Five things

Things have been busy! A few of the most notable things that have happened recently, are happening now, or are about to happen:

1. My mom came to visit. It was fun to show her where we live now – the house, the city, and the province. We did lots of things including making pancakes with farmers market haskaps, touring a local orchard, swimming in a local lake (I waded in about halfway up my calves), and going for a bike ride.

2. I got a new bike. A woman was looking for a good home for a recumbent bike, and gave it to me. I had been using my bike with the stabilizer wheels attached, but it was really challenging and a little bit more like therapy than leisure. At first I felt guilty about taking the recumbent bike, since I already had a bike to ride, but then Jeff reminded me that not everything has to be therapy, and riding the recumbent bike is really fun. I can go much faster and can go for longer without getting tired because it is not challenging my balance. Also, the stabilizer wheels may not have been attached 100% correctly – my mom tried riding my bike with the stabilizer wheels, and deemed it unrideable. Jeff had previously noted that it was extremely difficult to ride with the stabilizer wheels. We believe the problem may be that the wheels were not perfectly parallel to the back wheel, making it veer to the right all the time. We have removed the stabilizer wheels, and will try reattaching them again, and I may find that my balance wasn't so bad as I thought it was, and that it wasn't me it was the bike. For now, I'm having a great time on the recumbent.

3. I went swimming at the pool. I was pretty scared to get in the water, but it turned out that being in the water was actually really easy. I can keep myself afloat, and can do all kinds of things in the water that I can't do on land, like jump up and down. Unfortunately we went when the pool was exclusively filled with lap swimmers (even though it was an open swim time) so I felt a little silly trying to see whether I could jump on 1 foot (I can).

4. Today Jeff left to go visit friends and family in Ontario, and I am home alone for several days for the first time in over a year. So far so good! But this means that I have to do for myself all the things that Jeff usually does for me, so I am likely to be a bit tired and doing things the minimalist way for the next week.

5. On Friday I will get on a plane to head to a friend's wedding all by myself – my first time traveling alone in quite some time. I have help planned for getting to the airport, will be helped by airline staff when I make my connection, and will be picked up by a friend when I arrive at my destination. Everything is all planned out, but I can't help feeling like I will need a bit of good luck to make this trip go smoothly.

Also, since I will be away next weekend there will probably not be another blog post for two weeks. So if you don't hear anything from me, it is not because I had some horrible accident while being home alone, or because things went horribly awry on my solo trip. I'm just busy having a fun and busy summer!