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 Day to day stuff....a memoir without order. |
 Imagination is described by Webster as...The act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses in reality. Albert Einstein said "Logic will get you from A to B, but imagination will take you everywhere."  I never realized it until I read it somewhere but there are ways to boost one's imagination: Create a visual journal Draw whatever you see for 15 minutes a day. You don't need to be an artist. Think like an artist Cut out pictures from magazines & piece them together to create an original image. Listen to Bach Close your eyes while playing your favorite music. Or listen to the sounds of nature on a CD or in the great outdoors. Play word games Try thinking of as many words as you can that begin with MAR...or you pick. Daydream Let your mind wander, or focus on a single object & study its characteristics.     Everyone has a story....here's mine.....c ** Image ID #1701066 Unavailable **  |
| Do you ever have a day when you just feel at loose ends, when there is plenty you need to do, but you don't want to do any of it? That is how my day is going. I have so many things going through my brain that I need to accomplish, but I cannot seem to get started on any of them. So, here I am, writing my blog but at least doing something. I think Mopsy feels the same way because she keeps walking back and forth like she doesn't know where to go. I know just how you feel, Mopsy. Anyway, it is getting hotter than Hades here and the air is on. Staying inside to keep cool can dampen my spirits too so maybe that is part of the problem. Several bluejays have been hogging the bird feeder this morning. The cardinals wait patiently (or not) on the porch railing for them to leave. I made some lenticchie Sicilian lentil soup and cornbread for lunch...love that stuff. The soup is a dry mix made by Alessi so it didn't take very much effort and it keeps me in lunches for 4 days. I freeze the cornbread. It takes about 2 minutes to reheat in the toaster oven straight from the freezer. Then I just drop it into the cup of soup and break it up with each spoonful...yum. A green salad with pineapple chunks, raisins, blueberries (straight from the freezer), a few croutons and some honey/dijon dressing rounded out my lunch. Tomorrow evening I am going to a storytelling night at a local pizzeria. If you want to, (which I am sure I will not) you can get up in front of everyone and tell a five minute story (no notes). The topic for tomorrow night is secrets and lies. The stories are archived on a site called growradio. I've listened to a few and some are very interesting. I think a few beers might have helped some "tellers". Well, I absolutely must do something. I have company coming this weekend and housecleaning and yardwork are beckoning. until next time...c |
| Well, I have done it. I have signed up for an 'intro to kayaking' class. I have been thinking and talking about doing this for so long, I am getting tired of listening to myself. The entire class is only two days, the first on the 18th, classroom instruction, and the second on the 21st, ON THE WATER. My heart beats faster just thinking about it. The only part I am really concerned with is getting into the kayak. I called the instructor (yes, I did), told him I was almost 70, and he said there was nothing to be worried about, he has had 80-year-olds in the past. He said the kayaks are the ride-on-top kind, the easiest to get into with just a little finesse. Unfortunately, I never learned any 'finesse'. Finger-crossing is my style. This week has been busy with book club on Tuesday and life history group on Thursday plus my writing group critique pod stuff has gotten to be almost a daily thing. I send out my update requests on the first of the month. We have sixteen pods (critique groups) with almost seventy members. I like to be up-to-date on who is where and meeting when so that when new members to our writing group want to join a pod, I can (intelligently) suggest an appropriate one. The pods are all different genres with all different kinds of people. It is a little more work than I anticipated...but I tend to make things that way. Our monthly meeting is this Sunday Writers Alliance of Gainesville  with a special speaker whose pizza I have enjoyed more than a few times  .Well, I want to go for my walk before it gets steaming outside so.... until next time...c |
