Sharing My World 68

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Share Your World March 27 

(But first some missed questions from last week….)

How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?

I think 40 is a pretty good age to be.  It’s somewhere in the middle of your life after you’re over the trauma involved in being a kid, you’ve gotten pretty good at functioning as an adult, and there’s still so much to do with your life and so many good things to come.  You know, as long as you don’t get hit by a bus or eaten by spiders.

However, I can believe all I want that I’m in my forties until I look in a mirror and go, ‘whoa’, that can’t be right.  It’s funny when some musician or celebrity I’ve known about since I was a teenager is celebrating a birthday and I think it’s shocking how old they are.  Because if i stop to think about it for a minute, I have to admit I’m around that same age myself.  And then I realize we’re both still looking relatively good for being such old farts.

So, you’re on your way out and it’s raining. Do you know where your umbrella is or do you frantically search for it all over your apartment/house?

The umbrellas are in a basket above the coat rack at the back door.  Even though they are very handy, this does not mean that I will remember to grab one on the way out.  Those things are going to look brand new forever.

Do you recharge your energy by going out with friends for a good time or by spending quiet time alone?

Quiet time alone.  I don’t even know what that other thing means.

Name three things you and your spouse, partner or best friend have in common.

  1. Coffee first thing in the morning.
  2. We are each responsible for our own laundry.
  3. Family comes first.  Well, right after coffee and laundry of course.

Does your first or middle name have any significance (or were you named after another family member)?

My middle name is Mae because it sounds good with my first name, like Ellie Mae and Daisy Mae.  But it’s neither of those, thank gawd.  My dads eldest sister was May, my maternal grandmothers nick name was Mae, and I was born in the month of May.  There really was no escaping it, was there?

Music or silence while working?

Definitely silence.  The more silent the better.  I am very easily distracted.  Being distracted makes me irritable.  So shut up and let me drink my coffee before you try to talk to me.  Haha, sorry, I’m still on the things in common with your spouse question.

If you had a special place for your three most special possessions (not including photos, electronics, people or animals), what would they be?

We had a garage sale and then made several big donations to Goodwill.  So any potential most special possessions are now someone else’s problem.  It’s very freeing to get over attachments to things.  Plus it frees up a lot of storage space.  You know, for all those things that aren’t special.  Okay, the real answer is my top dresser drawer.  I don’t even know what all is in there anymore.

The Never List: What are things you know you never will do?

  1.  I will never stop being surprised and dismayed when people die.  We are all in our forties so it’s just bizarre when it happens.
  2. I will never voluntarily sky dive, deep-sea dive, springboard dive or bungee dive.
  3. I will never again be responsible for a pet.  With me these things tend not to end well.  However, as I say this, I am thinking about the video I watched of shelter dogs on a bus being distributed to their new owners and their forever homes and it made me cry and really really want a dog.  For about half an hour until I calmed down and got over it, as little stray dogs everywhere breathed a collective sigh of relief.

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

I’m grateful for the witches around the world who have twice now performed their binding spell on the big DT to thwart his and his cohorts efforts to do harm.  Looks to me like it’s working.  We all have to do whatever we do best.

I’m looking forward to April and the REAL start of Spring around here.  Which sometimes isn’t until May actually, but I’ll settle for the snow going away as a good omen.

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Coffee and Other Funny Things

We are running low on the Tassimo coffees I like so I am slowly using up the random pods I can’t remember buying and which they probably don’t even make anymore.  That’s how old they are.  Today I am enjoying a cup of Gevalia Caramel Espresso to which I have added extra water, French vanilla sugar-reduced cream and a dash of Truvia.  It tastes like pancake syrup.

And if you don’t think that’s funny, wait until you see what else my caffeinated brain has found for you.

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Happy Sunday.

Sharing My World 20

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Share Your World – 2015 Week #9

How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?

If this is a trick question, my answer is that I would be exactly the age I actually am whether I know what it is or not.  But if I had to take a good look at myself and figure it out with a wild guess, I’d say fifty.  (I’m a bit pathetic at guessing anyone’s age).  Then I would look at my adult children and wonder why I gave birth to the first one when I was ten.  This is assuming I recognize them of course.  Who knows what else I may have forgotten.

If this question is asking how old I would LIKE to be, there’s no magical time in my life to which I wish to return.  Life goes on with ever new challenges and adventures.  If I could make time stand still or slow down I might opt for that.  The older I get, the faster it flies.

Are you left or right-handed?

I am right-handed, but do a lot of things with my left hand, and so I used to tell people I was ambidextrous because ambidexterity sounded like a very impressive thing to have.  I have a son who is left-handed, so I will pretend he got that from me.  If it’s genetic, I will then be forced to admit he got it from his “actually ambidextrous” paternal grandfather.

One of my more interesting useless skills is the ability to write backwards, so that you have to hold whatever I wrote up to a mirror to read it.  Or perhaps you have the interesting useless ability to READ backwards, in which case, here’s something useless for you to read.

