Adriana Kraft

When it's time to heat things up...

Stay Healthy

#Boomers and Hobbies #MFRWAuthor #Health

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Welcome to Week Six of the MFRW 52-Week Blog Challenge! This week’s topic is My hobbies (when I’m not writing).

By now if you follow us at all, you know we’re baby boomers, so it should come as no surprise that staying healthy tops the list of anything we get involved in. (Photo – biking in Palo Duro Canyon, Texas).

With any luck, I might need this body another three decades, and I’d like to be able to enjoy it! Our health, our hobbies, and our writing form the proverbial three-legged stool upon which everything else depends.

That may sound way too serious, but don’t worry, our first criterion for selecting a hobby is pleasure! If we don’t enjoy it, we’re not likely to keep at it, no matter how much it might be good for us  🙂 . Beyond being pleasurable, we hope it contributes to our health in some fashion, but even if it doesn’t, a major criterion is that it not be harmful.

Most of our hobbies involve physical activity: hiking, bicycle riding, dancing (ballroom and country/western), walking, mini golf, and golf (Mr. Kraft is a regular, I’ve just started lessons). We thrive on being outdoors, traveling, taking in new events and new scenes, any time the opportunity arises. (on the right, Hecata Lighthouse, Oregon coast; on the left, hiking in Sedona, Arizona).

We both have a few sedentary hobbies – as long as our bodies stay healthy, we’d like to have a brain to go with them, and there’s Alzheimer’s in my family tree, so I’m probably overly sensitive on this issue.

In addition to reading (goes without saying – we’re writers!), both of us enjoy several word games – scrabble, crossword puzzles, the WordStreak App and the WordBrain App among them. I might be addicted to Sudoku. I take on the challenging ones and have to limit myself to one a day or I’ll get nothing else done!

And where does writing fit in? We started writing erotic romance together as a hobby to keep our own juices flowing and follow the use it or lose it dictum. I’ll spare you the details about how our writing feeds our personal life (TMI and all that…) – let’s just say we hope it does the same for our readers!

We blog about health issues from time to time and are always looking for authors and readers to interview about their health stories – leave us a comment if you’d like to be on our guest list!

Curious about what other authors do when they’re not writing? Check out the posts below!

Evening Walk – Evening Sky #MFRWauthor #Mindfulness

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Much of the year we take our daily walk in the daylight or early twilight. But southern Nevada June temps have driven us to wait until after nine in the evening – and even then sometimes it’s still over ninety degrees.

The upside? Getting reacquainted with the night sky. Our RV resort has an irregular shape, so as we walk its one-mile perimeter, we can take in the 360 degrees of the night sky from a range of viewing angles.

20150421 waxing crescent and venusTo the west as we begin our walk, Venus, Jupiter, and Leo’s largest star, Regulus, hang suspended like brilliant spangles on the strand of a necklace. I can’t remember seeing Venus look so large or so bright, but it turns out this happens every eight years or so, a combination of when it is closest to earth, and when its angle to the sun illuminates the greatest portion of its surface, from earth’s point of view. Watch your night sky the next two or three nights to see the waxing crescent moon in the vicinity of this stunning necklace. Here’s a photo I took at dusk in April in southern Arizona, waxing crescent and Venus.

Our next turn takes us facing south. Arcturus is nearly overhead – but we’ve learned we can always find it in any season by following where the handle of the big dipper points. Dropping toward the horizon from there, we find Virgo’s largest star, Spica.

As we turn east, the Summer Triangle of Vega, Deneb and Altair (in Lyra, Cygnet and Aquila, or the Lyre, the Swan, and the Eagle) is just starting to rise. When we first bought our telescope and began to study the night sky, this landmark – or perhaps skymark – formed the anchor of our summer sky. In that season it sits directly overhead in the evening, is visible from dusk to dawn, and is a roadmap to the Milky Way.

And finally the north, with the Big Dipper, Little Dipper, Cassiopeia, and the North Star, probably the most familiar part of the sky, Why? Because our night sky circulates around the North Star, and these constellations never set, though this week, here, Cassiopeia is lost in the haze close to the mountains on the northern horizon.

This doesn’t always happen, but last night as we gazed north, I suddenly experienced the sensation of being wrapped in splendor and flooded with gratitude.

Day One #MFRWAuthor #Stayfit

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Anyone who works at staying fit knows the syndrome – life is never static, and keeping healthy turns out to involve an endless series of starting over.

Today, it’s Day One after a fun three days at The Golden Nugget and The Fremont Street Experience in Las Vegas (well, no end of exercise, between all the dancing and the walking), and also Day One of changing up our timing.

Palo-Duro-Adriana-300x200Summer has arrived. Mimosa sweetness fills the air and the heat is intense. Ten AM bike rides are no longer an option – we’ve got to get up early and ride before breakfast to have a comfortable cruising temperature. It’s only 9:30 as I write this and already 87 degrees – we took our ride (ten minutes, to ease back into the routine) at 7:30, when it was only in the high seventies. This afternoon, instead of walking, we’ll hit the pool around 3 PM. (pic above is Palo Duro Canyon, TX, November, 2012).

Today is the first day of the rest of our lives…

Focus #MFRWAuthor #Health

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Stay healthy? Here’s hoping! As we’ve been evaluating our purpose and focusing our writing and marketing energies after our three month break, we recognized that our highest value, what we prize most in life, is health. It undergirds everything else. Without it, none of the things we value and enjoy are possible.

We work hard to stay healthy. We eat a balanced diet, use fresh foods, and avoid excessive sugars. We spend at least ten to fifteen hours a week in some form of exercise, including core strengthening, weights and aerobics. We exercise our brains through staying curious, studying new things that interest us, traveling, learning new dances, working puzzles and playing brain games. No matter how hard we’re working, we take breaks, relax, get out and enjoy nature, and just chill. And yes, having hot sex is on that list.

When we were younger, I think we were more likely to take health for granted. Well into the second half of our lives, we know it’s a precious resource. We’re passionate about this, and we’ll be sharing more about this passion in future blog posts. Stay tuned.

A sample of what we love about staying healthy: Hiking at Bell Rock, Sedona, last January.

Adriana Sedona Hike 2015

If You’re Lucky…

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The-Ultimate-Guide-to-Sex-Over-Fifty-200x300“If you’re lucky, the question of sex for seniors will be relevant to your life, sooner or later.” This is my favorite line from Charlie Glickman’s review of Joan Price’s brand new book, The Ultimate Guide to Sex Over Fifty.

Um, yes. Hubs and I are definitely over fifty, and we do consider ourselves extremely lucky. We write spicy romantic suspense and erotic romance together because we love it, we want to stay sexually active as we grow older (and we hope to grow lots older), and we’d like to entice others to do the same.

So we’re thrilled to see this new book out from Joan Price, whom we’ve been following for a few years, and eager to have it in our hands. It’s available for pre-order now at Amazon and will be released January 13.

While you’re waiting for it, Charlie Glickman’s review is definitely worth a read. Oh, you’re not nearly fifty yet, so this doesn’t apply to you? Here’s what he has to say about that: “If you spend the first fifty years of your life ignoring the fact that older folks have sex, or worse, if you make it into a joke or a target of mockery, you’re setting yourself up for a really rough time when you get to that age.”

Here’s to a long life and happiness, all the way around!