Inertia

I get ideas and the urge to write a post while I am driving somewhere, when I am trying to reduce the pile of laundry waiting to be ironed, as I read the paper or a book. But when I open the computer, lately, I find myself checking Facebook, playing Scrabble, doodling mindlessly with Spider Solitaire, fiddling with my photos - anything but write. I suppose this is writer's block in a specially insidious form. And I am behind in reading a lot of your very good stuff, and very bad at commenting, lately. Inertia (my mother would have said 'Lazy!) is not a good thing.

Part of it is, I think, that I am not sleeping well. What with the man in my life ripping the duvet off me in the pre-dawn, an inability to go to sleep in any timely way or sleep in and what seems to be a chronic state of fatigue, my brain is not functioning well. When I was a sleep-deprived young mother, I used to listen to my elderly relatives complain about inability to sleep and mutter to myself that if I just had some time and a flattish surface, this would never happen to me. I thought their complaints about sore knees and itchy skin were sad but would not ever be relevant to my life. Well, guess what. I've got all of that as well as a few that they never mentioned, probably because the symptoms were too gross to be public.

Anyway, enough of all that. I am going to write again, and it is not going to be a catalogue of the joys of being almost seventy. (Picture my jaw clenched with determination, head thrown back, eyes staring sternly ahead - disregard the bags underneath these glowing eyes.)

I have a friend who has just taken up blogging and is having a fine time journalling her life. The other day she put up (at some unseasonably early hour) a list of what she planned to accomplish that day. Knowing the Bee, I suspect she got it all done, too. And when she finds her voice, she will shine as she is one of the most up-beat, mindful and generous people I know. I have to check with her to see if she wants me to put her site up. One more to add to the list of people who inspire me (you know who you are!).

My preoccupations at present - one is the weather. We got a few minutes of rain last night, enough to bring the rain gauge up to 3/4 of an inch. That depth is the total sum of the rain we have had since September 2nd. And we had 1/2 inch between August 2nd and September 2nd. There are a lot of stressed and grumpy trees that have just gone dormant and are shedding dry brown leaves. A few of the more deeply rooted are showing some colour now after three nights of frost, but it is not going to be a colourful fall. Time to put the flower borders to bed and almost time to start raking. These next few weeks are one of the highpoints of my year. The bugs are gone, the sky is often a remarkable blue (to-day with the last of the rain clouds sailing away), the colour, good or bad, something to make me rejoice.

I also rejoice at the wildlife we see. Lately we have had a bear, various numbers of wild turkeys, and this morning six deer trooped out onto the back field in the early morning light. One was a very young buck with single spike horns, and there were two fawns, dancing and chasing one another. I posted this sighting to Facebook, calling it a 'good haul' and got called on the expression. In fact, I was asked (tongue in cheek) if this meant that they were being loaded into my truck. You don't question the expressions you use until someone does question them, in my experience. My mother's family used 'a good haul' to mean a satisfactory collection of something, whether it be strawberries or shopping. My guess is that this set of ancestors must have fished - they came from Ireland during the famine there in the nineteenth century. And they used some lovely phrases. My grandmother called the guy who delivered the baking 'gossamer wings' for his inability to remember much of anything, leaving your work undone to go somewhere was 'roading' and a child who misbehaved got 'a good hiding'. In fact, what I meant was that this sighting had a good number of deer - we usually see only one or two at a time.

I love language. Well-turned expressions, succinct and punchy sentences, a lyrical stream-of-thought poem, all delight me. Someone who can tell a story well, design an understated amusing comment or convey an atmosphere in a few words is an inspiration. I read well-crafted novels again and again, for the turn of phrase, the skilful characterization and the sheer joy of an exciting plot, one that keeps your interest even when you know the ending. Reading the local papers is an exercise in keeping my temper, sometimes, when the writer of an article makes basic mistakes. Sometimes they get an email from me, more in sorrow than in anger, about the repeated ones. If we're reviewing a set of minutes or a policy statement at the board where I volunteer, the meeting members will sigh and resign themselves when my hand goes up and I start correcting lame sentences and awkward grammar. I got myself onto a committee to redesign our Vision, Mission and Values statements because of this nasty little vice. The whole thing is now boiled down to fit on one page but we are still tinkering. As with family expressions, something you don't question takes on a whole new aspect when someone else tags it. The latest is a question about 'just'. If we talk about a 'just' society, just what do we mean.

Stay tuned. I may figure that one out one day. And in the meantime, I have to go and stock up the deer feeding station.

So, I blinked and a whole week disappeared...

During the last week I have returned to my usual complement of meetings of the volunteer organizations I work in and, as well, I have been co-opted into a group of folk who are trying to provide tools for a civil debate in our upcoming municipal election.  Our township council has been split four to three for much of its last term and the result has been in-fighting, chaotic or no decision-making and a wild assortment of letters to the editor of our local paper.  This paper is published weekly and does not have a lot of space and so, in the interest of keeping a good thing going, I volunteered to run a 'forum' type blog for a while.

