Exercise Maintenance with Mall Walking

Our Zumba class has been on summer hiatus from mid May until August so my Zumba buddies and I have been meeting at the mall on Mondays and Wednesdays before the stores open to do some mall walking.

I like it because it's cooler and we don't have to worry about the harsh sunlight. You'd think the mall would be empty, but it's full of other seniors taking advantage of the easy walk. We walk for an hour which totals three miles.

But the best part of all is hanging out with friends and then having a little Starbucks break afterwards together. Yes, I  know we're just drinking the calories back in, but it feels good.

Another benefit is every first and third Monday, the hospital has volunteers taking our blood pressure and glucose.

And so far... we're doing pretty great!

Retiring An Old Companion

I suppose this might sound a little silly to the guys who read my blog, but I've had a bit of a melancholy time of change for myself.

I'm changing my backpack. I know. I know. It's not a huge deal. However I've used this bag at least since 2005.

I know this for sure because I found this photo of myself at Pamukkale in Turkey. Pamukkale is an amazing site with terraces of carbonate minerals left by the flowing hot spring waters.

Our guide had us experience the terrace feet first which was amazing!

Do you see the backpack?

It's been with me everywhere for at least the last 11 years and probably longer.

It carries everything I need with an inside opening to make it harder for pick pockets.

Here's another photo of Pamukkale from the Pixabay Free Image site.

Here's my tired old bag with reusable bags attached. (Hawaii has a plastic bag ban at stores.)

The bottom photo shows where the zipper has come apart.

This bag is light, soft and comfortable. I've tried other bags, but this one is just the right size for me. It carries my memories in it.

Sigh...

And here's my back-up bag. Yes, I bought this a couple of years ago. I'll be using it now. It's a different color. I liked the old worn gray color better, and I'll have to learn to appreciate navy blue. It's a little stiff, but I imagine it will relax after a while.

I suppose it's like having a favorite jacket or wallet or shoes or even a car. When you've spent a lot of personal time with them, they seem like an old friend.

And like other old friends, I'm not throwing it away. It's in my closet.

Do you have something you're attached to?

Making My First Spam Musubi

My granddaughter is a huge fan of  Spam Musubi. It's not very healthy, but as a grandmother... I hope I'll be forgiven for indulging her island craving. I got the recipe from Food Network.

The recipe called for:

5 cups cooked sushi rice, room temperature
5 sheets nori, cut lengthwise
1 (12 oz.) can Spam
6 Tbsp. soy sauce
4 Tbsp. mirin
4 Tbsp. sugar
Furikake, to taste

I cut the Spam into 10 thin slices. They even sell Spam cutters in Hawaii that will do this for you. I just cut it with my knife. It wasn't perfect, but I didn't think KC would notice.

I put the soy sauce, sugar and mirin in a pan and cooked it until it was bubbling and getting a little thick. Then I added the Spam.

I did get this little Spam Musubi maker at Walmart for about $5.

Everybody has a different way of making Spam Musubi.

I opted to add the furikake (bonito flavored flakes and I don't know what else is in it) into the rice before hand. Some people put it only around the Spam.

Anyway...

I put the nori down first and placed the musubi maker on top. The rice was patted down, then the Spam and then more rice. Everything is patted down and the nori is wrapped around the whole thing.

I made the mistake of not pressing it together firmly enough the first few times. It started falling apart, but I got the hang of it after a while.

I'm a slow learner.

OK... You can see I didn't get it perfect. I ran out of rice and wasn't able to make the last piece of Spam into a musubi.

It was OK...

However, KC loved it and that's what counts. (Or was she just being nice so my feelings wouldn't be hurt.)

POSTSCRIPT:  We were at the new Shirokiya Food Court recently and saw this booth that specialized in Spam musubi. Very impressive.

A 20 Year Mystery Solved

Twenty years ago in June-July, 1996 we took our children, Tiffany and Keola to Japan. They enjoyed meeting my aunts and cousins who they'd barely known existed. We took them to as many famous places as we could fit into three weeks.

We enjoyed all the beautiful shrines and castles in Kyoto.

The Heian Shrine was huge and very beautiful. The orange paint on the buildings was our clue that it was a Shinto shrine and not Buddhist which is usually naturally colored.

We were curious to see people going through this grass ring several times, but had no idea why.

Our relatives did not know what we were talking about when we asked them later.

So it remained a mystery for twenty years.

