Cooking the NYTimes and Other Assorted Retirement Activities

I suppose this could just as easily be titled the joy of going home but no, not really, because I’m not going home.  I’ve lived in the Twin Cities twice as long as I lived in Chicago so home is Minnesota not Illinois.  Yet I will always be from somewhere else. As I compose this draft, the Spousal Unit   (™)  and I are riding the CTA Orange Line  with a transfer to the Blue Line  from Midway out to, well, where I was last from before moving to Minnesota .  I screwed up our plane reservations and booked us into Midway rather than O’Hare.  When my sister noticed, my only option was to repurchase the ticket so I decided we’d take the CTA out to O’Hare.  This will take us longer than it did to fly from MSP to MDW.  I’m not upset about it, though.  Because there is joy in being from Somewhere Else. When you return, every sense is assailed by the somewhere else left behind and indelibly etched in you.  For me, it begins as a small...

Recently I read an article whose headline drew me in.  It was about how not to get caught up in negative thinking.  The bottom line, according to this author?  You have a choice.  Either stay in the cycle of negative thought or decide to break the cycle.  No middle ground. More simple put, in the words of Yoda: Do or do not.  There is no try. (An aside here: if you are a Star Wars fan and have not already sprung the $6.95 a month to subscribe to Disney + streaming, do so, IMMEDIATELY.  There is no try.  Then set aside a couple hours, since you are not caught up, to watch The Mandalorian where you will coo, ooh and ahh over the most adorable character in the Star Wars universe—Baby Yoda.) I was looking for something with a tad more heft, as this is what I teach in most of my classes.  You always have a choice to make it better, even if only in increments.    Celebrate what you can do rather than focusing on what you have decide...