Category: 2022

We had a low-key, very nice Valentine’s Day yesterday. We got each other a few little things and took the morning off and went to the botanical garden. The weather was lovely and I felt very lucky.

There were three cards because one was “from the dog,” lol.

The most beautiful butterfly there was actually a moth.

I wouldn’t mind having that tree in my yard.

And the requisite cactus pic. It is, after all, Arizona.

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If you’ve heard of the Bumble app at all, you probably think of it as a dating app. But it turns out, dating is only one of the three modules.

“BFF” stands for Best Friends Forever. A little over the top, sure, but whatever.

Once I heard that Bumble had a friends mode, I figured I had to try it. For one thing, I have found friends online before. A long-time friend of mine in Albuquerque and I met on a website designed to link people up to exercise together. We started out hiking the in the foothills of Albuquerque we’ve been friends ever since! (Yep, that’s you, Clarice ❤️)

I have a lot of friends in Albuquerque, but not many in Tucson. I’m amazed I have any at all. Usually I meet friends at work. But I’m not working as an environmental scientist anymore. I’m only working from home over the phone. I don’t even have coworkers at all, not even in little zoom squares on the screen. I only have clients.

Another good place to meet friends is special-interest groups like church or art classes or the local gym. Enter – pandemic. Everything has been shut down since we moved to Tucson. We did go to those painting classes for awhile, but I would get so focused on my painting (it was quite challenging!) that I would forget to talk to the people around me. Plus, it was different people each time. For me it takes more than that to make friends.

I also joined a couple of book clubs for awhile, but they were all online (pandemic) and they were all old ladies and they were reading books I didn’t want to read, bla, bla, bla, excuses, excuses. I just didn’t enjoy the book clubs.

Plus, special interest groups are a slow and indirect way of making friends. It’s just so random. I am a practical, pragmatic, goal-oriented and somewhat impatient person and I wanted something more direct. I didn’t want to mess around listening to people say dumb things about books I never wanted to read to start with, on the off chance that I might end up befriending one of them. I wanted to get down to the business of making friends more directly! For starters, it made sense to find people who were also trying to make friends, rather than simply hoping for the best.

It’s so weird in that it’s almost exactly like dating. First we meet for coffee/tea, then if that goes well, we schedule lunch or a hike or other outing. On one of my “friend dates” I met one of my new friends at the botanical garden. We both loved the butterfly enclosure.

We wondered about the caps on top of the cactus.

I’m guessing it’s to help prevent frost damage. We do get occasional freezing temperatures at night in the middle of the winter here.

At some point my two new Bumble friends and I realized that the three of us had independently met each other. We were like, wait, I think I just met her too! It seemed like a big coincidence, but the reality is, there’s probably not all that many women in their 50’s looking for friends on Bumble at any given time and location.

So the three of us, Peggy and Amy and I, planned a hike together! And I invited Dawn, my-sister-in-law, who lives here in Tucson in the winter time. I don’t think Dawn knows that I met these “new friends” of mine on Bumble. Well, now she does, right Dawn? 😊

I was all excited about the hike we planned for the four of us. But half an hour before it was time to leave, I was talking to Laura on the phone and I looked down and realized something was wrong with my dog!

Biska’s face was swollen to twice the size. Her eyes were red and bugged out and nearly swollen shut. Her muzzle was all poofed up and she was rubbing it on the floor.

An allergic reaction to something! It’s so hard to know how serious it will be with an allergic reaction. It could go away on its own, or she could go into shock. I grabbed my keys and ran with her to the car, while Laura googled local pet hospitals for me.

The first one, just a couple of blocks away, turned out to be all boarded up – they had gone out of business. The second one, just a block past the first, refused to take us because they weren’t really an emergency vet, just a local vet, even though the term “hospital” was in their name. But they told me where to take her – which was only another couple of blocks away.

I ran up to the building with Biska, rang the bell and waited. A vet technician came out, took a brief look at Biska, decided to bump us to the front of the line, and took Biska in with her. I had to stay outside due to the pandemic policies.

I waited outside for at least an hour, on the phone with Laura and texting my new friends that I was going to miss the hike. They gave Biska an antihistamine shot and a steroid shot, and waited until they were sure she was fine before releasing her. Here’s a picture of her after they released her. Awww, poor baby! But by then the swelling was almost gone.

She had been a total fright when I took her in, but I didn’t stop to take pictures at that point. I had to get her to the vet!

After I got home, I searched the backyard to see if I could figure out what happened. She had vomited twice, so like any good mom, I poked a stick around in it to see what there was to see.

A bee! That’s what there was to see. A bee. And like any good scientist, I bagged it for further research. Actually that was for John’s benefit; I knew he’d want to see it when he got home later in the day. And sure enough, he rinsed it off and inspected it further and declared it to indeed be a bee.

