Sharing My World 15

Share Your World – 2015 Week #2

Are you a hugger or a non-hugger?

Hugs are nice, but I rarely initiate them.  We were not a very huggy family when I was growing up.  I know I hugged my own kids, but probably not enough.  Very public displays of affection make me uncomfortable.  However, all that being said, if you want a hug from me, or think I need one of yours, please go ahead.  I will hug you back.  Sometimes there just aren’t words to express what a hug is able to say.

What’s your favorite ice-cream flavor?

I’m going to go way out on a limb here, or way out into right field….because that would be my ideal place to eat ice cream, where no one can see me….and say fudge bars.  We buy big boxes of them to have in the freezer for when the grandchildren visit.  That’s a joke, because they visit us about every six boxes of fudge bars.  But because it’s just fudge bars, we can claim to never buy ice cream.  I like them because they are chocolate, eating one does not involve getting a spoon and a bowl dirty, and you can hide their little white wrappers at the bottom of the garbage can.  You could also use the wooden sticks for crafts later, if you washed them off and if they were not also hidden underneath all that garbage.

Do you prefer exercising your mind or your body? How frequently do you do either?

Of course I prefer exercising my mind, because it requires so little physical effort.  Except maybe for working out those frowning muscles in my face. I can also enjoy a fudge bar while I do it.  However, I have been performing a daily series of very non strenuous stretching maneuvers – I hesitate to call them exercises because they sure don’t feel like that – and can honestly say I feel better for it.  And almost look forward to doing it!  I am waking up muscles that nodded off years ago thinking I was done with them.  My neck and shoulders are less stiff.  My ankles feel stronger.  I’ve been up close and personal with my calves and thighs.  Yikes.

Are you more of a dog person or a cat person? Why?

I’m more of a cat person I suppose, because I totally get how much they like to sleep and generally laze about and do whatever they please.  They entertain themselves and require little more from anyone besides food on demand and a clean litter box.  What a life.  I’m not fond of all that hair shedding though.  When we had cats there was hair in and on absolutely everything.  We kept the lint roller people in business.  I would visit my mom and dad and marvel at how hairless their home was, finally understanding why they preferred animals to live outside or in a barn.  We have no pets now.  It’s enough of a challenge to look after each other.  Plus neither of us sheds much.

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 a lovely quiet week.  I’ve been able to read and write and draw and play word games and watch movies.  Cats got nothing on me.  And we are almost to the middle of the dread month of January!  The temperature has gone up to -4 C today.  Not quite lawn chair weather, but getting there.  Oh, crap.  There’s a freezing rain warning.  And we’re out of fudge bars.  I need a hug.

Just Jazzy 267

Jazzy Does 100 Days of Happiness 54

Happiness is finding the Cow’s store in Niagara on the Lake and eating the best ice cream in Canada. Yay!

Just Jazzy 196

groak (v.)  to watch someone who is eating or to stare longingly at someone else’s food in the hope of being offered a portion of their scrumptious bounty, or better yet, being asked to join them.

If you’re not sure you can succeed at the art of groaking, any dog will be happy to show you how it’s done.

Jazzy Words

The Luxury of Choice

“Everyone has choices to make; no one has the right to take those choices away from us. Not even out of love..”  Cassandra Clare, City of Ashes

Vanilla, chocolate, or something else entirely? (Daily Prompt: 32 Flavors)  Yay, an ice cream question!  But it could just as easily be saying – Black or White, Right or Wrong, or a million shades of grey?

I am thirty-two flavors and then some (Photo credit: harry harris)

The minute we open our eyes in the morning we’re faced with choices – simple, complicated, life defining, meaningless.  Sometimes we think we don’t have a choice, but that just means we’ve already made up our mind about whatever it is.  And that’s our choice.  Other times the shere number of choices available is overwhelming and paralysing, so we cross our fingers, close our eyes and point, hoping for the best.

