1. We've always called it The Trail.
It's the path leading from the convergence of Riverside and Mission, along the bottom of hill over looking west Sunnyside and the hospital, to Kellogg High School. If you start up The Trail from Riverside and Mission, it's a short uphill climb.
For now, until my surgical site has healed, I must limit my walking to flat areas.
If, however, you start walking The Trail from the little bridge over Jacobs Creek at the high school, there is a rise in elevation, but it's very mild.
Today, it came to me for the first time that walking The Trail, starting near that bridge and ambling to the Wellness Trail trailhead might be the perfect walk for me.
It was.
I established a slow pace, walked up the slight incline without a problem, and it took me about fifteen minutes to cover this segment of The Trail and return to the car.
I think this walk will be a perfect way for me to build back some stamina and when it comes time to stretch it to twenty minutes, all I'll have to do is walk around the parking lot or stroll around the outside of the high school.
2. Christy sent out a notice about this weekend's family dinner and it didn't occur to me to read the date we were having it. Stupidly, I assumed it would, once again, be on Sunday. Well, Carol brought Gibbs home this morning and, as she left, she said, "Okay! See you tonight at family dinner!"
"What? Wait! Isn't dinner tomorrow?"
"No. It's tonight so Paul and I can take Sunday to get ready for our upcoming camps this week."
"Oh, man! I'm totally unprepared for tonight!"
Well, luckily, Christy assigned each of us to bring a snack for dinner and our meal would be a collection of these snacks.
I knew I had a bag of frozen shrimp on hand and fresh lemons. Carol agreed to pick me up a head of garlic when she was out today, so I was set.
I heated up some olive oil, added a chunk of butter to the pan, and cooked the shrimp I'd thawed. When I turned the shrimp over, I added four cloves of crushed garlic and when the shrimp were done cooking, I added the zest and juice of a whole lemon.
Thus, I took Lemon Garlic Shrimp to Christy's deck as my contribution.
3. Christy, Carol, Paul, Brian, Molly, and I sat around a long table on Christy's deck. Christy served gin and tonics for our cocktail (I enjoyed a tonic and tonic) and we had a variety of snacks to choose from. Christy also prepared a shrimp recipe. She baked the shrimp and offered cocktail sauce as a condiment (and Frank's hot sauce), so our shrimp snacks were different from each other. Other snacks included popcorn, dill potato chips, imitation crab salad, deli bread, pickled asparagus, crackers, and more. Molly brought huckleberry licorice for dessert.
It was a fun collection of snacks and worked great.
Ah, one more thing.
Back in about December, I started working with an app to keep track of calories and to set goals for weight loss. I also cut way back on drinking beer, almost abstaining.
With my new kidney, it's all right if I drink a very moderate amount of alcohol, but, for at least the time being, I'm just not in the mood for it and I am abstaining.
Because I nearly quit drinking beer about six months ago, I have had a fairly good stash of beer in the fridge and the basement that's been untouched.
At dinner tonight, I offered Molly and Brian this beer, thinking they and some of their friends might like to drink them, hoping that most of it would be drinkable, even though none of it is very fresh.
They accepted my offer and, a little later in the evening, Molly texted me the news of how she and Brian had, indeed, distributed some of the beer to other people and kept some for themselves.
This delighted me!
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