Life in progress

Monthly Archives: May 2013


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Lunchtime!

I’m going to eat my last avocado. Wish me luck!


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Further to my post below this one

Dear Natasha,

P.S. When I told my son you were moving he smiled but his eyes glazed over. He turned away and tried to hide the fact that he had to take his glasses off to wipe his eyes. I imagine he’s upset because he remembers the two times, at the beginning when you allowed him to come over and play baseball with your kids, and because he’ll miss watching them have fun while pretending to ignore him for your sake, surreptitiously waving to him when you weren’t looking. I wonder if your kids wonder why they didn’t get to say goodbye to him.

I hope your kids rebel so bad…


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An open letter to the woman who lives behind me (a rant)

Now normally I’m not the vindictive type. I usually just let things go. But before my backdoor neighbour has a chance to move out (which she will any day) I’d love to be able to give her a little present in the form of a song.

Here is my letter:

Dear Natasha,

When I met you and became friends with you we had in common the fact that we both have children. You have six of them, which you repeatedly pointed out were little angels, I have a normal teenager who tends to swear (what teen doesn’t?) an autistic teenager who has tantrums, and a Deaf child who wants to be friends with your kids.

I didn’t really notice there was anything wrong with you until you commented on the fact that you’d traveled all over the world but would never go to a country like Japan because they weren’t Christian there. o_O

After a few weeks of summer break that year, and after having lent you all my DVD’s that teach kids how to speak American Sign Language in a fun way, you gave them back to me, saying that your children weren’t interested in playing with my son (they showed no indications that they felt this way) because of the way he showed his enthusiasm for actually having friends his own age by looking into your back yard and screaming with delight when he saw your kids doing something fun. You then went on to explain to me that I needed to teach him how to behave himself… after all, you didn’t have any problems making your kids behave.

So, Natasha, I leave you with this song. The heathen I am. And a big nakayubi to you.

No love,

Linda

To my readers:  Please note, when (and if) you listen to this wonderful gem, the chanting at around 2:19. Apart from the fact that I can imagine myself singing along at the top of my lungs exactly the way Sakurai Atsushi belts it out from on top of the table on my deck, my teenaged son and a few of his friends (if I have my way) would be trudging slowly around a bonfire in my back yard, fully cloaked in robes with pointy hoods. Please also note that the lyrics don’t matter. It’s the thought that counts.


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Why I write fiction

English: Icon for lists of science fiction authors (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was sitting here trying to come up with a blog post when I realized it. There’s nothing going on in my real life that’s worth writing. Whenever I came up with something, it was either something I want or something I imagine.

For instance, I was out on my paper route today, looking as I always do for inspiration, and there was this woman walking her dog. From a distance it was an odd looking dog, mostly because it was black and gray and the gray parts of the dog blended in so well with the sidewalk that parts of it were invisible. So, of course, my imagination took over.

What if I woke up one day and no longer recognized things that I should… as though I’d woken up in a different dimension. And what if I saw this dog on my paper route and *gasp* it had four legs?!? Everyone knows that animals all have two or three legs – except birds who of course have four. But imagine that! An animal that resembled a dog except it had FOUR LEGS!

So that’s my life. Dogs with four legs. Exciting stuff, eh?


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What is it with today?

All day, all this weird shit has been going on.

First my debit card was compromised – I lost almost $200 and would have lost more had I had more money in the account. When I called the bank the first thing they asked me was, ‘Were you in Puerto Plata yesterday?’ to which I replied ‘HA! I wish’. Anyway, they apparently tried 4 times to withdraw $200 from my account.

Second I get to the dentist’s office to pay my son’s bill for three teeth to be filled – $618. When I asked my ex to pitch in he simply told me he’s broke.  *sigh* …and I’m not. HA! again.

Third, I get home to find I’m apparently NOT a mother and so Mother’s Day didn’t apply to me – see the last comment on my About page.

Fourth, I was sitting in my living room and at exactly the same time my laptop shut itself off and my cellphone came on…except the cellphone doesn’t have a sim card in it. I just keep it around to set alarms on.

Fifth, I’ve tried 3 times to put a link code to my About page in this post and it keeps screwing up.

Is there a sun spot I’m unaware of?

I just…

Is it just me?


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Yes, yes, I know it’s Mother’s Day

As much as I want to wish all the moms out there a Happy Mother’s Day *waves to you all* I’d like to say something else.

Happy children’s day.

Because without them we wouldn’t be blessed with the privilege of being called a mom.

MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA

Fred, Chris, Alex, I love you. 🙂


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To pseud or not to pseud

…that is the question. What’s in a name after all? It’s something by which you are instantly recognized. But which one of you do you want recognized… I think that’s really what it comes down to.

We all have different personas for different occasions. To my children’s teachers I am nothing but a dedicated mother. To my readers, a sage. (Stop laughing.  Oh okay laugh. It was a joke.)  But seriously, I am myself. I am a woman who has never, on a regular basis, worn makeup. What you see with me is what you get. And yet few of the people in my real life understand where my imagination goes.

