writing skills/profession

Forgot How Hard This Was


The Gazing Nude.Emmanuel Marcou

Image via Wikipedia

I haven’t tried to blog every day in eons, so I’d forgotten how hard it was to do. Consider my lack of interest in gazing at my own naval unless I happen to be on a yoga mat,the fact that I’ve kept it up is astounding me – if no one else. The fact remains though that I just don’t need to angst over the minutia of life or create issue from detail. Not anymore anyway.

And technically, I am blogging twice a day because yesterday, I posted original material to the BlogHer site as well as here, which is not exactly what a great many bloggers do. Take for example the mom blog that is whooping bum at the Canada Mom blogs competition*.  It’s an aggregator serving as a community events page for the most part. Not much content and this is another reason to be pleased with myself, even if I am going to barely maintain a spot in the top ten list there.

More spectacularly is that I have finally gotten around to taking an online writing class in addition and the extra hours pounding at the keyboard are showing and not just in my sore achy forearms because I am getting back into the habit of outlining and drafting, which is something that bloggers don’t really have cause to do. Progress is being made with my voice and technique though I sadly remain an indifferent speller and more fond of punctuation’s eye-herding and melodic usages than what the moldy oldy Strunk and White have to say (and the irony of White pontificating about punctuation still amuses me).

If I were really ambitious, I’d start up the yoga blog again too, but I am not really ambitious. That’s my eternal issue. My inner Annie has never seen the need to work myself like a rented mule even if there was a really good reason to do so, and there never really is. Work should never crowd out life or even compete with it seriously. I suppose one could argue that I chose teaching for this reason, and you’d be mostly correct except that I also had to be freakishly good at it. The big bonus of being a teacher was that it came to me easily so, unlike some, I didn’t have to take it home with me after the first few years.

But it’s late, this post will just come in under the wire for the day. It was a big day. Potato soup. Which was excellent. Herding a child to soccer practice and enduring a spur of the moment play date sans benefit of sleeping in and snow. It has finally snowed.

Tomorrow is another day. Perhaps more interesting and then again maybe not. But I will blog. And again the day after. Twice daily until the end of the month. A modest ambition and just maybe, ambition can be cultivated.

* Just an fyi, thanks to all that have voted in the last two days, I am back in 7th place and have a shot at 6th if I can snag another 20 votes. If you are inclined, you can vote daily by just clicking here. Six more days and then we are done with this – I promise.

AM Radio


Radio Sony ICF-S10MK2I consider myself a child of the 70’s. My formative years, the ones I can actually remember, took place during that decade. The term “latch-key kid” hadn’t been invented then, but me and a great many of my friends did walk home from school to empty houses. The near to last of the free-rangers in terms of our upbringing, we can be found sandwiched uncomfortably between the Boomers and GenXers. They call us the Generation Jones when they bother to remember we exist at all.

The radio was a staple of our growing up. Not in the same way it was for our grandparents and parents, but in a sound-tracking way that I don’t think those just before us or who followed us quite experienced.

Lacking television, our background noise is provided courtesy of the late Steve Jobs and the iPod. Rob picked up one of those docking station speakers for me to use at the hall when I teach yoga, but he employs it more than I do. He can’t really enjoy his renovation work sans tunes. But the dock lacks a radio, and Rob recently expressed a desire for one with an AM/FM option, so he could listen to the local talk radio and maybe have his weather read to him as opposed to searching for it on the Internet, so I found one for him the last time I was compelled to make a Costco run.

When I was a kid, we had a transistor radio that sat on the refrigerator and my parents had it on all the time.

KDTH was Dad’s favorite. The little music that was played was mainly country, but the bulk of the programming revolved around local news, weather and the early versions of call in talk radio. There was also a show called The Cracker Barrel, which featured a form of Kijiji or FreeCycle. People would call in looking for items or they had things to give away or sell. It was a virtual garage sale. I don’t know how much junk Dad picked up that way.

Eventually, I learned of the existence of other AM stations and discovered popular music. Dad never recovered from that revelation. His music tastes never grew to include rock or pop or bubblegum. He liked old-time country, Hit Parade stuff and big band. He fought the inevitable turn of the dial as his children aged, but it was a losing one and once he relented and allowed cable to be installed, MTV sounded the death knell for him and his preferences.