| I am up early this morning with the window open and watching the birds at the feeder. There is a family of cardinals living in the bush at the corner of the front porch just below the feeder. I think they are the guarders of the realm. The bush (shrub) is called variegated ligustrum and is one of those needing lots of pruning or it would grow wildly huge. Even with pruning it is only about a foot below the hanging feeder. A few minutes ago out of its smoothly pruned greenish-white surface, a brilliant redbird popped through and gave me my version of eye-candy. It's nice and cool with the sun just beginning to rise and burn off the fog, my favorite time of the day. Now I'm sipping coffee and wondering if the grass will have time to dry before our daily thunderstorm. Yesterday I managed to mow the front yard, but showers drove me back into the garage after one swipe around the backyard. I can still smell the cut grass as I sit here with a slight cool breeze drifting in. Oh oh, here is a cute little black-capped chickadee at the feeder. In the last few days I have seen doves sitting on the porch railing waiting for smaller birds to slosh out seeds onto the porch floor so they can swoop down to nibble. And there have been lots of purple finch, now there's a cardinal and its new little one. She's feeding it seeds. It's a magical movie, free for watching. Mopsy is always begging for pieces of grass or dandelion leaves to eat whenever I go outside and come back in. Sometimes I grow the stuff they call catgrass for her, but she chomps away and it's gone in no time. Recently, I saw something on pinterest that gave me an idea. It was a pin of an eaten down romaine stalk placed in a squat glass (I use juice glasses) with about an inch of water in the bottom. The pinner says 'grow you own lettuce'. So I looked up the safety of romaine for kitties and found it is the perfect greenery for cats. Mopsy now has her own window garden, three little glasses with romaine at different stages of growth. It is unbelievable how fast it grows. You can practically see it. And Mopsy crunches away at the tender tops whenever she wants to.  Happy Sunday and.... until next time...c |
| I can't remember how I found it, but I ordered a book titled Love Saves the Day by Gwen Cooper. I finished it a few days ago, and yesterday I mailed it to my daughter in Delaware. It is about a cat named Prudence and most of it is written from the cat's perspective. I probably cried through 50% of the book - it was that emotional, for me anyway. I mailed it to my daughter to see if she has the same reaction or if it is just me and where I am right now in my journey through grief. She has a cat, Oliver, as I've mentioned before, about the same age as my Mopsy, so I'm hoping she has the same reaction. It will be two years in July since Jim died, and I am trying to move on with my life, but I do seem to want to dwell in the past a lot. I think writing memoir stories is not helping so I am trying to pause in that area for a while. I've done some new things that Jim was never interested in doing, some I have continued, some not. I still have a real fear of going very far away from home, afraid that something will happen while I am gone, not necessarily to me, but to Mopsy or my house. Everyone says this is silly, and I know it, but I cannot get past it. We are in our rainy and thunderstormy afternoon season here in Gainesville. Usually, it comes in June, but the storms are early this year. The good part is that the temperature cools down, considerably, from 90 something to 70 something. My a/c is thankful for that, but the lightening is prolific with flood warnings almost every afternoon. One would think that a sandy soil could take care of plenty of water, but roadways become dangerous with several inches of rain in a short amount of time. And we have plenty of hard pan (clay) under our sand. Hope everyone is having a good start to their weekend. Congrats to all the new graduates out there! until next time...c |
| We are having beautiful summery weather except for yesterday's afternoon rainstorm. And of course I had to go grocery shopping in it. As I may have mentioned before, Mopsy determines my time of grocery shopping. I always go on the last can and that happened to be in the rain. When it comes to what is more important for the umbrella to be over, groceries win hands down . I also picked up a couple library books on my travels, one that Joy mentioned a few blog's back in "Off the Cuff / My Other Journal" , titled In One Person and the other for my book club, Unbroken.Sometimes when I walk, I walk at the speed of thought. That is, I don't pay much attention to my surroundings (I know, that's bad) and I think about things to write. I did that yesterday because just before I went out the door I looked at the new "Cramp" prompt, title your entry "on mother's day" and make it a poem. I couldn't get the thought out of my head and when I got back the words just flowed through my fingers like magic. It's been a long time since I entered the "Cramp" and I was so excited to get a nice review and then the announcement that I had won. Thank you, "The Writer's Cramp" .until next time...c |