There you have it folks, a dead, $300 bee. And I missed my Bumble-friends hike! (There’s a pun in there somewhere.)

I learned that you can give over-the-counter Benadryl (diphenhydramine) to dogs, 1-2 mg per pound of weight. In the future I’m going to keep some on hand because this dog didn’t learn her lesson. Not two weeks later we caught her trying to eat another live bee! Are you a crazy dog?

Meanwhile, John is curiously watching all this trying-to-make-friends activity of mine. He already made friends with Lee, the old guy across the street with the grapefruit tree, and that’s all he needs. (Bumble and bees, Lee with the grapefruit tree – this is starting to sound like a Dr. Seuss book.)

In addition to providing John with grapefruit, Lee also alerts us whenever we have packages on our porch. It’s unnecessary of course, but nice of him. And I get packages embarrassingly often because I don’t like to get in the car and go to stores. Except groceries – we have gone back to going to grocery stores. But we don’t need to buy grapefruit!

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com

After my last post, some of you were like, “We want to see the flaming toast!”

So ok, yes, you know me, I did actually take a picture of the flaming toast. But not until I had pulled it out of the oven and set it in the sink. By that time the flame was only about an inch tall. It was significantly more impressive when I first opened the oven. But I was busy trying not to burn my kitchen down, so you’ll have to make do with a belated photo of a little itty-bitty flame, and the deep, rich, orange and black glow of cheese toast charcoal.

Had I not burned the crap out of it, it would have been a very nice treat of white cheddar cheese on a quarter of a French roll.

While I’m blogging about culinary catastrophes, I recently made a spinach quiche, but forgot the spinach. I had left the spinach in the microwave. I discovered it after the quiche was done baking.

But darn it, I wanted a spinach quiche. So I cut the cooked quiche into quarters, lifted the top section of each quarter with a metal spatula, inserted my microwaved spinach like cake filling, and replaced the top of the quiche.

It totally worked! In my opinion. I was very pleased with my spinach-filled quiche.

Of course if you don’t want to come next time I invite you for dinner, that’s your loss. Although I don’t actually invite people for dinner. And this is why!

We do encourage people to come stay with us, (Yay, Tucson in the wintertime!) but guests will quickly discover that a certain amount of independence around mealtime will make your stay more pleasant. We happily offer two guest rooms, three bathrooms, a heated swimming pool, and plenty of food in the pantry. After that you’re on your own!

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com

I haven’t been blogging very much recently and I’ve wondered why. Part of it is the usual excuse, “busy”. We had the holidays, and then I had migraines the first couple of weeks of January, then I had an unexpected trip to Albuquerque the second half of January. Now I’m just trying to get unpacked and caught up with everything.

I’m suspicious of “busy” as an excuse though, because I am the sort of person who simply adds things to my to-do list until it is no longer do-able. I just take on more until my time is full. So of course I’m busy; I’m always busy. Whether all those things on my to-do list are very important or not – well, that’s a different question. What’s important? The concept of importance is relative to preset goals and values. What am I trying to accomplish and why? Why am I here? What am I doing in life? What is my purpose?! What is the meaning of life?! Nice, big, distracting and ultimately unanswerable questions.

Maybe I’m just losing interest in blogging. Of course all of you are going to lose interest in this blog too, if there’s no content! That would be a self-fulfilling feedback loop, resulting in the demise of this blog.

What I actually think is happening is…I’ve gotten it into my head that my blog posts need to go up in chronological order. In which case, the next blog should be about a desert camping trip we took shortly after the holidays. But that was awhile ago and I don’t really have much to say about it other than, “We like camping and it’s nice to be able to camp in the desert in the winter.” Plus, there’s tons of pictures and it’s slow and boring getting pictures uploaded onto this blog.

Meanwhile, I’ll be going about my day, and I’ll think of some little current thing to say to you about the snow in Albuquerque or the flaming toast in the oven or about how Biska is losing her puppy coat and shedding all over the place. But then I’ll remember, oh, wait, I need to put that camping blog up first. The camping happened before the snow in Albuquerque. But the camping blog sounds like a big project and I don’t want to take on a big project, I just want to reach out briefly and post a snow picture. Or a burning toast picture. But the snow in Albuquerque and the burning toast happened after the desert camping and somehow that matters!

I think that’s the real reason. All my potential little, easy spur-of-the-moment posts about nothing much at all (Burning Toast!), are piling up behind one big, picture-intensive post that I intend to write but don’t really feel like writing, bringing the whole thing to a halt.

Therefore, in order to get myself blogging again, I need to relax my unexamined rules for myself, and allow myself to just hop on and say whatever I want in that moment, regardless of whether some posts end up in the wrong order. And maybe some of those picture-intensive posts aren’t going to make it up at all.

Biska thinks that’s a good idea.

So here’s to a new era of “Posts In The Wrong Order”!

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com