I have a hip problem. Still not sure what it is; I had surgery to correct femoral-acetabular impingement on both hips. The problem is, that didn’t correct the pain I still have, mostly when sitting. I also get twinges if I move the wrong way, which is what those sketchers made me do. So I decided to try the Vibrams.

My husband and I went to REI to try them on. I had them bring nearly every women’s pair they had in the 40-42 range as I attempted to find the right pair. I highly recommend doing the same. I’m certainly no expert, but my limited experience indicates that not all Vibrams are the same, and you may find one that fits and feels better than another model of the same exact size. I ended up with KSOs, women’s size 41, after returning the size 42. I finally got it right.

I wore them around the house the first evening and they felt fine; a little odd in a place or two, most notably on the left pinkie toe. I cut my toenail and that seemed to resolve it. Overall they felt good. So I decided that this, my first weekend with them, I would wear them all weekend and see what happened. This morning I went to the grocery store as usual. The right felt GREAT. The left… the 2nd toe felt as if it weren’t extending fully. But as much as I tried to feel whether that pocket was too short, I couldn’t. As I went on, they began to feel better.

The only negative is that the ground is HARD. Vibrams don’t have really thick soles; that would defeat the purpose. They do have a model for rougher terrain, but the KSOs I have are pretty slim; enough to protect your feet, but not much cushioning. I am not sure how long I’d be able to walk on them. But getting home to our wall-to-wall carpeting, suddenly my left 2nd toe felt fine and I was feeling pretty good. So maybe it just takes some getting used to. After all, it is an extremely different experience from a regular shoe.

Bwaaahaha!

But I bought a new hummingbird feeder because I so enjoyed the hummingbirds in years past. It’s one that doesn’t drip and it has a built-in ant moat. I know the ants are going to smell it, and I’m deluding myself. Somehow they will get to it. But a tiny part of me believes and so I’m the Little Engine That Could.

No hummingbirds yet, but I think it’s early in the season yet.

Happy summer solstice by the way!

If you think my blog completely dull and irrelevant, you’d be right. Well, it’s not toally irrelevant. The reason I started at all was the same reason I built my first website: to learn how to do it. Unfortunately I don’t really have a lot to say, or at least, the blog is just not a good fit for my thoughts and opinions. Or rather how I like to express them.

When I first considered getting on Facebook or MySpace, I really thought it was a way for our narcissistic society to talk about themselves. And it does provide that outlet. But now that I have been on Facebook for a couple years, I really like the ability to stay in touch–on a daily basis–with friends from all over the world. It’s like things you might talk to a neighbor about over the fence. Sure, it can be mundane and trivial, especially to others, but it’s those relationships and what I get out of them that is valuable to me. Hopefully I contribute something too.

You also find those people, just as you do in real life, that you particularly connect with. High school class mates (and some who went to my high school but I never knew!) I knew but didn’t hang out with back then, I find myself speaking to frequently, and enjoy reading their status updates and looking at their vacation pictures and helping them vote for their favorite animal shelter or band. Others that I was good friends with I may not mingle with as much. Funny, but just like real life; some friendships ebb and others flow. As your life changes, so do your relationships.

So back to the blog: I stopped blogging largely because I had nothing to say, but I’m starting up again despite that. I never really kept a diary because it seemed so pointless. I talk to myself all the time, do I really need to write to myself as well? I mean, we’re together constantly. A blog gives me a diary format, but its visibility to the public makes it seems less pointless. However, I am no longer going to be worried about being mundane. My point here isn’t to entertain. In fact, it’s not even to reflect or share. It’s actually that there are some things, like a bird who visits the balcony, that I’d like to record for the future.

My garden, my cats, my birds, my husband, my cooking adventures, my interest in nutrition and how our society eats, my weight-loss saga, my exercise, my FAI surgeries, my neices and nephews, my Mom and step-father, my Dad and step-mother, my neighborhood, my friends, my job, my 2nd job, my charity work… these are things I have no interest in putting onto Facebook. For some reason that doesn’t feel appropriate. But here it’s okay, just stuff I want to record. It’s okay if people read it. It’s fine if they don’t; I certainly won’t be publicizing it.

Boring maybe even to me in the future, but at least it’ll be there in case I wonder: has this bird visited before? Was it 2 years ago or 3?

And maybe good night-time reading for an insomniac.

In our apartment complex, we have rules that are understandable but annoying to early morning folks like myself. I can’t start laundry until 7:30 am. That’s LATE for me! I’d like to get started at 6:00 am, and I actually think 6:00 am is reasonable. People have until 10:00 pm to do laundry, and to be fair, I think that’s early too. But the people who complain about the noise are louder than those of us who want to start their day earlier.