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This has less to do with being left-handed or ambidextrous than it has to do with childhood boredom and writing secret messages in code when you’re too lazy to think up a real code.  I am an expert when it comes to finding the easiest way to do something.

If you HAD to change your name, what would you change it to?

My mother loved my name, as mothers do, but I always found it lacked sophistication.  So I would change it to Lindsey Maive MacKayla.  And although you may think that must be some random pronouncement right off the top of my head, I actually used a name generator to come up with it.  The suggestion for a pen name if I were a romance novelist is Libby Anne Funnyflower.  Seriously.  Does it get any better than that?  Well, yes it does.  I have been advised to write science fiction as Lilliana Mars Spencebot.

Where do you hide junk when people come over?

Hey!  How did you find that out about me?  Okay, if you must know, I use the dishwasher, drawers, closets, cupboards, rooms with closed doors,  and throwing things down the stairs into the basement.

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

I am grateful that W got well enough from “the worst cold he has ever had in his entire life” (this is how he describes every cold he has ever had in his entire life) to travel by plane to Ontario to visit his parents and celebrate his dads 93rd birthday.  I am looking forward to a nice quiet relaxing week on my own, doing nothing,  with no interruptions of my chosen nothingness activities.   It takes concentration to do nothing right.  And I am an expert at that too.   share-your-world2

Art du Jour 29

imageI have taken my own advice and gotten serious for a minute. This is a portrait of the famous W.  Perhaps his own children won’t recognize him, but that’s okay. I’m rather proud of this labour of love.

When I showed it to him he knew who it was and laughed.  I took that as a good sign that I hadn’t traumatized him for life.

Yesterday W came across a picture on Facebook of someone we haven’t seen for over thirty years and remarked that he looks awful.  He doesn’t really, he just looks old, because, well, he’s old.  We see our own changes gradually, and are often shocked at the changes in other people with whom we’ve lost touch.  Inside I feel like I’ve never left my thirties, but the mirror tells a different story.

So this is not the face I married, although he’s in there somewhere.  I’m going to hang on to this until we’re in our nineties and then show it to him again so we can both see how handsome he was way back in the day.  This is of course supposing we both live that long and can still see and remember where we put things.

I was looking at celebrity high school yearbook pictures on some Facebook site (yes, we both have way too much time on our hands these cold dreary January days) and the captions were statements of disbelief and what happened?  Well, time happened, you idiot caption writer.

Here’s to time and the wonderful changes it makes to our life-well-lived faces.

Prayer of an Abbess

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Prayer of an Anonymous Abbess

by ―     Margot Benary-Isbert

Lord, thou knowest better than myself that I am growing older and will soon be old. Keep me from becoming too talkative, and especially from the unfortunate habit of thinking that I must say something on every subject and at every opportunity.

Release me from the idea that I must straighten out other peoples’ affairs. With my immense treasure of experience and wisdom, it seems a pity not to let everybody partake of it. But thou knowest, Lord, that in the end I will need a few friends.

Keep me from the recital of endless details; give me wings to get to the point.

Grant me the patience to listen to the complaints of others; help me to endure them with charity. But seal my lips on my own aches and pains — they increase with the increasing years and my inclination to recount them is also increasing.

I will not ask thee for improved memory, only for a little more humility and less self-assurance when my own memory doesn’t agree with that of others. Teach me the glorious lesson that occasionally I may be wrong.

Keep me reasonably gentle. I do not have the ambition to become a saint — it is so hard to live with some of them — but a harsh old person is one of the devil’s masterpieces.

Make me sympathetic without being sentimental, helpful but not bossy. Let me discover merits where I had not expected them, and talents in people whom I had not thought to possess any. And, Lord, give me the grace to tell them so.

Amen
―     Margot Benary-Isbert

Posted for Cin’s Feb Challenge/Witchy Rambles Day 6 – Pray

Haiku Enlightenment

Sei Shonagon (清少納言)

Sei Shonagon (清少納言) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Weekly Writing Challenge: Haiku Catchoo!

Your mission is to write five haikus — one for each of the five days leading up to this Friday when we will choose some entries and feature them on Freshly Pressed. 

Wise words always sound ridiculously more sage and profound when they’re written in the form of Haiku.  So here’s my five deeply philosophical attempts to attain WordPress fame.  And if Freshly Pressed is not in my future, what the hell.

Not a broken mess –

Beautifully imperfect.

You are not alone.

~~~~~

There’s no good reason

To act your age my darling.

Stay forever young.

~~~~~

Can life be perfect

One fine day, some tomorrow?

Nope, so just relax.

~~~~~

You must learn the rules

Before you can break them all.

Hey, good luck with that.

~~~~~

Afraid of the dark?

What you can’t see worries you?

Kid – turn on the lights.

~~~~~

CalGeisha

CalGeisha (Photo credit: Wikipedia)