Life in progress

Monthly Archives: August 2014


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Stream of Consciousness Saturday – Prepositional Selling

Badge by: Doobster at Mindful Digressions

Badge by: Doobster at Mindful Digressions

Over the course of my day today, I will be going through boxes in my basement to find things I want to get rid of sell in a garage sale next week. First, I could use the extra space, second, I want to declutter, and third, I need the money for a trip I’m going to take in December.

I feel fortunate to live in a place where I can stand on my front lawn and sell things I no longer need. Garage sales are big here – I don’t know if they are in other places in North America. People spend their entire weekends out driving around town looking for bargains, and bartering around prices until they get what they want for next to nothing. Even if I get next to nothing, I figure I’ll be up a little bit from what I had when my stuff was sitting in the basement just growing older.

It’s amazing the things we accumulate, isn’t it? I have boxes of things I haven’t looked at since I moved them here almost five years ago from my house in Gatineau, and most of THAT stuff was already in boxes there and hadn’t been used in the fifteen years I was there. I would love to live light, with few possessions. But when you have a six bedroom house with a basement it’s difficult to justify getting rid of anything – I have the room. I have rooms I rarely go into so the mess gets ignored.

I was very lucky to find this house when I first moved here. It was originally a two bedroom bungalow, but the previous owners built three bedrooms and a half bath into the attic. When I moved in I kept one of the two original bedrooms as a guest room and turned the other bedroom into a computer room. The final room my eldest son moved into – he was happy to have the entire basement to himself and, as teenagers are wont to do, came out only for meals, showers, and to go out with his friends. He was as white as a ghost before he moved out.

Ragweed season is here and both Alex and I are sneezing. That was a left turn out of nowhere!

Wish me luck with my sorting and selling, if you please.

This post is part of SoCS: https://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-august-2314/  Click on the link and join in the fun!


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Have Any Good Dreams To Share?

I’ve been having a lot of weird dreams lately. Building things has been a prevalent theme, as well as organizing. It’s like I’ve been working in my sleep, and so I wake up feeling like I’ve had no rest. It doesn’t help that for the past week I’ve woken every morning between 1:30 and 4:30, at least once, and haven’t been able to go back to sleep. My mind becomes occupied with all the things I’m reminded I need to do in my waking life by my dreams and sleep eludes.

Every night when I get into bed I hope for a nice dream. One of the ones I sometimes have in which I’m madly in love with someone who loves me back, or I’m laughing or simply happy, hanging out in a shop with Johnny Depp, who is buying me anything I want. (Yes, I’ve actually had that dream. 😀 )

Dreams–good ones–can keep us going every bit as much as the bad ones can weigh us down.

What is your favourite dream?


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The Friday Reminder and Prompt for SoCS August 23/14

Hello again! It’s time for your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday! I barely have a thought in my head this week, mostly due to having a difficult child home with me and not being able to focus on anything, so I thought I’d keep this week’s prompt open for interpretation by you, the participants.

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: start with a preposition. That’s it! Have fun!

After you’ve written your Saturday post tomorrow, please link it here at the prompt page in the comments so others can find it and see your awesome Stream of Consciousness post. Anyone can join in!

Try out our new, handy dandy SoCS badge. Paste it in your Saturday post so people browsing the reader will immediately know your post is stream of consciousness and/or pin it as a widget to your site to show you’re a participant. Wear it with pride!!

socs-badge

Badge by: Doobster @ Mindful Digressions

Here are the rules:

1. Your post must be stream of consciousness writing, meaning no editing, (typos can be fixed) and minimal planning on what you’re going to write.

2. Your post can be as long or as short as you want it to be. One sentence – one thousand words. Fact, fiction, poetry – it doesn’t matter. Just let the words carry you along until you’re ready to stop.

3. There will be a prompt every week. I will post the prompt here on my blog on Friday, along with a reminder for you to join in. The prompt will be one random thing, but it will not be a subject. For instance, I will not say “Write about dogs”; the prompt will be more like, “Make your first sentence a question,” or “Begin with the word ‘The’.”

4. Ping back! It’s important, so that I and other people will come and read your post! The way to ping back, is to just copy and paste the URL of my post somewhere on your post. Then your URL will show up in my comments, for everyone to see. For example, in your post you can copy and paste the following: This post is part of SoCS: https://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/08/22/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-august-2314/  The most recent pingbacks will be found at the top.

5. Read at least one other person’s blog who has linked back their post. Even better, read everyone’s! If you’re the first person to link back, you can check back later, or go to the previous week, by following my category, “Stream of Consciousness Saturday,” which you’ll find right below the “Like” button on my post.

6. Copy and paste the rules (if you’d like to) in your post. The more people who join in, the more new bloggers you’ll meet and the bigger your community will get!