It’s strange to have a radio in the kitchen again. I can’t decide if putting one there is a sign of old age or not. I do know, however, that I can’t work with music as wallpaper.  Rob has no trouble. He can even plug himself in with ear-buds when he is on his computer at work and bang away on the keyboard. Not me. I can totally ignore the spoken word, but put them to music and it’s a struggle.

Trouble is that I haven’t reached a point where I am comfortable with ignoring new music. Rob is one of the few people my age who continued to listen to current music after his early 20’s. His knowledge of groups and his taste for music beyond our youths runs as late as the 90’s, but I still like to acquire new songs. A side-effect of being a teacher for so long probably and I wonder if I will ever lose my ability to pick up new tunes.

It does make it hard for me to push the radio to the background, so I don’t think I will change my radio silence policy when I am on my own during the work week. This week is Fall Break and Remembrance Day, so Dee and Rob are home now until Monday. Noise, noise, noise as the Grinch would say. But it’s a nostalgic kind of thing. FM instead of AM, but warm and cozy just the same.

 

* Here’s the link to today’s NaBloPoMo at BlogHer and another to the Top Canada Mom’s Blog contest, and I hope you’ll take a moment to pop over and vote for me because losing really sucks and if each person who reads this votes (more than once is good), I won’t. Thanks.

I’m Worried About You, Honey


The day began wobbly. Literally because my ears are still somewhat plugged and the back of my throat aches, but 10 AM soccer practice will not be denied. Though some

Frost on Window

Image by Chris Campbell via Flickr

might argue that it’s hardly Dawn’s bumcrack, I consider having to be anywhere on a Saturday before noon barbaric.

The neighbor drives a school bus, in case you’ve forgotten, and with the warm weather deserting us, she is revving that yellow beast up at earlier and earlier hours. Most weekday mornings find us jarred from our short-sleeped slumbers 30 minutes or more before our own alarms sound off. The weekends, in my opinion, should be about snuggling in until it’s officially daylight at the earliest and even that is a bit too uncivilized for my aging tastes.

Cold weather has caught me unprepared. My winter coat is still in the basement closet and I am out of practice with the whole “warming up the vehicle” routine. When Dee and I made for the truck, it was cold and frosty.

And I had no idea where the ice scraper was.

“What are you doing?” Rob was at the door watching me incredulously as I attempted to scrape frost off the passenger side windows with a Starbuck’s napkin and my fingernails.

“I forgot to warm up the truck and I have no idea where the scraper is,” I thought that was a reasonable reply.

He came out in his robe, liberated the scraper from a side compartment and shooed me into the truck as he proceeded to clear the windows of Jack Frost’s handiwork.

“Your mom is silly,” he told Dee as he kissed her good-bye and gave me the “I can’t believe you sometimes” look when he kissed me.

Fast forward.

Practice is done. I managed to stay upright and wrangle a few groceries while Dee continued her march to someday dominating at the World Cup and we were home. I’d phoned Rob to check on his plans to run into the city while we were out, but he’d decided to wait for us.

“Wouldn’t you like an outing?”

I love outings. Rob’s idea of outings typically involve a lot of driving with Clark Griswold-ish stops at various home handyman fave spots, but as I seldom make it farther from home than grocery or yoga class – I am easy to please.

But after we entered the house, Rob crooks his finger and asks me to come upstairs with him. He needs to show me something.

“I’m getting worried about you, Honey.”

Wha???

The last time he was “worried” he thought I’d been putting tea bags in the paper recycling and it was actually him that did that.

I reached the bedroom and he showed me one of his white socks and one of Dee’s leggings.

“Did you fold these together?” he asked. “I found them rolled together.”

It took a minute but I remembered that months ago, Dee had rolled her legging together with her Dad’s sock as a joke.

“Dee did that.” I explained, “as a joke, but thanks for jumping to the conclusion that I am demented.”

The girl child lay on her bed cackling and Rob looked relieved and a bit chagrined.

*Still blogging for NaBloPoMo, catch today’s here and this is the last time I am linking to the Top 25 Canadian Mom Blogs list contest though the contest will continue on without further notice from me.