Sharing My World 51

Does this look like February? I’m squinting and it looks like spring to me.

SHARE YOUR WORLD – 2016 WEEK 8

What household chore do you absolutely hate doing?

Is this a trick question?  If I choose laundry will my washing machine suddenly break down?  I hate them all equally.  I used to wonder why I was so accident prone when it came to housework, but now I know it’s because most of it is so mind numbingly boring it’s impossible to pay attention to what you’re doing and incredibly easy to think about something else entirely and end up twisting your ankle or falling down the stairs.  Especially when doing something disgusting like scrubbing a toilet bowl.  Ok, for the absolutely hate part, that might be the one.

I do like a clean house, I just don’t love the household chores involved in getting one, especially when they can be worse health hazards than the ones you’re trying to avoid by cleaning up.  House cleaners should get danger pay for bumped heads, sprained wrists, cut fingers, mental anguish and broken toes.

What was the last URL that you bookmarked?

Honestly I have no idea.  Since W crashed his computer (he says it got hit by lightning and I don’t have the energy to argue with that) he has taken over mine and I use my iPad for everything.  I never really had a chance to get used to Windows 10 but W hates it.  I will convert him to Apple if I live long enough.  He still has a flip phone.  The two of them could be a museum exhibit. I did show him how to use bookmarks instead of putting a billion icons on his desk top but he wasn’t impressed.

Close your eyes. Listen to your body. What part of your body is seeking attention? What is it telling you?

My right shoulder is arguing with my neck about which of them can be the most annoying.  Both are screaming for a massage.  My feet are telling me to put some socks on.  My right index finger thinks it might be arthritic.  My brain says to ignore them all and go take a nap.  I’m going to stop listening to my body now, thanks, it’s such a complainer.

Would you rather have a two-bedroom apartment in a big city of your choosing or a mansion in the country side in the state or country where you currently live?

Can you imagine how many toilet bowls you would have to scrub if you lived in a mansion?  And how long the drive would be to buy new toilet brushes because you kept wearing them out?  No hesitation here, give me a little apartment in a big city.  Somewhere with easy access to all the amenities and where someone else is responsible for things like maintenance and flower beds.

Bonus question: What are you grateful for from last week, and what are you looking forward to in the week coming up?

Today the appliance repairman replaced the broken spring on our dishwasher door so I’m grateful to be able to use it again.  He says it will now last us another 20 years.  How scary is that?  It could live longer than I do. W says we didn’t really miss it, although I don’t remember him personally doing a lot of dishes in the sink this past week so I’m not sure how he came to that conclusion.

Last night we went out for ‘all-you-can-eat ribs’ because we are crazy and forgot for a minute that we’re not 300 pound football players with voracious appetites.  Live and learn.

I’m looking forward to experimenting with my new water-soluble wax crayons.  They’re like water colours and oil pastels (neither of which I like all that much on their own) combined.  Can two wrongs make a right?  So far the answer is yes, but I suppose I can’t pretend to be an expert yet.  Give me another twenty-four hours.  Or until all those ribs are finally digested, whichever comes first.

Just Jazzy 319

Paint yourself a beautiful day.

Art du Jour 91

It’s the Fish Picture!  Or the Fishing Collage!  Or Angling in Hell!  I haven’t made a final decision on the title.

Normally I do ink spritzes to finish but W was so happy identifying fish species I decided not to obliterate them with colour.  There are no purple pickerel in the real world.

But there could be rainbow cats.

I got a how-to art book from Amazon and the first exercise is to draw a bunch of cats.  HAHA!  I am obviously SO ready to move on.

Hope your weekend was happy and fun!

Someone Left the Cake Out

On my first birthday I had already been walking for 3 months.  My sturdy bowed legs were something I always blamed on my mother but she said there was no stopping me.  Obviously the droopy drawers didn’t slow me down either.  Does anyone even remember pinned cloth diapers covered with plastic elasticized bloomer type pants?  No wonder kids were easier to toilet train before disposables became so dry and comfy.  There’s no motivation to get out of them like there was for this bulky chafing paraphernalia.

The old Kodak box camera had no flash, so photos were taken in bright sunlight streaming through a window, or the subject and the props were simply moved outside.  I remember this little three-legged table, one of a pair and eventually used by my grandma shoved up flat against a wall in the sunlight holding potted plants.

