This is the flag a the entrance to our neighborhood. It was donated by one of the residents.
Memorial Weekend I heard the phrase “Be worthy” repeated several times. It was in response to those who have sacrificed for our freedom. That hit a note with me. Am I worthy?
When my son was in eighth grade, his class traveled to Washington D.C. I was lucky to get one of the chaperone spots. I had never been to D.C. and felt so much emotion visiting the War Memorials and the Arlington Cemetery. If you’ve been there, you’ll understand. If you haven’t been there, you should plan a trip.
I wondered. Am I worthy? I try to be a kind person. I help my neighbors and volunteer in the community. I have for decades. I try to be a parent and wife who is supportive and understanding. I have my shortcomings. But have I done anything worthy of someone sacrificing their life for my freedom?
What do you think the phrase “Be worthy” means? How do you try to be worthy?
Waffles the pug with my daughter during a beach vacation.
My kids like to call me when they’re walking. Yesterday, while my daughter was walking Waffles around her neighborhood I heard her say “Oh no!”
“What?”
She talked softly, “There’s someone laying on the sidewalk. Probably a homeless person.” My daughter explained that they look away from homeless people, that they don’t want to engage them. My kids live in the Bay Area where homelessness is a problem.
“He’s bleeding!” she said. It looked to her like he had slit his wrists. She ended her call with me. Minutes later she called me back and said he was conscious and was trying to get up. I suggested calling the police but she didn’t think they would help. She tried calling some mental health crisis centers, but nobody answered. Apparently crisis hotlines are staffed at night, not in the morning.
She called me again and said she asked if he wanted her to call someone or if should she call 911. He told her to call 911 because he couldn’t get up. She did and asked for the police and an ambulance. She waited with him until they came along with the fire department.
Another life saved by my daughter.
As a lifeguard she saved a drowning young boy. Then one evening in Laguna Beach, she and my husband went for a walk and a swim. She saw two people struggling in a rip tide. It was hours after the lifeguards were off duty. She swam out to them and told them what to do, to stay calm and helped them in. My husband swam out after her and they were able to get the people — who were drunk — safely onshore.
On her way back to the vacation cottage, she spotted the neighbors dog loose. She brought the dog back safely to its yard.
Yes I’m proud of my daughter to have empathy and to be able to help those in need. She said people were walking by ignoring the man. She was the only one who stopped to help.
What would you do if you saw someone who was probably homeless, bleeding on the sidewalk? Do you think you’d try to help? Or more likely walk away?Honestly, I don’t know what I’d do.
I never grow tired of the desert sights. It’s such a different desert than the manicured lawns, hedges and golf courses of Palm Springs — yet it’s technically the same desert. The Sonoran Desert.
My husband spotted these quail eggs in a planter under a bush. Talk about an effective nest. Now we know where the babies came from.This is the planter where the quail made a nest! It’s in the side yard right outside where the trash bins are stored.I’ve been watching this century plant grow.A few weeks later. It’s grown so fast, you can stand still for a few minutes it seems like you can watch it grow. I wonder if it will bloom? Sunset view with ocotillo.
Have a great weekend! Thanks for stopping by. What are your plans for the weekend?
My husband and I disagree about shaving Olive. She’s a long-haired cat and is shedding like crazy. Our kids are coming to visit us soon. Our son is super allergic. My husband thinks I should take Olive to a groomer and get her a lion cut. That it will help our son’s allergies.
I googled about shaving cats and it’s mostly negative. The sources said you CAN get a cat shaved, but it’s not a great idea.The hair protects cats from heat and cold. Their fur is their natural insulation. Getting shaved is something I know my cat will freak out about.
She’s a scaredy cat and doesn’t like anyone except for me, my husband and my daughter. When people come over, she hides. When we leave for more than a few days, she is boarded. Olive howls the entire few miles drive in the car. She demolished the cardboard carrier I bought at PetSmart with her claws and teeth. The employees in the boarding place were afraid to get her out of her “suite.” when I came to pick her up. I had to do it. Then the cardboard carrier collapsed as I walked to the car. It was a frightening experience for both me and Olive.
So, how do you think Olive will feel driving to a pet groomer, being around strangers and barking dogs to be groomed? Once she gets home I’m sure she’ll hide away for weeks. She’ll be super mad.
I think you can tell who has won the debate on whether or not Olive gets a haircut.
What are your thoughts about getting a cat groomed? Should we or shouldn’t we?
Olive at our old home where she was an indoor outdoor cat.
The baby quail are growing up. Bird watching, especially the babies, helps me relax.
I have two mindfulness apps on my phone. They are supposed to help me with anxiety and stress. One is called Mindfulness, the other Headspace. I’m not very good about using them. I’ll go through a phase where at the end of the day, I’ll sit down and turn on the app for a five minute mindfulness session. Then the next week, I forget about them.
