An Ode to the Everyday

The first name for this blog was: “Ode to the Mundane”. But Michelle thought that was a bit too negative sounding so she looked up synonyms for mundane, and the best match that came up was “everyday”, as in: “having to do with the practical details of regular life.” How true this rang! After two months in our home on the road, we’ve accepted this obvious insight – that much of a “Grand Adventure” is not grand at all – it is just about the ordinary business of living day to day.

We reflected on this as it took us a full week here is Tucson to really get settled – find the places to buy groceries (yes, there are three Wholefoods in Tucson), hardware, wine, hiking supplies, and ice; know where to do laundry and banking; map out the post offices; figure out where to take the dogs for walks; identify RV repair places before you need them (turns out there are two mobile RV services right in our park); note the location of medical services; use All Trails and Trail Forks to find hiking and biking routes; get the accurate address for Amazon to send packages to; etc. We did all this the first week.

So this blog is about the everyday rather than the grand adventures. It turns out those can be fun and interesting too.

Our Citrus RV Park

We love our new neighborhood at the Tucson. The sites are large, spacious, flat, and clean, with concrete patios. Our also has a 15’ X15’ dog pen, which makes puppy management a lot easier. And almost every site has a mature citrus tree, all of which are in the middle of fruit production right now. Ours is a grapefruit, and we shamelessly pilfer lemons and oranges from our neighbor sites when they are empty (or even sometimes when their vehicles are just gone).

Our grapefruit site

Our next door lemon supply

An Everyday Medical Miracle

Towards the end of our first week here, I had a new medical issue pop up out of nowhere. I was outside repairing the Airstream screen door handle (when you own an RV, you use the verb “repairing” often!) when suddenly I noticed a strange dotted black “Z” shape covering about half of my right eye – think the Z for Zorro.

I thought maybe I had smeared something while wiping my eye, but I couldn’t recall touching it. I went inside and tried to flush it out with eye drops. It changed shape from a Z to a circle but did not go away.

I vowed to ignore it (like any self-respecting male idiot – which is why there is a serious problem with men not getting treatment for chronic illness – but that’s a whole other story). Michelle convince me otherwise since it was a Friday and getting an optometrist on Saturday would be much more difficult. So I reluctantly went online and low and behold found an optometrist two miles away that did online scheduling who had an open appointment for two hours later.

I ate lunch and headed out to Dr. Arjun Patel, a delightful young guy who had owned the local Pearle Vision franchise for two years. He did a thorough eye exam and took multiple pictures and let me know two things: 1) it was a really good idea to come in and get it looked at since one of the possible causes could have been a torn retina; and 2) that was nothing serious and required no treatment. Turns out it is a common age-related condition called “posterior vitreous detachment” or PVD, where your vitreous gel comes away from the retina at the back of your eye. One online resource explains it this way:

“PVD isn’t painful and it doesn’t cause sight loss, but you may have symptoms such as seeing floaters (small, dark spots or shapes) and flashing lights.

These symptoms will calm down with time and as your brain learns to ignore them. With time, you should be able to see just as well as you could before your PVD started.

The symptoms of PVD are very similar to those of a different eye condition called retinal detachment, which needs prompt treatment to stop you losing part or all of the sight in your eye. Because of this, it’s important to have your eyes examined by an ophthalmologist (hospital eye doctor) or an optometrist (also known as an optician) within 24 hours of noticing any new symptoms.”

Clearly, Michelle made the right call!

You can see my remaining “floater” in the picture of my retina — the circular cloud. It flits across my eye right to left and left to right.

OK, lest it feel like I am wandering way too far into the TMI zone, I want you to know I’m sharing this because the experience reinforced for me an extraordinary sense of wonder, amazement and gratitude for the way our bodies and their related organs work silently in the background, keeping us motoring through the “everyday” without having to think about it at all.

I mean, really, can you believe how the eye functions, collecting photons of light, transferring them to the brain which translates these photons of light into precise images of our environment? And with the brain basically making a bunch of it up from prior experiences in so seamless a fabrication that you can’t tell the difference? As one online source explains:

The eye captures light and sends signals, but it’s your brain that creates what you “see,” filling in details, flipping upside-down images, and making sense of the world; while the eye sees only a small, detailed part at a time, the brain stitches these together into a rich, continuous experience, using only about 1% of high-detail vision while the rest is processed peripheral data and assumptions.

All I can think when I read this and look at the pictures is OMG!

An Everyday Ritual With Endless Possibilities

Ever since Michelle and I have lived in Tamworth, we have a morning ritual we picked up from my Dad and his wife Elaine that we have come to love – coffee and breakfast in bed. The ritual involves a tray with a pot of coffee, a bowl of cereal and fruit (for me), two cups of coffee, creamer and foamed oat milk (for Michelle).

We found this new coffee at a roaster (Arbuckles) 2 miles from us. They were the first organic Fair Trade certified roaster in Arizona and have been in business for 48 years. They inspired us to shift from a dark roast we have been drinking for 30 years!

At some point, I noticed that I often put the morning tray together in a slightly different fashion each day. I wondered how many variations on the theme were actually possible. Turns out there is a way to calculate that, called a “factorial”. (Those of you with science or math training would know what this is.) There are nine steps in the process, and they can be done in any sequence. (Even though some of those sequences wouldn’t make practical sense, they still would work). Well, the factorial for 9 is 362,880, meaning that technically, there are that many ways we could enjoy this daily pleasure. Amazing!

A Potpourri of Everydays

I’ll end this “mundane” blog with a mishmash of other everyday things we’ve been doing to enjoy our daily living.

We’re replacing 8 of these old inefficient heating and cooling vents with these new ones — a very satisfying DIY project.

This new water filter allowed us to stop buying many, many plastic gallons of drinking water. (The ground and city water in most of Arizona is not pleasant to drink.)

For the last decade or so, my after lunch indulgence has included this awesome combination of good port, chocolate and a small cigar.

And of course we stocked up on whiskeys from our friends Richard and Sarah’s Iron Fish Distillery!

I’ll end with this artifact of Michelle’s that expresses our general feeling about our travel across this grand place.

Goodbye until the next blog when we will be back to Grand Adventures in the mountains, deserts and city of Tucson.

Love to you all for the Holidays,

John & Michelle