Snorting Eucalyptus

The view from where I’m sitting.  Yeah, I know.  Gives a whole new meaning to “still life”  

Yes, snorting eucalyptus IS what I’ve been doing for the past twenty-four days, which WP was kind enough to remind me is also how long it’s been since my last post.  Even W noticed this strange silence in November, the month in which we are supposed to be writing our little hearts out.  I did the polite Canadian thing and kept my comments about the American election more or less to myself, except for sharing a few news stories on Facebook.  That’s been pretty hard.  Are y’all batshit crazy down there??  Well I know you’re not, and have faith that sanity will prevail.  You know, before we all die hating each other.

In the summer I was blaming my stuffed up sinuses and chronic cough on seasonal allergies, but I’m not sure what the heck is going on now.  Rather than complain (and rewire my brain for negativity) (seriously, that’s an actual thing) I tried allergy pills and nasal sprays and decongestants, and elevated my blood pressure in the process.  So I ditched all that stuff, but I still wanted to breathe, so now I’m using my little air purifier even though there’s already an air purifier on our furnace.  Our air is PURE, man.  And I’m shooting a eucalyptus based spray up my nasal passages more than the recommended four times a day.  It does not cause rebound congestion and it works very well, for about twenty minutes.  Then it doesn’t anymore.

My hematologist said my chest was wheezy, and suggested I go back to my GP for an inhaler.  So that’s next.  I’ve had pneumonia.  I don’t want it again.  I keep running out of tissues.  My life is hell.  No of course it isn’t.

Other than wheezy breath I’m healthy enough I guess, because the hematologist said to come back in a year.  Her pre-screener gave me longer than that. I think.  The first thing he said to me was “…so, you’re sixty-seven, you’ve got another ten or twenty years to go.  Because, you know, eighties….” I did not know what the proper response was to that statement but probably because of the blank look on my face he quickly changed the subject and went on to other things.  Weirdo.

And speaking of weird, W said if I had nothing to write about I could always talk about him.  Wow.  He should NOT be encouraging that.

I never had much of a love for Christmas when I was growing up (too much church and  too many crazy relatives) (although the food was good), but when I met W his enthusiasm for the holiday was infectious.  He still absolutely loves Christmas.   He puts up the outdoor lights in mid November.  This year he added two spotlights which sit on the front lawn and flash revolving red and blue lights all over our house.  And the snow. And maybe the sky.  When I’m sitting in the living room they also flash all over the ceiling and the walls.  I told him it’s a good thing neither of us is prone to epileptic seizures and God help our neighbours if they are.  He didn’t find that even remotely funny.

Maybe my eucalyptus spritz is hallucinogenic.  Because he loves the lights.  He found out they are now on sale so I suggested he go get a couple more and the sarcasm was completely lost on him.

I wonder when my brain got rewired for sarcasm.  There’s probably a doctor for that, hey?

In other news, I put shelf liner in my cupboards this week.  Our washing machine (age 22 years) died a noisy death and has been replaced by a newer but amazingly similar model (but this one is water efficient, so there’s that) which cost less than the price of repairing the old one.  W also loves a bargain.

And I love my ordinary little life with a husband who thinks it’s funny that I find him funny.  There’s always something to be thankful for.  Like eucalyptus being a scent that kind of grows on you.  That’s a big one for sure.

Sharing My World 24

Mother Natures April Fools Day Humour

Share Your World – 2015 Week #13

What was your favorite subject in school?

Language Arts, or whatever name it goes by now.  Back in the dark ages when I went to school this subject was called English and broken down into reading, spelling, grammar and composition.  I loved them all.  Although my spelling wasn’t one of my highest priorities and as a result there are still words I don’t like to spell correctly the first time.  Spell check makes me doubly lazy.  Plus it also appears to have a sense of humour with its sometimes bizarre suggestions.

Both my parents were sticklers for excellent grammar so we learned to say things properly to avoid having them constantly correct us.  They both instilled a love of reading in us, by reading to us until we could read for ourselves.   Do kids still have to parse a sentence and identify all the parts of speech?  One underline for subject, double underline for verb, triple for object, adjectives and adverbs and phrases in brackets with arrows to what they modify.  Then name the conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions, etc.   I love all those rules which I often delight in breaking with run-on or incomplete sentences and dangling participles and orphan which clauses.  Excellent grammar can sometimes sound very snobbish, so usually I write the way I talk and break many of the rules.  Just so you know it’s (mostly) on purpose.

“Life is not measured by the number of breaths you take,  but by the moments that take your breath away” (George Carlin).  When have you had such a moment?

At the births of my children (after all that heavy breathing) and when seeing each one of my grandchildren for the first time.  There’s something about a newborn baby or a baby of any age that melts my heart.  I look at those perfect little faces and forget to breathe.

There was also that time in Scotland when we got off the bus at Glencoe and looking at those noble green hills gave me the weirdest sensation of deja vu.  Maybe I was a Highland warrior in a previous life, or lost loved ones in the massacre of 1692.  It’s also possible, (because of my retracted ear drum which I believed at the time was caused from the stuffiness of a head cold),  that I was simply high on decongestants.

What’s your choice: jigsaw,  crossword,  or numeric puzzles?

I’ve been seriously addicted to all three, but thankfully not all at once.  My various obsessions last until I get bored or realize I’m wasting an incredible amount of time that could be better spent, and then I move on to a new addiction and repeat the process.  My choice at the moment would be crosswords of medium difficulty.  The really hard ones make me feel stupid.  And nobody likes that.

