Connections

Lately I've been thinking about connections.  More specifically, about how a random thought, a phrase overheard by chance, a glimpse of something caught in passing, can lead us to renew connections with people or places or things that we hadn't even realized we'd missed.

I was walking from the Skytrain station to the office last week  -  taking the same route I always take  -  when I looked up at a building I'd been passing twice every day and suddenly realized that was where my friend E was working when I was at my old job.  I wondered if she was still there; later that day I made a call and found out she'd left that job at about the same time I was laid off.  But ... I didn't know that the person I talked to would call E the same day to let her know I'd been asking asking.  End result?  E learned where I was working, called me, and we're getting together next weekend.  As it happened, not long after we lost touch, E had moved out to this area and now lives about a ten-minute walk from my house!  I'm looking forward to renewing the friendship, and I think E is too.

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On the "Projects" front, the sweater is coming along nicely.  I finished the sleeves on Saturday, yay!  So now it's back to the workroom cleanup, with added motivation  -  until it's done, I can't set up the ironing board to block out the sweater pieces before I sew them together.

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Elderly Cat had her every-six-months checkup and blood work done last week.  The vet says she's doing exceedingly well  -  she's even gained weight!  We're all very pleased, even Big Guy who pretends he doesn't care for cats.  She still needs her meds every day; one pill for her digestion, a quarter of another pill for her kidneys, and an eighth of a pill for her heart; I crush them all into her food every evening and so far she hasn't caught on.  She may be eighteen years old, but she's still happy and active; when she thinks we're not looking she plays like a kitten, and I still catch her jumping up on the kitchen counter to drink from the sink on occasion.  Not bad, considering that in human terms she's about ninety and the counter, proportionally, if she were my height, would be about twenty feet over her head ...

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I stopped at Costco on my way home from work today, to pick up a month's worth of my work breakfasts and lunches  -  two boxes of sausage rolls, two dozen apple-oatmeal muffins, a bag of apples, a bag of bananas, and two tubs of yogurt. (I love my wheeled shopping bag!  It folds up to fit into the tote bag I carry every day, and holds a lot.)  My co-workers think my diet is really dull, because they see me eating pretty much the same things every day  -  a muffin for breakfast (the office provides coffee), a sausage roll and some yogurt for lunch, and a piece of fruit mid-afternoon.  S, who goes out and buys her lunch every day, asked me if I don't get bored eating the same thing every day.  The truth is, I don't.  It's nutritious, it's fairly balanced, and it's a huge time-saver in the mornings, when I am definitely not at my best.  I just grab a sausage roll and a muffin from the freezer, a pre-filled one-serving container of yogurt and a piece of fruit from the fridge, and I'm good to go. Plus it's cheap ... I sat down and did the math one day, and discovered that the two meals and snack I eat at work every day cost me roughly $2.10 per day.  That's not much higher than what S spends on whatever pastry she picks up for breakfast in the mall every morning, and about a third (or a bit less) of what she usually spends on lunch.  So while I'm spending $10.50 a week to eat breakfast and lunch, S is spending, on average, $40.00.  And most weeks my total is lower, because sometimes there are some pretty nice leftovers to take the place of the sausage roll.  Then I did some more math, and found out that buying good bread and sandwich makings would cost me closer to $3.50 a day, plus the muffins, yogurt, and fruit.  So I feel both well-nourished and virtuously frugal.