The European Robin at 63

I miss the days when I could just embed a photo here. Ah well, picture an English Robin, won't you? Now picture an amazing husband who helps me with IT problems, household issues, emotional stability, genuine warmth and humor, and all the intangibles I can possibly think of. That's pretty much my English Robin, who turns 63 today. And we've actually had an interesting day for the most part! We got a lot of deliveries this morning, so Robin's attire for next Wednesday's office holiday party is all set, and he used his photography-related holiday gift to get some amazing ultra-widescreen shots, although the substantial murder of crows dive-bombing our driveway this afternoon was captured via iPhone. Mostly we just tried, and are still trying, to remain warm in this cold spell, which is supposed to finally break tomorrow evening. At the moment I'm way too tired to care about anything other than my lovely Robin.

A Changed Nature

Exactly 26 years ago, Robin and I were married at City Hall in Manhattan. We exited the building to gaze on the World Trade Center... and I guess that tells you everything about how many changes we've seen since then. The world may have become harsher, and the pace of change seems to be accelerating ever faster, but we're holding fast onto each other even more and loving one another as fiercely as ever. Happy anniversary, my love! I'm glad we got to spend it at home together.

Here's To Old 67

It's weird. I don't actually feel like I'm 67 years old, although I can't tell you what that feels like. In my head I'm still in my 20's, so there you go. But it was a lovely day nonetheless, with tons of Facebook greetings and a rearranging of my tops so all the fancy-schmancy ones are finally in the same closet and a bit of Cyber Monday shopping thrown in (as I'd paid all the bills yesterday). I'm still beset by the cold weather so we didn't go anywhere, but Mom called this morning and my CA brother texted and I just got off the phone with my NJ bro, so those are the three that count (even though I've heard from so many others, including two from my last job) and now I'm very happy and somewhat verklempt to boot. I actually like that I'm getting more sentimental in my older age, far better than being crochety and contrary. I'm back on the exercise bike, so I'm trying to maintain my body as much as I'm able, but I've been on a chocolate binge of late so I probably need to increase my veg intake to feel right again. All in all, however, I'm as healthy as I could expect to be, and all is going well. On to the year ahead!

My English Rose

Today Robin hits his 62nd birthday, and thanks to this respiratory illness it's hitting back hard. It's a good job we never make concrete plans around our birthdays and anniversaries; after all these Decembers I know better. I'm hoping that being sick now means we won't be during our firm's shutdown week later in the month but I know it doesn't really work that way. In the meantime, in sickness and in health, Robin is pretty much my everything, and I'm so, so grateful for him. Happy birthday, darling.

By the Light of the Silvery...

Twenty-five years ago today,Robin and I got together with a few relatives and friends at Manhattan’s City Hall for, as one friend called it, an “emergency wedding,” to satisfy the terms of Rob’s 90-day fiancee visa. I had vague notions, seemingly, of doing a vow-renewal gathering this year, but at my age and “post”-pandemic it’s all too much. So I’ll just say what I said on Facebook: thank you, Robin, for a wonderful quarter century of the most amazing intangibles I could ever have dreamt of. After all this time we are still so very Us, and I couldn’t be more thrilled. Happy anniversary, my love.

Got My Kicks at Age 66

What an exhausting and rewarding day! Used my senior citizen half-price pass for the first time on the bus and subway to the Javits Center, where I met up with coworkers helping out with the Special Olympics New York's Winter Games. So much of it was hurry-up-and-wait, but the bits where we actually interacted with athletes were very rewarding. Still, it was enough after 3-1/2 hours and I made my way back to Bryant Park, where I'd hoped to stroll around the Shoppes. But every single person in existence seemed to have the same idea, and even masked up I didn't feel safe in that impenetrable crowd, so I made it back home by around 2:30 and rested until we went out to an early dinner time at our local sushi place. And so many folks wished me a happy birthday online, it was gratifying. Much thanks to you all!