Although the group has decided not to endorse candidates openly, I am comfortable in giving advice to the people we think should win.  I have been editing letters and putting together election material, printing stickers and getting the publicity out for the blog.  Meanwhile, my camera has been sitting around, whining that no one is playing with (him, her, it?  Does anyone anthropomorphize a camera? And is is 'z' or 's'?).  Is that even a word?  By the time I finish putting a candidate's thoughts into succinct bullets, my brain is like jellied aspic.  The green kind, with marshmallows.  As we all know, marshmallows can't spell.

However, we did have another day of alternate rain and sun, and late in the afternoon the sun shone through the rain and I had a tiny rainbow in my front yard.  Alas that it did not photograph at all well.  However, the cold rain on the hot rock in the back produced lovely mist. 

041/365

I also got this.  Grasshopper floats in space.  Kind of neat, eh?

042/365

We have had a young pileated woodpecker squawking around the place for the last week or so.  It's at the stage where the parent is leading it to a food source, feeding it once and then leaving it to continue finding the food on its own. Over the weekend, the food source was the wild cherries ripening on the black cherry trees along our side yard. The youngster eats a bit, slips off the branch, yells for a bit, eats a bit more, moves to the tree trunk and tries to find a bug.    Having listened to the wretched bird yelp and squall and whine for mommy most of the day, I took my camera out onto the kitchen porch, cranked up the telephoto lens and got these results.

043/365, 044/365, 045/365, 046/365.

And if he isn't pretty, he sure is dramatic. 

Monday Mission - Verse or worse.

The sun is shining here today,

It lifts my flagging spirit high.

Without the sun, my day is gray.

But on this fine November day

My words and fingers seem to fly.

The sun is shining here today

And so my today my life is gay.

To write some poetry I'll try.

The sun is shining here today.

The Monday Mission game I'll play

For good rhymes with my friends to vie.

The sun is shining here today

It seems to make things go my way

While smiling down from the blue sky.

Without the sun, the day is gray.

My friends are like a warm sun ray

They daily lift my spirits high.

The sun is shining here today.

Both sun and friends relieve the gray.

This is somewhat of a cheat on the verse form Villanelle.
The first and third line of the opening verse are supposed to be repeated verbatim at set intervals throughout the poem and again as the last two lines. But when did I ever do a Monday Mission without cheating just a bit.

But what it is trying to say is that you lot of Monday Missioners are a great group and make my life better. Earlier this week Kaye gave me an award, and I am really thrilled. Thank you, Kaye, but I think you give me just as much or more as I have ever given you.

You all do. And so I am passing it along to all of you.


The link is now up at Painted Maypole and there are some great and greatly funny poems to be found there. I personally give thanks for Maypole who keeps this thing going.

Menu - Monday Mission

Painted Maypole hosts, plans and manages, the Monday Mission challenges. She's a real trooper; in more ways than one. To see who is playing this week, hop over to her blog and follow the links. This week's challenge was to do a menu. I, erm, twisted it a bit.

Here, then, is what I dream of finding among my texting software's drop down menus. The Ultimate Edit Menu.

It's a JOAT's Life After All

Image borrowed from Wikipedia

I spend far more of my time than I would wish trying to flesh out acronyms and so I am sitting here laughing at myself as I title a post with one. I first ran across 'joat' in Heinlein's stories, I think, and loved the word. It means 'jack-of-all trades' and he used it to describe someone who could turn his hand to anything as needed. But I have always thought of it as the perfect description of a housewife and mother (or, to be politically correct, a house-husband and SAH father too.) Chief cook and bottle washer, laundress, chauffeur, chief procurement officer ( of food, silly), safety inspector, chambermaid, librarian, early childhood educator, gardener, handyman, dog walker, book-keeper, gate-keeper, practical nurse and practically everything else. With a lot of us working outside the home as well. Not to overlook the amount of energy it takes to make the personal part of marriage work. It doesn't surprise me at all that vitamins sell so well.

There are a lot of joatish aspects to running a home even after the kids have left it for good -- and even after they have, you're still a mother, there at need, and eventually a grandma.

As for me, I am a quintessential joat and have been all my life. I'm the kind of person who can turn my hand to a lot of things, from being the body on the other end of the cross-cut saw as an eight year old to the person who could think up skits and draw or make decorations for school dances, chair an obstreperous meeting, make costumes for the gymnastics team, run a parents' lobby group, read and correct a PhD thesis, work puppets (and make them), design posters or look after an evaporator. As I write this list, I realize that I could make it longer: good for a person's ego to look back and think about things that have been accomplished.

There's an underside to this rock, however. Or there is for me. In the course of doing a bit of everything, I have never spent the time and energy to do one thing well. I've been reading The Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. The book is an analysis of why some people do amazingly well at what they do - Bill Gates is one of his examples as are star hockey players - and he postulates that it takes ten thousand hours of practice to learn to do something exceptionally well. Putting in that amount of time is not something that a joat will do, being too busy doing an adequate job for ten hours at a thousand things. After I put the book down, with a sigh, I thought a bit about that ten thousand hours. And I realized that I have, indeed, put that amount of time in at something. Reading. I have known how to read for 62 years. That's 22,630 days. And I have probably read something for at least an hour on more than half of those days. I'm eligible to be an elite reader. Woot.