| My kitty, Mopsy, the great huntress, is waging war on lizards. If there is a lizard season in Florida for the little speed demons, it must be now. They seem to be everywhere. Of course, Mopsy is a house cat and must make do with what is available on the porch. The porch is screened but lizards seem to appear out of thin air, and Mopsy is not content with biting off their tails as normal cats do. No, she uses them for playthings, tapping them with her paw to make them go, the torture queen. She never tires. I have roll-up blinds all around the porch and have to keep them rolled down to keep Mopsy from climbing the screens. Otherwise they would be hanging in shreds, the screens not Mopsy. She sits underneath the blinds, watching and waiting patiently and is always rewarded...dumb lizards. I keep the inside house door open to the porch, but usually she and the lizards keep their activities confined to the porch area. But this morning when I came in to turn on the computer, this shadow darted in front of me and I knew I had company of the wrong kind. He (or she) darted behind a chair leg and froze, normal for lizards. I peered down at him and saw that he had been wounded on his side (something red there), but it didn't seem to have slowed him down any. Mopsy was busy elsewhere. Now, I am usually of the attitude of live and let live when unwanted critters get into the house. I try to capture or shoo them back outside where they belong. Usually, I can accomplish this with my herding technique. Even wasps can be herded. I open the screen door (after making sure Mopsy is locked inside) and wave the flyswatter (just in case) so the airflow pushes the wasp toward my intended destination. But lizards do not herd well. You try to make them go one way and they go the other. So thinking about this, my mind remembered seeing a jar being placed over something and cardboard sliding underneath. I secured my tools and began my search for the victim. It wasn't hard. He was still in back of the chair leg, traumatized by the cat I'm sure. Of course, when I moved the chair, off he went. Now, if you can picture this, me creeping up on Mr. Lizard throughout the house, slowly lowering the glass jar only to have him dash off again and again. But in the end, success. I'm sorry to say I traumatized him some more. When I finally got that jar over him, he was frantic, bouncing off every point of the inside of that jar from top to bottom. It took nerves of steel for me to slide that cardboard underneath and then to lift it up with him raising such a ruckus! With trembling arms I carried him outside, placed the jar on the grass, and lifted it up. Free at last. Do you know that dumb lizard froze again and would not move. I watched for about five minutes and finally had to get the broom to shoo him off. He darted away through the grass about two feet and froze again...and I said good riddance and got on with my day.until next time...c |
| I guess it is inevitable that problems will occur in writing critique pods. After all, they are made up of humans. But this particular problem had never occurred to me. Content. Specifically, sexist erotica. This particular member started out writing acceptable fiction, the type of writing the group accepts, but he evolved into this unacceptable area, unacceptable by all other members. I was emailed by the leader for help. I am the coordinator (newly appointed) of all the critique groups. Usually, this position only involves matching up new members with appropriate groups. The problem member was asked to refrain from such writing, seeing nothing wrong with it, and became confrontational with other members. To make a very long story short, the member was requested to leave the group after a unanimous vote by all other members. Now the problem becomes how to avoid this same situation in the future? Specific group guidelines? How do you determine what is acceptable and what is not? Anyone else had a problem like this? Any ideas? until next time...c |
| Book Club yesterday and thank goodness, Gone Girl is gone. What a crazy book, literally. Likes and dislikes leaned toward the dislikes and people who liked it were looked at suspiciously...just kidding. According to our leader's research, the movie will be out in October with a different ending. I may have to see how that works because Flynn's ending was awful in my opinion, too many questions unanswered and full of Swiss cheese, the holey kind. Even the writing style was confusing to me. I kept having to return to the beginning of a chapter to remind myself who and when I was reading about. Okay, I think I have clubbed Ms. Flynn enough. It does make me wonder, though, about all the people who bought this book and placed it on the best seller listing. Mistakes? It does get one talking. My N.D. son called last night. He usually calls when he is on the road...and he was. We talked for almost an hour. He says he still intends to ride his motorcycle down here for a visit this summer, over 2200 miles. Most months in N.D. prohibit that kind of activity, way too cold. I was surprised when he said it snowed (a little) on May 1st...yikes! My neighbors next door are moving again...in June to Georgia. Hubby got a job near Atlanta. I will miss them. They have the cutest little girls. They'll be renting their house again and I wonder who my new neighbors will be? Next month for Book Club we are reading Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, a biography about Louie Zamperini...looks very good. I am glad our reading list is so varied. And near the end of our meeting, we discuss other books we are reading and find many are reading or have read the same ones. Well, I need to start typing up the minutes, so... until next time...c |
