Want a laugh? I posted a limerick contest over at HarsH ReaLiTy! There are some good ones already – add yours!
Monthly Archives: February 2015
SoCS – Sticky Friends
I’ve had very few friends in my life who have stuck with me. Not one to make friends easily in the first place–I make great acquaintances–there have been not many to count on to stick with me anyway.
When I was little I had a couple of friends, then in my teenage years there were three or four of us mostly, maybe six in total. Two of those six I still speak to occasionally – my best friend John who I met when we were 17 and my friend Joe. One thing that’s remained constant in my life – I don’t make friends with women very easily. I imagine I’m not “girly” enough.
As for imaginary friends, I’m not sure if I even did those right. I’ve never had “friends” I was able to talk to… no, my imaginary friends are characters I live vicariously through. Right from childhood up until now I’ve been able to sit and create worlds, populate them with interesting people with fabulous lives, and spend time there sometimes going over and over the same scenes for hours on end. I wonder if all writers of fiction do this.
Now I have John, Joe who I text to once in a while, and my neighbour with whom I have coffee once in a blue moon. (She keeps asking me to go, bless her, even though so often I’m not able.) And I have all of you, my faraway friends on the internet. It would be interesting to meet you all in person, and see if any of you “stick.”
This post is part of SoCS: https://lindaghill.com/2015/02/27/special-edition-friday-prompt-for-socs-february-2815/
Badge by: Doobster at Mindful Digressions
and Love Is In Da Blog: https://justfoolingaroundwithbee.wordpress.com/2015/02/22/love-is-in-da-blog-february-ping-back-post-rulessuggestions-week-4/
Please click the links and join in!
Here we go again.
She wrote, “I need some people to hold me accountable. I want to make it a goal to write something every day.” Can we help Brittney out with this? I think so. 🙂 Give her a visit and say hi!
Note: Comments closed. Please comment on the original post.
I’m relatively sure that at some point in the past I told myself I wasn’t going to start a new blog. I was going to keep the one I was working on.
Clearly that went out the window.
I doubt many people will end up reading this, but for those who do, I need some people to hold me accountable. I want to make it a goal to write something every day. I don’t know what, and I don’t really care what, but something. Something about what I know. Something about whatever is going on. We’ll see how this goes.
Until then, this blog of course doesn’t have much of a theme. It’ll get there this time. I have some kind of faith. The amount is debatable, though.
If anyone wants to talk to me about anything, I’ll probably welcome the conversation.
Special Edition Friday Prompt for SoCS February 28/15
As a special feature for February’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday, The Bee and I have decided to collaborate! As you may know, on her site – Just Fooling Around with Bee – a month-long blog-hop is going on in recognition of Love, called “Love Is In Da Blog.” The week 4 prompt is Love in friendship. This, conveniently, ties in to my own special occasion this week.
This weekend, the Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt is one year old! Since its humble beginnings, starting with the rules, I have met SO many new bloggers who I now consider to be friends. And let me tell you, I appreciate each and every one of you! I’m so happy that my prompt has led many others to connect as well and I’m constantly amazed by the wonderful posts that have come out of this event. Thank you all so much for joining in over the past year!! Here’s to the next!!! 😀 Without further ado:
Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: acquaint and/or friend. Use one, use both, add prefixes or suffixes, but whatever you do, have fun!
After you’ve written your Saturday post tomorrow, please link it here at this week’s prompt page and check to make sure it’s here in the comments so others can find it and see your awesome Stream of Consciousness post. Anyone can join in! And don’t forget, as a special feature this month, you can also ping back to “Love Is In Da Blog”! Find the prompt here and get the badge: https://justfoolingaroundwithbee.wordpress.com/2015/02/22/love-is-in-da-blog-february-ping-back-post-rulessuggestions-week-4/
To make your post more visible, use the SoCS badge! Just 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!!
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 can come and read your post! For example, in your post you can write “This post is part of SoCS:” and then copy and paste the URL found in your address bar at the top of this post into yours. Your link will show up in my comments, for everyone to see. 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!
Tokyo, Japan – Part 2
Since I’ve already written about the day of the amazingly awesome Buck-Tick concert I attended, I’ll skip that day and go straight to the next.
