blog Archives · Introspective Adventurer

Two years apart

Listen to your gut

I have been waiting to write about this until I had several weeks under my belt. If you have been following my journey, you know that I started this blog just over two years ago.

My two-year anniversary was July 14, 2019 – the same day my sister died of a heart attack.

When I started my blog it was with the intention of sharing my authentic self and being honest, especially with myself. It started with a focus on my health and morphed into telling my story along the way.

But my health has been a steady focus from the beginning.

Can we go home again, part two

2019-09-25 / Loretta Sayers / 7 Comments

Driving away from the old farmhouse I grew up in, I was pensive and melancholy. I knew the place was rundown, but to walk into the now-abandoned shack that held so many memories was such a letdown. I wanted to find a way to shake my sense of unease.

Another place that holds wonderful memories growing up was Lake Michigan, and Silver Lake to be specific. On my way, I drove through my hometown of Hart that was just a mile or so from our farm.

Making my way past Hart Lake, I turned left towards the cemetery where my mother was buried. I stopped to see her little headstone with the wrong birth year on it. I have always wondered what the story is behind the incorrect headstone that marks her grave.

It never seemed to bother any of us, because that grave wasn’t her home it was just a marker with her name on it.

Can we go home again?

2019-09-24 / Loretta Sayers / 13 Comments

Tomas Wolfe wrote, “You can’t go home again” and after my trip to Michigan last month the literal meaning of that title hit me hard. If you have been following my story, you know I grew up in a small town in Michigan. In August I flew home to go to my sister Janet’s memorial service.

It was a somber trip dotted with memory lane moments and visits with old friends and family. I stayed at my sister Linda and her husband George’s 40-acre country home and we spent a lot of time sitting on her porch chatting.

Looking back at Linda’s house from the blueberry patches

On the day of the memorial, we headed towards Lake Michigan to join our family for Janet’s service. As I sat in the passenger seat looking out at the countryside rolling by, I couldn’t help but feel nostalgic.

You better slow down

2019-09-06 / Loretta Sayers / 25 Comments

Those four words kept gnawing at me, but I refused to listen. “I don’t have time right now!” was always my rebuttal.

You better slow down.

I heard it over and over but I just kept going. I had to, I told myself. Things needed to be done. Arrangements needed to be made. People needed to be taken care of. Boxes weren’t going to pack themselves.

There was no time to slow down.

So I kept going and going and going until I found myself laying on a gurney with needles in my arms, sick to my stomach from drinking the chemical chalky shake they said I needed. “Take a deep breath in and hold it,” the computer voice told me as the gurney moved my body into the machine that would take photos of my insides to help determine what was going on with my (lack of) health.

The nice lab tech who felt bad for sticking me twice took this photo

Scattered about – finding peace

2019-08-13 / Loretta Sayers / 11 Comments

I feel like I’m all over the board right now.

We moved out of our apartment in Santa Barbara last weekend. Well, mostly out. There are still a few things at the old place and it needs to be cleaned up, so a part of me is still there.

When we moved from the Bay Area to Santa Barbara, I had a hard time finding a place that would fit our needs. There are only two of us but I wanted to be sure there would be room for family when they came to visit.

I’ve always wanted the home that my kids and grandkids could come back to and a one-bedroom apartment wasn’t exactly my dream home. But we made it work.

The little schoolhouse that will

2019-08-02 / Loretta Sayers / 4 Comments

I shared before that my son and his family live close to the epicenter of two of the largest earthquakes to hit Southern California in 20 years.

On July 5th they had to evacuate their home after the 7.1 quake.

When they arrived at our house at 3:30 on Saturday morning, they were exhausted and shaken. I tucked the girls in their little bed in our room and we made sure nothing was on the walls or shelves around them.

As we were saying goodnight, their cat leaped from my nightstand down onto their bed and both of the girls jumped. They immediately started comforting each other saying it was okay it wasn’t another earthquake.

It broke my heart to see them so frightened.

Life’s Roller Coaster Ride – part 2

2019-07-31 / Loretta Sayers / 13 Comments

…continued from part 1

I’ve received the call before. You know the one. The “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news” call.