| I rode down to Micanopy yesterday, mostly known to outsiders as the scene of Michael J. Fox's movie, Doc Hollywood. To locals it's a haven for antique browsers, not that you need be antique to browse but sometimes it helps . It's not far from my house, around 12 miles according to Google maps, but I like to travel the scenic route instead of I-75. I drive down 441 through Payne's Prairie. I-75 crosses the Prairie but it seems "removed". Timewise, it took me around thirty minutes. The town is named after a chief of the Seminole Indians, Mikanope. When I first came to Florida, I pronounced it "my can o' pee" and later discovered many people do the same. The accent is actually on the "nop" with a long "O" and the "mi" having a short "I". The main street is Cholokka Boulevard...antique alley. I normally hit the shops upon arrival, but yesterday I decided to walk out the kinks from the drive. The entire street is not very long and I managed to go from one end to the other crossing over to opposite sides for the journey to and fro. There was a very old Episcopal Church which I would have recognized by the red door without the prominent sign. I was raised Episcopalian and Jim and I were married in a small Episcopal Church, but now I'm not sure what I am???? A sign outside caught my eye and made me wonder..."Paid Child Care". The church pays for childcare, you pay for childcare, don't expect to bring your children into the sanctuary...what? A little farther on stood an old, old building, the Mosswood Farm Store. Inside were jars of honey, vials of essential oils, and homemade pastries...and lots of other homemade stuff. It seemed like a family affair with a couple of generations present, the cutest little blond-haired girl running around. She kept eyeing me like I was from outer space. Here is a pic, http://www.mosswoodfarmstore.com/ Yes, I said it was old. On the way back down the boulevard I stopped in at the Micanopy Historical Society Museum. Originally it was a warehouse for cotton or maybe turpentine and then for the shipment of wooden boxes before cardboard came into being. A railroad spur came close by. The thing that amazed me most....did you know a bobcat is smaller than a big-mouthed bass? Stuffed examples of each resided in a glass case. There were lots of old tools for men and women. I would consider two tubs with a wringer in between a tool...old typewriters, sewing machines, etc. Lots of pictures of Seminoles, old Army uniforms, lots of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings stuff (her home is nearby). After traipsing through a few antiques shops, I treated myself to a scoop of mint chocolate chip ice cream. I ate it outside on the old porch and got friendly with the resident kitty (no ice cream for kitty, though, chocolate is poison to cats). A family passing through sat at a table near me. I know this to be true because they were discussing how they had never heard of "My can o' pee" .After getting my antique "fix" for a few months, maybe years, I came home and started a new library book, Secrets of Eden by Chris Bohjalian, and then of course there was Mad Men at 10... until next time...c |
| It is raining again with no letup forecast until tomorrow morning. From my window nearby I can see the moving water in the gutter between the roadway and curb out front. It is moving at a fast pace. Cardinals and chickadees continue to visit my porch feeder since it is sheltered. They are hungry little dudes. I have some hanging plants around the porch soaking up the rainy spray and humidity. It is not dark today, only dreary. I met with my life history group yesterday and enjoyed some incredible stories about tomato picking, albino frogs, posing nude for artists, newborn twins, nursing misadventures, genealogy updates, and some very expensive repair work. Ocala, Florida, just south of where I live, is a horse-intensive town with several local born and raised four-legged creatures in the Derby tomorrow, Dance With Fire, Chitu, Commanding Curve, and Wildcat Red. Don't horses have wonderful names? Suppose we were named like horses, a little something of our parents and a little something for our own disposition...Momma's Mischief, Rose's Waterbaby...who would you be? I'll be watching the derby and rooting for the homegrowns. And praying for no mishaps. I just read this and thought it worth sharing. "If you are saying things to yourself that you would never say to a friend, It's time to make a change." It is a bad habit and not funny, beating oneself up. until next time...c |
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