Being Christmas time, and still having to do a fair bit of shopping, I decided to make my final two full days in Tokyo shopping days. I started out going to Shibuya – an absolutely fantastic place to go if you like crowds of people. I can’t stress enough how overwhelming it is just to cross the street there. I found this:
It’s a live camera at Shibuya crossing. (I swear I could watch this video for hours, especially when it’s crowded at lunch time. Is it just me?) On the far left side, outside the shot, is the train station. It is from that side of the street that I took this picture:
and here are two photos I took
facing the train station
at the end of the crosswalk on the far right of the youtube video screen
I went from there just a short way up the block to Tower Records
and bought a CD by, you guessed it, Buck-Tick, as well as a Christmas present for my best friend John – the new AC/DC CD with a bonus poster. He’s now likely the only person in this little town of ours to be in possession of an official AC/DC poster in Japanese.
Its funny, here in North America McDonald’s seems to me to be generally the most garish thing in any cityscape. In a place like Tokyo, the golden arches get all but lost.
Can you spy the McDonald’s?
amongst the karaoke bars and cartoon characters. But there it doesn’t seem garish. It just all awesome scenery.
From there I went to Akihabara, the area of Tokyo which is famous for anything gadget-like or to have anything to do with anime, to shop for my kids. As always, the store lights are stunning.
With so little space, a tiny shop is expanded by going up – some of the stores have seven floors of retail area. I would have liked to have gone back to Shibuya to see it all lit up, but by the time I finished having dinner with my friend Kellie (who I’ve known for about seven years through LiveJournal but never met in person before) in Shinjuku, I was too tired to make the extra stop before going back to the hotel. It had been yet another nine hour day of walking around.
To be continued…
My Beloved Paper Route
It’s been a busy day, starting out with an appointment with Catherine, my occupational therapist. I was happy to go – my tendonitis/rotator cuff injury has been getting steadily more painful. It’s at the point now that I can’t properly wash the hair on the right side of my head without supporting my right arm with my left. Getting dressed and undressed is something I dread, and don’t even ask about the jungle that is my right armpit. (I swear I have a nest of gerbils under there.)
So what does all this have to do with the title of my post? It’s like this: Catherine made a few suggestions concerning the flare-up I’m having in my shoulder (and now my entire arm) that included making sure I’m sitting up as straight as possible when I’m on the computer *sits up straight*, attending some aqua fitness classes in a therapy pool, and taking a temporary leave of absence from my job. Yes, my job. My beloved walk around the block every day.
It’s not that the walking is doing me any harm except that in the snow, with the possibility of slipping and seriously hurting myself, I’m walking hunched over in the attempt to be more careful about my footing. In essence, I’m making my shoulder worse. So I called my boss at the paper and left a message on her machine this afternoon. I’m still waiting for a call back.
The more I think about it though, the more upset I am at the prospect that I may get fired over this. It’s not the monetary loss, nor is it really even the fact that I do it for the exercise. The truth is, this stupid little job actually gets me out to talk to people. It makes me a part of the community in a way nothing else does – because I’m really not a part of it. My work, my family, and my friends are all here in my home. I have one friend on the outside of these walls and that’s it. Without my paper route I’m no longer part of the work force. I have no worth as a citizen. I’m merely raising my children and, without the meagre $20 per week I make off the paper, am completely dependent on the system.
While I await the verdict from my boss I’ll contemplate what I should do. Perhaps I can make a living off my writing… oh no, wait. Catherine also told me to get off the computer. It, too, is hurting my shoulder. Speech to text? Anyone tried it?
I’ll keep you all posted and let you know what’s happening. Now I have to run. I think the gerbils are thirsty.
One-Liner Wednesday – My New BFF
Best. News. Ever.
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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. To execute a ping back, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below.
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 (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:
1. Make it one sentence.
2. Make it either funny or inspirational.
Have fun!
Random News and Kitties
First up, it’s time for a happy dance! My Facebook author page hit 100 followers today! If you’re not already following me, I’d appreciate it if you’d contribute to my new goal of 200? 😀 Here’s the link: https://www.facebook.com/lindaghill.fiction?ref=hl
In other news, I decided to go ahead and make another WordPress site. I took the advice of several of my commenters on the previous post and downloaded Chrome so I can keep the two identities open at once. Finding followers is going slow, but it’s infinitely better than at Blogger, where I’ve started writing a parody of sorts. It’s enjoyable for the moment, but with no one reading it, it’s going to get boring. I’m sure I’ll eventually post it here at WP – where it won’t be boring, natch.