This is quite possibly the least attention I ever paid to a cake in my life.

That’s it.  Totally done with standing still.  My turn to play with the camera.

Not Too Wordy Wednesday

My mother was born on February 17th, 1917. She lived her life for ninety-one years.  She was seventeen in 1934.  The four numbers in that year add up to seventeen. She told me I was not permitted to go on a car date with a boy until I was seventeen.  Maybe seventeen was her lucky number.

Sharing My World 50

Coffee Wars Front Runner in Action

SHARE YOUR WORLD – 2016 WEEK 7

What are you a “natural” at doing?

If natural abilities show up in childhood with a minimum of encouragement, perhaps mine was related to music.  I never had much of a singing voice (my sister got all the talent there) but I had an ear for music and perfect pitch and could sight-read pieces and play them on the piano with ease.  In teachers college when I finally showed up to try out for the special music class they asked me what in the world I’d been waiting for.  Not much ever came of all that talent.  I haven’t touched a piano in years.  I get supremely annoyed if someone sings off-key or hits a bad note.  I like to listen to classical music and jazz once in a blue moon, and sometimes switch the sat radio to tunes from the 1940’s  They’re so bad they’re good.

Now I’m a natural at making soup.  It’s a much more useful ability.  My mom must have passed on to me part of her talent for throwing a bunch of stuff together without a measuring cup in sight and ending up with something delicious.  No recipe, difficult to duplicate, always a surprise.  Edible music to warm your soul on a cold winters day.

Would you prefer a one floor house or multiple levels?

The house you need/want/prefer is constantly changing as your life and circumstances change.  As much as I have always loved the idea of living in a six-story castle with turrets and ballrooms, I’m afraid all those stone staircases and drafty halls would kill me now, never mind the responsibility of servants and groundskeepers and film makers wanting to use it for a movie set.  A grand old three-story mansion with an attic would probably do me in as well.  I’m too old for haunted spaces and fireplaces with dead birds stuck in the chimneys and entire rooms made in to dusty old libraries.  I’ve also given up my dream of having a cathedral ceiling with windows everywhere and a cozy artists loft.  Even our three bedroom bungalow is feeling too big for the two of us these days.  I’m ready for something smaller with no stairs anywhere, not even up to the front door.  Flat as a pancake and easy to clean.  Sturdy shelves for my books and a corner for my art supplies and a kitchen almost too small to turn around in, but big enough for soup.

What was your favorite subject in school?

You might expect me to say art, but I didn’t love it because it was so structured then, with too many rules and often disappointing results.  I did love English, or Language Arts, and composition.  I hated how we were made to do book reports though, dissecting everything to death.  It was like explaining a joke until it was no longer funny.  In high school I thoroughly enjoyed Latin.  That was like having a love affair with words.

Complete this sentence: If only the rain..

…..would soak the world with joy and wash away all the pain and hurt and hate.  And maybe sweep some obnoxious mouthy morons down a sewer grate.

What are you grateful for from last week, and what are you looking forward to in the week coming up?

It is getting easier every day to know what I can and cannot eat to keep my diabetic readings stable.  Last night we dined out.  I had Chicken Parmesan, sweet potato fries and five ounces of Merlot.  Perfect.  Except for the blatant absence of vegetables.  But sometimes I make a meal of nothing but vegetables, so it all evens out.

We have packages of coffee, both beans and ground, that we are trying half heartedly to use up by brewing a pot of coffee in the morning.  It’s coffee brewer vs. Tassimo, and Tassimo is sneaking in a lot of wins.  It’s just so much easier than measuring out water and scoops of coffee and having the coffee sit there and get stale and then poured down the sink and spilling the filter full of wet grounds on its way to the little green compost bin.  Life is just so hard when you have nothing of consequence to do with yourself.

There is this one thing though.  W has asked me to do one of my collage pictures with a fishing theme.  He wants to hang it up at camp, although where exactly is a mystery because the walls are already covered with photo boards and other fishy things.  I said ‘what if you hate it?’ and he said ‘I’ll hang it up anyway’.