Object Permanence

How can this blog be 21 years old today? In internet time that's at least a century, considering the speed at which things change. I'm amazed blogging software still exists, considering all the new apps I've had to learn at work in just the past decade. Yet here we are, and here I am, still (relatively) healthy and hanging in there, saying farewell to too many folks I loved and admired but greeting new additions with all the enthusiasm a childless-but-grandmother-age person can muster. I've become the kind of person to whom hip-hop is still "that new music the kids love but I just can't get into" but fall short of "music was better in my day" because, for all I know, music is still wonderful even if it's not made for me. I think reading comics primarily made for young men all these years has helped in that regard; I'm used to not being the target audience for pretty much any form of entertainment. And yet, I find many things still make me smile. So much streaming media to catch up on that I'll never get bored. Even though I lost my fifth cat earlier this year (I still fondly and lovingly remember Gypsy, Phredd, Datsa and Amy, along with Zed) I'm yearning for another to love, and I continue to peruse lots of cat memes and videos. I don't have any real close friends besides Robin, but I do have lots of online Facebook "friends" and work colleagues, all of whom bring me joy. And I imagine this blog still has at least a few dozen readers. So there are reasons to continue, including this blog. Thanks for still being around.

Silly Site o' the Day

And that's August put to bed, and one short week away from Pen-Elayne on the Web's 21st blogiversary. No celebrations are planned. Maybe we'll have a sushi dinner, I'm feeling so peckish of late I could eat Lego fried chicken and French fries:

Via Laughing Squid.

Silly Site o' the Day

Today is Mom's birthday, and we'll be traveling to NJ tomorrow to visit and celebrate. Also celebrating the COVID numbers going down (i.e., in the right direction), at least locally, and my plans to return to the office on a slightly more regular basis next month, tendinitis willing. I'm starting to have actual wanderlust, and hope we can get to England soon if their numbers start coming down, but until then I'll have to make do with these terrible maps.

Silly Site o' the Day

The wrist is still aching but I'm faithfully doing my morning physical therapy exercises, and wearing the thumb brace overnight, so I've been able to relax it for most of the day today, to celebrate Robin's and my 24th anniversary. Can I just again say how lucky I am to have found Robin? He made us a splendid English breakfast this morning. For dinner I've just finished our traditional tasty sushi, and I think I'm more or less sush'ed out for the moment, so for his birthday on Tuesday we'll probably get something else. Otherwise I'm still deep in the throes of this cold (self-tested negative for COVID for about the fifth time this week so goodness knows what it is I have), so it was another enforced-leisure day. I had wanted to compose our Riggs Residence Roundup but it's really hard to concentrate when I'm this run down, and know I have to log onto work tomorrow morning. Maybe I'll take it easy (with two partners being out of town) and take some free LinkedIn Learning courses. I really appreciate the ones that teach me new things, like about cognitive bias. My supplemental reading includes this handy codex.

The Other Side of 65

I've now reached the end of my 65th year around the sun, at a point where time is still malleable due to the pandemic. Age 65 feels weird. I know I'm officially a senior citizen now, my various body aches are testament to how long I've been around, and yet inside I still feel like I should be in my twenties. In any case, it was a fine birthday considering I spent it much the same way I've spent the others - working (albeit not in an office any more, but it was nice to receive so many good wishes from colleagues, and even phone calls from two of the partners I support), ordering a lovely sushi dinner, and nursing a horrid cold. It would have been nice to have felt better, but when you have a December birthday you don't always have that luxury. Onward to the weekend, and the rest of my life!

Silly Site o' the Day

In exactly one month I will be 65 years old, which is kind of freaking me out because I'm going to have to figure out Medicare, 401K's, all the stuff I haven't had to think about because it was so far down the line. I still plan on working for awhile, give or take this stupid wrist tendon injury that's healing way too slowly (like everything else nowadays), but there are still mandatory things to do once one reaches That Magic Age, and I just don't like to think about them. Sometimes I'd just rather think about skullets.