I saw a headline in the Washington Post that caught my eye:
An unintended consequence of mindfulness
Sometimes it pays to contemplate other people’s feelings — not merely your own by Andrew C. Hafenbrack
Here’s an excerpt:
You’ve had a stressful day at work, so, like millions of other people, you open up Calm or Headspace on your smartphone and do some mindful meditation — concentrating on your bodily sensations, “observing” your thoughts in the moment. Research has shown that this is likely to have benefits: Mindful meditation reduces anxiety, depression and stress; more pragmatically, it can also improve sleep, decision-making, focus and self-control. This helps to explain why so many companies have jumped on the mindfulness bandwagon, incorporating it in corporate wellness programs (and why Calm was valued at $2 billion in 2020). But what if, in the course of your stressful day, you acted like a jerk toward a colleague at a meeting? Could all of that inward focus cause you to downplay the harm you caused that person, letting it float away like a leaf on a stream?
That’s exactly what my research colleagues Matthew LaPalme and Isabelle Solal and I found in a series of eight studies, involving more than 1,400 participants in the United States and Portugal, slated to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Across a range of laboratory scenarios and online experiments, we found that asking people to engage in a single session of 8 or 15 minutes of mindfulness meditation — focusing their attention on the physical sensations of breathing — reduced their self-reported levels of guilt (about incidents warranting guilt). It also reduced their willingness to take “prosocial” steps to remedy harms they’d done. The research suggests that people ought to be careful about when they use mindfulness meditation, lest the comfort they derive from it come at the cost of their connections with other human beings.
The writer is an assistant professor at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. In his studies he discovered that Meditation led feelings of guilt to subside, along with the desire to rectify the situation.
So meditation is good at making us feel calm, but it may get rid of guilt when we hurt someone else’s feelings. Sometimes feeling guilty is good, especially if it’s warranted. The emotion of guilt can prompt us to do the right thing like apologize. The inward trend of mindfulness can lessen our empathy to those around us.
I had never heard this perspective before and I found it interesting.
What are your thoughts about mindfulness? Do you find it helpful? Do you think it alleviates feelings of guilt or not?
I’m trying to get my head out of Mexico and a relaxing three-day weekend, back into the real world of everyday life.
Several of my friends were worried when they heard we were driving to Mexico. I had been afraid for more than a year. I was too afraid to go. Finally, I talked to people who have gone there and they assured us it was safe.
Sandy Beach (where the condos are located) looks across the bay to downtown.
The drive is very easy — once you get off Interstate 10 and the crazy Phoenix traffic. It’s a straight shot down a two-lane highway to the border. It’s such an easy drive that I take over in Gila Bend to Ajo and Why — all the way to the Visitor’s Center at the Organ Pipes Cactus National Monument. (Ajo and Why are two tiny American towns.)
The beach resort is one hour from the border on a road exactly like on our side of the border. The only difficult part is what I call the gauntlet. Once you cross the border you have about 300 meters of mutilated beggars, squeegee guys and tamale and tortilla hawkers. They surround your car and we nod our head “no thank you” repeatedly. It’s really a depressing view to enter and depart Mexico. It’s a gut wrenching contrast to our life in the states.
My husband during one of our many beach walks.
Once through the gauntlet, it’s smooth sailing. They love tourists. The resorts are 50/50 Americans and Mexican families. There are security guards and police at every resort and throughout the town.
We took beach walks, collected shells, and I read tons. Then we worried about where to go for dinner. That was it. I really got into a relaxed frame of mind.
Where is your favorite place to relax? What do you like to do during a weekend getaway?
A hand-painted sign in the parking lot of Pollo Lucas On the curb.
Our exploring this weekend took us to a small fishing village in Mexico. Although it’s still a fishing village, Puerto Penasco has grown into a tourist resort town with towering condos and fancy restaurants. Our first trip there was at the end of March. I had asked our realtor, who owns a condo there, where we should eat. He told us his family’s very favorite restaurant was Pollo Lucas for chicken, rice and beans.
That didn’t sound exciting to me, I was on a quest for fresh seafood. So we skipped Pollo Lucas last trip. I remembered it this time and thought, “If it’s his family’s most favorite, maybe we should give it a try.”
The Coca Cola sign with the restaurant name is how you spot it from the street.
The menu is simple: whole chicken, half chicken or quarter chicken. Chicken comes with garnishes of shredded cabbage, onions and home-made tortillas and salsa. Plus rice and beans for 180 pesos or nine dollars for the full chicken meal. That sounds wild right? Maybe I’m off the price for a few dollars.
The chicken charbroiled on the grill and the menu in pesos.Under the grill is charcoal. What a hot job that would be!
My husband insisted on the full chicken, while I said we only needed a half. Boy, am I glad he insisted! We got about three meals plus snacks out of the best chicken I’ve tasted in my life! Juicy charbroiled chicken like I’ve never had before.
The beans, rice, tortillas and salsa were unbelievable, too.
A full chicken dinner at Pollo Lucas.The large tables sit under a tall palapas that is open air on several sides. We shared a table with a Mexican family of several generations and took a ton of food home.I tried the super syrupy sweet original Coke that’s found in Mexico. Wow!
Yes, we’ll be back. This is at the top of our list for favorite restaurants in our new beach vacation town. Talk about winner winner chicken dinner!
What restaurants have you been to that compare to this find in Mexico?What’s the best chicken you’ve ever had?
