I find getting from one place to another to be tedious. I could be doing so many things in the time it takes a car to meander to that place. A trip to nearby St. Joseph takes 45 minutes by car; a trip to Kansas City an hour and a half. That time is spent captive in a car, and I get carsick if I want to read during that time.
But if I could teleport, I could near instantaneously appear at my destination. How great that would be! No transit time, no carsickness. I could make traveling across the country as convenient as a trip to the store. I could afford traveling to France!
I’m assuming there’s great energy use in teleporting. If so, that’s a bonus. I would not have to diet. I would burn off the extra calories teleporting. I could eat a whole pie! I suppose having to eat so much to refuel would be a burden after a while, but in the short run I could eat a lot of dessert.
I moved out to Missouri because of a guy, and I ended up breaking up with him after three years. I don’t regret this a bit.
Generic Small Town
Moving here, at first, was difficult because the town I ended up in was rural, very rural. It did not have the upstate New York ambience with its cafes, restaurants, and quirky people. It did not have the beauty of the hills of Oneonta. But I was here because of a relationship I thought had promise.
It didn’t. After three years of stagnation, I broke up with the man, and I was stranded in middle of nowhere Missouri. I made the most of it, got tenure, and was well-established in the town by then. After my childhood in a small, violent town, I could live just about anywhere, and so I stayed in Missouri. I bought a tiny house and established myself.
Maryville was not a great place to find a husband. Most professors are already married, or else there is a reason why they are not. Then I met my now-husband over Match.com. That’s the beauty of a small town — the Internet still reaches there. It was a long-distance relationship for a while, but only 2 1/2 hours away. We dated long-distance for a while until he finally moved down here. And then we got married in our small town.
Meanwhile, we’ve had several cafes over the years, and this has helped make Maryville hospitable. Cafe culture livens up a town and feels like community. We also occasionally go to the big city — Kansas City or Omaha or Des Moines — for a weekend writing and eating good ethnic food.
If I hadn’t moved here, I would never have met my husband, because Des Moines is far from Oneonta, NY. I probably wouldn’t have met anyone to be with, because Oneonta had the same problems as Maryville for dating. I probably couldn’t have afforded a house (much less the bigger house Richard and I moved into). I don’t regret a thing.
This answer isn’t too exciting, but it explains why I want to be retired so badly. Both my parents retired at 62. My mother was seven years older than my dad, so she retired first from the Census Bureau, where she was a supervisor out of the Chicago area for ongoing surveys. (The Census Bureau does not just do the decennial census, but ongoing and occasional surveys like Current Population Studies and Health surveys). Mom retired to do things like cross-stitch projects until my dad caught up with her.
My dad retired from his job as an equipment installer at age 62. He worked at several different places over his career without ever moving from his job. He started at AT&T Long Lines, then Western Electric, then AT&T Technologies, then Lucent Technologies. “Work isn’t fun anymore,” he said, and then it was time for him to retire. The picture above is where my dad worked for many years when he wasn’t installing electronic switching equipment throughout the state.
My parents retired well together. They spent their time doing projects and traveling, usually taking several-day trips through the US. Occasionally they would visit me. My mother would decorate anything that didn’t run away fast enough at Christmas time. I credit some of their longevity to the fact that my mother was a night person, and my dad a morning person, so they had limited time to get on each other’s nerves.
My life is different. First, I will not get to retire till 67, which is when Social Security and Medicare come up for me. I have five years left to go. I don’t know how long I will live past then, because my mom died at 76 from cancer and I don’t know if I take after her. My dad died at 86, so maybe I take after him. We’ll see.
I wake up at 5 in the morning, and the first thing I do is check my phone. It says that I have fifteen more minutes before I need to get up, so I read the phone for a while. The news announces that the President has just signed new climate accords mandating an increase in clean fuels over the next 15 years. Those in the fading coal and oil industries will be retrained in solar and wind.
I get dressed and go downstairs to my car. My car is electric, as most of the cars are. The cost has gone down enough that people can afford them. Clean tech is subsidized through tax incentives.
There hasn’t been an air quality alert in three years. Cities are cleaner and asthmatics can breathe better. The world is healing itself, given a chance.
In my office, the hypoallergenic therapy cat saunters by asking to be petted. I pet her and she jumps in my lap. I guess I needed a hug. My cats at home get jealous sometimes.
My coworkers are friendly, relieved of the stress of the environment.the world is a bit kinder of a place.
When your last name is Leach, “Leachie” is a natural nickname.
I think it started in Kindergarten, which is a natural time for kids to figure out that “Leach” > “Leachie”. It continued through school, and I think people even called me that in high school. Not a terribly complicated story.
However, my favorite user name is “Lleachie”. If someone on the web has the nickname “Lleachie”, it’s a good chance it’s me. It’s pronounced like “llama”, with one L. Except for one person from Poland who pronounced it “ill-e-ATCH-ie”, which I’ll forgive him for.
My Scrivener files are a mess. Something happened with syncing that they are no longer opening on my iPad, and I’m afraid that if I open them up on my computer, the same thing will happen and all the versions will be corrupted (through a sync).
So I’m going to have to make and move copies before I open Scrivener and see if I can transfer the moved files back in. Otherwise I’m not sure what I can do to de-corrupt too many files.
