More school visits yesterday.
I enjoyed it. Bucolic scenery, the Strut and Rut Outdoor Supply Store, the hardware store with “MUCK BOOTS” on its marquee, cattle ignoring the new developments popping up in the next field over, and lots of impressive clouds.
The Empress and I did the East Side together.
We have this whole East Side/ West Side rivalry thing going on in our county. I don’t get it, myself, though it reminds me of a student from Rwanda I once had. He was from a really homogenous community — one race, one religion, one political party. Did that mean there was no discrimination in his society, I asked him. No, he said, they just used clan membership. It was the next year that the clan issue in Rwanda made the international news.
It isn’t that bad here. But The Empress and I, not being natives, don’t fully understand the rivalry
. We are aware of it and try to respect it or at least not to step on any toes about it. That’s all we can do.
We had business strategy talks while we drove.
I wore my sunglasses. My optometrist told me at my last visit that I had a lot of sun damage to my eyes, so I got prescription sunglasses and am trying to wear them. I’m trying to wear sunscreen, too.
I feel bad about wearing sunglasses when speaking to people, though, so I apologized and explained to The Empress about wearing dark glasses while talking with her in the car.
“I looked at my hands,” I said.
That was enough.
Young people will not know this, but the hands become old way before the rest of the body. Your bosom is still in a reasonable place, your face is not yet like a road map, the hair is not thinning, but your hands become aged.
It is sun. So let that be a reminder to wear sunscreen and sunglasses and give up tanning.
The Empress said she just tries not to look at her hands.
She doesn’t think that it is sun exposure anyway. She thinks it is about how much water you drink.
Chanthaboune hooked me up with some honey and salt hand treatment that prevents my hands from looking 
completely grotesque, but I still see The Empress’s point. It might be better just not to look.
I had to come back and add this not-lovely picture of the Bijoux Blouse because, well, it proves that I am doing a little bit of knitting. This is …. I have lost track of how many skeins I’ve knitted of this stuff by now, but I was at the end of one when I took this picture. I am three inches from the neckline shaping.
Actually, if your hands have inexplicably gotten old-looking while you were busy doing something else, you should definitely knit. This will cause your hands to look venerable and wise, rather than merely spotty and sun-damaged. This doesn’t work for any other part of the body, so take advantage of the opportunity.
Spectacular cloud photos!
There are parts of your post that are very rhythmical and poetic. The part about looking at your hands is BEAUTIFUL!! (I’m paying a lot of attention to word use and flow lately as I’m about to start working on my book – did I just say that? WOW.)
RYC: I will do a post on my book when I get my life back in order. Perhaps tomorrow (if I’m not too pooped). I’ve been really sick (tired and cold and hot and cranky) for nearly 1.5 weeks. But I’ll throw an abstract onto my site tomorrow (or the weekend). It’s in its very beginning stages, so the abstract will be rough. Oh so rough.
My mother recently told me to ALWAYS wear sunscreen on my hands. I wish I’d known that 20 years ago. And I’m not even (that) old.
Sunscreen and sunglasses are big issues over here because of the extremely high incidence of skin cancer in NZ (and in Australia). A problem with being under a hole in the ozone layer. I stay out of the sun mostly so not so much sun damage on my hands but as my hands are the one place on which there is no fat at all my hands have always looked oldish even when I was a kid – loose easy-to-wrinkle skin sitting directly on finger bones and knuckles with no softening fat layer. That’s all my mother’s fault, I inherited that physical characteristic from her.