Del Valle (5)

I seem to have arrived at a time of life designated for getting my personal stuff together. Now that I’ve launched my Healthier Me Initiative, it is time to look to the future I’d like to live long enough to see. That includes giving a thought to some day retirement. It is not an imminent possibility, but it’s not that far off either. So, in order to do that in an intentional and less stupid way, I need to get myself over to the highest level pay scale as soon as I can. To do that, I need to take a few more professional development classes. If I can push through the next three months being somewhat unhappy, it will pay off in the future. I really should have done this years ago. So stupid. Oh well.

So this weekend for me was all about executive functioning. Backwards planning my retirement led me to signing up for classes, which led me to planning out assignment due dates over the next month, which led me to downloading resource materials so that I could crank out three papers on Saturday. Which I did. Yay me. I swear, I don’t know how twenty somethings get through classes. I’m over fifty, with highly developed executive functioning skills and a fully formed prefrontal cortex and it was a lot for me. I wanted to shut down many times. Luckily, there was zero cell service at this campground, so I couldn’t turn to the internet to distract me. Unluckily, the download of Microsoft Word that I executive functioned ahead of time onto my laptop required service to initiate. That came really close to stopping me. But once I put things on my calendar, I feel compelled to do them. So I typed up three papers in Text Edit. Boom.

I seriously want to develop a self paced, online class that teaches executive functioning. Like all of the assignments would be designed to executive function the class itself. Assignment 1: what are all the assignments for this class? Assignment 2: submit a calendar showing when you plan to turn in all of the assignments. Assignment 3: what are all of the materials and resources you will need in order to do the assignments? (extra credit: prove that you figured out how to download and install Microsoft Word and tested it ahead of time because you already know you will not have service on the first weekend you plan to do assignments). It would be great.

While I was sparring with my prefrontal cortex, Richard was out riding. On Saturday he kept it short, but on Sunday he rode all the way from Del Valle to home. It’s about 40 miles, so that was a good ride for him. I again took to the backroads there and back, which was fun. I got to see a whole other part of Livermore and Pleasanton through the eastern hills. Very pretty and far preferable to highways 680 and 580. Now all we need for our avoid highways route collection is a way south, bypassing San Jose proper.

This campground is so nice. It’s very quiet because they don’t allow generators and the sites are spaced apart from each other. Some of the sites have hookups and there are plenty available for dry camping that would fit Dory just fine. There was nice water flow in the little river that goes to Lake Del Valle, which also looked nice and full. The hills were green and lush, and we got a nice rain shower Friday night.

We watched a horrible movie called “The Impossible.” It’s about a family’s true story of getting caught in Thailand during the Tsunami of 2004. We were both so tense while watching that it took a long time before we were ready to go to sleep. We both had water dreams. Wrights Beach and Seacliff now seem like terrible places to camp. What a nightmare. Though the movie was brilliantly acted and produced, I do not recommend it. I can’t even imagine. I mean, thanks to that movie I guess I can.

Between now and summer, I will be using all my self control to get through classes and not binge eat while doing it. I’d better not die in a tsunami after all this.

Total miles: 40.9 (avoiding highways), 15.7 mpg, 1 hour 47 min. Site 31 hookups. Didn’t use sewer hookup because far back and weird. Good dump by entrance. Water pressure was crazy high. Good solar, but had hookups. Richard got lost in Pleasanton and needs a better bike route through that section.