Sally - ProfilesArchive

About Me

I am currently 50 years old, single and living an insanely busy life at the moment. I have a rotten habit of overscheduling myself to where I end up with very little time for me. However, keeping busy makes the days go by quickly and now that I am looking at retiring in 5Â½ years, I can honestly say that this is one life changing event that I am truly looking forward to. I will finally have more time for myself instead of working all day and then going off to do stuff in the evenings.I study and teach T'ai Chi (Wu Shu Long Form), I work out with a trainer (who is also my physical therapist!) and am an avid hiker, having many trails under my belt. I love walking in wild areas and appreciating the beauties of nature and the changing seasons. It brings to mind Thoreau's "Walden", which I read several years ago, a life altering experience.I am a practicing Unitarian Universalist by religion (raised Roman Catholic), active in our local UU Church on the Social Justice Committee, the Adult Religious Exploration program and am currently building our church's new library collection. I just completed a year of helping our church celebrate its 140th anniversary and heading up the committee that was in charge of this activity.I have also been a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism for 30 years, and for those of you familiar with the SCA, I am known as Lady Saradwen and live in the Marche of Gwyntarian in the Middle Kingdom. I am also involved in the Kent Civil War Society and I typeset their newsletter, "Bivouac", every month and maintain the Society's web site:http://www.geocities.com/kentcivilwarsociety/Needless to say, I do my best to keep very busy with numerous things going on in my life at any given time and on any given day! But I do look forward to down time to lounge on the sofa and read or watch movies or just sit in front of the computer and surf my usual daily web site visits.

My Interests

Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), history, Civil War, traditional (folk) music, reading, religion, nature, hiking, mountain climbing, working out, movies, art, classical music, architectural history, singing, Unitarian Universalism

I'd like to meet:

Trainer Bob Harper, Barack Obama, Dennis Kucinich, the Dalai Lama, author Sharon Kay Penman, author Sharyn McCrumb, singer/songwriter David Francey, singer/musician Tim O'Brien - I'm sure that there are many more, but I can't think of them at the moment!

Music:

I love classical music, opera, folk music and am open to listening to other types of music, but the ones listed are by far my favourites.

Movies:

I love historical sagas, my recent favourites being "Amazing Grace", "Gladiator", "Master and Commander". I also loved Michael Moore's SiCKO. I also like sports stories like "We Are Marshall" and "Coach Carter" as well as small independent movies like "Songcatcher", a movie about southern Appalachian folk music.

Television:

I don't get to watch a lot because of time committments, but I religiously watch "The Biggest Loser" and I love PBS and am currently watching Ken Burns' "The War" which is really moving.

Books:

I love historical sagas (do we see a repeating theme here?) and particularly like Sharon Kay Penman's series on early Mediaeval English royal histories. Her "Llewellyn" series and her current "Plantagenet" series are wonderful! She also writes a cracking good mystery series set in the court of dowager Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. I like mysteries so long as they are in a historical setting. I also like Civil War books, both fiction and non-fiction.

Heroes:

John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Col. Robert Gould Shaw (white commander of the all black 54th Massachusetts regiment during the Civil War), Francis Child (collector of many now well known English ballads), Cecil Sharp (collector of Southern Appalachian folk songs), Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Thomas Wentworth Higginson (19th century firebrand Unitarian minister and early fitness buff), Olympia Brown (first female Universalist minster), Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Dorothea Dix (19th century mental health advocate), Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain - just to name a few!

My Blog

MLK, Jr. and Unitarianism

This being the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., I wanted to share a bit of interesting knowledge with you all that even I did not know about him, that, upon reflection...
Posted by Sally on Sat, 05 Apr 2008 06:50:00 PST

How I eat

Today at work, we had one of our occasional "food days", where we all bring in lots of good food to accompany what turned out to be a rather lengthy, but at least not boring, staff meeting. Wow, do I ...
Posted by Sally on Fri, 28 Mar 2008 03:05:00 PST

OK, so it’s been a while.....

As you may have guessed, winter succeeded in doing its usual number on me by sapping me of my energy that is usually far more abundant in the lighter months of the year. Thus, the long absence from th...
Posted by Sally on Sun, 23 Mar 2008 05:08:00 PST

A New Year’s resolution

Winter. The end of the holiday season. The descent into the coldest, darkest part of the year. Often, this is the hardest season of all for me to tough out and to try to stay happy and optim...
Posted by Sally on Tue, 01 Jan 2008 11:26:00 PST

Insecurity

Lately it seems like I've been dealing with a great deal of insecurity. I'm 50 years old and often my body feels more and more like that age. I work out but it seems like I'm really struggling with th...
Posted by Sally on Mon, 31 Dec 2007 07:16:00 PST

The sounds and smells of Christmas

Although I am currently a Unitarian Universalist by religion, I was born and raised in the Roman Catholic faith and attended Catholic school as a child. My earliest exposure to the Catholic Mass was t...
Posted by Sally on Mon, 17 Dec 2007 08:11:00 PST

The Journey of my Heart

After the heart scare that I experienced a few weeks ago, the good news is that my heart and blood cholesterol test results all came back excellent, so I have no reason to worry about either of those ...
Posted by Sally on Sun, 09 Dec 2007 01:53:00 PST

Working out with a trainer

For the past year, since being released from what would turn out to be a long round of physical therapy for two separate injuries, I've been working out with a trainer who also just oh, so convenientl...
Posted by Sally on Fri, 30 Nov 2007 08:13:00 PST

Ticker Tape

The past two and a half days have been pretty nerve wracking, to say the least. First, I began feeling a peculiar headache on Sunday morning. It was coming from the back of my head and when I rea...
Posted by Sally on Tue, 20 Nov 2007 10:37:00 PST

A church of peacemaking, born of war

It occurred to me at church yesterday when the worship associate pointed out the dove in our one stained glass window that we are a church born out of war that was created as ...
Posted by Sally on Mon, 12 Nov 2007 03:18:00 PST