New Year, New World, New You?

Readers from "before times," when this was an actual health and fitness blog, may recall that I've already written many posts about New Year's Resolutions.

There's a search bar if you're curious, and if you were to type in New Years Resolutions, many, many posts would come up, full of advice and complaints. Mostly it's the obvious stuff: Keep promises realistic, and expectations low. Aim for baby steps. Celebrate small victories. Try hard, but expect repeated failures, and focus more on getting back on track and not giving up than on perfection.

We know this stuff. And yet the failure rate for resolutions remains pretty darn high. So the heck with that, let's not talk about making promises to ourselves that we may not keep!

Instead, let's talk about hopes and dreams and intentions for the coming year in a totally hypothetical way. No pressure. After all, the beginning of a new year is a good time for reflection, for fresh starts, and maybe even big dreams. And if thinking big leads you to want to do something little in order to get there... bonus!

But before we get to that... a special request.

So I recently found out that the little doohickey at the top of the sidebar that was supposed to encourage email sign-ups? It didn't actually work.

But now there is a much better, user-friendly email subscription/newsletter link. Please sign up! Your email will stay totally private, and you can always unsubscribe later if you get tired of my ramblings.

That way when a new post is out, you will not have to swing by the sad little Facebook page to find out about it. You can read new posts in your email. Or, having been duly alerted, come back here to read it and leave a comment and make my cranky old heart sing.

One thing you WON'T have to worry about is getting a whole slew of Just Cranky blog posts. One or two a month is probably max, and you know me... I will likely stop posting again, and then in 2035 you will suddenly discover that I've yet again resurrected the blog, which will appear as a hologram in the artificially intelligent lenses surgically implanted into your eyeballs.

There may at some point be an announcement about my novel, Niccolo Would Like a Word, hitting virtual bookshelves in a few weeks or maybe months. But I won't be a pest about it.

How To Accept Chronic Illness or Disability Gracefully?

Maybe it happens all of a sudden: you're crossing the street in a clearly marked crosswalk and a car runs a red light and hits you. And your body is never the same again.

Or maybe it's the onset of a peculiar minor symptom, followed by more strange little symptoms, all of which get more alarming and eventually turn out to have a common, unfixable cause.

Possibly it's just the inevitable, but still disagreeable, result of getting older. Organs and other body parts begin to fail in ways that are not reversible.

But the bottom line is: you are no longer "healthy" in the way you used to be, and you probably never will be again, and the best you can do is try to accept this and move forward.

But how?

Oh wait... maybe you thought I was proposing an answer? No, I was asking YOU, because I seem to really suck at this whole acceptance thing. 

Cruisin'

We always say we're not "Cruise People." We object to their environmental impact. We don't like crowds, long lines, cheesy faux-Broadway musical productions, gluttonous buffets, smoky casinos, or traveling in packs like water buffalo, ruining the ambiance of otherwise charming port destinations.

Yet clearly we must be "Cruise People," because somehow we've been on an embarrassing number of them. We get tempted by bargain prices, by the convenience of packing and unpacking just once, by the notion of not having to shop, cook, or clean anything, and by the efficiency of scouting out multiple destinations we might someday return to at a more leisurely pace.

We know a lot of people who are cruise enthusiasts, who love everything about them, from the fancy formal nights to the lifeboat drills. But we totally sympathize when others who are decidedly not cruise people and have no desire to travel that way.

So why am I posting about cruises all of a sudden?

Why yes, you guessed it! Right now we are aboard a Spain/Portugal/Morocco cruise for our 35th anniversary.

A Few Reasons You May NOT Want to Move to Spain

Here's the context, in case you accidentally googled your way here: My wife and I spend half the year in Valencia, Spain, and the other half in Provincetown, Massachusetts. (Although that may change soon, which is a whole other story).

So which country will we ultimately end up in?

It's an ongoing debate. Not between us: we're always on the same side. It's just that we constantly change "our" mind, because after so many years together we only have one brain between us.

Given the terrifying future that the US president and his cronies say they have in store for us, we understand there are quite a few others considering their options as well. And Spain comes up a lot.

In the last blog post I shared a few good reasons to move to Spain. And honestly, that was just the beginning of a very long list, which someday I might elaborate on.

But you can't debate Pros and Cons without even looking at the Cons. So here's my very subjective take on a few reasons you might not want to choose Spain as your forever home. 

A Few Really Good Reasons to Move to Spain

So we're back in Valencia Spain again, where we live half the year. Why were these people outside our door yesterday? We don't know, there are too many parades here to keep track of. 

And while we're still on the fence about going full-time, it's hard not to notice that there is a lot to like about living here.

I realize that not everyone is as alarmed as we are about the bizarre and horrifying changes happening in the Good Ol' U.S.A. I'll refrain from any sort of recap, because I don't have the thousand or so hours it would take to even get started. Let's just say the political climate is not to our liking.

I also recognize that we're coming from a place of privilege: there are not a ton of folks who can just pick up and move to new country. If you're just trying to make ends meet, or have overwhelming work and family obligations, it probably sounds like debating whether or not to hop on a rocket ship to the moon.

Of course this post will be followed by Reasons NOT to Move to Spain, because I always have a long list of "cons" for any proposition more complicated than "shall I have another cup of coffee?" But let's start with just a few of the most obvious factors that make Spain an appealing choice when compared with the United States.