Keep Cleansing, Bar Buddies, Progress, Many Mirrors

Because of my surgery last Thursday a road bike ride was off the menu for Friday.  I did however later in the night ride my barely used Inmotion V10F over to the park to talk about how I came to own it.  I meant to make this video a week prior but just hadn’t made the time to do so.

Saturday after doing the chicken chores and weeding Elsa and I went out to run errands.  One of those was to stop at Home Depot.  My numbers of Home Depot trips have dropped off the table the last 6 months.  I used to be there almost every weekend to grab one thing or another.  Now my visits are more like once a month.  I also had not been bringing Elsa into the store much since she developed the habit of dropping a deuce in the aisles.  I decided to bring her in this time but only after walking her around outside the store until she did her nervous pooping.  There were no further accidents once we went inside, thankfully.

I hoped we would see this nice older woman cashier that loves Elsa.  She always has dog treats ready to go.  Unfortunately she was not there on Saturday and the few times I have gone to Home Depot recently I have not seen her either, I hope she is doing ok.

Saturday afternoon I started digging into getting rid of additional stuff.  Some of went in the trash, some went to the neighbors, some hit the curb with the rest donated to Goodwill.  The process took a little while and got me a little sweatier than anticipated.  It’s funny how the passing of time can totally shift your willingness to part with items.  Things at one time you absolutely felt you needed/wanted can suddenly flip to becoming readily expendable.  It’s all a matter of your state of mind, something I will talk about more later.

I also shot a quick video during the afternoon regarding the updates on my Tesla accident/repair.  All of the information in it you already know about if you are a regular blog reader.

I had already planned to go to the bar at Brooks Burgers Saturday night however during the day I invited my buddy, ex-boss/coworker Don to come join me.  I had not hung with him since he retired at the end of February.  Don and I are friends but we never did a lot of hanging out socially during our 22 years of knowing each other.  I think for both of us alcohol consumption is a key ingredient to hanging out effectively, for whatever reason.  We were there for around two hours catching up on life.  So far he appears to be enjoying retirement and I continue to be envious of his situation.  I hope that we can hang more in the future, although I am getting more accustomed to drinking at a bar myself, I would much rather share the time with someone else.

Sunday is Mother’s Day, a day that obviously has mixed emotions for me since my mom has been gone since 2014.  It had mutated into a day for me to celebrate the other mother’s in my circle of life but now, it’s something else.  I miss my mom and I appreciate the role that all mothers take on to devote themselves to their children, hoping to guide them down the path of life without hitting too many walls along the way.  It’s a tough job.

I made arrangements to meet Ali and Shugs to go take a look at their house that is under active construction.  It had been several weeks since I saw it last.  There was some nice progress, the drywall is starting to go up, the roof is mostly shingled and the pool has been dug out with concrete poured.  Every time I do a walk through with them it transports me back to when this house was built and thoughts of how I wished I knew then what I know now.  There were a lot of corners cut that I should have flagged.  After seeing the house we ate lunch at a primarily pizza place called the Mellow Mushroom.  It was my first time there, my main meal was a portobello mushroom dish but I also tried a slice of Ali and Shugs pizza, it was top notch.

We took the Tesla for the journey which was pretty lengthy overall.  I ran my Model Y battery from 90% down to 35-36% by the time I got home.  All that time in the car gives you time to talk about all sorts of things.  Some of the talks are about life topics.  For example evidently Ali did not know that my dad converted a bunch of my early years of blog entries into hard cover books.  I told her that once in a while I will thumb through them and how my major takeaway is how differently I thought/acted back then compared to present day.  I also talked about my efforts to flip my mental script that gets me stuck into negative thought loops that do nothing positive for me in the big picture.  Ali joked about how someone (me) used to say something along the lines of people can’t change.  I asked her what asshole said that, which made her laugh.

I do believe people’s personality traits are embossed pretty deeply however that doesn’t mean that negative traits can not/should not be worked on.  Is there any more worthwhile goal than becoming a happier, healthier, and more fulfilled person?  I don’t think so.  There has been so many reflections going on in my world lately it feels like one of those carnival mirror houses.  Some of those reflections are positive, some negative, but hopefully the sum of all of them eventually lead me down a much brighter path in the future.