Odd

One Liner Wednesday:  It’s Not What You Think

“You don’t get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd.”
― Neil Gaiman

Sharing My World 9

This is what you get when you ask everybody to smile.

Share Your World – 2014 Week 45

What is your favorite color?

For as long as I can remember it’s been red.  There was a brief period in my life when my mother was going through her “little dark-haired girls should be dressed in red” phase when I wished for my blonde haired sisters blues and browns, but I was just going through my own “jealous sister” phase and got over it.  Now I find myself choosing red for just about everything where red is a choice .  My I-Pad cover and my dinner plates are red.  I have a red wall in my living room.  A lot of my blood cells are red.  (My grandson helped me out with that one.)  I did a quick survey in this house and discovered there’s not a red lover amongst them.  Lime green, light blue, dark blue, purple, brown and yellow.  Maybe if the dog could talk and wasn’t color blind she’d say red.

In what do you find the simplest of joys?

Waking up well rested, that first fresh hot cup of coffee, my breakfast smoothie, a lazy relaxing day with no definite plans, some pleasant conversation, getting motivated to start an exciting new creative endeavor, getting something finished, making and eating a delicious nutritious meal, going to bed with an excellent book, long run on grammatically incorrect sentences which make you wonder if they’re ever going to end.

Would you prefer a reading nook or an art, craft, photography studio?

My photography skills are pretty basic and I can read anywhere, but for arts and crafts it’s important to me to have a space big enough to make a colossal mess.  Because the creative process is messy.  Or maybe that’s just me.

What is at least one of your favourite quotes?

“I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.” ― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman

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

It’s been great visiting with family for over a week, seeing the grandchildren and how they’re changing and growing up.  It’s a bit scary knowing they’ll all be teenagers before we know it.  I’m looking forward to going home, of course, because I always like that part of a trip as much as any other part of it.  Here’s hoping for an uneventful and safe drive.

Next week it’s back to my favourite surgeon for a follow-up/recheck.  And then I guess it’s time to get into Christmas mode.  Time rushes on.

Just Jazyy 150

“The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.” Neil Gaiman

(from Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)   

Better deal with whatever is bugging you now – today – don’t put it off until tomorrow. The longer you wait for your perfect future, the shorter it will be.

ADHD Book Reviews

This has been a summer jam-packed with books for me. Sometimes it feels like the reading of them is more important than the content.  It’s like that feeling you get when you’re really hungry and you don’t care what strange thing you eat as long as it fills you up.

This is not neccesarily a recommended reading list, it’s more a hodgepodge sample of what has been filling up my little head, because reading even a mediocre book beats sitting around staring off into space.  I think.  (*stares off into space and thinks about that*)

A man revisits his childhood, drawn to a small farmhouse and the pond behind it where his seven-year old self encounters dangerous, strange and frightening things.  His beloved kitten gets run over, his family’s boarder commits suicide, and he and his eleven-year old friend Lettie try to send some creepy evil thing, accidentally awakened from another realm, back to its own world.  This is one for fans of grown up fairy tales who like to remember the terror and magic involved in simply being a kid.

Vonny and Andre are worried about their abnormally short four-year old son Simon, but go on to worry about a variety of other things after their elderly neighbor Elizabeth, suffering from deafness and dementia, jumps out of her second story window and has to have her 16-year-old (kind of trampy, Andre-seducing) granddaughter come to live with her while she convalesces.  Spoiler alert – Simon gets taller.

Coco is a struggling author who has a cheating husband, a gay son named Rosencrantz, two best friends who receive the bulk of her crazy e-mails, a hideous mother-in-law, a snobby agent, and a seemingly endless run of bad luck.  It’s not easy getting back into the dating scene at the age of 42, never mind trying to steer your chaotic life in a new direction and get yourself back on track.  But like Rosencrantz – (“Fucking hell Mum, like, way to go”) – I was laughing out loud and rooting for her all the way.

I guess I did not read nearly enough angst ridden young adult novels as a young adult so I’m making up for it now.  This is a book written for teens by someone who remembers very well what it’s like to be one.

A down-on-his-luck disabled veteran detective investigates a super-model suicide and solves the mystery of her death.  I read this only because it’s actually J.K. Rowling writing under a pseudonym, and not because I like to read crime fiction or mysteries. More seasoned whodunit lovers will probably have this one figured out before the end, but I never expect these things to turn out the way they do.

What secret is locked inside Rabo Karabekians potato barn?  What better way to delve into the many layers of brilliance in the works of Kurt Vonnegut than to re-read some of my old and long forgotten favourites?

There are more books I could mention and give bad reviews, but why say things that aren’t nice?  Or did I do that already?  It’s hard for me to stay focussed on this because I’m part way through something new and hungry for the next chapter. In fact, I have two books on the go at the moment.  I am a book glutton.  Maybe I need help. Maybe there’s a book on that.