Happy Saturday! Come on in! As always, a big thanks to Natalie of Natalie the Explorer for hosting WeekendCoffeeShare.

After a brief cold spell, I began to slowly re-introducing my plants to the outside world again toward the end of the week. I have been checking my weather forecast. I want to say it but I don’t want to jinx it but I think (and hope) the last frost has come to pass. It’s usually in early May, so even though there’s no freezes in the next 10 days, I think I might play the safe card and let May 1st come and pass before I put any of the warm weather crop in the ground.

Meanwhile, the garden is so incredibly lush and green with lots of goodies.

Do you see all the flowers in the garden bed full of strawberries? I hope those berries will be big, juicy, and delicious. 🤤

I went on a couple of walks this week around the neighborhood and around the park. I have kept the walk to around 2 miles as my knees are still recovering from the plane ride from a month ago. Can you believe my trip to Taiwan and Japan was a month ago? The memories still feel fresh in my mind, but at the same time, it’s growing more distant by the day.

On my walks, I listened to podcasts. I’m finding them more enjoyable than music these days, particularly because I don’t have to keep skipping songs I no longer like. The podcasts I listen to usually last the duration of my walk. I recently discovered the podcast – Unsolved History – and it piques my interest with each episode as I follow to uncover some cold mystery.

As I walked, I paid attention to my surroundings. I had to keep reminding myself that it’s now only spring and flowers are blooming but there were days when I’ve felt like we’re hurtling toward summer, especially on days that demanded me to take off my jacket.

Work was exciting this week as it was the quarterly activity for the department. This time, we went to smash some junk in a rage room. Arrgh!

Earlier in the week, I told my mom that I would be going into the office on Friday this week because of the team activity. “Where are you going this time?” she asked.

“We’re going to let go of our rage and break some stuff,” I said.

She scoffed, “The people that need to do that is weak and cowardice. Strong people don’t need to do such things. Strong people don’t have rage.”

That’s not true, I wanted to say but shrugged instead. That’s not a battle I wanted to pick. Not that day, maybe not ever.

Going into the rage room, I thought I had the amount of rage to fuel me but instead, I found myself feeling that smashing stuff wasn’t what I wanted to do. The truth was, I wanted to punch things, not destroy things like a monster. I tried throwing things, too, and it didn’t make me feel any better. So I found myself sitting at the table outside the rage room, watching my co-workers have fun while sipping on a sprite, drawing and writing on the table.

I wrote, “Expressing rage and anger is not cowardice but it’s an act of courage.” I feel like strong people are the ones courageous enough to demonstrate anger and rage. They’re not afraid to show it and they don’t care who’s watching. They are the ones who can “dance like no one’s looking.”

We left the room with a pile of plastic on the ground and went to do one last thing before calling it a day – bottle throwing. The sprite I was sipping was in a glass bottle. With safety glasses on and bottle in hand, I threw the bottle as hard as I could until I heard the glass shatter.