Fun & Fitness over 50

This is going to sound silly but the zipper on my new coat makes me happy.

I bought a new winter coat this year and I liked it except that I had a lot of trouble with the zipper. I knew there must be a trick to it but I couldn't figure it out. It got so bad that I started leaving it unzipped.

I was almost ready to return it to the vendor as defective when I got the trick! I had been focusing on lining up the 2 separate parts that slide as the trick when the trick was making sure the lower sliding part was all the way to the bottom. Simple. You probably knew that.

Now it works everytime and I'm happy everytime I do it. Everytime I zip my coat I want to tell someone how happy I am about it. But of course I don't. People would look at me funny.

What's the point of telling you this?

I'm reading a book by Donald Miller called "A Million Miles in a Thousand Years" in which he talks about lowering expectations. He says Americans are typically unhappy because they expect things to make them happy. If you don't expect things to fulfill you, paradoxically you CAN get some pleasure out of them.

So, I expected that my coat was a wash but I now have a great coat that gives me pleasure everytime I zip it.

Snow also makes me happy. We had a ferocious squall the other day and it gave me pleasure to be out in it. Like I said before about winter, I don't like snow because I ski, I ski because I like snow.

Ok, enough of that.

I went out x-c skiing today and even though I thought it was too wet I just had to get outside on the snow or I would go nuts.

As it turned out, it was a fantastic ski day! The snow was soft and wet but there were good tracks set by other skiers and also snowshoers were out which makes for nice trails too. So I could actually steer some turns.

It was pretty warm, maybe mid thirties so I stripped off my middle layer almost right away.

I wound up skiing for about 2 hours which was overdoing it but I was thrilled to get such a good workout. I was able to get a nice stride going much of the time.

Once again, I didn't expect much but I got more than I expected! And I got some pleasure out of that.

Here are a couple of pics from the day. This was at Five Rivers Environmental Center in Delmar, NY.

Peaceful solitude among the trees!


Water barred the way here.


There were a lot of branches and trees down from the storm.


Deer