On Our 20th Blogiversary

On this day 20 years ago, Pen-Elayne on the Web was born. As I always say when I trip over the cobblestones in Memory Lane, stuff was different then. We had a venal Republican president to contend with who'd spent too much time undoing the good of his predecessor and racking up debt whilst lying us into war, but that happens just about every time a Republican was elected. My dad and my best friend were both still alive. I didn't yet know I had diabetes, I was to find that out about half a year later. I don't even think I went on meds for at least a few years after that, and the a-fib incident was probably first. And I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot more things that were different then but, as I believe I've mentioned a number of times, my memory is notoriously spotty, which of course is one of the reasons I have a blog in the first place, to serve (along with friends and family) as my supplementary memory.

This year I want to talk about something I've been considering a lot these past couple of years, particularly now that the world seems to have lost its collective mind and decided, all evidence to the contrary, that we are no longer in a pandemic. I'm not that keen about contracting this disease, and for me FOMO isn't Fear Of Missing Out (as all my friends travel the world or go to conventions or even take in movies and concerts and restaurants) as much as it is Fear Of Microscopic Organisms. I'm a homebody to begin with and detest going out in hot weather so I haven't felt that affected the past few months, but now the weather will start to change and I'll have to re-evaluate how I feel.

And so I'm learning how to Scale Back Expectations, even as lucky as we've been not to come down with the COVID. At the moment, possibly because it's been so hot, a walk around the block exhausts me, which it didn't a year ago. I haven't made my daily two miles on the exercise bike consistently due to various body aches as well. When I know I'm going on any sort of trip I usually brace up both knees and the left foot, just in case. I tire more easily in general, and I've started realizing that I can't necessarily do more than one thing in one trip. I still have grand and glorious plans in my head, I want to travel safely again (masked) in the autumn and maybe even see friends once more, but the body doesn't necessarily want to follow. So my watchword has been to maintain.

And I'm maintaining the blog, years after so many others have abandoned theirs. It's my memory hole, it's my constant tribute to Leah (my late best friend), it's my joy. It's yeah, mostly silly sites, and occasionally the daily content is back-dated, but it's still chugging on, as am I, and that makes me happy. Thanks again to the few of you who are still reading.

Silly Site o' the Day

We're coming up on this blog's twentieth blogiversary on Wednesday, and I have a vague idea of what I want to write about it but that's still a few days away. In the meantime, our relaxing weekend continues; it was too hot and pandemic-y to go anywhere, of course, so I finished up about two months' worth of my heretofore-unread local weekly newspaper, watched baseball and football (the Engish kind), and relaxed. Not a terribly adventurous weekend so far, but after all I'm not Indiana Jones:

Via Laughing Squid.

Silly Site o' the Day

Happy milestone birthday to my wonderful husband Robin! We had a low-key day, like most everything is nowadays, with me taking care of business during work hours and spending as much time as I can during the rest of the day. Because he's got such a keen eye, I'm sure Robin would appreciate these ugly designs.

Silly Site o' the Day

It's been one heck of an anniversary. Robin woke me up in the wee small hours-- actually, he and our shouting basement neighbor woke me-- to inform me that all the electricity was out. We found out later that morning that it was just a partial outage, most of the kitchen outlets were still operational including the fridge, so Robin kludged together a few extension cords so we could boot up our router and keep our phones and pads charged. Worst of all, the boiler was on the circuit that had fritzed out. I had hoped to get our grocery shopping done, and buy him an anniversary card when I couldn't locate the one I swore I'd already bought, but we spent much of the morning with the landlord, his handyman, the electrician, and neighbors. Turns out the power was half-out for all four houses along our row, which indicated it was definitely a ConEd problem. The good news is, they located and repaired the problem by 10:30, and we were nice and toasty again by 11 in time to relax a bit and do our shopping a bit later but not appreciably so. Interestingly, the lights all seem much brighter now than they have in months, which leads me to believe this issue has been building for longer than just a day or so. We had a lovely anniversary together the rest of the afternoon and evening, got lots of online and in-person congrats on our special day, and once again everyone commented on Robin's weight loss but nobody on his shaved head. Me, I'm just grateful he's no longer subject to any tragic hair accidents.