When I finally arrived at Adam’s house after a long day of travel, I was still messaging with my sister, Linda about my day. We sent several messages back and forth and I told her I arrived safely.

Then she called.

I answered happily, thinking how wonderful it would be to chat with her instead of texting. Only she didn’t sound happy. She had just got off the phone with close friends of our sister Janet and delivered the bad news to me.

Janet is dead.

Life’s Roller Coaster Ride

2019-07-30 / Loretta Sayers / 6 Comments

I barely know where to begin.

I started writing this post about five times now and couldn’t seem to get past the first few lines. Forgive me if I ramble or it seems disjointed.

The last six weeks have been filled with so many highs and lows, I can hardly keep it all straight. In June, I was riding roller coasters with my granddaughters in Legoland and Sea World laughing and have a great time.

Roller Coaster ride at Lego Land

I didn’t realize at the time that my own personal roller coaster ride was just starting.

Optimum health

2019-07-10 / Loretta Sayers / 22 Comments

After last month’s scare over the health of my niece and sister, I started July with a renewed sense of purpose to return to my optimum health. I did a little research and learned a bit about insulin resistance and found that I hit all the markers for it.

So on July 1^st I tweaked my diet to help my body regulate insulin better.

Healthy fats, lots of veggies for optimum health

Everything was going great until July 4^th, and no I didn’t eat hot dogs and potato salad and blow my diet. Instead, we experienced the biggest earthquake southern California has had in 20 years. That was until July 5^th when a bigger one hit.

Celebrating life

2019-07-02 / Loretta Sayers / 20 Comments

My family had a big scare last week. My niece was rushed into the emergency room on Saturday unable to breathe. She was immediately put on a ventilator and by the following Friday, she was still unable to breathe on her own.

My sister (her mother) lives in Texas, 1500 miles away from her daughter in Michigan, and we were scrambling to get her a flight to be at her daughter’s side. In the midst of searching the Internet for a flight that didn’t cost as much as a mortgage payment, she had a heart attack.

Stress can have such a powerful effect on us.

Leave yesterday in the dust

2019-06-24 / Loretta Sayers / 19 Comments

A funny thing happened while riding my bicycle Sunday morning. It was such a subtle shift in thinking I almost didn’t appreciate the gravity of it.

John and I have a tradition of riding our bikes to breakfast on Sundays. The little restaurant we go to is the Summerland Beach Café, which is about eight miles from our house. There are some pretty good hills along the route, especially the last one, so it is a good way to earn breakfast.

I usually look forward to our ride, but this Sunday I woke up feeling terrible. I had a headache and felt tired. We had been on the road the last week and I was beating myself up for not eating as well as I should and for drinking more wine than I normally do.

Sometimes the journey is the destination

2019-06-17 / Loretta Sayers / 20 Comments

This past weekend, John and I decided it was time to get the big bike out and go for a long ride. The last few months have been chilly and rainy and we missed our fun outings on that big beamer.

So we packed a couple of overnight bags and since there was a thick marine layer lingering in the early afternoon, we headed up an over the San Marcos Pass looking for sunshine.

As we crested the summit, making our way through the fog it felt like we were riding with the clouds, and I was glad I had bundled up for the ride.

If you win the rat race are you still a rat? – How Instagram and Facebook have become the new rat race

2019-06-13 / Loretta Sayers / 67 Comments

I have found myself running a race on a treadmill, and I am going to step off.

When I started my blog two years ago, I knew I wanted to start a Facebook page and Instagram account to have a platform to share my blog. For the most part, it worked wonderfully.

I have close to 20,000 followers between all mediums.

But those followers came at a cost that I wasn’t prepared for. It turned out that writing my blog was the easy part, but social media would be a bigger challenge.

Ding Ding Ding Went the Trolley

Ding, Ding, Ding went the Trolley

2019-06-04 / Loretta Sayers / 12 Comments

What is the difference between streetcars with cables, cable cars, trolleys and trolley tours?

Turns out, a lot.

