makes me happy

Winding Down The Week

More by happy accident than by design, I have found myself with a slow Friday afternoon.

I have let my brain off leash and now I’m reading until it occurs to me to do something else.

PS – I like the non-alcoholic version of Corona just as much as the alcoholic one.

A beer and an ereader in a case sit on a red patio table.
A beer and a book makes for a good way to spend a sunny afternoon. Image description: my Corona Sunbrew sits on a red patio table next to my Kobo ereader which is in a blue, purple, and gold patterned case. Beyond the table, the floorboards of the patio are dappled with sunlight.

Drawing with dots

I have many many different versions of drawings like this – a figure, back on, standing on a hill, reaching their arms towards the sky.

I don’t know exactly why I am drawn (ha!) to draw this so often but I am and I do.

Today, I experimented with creating this image from dots.

I really like how the sky turned out but I think that, next time, I’ll make the figure taller with longer arms.

A drawing of a person standing on a hill, arms outstretched toward the starry sky. This drawing is made entirely of dots. Curving horizontal lines of green dots for the hill, vertical lines of blue dots for the sky, clusters of yellow dots of stars, and a three triangles and a circle of black dots for the figure.

Ducks!

My sister and I went swimming this morning, in the rain, at a local pond.

Some ducklings had the same plan.

Small ducks swimming in a pond with another duck walking towards the water.
Image description: a photo of some ducks swimming and walking up to get in the water at the shoreline of a pond with a pebbly beach on the right, the water on the left, some trees and greenery at the top of the photo.

Exercise Victories

For the past month, I have been doing some extra mobility/rehab exercises every day.

This week, I noticed two things:

1) After my exercises on Tuesday, I felt great!

A little muscle-tired but my brain was awake and my body felt good.

2) Last night, when I reached down for Khalee’s water bowl, the movement was easy.

It’s never super-hard but there has been a sort of stiffness, a resistance, in my movements.

Last night, though, I felt fluid and flexible.

I love this for me!

Practicing TKD

My TKD classes take a a summer break and I love taking time away from that weekly routine.

I generally don’t need a break from TKD per se, I need a break from having to get to class twice a week at a specific time.

This year though, I also needed the physical break, the time away from the movements.

After the stress and pain around my Dad’s passing in May and the stress of scrambling to catch up on things in June, I needed to just let my body do what it wanted to do at whatever pace it wanted to do it for a while.

Today, though, it was time to get back to those movements and it felt really good.

I just did the first four patterns, relatively easy stuff that my brain and my muscles are very familiar with.

And it was fantastic.

I loved the almost meditative quality of those familiar movements, the ease of just letting my body do something it knows how to do.

And I felt very satisfied with the whole process when I was finished.

Self care for the win.