Monthly Archives: January 2026

Dance, Dancing, Fun, GenX, Humor, Lifestyle, Self Improvement, Storytelling, Wisdom

The Elephant In My Rec Room

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Meet my elephant.

This elephant, aka Nordictrack elliptical machine, has been living rent-free in my rec room since 2024.

Mr. NOA and I were in agreement back then that it was time to get serious about getting exercise. Improving our health and losing weight. The year was young, and we were feeling sassy. We had such good intentions.

I can count on one hand the number of times I climbed onto that elephant and used it. Mr. NOA as well.

So, it sits there, taking up space on my dance floor. Yes, I said “dance floor”. One of my aims in this new year is to, like in 2024, improve my health and lose a bit of weight via exercise. The exercise of choice for me, I have now determined beyond a shadow of a doubt, is dance.

But this elephant is in the way. I’m not using that as an excuse to not dance in my rec room for exercise, mind you. I’ve got space in the carpeted area down there to get my groove on.

Yet it’d be such fun to have more space to dance in the tiled section of my rec room where the elephant lives.

Maybe I’ll even hang a disco ball on the ceiling for extra funsies.

It’s going to take some effort to get rid of my elephant. I’ll likely have to put this picture of it on our local social media sites to see who might want to adopt it. I won’t even charge them, as long as they commit to removing it from my dance floor and hauling it away on their own.

Looking back, it was quite the effort that Mr. NOA and I made to obtain this damn elephant. We found it on our local Facebook Marketplace. It was available for $50, with the understanding that we pick it up and haul it off. So, one winter day back in 2024, Mr. NOA and I got in our Tacoma and drove 10 minutes away to pick up our new toy. Thankfully, the young man selling it to us was able and willing to help us get it into the way back in our truck. That thing is HEAVY. The wind was whipping that cold day, which caused the elephant to move about and create some alarming noises. When we got home, both of us (or perhaps just me?) were privately bemoaning this decision (now how were we going to get it into our house?). Mr. NOA determined the best course of action was to drive the Tacoma backwards, to get it as close as possible to the door of the rec room (it’s a walk-out basement, which I love). In the as careful-as-we-could-be maneuvering of this elephant out of our truck, we still managed to acquire a ding along the side of it.

We felt a sense of accomplishment along with relief once it was safe inside our rec room. It was ready to be used to transform the two of us into more physically fit versions of ourselves.

Yet, as I stated at the top of this post, the elephant ended up being mostly ignored. And we have no good excuse.

But now it’s a new year! I’m older and wiser, and therefore more thoughtful about how I can best meet my fitness goals. With or without the elephant in my rec room, I will dance (she says with a dramatic flourish).

I have started a playlist, after all, so the wheels are in motion. It features songs that have great beats to dance to, like this one from my youth in the ’80s.

Adult children, America, Anger, Community, Compassion, Faith, Life, Minnesconsin, Protests, Revolution

Bearing Witness in These Times

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As a life-long conflict avoider, it’s unnerving for me to put myself in a position where it’s likely others will disagree with me. I’m a people-pleaser. I never want to rock the boat.

This is not me trying to get an “atta, girl” from you, my patient readers and friends, but this past Sunday, Mr. NOA and I participated in a rally to protest the infiltration of federal ICE agents in Minneapolis. There are many people, some whom I know and love, who don’t “get” why I participate in these things. And truthfully, I don’t actually want to participate in these rallies and protests. Because I don’t want there to be a reason in this country, the “land of the free”, to have to do so in the first place.

Yet I must bear witness.

When the first Trump administration began separating children from their parents at the southern border of Mexico, and putting these children into detention facilities (many are still there, a truly disgusting fact), I began praying that these kids would be reunited with their families again, ASAP. I imagined my daughter at the time, who was in her mid-twenties, a mom to our beautiful grandson, and in a very challenging marital situation. I imagined her being in a foreign country where she and her son’s life was in danger due to rampant violence by members of a drug cartel. How I would support her fleeing that country to come to America where she and her son could be safe. And then when they got across the border, after a harrowing journey, feeling weak and cold and hungry-having my grandson taken from her and put in a detention facility where he knows noone and there is nobody who can tell him when (or if) his mom was coming to get him. The cruelty is astounding to me. It’s un-American, inhumane, and it fills me with rage.

