How I Spent My Summer

My last post was in April, which amazes me. Time has sped up once more, and summer at my house has been busy, kind of like during the before times.

What about you, have you emerged from pandemic isolation and gone a little bit wild? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Here are a few of my activities since April:

• Road trip in Pernell from Florida to Seattle that took two weeks and included fabulous visits with family members in Arkansas and Missouri.
• A three-day golf trip with some women friends to courses in Bellingham and Blaine, Washington. We played 18 holes each day and drank quite a bit of wine in the evenings, no longer worried so much about Covid.
• I had Covid. But it wasn’t so bad. Vaccines, boosters and Paxlovid are all good things. It was my first time, however it doesn’t look like it will be the last given the constant evolution of the virus.
• Sliced my left index finger with a battery operated hedge trimmer while back in Florida by myself for a week. So much blood! But I drove myself to the emergency room, where I received fast and excellent care including X-rays, four stitches and a very large bandage with firm instructions to avoid infection. There was much finger wagging about how lucky I was not to have nicked the bone and to be more careful in the garden. They also gave me a tetanus shot. I haven’t golfed since. Nor did I do much cooking for a couple of weeks because I had to keep the left hand dry until the dressing came off and the sutures were removed. It’s healing up now, but my career as a hand model ended before it began.
• Roger and I went to France for two weeks on a river cruise along the Seine that had been cancelled and then postponed a second time.

Third time’s the charm! We returned to Seattle from France this past Wednesday after eating our way from Paris to St. Malo and back again. It was wonderful. There were only 44 passengers on a boat that can support up to 120. We made some great friends, all the while realizing how much we’d lost in terms of human contact throughout the pandemic. Our lives had grown rather small, and I’m relieved that my world is expanding once more.

Unfortunately, so has my waistline.

As a result, there will soon be more posts of tasty, super nutritious and longevity affirming recipes that support healthy weight, lower blood pressure, reduce inflammation and also help me avoid lifestyle diseases such as diabetes and dementia. All of it supported by data, which I’ll get into with future posts.

For now I leave you with a short video of my French vacation.

Some of you may remember slides, filmy things made from photos taken with 35mm cameras, developed in a lab, which a person later fitted into a projector equipped with a carousel. The images were shared with others by projecting them onto a screen, usually accompanied by a rambling commentary. Since 36 slides could be made from a single roll of film, my uncle, the amateur photographer, would shoot hundreds of pictures while on vacation. Then subject his family to all of them. These shows were interminable.

Aren’t you glad times have changed?