Tag Archives: feeling good

Feeling Good

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I’m inching my way out of my sad sack self. I can only handle so much gloom and doom and feeling sorry for myself. Enough is enough. It’s time to climb out of my hole and step into the sun even if it is a cloudy day. Here’s my course of action into feeling good again.

  1. Flood my Instagram feed with Asian cooking posts.
  2. Bypass all those posts about mothers passing and people with strange and horrible physical conditions and diseases. It doesn’t make me feel better knowing there are those who are worse off than me. They might have been inspirational at first but now they are dragging me down. I’m getting an impression that the world is not a safe place.
  3. Stop feeling I have to listen and help everybody with their woes.
  4. Making notes of things that make me feel good.

What felt good yesterday:

  1. Watching the movie Good Morning Saigon. I can’t believe that it was made 40 years ago and that the Vietnam War was 60 years ago. I can’t believe how talented Robin Williams was. Though it was a movie about a war, Robin Williams gave me the good feeling.
  2. Coffee with my father. Though he is 94 years old, he is still trying and growing. He is alwlays willing to go out every day with me.
  3. Making a buttonhole on my Bernina 790 sewing machine. It’s the first time using the 3A buttonhole foot. It’s a very good exercise for my brain learning all the ins and outs of my machine.

That’s it for this 4th day of the Ultimate Blog Challenge. It felt good to write this post and that I didn’t have to struggle with it.

Then There Was Five – Feeling Good

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Buoyed by yesterdays’s success of doing small, I was able to plant 3 more tomato plants with kosy coats. Now there’s 5 in a row. I feel pretty good and proud of myself for the deed. I can give myself another thumbs up. Let’s make it 5  👍👍👍👍👍. It’s not often that I give myself much credit. It’s not often that I’m conscious of what good feels like either. Now I know. It feels good to see the 5 red kosy coats in a row. The tomatoes love it, thriving already inside the warmth.

I love sitting in the sunroom facing the dining room and looking out the living room window. I see the trees framed by the bay window. There’s something about the afternoon sunlight on the green of the leaves that is so pleasing. I sit and savour the feeling goodness of it. I’m waking up and feeling the good vibes. It’s a good place to end the day.

One Tomato, Two Tomato – Doing the Hard Stuff

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I’m a great gatherer of information. I seldom put them to use. It’s no wonder that I’m stuck, finding myself in the same ruts, year after year. I mutter and moan the same old, same old. I set goals, I write about them but somehow the doing gets left behind. Here I am again, at my keyboard. This time, it is a little different. I am doing, using information gathered from B.J. Fogg’s Tiny Habits: The Small Changes that Change Everything. It’s working for me. Hooray!

I’m applying the idea of doing small to my gardening. I am struggling this year. I still have alot of tomato seedlings to plant and it is still cool. I have kosy coats for them but it is very labour intensive when you have to do dozens of them. So using Fogg’s example of flossing one tooth to establish his habit, I decided that I could just plant one tomato with a kosy coat. It didn’t feel so daunting when it is just one. It wasn’t hard and I ended up doing two. I felt pretty good after. I’m confident I could do it again tomorrow. Maybe I could do 4 tomatoes.

There’s nothing like success to make a person feel good. I like it. It helped me to seed another raised bed with more lettuce, spinach, Asian greens and radishes. I’m hoping successive seeding will keep us in salad greens all summer. I finished my day of gardening by spreading 4 bags of manure on 2 raised beds. Enough for one day. I am happy.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING IMPORTANT

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Photo by Brett Sayles on Pexels.com

I’ve been struggling with a little bad attitude and moods lately. It does not make me feel good about myself. At the same time, they are what I’m feeling. I cannot just squash them, wipe them out. I had to let them do their mischief within me. Otherwise, I would be saying that I do not matter. I am of no importance. It was difficult but I withheld harsh criticism of myself. The bad vibes passed along with the attitude. No CBD oil was necessary today.

The fine weather brought out my sunnier side. I’m a happier camper. But I cannot deny that the season and days are changing. My body is telling me so. I’m waking up at 2 am almost every night as if I’ve set the alarm. The good thing is I’ve been able to get back to sleep after a trip to the bathroom. I’m still getting at least 7 hours of sleep. My exercise class helps along with coffee with the girls after. Today’s sun helped tremendously. It gave me a burst of energy. It was no problem to dash off to the community garden to do a harvest after lunch. I was rewarded with 2 pails of food I grew from the good earth.