I’m grateful he has shown an interest in my work, other than to ask me what the hell I’m planning to do with all this shit.  So that’s my next project.  When we move to our tiny little pancake house we will be having one hell of a garage sale.

 

Just Jazzy 318

Speak softly and carry a big beverage.

Birthday Girl

It doesn’t seem so long ago that “grandpa’s munchkin” was just a happy goofy little kid.  She’s not exactly front and center in this photo with mom and great grandparents but somehow she manages to grab the spotlight anyway.

She’s still doing that, fifteen years and counting.

I’m tempted to talk about time flying and growing up too fast but I’ll skip all that grandma blather we’ve all rolled our eyes at before and just wish Happy Birthday to our beautiful Valentine girl.

BPPV and Me

Why is snotbag not an acceptable word?  Why?  WHY??? lol

Oh well, there was really no place to put it anyway.  And the word and the game have nothing to do with the subject of this post, but this screenshot has been sitting in my photos for a long time with nowhere to go and I must have thought at some point it was funny and worth sharing.

For the past several days I have been experiencing vertigo and dizziness and intermittent balance issues.  I have had this before.  It’s easy to recognize and a bit of a snotbaggish pain to deal with.

From the Mayo Clinic site by the Mayo Clinic Staff:

Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV) is one of the most common causes of vertigo — the sudden sensation that you’re spinning or that the inside of your head is spinning.

Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo causes brief episodes of mild to intense dizziness. Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo is usually triggered by specific changes in the position of your head. This might occur when you tip your head up or down, when you lie down, or when you turn over or sit up in bed.

Although benign paroxysmal positional vertigo can be a bothersome problem, it’s rarely serious except when it increases the chance of falls. You can receive effective treatment for benign paroxysmal positional vertigo during a doctor’s office visit.

Man, do they ever like repeating ‘benign paroxysmal positional vertigo’, hey?  You will now probably be able to say it in your sleep or repeat it in random conversations to impress unsuspecting people.

Inside your ear is a tiny organ called the vestibular labyrinth. It includes three loop-shaped structures (semicircular canals) that contain fluid and fine, hair-like sensors that monitor the rotation of your head.

Other structures (otolith organs) in your ear monitor movements of your head — up and down, right and left, back and forth — and your head’s position related to gravity. These otolith organs contain crystals that make you sensitive to gravity.

For a variety of reasons, these crystals can become dislodged. When they become dislodged, they can move into one of the semicircular canals — especially while you’re lying down. This causes the semicircular canal to become sensitive to head position changes it would normally not respond to, which is what makes you feel dizzy.

I have been doing the recommended exercises to move the ear crystals back to the right place and things keep getting better with each repetition. Otherwise I’m okay if I keep my head still and stay upright.  If you’ve never experienced this,  its kind of like being inebriated to the point where the room spins one way and you spin the other and your face is suddenly on the floor and you have no idea how it got there.  Not that I’ve ever done that of course.

So don’t say you never learned anything here on the breathing space blog.  I hope this has been wildly educational.  Especially the snotbag part.

Bedtime Cookbook

How far shall we flash back this fine Friday?  More than a lifetime for some of you, and just a drop in the time bucket for the rest of us.

What is more delightful than two recently bathed children with shiny clean hair all ready for bed?  Sitting together, sharing, being super good so bedtime will be delayed.

This was not a rare moment.  My mom often remarked on how well my kids got along with each other.  That changed for a while in their teens, but really, underneath the growing pains, they have always remained good friends.

I know it looks like the reflection of a halo on my daughters head, but don’t let it fool you.  She had her un-angelic moments.  And I never realized my son had such expressive toes.  I think that might be our polar bear hide on the wall in the background.  Hard to believe now we ever had such a thing.  But this is the NWT in the late 1970’s.  We didn’t know any better.  And that awful brown colonial furniture was in every government house.

One other thing I noticed in this faded photo is that the book they’re reading is not a kids book (although they had lots of those I swear). It appears to be a cookbook.  My poor children.  Is this what I gave them instead of reading them a bedtime story?  I can imagine the two of them pointing at the pictures saying – what is this yummy dish called?Mom has never made anything this awesome for us!  Maybe she doesn’t know how!  Maybe she doesn’t really love us!

Hey, they’re alive and clean.  Looks like it was a good parenting day to me.