May wasn’t a good month since it began with us losing Wookie. <\/p>\n
We kept busy by visiting a lot of forest preserves since spring migration was happening and we didn’t want to sit around at home moping. We even went on a guided bird walk one morning which was nice. It was the most socialization with strangers we’ve had in a long time. And I did see, and photograph, some new to me birds which was nice. <\/p>\n
The month included lots of visits to the arboretum too. I don’t think we’ve ever gotten as much value out of our membership as we have since signing back up (after a few years reprieve) in September. We even went there immediately after saying goodbye to Wookie since we couldn’t bear the thought of coming home to an empty house. So it’s become our peaceful retreat. I wish it was a bit closer to home, though.<\/p>\n
We also worked on making our patio area look nice. With everything going on with Wookie the zinnias I had started growing inside in April didn’t take when I haphazardly planted them outside, so we bought some dwarf zinnias and other flowers at a gardening club sale, and additional zinnas, misc flowers, and tomato plants from a local farm. We also got some cute fencing and new solar lights from Walmart, so the patio is really coming along. <\/p>\n
It’s too bad the new landscapers our association hired suck. They’ve been in the area twice and have overlooked trimming our bush and a neighbor’s bushes both times even though they’ve done everyone else’s in the vicinity. I can tell they have far fewer workers than the last company so I think they took on a larger project than they can reasonably handle. One week they cut 1\/4th of our backyard and didn’t do the rest until the following week. They can’t seem to focus on making one entire area look good before moving onto the next, so there are areas that are only halfway landscaped. It’s really aggravating!<\/p>\n
In other news, my ability to concentrate on tv shows, movies, and books has been awful the past few months. We’ve hardly watched anything new and have been sticking to re-watching shows like Mom<\/em> and The Big Bang Theory<\/em>. I had to lower my book reading challenge on Goodreads from 52 to 24 since I was falling way behind. I’ve only read 14 books this year, most of which were read prior to April. I’ve lost count of how many books I’ve started and given up on since then. Nothing can hold my attention. <\/p>\n It’s ironic that I have more free time than ever but am not utilizing it, at least on the entertainment front. I have been working on decluttering the house, donating unused items, and performing a digital decluttering of my computer (and digital storage spaces like Dropbox and Google Drive). The latter was spurred by me needing to make sure I had every single photo and video of Wookie backed up in several places, which required me to find them all and merge them first. I’m still not entirely done (I still need to compare what’s on my phone to what I have backed up to make sure I didn’t miss anything), but things are much more organized now.<\/p>\n One thing I’ve remained consistent with is exercise. I walk 30-60 minutes daily, some of that on the treadmill and the rest either at a park, forest preserve, or around the neighborhood in the evenings. I think it’s helped keep me from having a complete breakdown. Between losing Wookie and dwelling on how disappointed I am in the lack of closeness with most of my family members (and trust me, I’ve tried, but I can’t make people give a crap about me so I’ve stopped making the effort), I’ve been feeling really down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" May wasn’t a good month since it began with us losing Wookie. We kept busy by visiting a lot of forest preserves since spring migration was happening and we didn’t want to sit around at home moping. We even went on a guided bird walk one morning which was nice. It was the most socialization with strangers we’ve had in a long time. And I did see, and photograph, some new to me birds which was nice. The month included lots of visits to the arboretum too. I don’t think we’ve ever gotten as much value out of our membership as we have since signing back up (after a few years reprieve) in September. We even went there immediately after saying goodbye to Wookie since we couldn’t bear the thought of coming home to an empty house. So it’s become our peaceful retreat. I wish it was a bit closer Read More …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,25,35],"tags":[107],"class_list":["post-11536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-excursions","category-house-home","category-neighborhood","category-pets","tag-wookie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicole.sleepyfroggie.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11536"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicole.sleepyfroggie.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicole.sleepyfroggie.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicole.sleepyfroggie.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicole.sleepyfroggie.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11536"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/nicole.sleepyfroggie.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11540,"href":"https:\/\/nicole.sleepyfroggie.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11536\/revisions\/11540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicole.sleepyfroggie.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicole.sleepyfroggie.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicole.sleepyfroggie.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}