So, my new persona. The name came to me as sometimes names do and you just know they’re right; no rhyme nor reason for it. My profile picture is a selfie I took of the back of my neck… which was fun with my sore shoulder. Why a picture of the back of my neck? You’ll see when you get there. I’ve created a twitter account to go along with the blog, just for the hell of it. As it says on the little twitter description of me, “Beware: utters expletives without warning” – there will be more swearing over on my new blog than there is here. To give an example, I’m thinking about doing A-Z April over there with the theme, “A-Z imaginative cusses.” Because I can.
Anyhow, I plan to have fun over there. My address is https://isabellamorgan.wordpress.com/ and my twitter is @izzymorganblog. This may be the only link to the new blog here at Life in Progress (except for the edit I plan to do on my previous post), though I might advertise it once a year as an anniversary thing. There won’t be any links over there to this one. I just want to keep the two separate, but if you comment over there, don’t be afraid to call me Linda. I’m not going to advertise, but I’m not uptight about keeping the two secret from one another. It’s really just a way to keep this blog more professional while having the freedom to write whatever I want, whenever I want.
So what other news is there? Oh! A cat,
Luka
or two.
Casper
What random post would be complete without cats? These two are boarding with the troll (aka my eldest son) in my basement. They came upstairs for a visit so I thought I’d shoot a few piccies.
See you on the flipside.
Oiling the Creative Machine
I’m looking for input on an idea. It all started like this…
I decided to play with a pseudonym, but I didn’t want to have to keep signing in and out of this WordPress account to keep my name a secret, so I went to … hold on to your seats … Blogger. Don’t everyone gasp at once. I’ve been there for a whole four days and not a single peep out of any one of the maybe three people who have looked at my blog. Needless to say, it’s frustrating. SO much harder to follow people over there – I swear I can hear crickets. You may be wondering just why I would want a pseudonym. Easy. Yes, that’s right, I want something easy to write – short, sweet, random, funny snippets that don’t take away from the theme and goal of this blog, which is to talk about my life in a reasonable manner and to further my career as a novelist. I can’t see shooting out the occasional random crap as a stop to reaching that goal. The other, more important reason for my Blogger blog came up in relation to my shoulder. I’ve been told to bend over and let my arm hang, swinging every once in a while to keep the joint lubricated. Just like I need to lubricate my creative joint by writing… But writing things like decent fiction and grammatically correct articles takes up so much time!! So here’s my crazy little idea.
What if I created another WordPress blog, just for this purpose. I could keep the pseudonym, only everyone will know it’s me, because when I write and comment my gravatar will be there. Would you follow me? Some of it will be semi-fictional, some will be more like a tweet only longer… all of it will be just random amusing crap that may well culminate in huge discussions. Most of all, it will be for me.
So, input? Have you ever considered doing something like this? Your opinions will likely have a lot to do with whether or not I go through with it, so please be honest. Here, I’ll make it easy for you.
The poll is no longer active. Thanks for voting!
SoCS – Relatives
I think, sometimes, about the fact that when my mother passes away I will have no relatives here in Canada other than the ones I made – my three kids. When I think about it I feel alone. I realize that should my eldest son ever have children, I will have more relatives. The other two of my boys will likely never have families.
So where will be my legacy? I wonder if maybe that’s why I write… to ensure there will be something left of me, even if it’s not a blood relative. I used to think about this in regards to my father. As an only child, and a girl to boot, the only chance of my father’s name being passed down was if I kept it. But I didn’t, in regards to my children. They have their father’s surname. So at this branch of the family tree, the name Hill will end… or will it? Again, if I publish my novels perhaps it will live on, at least as a concept if not a warm body.
As the generations pass on we are all eventually forgotten in everything but name. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could be somehow remembered though? Words go a long way.
This post is part of SoCS: https://lindaghill.com/2015/02/20/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-february-2115/ Check it out and join in the fun!
Badge by: Doobster at Mindful Digressions
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