A couple of weeks ago, we saw an article in the Star Advertiser.

It mentioned the "Ring of Renewal" and "Ring of Purification" at a Blessing for People and Pets.

It stated that the grass (cogon or chogoya) ring is called a Chinowa. I was then able to look it up online and got an explanation.

According to the Encyclopedia of Shinto, "Worshipers at the shrine pass through the ring as an act of purification from misdeeds (tsumi), impurities (kegare), or bad luck."

The mystery is solved and I'm glad we went through the ring. It never hurts to be purified now and then.

Fit Bit To Be Covered

As a Father's Day surprise for Art last month, I had my daughter Tiffany order a Fitbit for Art. He's always wanting to know how far he walked, his heart rate, ETC. No, he doesn't need to exercise more, but I thought this would be something he would have fun with.

We'd bought a Fitbit last year for Tiffany's big birthday but after a few months it started losing its charge within a day or two. It's supposed to last for about 5 days. She called Fitbit and after testing it online, they opted to send her a new one. They told her to keep the old one so she gave it to me to try.

It's lots of fun. Gosh! It's not easy to get those 10,000 steps each day.

And there was another problem. For some reason, I kept getting an itchy, irritating heat rash on the inside of my wrist.

I came up with this solution. I used the small remnants of cloth from the keyboard cover I made for my nephew and sewed a cover to wrap around the Fitbit wristband. I used velcro strips to secure the ends and it works perfectly.

One day last week, I was happy to get 12,000 steps. What did Art do? 26,000! Sheesh! So annoying!

Bringing It Down to Size

Now that Mom no longer feels she can travel with us, she's been looking at the photobooks we've made for her since 2008.

Up until 2013 I had photo pages printed at Office Max, placed them in plastic sleeves and stuck them in a binder.

It worked best for us.

Blog visitor Hank Chapin kept suggesting for at least a couple of years that I should have a photo book made at Costco. I didn't think it was possible because we had so many photos and captions, not to mention Mom's recollections in Japanese.

Sigh...

It took too long for us to figure out that I could take each of the pages I made and upload them onto the Costco page as one jpg photo per page.

I was looking back at one of the binders of our trip to the National Parks (Bryce, Grand, Antelope, Zion, etc.). Mom had really loved that trip.

I'd made that binder album horizontally so I figured I could transfer them easily to the Costco book.

Not so easy.

The Costco books have a limit of 100 pages. I had 116 in the binder.

Sigh...

Well...

We did it! We went through the photos and were amazed at how many photos were really unnecessary or redundant.

I took out a bunch and enlarged a goodly number of them.

When we brought the book home, Mom looked through it and said, "This book is so much better. You put more photos in it."

When we told her we did the opposite, she said she liked the fact that photos were bigger and that it somehow made it seem like there were more photos in the book.

Thank goodness our trip to Seattle and Vancouver last year was already in a Costco photo book because I KNOW she looks at it constantly and it brings the trip back for her every time she looks at it.

In fact, because of the book, she remembers more about the trip than we do.

Finding Dory and a Good Deal

It's been absolutely wonderful having my son-in-law in the house. There's nothing so amazing as having Eddie within calling distance. Sometimes, he just has to wave his hands over my keyboard and the computer will know who is the master and fix itself automatically.

My computer would NOT recognize Art's Fire in order for me to download books from the library for him. I'd searched the web for a solution and discovered MANY people with Windows 10 having the same problem. It took Ed about five minutes to fix it. I have no idea what he did, but it's fixed.

Another thing Ed is a genius at is finding deals on the Internet.

He said a website called Slickdeals (http://slickdeals.net/) has lots of offerings. It was on this website that he found a T-Mobile deal where you could get amazing bargains on Tuesdays if you have T-Mobile as your carrier.

It's an app called T-Mobile Tuesdays (https://explore.t-mobile.com/t-mobile-tuesdays).

Since we had four phones with T-Mobile, we were able to get enough credit to cover three adults plus our granddaughter. Art had to pay (senior rate), but what a bargain that was!

And Finding Dory?

It was wonderful!!! Absolutely wonderful! We enjoyed every minute of it just as much as my granddaughter, KC did.

Caught One!

Finally!

We didn't think we'd ever catch a slug in our beer trap. We caught several cockroaches, but never a slug.

Until one morning....

At last! We caught one!

I sent this photo to my cousin who emailed back, "You can put that on top a sushi."

Verrry funny!