The murder of Renee Good, a mother of three, only 4 years older than my daughter, by an ICE officer in Minneapolis, fills me with rage and breaks my heart at the same time. To add insult to injury, the responses of some of my fellow Americans to this event have been quite disappointing. The amount of folks driving by as we waved and held signs opposing this administration and it’s American Gestapo, ICE, who flipped us the bird, was shocking to me. It did give us a little satisfaction, however, when a cop pulled over a speeding driver who was clearly attempting to use his speed and truck tires to splash slop on us on that bridge connecting Wisconsin to Minnesota last Sunday. The comment sections on social media regarding this crime was largely disappointing as well. People stating their belief that Renee Good was attempting to run over the ICE officer as she turned her SUV’s tires to the right, away from the officer. People believing she got what she had coming to her. Seriously? Like, the officer couldn’t have simply shot out her tires to stop her from using her vehicle as a weapon? It makes no sense.

May the Universe bless Minneapolis, and may we summon our better angels as a collective. May there be justice for Renee. I know in my heart that we can do better than this.

Adventure, Creative Pursuits, Creative Writing, Creativity, Dance, Imagination, Intentionality, Overthinking, Personal Growth, Positivity

New Year, New Project? Perhaps.

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Have you ever heard of this thing called the “100-day project”?

I hadn’t either, until recently. It was an idea sprung from Yale graphics design professor, Michael Bierut, who randomly decided to embark on a quest to draw one thing each day inspired by a photo in the New York Times. I believe he ended up doing it for a year. As a result, he decided to task his students with doing one personally fulfilling, creative project every day. To pick just one thing and take maybe 10 minutes every day to work on it for 100 consecutive days. His students by and large embraced it and during the Covid-19 pandemic it became quite the phenomenon (one which apparently passed me by).

Ever since learning about this, I’ve been toying with doing it myself. I’m non-commital about the whole endeavor, but I do think it’s a fun idea to play with, don’t you?

My first 100-day project idea: find every single intact greeting card (including envelopes) in this house. This can include postcards. Write and send one every single day for 100 days. Figure out a way to make it happen. Answer the following question: what’s my response to a potential time within these 100 days in which major obstacles could arrive, unbidden? Do I have the option of doubling or tripling up the next day? So it “averages out” to be 100 times? But is that not killing the spirit of this thing? To do it daily? I think I’d have to be quite stringent about this. Unless I’m totally incapacitated, I’d do it every single day. To address the possibility that I could become totally incapacitated once I started this project, I could write extra letters ahead of time, so I’ve got a stash ready to go for someone in my life who understands they need to be mailed every day.

How’s this for ironic? As I was writing the above, the song that randomly came on was “Please Read the Letter I Wrote” from what I consider to be my all-time favorite album: Raising Sand by Robert Plant and Allison Krause. Is this perhaps a sign from the universe? Also ironically, just the other night I read something on Facebook about a country singer who was famous back in the late 80’s, before I really started paying attention to popular country music (that was a distinct era for me in the early 90’s). His name was Keith Whitley and he died when he was only 34 of acute alcohol poisoning. I did a little googling and learned he was a great songwriter as well. He wrote and was the first to perform the song “Nothing at all”, which I had assumed was originally done by Allison Krause, because that’s the version that came into my songbrain when I read the song’s title and the first couple of lines.

More than likely, I’ll be putting a pin in doing this 100-day project for now, but that doesn’t mean coming up with ideas for it and then overthinking each one of them ad naseum as I did in this post won’t be happening.

It’s possible, actually, as I read in an article about this project, that the 100 days could be spent coming up with and then writing down ideas for this project. And then, apparently, never picking just one idea and doing it. I think I’m too neurotic to actively come up with ideas for this project with no intention of following through with any of them as my actual project. It’s also true that as I hung in for 78 days total doing The Artist’s Way course last fall, I likely have the bandwidth for a 100-day project. I think the caveat for me would be to keep it to myself, not writing about it here or anywhere else, until the 100 days have passed. No sense in jinxing myself!

Time will tell, I suppose.

If you were to commit to a 100-day project of your own, what would it look like? I would love to know. Or, if you have done a 100-day project, how did that go for you? What did it consist of? I would also love to know that.

Here’s a video I found on YouTube of a young man, Ely Kim, who chose dance as his creative medium for his 100-day project. I love that he shared it on social media. So much joy!