On the grand decision-making scale, which starts at wishy-washy and goes all the way to carved in stone, I like to think of myself as being somewhere in the middle with a fair and open mind.  (Hey, it’s my choice to believe whatever I want about myself, even if I’m wrong,  right?)  But I do think it’s important to listen to more than one side of a story, to consider sources, and to respect the choices that other people make.  None of us that I know of has reached the point in life where there is nothing left for us to learn.

I once read off all the flavours listed on the board at a Baskin-Robbins store at the request of my then five year old daughter so that she could decide what kind she wanted.    I thought she might choose oreo cookies and cream, pink bubblegum, rainbow, strawberry shortcake or cotton candy.  She was a little girl in love with hot pink, lime green, every shade of purple, and eating drink crystals directly from the package.  But what do mothers really know?  Not everything, that’s for sure.  Except it’s a given that their kids will constantly surprise them.  When I finished reading the long list I was prepared to make a shorter one to help her decide, but she only needed to hear it once.  I’ll just have vanilla, she told me.  (Really?  That’s the perfectly white ice cream with nothing in it, you know.)  I know, that’s the one I want.  And so that’s the one she got.

Baskin-Robbins Baseball Nut Ice Cream

I suspect it was the one she knew she would be getting in the first place, and the recital of the ice cream flavour list was merely to satisfy her curiosity as to what else was out there.   Or purely to make her mother do something time-consuming and ultimately useless in the name of love.  Now she’s much more an adult of the “something else entirely” genre.  But still making her own informed choices and living with them.  It’s all any of us really want for ourselves.  My own ice cream choice has always been boringly predictable – chocolate in some form or other;  fudge brownie, jamoca almond fudge, tin roof, rocky road.   It’s lovely to have some chocolate choices, but it’s all still chocolate at the end of the day.

What a luxury it is for us, to live in a world where there are so many choices and where we are free to do what we want to do, and be who we want to be.  Even when there are limits imposed, no one can tell us how we must react, or make us feel any way other than how we ultimately choose to feel.  Maybe one of these days I’ll go way out on a limb and try baseball nut. or lemon custard.  Or maybe  I won’t.  It’s my choice.  And how wonderful it is to be able to make it.

Brownie Points and a Brief Bulletin

Jazz Has a Sense of Humor (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Thank you Molly at http://mollyfielddotcom.wordpress.com/ for thinking of me for the “creepy-chain-maily” award.  HAHA!  I love it.  I’ve turned out to be good at accepting these things but not so great at passing them along – unlike Molly, who is able to accept three of them with aplomb in one fell swoop. Amazing.  Click on the link to see for yourself.  I hope this gets her some extra attention, because she has a fun blog and a great sense of humor. Instead of making a list in this post of blogs I love to follow, I’ve decided to update my “appearance” here with a “Blogs I Follow” widget.  This was so incredibly EASY, I have no idea why I didn’t do it sooner.  The only problem – the maximum number for the list is 50, and it picks up the latest ones I’ve followed, and not the ones I’ve followed the longest.  So some of my oldest and dearest friends are missing from this grid.  Boo.

No matter, you know who you are, and I don’t love you any less.  And it’s quite possible that I’ve sent you an award already that you’ve politely ignored and are breathing sighs of relief now that it’s not happening AGAIN, thank Christ.  Sorry to the few people who would never say that.

English: Johnny Depp at a ceremony for Penélope Cruz to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m supposed to list seven random facts about myself, but I’ve decided to copy and paste a bunch of questions nobody asked me and assume that will more than cover the requirements. This is the bulletin part you can skip over entirely if you already know more about me than is good for your health.

