Venturing Out (Into The Sun)

Maybe I just needed a day out in the sun like today to finally get out of this weird haze I was in during the last few days/weeks/months. Or maybe it was just about time. And maybe I’ll be back in this funk in a couple of days. But I’ll try to not slip back into it. And I’ll try to not dwell too much on any kind of bad news (globally or personally) but also not ignoring them either. Just find enough good news and activities and thoughts to get a healthy balance.

I’ve been quite busy lately with work and local politics and once more I’m glad that I have already announced to to my local Green party that I will withdraw from some of the “jobs” I took over a few years ago this spring. In May actually. I liked doing these jobs for the most part, but I realized I had to cut back on some of the more stressful activities in my life and politics definitely is one of them. So I’ll pass on the torch :-) And still be activly involved in everything, but just not as the frontrunner and go-to-person. I’m really looking forward to that actually and I already feel much more reliefed just thinking about the more carefree time and more time in general that decision will provide for me.

It feels like I spend more time reading during the last few weeks than I did for most of the last year. Maybe it was the lack of new episodes of my favourite TV shows? I don’t know and it doesn’t matter anyway, does it?
I just finished “A Walk in the Woods” by Bill Bryson yesterday and it really makes me want to go hiking. Not for days on end like he did on the Appalachian Trail, but for an afternoon or even a day. I might just do that next weekend. This one is already booked for other things. But… next weekend I might just venture out into the woods. At least I’m very determined to do that. My mom will be proud and my late father would be. My parents met while they were on a one-week-hiking trip and they took us kids on hiking day trips regulary.I haven’t hiked in decades, I think. Going for a walk in the woods maybe, but not a real hike. But Bryson’s tale of the Appalachian Trail makes me want to just go out there even if the woods around here aren’t the wilderness of the Blue Ridge Mountains :-)

Bro2 and I went to the zoo this afternoon, rather spontaneously. We both own a special kind of bonus card which for not quite 50 EUR ($70) allows a one-time admission-free entry to a lot of the various tourist attractions in our metropolitan area (museums, zoos, sites of industrial heritage and lots more) for the complete year. At the large and still pretty new zoo “Zoom” it’s only valid from January till March and when we went there this afternoon it was rather obvious why :-) I have been to this zoo a few times in the last few years, but usually during the summer, when all the animals were out in the open and active and when there was a lot going on. That wasn’t the case this time and there were some parts where the necessary repairs and refurbishments were going on and some animals were relocated for that.

If I had paid the whole admission fee I would have been disappointed, but as I kind of got in for free (which of course I I didn’t because I had bought the bonus card earlier this year, of course), I didn’t mind it all that much. It was just nice to be out and about and I realized that I haven’t done something like that for a while. Not in 2011 anyway, I think. There were health issues and then there was a lot of work and wrecking my brain because of the health issue and so forth. But this afternoon I just let go of all of that and just enjoyed strolling through Asia and Africa and Alaska. Asia is my least favourite part of this zoo and Alaska still is my favourite. Most impressive there this time were the beavers, because they were huge. I didn’t see them in the water, only through a window in the tiny little cave. It probably mostly was the additional fat they put on for hibernation, but they really looked huge. Because of the reflection in the window I couldn’t take a decent photo of them and it was too dark in their cave anyway.

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2 Responses to Venturing Out (Into The Sun)

  1. Hope says:

    I always feel better when the sun comes out!

  2. liljan98 says:

    I definitely needed the sun to get me out of this gloomy mood. Now the weather just have to stay this sunny and everything will be fine…

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