The highs and lows of aging

There are so many products out there these days to "combat" aging. There are boob and butt lifters, wrinkle creams, pills, beverages, etc. I have crows feet and I wear them like a badge of honor. I have no plans to do anything about them. I do scrub and moisturize and that's it. I don't want to combat aging, it's a natural progression. I will get skinny again and that might take a few years off but otherwise, hey, 50 is what it is. There are fun parts and not so fun parts. The poking and prodding and testing is not the fun part. I still have to schedule my colonoscopy. And today I received a phone call from a lab nurse at Group Health about my mammogram. They found what look to be calcium deposits and want to have another, closer look. She told me that those show up in about half of all women who have mammograms and that it is probably just that, benign calcium. They just want to look again and rule out anything else. That is also not the fun part of getting older. Getting what could potentially be bad news. It probably is nothing but I have to wait until the 23rd to go in for my next round of xrays and then wait another week or so for them to analyze the films. Lovely.

The fun part of getting older is having grandchildren. It's having a life to reflect back on and one to look forward to. It's thinking about retirement. It's getting closer to my husband. It's taking the time to enjoy the details in everything.It's developing a good photographic "eye". It's developing new friendships and cultivating some old ones. It's learning new things and learning to like things that are out of my comfort zone. It's about appreciating the everyday things that you often take for granted in your younger and busier life, and it's about counting the gifts and blessings that have been bestowed on you thus far. It's about looking forward to what God has in store for you for the next 40 or 50 years. It's about appreciating everyday as a new opportunity. So there it is.

Now I have the "opportunity" to go bake brownies for my HOA meeting tonight and have another "opportunity" to go vacuum out my car. And then there is finishing the laundry, doing a bit of sewing, and straightening up the rec room to get ready for tonights' meeting. Away I go!

Friends past and present

I have some pretty awesome friends in my life right now and they are very important to me. However, I had some really great people in my life when I was younger but because of the person I was then, I let them go. I just sort of blew them off and went my merry way. People and relationships weren't a priority then, not sure what was really. Probably drinking and being selfish I suppose. It would seem that in my late teens and through my twenties people were pretty disposable to me. I have over the past year been in contact fairly regulary now with a person that I worked with at Arrow back in 86, another that I've known since I moved to Wallingford in 1970 and a few others that I just wanted to reconnect with. I am so grateful that they are so forgiving.

During the last couple of years I have spent a pretty fair amount of time contemplating what I would write for the biography that I would like to give to Fawn. In doing so, it has brought up repressed memories that I don't want to deal with but will, memories that are good and I'm glad have surfaced,and thoughts of so many people that I knew. I have googled some, facebooked some, and just wondered about others. With some it's just curiousity in wondering how they are and how their life turned out, and with some of the others I feel like I might want to reach out to them and communicate. They may not want anything to do with me and that I can accept. It can't hurt to try. All they can do is say no or perhaps, yes. Time will tell.