work that was very challenging. I felt way out of my depth and thinking through those words helped me a lot in that position and in other positions that followed.



I remember listening to that song three or four times in a row one night while I was on a treadmill at a hotel. I had to travel with my boss and several other people to a big meeting and they were all out doing whatever they did together and I stayed back at the hotel to prepare for the meeting, to work out, and get some alone time.



Now when I listen to that song and it says "light up the lot, don't ever let them make you stop" I enjoy it, but I chuckle because I think of it more for other people now instead of me. But it's a good song.



If you're looking for something different to listen to, give it a tumble.



https://youtu.be/Yb51mH3DApw?si=c6tevPR7_hs_lPzO



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#song #music #memory

Dropping expectations ~

No expectations. One of the things that I've gone through many times in my life is being disappointed by people. Relatives, friends, coworkers, churches, fellow shoppers, fellow drivers. Lots of people.



Every time that it's happened, I've come to the realization that I had expectations that I shouldn't have had and I dropped my expectations lower and lower.



It's hard because I'm told over and over by people that I should have the highest expectations and I should expect the most and the best out of people and situations.



And when I tell even my wife and family "I'm dropping my expectations to zero and I have no expectations now" they get offended because, well, that's just wrong.



I went through a meditation lesson where the theme was "expectations ruin things".



And the idea is that to attain maximum adaptability, you should drop all expectations and accept everything as is, as it comes. no matter what.



What's funny is I'm right there with them, but I've been beat up so many times for saying and expressing this that I cringe when I hear it said in a lesson like this.



It's really weird. Sometimes it's challenging to balance everything and to understand. I take comfort in my belief in God and how I know that God is conspiring for me. For me and not against me.



It's still interesting though, trying to have no expectations so that I can be supremely adaptable.



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Commit ~

Recently my wife and I went to a church service at a church that is not our normal church. We've been there before and enjoy the production value and always enjoy the messages.



This church is in the city so it's somewhat challenging to get to. And parking is always a challenge. The people at that church seem to be upper-class. There are always a lot of very expensive cars in the parking lot.



The people seem genuinely happy and like they're having a really good time. But as we were leaving this church service my wife commented on how she felt so lonely there. She hardly ever talks about being lonely, and so it was a surprising comment from her.



I understood it because I felt it too, but that's just part of my deal. But I've thought about her comment, and I even told her that day that I think it's because we're not committed here. We don't have a smaller group of people that we can look for in the crowd. And we can't say we contribute to this church.



That boils down in my world to we're not committed to them. And commitment is a lot! It's something that's lacking in what I'm seeing around me.



When we set up gatherings or parties and ask people to RSVP to let us know that they're coming very few responses ever come. At the church we normally go to, things are put out there and very few people commit until the last minute, if at all, because they're trying to keep their options open.



Maybe something better will come along and so I don't have to do this. I've watched that in members of my own family, where they don't say yes or no until... the day of, and maybe two hours beforehand.



That's not the way I operate. If I commit to something, or if I decide that I want to do something, I go ahead and commit, and I let people know I'm coming, and it's happening. And then I turn other things down, and fight to keep that spot on my calendar. And I do my best to be five minutes early, because early is on time.



But I think that more commitment would help a lot of things happening around me. And it would help us all not feel as lonely.



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