Reminiscing

I have spent the last couple of nights reading the blogs from the last year in Massachusetts and the first year in Utah.

I find it unbelievable that I have lived in Utah for nearly 8 years!  That is the same amount of time that I lived in Pennsylvania and that felt like a long time...but of course at that time I was raising young children and my time here in Utah has been a decent percentage of empty nesting.  I'm sure that's the difference in how I perceive the time.  Still. 8 years.

I'm still not quite ready to call myself a Utahn though I do like it here for the most part.

Good things: 
being near family. I missed them for so long.
no (or almost no) mosquitoes.  Dang I love being able to go outside after dusk.
the mountains. I never tire of looking at them.
my house. It really is just the right size. I love my covered porch and my lovely back yard. I still want to change almost everything about the inside and decor but the house itself...so good.
A job I enjoy and nice coworkers. 
A couple of my kids are living here locally which is super-dee-duper good!  I try to make an effort to stay connected though they are grown up and have lives and stuff now.

I still miss the East so much and I feel like I've struggled a bit to really fit in here or make new friends.  I haven't totally lost my Eastern attitude and, dare I say, crankiness?  Maybe I shouldn't blame the East though. It's probably just me. 

Back East I was kind of "conservative". Here, I feel like I'm a raging liberal. 

It's different and some of it is good and some of it isn't.  Of course, I'm now at a point where I am remembering all my time back East so fondly and forgetting all the hard stuff...that how we humans work I suppose.

Lots of things have changed:

My parents moved to AZ and our weekly get togethers were over.

Mom died after the horrible fight with Alzheimers.

My dad remarried and is living in AZ.

My oldest son and his wife and kids (who lived here when we first came here) moved away: first to Alaska and then Michigan.

Some kids left and then came back. Some left and stayed gone. 

My family is kind of broken. I can't fix it.

I'm an empty nester. 

I have a job. Ok, I've had jobs before but now having a job is like...my thing. My main thing. What is up with that?

I don't get together with my family enough. Everyone has lives you know?! And it totally gets in my way of hanging out with my family all the time!  Plus for some reason Frank wants to do other stuff besides hang out with my siblings. Who can even understand this?

Anyway, regarding the blog, I'm so glad I have it.  There are so many things I would have forgotten but there they are, all written down!

My cousin Emily has been my number one commenter and I thank her for it. I honestly feel like we are close though we haven't seen each other in years! It's probably because she posts comments on my blog and also from Facebook posts. Thanks Emily! Let's get together sometime!

I've been meaning to get back to blogging for some time now. I cut way back when I started working full time (I think that's when it started. Or stopped. Whichever) and I just never have any idea what to write about anymore.  But I think the reason I used to blog a lot and had stuff to say was because I was blogging a lot. haha 

Does that make sense?  The more I wrote, the more I had to say.  And  I probably have stuff to say now, I just can't think of it yet because I'm not writing enough.  I used to really enjoy the act of writing.  I know I've mentioned this before, probably the last time I blogged!  I do tend to repeat myself.

But I'm going to try to get back to it. Again.

Dreams and Sleep

 I don't know what dreams mean and I usually don't put a lot of meaning to my dreams. I do think my dreams often have to do with what I'm stressing/thinking about.  Here are some dream topics lately:

I've removed Facebook from my phone as I really have a problem over checking the phone during the day only to look at NOTHING.  Anywho, lately I've been dreaming dreams where I am scrolling through my phone in my dream. I wake up to my hand in the correct position for scrolling. That seems bad.

I dream about work a lot. So annoying. I already spend lots of time there, can't I be away from there during sleep??

Last night I dreamed about a combination of Ryan moving (helping him do that today), family craziness, and pickelball.  All in one dream. Woke up feeling stressed out.  My least favorite way to start the day.

