Zonk–to fall soundly asleep or relax completely. The last day of the Blogging from A to Z in April Challenge.

Ready to zonk out accurately describes my life at 82 at this time! I always want to finish something I’ve started, but completing A to Z has been a challenge. Each blog post takes one to three hours a day depending on what WordPress challenges I encounter along the way. I look forward to having those hours back as discretionary time!

However, it’s been fun to meet old friends and new that have stopped by my blog this past month. I hope I’ve given you a flavor of what a day-to-day life can be for an 82-year-old. Looking back, I see I’ve had a full month. To refresh my mind and yours, here’s the topics I chose to write about:

aging, ballooning, clutter, diet, exercise, finances, grrr, heavy,

I, joy, kinship, love, Marv, nothing, oliver, place, quote, rant, story,

travel, unencumbered, vacation, whack, (e)xasperation, you, and now zonk.

Now that mess above is an example of a WordPress problem I can’t solve. I typed all the words in, followed by a comma, and intended to go back and add spaces. No luck. Pressing the space bar jumped each word down a line. I’d have had 26 one-word lines! Other times, I’d take hours to figure it out. Not today! (Eureka! On an edit, I put the one long line into three lines, and then I could use the space bar to separate the words. Such brilliance.)

Back to zonk. Last night I was ready to zonk. Yesterday, I started the day cleaning up my house. Junk all over. Dishes undone. Kitchen island full of birthday cards (from January), mail from the last week, small piles of what do I do with this next, five pens to decide which one was best to sign books, four small stacks of magazines and brochures, antibiotic container, orange marmalade jar, large jar of honey roasted peanuts, dish soap–all the latter from a grocery trip a few days ago. And a lovely large bouquet of flowers that my daughter brought over a week ago that was now not so lovely anymore with petal droppings around the base of the vase.

When I let things go, I let things go. But I’ve been working on some things–a column I write for my church newsletter and a book talk that I gave yesterday afternoon.

Giving a 45″ book talk takes me back to my teaching days. I’d often come home exhausted. Now when I give talks, I get tired just standing up (and I’m not ready yet to ask for a bar stool), and then my topic, our experience with Marv’s terminal cancer, is heavier for some in the audience than others, and I stick around after the 15″ Q and A for an extra 30 minutes or more to address all concerns. My daughter was with me yesterday, and with her background in long term care, she had insights for the group. Interestingly, I gave my last book talk a month ago in AZ, and my son came with me, and he served a similar purpose by answering questions about end-of-life financial concerns. It takes a village…!

Getting back to zonk. As an 82-year-old, the wisest thing to do after giving such a talk would be to go home and zonk. But no, a professor many of us love at OLLI was giving a talk on war. He comes once or twice a year and talks about current issues. I couldn’t miss it. I left my speaking venue to cross town to listen to him.

I was a tad late and had to park about a block away. I caught up with a woman walking slowly with a cane. I slowed down to walk alongside. She told me to go on ahead. I said no that I was happy to walk with her. She asked to use my arm, saying she could walk faster if she could hang on to someone. Together, we marched double time the rest of the way and made it just in time. She told me her name and asked for mine and said, “Lois, you are a very nice lady.” Sweet!

For two hours in that class on war, I sat there mesmerized. There’s no way I’d want to miss hearing this prof.

Then, you guessed it. I came home and zonked on my couch. A few hours later, I moved my body to my bed and zonked all night. (Never fear. I did eat, picking up a nutritious Junior Big Mac on the way home.)

I tell you about this day because in days gone by this would have been a normal day, maybe even a light day. No more. I’m best now with doing one activity a day. Either clean. Give a talk. Hear a talk. Go for coffee or lunch or dinner. And some days, just couch it and read.

Thanks again for stopping by! I appreciate it! Maybe I’ll do A to Z again when my theme can be Life at 92! For now, I’ll go back to blogging every week or two or whenever I have something I want to write about.

PS I found my red glasses and am wearing them to write this post! Maybe my problem is not my eyes after all. Maybe my problem is treating my glasses like a game of musical chairs. No matter, I will see my doctor soon:)!