Still alive, see? Without Lipitor!

I have not gone back to get my numbers checked again. I will wait for all the strategies to take effect. I’ve been walking, religiously. The Lake is 0.6 miles around. Three or four miles means I have to walk around five or six times, and though there is plenty to talk and gossip about with my walking partner, and there is a lot of wildlife in that lake to entertain us, it’s dizzying. It’s not really a lake, but a retention pond,  where the runoff water from the heavy rains end up. There really is wildlife there, right in the middle of Tallahassee.

My mother often said she wanted to be a bird after she died. I never thought of her as a cute songbird or as a raptor. I started walking around this lake soon after she died. I saw the great blue heron on one of my earliest walks there.  He was perfect in every way, and had a large scar on one side near his wing. I was immediately convinced that he was in fact my mother, the scar was proof.  It was a mark from the heron’s previous life, in which he had fatally damaged his liver. He still comes, six years on. He walks right up to the gaggle of Muscovy ducklings, picks up one of them in his elegant beak, and swallows it whole. His neck gets a little ungainly as the creature descends into his belly, and when the bulge vanishes, he steps up again to his buffet, and takes another, and so on, till he is full. That’s my mother all right.

Those Muscovies are ugly, and, little signs around the lake inform us, dangerous. They spread disease, are aggressive, produce about a pound of feces each per day, some of which we carry into our cars and homes with our shoes, and worst of all, they mate with native wild species of ducks and turn them into Muscovies! All these things considered, I am grateful for the heron’s contribution to the eradication of these spectacularly ugly creatures.

Muscovies

In the spring there are soft shell turtles that go a little spring-silly and start coming out of the lake to find mates or lay eggs. They are big, they resemble the unfortunate Jar Jar Binks, and really do have soft shells, as I found out when I rescued one who had wandered into traffic in search of a mate. He was very heavy, and tried to bite me.

That’s the walking part. Then there are the oats. In the beginning it was awful to eat the goopy matter. But more and more, I find myself looking forward to the warm slurry with a handful of dried blueberries. I have not eaten any red meat or bird (I would put that aside for some Muscovy duck flesh) since the 11^th of November, and have consumed so much Mackerel and salmon that I must smell fishy. I’m sure the garlic and olive oil contributes to my general aura as well.  But, all in all, I feel better, and maybe I am getting better too. If not, then not, but I am still adamantly against swallowing statin drugs to bring down those scary numbers.

The smoking, I’ll be honest, is a FAIL. I could easily do it in the next two months, it is football season after all. There are so many ups and downs, and so much of it on the NFL channel, that hours and days could pass before I needed to leave the house to smoke. That one thing will improve my numbers more than any amount of walking, herbal powders, or food. It has to be my next goal. I’m thinking about it. I’m down to two a day, the hard part is to bring that number down – to zero.

And, I could finish my unfinished third book…