Eighty Years (or so) To The Big Zero

Yesterday two good things occurred. One was planned and the other was not.

First the planned one: I got my refund check from the IRS last week. I put most of it down on my one remaining credit card and reduced the balance by a little over 55 percent. I’ll have some very comfortable payments for the next couple months and it should be completely paid off by July. This is important for many reasons. The primary one being I now have a car payment (plus insurance for a new car) so my budget has been squeezed a bit.

The second thing that happened was at work. I was coming out of the staff lounge and heading down the hallway when a fellow worker who was further down the hall was headed toward me. When we met in the hall he said “Hey have you lost weight? I didn’t recognize you when I first saw you coming out of the door.”

I was like - “Really? Thanks. Yes I’ve been working out.” And he replied. “Well it’s surely working. I hadn’t seen you in a while and I wasn’t sure it was you for a moment there until I got closer.”

Now that’s cool!

As you can tell from my Road to Mt. Olympus tracking I haven’t really lost a whole lot - about 3-5 pounds on any given week - but I’m definitely slimming down.

Then that same day I had just gotten home and was about to go on my walk when I head some birds in the back yard. I looked out back and there were dozens of vultures sitting in the trees and even walking around the ground. I went out and they were cawing and fluttering their wings and just hanging out in my back yard.

I went toward the trees they had roosted in and was walking underneath them but they didn’t move. I looked into the sky and more vultures were overhead. I was sniffing the air for death, and looking at the grounds for some dead animal. I was out there about five minutes when suddenly they all started to move on. Some took off and flew into the sky while others simply moved to jump from tree to tree.

Circling off in the distance I saw a few more vultures and the ones from my yard started to join them. Then a hawk started to screech in a tall tree nearby.  I’m not sure if it was the hawk or they were simply resting but almost all at once they were gone and large cyclon funnels of birds were springing up in different areas of the sky. It was like out of a King novel or something.

I hope they had just needed a place to relax after a hard journey of eating the dead. I still have all my cats so I know it wasn’t that.

A Whole New You, The Credit Trap, Thinking out loud