I've been working to improve my sleep and I *mostly* am doing pretty good. I try hard to get to sleep by 10 and I wake up between 6 and 6:30. Don't need to wake til 6:30 for work but often wake before my alarm. I also nap almost every day during my lunch break. It used to be 25 minutes almost exactly but lately I've been napping as long as 45 minutes! It is during these naps that I often have the scrolling through my phone dreams... I LOVE my naps and according to what I've read, they are good for me. But I'm so used to them now that my body gets sleepy at noon even on my days off. No idea if that's normal or bad or what.  But as long as I have the time, I'll keep napping. 

Actually, that sounds pretty good right now. Off to snooze...

Pickleball

 I don't think I've talked about pickleball and yet it has become a big part of our lives.

Theres a pickleball court at a park very close to our house. I don't remember how we found out about it or exactly why Frank became interested but one day he decided we should play.

I have NO training in any sort of racket sport: terrible at tennis and have only played a few times, always chasing the ball in ping pong, never played racquetball etc.  So I assumed I would be terrible.  And, well, I am not good.  But, even with my lack of skills, pickleball is pretty fun!

We've been playing for about a year now!

We play once or twice a week on average and almost always have lots of fun.

Theres a big family group that comes to the same courts we do. They bring food and music and chairs and just have a grand ol' time. They laugh so much!  It really seems like they are having the time of their lives.  They are also very good at pickleball and super fun to watch.  Frank can be pretty competitive so he sometimes gets worked up about how bad we are or how we lose too much or whatever and I have to point out the family and say "we need to be more like them!  Remember we are here to have fun!"  haha

I have definitely improved over the last year but I'm still sort of the "weak link" in the team.  We play with a couple of neighbors and sometimes we switch up the teams so Frank can win. ha!  Lately I have been feeling more frustrated at all the mistakes I make. So we decided, for fun, to take a pickleball lesson when we went to St. George to celebrate our anniversary. 

The first day our lesson was at 5 pm and it was 102 degrees. It was not fun.  Turns out, that's too hot.  So we signed up for a second lesson a couple of days later and the weather was lovely, thank heaven.

Ever since then, I have played worse than ever!  Gah!  I assume I'm thinking too much now.

Oh well!  I will still play pickleball (until I jack up my knee too bad) and have a fun time doing it.

I really love that we have something that is both active and that Frank and I both enjoy doing!

Fun facts and stories related to pickleball:

After our discovery of the nearby courts, Frank went to buy some paddles. He had played pickleball back in the day in Portland when he worked at the bread plant. It's a wooden paddle and a wiffle ball.  Well, pickleball has evolved and he discovered all these high tech paddles that were like $50 a piece.  He didn't know which one was best, so in typical Frank style, he bought 4.  He figured we'd need extra so we could invite others to play. 

I hate singles and love doubles.  WAY too much running around with singles especially when playing someone who can aim the ball at the opposite side of the court you are on (i.e. everyone but me).  When I hit the ball, it's a surprise to even me where it may land. LOL

We bought balls and rackets at a local sporting goods store, knowing nothing about the game. One day, pretty early on, we asked this random couple of guys if they wanted to play doubles with us.  They were way better than us.  They scoffed at our balls and called them beginner balls (yellow) and showed us the balls that are used in tournaments (green).  They creamed us in one game and then declined to play again (we were that bad).  Frank, not to be deterred, sat on the bench right there and ordered the green pickleball balls from Amazon. He wanted to learn with the right equipment!  He can't be convinced to play with the yellow balls now. ha!

We usually play in the evenings after work. So we'll start at like 7 and we often play til 9:30 or later. We have played in the wind and rain and played until the court lights go out at 10:30 PM! On a work night! We played all winter long on the milder days. We played in coats and gloves.  We once went to play on the pretty nice winter day only to discover that we weren't the only ones with that idea.  Only two of the 6 courts were usable due to snow/ice on the surface. Someone brought a couple of snow shovels and when it was our turn to be waiting, we would work on the 3rd court, shoveling and chipping away at the ice.  Everyone helped. I was so proud of us for working together like that though we were strangers to each other. We did eventually get the 3rd court to be usable. It was awesome.