• What’s better, being an adult or being a child?  Being an adult doing childish things.
• How many pairs of shoes do you own?  Three that I wear – thirty or so that live in my closet.
• If space travel became possible for the average person, would you go?  Only under heavy sedation.
• If you were given a large sum of money to donate to a charity of your choice, which charity would you choose?  Cancer research.  We need prevention and we need a cure.
• Reality TV: Good or Bad?  BAD BAD BAD.  Because the reality part is a big fat lie.
• If you could be a character in a book which character would you be and why? Alice when she returns to Wonderland as an adult and gets to hang out with Johnny Depp.  I mean the Mad Hatter.  I know it’s a movie.  I don’t care.
• What is the weirdest food you have ever eaten? Muk-tuk.  Although I’m not sure I swallowed any of it.
• What laundry detergent do you use?  Purex or Sunlight.  Did you need to borrow some?
• Do you think aliens exist?  Yes. But then I think a lot of strange and unbelievable things.
• Chocolate or Vanilla? Chocolate, no contest.
• What is the worst job you have ever had?  Being a waitress when I was a teenager. That’s why, ever since, I’ve been amazingly nice to wait staff no matter how bad they are.

1. Are you a dog, bird or cat person?  Cat person because they’re so independent, but lately I’ve become a non-pet person altogether.
2. Favorite ice cream presentation: hard packed or soft serve? Cake cone or sugar cone? Seriously, any of them, it really does not matter in the least.
3. Favorite time of day: dawn or eventide? Dawn.  With the whole day ahead of me.  At eventide, I’m usually remorseful that I didn’t take full advantage of that whole day ahead of me.
4. What do you like most in others?  A sense of humor. The ability to really listen.
5. What is the most frustrating part of your craft?  My lack of ambition.
6. What do you do for exercise?  HAHAHA!  Oh – were you serious?
7. What is your favorite personal quality in yourself? My sense of humor and ability to really listen.
8. Is where you are right now in your life where you expected to be?  More or less.
9. What would you change, if you could, about your life per your answer above?  I’d be retired already with a shit load of money.
10. What is the greatest sorrow you have experienced? The death of my parents.
11. What is your greatest joy?  My family, my kids and my grandchildren and how life goes on.

Flavor of the Month

Once again I can’t get Plinky to come up, but I know what todays prompt is via Facebook;  If you were a flavor, what would you be?  So I guess we’re revisiting our childhoods here, trying to answer a sneaky question that makes us think of words to describe ourselves and what we’re like.

I’m suffering from introspection overload, and I’m no child on normal days, so why not ask some actual children for their answers to this?  I’ve got a few of them handy as it happens, since today is a snow day and there are four grandchildren milling about willing to answer grandma’s weird questions.

Kale hardly needed to give it any thought at all.  His answer was immediately “Annoying Orange.”  Anyone who knows Kale will appreciate the very subtle humor in that.

Corey decided (with a little help from his brother) on “Kung Fu Coconut”, because he is evil and funny and a bit nutty.  Then he had second thoughts about it and made ‘annoying apple’ his final answer.

Omayja chose “Minty Ice Cream” because she is smooth and cool and sweet and delicious and everybody loves her.  All true.  You can ask her grandma.

Madison thought she might be more like “hot and spicy pizza”, so hot that she could make people cry.  Everybody knows Maddy has this side to her personality.  Then she grinned and told me she’d be a honey dip donut instead.  We would all like the donut girl to surface more often.  Especially on snow days when we’re all cooped up inside trying to be quiet so mom can rest and get better after her surgery.

We’ve made it all the way from 7 a.m. to noon!  Yay me and my flavorful crew!

My Favorite Comfort Food

Love Coffee

It’s rude to pick favorites, and I just can’t do it. The best I can manage is a short list with sincere apologies to anyone I’ve forgotten.

– cold potato salad on a hot summer day

– chocolate ice cream in a waffle cone

– yogurt covered raisins

– scones, hot from the oven with butter and honey

– turkey stuffing when it’s not even Christmas

– hot Starbucks coffee with a splash of hazelnut cream

– movie popcorn with extra butter

– veggies and dip, even though you wouldn’t expect them to be on this list because they’re actually good for you but the comfort part is in being able to eat a whole bucket full and not feel any remorse or guilt when you’re finally so stuffed you can’t move

– and honorable mention goes to toast for its versatility.

Don’t know how to answer the ‘why’ part either, because there are different foods for different moods and days of the week and seasons. A spread sheet might be helpful, and I’d make one up for you now if I had the time, but there’s some rye toast with peanut butter calling my name and I gotta go.