CHASING THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM

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I’ve learned many things from my mother but not her orderliness nor calmness. I’ve gotten a little better at both but it’s nothing to write her about it. It is indeed a life long learning journey. I’ve found every single step difficult. I’m not expecting it to get any easier. Once I get over one hurdle, another one shows up. It will end when life ends. I suspect that’s the way it is suppose to be.

Given that, I wonder if we I’ve been going at life erronously. I’ve been working doggedly at doing everything and behaving properly. It could be that I’ve been too proper all these years. I’ve had a broom up my arse, walking forever on a tightrope, always doing a balancing act. What if I could have loosen up a bit, let my hair down and lose some face? What possible things could have happened if I had except have more joy?

They say there’s no point in what ifs and could haves. Done is done. Now, what and how? I’ve been thinking. It’s dangerous. It makes me paranoid. But I’ve been thinking that we’ve been sold the wrong bill of goods. There’s so many pitches on feeling good, being happy and all that.  What does that mean anyways? It makes me feel inadequate and a failure. I’m often doleful. I seldom feel blissful or euphoric like the ads for antidepressants. If I have, the moments are not long enough to run slow motion through a meadow of flowers.

Should we be in such pursuit of these feelings? I know I have but have failed to achieve. I’ve come to realize at this moment, that it is not possible to be physically, psychological or spiritual pain free all the time. Bad things happen. Accidents happen. Bodies age. Good things happen, too. It’s the flux of our lives. I cannot avoid these things. I cannot avoid pain or suffering. I cannot take a pill for everything. I cannot push everything under the rug. I have tried. It didn’t work for me. Then I stopped chasing after being happy and feeling good. I let the shoe drop. Nothing terrible happened. But my fears stopped.

 

 

JAMMING IT

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IMG_3426There’s something so soothing and meditative about squishing grapes that I never thought possible! That’s the surprise I discovered when I sat down with my two pounds of Concord grapes. Two pounds is not alot but too much to eat.  Since we made the effort to grow them, it’s hard to waste them. I am not fond of making jelly.  It seems like SO much work.  My head gets boggled and quirky just thinking about it. Jamming is no breeze either, but seems like the less evil of the two.

I resigned myself to a bunch of work.  But I tried to make it as easy and pleasant as possible.  I took the lot into my sun room and sat down with them.  There’s no easy way of skinning them except squishing them one by one.  I did not rush.  I tried to watch/listen to video on YouTube but found it not enjoyable.  I gave that up for just sitting in the sunlight, squishing one purple grape after another, watching them plop into the pot on my lap.  In a little while I was overcome with peace and contentment.  My body said, Boy, I feel good! WOWZIE!

It took a couple of hours to jam two pounds of grapes from squishing to jarring.  The result was two little jars of purple jam.  No boiling bath was necessary.  They will be eaten soon enough or into the freezer they go.  The PROCESS was slow and enjoyable but not difficult.  The only difficult part was STARTING.

The recipe I followed, more or less:

4 lbs Concord, wild or other seeded purple grapes

1/2 cup water

1 cup raw sugar (organic turbinado)

pinch sea salt

Rinse grapes, stem them, then rinse again (especially if yours are wild or homegrown and covered in sandy Downeast soil, spider webs and slugs like mine).  Peel grapes by pinching each one (at the end opposite to the stem end is easiest) and allowing the grape innards to plop out into a medium (4-quart) stockpot or Dutch oven (this is far easier than it sounds; 3 lbs of grapes took me a leisurely 15 minutes to peel). Keep the grape skins in a separate bowl.

Bring the grape innards and any juice to a boil over medium-high heat; reduce heat and simmer until grapes begin to disintegrate, releasing seeds, about 10 minutes. Pour into the bowl of a food mill. Rinse the stockpot, add grape skins and 1/2 cup water, and bring water to a boil.  Reduce heat and simmer grape skins, partially covered, until soft and breaking down, about 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, pass grape innards through the food mill; discard grape seeds.  Add grape pulp, sugar and salt to the grape skins. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, then continue to cook at a brisk boil (lowering heat if jam begins to stick) until the gel stage (mine never reached 220 degrees F; I stopped it at 216 degrees when it formed a wrinkly set on a frozen plate).

Ladle hot jam into hot, sterilized jars to 1/4-inch headspace. Pass a wooden utensil along the sides of the jars to remove any bubbles, wipe rims, affix lids and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes.