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Only a day late, courtesy of the Sinulog Fluvial Procession which caused our ferry to be cancelled yesterday (but if it hadn’t been for that, it would have been cancelled due to Tropical Storm Ada. At least those two coincided so we didn’t lose two days.

The outside seating on the ferry was almost deserted! I don’t know why people hang out in near-zero AC cabins with movies and other people’s devices blaring when you can be out in the air, watching the water.

This jawfish has some serious construction plans.

max image size is 128MB. I am nowhere near that. What gives?

seems to work from browser but not iphone app. curious.

After a night of the heaviest rain I’ve ever been in (and I have spent a decent amount of time in SE Asia so trust me – this was serious rain) we decided to not go trekking in the jungle because the trails would likely be too slippery and dangerous. (The local guide agreed).

But the monkeys in the area decided to come to us and we saw three kinds around our deck before deciding to go walk up the road toward the park. I decided to stay behind and read because I’m still dealing with some blisters from newer flip-flops. Bill said he’d text me if he found any orangutans and I said sure, go for it.

(if I could upload photos here is where I would include the screenshot of the text message that says “found some”, the “Find My” screen of me zeroing in on Bill’s location, and the video of how quickly I was walking with those cruel flip-flops)

We got some good photos and some great video that I swear I will put up as soon as we have enough throughout for TLS sessions to work!

All in all, we saw 4 of the 6 endemic primates of North Sumatra today! Orangutan, long-tailed macaque, short-tailed macaque, and Thomas Langer (which I gather is a type of monkey and not the specific guy we saw)

I am still doing this, I swear 🙂 The mindfulness bell keeps turning itself off, which is odd. I haven’t figured out the right routine for me to remember to write every day but at least I remembered again.

Intention is still to take in the good. I think this is a good full-week intention. And I’m actually feeling pretty happy today (that’s a bit of a cheat, since it’s Friday).

I do have a 90 min float booked for this afternoon and then I have the evening alone because Bill is going out for dinner. I got the materials I needed to start on this course,

so I plan to get a nice warm fire going to ward off today’s downpour and play at being creative 🙂

Well, as expected, by about noon on Monday, I’d forgotten about my intention for the day. I did remember again yesterday though and was in the middle of typing up a post for the day (same intention) but I got derailed and then forgot about the whole thing even sooner!

I’m trying again this morning and I think I might set a reminder for about 2pm to poke myself again. The trouble is, I often get distracted so I set a LOT of reminders and now I’m in a ‘broken windows’ situation where I just ignore most of them. I could probably benefit from a reminder purge.

At any rate, I’m sticking with the the ‘take in the good’ intention today, and possibly for the whole week. I did feel like it was having a positive impact (at least in the moment) on Monday and it’s certainly an area I would benefit from more strength in.

I have been reading “Buddha’s Brain” lately and I think it would be useful for me to explicitly state an intention for each day.

I want to follow the exercises in this, and other books, but I don’t tend to have these things bubble up in my mind regularly. So I’m going to try getting into the habit of explicitly stating an intention publicly to see if that might help.

Today’s intention is “to take in the good”. The exercise is intended to help counter the negative bias that evolution has gifted ya with (in order to help us survive)

But apparently actively “soaking” in positive events can help shift one’s default reactions to situations and these days, I could really use that.

I am attempting to post from my iPad for the very first time! This is not going to be a tremendously interesting post, but it sure is interesting to ME!