Whenever John and I travel, we rarely do any of the typical tourist stuff. Mostly because we like the road less traveled, but also because we are not fans of big crowds.

But last week while tagging along with John on a work trip, I decided to go “full tourist” for a couple of days in San Francisco.

The meaning of Memorial Day

2019-05-27 / Loretta Sayers / 12 Comments

For many families, Memorial Day is a somber day of remembrance.

I don’t pretend to understand how devastating it is for military families who lose a loved one. Luckily all of my brothers came home, and my son too.

The closest I came to experiencing it (or ever want to) was in September 2014.

My son was stationed on the USS Carl Vinson as an F-18 Fighter pilot. He was tasked with leaving his family; his wife and two small daughters, to put himself in harms way in service of our country.

How to throw the best photo themed 60th birthday party ever

2019-05-22 / Loretta Sayers / 22 Comments

Birthday parties are a lot of fun and a lot of work. I have known for a long time that I wanted a big birthday party to celebrate my 60^th year, and it turned out to be more than I could have hoped for.

Everyone pitched in to create exactly what I dreamed of, and friends and family who couldn’t attend made sure I felt loved and honored as well.

My son, Adam created the invitation for me.

Counting up to 60 and what I’ve learned – decade six

2019-05-09 / Loretta Sayers / 5 Comments

I breathed a big sigh of relief when I turned 50. My 40’s had been some pretty rough years.

Oprah reached that milestone five years ahead of me. She showed the world that 50 was just the beginning of some of our best years, and I felt a complete kinship to her because of that.

But even fortified by Oprah’s example, my 50^th year didn’t go as well as I had hoped. That year saw the end of my short-lived marriage, and for the first time I was completely alone.

Which is exactly what I needed.

Counting up to 60 and what I learned – decade five

2019-05-08 / Loretta Sayers / 4 Comments

Have you ever seen the movie, “Runaway Bride” with Julia Roberts? While I can’t relate to her running at the altar, I can relate to the fact that she didn’t know who she was and kept modeling her behavior after whichever man she was with at the time.

There is a scene in the movie when her tormenter (the next guy) says she doesn’t even know how she likes her eggs because she just orders whatever her guy orders. I may have known exactly how I liked my eggs, but I didn’t have a clear understanding of who I was or more importantly what I wanted.

At 40, I was divorced and in a relationship with a saddle maker. So of course, I was a saddle maker too. He happened to be half Native American, and I jumped in headlong learning everything I could about my native heritage.

Counting up to 60 and what I learned – decade four

2019-05-07 / Loretta Sayers / 8 Comments

I’ve heard it said that a grain of sand can tip the scale, but in my opinion it is the pile of sand before it that rarely gets the attention. By the time I reached 40 I felt like I was in a constant struggle to climb the dune I had created.

Turning 30 was fun and I was sure I had everything figured out, at least on the outside. I was married with two kids and very content with my day-to-day life. Things got even better when we bought a little 20-acre farm on the outskirts of town.

I’ve written many times before that I grew up on a farm, and when my boys were entering grade school I had the strongest desire for them to experience country life. The run-down, cat-infested place we purchased turned out to be the best place to let a couple of boys roam and discover things on their own.

Counting up to 60 and what I learned – decade three

2019-05-06 / Loretta Sayers / 6 Comments

I find it interesting that reaching a certain age holds more significance than other ages. For me, turning 20 was important. I was no longer a teenager and somehow felt more grown-up.

Things quickly fell into place when I moved to Bend, Oregon. I found a great job working for someone who would end up being a life-long friend, I had a nice apartment and best of all I had a fun convertible sports car.

I was a bonafide adult, or at least I thought so.

Aging on my terms - Daily musings in 500 words or so

Category: blog (page 1 of 20)

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There was no time to slow down.

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It broke my heart to see them so frightened.

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Janet is dead.

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I didn’t realize at the time that my own personal roller coaster ride was just starting.

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The closest I came to experiencing it (or ever want to) was in September 2014.

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My son, Adam created the invitation for me.

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Which is exactly what I needed.

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