Somehow, this thought is not as comforting as all that. It would be nice, she whispered, to be really, really good at something that other people recognise as amazing. Even nicer if that thing generated income, but, for me, the important thing would be to have some confidence that the thing I did (whatever that would be) would turn out superlatively well. I wonder, though, if the kings (and queens) of their kind really feel the kind of confidence that I long to possess. Did Gretzky take the ice knowing he could and would score or did he start every shift in terror that this time it wouldn't happen? Or the Beatles wake up in fear that they wouldn't come up with anything new that day? Strangely enough, I can launch into an activity that I am 'good enough' at with some confidence and make adjustments on the fly to make it work.

But when it comes to something that I would really like to be an ace at, like writing in this blog, there are a lot of false starts, erasures and angst. (Wait, should angst be a plural noun to keep the cadence? Is there a plural of it? If so, what is it? Mmm. Better pick another word.) But when it comes to something I really want to do well, such as writing this post, I make a lot of false starts and erasures and suffer a lot of anxiety.

Every once and a while, though, the words will fly and I will fly with them, higher, faster, stronger, and what ends up on the page is all I wanted it to be. And some day, maybe, I will have written my ten thousandth post and it will all come together. Until that day I jog along, a happy-enough joat, using my highly honed reading skills to admire the work of my friends. And life is good.

Writer's Block

Or, perhaps, blockhead.

Falling

Photo Credit: The Younger Daughter

It's almost noon here and patches of frost are still lingering on the shady side of the lawn; the leaves are raining down whenever the wind blows, broken free by the frost from their hold on the trees. The red maple that I have in the header picture is now bare of its gold and scarlet as are the birches of their paler yellow. Only the sugar maples and oaks are still holding a brave show of red and bronze. And what am I doing in the midst of all this splendour? Not posting, that's for sure. It's been more than two weeks since I have had a free hour to play.

The things that I have been doing? Well, raking leaves for one thing. JG is not happy if his lawn is covered with leaves. And when the lawn is surrounded by and dotted with trees, each day brings a new covering to be removed. I have also been: dealing with Thanksgiving; visiting my mother-in-law; making posters and drafting a display ad; running to meetings; running to physio; doing the exercises (not often enough!) that the therapist is giving me; trying to get the winter clothes out, pressed and ready to use; making stacks of the papers in the office that need to be sorted and dealt with; and doing a little retail therapy. In fact, we bought a new vehicle.

I have been driving a Jeep Liberty and I adored the thing. It had four wheel high and low drive and could pull out of the nastiest snowy ditch. It took diesel fuel and got great mileage. What it could not do is miss a deer. Last winter I moaned a lot on this blog about the deer that crunched in the front end and about the subsequent tribulations of getting the damage all fixed. Since it was repaired, the Jeep has never been the same and has become prone to quitting dead just after being started and refusing to restart. It also sometimes refuses to shift. This is not good, not at all good, if a lot of the driving you do is through the back country where there are no people and no cell phone coverage. It stopped last week eight feet out of the garage and we decided that this was the last straw.

I now have a nice Ford Escape, all wheel drive and lots of bells and whistles, including Sirius Satellite Radio. I had no idea there were so many kinds of country music, not to mention sports broadcasts. I have a sneaking suspicion that Sirius is just as much of a distraction while driving as cell phones. The Ford is also equipped with a hands free connection for the cell phone, if I could make it work. The dashboard is more than a little daunting, let me tell you. My darling Jeep is in the hands of my brother-in-law, a Class A mechanic among his other accomplishments, who lives where he can phone for help. I am sure he can keep it running, if anyone can. And I have some confidence I can get where I need to go without hassles.

I wish I didn't need to go so many places so often, but the load is going to lighten after November when I am handing over the Chair position at the LHCS Board. Between then and now, unfortunately, we have to go through an accreditation process and preparing for this has been a lot of work, meetings and studying. The accreditation team interviews board members as well as staff and we have to be able to discuss such fascinating topics as how a governance board works and how we establish, follow and review our aims and objectives. I would go to sleep working on this stuff if I weren't so terrified that I won't have an answer that will satisfy the examiners. It's like a final exam but with a team that I really, really don't want to let down.

At least I am not frantically sewing a Halloween costume. Little Stuff decided that she wanted to be a witch, with a slinky dress and a crow on her shoulder. Her mother was able to find a dress that suited her at a costume store, along with a witch hat with streamers, a black wig and a lot of black, purple and sparkly green make-up. I found a paper maché bird that is properly black and boding and she is all set. She did want black shoes with buckles and high heels but I think her mother talked her out of that notion. I do not recall her mother and aunt being quite so exigent about the detail of their costumes, but maybe time has softened the memories. She has already informed me that next year she wants to be a rock star. I guess if the black wig hangs together she could be Cher, maybe.