7. Have fun!


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I Know What I Want

There are people in the world whose words are consistent with their actions and there are people who say one thing and then do another. Okay yes, there are times that the former type lapse into the latter, just as I’m sure there are people who are almost constantly doing things contrary to what they say might be tempted to actually do what they say. But it’s the latter type I see as not really knowing what they want out of life.

Of the latter type there seem to be two sub-types, as it were. There are those who say they’re going to do something and then never do. (We’re all guilty of that occasionally though, aren’t we? I was going back to school in September… ha. Maybe next year.) And there are those who say they feel a certain way but their actions don’t match. Take, for instance, a person who says he wants to meet, in person, a friend who he met online. He might say, “I’d love to get together,” but then always finds an excuse not to. Or a woman who is cheating on her husband: at night she may come home and tell him she loves him, and would go to the ends of the earth for him, but the moment he leaves the house in the morning she’s having it off with the pool boy.

Lying to the people around oneself aside, the dishonesty in these kinds of actions must take a toll on the psyche. In the case of the woman – does she want the happy life she portrays with her husband? Or is freedom what she really wants? Likely she has no real idea, so she juggles both, possibly while she attempts to figure it out. Even in the less life-altering case of the man, the stress of having to keep up the appearance of wanting something he doesn’t really want (which is shown in his actions) has to come with some kind of cost. The cost is in energy and on the conscience.

I strive to match my words with my actions as much as I possibly can. I try to be honest with myself, even if I can’t always be honest with everyone I meet. (Of course that hairdo looks wonderful on you!) In being honest with myself and for the important things with other people, I feel that I am able to know what it is I want in my life.

Do you know what you want? What you really really want?


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Liking Comments on WordPress, Reevaluated

After much thought and many comments, I’ve decided to try out the “like” button in my comment section. As Jason of HarsH ReaLiTy pointed out, it’s another way of making connections and interacting and I know this to be true by experience. I have, in the past, clicked on the blogs of people who have “liked” my comments and found a few bloggers who were interesting enough to follow, and who subsequently followed me back.

In all I’d have to say that the enlightening conversations I had on this post have highlighted not only the benefits of “liking” a comment, despite its often narrow meaning, but I’ve had some fun “liking” comments there too. My love/hate relationship with the button has tipped slightly to the “love” side. Or at least the “like” side.

If you decide to come along for the ride, you can turn your comment likes on by going to your dashboard, in the settings and then the “sharing” section. Why not give it a try? You might end up “liking” it.


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Liking Comments on WordPress

I’m having a bit of a love/hate relationship with the addition of the new “like” button in the comment window. My first reaction when people started putting the button on their own blogs in the comment section was that it was a lazy way of saying to someone that you either agree with them or that you enjoyed their comment. Before it showed up, one was forced to actually write out his or her thoughts. I wasn’t going to put the option of “liking” comments on my blog. Now, it seems, I don’t have a choice. If the comment shows up in the notification box, it’s fair game for a “like.”

Now I’m not saying I don’t think anyone should use them, nor am I complaining when someone “likes” one of my comments. Though I still think it’s a way to be lazy, I find it handy to use when all I really want to do is acknowledge that I’ve read a comment. Particularly if that comment is simply a 🙂 Thus, my love/hate relationship with it.

What do you think of it? How do you use it the most?


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One-Liner Wednesday – Theoretically…

The quickest way to a man’s heart really is through his stomach, because then you don’t have to chop through that pesky rib cage.
– J. Jacques

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Anyone who would like to try it out, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do, you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday, if you see a ping back from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.

The rules that I’ve made for myself for “One-Liner Wednesday” are as follows:

1. Make it one sentence.

2. Make it either funny or inspirational.

Have fun!


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A Difficult Day

It’s been a particularly tough day with my son, Alex today. For those of you who aren’t familiar with him, he’s a Deaf, four foot tall, cute as a button thirteen year old who has somehow managed to combine adolescence with the terrible twos. He has scabs on both knees from a fall he took last week. They were both healing nicely but …

Alex can’t leave a scab alone. It doesn’t matter if he opens it up again, he’ll just keep picking and picking until it gets infected and I have no idea what to do. Today I tried the following:

1. Telling him “no.”

2. Taking away his laptop and turning off the tv.

3. Putting him in his room.

4. Saying please (trying to reason with him).

5. Putting a bandage on it. (He took it off.)

6. Restraining him.

7. Ignoring him.

8. Putting a cloth damp with rubbing alcohol on the cuts (which by that time were oozing pus).

9. Threatening to put MORE alcohol on if he didn’t stop touching it (in the end he held the alcohol-soaked cloth on it himself).

