Approaching Weekend, Its Rainstorms and Depot Parkrun

This morning I woke up around three, but decided to return to bed after making a bathroom visit. Melissa paid a Dunkin Donuts visit to pick up some coffee and breakfast, something I really appreciate.

Now it's mid-afternoon on this Friday "May the First" be with you, and I'm sitting here at my dining room table Chromebook writing this entry.  It took them long enough to start their day's major league baseball schedule, but now it looks as if the solid-hitting Arizona Diamondbacks have just begun their road contest in northern Chicago against the Cubs  the MLB channel is doing a good job carrying the day's load of games.  Both teams have winning records so far, and are known for their hitting.  I enjoy watching them go through the innings.  Today I have a little more exercising to do before I settle down to rest before tomorrow morning's Depot Parkrun 5K near downtown, Gainesville. Looks like another pot of coffee is in the works for now.  Neither of t best behavior, even for picture-taking. The two of us didn't have any appointments or meetings planned for today, so I suppose we'll be taking it easy for a while.  Tomorrow it's supposed to be raining...even possibly storming...later on into the afternoon and evening.  Maybe some precipitation will help to counteract the drought and wildfire danger...or so I hope.  At the Parkrun...assuming it goes off well and the weather doesn't interfere..my overwhelming goal will be to walk it through to its prescribed finish (and stay on my best behavior).  Then at worst, at least tomorrow's story will be that I showed up and followed through to an extent... 

Time Takes on Urgency During Aging

As I age, now into retirement for seven-plus months, my changing perception of the passage of time is causing me to reevaluate how best to spend it.  For one, with me it no longer seems that the future is as vast and wide open as it was during my youth...that's being pretty realistic, I think.  You can be pretty healthy...even athletic in your "golden" years, as Paul, an acquaintance in his 80's, demonstrated, and then quickly succumb to an aggressive cancer, organ failure or other ailment.  After my open-heart surgery four years ago, I recovered to the level of being once again able to do Parkrun 5Ks.  On one such run the following year, Paul and I found ourselves running side-by-side, and he revealed he had run many marathons in his past. He seemed very fit and at the close of our little talk, he then sped off and finished the 5K well ahead of me.  I hadn't seen Paul in a long time and just recently discovered that he had died this past February from pancreatic cancer.  Very sad, but that's a common part of being a senior: you're going along just fine, with what seems like an open future stretching out before you...and then, poof!, just like that, you're gone.  Well, that's one rapidly shifting perception of time that's recently affected me.  The other is my increased sensitivity to how, with each new day, I have things I want to do and how so-called "urgencies" that crop up tend to crowd them out, making me feel selfish and guilty should I assert myself and carve out my own time for them.  This also has to do with my sense that I don't have forever in this world to pursue my own interests and goals in spite of how well I physically feel or what encouraging words my doctors say...I'm developing my own personal sense of urgency regarding these things...