20200609T-0903 Austin, TX
I woke up around 0730 this morning and the headache I had when I went to bed last night was gone, thankfully. I pondered pumping up the mostly flat back bike tire on the Schwinn bike that I purchased at a Riverside pawn shop last year. I remember that I bought it at the encouragement of a homeless guy who I had helped to pay off his pawnshop loan so he could get his guitar back. I had met the him while I was running underneath one of the bridges on the riverwalk and he was playing music with his other guitar. I also pondered swimming in the pool as I haven’t done that in a long time.
But the weather was overcast and perfect for running, so I ran out my back door and down the street to the local park. If I remember correctly, it’s about 2 miles from my door and back. I ran it slow and didn’t keep time. My goal was to just run it. I don’t have an Apple Watch anymore to time it because I gave that to my Aunt before my pandemic wormhole travels.
I now have showered and made a cup of coffee – not too strong – with some cacao, coconut oil, and a bit of creamer that my Aunt gave me before I had a chance to go to Whole Foods and buy groceries. I have also made a juice drink, mixing orange and tart cherry juice with some Q Tonic water, and some dried blueberries thrown in.
I remember spending my 50th birthday with the intention of doing things that I would be happy to do every day of my life. Not that I would necessarily do all of those things every day, but if any one of them became a habit that I couldn’t break, that I would be more than fine with that. When I woke up this morning, I felt a bit of that same spirit. With this intention, the details of the activity are not as important as the impact on my body, mind, spirit and soul. So, it doesn’t matter really whether I run, bike, swim, practice yoga, etc. It also doesn’t matter whether I drink hot coffee, tea, cacao, or lemon/ginger water. And the time that I do each activity can vary depending on my mood or schedule. OK, I think that gives me enough wiggle-room to not get confined into a box.
As I check twitter, I’m realizing that there is a more difficult part of this intention, which is to “only” do things that I would be happy doing every day. So, would I be happy checking twitter (or facebook, etc.) every day for the rest of my life? No, that sounds like a kind of time-out punishment. I imagine that many other people feel the same and yet we all also spend time doing activities that if we had to do them every day, it would be disheartening.
20200609T-1433: I’m cleaning up browser tabs and found this article comparing the 1918 and 2009 flu pandemics with this interesting quote involving research paper-1 and paper-2. The papers cause me to be concerned that we are possibly harming our children by keeping them from being infected by SARS-CoV-2 now. While society may benefit by school being closed, the children may be paying the price later in life when SARS-CoV-2 comes back to haunt them.
Structural similarities between the pandemic flu viruses of 1918 and 2009 may explain older adults’ apparent immunity to the newer virus, two scientific teams report today in two journals. Their results may also explain how pandemic viruses evolve into seasonal viruses, and could point the way toward development of future pandemic vaccines.
Article by Maryn McKenna – Mar 24, 2010
20200609T-1600: I got distracted by another browser tab on the fine structure constant trying to validate the iteration equation found in this Oct. 4, 2004 posting by Hans de Vries.
surfing the universe 