Random

Hello, friends! It has been a busy couple of weeks since I last wrote here. Last week I was in Connecticut for an extended weekend visiting family. The weather was absolutely perfect during my stay.

Since August 22 I have been preoccupied with a competition we are having at work. The powers that be thought it would be fun to have a friendly wellness/exercise challenge for anyone interested, using the app Wellable (link here). You can earn points in a variety of ways: 0.05 points for each step you take, 5 points for every minute you exercise, 100 points for every mile you walk/run, 30 points for every mile cycled, etc. I’ve definitely gotten caught up in the competitive vibe of the thing – out of 48 participants I am currently sharing the 3rd/4th place position with a perfectly nice coworker who has become my nemesis – up until yesterday. The problem with the competition is that they cap the number of points you can earn at 1,500 per day. That’s the equivalent of 15 miles of walking/running a day (about 30,000 steps). That’s a lot. And that’s what everyone in the top 5 or so have determined is needed to maintain their position. So, yeah, it’s been exhausting. The competition lasts until October 2 and yesterday I decided to scale it back to something more sustainable (and something less likely to give me a stress fracture in my foot). Fifteen miles a day is technically do-able. But do I want to do that? It’s quite a chunk out of my day. Yesterday I ended up doing 18,884 steps, which felt like a walk in the park compared to 30,000, and a lot more reasonable. We’ll see if the rest of the top group feels the same way soon, or if I’ll be left in the dust.

Last Friday was a momentous day – Chris became a naturalized US citizen. It was quite moving seeing the 50+ other people there with their families (and in some cases the entire family were becoming citizens at the same time). People from all over the world whose life paths somehow brought them all to the same court house in Cleveland, Ohio on this day. The culmination of lifelong dreams for many of them. I will never forget the feeling of that morning.

The hummingbirds will soon be all gone for the year. As it is, there seem to be only a couple left: two immature males who are in the process of molting (in the photos above you can see the lost/new feathers). I imagine they will be on their way after the process is complete. In the three years that I have been photographing hummingbirds I have never witnessed any of them in the process of molting, and I must admit it looks a bit freaky to me, lol.

On Friday I will be flying to Providence, Rhode Island for a celebratory long weekend with my BFF Beth – we met on the first day of school in 4th grade and immediately became friends. 50 years later we are still friends. I am so excited for this trip. There will be visits to Italian bakeries. There will be self-guided walking tours all over Providence. There will be a boat tour of the Providence River. There will be pizza strips and Del’s lemonade. But most importantly, there will be plenty of time to visit with my oldest friend. We haven’t had a good, long, in-person visit in many years.

That will be my next post. In the meantime, take good care of yourselves.

Love,

Michelle xoxo