Beautiful sunny morning and I went down to the courts for my usual Tuesday tennis but when I got there I found a mix up with the players and there was 5 of us so I told Nano who was the one that was not scheduled to play to take my spot for this morning…I had no problem giving it up as he was the one that was so obliging at the tennis slam when last minute I asked him to take part then two hours later had to cancel him…so it was good he got to play and I came home and sent a lot of time on the computer.
One issue for me is medical coverage because I have been out of my home province in Canada for an extended period of time my health coverage is cancelled and would require me to go back to re apply so I have been looking around for good medical coverage and I think I have found a good company with a adequate coverage for me…so I have lots of forms to fill in and having trouble with the format I think I may need help with the forms.
Anyway it took a lot of time and I really did not achieve very much…..at 12.30pm I had chores to do in town and also went to my old neighborhood to see Sylvester my friend and odd job man as I remembered when my camera was not working properly last year he got someone to fix it…..there is no camera repair shop in town…so I left the camera with him and he will check it out me. I noticed that the town has a crew paving the road upto my old Colonia so that will be nice for the residents.
I then went for my regular visit with Rita and I also met her lovely daughter Ali, who is down for a whirlwind visit to see her Mum and she was also the one who took charge of my tennis racquet saga…..but wait it gets better…..this is a brief history of the racquet which I now refer to as my bat……I found the bat on the web site of Sports Authority in the States it was 229 dollars on sale for 99 dollars….I tried to order it on line and have it shipped to Ali’s address but because my credit card is a Canadian one they would not accept it so I asked Rita to order it for me and use her card and I gave her the money…that was done and the company told her 7 days for delivery which was enough time for Ali to get it and give it to her Brother Josh who you remember came down three weeks ago…well long story short the bat did not arrive in the 7 days it was over 15 days…anyway I did eventually receive it this weekend.
So when I get to Rita’s she has a big smile on her face and gives me back my money for the bat!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! She said Sports authority sent her an e mail survey of the service and Rita filled it in expressing her displeasure of the service…well she received an e mail a few days later telling her how sorry they were and refunded the whole amount…. that is what I call customer satisfaction..…so Leslie gets a free bat!!!!!!!!Merry Christmas!!!!
We had a great game of cards and then I drove Ali around town to do a few chores…….
Tonight I went to a friend of a friends house for dinner it was a small birthday party with wonderful food and great company sorry no photos you know why now!!!!
My friend Carol sent me the below interesting story!!!
The slow death of purposeless walking
By Finlo Rohrer BBC News Magazine
A number of recent books have lauded the connection between walking - just for its own sake - and thinking. But are people losing their love of the purposeless walk?
Walking is a luxury in the West. Very few people, particularly in cities, are obliged to do much of it at all. Cars, bicycles, buses, trams, and trains all beckon.
Instead, walking for any distance is usually a planned leisure activity. Or a health aid. Something to help people lose weight. Or keep their fitness. But there's something else people get from choosing to walk. A place to think.
Wordsworth was a walker. His work is inextricably bound up with tramping in the Lake District. Drinking in the stark beauty. Getting lost in his thoughts.
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"As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives."
Charles Dickens was a walker. He could easily rack up 20 miles, often at night. You can almost smell London's atmosphere in his prose. Virginia Woolf walked for inspiration. She walked out from her home at Rodmell in the South Downs. She wandered through London's parks.
Henry David Thoreau, who was both author and naturalist, walked and walked and walked. But even he couldn't match the feat of someone like Constantin Brancusi, the sculptor who walked much of the way between his home village in Romania and Paris. Or indeed Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul at the age of 18 inspired several volumes of travel writing. George Orwell, Thomas De Quincey, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bruce Chatwin, WG Sebald and Vladimir Nabokov are just some of the others who have written about it.
From recent decades, the environmentalist and writer John Francis has been one of the truly epic walkers. Francis was inspired by witnessing an oil tanker accident in San Francisco Bay to eschew motor vehicles for 22 years. Instead he walked. And thought. He was aided by a parallel pledge not to speak which lasted 17 years.
But you don't have to be an author to see the value of walking. A particular kind of walking. Not the distance between porch and corner shop. But a more aimless pursuit.