Also, since most people stay up later than me, I have to try to fall asleep with TVs blaring and talking and thumping going on. Yet I tiptoe around when I’m up at 6:00 am — I don’t run the dishwasher or garbage disposal (kind of annoying since I make our breakfast and lunches around 6:00 am), and I walk lightly.

I also see it at work, where we have flex time. Those of us who start earlier are in before the majority of people. Then we leave starting around 4:00 pm and get comments like, “oh, must be nice to get to go home now.” Well, yes, it is in fact, considering I was in the office a full three hours before you.

Sometimes we get dismissed early, usually before a holiday weekend. That’s really nice, but by 3:00 pm, many of us have already put in a 7-hour day — 8 if you’re like me and eat at your desk (pathetic but true).

Also — and now I realize I’m starting to vent — people bug me all the time about not staying out late. I’m starting to respond that I’ll stay out late with them after they get up and go biking with me at 7:00 am next Sunday. Grr. My husband still owes me a morning out, after keeping me out until 2:00 am the weekend of his sister’s wedding — at a nightclub, no less. But somehow, expecting him to get up early is unreasonable…

So I just did a quick searching, thinking that it might be interesting to see what percentage of people are morning people. And the majority of results appear to be venting by night people about feeling slighted by morning people. The rest of results appear to be articles about how night people can become morning people.

Well, never having been a night-owl, I wasn’t aware of the difficulties this maligned group has been living with. I’m only being slightly sarcastic. Frankly I feel great understanding for their plight. It is annoying and frustrating to have other people insist that you be a different way. In my case, to stay up late and stay at work later.

I guess we all have problems, but I still don’t see that night people have to abide by as many rules that cramp their style as morning people do. It just seems more acceptable to be a night person.

But then again, if you’re a noisy night person, you might be frustrated by rules saying you can’t play loud music after 10:00 pm.

The more I think about it, the more I realize I have a lot in common and a lot of sympathy for night people. It’s not them I dislike. It’s loud people. And of course, annoying people, but that’s no news.

A year or so ago we bought a soda maker, since we like to drink seltzer water. We have four one-liter bottles we re-fill from our Brita pitcher. We also have about 5 or 6 water bottles of various kinds, that are also filled from the Brita pitcher, and kept in the fridge so we can grab a bottle whenever we want. Works pretty well and we’re happy with the reduced waste.

Then I get this “bite of the day” from www.idealbite.com, which is a pretty fun site providing a tip a day on easy ways to be more environmentally friendly in your daily life. For the past week or so, it’s been all about babies and crap, making me concerned that one of the people who runs the site was pregnant and the site would turn into a “baby and me” site about how children are the future… blah blah blah.

Proving that I desperately need sites like idealbite, I’ve been spending the past couple years happily refilling my resuable bottles–and tossing the Brita filters into the trash when they’re depleted. Duh. Anyway, Brita does not recycle the filters at this point. So the tip of the day is to petition Brita to do so. They’re asking you to sign the petition, and to send them your used Brita filters, which will one day be delivered, along with everyone else’s filters, to the Chlorox Company, which owns Brita. I think that’s a great idea.

So I’m posting this here for my thousands of readers (haha) to do this as well.

I had a lovely time on the balcony this weekend too. The hummingbird activity got pretty frenzied. I’m guessing that another hummingbird was trying to encroach on the resident hummingbird’s territory. It was quite an aerial spectacle watching them. Then even had a little battle right in the balcony area, pretty much right in front of me. I have to say, I was a little startled.

After that, and watching a nuthatch and a downy woodpecker bickering, a butterfly came by and made good use of the petunias. It was lovely and calming after the hubbub of the fighting.

It doesn’t take much to entertain me. I’ve learned a good deal about why lately, too, and why things like the hummingbirds duking it out, and things thumping in the building startle me so much. I am apparently a highly sensitive person. More on that as I learn more about it myself.

I will try to find a photo of the butterfly I had visiting. It was pretty nice.

Yesterday we had my husband’s grandparents and their 12 year-old grandson, all from Germany and not speaking English, and my husband’s mother, who does speak English (thankfully). I got to sleep in the aerobed in the office, which is where I always am when we have guests in the master bedroom. I need a room to get away to, particularly since I go to bed early.

Of course, my husband, being a typical man, thinks of nothing ahead of time, like where FOUR people will sleep, whether there are clean sheets and pillows for everyone, or clean towels. Thankfully, he married well. What really bugged me about him this morning is that he wouldn’t get up, and I had to go to work, but I had to say goodbye to the grandparents, as they’re returning to Germany today. I had nowhere to go, with every room taken up by sleeping Germans, so I ended up just standing in the office over him (it’s a small office), for like 15 minutes, waiting.