Tomorrow we are supposed to go and get our regular flu shots; the H1N1 is supposed to be along in early November. Although I am concerned about the grand kids and their parents, who are all in schools where the virus is said to thrive, I am not worried about JG and myself as we are old enough to have been through both the 1950's wave and the 1960's wave and probably have a pretty good immunity. I am told that the line-up for flu shots has been huge so far, most unusually for our area where people are normally pretty blasé. It never ceases to amaze me how little attention people actually pay to the facts during these health scares; the ordinary flu shot has nothing to do with H1N1. Nor is it necessary to stop eating pork. It's frustrating when you are trying to get basic information out; I get the impression that people will do anything rather than wash their hands and stay calm.

I just saw a young doe stroll across our lawn, kicking through the leaves and paying me no attention at all. She's a pretty little thing, just old enough to have lost her dappled coat. The leaves are still pattering down. I need to quit writing, get some lunch and get out there, rake in hand.

One of those Mornings

This morning my brain feels as if someone has stuffed it with cotton wool, put a plastic seal over the top and proclaimed it 'tamper-proof'. There are lots of Good Ideas rattling around in there, because the cotton wool never does a perfect job, but I can't get to them. Can't pry off the seal, can't get the wool to pull out of the cavity, not sure the ideas will prove useful if I do get to them.

If I can't think, then I should be working at mindless tasks. There are lots of those. I should be stuffing the underwear into the washer, since the pile in the dresser drawer is almost non-existant. The bed linen needs changing and washing too. No enthusiasm. My desk and bookshelves are more than usually chaotic. I could at least file stuff. Yawn. I should certainly be making a list of the jobs I have acquired at the meetings I was at yesterday. I am pretty sure there are five or more. I should be working on one of them this morning, in between laundry loads. Maybe later.

I am on my third cup of coffee, too.

Instead of doing any of these good things, I am alternately reading brilliant posts from the talented (and, I am sure, organized) folk on my Reader, throwing in the occasional very dull comment, and playing Spider solitaire. And losing.

Enough, already. My talented and organized mother, when she found me in this kind of funk, always urged me to pick up one corner of one task and worry away at it. Get just a bit done. The momentum, she would tell me patiently, would then carry me forward and I would amaze myself at how much I could accomplish. And of course she was right. As soon as I finish the coffee, the post and have a wee nap, I will find a corner of something and start in on it. Honest.

If I could only pull the cotton stuffing out of the small hole in the top of my head, that is.

And my coffee got cold while I was doing the drawing. Now I have to go and warm it up.

Life with Little Stuff

I honestly don't know how you young mothers find time to write a blog while dealing with kids, household and all the other bits of stuff and fluff that are needed to keep a family going. And hold down a job, many of you. I have had one six year old for ten days and I am a wreck. Not only that, I did not put finger to keyboard for the whole ten days, other than to write (at Little Stuff's dictation) emails to her parents detailing what frogs she had caught each day, what she had painted/made/baked, and how far she was with the latest jig saw puzzle. We went through two 500+ piece jig saws.

It would have been easier if it had not rained just about every blessed day. We did get out a bit between rain showers, mostly to the beaver pond or the marsh to collect the latest in the frog study. We had promised her the beach and a fishing trip in the big boat and neither of these treats happened. 'I guess we aren't going to the beach today Grama, are we?' she would say, small nose pressed to the rain washed window. Luckily the birds were not deterred by the wet and we had a hummingbird show every day on the screen porch. We also reduced the chipmunk population by live trapping the little wretches that were tunnelling in the septic tile bed and releasing them far, far away.

Grama is tired. Grama is tired, mostly, because Little Stuff usually spends 8:30 to 5:30 five days a week in either school or daycare. Her parents try to make her weekends fun to make up to her for lack of time during the week and what this boils down to is that she expects to be entertained or provided with things to do. 'What can I do now, Grama?' was heard a lot chez G this last while. Words to strike terror into the heart of any grandmother trying to make the visit fun so that the parents can relax and know their child will be happy while they are away. I will say for her that, given a craft or toy, she has good concentration and a long attention span. Grandpa taught her to play 'Doe, a deer' etc. on his keyboard and she practised it for hours. She worked at the jigsaws for up to an hour at a time, if someone was doing it with her.

Someone, meaning me or Grandpa. More often, me. I have created a couple of games that are ongoing, one being Spider and the other being a similar pretend game with two china birds that sit on the windowsill near the kitchen table. Spider appears at bath time and at tea parties, the china bird game is requested for each snack time and sometimes the birds join Roo and Spider at the tea parties. I get very tired of them and struggle to come up with new jokes and scripts but Little Stuff loves the game and I am not hopeful that she will tire of it soon. Spider is now almost two years old and the bird game has gone on almost as long.

Grandpa takes her out in the punt we keep on the beaver pond. They got a bullfrog into the punt but it escaped before they could tie down the screen over the top of the old drywall pail that was being used as a holding pen. He comes back wiped out, staggering into the house preceded by a pink cheeked, bright eyed Little Stuff full of stories about their adventures. They were not able to catch a garter snake either. I am thankful for small mercies. Two tree frogs, a leopard frog, a pickerel frog and assorted dragonflies and moths were quite enough.