And what, of all this worked eventually? Ignoring him. For a limited amount of time.

This has been my day from the moment I woke up to the moment he finally went to sleep after whining that his knees hurt for about an hour from the time he went to bed.

Any suggestions? Because I’m looking forward to the same thing tomorrow and every day until he goes to his dad’s on Monday… and at this rate every other day ’til Christmas, if it’s healed by then.

P.S. If you “like” this post I’ll consider it support. 🙂


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Intuition, Fear, and What a Bird Taught Me

Imagine it: you’re just puttering along, living your life as usual and then suddenly an opportunity arises. You have a chance to do something you’ve dreamed of doing for years – something completely different from your ordinary life. Something so “out of the box” that the mere prospect scares you as much as it excites you. It’s not something that’s too good to be true – it IS true. But it’s so far removed from your comfort zone that you begin to wonder – is it fear that’s making me hesitate? Or is it my intuition kicking in, telling me there’s something wrong with the picture, or that if I go for it, something bad will happen? What do you trust?

Many people I know would pray for guidance. Some would trust that if the universe dropped the ideal scenario in front of them, they should take it. But what if you had no actual faith? This is where I lapse into the story of the bird.

It was about twenty-five years ago, back when I owned a horse. I arrived at the barn where I had him boarded one day to find a young barn swallow stuck in the window. The walls of the barn were thick – if I was to guess I’d have to say eighteen inches to two feet, which was about the depth of the window sill. The door was only a foot away from the window, and the other members of the bird’s family were frantically flying in and out of the barn. I had no idea how long the one who had missed the door and hit the window instead had been flapping around in the window but it still had plenty of energy. I couldn’t let it die there, so I decided to try to help it.

After a few fruitless attempts to catch it, which only resulted in tiring it out so much that I was afraid it would have a heart attack, I rested my hand on the sill. It stopped trying to get out; it watched me instead. Gradually I moved my hand closer to the bird until I was able to touch it. Still, it didn’t move. Rather than trying to grab it, I nudged its breast with one finger and the tiny, frightened bird stepped on my finger.

As I stepped back away from the window, hoping the bird would stay on my finger, I marveled at the weightlessness of it – of its breath, so fast, its little eye staring at me, weighing with its own sense of self-preservation whether or not it should trust me. It did stay on my finger as I passed across the door post and as I reached the door, one of its siblings flew past my head and with it my little bird took flight.

I’ve never forgotten that experience.

Back to my original scenario: the opportunity may not be one of life or death, but imagine if it’s no less scary than trusting in something as unknown as a human to a wild bird – as unknown as God or the universe to a human. Was it intuition that drove the fledgling to trust me?

So you’re faced with an opportunity: something that’s entirely foreign and yet it’s something you’ve always dreamed of doing.

What do you trust? How do you know the difference between fear and intuition? Or do you simply have faith?


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Starving my child for kicks

I had the pleasure today of going out for lunch with my son, Alex. For those of you who are new to this blog, Alex is Deaf and he is tube-fed. He nibbles a little, drinks even less, and has never eaten a meal in all of his thirteen and three-quarter years. However it’s fun for both of us: I get to treat myself to a meal and he gets to people-watch, which is his favourite thing in the whole world.

So we went into Montana’s and sat down in a booth and the waitress came over to ask if we wanted anything to drink. I ordered him a glass of water without ice (I’m won’t pay for something he won’t drink – he did end up sipping about a half-teaspoon of it though) and I ordered myself a beer. A few minutes later she came back with that and took our order. We had agreed on a salmon salad – Alex liked the picture – so I asked for it and he pointed to it.

“Just one?” she asked.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Shall I get him a plate?” she half-whispered, I suppose so as not to embarrass me.

“Sure,” I said.

She looked at me briefly as though she was assessing how cheap I must be and left the table. Five minutes later she came back with not one, but two small plates. I mean seriously, SURELY I was going to split the salad evenly. I did manage to not tell her to go fuck herself however – I said thank you instead.

When the salad came she put it in the middle of the table. Of course I immediately moved it in front of me and gave Alex a nibble on his plate. After two miniscule bites of salmon he was full.

The thing is this: every time this happens I’m tempted to lift up his shirt and show the waitress his g-tube button, permanently implanted in his stomach, and explain why I’m not feeding him. But then I think, why should I have to? What I do in a restaurant, as long as I’m being polite and paying for my food, shouldn’t matter. Yet how much do you want to bet she went home and told her husband, “There was this woman who came in today and ordered herself a beer and a salad and let her kid starve, blah blah blah…” Actually, it’s kind of funny, when you think about it.

Would you explain to people why you’re not feeding your child? Or would you just allow them to judge and tell everyone about it who will listen?