Finally I managed to get him up so he could translate my goodbye.

I guess what would be nice in the future is for him to recognize that having guests is a lot of work on my part, and the planning often starts a week ahead of time, if I need to do meal planning and grocery shopping. I don’t think that will happen, though. Also, if he could get up at a reasonable hour (like, when everyone else is up), that would be helpful. Haha… hahaha… I didn’t sleep much last night, I guess I’m delusional.

We were right. It was awesome, very interesting, and the people answered every question we had and helped us identify our own cacti. We bought them at Ikea because they were cute. They quickly moved on to large. One of them keeps pushing itself out of its pot. I’ll repot it next year.

Here are the plants we bought, I took photos so that we could track their progress. They are VERY happy in the windowsill.

Obviously I decided I could live with that, but it didn’t last long. I decided that since I had leftover seed, I’d put out small amounts in a little holder–not even a real feeder–and see what happened. After a few days, the birds discovered it, including sparrows, mourning doves, and starlings. (Everytime I think about starlings I say the word in my head with the same disgust and contempt that the sheriff in Robin Hood Prince of Thieves says “Celts.”)

I decided regular seed wouldn’t do, if it attracted all those big, messy birds. So I looked into what birds eat and decided to put down only shelled peanuts, which little birds like chickadees, tufted titmice, and white-breasted nuthatches like. It’s worked, those are my three biggest visitors. I do get sparrows and the occasional mourning doves. But the chickadees, titmice, and nuthatches are the most common, along with, depending on the season, juncos, cardinals, red-bellied woodpeckers, and more.

This year for the first time I hung a hummingbird feeder. I’ve wanted one for ages but didn’t want to deal with cleaning it and stuff. This year it suddenly didn’t seem like a big deal, and it hasn’t been. The biggest problem is that our community has a huge problem with ants, and I know hanging sugar-water isn’t helping, but truthfully the measures I’ve taken to prevent the ants from invading my petunias and installing their aphid colonies have been largely successful, and so the hummingbird feeder hangs in the petunias.

There’s a family of ruby-throated hummingbirds nearby. For those who may not know, ruby-throats are the only hummingbirds I’d see here in DC-area, so identification isn’t difficult. I’ve seen both the male and female and at least one juvenile. For all I know there could be two families but I’ve never seen two together at a time.

Hummingbirds are very bold little things. For their size, maybe their flying abilities make them more confident. They’re the only birds that can fly backwards. That and their small size make them pretty agile. They’ve definitely adopted my feeder and I like to think that the few ants who make it up here add a little protein to their diets.

So a couple nifty little stories about my hummingbirds: yesterday as I sat on the balcony, one of the hummingbirds, I think one of the young’uns, came and inspected me. It hummed around about a foot away from my face, darting around to look at me from different angles. Since I don’t look anything like a tubular flower, I can only think that it was just curious about this big creature always sitting around near its feeder.

A few days ago I left work early (by like a 1/2 hour, big whoop), and sat on the balcony with my wine and book. The book didn’t last long because the hummingbirds got busy, and at the same time, a sharp-shinned hawk showed up on my other side, with HIS dinner (a lot less appealing, given that they eat mostly small birds). I have to say, watching the smallest bird and one of the biggest birds (in our area, anyway) eating their dinners at the same time was kind of cool.

I live a boring life, in case you haven’t deduced that yet.

We are minorities. Almost all our old friends are reproducing. The only ones we still really like are the ones who don’t think their kids are the second coming. But mostly, we’re making new friends who also do not have children.

I almost feel like I’m part of a little subculture, and I guess that’s true. Going into middle age and growing old without children and the prospect of grandchildren isn’t that common, certainly not the norm. However, I would like to point out that we, along with our childless friends, aren’t idle when it comes to improving the world. In fact, many of us do a great deal of volunteer work, some of which even consists of educating and enriching the lives of children. Just not our own.

People also amaze me in how they feel so comfortable in asking about our reproductive plans. “Aren’t you going to have children?” “It’s about time to get started, don’t you think?” I’ve decided that from now on, my answer will be, said sadly, “Oh, we can’t have children. I’m barren.” Maybe they’ll think twice next time they make those types of inquiries.

Anyway, we enjoy our neices and nephews. It’s especially fun being the cool one now. My sister in particular, who was always the cooler one, really hates that her kids think I’m cooler than she is. I am, too. Most of the parents I know seem older and less cool than their childless counterparts.