We also took her to a local conservation area where there are a lot of showy lady slippers in bloom. I loved watching her; in between photographing the flowers she regularly peered under the board walk in search of amphibians and any other goodies that might be present. Looking, in her sundress and straw hat, like something out of a Victorian drawing. You've got to give her credit for perseverance anyway.

I now have two events for the Seniors' group I belong to; preparing and working in a booth to explain our programs and helping organize games at a picnic. One is on Sunday, one on Tuesday. Rain, of course, is forecast. After I get these two obligations out of the way, I may sit down and write something sensible for a change. And there are all of you, with all you do, writing thoughtful and wonderfully funny and fascinating stuff. But if anyone mentions a frog in the next little while, I may scream.

A Monday Mission Announcement

WE HAVE KIDNAPPED MARY G.

THE JUNTA ADVOCATING PLAIN ENGLISH IS HOLDING MARY G TO RANSOM. TO RELEASE HER WE DEMAND THE IMMEDIATE FREEING OF ALL LATINATE MULTI-SYLLABLE ADJECTIVES, AN END TO THE EVIL STRETCHING OF METAPHORS AND THE FREE DETERMINATION OF ALL WHICH CLAUSES.

YOU HAVE UNTIL NOON ON WEDNESDAY TO COMPLY WITH THESE TERMS. OR MARY G WILL BE TOAST.

Your Monday Mission. Brought to you by Painted Maypole.







P.S. If you want the Monday Mission button, Kaye at the road goes ever on designed it and she has it up on her website. I am sure that if you ask nicely, she will share. Thank you, Kaye!

Things are Going Swimmingly

Two years ago today I tentatively stuck a toe into the blogging ocean and shortly thereafter got sucked right out to sea. That's 239 posts and although there are a fair number that are photos or memes, a lot of them have cost me time, skull sweat and frustration. A few of them have garnered me some much needed and gratefully received compliments. It is scary to put parts of yourself on public display, and I find myself at times very insecure about it. Especially since I am an old, gray fish in a school of glittering young ones. I sometimes feel very diffident about hanging about with the mommy bloggers. They all seem to have better stocked minds, intimidating writing skills and a level of technical competence that I struggle to attain.

It is such a wonderful ocean, warm and full of ticklish bubbles, vast and ever changing. [Don't you think you have taken that metaphor far enough? hisses my internal editor.] As I slowly began to find my way around the place, I discovered that the voices and opinions I liked best, the writers with whom I had empathy, were 'mommy bloggers'. I discovered blog after blog sparkling with wit and erudition, funny, wistful, sad. And every one had something to teach me. Most of these blogs are on the blogroll on the lower right hand side of this screen; not all of them because a few, for some reason I can't fathom, won't load into my 'Following' gizmo. I am contemplating trying to find and load a widget I see around the places I go that allows you to list favourite posts. I need courage, coffee and a lot of time before I tackle adding gadgets.

I am only going to mention one blog in particular because we share the blogiversary - her third and my second. This is Under the Mad Hat (Happy third to you, Mad!), who is one of the cleverest bloggers out there. Her posts are amazingly good; she has one of the quicksilver minds I cherish and an understated and somewhat wry humour that sets you off laughing an hour or a day after you have signed off.

This on line world is not a natural fit for me. For quite some time I printed a hard copy of every draft post and went over it with the dreaded red pen. After two years, I no longer do that, but when I put a post up and see a typo or infelicity or bad cut sneering at me, I wonder if I still should. The brain does not function with the speed it had a quarter century ago, that's for sure. And I never have had the kind of concentration and dedication a professional writer needs. [I just leapt up and grabbed the field glasses to check out a bird that flew by my office window. Now, where was I?]

I was I was both surprised and flattered lately when a group of mommybloggers headed by Catherine of Her Bad Mother and Katie of Motherbumper asked me to join a group concern called Canada Moms Blog. I have joined and as I sit here, I have a pile of printouts beside me on the desk detailing all the steps to take to get enrolled and use Typepad. Oh, my aching head. The printouts are already dog-eared and marked up in red with stars and arrows and I did one major goof in my first post on the site that I don't know how to fix. Setting aside the fact that I have to learn how to do Technorati tags, the style of post they want is different from my usual ramble along twisting paths and I am editing, rewriting, second, third and fourth guessing myself and gulping down yet more coffee. And loving every moment, do not get me wrong. They do say that intellectual activity is good for ageing brains, don't they?

I guess I have swum come a long way in two years, eh?

The first ending of this post has been edited and is shown below. Daysgoby has just told me how to do this. Heartfelt thanks and I will share the cookies.

Now, if I could just figure out how to do that cross out thing, I could have written swum, crossed it out and put in come. Which would make a lovely metaphor bracket. I'm going to learn how to do that. Someday. Soon. More coffee, I need more coffee.

And maybe a chocolate raspberry marshmallow cookie.

First?

