Welcome, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the author of the USA Today best-selling Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series. In this daily newsletter, I reflect on my life as an indie author trying to age gracefully, including my struggles to maintain a balanced life, what I listen to, read, and watch for entertainment, and occasional bits of information I’ve gleaned from doing the research for my novels.
Daily Diary, Day 1291:
Brief Check-in: As expected, I a very busy day yesterday, but I felt productive. Two good phone calls, three walks, a good zoom meeting, and I would say overall I felt better than I did the day before in terms of general arthritis pain. This morning, I did my 6 AM yoga, I’ve taken a 30 minute walk, cleaned, soaked my eye, and after I publish this post, I am actually going to open up the novel manuscript and see if I am up to working on it. I have other things I can do today, like putting together my monthly newsletter, maybe working on some of my data analysis of sales, so if I don’t feel up to doing the writing, I certainly have stuff to do. Oh, and I also finished my novel, so I need to think about what else I might want to read as a distraction.
Here is a picture of the sky this morning (it was 49 degrees when I went for the walk) and a brave little rose.
And now, for my recommendations! I decided to go with two historical themed posts today.
The first is from a newsletter I don’t believe I’ve recommended before, Positive Aging Matters, where in the about page the author states, “Changing the negative social narrative around ageing can only happen if we show how a positive life in the third age can be lived.”
As an example, one of the recent posts the author wrote on this subject is, What are Friends For, which is on the importance of friendships, a problem many people of all ages have faced coming out of the isolation of Covid.
However, today I am featuring an earlier post from this newsletter, because I found the whole topic so much fun. The title is The Lowdown on Nursery Rhymes, and I particularly liked the historical context she used. This reminded me of some of the research I did about children’s games in the 19th century, the first historical tidbits post I did for this newsletter.
The second post I’m recommending is from one of my favorite newsletters, Looking Through the Past by George Dillard. Frankly, I don’t know that there’s a single post of his I wouldn’t recommend, so if you haven’t checked out this newsletter and like learning about the past, I strongly recommend that you do so.
However, today I am specifically recommending an amusing post all about the history of parachutes. The title is, To Resist a Fall, and I was surprised to discover how foolhardy some of the early attempts were, but not surprised to discover that Leonardo da Vinci was one of the first people to speculated on how to create a device that would permit people to float to the air.
Read and enjoy!
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Must have been the ids of March yesterday I couldn’t get my comment to appear.
Just wanted I point out that many of us “certainly have lots to do”” and it never ends. Just changes.