This diary belongs in the No Politics Zone and is really about maintaining balance in our lives and about stress relief lest you get mired in depression and anxiety over the state of the country and the world. This diary is about some of the ways I deal with my stress. Everyone has to discover what works best for them. Counseling is often appropriate if you find yourself obsessing so much you find it difficult to function. Others who are stressed out may just need to light a fire under themselves and break their usual routines. One of the best remedies is to socialize with like-minded people but to temper talking about current event with doing fun things. Everything I write about here can be made more satisfying by having someone to share the experience with.
Some of my friends and quite possibly those who have read my diaries here think that my life revolves around following the bad news that seems to come fast and furious throughout the day. I do occasionally bring pop culture references into my diaries, though. For example “HELLACIOUS HUMOR: Mr. Pillow to open the Hellmouth tomorrow. Better call Buffy and the Scooby gang” (here: www.dailykos.com/...) from Wednesday where I featured one of the series I also referenced here.
Two or three times a week I literally make my physical escape from being mired in depressing and anxiety provoking news. I take trips into the countryside and find lovely scenic vistas and parks. I also eat at lots of different restaurants including old favorites and new places and now with nice weather am starting to find neat places to have a picnic where I always manage to find a table a few feet from one of our rivers. (See photos in first comment)
Oregon wine country and (lower right) Willamette Falls, the second largest waterfall by volume after Niagara Fall in the United States, just a 15 minute drive from where I live.
The author at Oregon’s Molalla State Park on the Willamette River
Another way I spend my time is watching streaming video.
Currently I am watching two popular and long-running TV series which I viewed when they first aired. I am watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer (on Amazon Prime, Rotten Tomato reviews) and Nashville (read reviews) which unfortunately is on Hulu.
I say this is unfortunate because while I have had no problems at all with Amazon Prime or Netflix, Hulu goes offline every few days. It did this last night and even though I unplugged my devices and rebooted them several times a message kept appearing that the service was unavailable.
This morning I did a simple web search for "Hulu problems" and discovered that I was wasting my time trying to get the service to function. The graph below shows exactly when Hulu stopped working on my TV. Here's DownDetector, the website that tracks in real time which services are having outages, and this shows the reason I couldn't continue to watch Nashville.
After repeatedly trying to get Hulu to function I gave up and watched a few episodes of Seinfeld on Netflix. This is my back-up escape into what I consider pure comedy genius and the best written and acted sitcom ever made. I remember very well the plots of many of them having watched when they aired, but it is a treat when I see one that I don't really recall all that well. I just watched Season Three, episode 15, The Fix-Up, and episode 16, The Suicide. Episode 17, which I am looking forward to seeing, is an hour long special, The Boyfriend which Jerry Seinfeld has said is his favorite. TV Guide ranked the episode fourth in their 1997 list of the 100 Greatest TV Episodes of All Time. Fans will remember it as the one about former New York Mets baseball player Keith Hernandez who appeared as himself.
I also watched The Batman the other day and managed to get through the entire movie though I didn't think it was particularly good even though it got 86% and 87% positive Rotten Tomato ratings.