I just did a 'Wordle' 'Wordcloud'.

If you haven't heard of this, you will find it at Wordle. Some of the formats are awesome. But why, she asked in a soft and whimpery tone, did my main word come up as 'first'? Hah! Figured it out. It just used the top three posts published, in one of which I talked about a lot of 'firsts'. I think I will do it again after a few more less word biased posts. If I ever write any.

Clenching Our Fists

What is this all about? To find out, you need to read this post from Don Mills Diva. It's far more eloquent than anything I could write.
The type of lifting of material and reattributing it somewhat that she describes has also happened to me. A part of a post on a sensitive topic, a post that I had very very carefully constructed to lead toward my final argument, was lifted and used out of context. Needless to say, I was not happy. I could not even find a place on the offending website that would allow a non member to post a comment.
I have never bothered to put copyright notices or equivalent on this blog; I figure that people who have ethics and a conscience will ask and attribute and people who don't would not be deterred by anything short of a leg hold trap. Our information is all out there, for sure, and the list of less than ethical institutions that suck it up is headed by Our Very Own Government. So, what's the use. If you blog it or Facebook it, they will come.
Kelly's request, however, just seemed to make my hands and mouse move of their own accord to set this up. She's that eloquent. So, please go and take a look and I hope to see some fists popping up around the place.

Bits of this and that.

I had this nice little post I was writing and it was trotting along on its leash beside me, occasionally sniffing at things but pretty well behaving itself and all of a sudden it stopped behaving and took off, sniffing around clichés, lifting its leg on trite little aphorisms, tugging me along behind it. When I jerked the leash it paid no attention. Even when I deleted the tangential stuff it would not come to heel, just kept pulling me back into the dead wood. So, I have put it in the drafts kennel for now and it can just stay there and sulk for a while.

In the interim, a chez G yard update. We've had a barred owl visiting us the last few days. It perches on the old apple tree beside the bird feeder and hunkers down to wait for a mouse or red squirrel to visit. My daughter shoved her bare feet into clogs on Sunday afternoon and scrunched out into the snow to take its picture. The owl was so calm that she was able to get right up to it and take some marvellous portraits.

And you are getting these shots in all their glory because on Saturday we got hooked up to broadband. A local internet provider sent out a crew one of whom climbed 90' up the tall pine tree behind the garage and bolted an antenna to the top of it, and hooked in a node. The pine in question is the one in the centre of this photo, and the climber is seen as a dull blue blob in the zoomed shot below.He then ran wires to the house and set us up. Woo hoo! I am now able to go and read blogs with a really heavy upload without waiting five minutes for them to open. So expect my Following list to expand over the next while. I can even get video clips and music now. I'm not sure I'm ready for the 21st century, but it has finally arrived here. Until lighting strikes the antenna, anyway.

I'm hoping the owl has found the hunting so good here that it will stick around so that Little Stuff can see it this weekend. Grama will be child minding.

This post is in the form of a diary entry, the Monday Mission for this week. The Monday Missions are planned and tracked by Painted Maypole and if you want to find out who else has done the MM, go to her site and you will find a list. Thanks, Maypole, for doing this -- along with everything else you do!

Sunday, January 25th, 2009 10:30 pm

Robbie Burns 250th Birthday

Overcast, - 20ºC (-3ºF)

Sunset today was 5:00 pm. The days are getting longer. And that is about the only good thing that I know about today. The majority of it was dismal.

My knee is still giving me a lot of trouble; as I sit here writing this diary entry it is aching fiercely and I have had to get up and walk around twice. This has now been going on since the third week in December and I am getting very, very bored with it. Here I am with lovely new Christmas present snowshoes, my pool back in service and a new treadmill but most things I do just tease the joint and I end up limping. Yesterday I did a half hour walk on the treadmill and danced twice at the Burns' night party and I spent the last half of the night awake, propping the knee with pillows, getting up and walking around and generally getting no sleep at all. And so today I am dismal and projecting my tiredness and crankiness on everything around me.

Grumble, grouch. I overcooked the salmon at supper time. I missed a phone call from the YD. I have been running up and down stairs to do the laundry and that means I can't really settle to anything else. I finished my book and am out of new things to read. My husband went out snowshoeing without me and found all sorts of fun tracks to follow. There is a little black cloud hanging over my head and it's raining on me.

It's amazing how writing all this down makes it trivial, how the good things pop up like Whackamoles as I list all the grumpy ones. This time last year my husband was in the hospital having just had complete knee replacement surgery and he was groggy and hurting. Today he was out on snowshoes. What a difference a year can make!

I tried out my new mask and snorkel in the pool this afternoon and it is the best mask I have ever owned; far superior to the one I lost sometime last summer. Lighter, more comfortable, with a thing called a 'splash baffle' on the snorkel tube that prevents the standing wave from slopping down it when I am doing breast stroke. And I did get a good twenty minutes in swimming this afternoon, knee or no knee. And all the laundry done except for the cold water trousers load.

