This and That

Dear George,

We’re trying to adjust to being back home after an exciting vacation in New Orleans with our family.  We did lots of things there, and now we are suffering from some sort of post-vacation lethargy.  Partly this is because the U.S. Open has been going on for two weeks, and ESPN has been broadcasting matches daily from 11 a.m. to 12 midnight.  This is an awful lot of tennis to watch, but we have done our best, probably averaging five or six hours a day.  Basically this amounts to watching two players hit a ball back and forth across a net until one of them misses.  For us as viewers, this has amounted to about 25,000 hits so far (e.g., 4,000 serves, 11,000 forehands, 7,000 backhands, and 3,000 volleys).  You’d think that that might get boring, but, in fact, we’ve gotten more obsessed as time has gone on.  By and large, the results have been painful.  We started out rooting for our favorites, Roger Federer and Maria Sharapova.  Maria, plagued with unforced errors, lost in the round of 16, and Roger, who said he couldn’t breathe in the hot muggy New York air, played the worst match of his career in the quarter-finals.   We still had hope for Sloane Stephens and Raphael Nadal, but 3rd- seeded Sloane was soundly defeated by the 19th seed, and Rafa had to retire from his semi-final match because of tendonitis.  I’ll be relieved when the Open is over. 

When we came back from NOLA, I asked Katja to stop cooking for me since I was going to go on my Spartan weight-loss diet.  That was nine days ago, and so far I’ve lost nine pounds.  I’ve always been fairly successful losing weight when I set out to do it seriously, although I realize I will to hit a plateau any day now.  I drink lots of water and have cut back to two meals per day.  For brunch I have a few ounces of sliced turkey, some cole slaw, and some cottage cheese.  For supper, tossed salad with tuna and or cottage cheese.  I don’t actually get too hungry.  The main drawback is that I’ve been having a terrible time sleeping.  As far as I can tell from the Internet, dieting makes your body restless and it protests by staying awake.  I will try drinking a little milk before bedtime and see if that helps.

Another source of sleeplessness cropped up when Katja asked me to type and print a letter for her requesting that a California company stop sending her skin care products.  It turns out she purchased a product that she saw advertised on TV, and now they are sending her unordered products every couple of weeks.  I looked up the company on the Internet, and they immediately turned up on “Ripoff.com".  All their customers have the same complaint.  The company sends products without asking and charges $125 per shipment.  They tell people that they cannot return products and they can’t give refunds.  I, of course, have gone slightly insane, begging Katja to contact her credit card companies to cancel future payments.   At present she’s thinking about the best course of action.  

I try to find solace in writing poetry, but I’ve been suffering from writer’s block ever since our OLLI poetry workshop ended nine weeks ago.  I apparently have become dependent on the teacher to give a homework assignment before I can figure out what to write about.  Instead of anything new, I’ve been working on revising some old poems that I’d never completed.  Some of the titles are: Foul Air; The Downhill Slide; Near the Bed of Death; Night Terrors; and Narcissistic Angst.   I’ve been putting some of these on a blog called “Funny Poems Maybe”, but Katja pointed out that most aren’t that funny.  Oh well, that’s my early September report.  Now I’m off to watch the U.S. Open Women’s Final.

Love,

Dave