On August 12th I had my first Covid vaccination. At the time it was scheduled, my most local vaccination sites were the CBD and Henderson. I decided to have it in town and to schedule it on a Thursday (Martin's regular day off) so we could spend some time exploring the waterfront together first.
Today we went on a household excursion to Rizal Reserve. It turns out to be named in honour of José Rizal: a Philippine nationalist who seems to have been quite the polymath! There's a monument to him there, put up by the local Philippine community.
I'm not sure what the Philippine connection to the area is, but there's a Corregidor Place running more-or-less parallel to the park, too.
It's two and half years since I got better, but I still feel like I've got a lot to figure out about this new life. When I first got sick, I think it took around that long to move from being scared through to a place of contentment - and it took periodic reviews of my activities to keep me there. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised it's taking a long time this time around, too. It's a big change!
I think one trouble is that I still don't have a good idea how much energy a lot of things will take. Recently I went to visit a friend in Takapuna. I spent about two hours with her, maybe an hour or so each way in travel time, and I rested for about an hour at her place before coming home. I'd expected it to take basically the whole day, so wasn't unduly distressed at the two hour visit taking five hours - and we had a really good time together :-) What I hadn't expected was being incredibly wiped out almost the whole following day as well, so suddenly my fun two hours had cost me almost two entire days...
And then I felt stink, and lonely - if visiting one friend 'costs' so much, how can I ever get around to visiting all the people I miss? Time already feels so tight.
That was probably mostly because my expectations are still all a bit all over the place. After all, no one else gets to do things that take two whole days all that often, either! But I hadn't realised that was what this would take.
That's kind-of prompted a bit of a review of my time, though. If things that matter so much to me take so long, I really do need to take steps to make sure they can happen at least sometimes!
For our home group last week, we each had to pick a psalm of significance to us and talk a little about what it meant to us. We then spent some time as a group, praying the sorts of things the psalmist was praying in the psalm, before doing the same with the next person's psalm.
Two psalms immediately came to mind for me (or rather, phrases from two psalms - I couldn't have told you the numbers of either, let alone quoted them in their entirety), and I was struck by how similar they were.
Here we are at the local train station, about to start our adventure.
Today has been my 'sabbath' (something I usually take on a Monday), where I take the whole day to rest, relax and 'be'. My only 'have-to' on such days is generally to take a time of reflection, and ideally I also do something fun.
For reflection, today I took myself, my Bible (aka my phone with a Bible app) and my journal down to Oakley Creek. As well as reading and praying, I spent some time wandering around on the grass barefoot, noticing what was around me. There was a strong smell of onionweed and also, puzzlingly, a salty smell like the sea. I heard two kereru flying high overhead, various song birds I couldn't identify and, I think, a riroriro. I nibbled on the leaves of some kind of radishy weed. And here is some of what I saw.
A clump of some kind of mushrooms. I took a couple home to see if I could figure out what they were (and if they were edible!), but still have no idea what they are.
The other week Auckland spent a week at Covid Alert Level 3 - which, from my point of view, mostly means no buses, infrequent grocery shopping (with everything getting washed or put in quarantine) and Martin and Sarah working from home. This time it also meant really not leaving the property for a couple of days, as I had a bit of a sniffle so had a Covid test on the Monday and we were told to not even go out for a walk till the result was back.
Still, I had quite a fun week.
A house on our street was knocked down that week to make way for 6 townhouses. On the weekend (before my sniffle) Martin and I went scavenging and came back with these glorious flowers.