In the UK, May is National Walking Month. And a new book, A Philosophy of Walking by Prof Frederic Gros, is currently the object of much discussion. Only last week, a study from Stanford University showed that even walking on a treadmill improved creative thinking.
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"Some years ago, a temporary inability to sleep, referable to a distressing impression, caused me to walk about the streets all night, for a series of several nights. The disorder might have taken a long time to conquer, if it had been faintly experimented on in bed; but, it was soon defeated by the brisk treatment of getting up directly after lying down, and going out, and coming home tired at sunrise."
Across the West, people are still choosing to walk. Nearly every journey in the UK involves a little walking, and nearly a quarter of all journeys are made entirely on foot, according to one survey. But the same study found that a mere 17% of trips were "just to walk". And that included dog-walking.
It is that "just to walk" category that is so beloved of creative thinkers.
"There is something about the pace of walking and the pace of thinking that goes together. Walking requires a certain amount of attention but it leaves great parts of the time open to thinking. I do believe once you get the blood flowing through the brain it does start working more creatively," says Geoff Nicholson, author of The Lost Art of Walking.
"Your senses are sharpened. As a writer, I also use it as a form of problem solving. I'm far more likely to find a solution by going for a walk than sitting at my desk and 'thinking'."
Nicholson lives in Los Angeles, a city that is notoriously car-focused. There are other cities around the world that can be positively baffling to the evening stroller. Take Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital. Anyone planning to walk even between two close points should prepare to be patient. Pavements mysteriously end. Busy roads need to be traversed without the aid of crossings. The act of choosing to walk can provoke bafflement from the residents.
The flaneur
- Oxford English Dictionary defines as: "A lounger or saunterer, an idle 'man about town'"
- Term originated in 19th Century France
- Poet Charles Baudelaire regarded as archetype
"A lot of places, if you walk you feel you are doing something self-consciously. Walking becomes a radical act," says Merlin Coverley, author of The Art of Wandering: The Writer as Walker.
But even in car-focused cities there are fruits for those who choose to ramble. "I do most of my walking in the city - in LA where things are spread out," says Nicholson. "There is a lot to look at. It's urban exploration. I'm always looking at strange alleyways and little corners."
Nicholson, a novelist, calls this "observational" walking. But his other category of walking is left completely blank. It is waiting to be filled with random inspiration.
Not everybody is prepared to wait. There are many people who regard walking from place to place as "dead time" that they resent losing, in a busy schedule where work and commuting takes them away from home, family and other pleasures. It is viewed as "an empty space that needs to be filled up", says Rebecca Solnit, author of Wanderlust: A History of Walking.
Famous walkers 3
"... When the desire comes upon us to go street rambling... getting up we say: "Really I must buy a pencil," as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter -rambling the streets of London."
Many now walk and text at the same time. There's been an increase in injuries to pedestrians in the US attributed to this. One study suggested texting even changed the manner in which people walked.
It's not just texting. This is the era of the "smartphone map zombie" - people who only take occasional glances away from an electronic routefinder to avoid stepping in anything or being hit by a car.
"You see people who don't get from point A to point B without looking at their phones," says Solnit. "People used to get to know the lay of the land."
People should go out and walk free of distractions, says Nicholson. "I do think there is something about walking mindfully. To actually be there and be in the moment and concentrate on what you are doing."
Physicists who liked walking
- Werner Heisenberg liked to walk
- The full significance of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle only struck British physicist Paul Dirac when the latter was out for a long walk
- Otto Frisch and Lise Meitner realised the key principle behind atomic weapons on a walk in the snow. Technically, Frisch was not walking but on skis at the time
And this means no music, no podcasts, no audiobooks. It might also mean going out alone.
CS Lewis thought that even talking could spoil the walk. "The only friend to walk with is one who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to assure us that the pleasure is shared."
The way people in the West have started to look down on walking is detectable in the language. "When people say something is pedestrian they mean flat, limited in scope," says Solnit.
Boil down the books on walking and you're left with some key tips:
- Walk further and with no fixed route
- Stop texting and mapping
- Don't soundtrack your walks
- Go alone
- Find walkable places
- Walk mindfully
Then you may get the rewards. "Being out on your own, being free and anonymous, you discover the people around you," says Solnit.
Yashi Kochi!!!!
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