My dear friend Susan and I met up later at Whole Foods with our dogs. We planned to walk but ended up sitting outside in the fresh air for a couple of hours and lots of people came up to us. Susan has a gorgeous rescued standard poodle - a pet therapy dog who is just the sweetest, calmest and most gentle of dogs. Susan and I met in the MSW program and spent our first internship together at a nursing home/rehabilitation facility. She would bring Monique there and we witnessed transformational miracles when the patients saw and interacted with Monique.
Susan is also very spiritual and she brought some "angel" cards with her and asked if I wanted to ask the angels anything. We had done this once before and frankly it was amazing how on point the answer was to my question the previous time so I said yes. Well, the angel cards were on point again. And this is the second time that Mother Theresa ("Activist") came up for me as my present angel. I had asked if I would be able to make the shift to becoming a person who eats mindfully. The cards reveal past, present and future. Past card had to do with emotions - on point - emotional eating - or not dealing with emotions when eating and distracted. The future card had to do with love (love myself, my body, those around me...). Lastly I picked my mantra card - a mantra for the day - "Triumphant". There are descriptions that come along with each card and more details and it was uncanny how apropos the entire process played out. After the cards and booklet were put away, we took a little walk with the dogs, I skipped a bit (when's the last time you skipped?) and Susan left to go home and I took my dog to the dog park.
We were at the park for a little while and probably only walked a total of 1 mile yesterday but that was fine - I had also done the yoga class, and my intention with the 126 to Marco is to average 4 miles per day - not to be precise about it. The dog and I were happy having had lots of fresh air so it was a great day.
This morning I im'ed my friend and asked if it was the king or the queen. My friend and her husband share the same IM ID. It was the king but he soon got the queen and lo and behold the queen accepted my suggestion to walk. She had to be somewhere later in the morning so we just walked once around the neighborhood 2.2 miles. I skipped for 1/2 block - have to get that heart rate up somehow.
When I got home, my dog was looking at me with those sad eyes that expressed "Mommy, you walked without me?". I put food in her bowl and tried to get her to eat breakfast before we left but she wanted to leave the house. I planned a route to go 4.2 miles, brought a backpack with 2 water bottles and a bowl for her, and off we went.
I snapped some pics on the iPhone - the first one was with a large white bird on the top of the roof here - but although you can't see the bird - you can see the sun was shining.
And I took some pictures of flowers and one of papaya growing:
Somewhere around the 2.5 mile marker - when we were about to do a second mile in the neighborhood across from ours, she pulled me to the shade and she plopped down on the grass of a stranger. She was going to have no part of walking a second time around that neighborhood and back through ours.
We had taken a water/rest break before that. The heat index was 90 degrees and she's a princess who doesn't like to walk in the heat. So we rested a while and then returned home slowly so she could rest a bit in between when we got to some more shade. Our walk together was 3.2 miles.
8:36 p.m. - Just got back from another 2.2 miles with Brie.
64.1 to Marco