And the book was interesting -- Orson Scott Card's Ender in Exile. It's a pot boiler of the first order, filling in a hole in the Ender tapestry. What is interesting is the way he does it, so carefully picking up all the threads and colours. He knows he is contradicting some of the original Ender book and in a postscript he tells the reader that he has revised the relevant chapter to fit this new piece in and gives directions for reading the revision. The Ender aficionados will have nothing to grumble about. Hm. I think I should put the Ender books into my library thing.

Well, I've almost talked myself into a more reasonable frame of mind and that is, after all, one of the main purposes of a diary, isn't it? After a record of the weather. It's a good thing no one will read this.

It is 11:00 pm. I am going to make the bed and crawl into it.

Words, Glorious Words

As a fan of both Jabberwocky and Mondegreens, I love silly words. Lately I seem to have hit a goldmine of amusing combinations coming up in verification boxes. Here are some of them that I have collected this week.

focko
bohmedis
ospolit
woofsk
unpro
insei
conciphe
napo
binks

Don't you think that they look naked? Don't you think they need definitions to give them some gravitas? Rather than hogging all the fun, (although I can't resist tagging woofsk as the utterance of a Russian dog) I am posting the list and offering you a chance to define a brand new word. Why should computer nerds and teenagers have all the fun?

Blue Funk Day

There's a reason I picked this for my online image. Not only does it look like me, a lot, but also it symbolizes for me what I want this blog to be.

I stomped around the house yesterday in a senseless rage at fate, the weather, my poor husband and anything else that got in my way. I stomped on sluggish flies, slammed drawers and, to put not too fine a point on it, sulked. It was that kind of day, I was tired and bored and had a pile of things to do that I did not want to do and nothing to do that I did want to do except write a post for my blog. But, I thought to myself, I cannot write a post while I am in this terrible mood because the YD reads my blog and the YD is an activist; if she reads about this she is going to get on the phone and try to Do Something about it, and so I can't talk about it.

Well, this went on for a bit, as I wrote bits of invective about anything and everything in my head, and then I thought…."Wait a minute!"

All my life I have perceived it as my role to be the constant cheerful person, especially to my mother. I could write to her about anything, anything except that I was in a miserable mood, because if she thought I was down, or sad, or upset, she would inevitably try to Do Something about it, or at the very least fret about not being able to Do Something. (Did you follow me around the last curve? Sorry!) Anyway, I hardly ever mentioned times when I was less than cheerful. But when I started this blog, the idea was that I could write about whatever was on my mind, bad or good. And here I find that just because the YD will read it, I am censoring. Again. I do not think this is a good thing. No.

(YD, if you are reading this, do not pick up the phone. This is my bad mood, and I intend to enjoy it fully.)

And so, here is the manifesto. I, Mary G, resolve that I am going to portray what I really am like in this blog. I will not try to be better than I am. I will not do the constant cheerful thing. The censoring will be limited to other people, whose concerns are private to them. I will not self censor. I will not write around things to avoid upsetting anyone. Not here. And if someone who knows who I am tries to Do Something about it, she is toast.

Now, can I keep this resolution for five seconds straight? We will see.

All this leads to a question I want to ask. The self censoring topic has been bounced around in MommyBlog land as long as I have been reading in it. Julie at Using My Words tackled it not long ago; it has been a topic on BlogRhet. People have talked from time to time about topics they avoid, about how they deal with controversy, about how they handle references to family and friends. But I have a specific curiosity. And it is this. If your family and friends read your blog, how conscious are you of how they will react to what you write? If you find yourself self censoring, what do you do about it? How much does it change your blog personality?

My answer would be: I wrote the blog anonymously for some time. I censored, but only to protect the inncent. Then I let my daughters and several friends in on it. Since I did so, I fear that I am becoming less …. real, for lack of a better word, less three dimensional, less forthright. I don't know if this is reflected in my posts, but if anyone who is a regular reader has seen a difference, I would love to know what you think.

Two further things.

1. I have written about my blue funk as if it were funny. Today it is. Yesterday it wasn't.

2. Advice from the crone: when you plan your retirement home, make sure it has two good, comfy beds in it. In different rooms.

Hello? Hello? -- Monday Mission

Painted Mapole's Monday Mission is to write a post in the form of a voicmail. Please drop in to her site and see who has done it this week. It's a lot of fun, and I urge you to join in!

Hello, I'd like to speak to your City section editor. He's in a meeting? Fine, give me his voice mail if you would, please.

Mr. Jones, my name is Mary G and I am one of your subscription readers. I'm calling to complain about the quality of the writing in your paper. Specifically I would like to complain about the use of 'meet up with', when 'meet' would do, the inability of your writers to distinguish between 'lie' and 'lay', the misuse of commas to separate a noun in apposition, and the erroneous use of 'it's' instead of 'its' for the possessive. I know that you get the youngest, beginning writers and that you are pushed for time to correct them, but if I see much more of this nonsense, I will cancel my subscription. I also know you know what I am talking about. Remember your Grade 10 grammar class? If you don't, I do. And I've still got the text book, if you want to borrow it.

