Hi all you people out there! How are you doing this wonderful evening? It's beautiful here in Illinois. It's breezy and cool, yet not cold, and doesn't quite feel like fall yet. I love fall; it's got that feeling of crisp in the air, yet it's got this incredible feeling of yearning and melancholy, too. Maybe that's just me. I love the smell of woodsmoke, too. It's one of my favorite memories from childhood. Bright moonlit nights with the moon reflecting off every visible surface covered with snow. Absolute quiet except for the crunch of snow underfoot. A few moonlit clouds in the cold black sky. Your breath puffing out in a white mist. The smell of pure snow, like when you're in an igloo. It's like you're the only person in the world, and then you smell woodsmoke and know you are not alone. It's just a sublime mix of senses that only people in the country can get, cause you don't ever get that still and sense of complete loneliness in the city or suburbs.

So if this isn't the darnedest thing. I went in to get new glasses, cause my old ones got so scratched up that it made my eyes film up and water just trying to see through them. As I'm getting tested for this and that, I get my blood pressure taken. Now, I don't know about you, but I hate going to the doctor. I haven't been to see my GP in like 2.5 years. I need to go in for an exam, etc., but I didn't want to go until I had a chance to lose weight and get in better shape. You know I did some interesting research that even doctors who are supposed to be advocates for you when you are overweight, a LARGE majority hold their patients who are overweight in contempt. Isn't that a sad revelation. So my feeling of...dislike, let us say... that I felt from my doctor, really wasn't in my head. Anyway, I have derailed a bit. So I get my blood pressure taken and find out it is incredibly high. I mean, I thought the machine had messed up it was so bad. So a few minutes later, I had them take another reading,it was marginally lower, but still sky high according to the medical profession. Ok, so maybe it's a bad day. I go to one of those blood pressure machines scattered throughout various stores and take my blood pressure again, a few days later, and it's still incredibly high. So now, completely by accident, I have found out that I have high blood pressure. I still don't want to go to the doctor. I know if I talk to my family, they'll all tell me to go and get on BP medication, but I just don't want to start the slide down that slippery slope already. And I'm thinking to myself, "What about all those people, in worse shape than I am, who have much higher blood pressure? There must be tons of them with it."

Now I'm trying to find ways to lose weight and cut down on cholesterol and lower blood pressure. I know it can be done naturally, right? Any suggestions out there from anyone?


And then today, I tried signing onto Yahoo mail, which is the email provider I've been using now for several years. I've had some issues with it in the past couple days, slow logins, cannot connect error messages, etc., I figured with the hot weather, maybe it's just something with the service. Well, whether it was something with the service or not, all of a sudden, my Inbox is completely empty! I had some 1800 messages in my email (ok, I should clear it out more often, but I was still only using a fraction of the available email space...) and in the blink of an eye, they are GONE! OH MY GOSH! How am I ever going to get them back??? AAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!! All my ever-important Facebook notifications, my yahoo news alerts, my alerts when my favorite stores send out new flyers, all GONE. YIKESS!

But then, I discovered something today. If I click on the 'read mail' button that is located on the menu bar that pops up whenever I go online, there is all my email. Wow, was that ever a great feeling! I wasn't lost in email message limbo, forever doomed to not know what essential life-changing emails I had missed! I was a whole person again!

Now, if I could just remember my passwords...