If you found an obviously abandoned car with $50,000 in the back seat, what would you do?

If I knew for certain that I would never get caught, I would take the money home with me and hide it under my mattress.  Because you don’t want to create suspicion by suddenly depositing a lot of cash in the bank.  And then I would have to pray that the house didn’t burn down.  But who is EVER certain of not being found out?  And if we’re not called on something, we eventually blurt out the truth on our own because the burden of keeping a secret drives us nuts.

So I would call the police.  Because it’s the right thing to do.  And I’m rather boring like that.

The grateful for and looking forward to part….

Late yesterday afternoon we had a delightful rain with thunder and everything.  Then over night the rain turned to blowing snow.  It looks like January out there.  So I’m grateful to be inside where it’s warm and not out driving anywhere in this.

I’m looking forward to finishing the reading of a book.  ANY book.  Amazon keeps sending me e-mails asking me to rate the books I’ve purchased and I haven’t read them yet!  I get annoyed with the emails because I’m annoyed with myself.  And I’m also annoyed that when I start reading where I left off I have no idea what’s going on and have to backtrack a few pages to figure it out.  So lately it’s two pages back, three forward, and then I fall asleep.  I’m grateful there is nothing more serious to be annoyed about.

It’s too cold and blustery to go for a walk and search for abandoned cars full of cash, so I’ll just curl up on my couch and play word games instead.  In no time at all I will find myself gasping at my own breath-taking brilliance!  HAHA!  Mother Nature is not the only one who does funny things.

 

Why Breathing Space?

Jazzy and the Pussycats (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Daily Prompt:  All About Me

Explain why you chose your blog’s title and what it means to you.

Breathing Space  Life on the Sidewalk….where every day is a new beginning, take a deep breath and start again.

1.  It all started seven years ago and was inspired by the site called “myspace” and reading about other people and their adventures on their own “space”.  So I wanted a space too.  Being spacey and all.

2.  My fear of water and drowning and not being able to breathe, plus my love of being left alone to think, plus my inability to come up with anything even remotely unique, prompted the Breathing Space name.  You can find “Breathing Space” on Wikipedia, but it has nothing at all to do with me and everything to do with a band by the same name.

3.  Life in the fast lane is an expression I like, but have never EVER lived.  Life in the slow lane would be slightly more accurate, but life on the sidewalk is even better.  Because here I am, strolling along, watching the rest of the world zip on by.  Where the hell are they all going, anyway?  I’d hitch a ride if I really cared.

4.  Somebody said I should have more of a tag line or something to better explain what this blog is all about so that’s where all the deep breath new beginning stuff came from.  I keep thinking I should change that to something better.  You know, the whole starting over thing.  One day it might just go missing altogether.

5.  I am a grandma to five kids, ages 7 to 12.   W has always called me Lin, as if saying my whole name would wear him right out.  So those two things combined end up being grandmalin.  However, if you are French you might read it as grand malin which very loosely interpreted means big shrewd/cunning/crafty or clever person.  Voila.  It can also mean malicious or malignant, but I try really hard not to be either one of those things.

Il faut être malin pour réussir – You have to be shrewd in order to succeed.

Il m’a donné un sourire malin – He gave me a knowing smile.

There’s your French lesson for the day.  There is some French on my father-in-law’s side of the family but that’s my closest claim to being French myself.

6.  The name of my alter ego Jazzy is nothing but wishful thinking.  I’d like to be jazzy.  I like jazz.  I was reading a book in which there was a minor character named Jazzy.  This one kept showing up in random doodles.  Thus Jazzy was born.  She will die when she runs out of stuff to say.

7.  In the beginning my site was all about the history of my family and preserving the pictures and the memories for future generations.  After several years of that I got bored and branched off in a multitude of different directions so that now I have no idea what any of this is really about.  It’s a work in progress.  It’s a walk on the sidewalk.

Some days it’s just a long sit down rest on the curb.

Self Indulgence Haiku

Breathing, coffee, sleep,

time to think and time to write,

my greatest pleasures.

My list book suggested making a list of my guilty pleasures.  Pleasures should never make a person feel guilty – unless the whole point is getting away with doing something you shouldn’t be doing.  I suppose there’s a certain amount of fun in that.

I wanted to work ‘bacon’ into the above haiku, but gave up.  It deserves honorable mention though.  W made breakfast this morning.  I love a man who knows how to cook bacon so that every bit of it is crispy and not one bit of it is burnt.  He has an infinite amount of patience with some things, and slow cooking bacon to perfection is one of them.

So I had a choice this morning – write something interesting, or sit down and indulge in the best bacon and egg breakfast I’ve had in a very long time.  And the winner is…..

English: Open face bacon and egg sandwich (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

10 Things to do Before 2012

I would like to:
1.    Stop making absurd lists.
2.    Quit setting ridiculous deadlines.
3.    Discontinue establishing meaningless goals.
4.    Give up all this crushing negativity and get over myself.
5.    Keep breathing.
6.    Figure out once and for all what the hell happened to that blue back-pack my son had in grade six so we can put that haunting family question to rest and finally be able to sleep again at night. And for those of you who had forgotten all about it, sorry to bring it up.
7.   Stay reasonably sane.  Please don’t tell me it’s too late for that.
8.   Read another 80 (or more or less) books via Kindle.
9.   Write at least three sentences in a row that relate to each other and make sense to someone besides myself.  What the hell.  Try for four.
10.  Clean out the damned fridge.  There are things walking around in there.