When I started writing this journal I needed a place to write various ideas and notes on concerts we had attended and books I had read; hopefully a portable place with easy access, unlike the myriad books, notebooks and scraps of paper on which I had written in the past.  I had also hoped that this would be a place to hold my travel journals and keep them all in one place.  Of course since then we seem to have stopped traveling and life has become much more staid and mundane.  I am forced to wonder if I will have anything to write about in the future?  I suppose so since I have kept sporadic journals much of my life.  But the writing might be slim at times.

We had planned to make several short trips in January, long weekends really, but at the moment they have been put on hold, either cancelled or delayed until later in the spring or early summer.  G discovered over the Christmas/New Years holiday that he can’t see out of one of his eyes.  This apparently happened gradually and his other eye took over so he hadn’t noticed at first.  This explains much of his recent trouble reading (and driving).  The cloudiness is an apparently common complication from cataract surgery so it is not a complete surprise, but it is an inconvenience.  The surgery has been scheduled and is quite minor with no scheduled recovery time; the biggest hassle has been coordinating the doctor’s schedule with G’s.

A crimp in our travel plans has been the resurgence of G’s UC (ulcerative colitis).  He had undergone a prolonged siege in the fall and had been better and just gone off the heavy duty treatment when it began to act up again over the holidays.  Of course this could have been partly due to holiday variations in diet, but this is an issue that comes up whenever we travel as well, changes in diet seem to correlate to UC flare-ups.    I suppose this is a significant contributing factor in why G, of late, has seemed to like to talk more about traveling than he does actually going anywhere.  I suppose that he will eventually have to reconcile himself to following a stricter treatment regimen, but he is still fighting that, and I have little faith that we will reach any kind of stasis state in the near future.  Since travel seems to be increasingly more of a hassle for various reasons not including the UC, whether we will return to our active travel schedule or remain closer to home is yet to be determined.  I may have to reconcile myself to the quieter life.

I did restart a book I had begun in early December and then abandoned, not because it was not interesting, but because of holiday time constraints, Fast Food Nation.  This book has been around quite some time and has been on and off my reading list but I finally decided to give it a try.  It is surprisingly interesting.  I had gotten only about a third of the way into it when I stopped, so I began at the beginning again today.  I can see a part of the youthful food and farm activist rising to the surface here as Eric Schlosser writes about how fast food has changed the way food is produced and prepared in this country.  I immediately start thinking about counteractive measures such as the slow food and eat local movements. It reminds me of my college years when I read MERCHANTS OF GRAIN, CARGILL and Jim Hightower’s EAT YOUR HEART OUT, which is mentioned by Schlosser. I may have to pull the old books out and raise the hackles again.  I kind of miss Hightower, I suppose he is still around and cussing and shouting and raising a ruckus and it is only I who have been out of touch..