This post was brought about by the fact that, after a rather questionable fic I wrote last night, I lost a follower on my fiction blog. Whether it was someone who went ‘Ewww, what am I reading?!’ and clicked unfollow or whether it was someone who deleted their blog (a robot perhaps?) I have no idea. But it got me to thinking. My writing covers many different things. I’ve written a children’s book which is currently being illustrated by a friend and most certainly will go out to a publisher under a pseudonym. The stories I tend to enjoy writing however, go from humorous (my Second Seat on the Right series ) to perverted ( Beauty ) to horror (see a short story entitled ‘Reaper’) and of course the psychologically horrific Boy Series on this blog.

I understand that it’s probably important to write under different names for different genres. My biggest concern, however, is protecting those I love from the depths of my imagination, not only for what they would think (I believe they already suspect a great deal anyway – case in point, my eighteen year old son telling me I’m a sick fuck) but also for what the people my kids have to deal with on a daily basis – what are they whispering about mom?

Having been married a number of times I’ve been through a few aliases in my life, to the point where the hardest part of filling out an application form for something was deciding on my surname. My kids don’t even have the same last name as I do, and to this day you wouldn’t find me under Linda Hill in the phone book. But it was the name I was born with and the name I’ve chosen to stick with from now on, no matter what.

Unless I don’t.DSC00191


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Private Thoughts, Private World Part 6 – Beauty

In each of us the idea of it is cradled, warm and glowing. It’s something we wish for, something we strive for, something we hope to behold and to create. For each of us there is a singular nuance that we recognize and when we see it, or hear it, touch it, taste it or even smell it we know. It lights up a part of our brain like nothing else can.

It is beauty.

It moves us, it inspires us. It comes in so many forms. I remember once, I had taken an overnight flight from England back home so I had been up all day the day before and because of the time change and having to look after my kids… let’s just say I was exhausted. In this state, I was in the car for some reason and the song ‘Comfortably Numb’ came on the radio. I sat and listened to the entire thing. It wasn’t until the guitar solo at the end when I started to bawl my eyes out, positive that it was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard in my life. …at least since I saw Pink Floyd live so many years before that.

How do you describe something that, to you, is so beautiful that it makes you cry? By giving it life. Like the gritty, piercing of David Gilmour’s guitar crawling up the back of my neck and wrapping me in a warm blanket of pure, ear-splitting devastation.

By giving an inanimate object a soul we can not only describe what we see but how it makes us feel.

Sakura2

Sakura

I see a delicate cherry blossom, known only to spring. It signifies both the brilliance and the swiftness of life and all its glory, for it comes and goes, so very quickly.

Beauty can be defined in so many different ways. For some of us it is in a face, in the sound of children’s laughter. For some it is home and the aroma of freshly baked cookies or the comfort of a roaring fire on a cold winter night. For some it is the exquisite line, where pain and ecstasy meet – the drop of blood,  the single tear shed for love.

Beauty is one of only many things that move us, that make us want to write or to articulate our emotions in other ways. To be able to elicit in others the emotion that comes from our deepest most precious place where we know things such as beauty is a gift. It’s one that I hope to practice and somehow, perfect.


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Adventures on my Paper Route – Cats, Wine and Flowers

Seems one of the neighbourhood’s kitties has gone missing.

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Mmmm…reward….

Seriously, check out the reward.

Do you think I can pass off Thomas as their missing cat?

Thomas the feral cat

Thomas the feral cat

There’s a bottle of wine in it for me if I can pull it off.

In other news, I’m afraid to go into my front garden in case there is black and white cat hair littering the ground around my daffodil.

Speaking of flowers, we have some!

Pink2 Blossoms

Here’s to spring!

Cheers all!


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Another week, another… seriously?

photo credit - Wikipedia

photo credit – Wikipedia

Friday evening is here, the kids are home for the second weekend in a row (their dad is supposed to take them every other weekend but apparently, work) and I’m fighting a chest/nasal infection. I went to the doctor and he asked me, “So, you have a chest infection?” – information he got from his secretary who asked me what colour my phlegm is – to which I replied, “yes”. He listened to my chest in four different places, through my shirt AND my bra strap and within 30 seconds I was walking out the door, the prescription faxed directly to my pharmacy from the doctor’s desk.

Yeah.

So I get home from the pharmacy and take two of these little yellow miracle pills and lo and behold I can speak again! For the first time in a week I don’t feel as though I’m going to cough up a lung sometime in the next few moments. Unfortunately the side effects may include death.

I hope my ex will get the hell off his ass and come and get the kids if that tiny little detail that the doctor, in his infinitesimal (no, that doesn’t mean infinite) wisdom, failed to inform me, comes to pass.

Then again maybe the run-on sentences will get me first. 😛