Will You Still Need Me?

Sometimes I wonder. But I am indeed 64 now, and I still need me. I'm very self-amusing, after all. It's been a fun birthday. From all the greetings from work colleagues to calls from most of my immediate family (and a former boss!) to lots of Facebook posts to an actual virtual party thrown for me by my Firesign friends, to of course spending the day with my favorite person and pet, it's been quite the whirlwind. I'm giving myself a birthday present by not doing a Silly Site today.

Persistence, Subsistence, Existence, and Number 19

Nineteen years ago today I wrote my first blog post. It was Rosh Hashanah then too. This year I'm just glad I'm still here. It's the second Pen-Elayne blogiversary (yes, the late great skippy coined that word, speaking of dear bloggy friends no longer with us) since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and at this point many of us who are trying to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe are just persisting and going through the motions. Oh sure, I'm back seeing (local) doctors and Robin and I have both been taking care of our health in other ways (mostly the exercise bike), but I feel like I haven't been feeding my soul that much. My self-teaching-art books sit unopened on the living room couch, I haven't actually written anything creative outside of work since this time last year, and I just looked at my collection of blog posts that I wanted to write about and they stretch back over two years.

During this pandemic I've come up with so many things I want to say but no coherent way to string them all together. Some of it is because of the obvious existential turmoil brought on by sheltering in place with human contact discouraged, despite vaccines (breakthrough illness among the vaccinated is starting to rise among my circle of friends and coworkers). For me, finding out almost simultaneously about a year ago that I will be retaining my current job and that I'll be working remotely from home even as the people I support return to the office post-pandemic also threw me on a bit of a roller coaster. I'm so, so lucky to have this work that pays me well enough to continue to enjoy my life, but at the same time I feel like I'm constantly pushing myself to justify my continued value to my company in all kinds of different ways so I can stay employed there until I retire in seven or so years.

All this means I have less emotional and mental energy to devote to personal hobbies. But don't get me wrong, it's not all doom-scrolling. Although Robin and I tend to be homebodies anyway nowadays, I've made sure to hug my downstairs neighbor at least once to thank her for all her help. I've seen my mom in person twice this summer and my brother and sis-in-law once, hugged them too. We're blessed to have human contact virtually, whether with work colleagues or relatives and friends we miss seeing and love so dearly that we refuse to endanger them until All of This is Past. And I still engage in hobbies that don't necessarily require the use of copious amounts of brainpower, like online puzzle games.

But I do miss writing. I miss the equilibrium it affords, the inner peace it brings me. It's my form of meditation. And I will do that blogaround pontificating on the 24+ month old posts, and I will get back to my art book, and I will even return to regular old meditation... but in my own time. When I'm ready. I honestly think it's enough for the moment to just Be Here Now. And I thank you for being here as well.

Silly Site o' the Day

Today is my mother's 90th birthday. I made sure to call her before work because, as expected, yesterday's walk took a toll on me, I got very little sleep, and only now am I starting to come out the other side of this illness. Managed a lot more work than I felt myself capable of doing, which was a nice surprise. As Mom loves to read, here are some Bookface Challenge submissions here and here. They might be redundant, I haven't checked... Happy birthday, Mom!!! One more month and we'll be able to hug you in person!

Silly Site o' the Day

A very happy birthday to Robin, feeling all the appropriate aches and pains as winter sets in but otherwise happy and healthy. It was, as all days are now, a relatively quiet day spent at home, where I wrote up our annual holiday card roundup message (saying pretty much that all days now flow into one another but we're okay so far) and we relaxed as it was a bit too cold to do much more outside than take out the trash. I'm so grateful I have someone with whom to shelter in place during this adjectival time! I'm not even sure I have the words, but then I'm not a major corporation's Twitter manager like these clever folks challenged to describe 2020 in one word.