More about Danier

For anyone who has not been reading this thread, I posted a sad story about being ignored in a retail store here, the commenters urged me to write it up as a letter, which is here, and before I send it, the retailer, Danier Leather, found the posted copy and their representative sent me this email.

I talked to the writer of this email this afternoon, a conversation somewhat muddled on my end as I managed to fry my Blue Tooth connection half way through. Annette T was patient with me, however, and we managed to get a two way information exchange done. Although Annette had read the letter and the post it stemmed from, she had not picked up that the main threads of that post were discourtesy in retail personnel (Julie at Using My Words) and discrimination due to age, my ongoing preoccupation. Nor had she picked up on the cross links to BlogRhet threads; not surprising since I noticed that my BlogRhet logo does not link to the blog and that I had not explicitly tagged the BlogRhet threads. (I really didn't structure that post well. I'm an embarrassment to myself.) What I hope she took away is that I was as objective as I could be in recording the incident.

What she got across to me was that she is very good at her job, which is cleaning up after the snags that are bound to happen at a many outlet retail chain, and that she is prepared to take the time and effort to understand the background from which I wrote. I hope she enjoys BlogRhet! As it is her job to do, she ended up by offering me a gift to placate me. I wasn't going to accept it because the acknowledgement of the incident was what I was wanting, but then I thought of my latest effort at fundraising, which is an auction to be held in Christmas shopping season, and accepted. We're into the last $50,000.00 we need, by the way. What she cannot do, of course, is specifically sort out what actually happened -- that's the job of the manager of that outlet, poor thing.

It's quite possible that as a 'consciousness raising' effort, the post and letter have been a success.
It certainly has brought it home to me that I need to structure my posts better and make my points more clearly. The example I used just overwhelmed the main theme, not just in Annette T's mind but in the commenters' as well. Well and so. If the sales staff at Danier are going to get educated about ageism, the least I can do is learn from it also.

October Song

This is the first time in over a week that I have had a chance to write a post, and I can hear thunder in the distance, signaling that I may have to shut down the computer or that I may lose the satellite signal that connects me to my virtual world. Bummer. In the meantime, though, it's beautiful. We still have a lot of gold and bronze leaves on the trees and the rain and wind are knocking them off -- they're swirling past my window, high contrast against the grey/black storm cloud to the south. There's a soft sibilance as the rain hits them and tiny splatting noises as they hit the deck. And as a counterpoint to that, there's the sound of clucking and squawking as a flock of fifteen turkeys straggles past the open window, chattering among themselves. As I write this, the sky is getting brighter and the gold leaves are glowing. No more thunder; I may even get this done and up.

I have just been playing around with Facebook, a toy world which the YD seduced me into several weeks ago. It's a champion time waster at the moment, but it is allowing me to get my trip photographs up and indexed so that the friends we went with can see them. I had meant to do a travel post, but this is easier. I may still get the post done as well because I have some really good pictures. Or at least so says my BIL, who is an amazing photographer and whose opinion I value highly. Plus he's a tech whiz and I now know how to shrink my photos to easily loadable sizes without hauling them through a photo paint program. Well, I'll get it done if I can refrain from adding things like Visual Bookshelf to my Facebook page -- fun but a real time eater.

Do they give out championships for procrastination? Is there a twelve step program? Timewasters R Us? Although I don't count time looking out the window at the world as wasted, exactly, it isn't getting the laundry done. Nor the six or seven documents sitting on my desktop waiting to be edited. Nor the letter for the Hall Committee. Nor the fundraising phone calls. I've got a pile of sewing and mending including Little Stuff's Hallowe'en cat costume. If it would ever stop raining, there are flowerbeds to put to sleep, and a lot of tidying up around the house. Wednesday morning it did stop and we raked leaves. You would never know it. But here I am, eating cookies and typing and thinking about the old joke about work. 'I'm not afraid of work! I can sit right here beside it and do nothing.'

Posting, for me, is not work. It's my virtual window to the world and time spent looking through it is not wasted. How I love to read about what all of you are doing and thinking. Pause there while I took some photos of the leaves pattering down. The big sugar maple by the corner of the deck has a circle of gold below it and the wind is whisking more off all the time. And the sky is darkening again. More thunder. More rain now. There's a pair of soggy blue jays vacuuming up the corn that the turkeys left behind. And I have to stop for a minute and close the windows since it is really raining hard now. Wonderful. I get back and the satellite is now down.

Well that gives me time to download and edit the leaf pictures I just ran out in the rain to take so that I could illustrate this post. And to think about the flying feet of time, since I have just spent the morning writing this, playing with it and dealing with a series of phone calls. eheu! fugaces labuntur anni. Not to mention minutes, seconds and hours. I don't want to stop time. Nor even turn it back. But I would love to have more of it. Time to do things well, without scanting other things. Time to look out of the window without worrying about the unwashed clothes. Time to write really good posts about meaningful things, instead of babbling on. Well, this babble will have to do as the satellite is now back up and I have to get back to the real world. Always vowing to do better next time. To stop squandering the time I have. Hollow laughter. And that's not a noise the turkeys are making.