The first thing I did when I found my error was count my lucky stars that it hadn’t been published. Now what I have to do is some research and rethinking to make the plot more plausible.
My error had to do with technology — in particular, the technology concerning encryption and the fact that my example was not secure enough. As my writing is fantasy rather than science fiction, I don’t have to get into the details of the tech. I do have to be somewhat realistic (given my style of writing, which is closer to magical realism) and plausible.
So this morning is going to be research and rewriting some sections of the book. Not my favorite thing to do, but I want my books to be good.
I have another Big Audacious Goal I hadn’t counted on, and that is to lose some weight. I am way too plump for my doctor’s liking, and now I have to do something about it. My weight is starting to affect my health.
This is going to be a neverending goal, and that is a bit daunting for me. I have a sugar addiction (and I mean this in the most literal way possible). I have always had disordered eating in the form of sweet foods. My doctor said, “I mean you can have those things occasionally,” but given our game plan, I don’t know how.
The goal is to eat around 120 grams of carbs a day. That is not a SMART goal, so I need to work on it. I will set a goal of 127 grams of carbs, 48 grams of fat, and at least 60 grams of protein a day (give or take a few). This is based on a 1500 calorie a day intake. I will choose complex carbs like fruits and vegetables and whole grains. I will track my food intake daily to see if I meet those goals. I will weigh myself once a week. I will wean myself onto Ozempic according to my doctor’s instructions.
Notice I focused on my actions instead of the results. If I had said “I will lose 2 pounds a week”, I might have run into problems, as this doesn’t take into account my 62-year-old metabolism. Focusing on my actions makes more sense, because that’s what I can do something about. I made my goals realistic (I can do this!) and specific and measurable. The only thing is it isn’t time bound because it’s open-ended. I should be eating this way for the rest of my life, I suspect.
There are things this BAG needs. Like “how often can one diverge from this meal plan to have occasional ‘bad things’?” (I don’t care what dieticians say, there are ‘bad foods’ when an ice cream concrete leads to a sugar binge). A goal of how much weight to lose (at the moment, that’s 50 pounds. I have more than 50 pounds to lose, to be honest, but we’re being realistic).
So far, after two weeks of following this protocol, so good. I haven’t had a bad eating day and I have lost 3 pounds. Knowing my past attempts at losing weight, this stage is not the problem. The problem is keeping it off, especially when faced with desserts. Wish me luck.
This is a hard question to answer, because the one thing I “can’t live without” is my iPhone, and I don’t know whether that is a luxury or necessity these days. I use it for work, I use it for entertainment, I use it to record my carbs every day. I read and compose email, I keep up with people I know — it’s a tool that’s no longer a luxury to me.
At the same time, it’s a luxury. I pay a decent amount of money for my iPhone, although I only replace it after several years. I have lived without a smartphone, but I used to have a Palm Pilot back in the days before the iPhone. (I remember the Palm Pilot for its tendency to regurgitate all its data and become useless until synched on the computer.)
I suppose I could live without my iPhone, but it would have to be a different world, one in which I didn’t get daily emails from my students or have to fill out paperwork for them. One where I don’t need a handy reference for counting carbs. One where my life was a lot slower than it is now.
I do not have some of the typical fears — flying, public speaking, spiders. I have a fear of heights, but I consider that perfectly reasonable, like fearing something that’s about to tear your head off. The big fear that I harbored for many years was a fear of driving a car.
Cars are big and you can kill people with them. That was what was on my mind when I was sixteen and in driver’s ed. When I had to get behind the wheel of the car, I was a disaster. I could barely accelerate, oversteered the car, and hit the brakes too hard. Worse, I couldn’t figure out in what order I was supposed to do things, so I failed driver’s ed by stopping the car in the middle of the railroad tracks to check for trains. So I didn’t only fear being behind the wheel, I had a reason to. After a second time going through driver’s ed, I took my driver’s license test and barely passed. And then I never drove.
When I was 29, I got hit by a car, which didn’t help the fear any. All it did was break my leg, but it pretty much pulverized an inch of bone near the ankle. I now have a metal bar in that leg from knee to ankle.
A few years later, I lived in an area with a vibrant arts scene, except that the scene was spread over several towns. So one had to be able to drive to Franklin and West Kortright and maybe even Albany. I had just broken up with my husband, and the social engagement sounded nice to me. So I decided I needed to learn how to drive.
I took driver’s ed again, this time with a driver’s ed teacher who figured out the problem and helped me get over it. He made me check with him out loud anything I was about to do while driving. I talked myself through it. Then when I didn’t need to say it aloud anymore, I took my driver’s test and passed.
I got myself a car, and I was not a good driver at first. I got into a couple fender-benders, one with a rental car I had gotten while my car was in the shop. Some of the fender-benders weren’t my fault. I was suspended for 60 days for one of the accidents that wasn’t my fault. But I kept on driving.
I am still scared of driving sometimes. I am scared of driving in cities, especially with complicated splits in them. I am scared on crowded interstates. I keep seeing accidents in my head and they keep me from driving solo a lot of times. I don’t like it, but at least I can drive locally without fear.
Words Like Me 