Now That Roosevelt's Dead, What Do You Do After Dinner?

Berkeley, 2014

Three months ago, I realized that every night after dinner,we sat on our bums, fired up the TV, and watched whatever we could find on Roku or PBS.

Every night.  This meant that 3-4 hours a day were about sitting, semi-vegged, doing not much, watching the tube.  It bugged me.

"What did people do before TV?" I said to Jerry.

He shrugged.  He was actually alive at that time, in elementary school.  Why couldn't he remember?


"Listen to Roosevelt on the radio?" he suggested. 

Yes, but they were doing things with their hands.  Knitting, building ship models, whatever.  So, I decided we'd devote and hour or so to "projects" every night after dinner.  We cleared off the dining table, made numerous trips upstairs to find paper, pencils, scissors, glue sticks, blah, blah, and set up shop.

A mess for two:  Notebooks and cards for Jerry, trip journals for me

Gathering up what we needed was so much trouble that we weren't going to put it all away each night, which meant we had to find another place to eat dinner.  What to do?  Eventually,  I set up a small table in the nice-but-useless nook we have off the dining room, and we eat there now.  It's sort of romantic. 

Dinner for two

We commenced.  We've been doing the kinds of things we thought we'd never get around to doing:  labeling trip photos, sticking random photos in albums, etc.  Last week I did some review and updating of trip journals/scrapbooks I've put together since we began traveling a lot in 2006, and glued my trip blogs into their respective journals. At that point, I moved into the living room and did a lot of cutting:

A blizzard

As I went through my trip journals, I was amazed at how many leaves I found.  We don't always travel in the fall, but you wouldn't know it:

New York City, 2008

Middle Temple Courtyard, London, 2009

Memphis, 2008

 Switzerland, 2013

Rome, 2011

Boston, 2009

Corfu, 2011

 England, 2011

Spokane, 2012

Castle Howard, England, 2011

 Paris, 2008

England, 2009

Chicago, 2012

Kew Gardens, England, 2008

Hyde Park, New York, 2007

Washington, DC, 2006

 England, 2009

 And one of my favorites:

New England, 2007--amazingly well-preserved!

I never set out to collect leaves and didn't look for them in key places.  One would catch my eye, and I'd carry it around and paste it in my journal.  Here's one that didn't work out so well:

Rome, 2013

 * * * * *

This week Jerry had a cardiac stress test, which he has every year.  I went with him, and it was a long haul, because they gave him shots of something-or-other so they could track the blood flow through his heart before and after exercise.  But he did really well, working up to a run on the treadmill.  Just watching him made me tired:

He was running uphill at the end.

 He gets the results next week.  In the meantime, no more shirking hills on walks, I told him.