Life in progress

Daily Archives: January 8, 2016


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The Friday Reminder and Prompt for #SoCS Jan. 9/16

It’s Friday, and time for your Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt. Today’s SoCS prompt will be tomorrow’s Just Jot It January prompt word, so if you want to use it for your JusJoJan post, go right ahead, and if you want to combine the two challenges you can do that too!  Now, since we’ve had one-word prompts all month so far, I’ve decided to do something slightly different with SoCS this week. Pay close attention; here is your prompt:

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “title.”  Think of the title of a movie. Remember or jot down the first one that comes to mind. Now what I’d like you do for SoCS is, use that title as the inspiration for your post. It can be the story of the movie, the title of the movie, or you can simply quote the title of the movie somewhere in your post. It’s up to you! Enjoy!

P.S. If your chosen movie is largely unrecognizable, please let us know at the end of your post what you’re referring to. Thanks!

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!

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!!

SoCS badge 2015

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,” “Begin with the word ‘The’,” or simply a single word to get your started.

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. As a suggestion, tag your post “SoCS” and/or “#SoCS” for more exposure and more views.

8. Have fun!


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Just Jot It January 8th – Honorable

I’ve been procrastinating long and hard on this post. It’s not that I don’t want to write it, it’s more that I want to get it right. But I want to get some sleep at some point tonight (I haven’t had a night off without kids since my last one in Japan, on November 29th) so here I am just writing it.

Honesty, honour (I managed to eke out one American spelling for the title; sorry Tasha, that’s the best I can do), and ethics, to me, are the most important qualities in a person. I’m no harder on anyone else on these points than I am on myself. I demand them of myself constantly. I come by it honestly enough.

The Golden Rule was drummed into me as a child to the extent that I’ve developed a love/hate relationship with it. Yes, it should be followed always, but it seems a no-brainer. While many people consider it a purely ethical teaching, I can see an equal amount of logic in it. Like Newton’s third law (every action has an equal and opposite reaction), “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” simply makes sense. I’ve begun to see it in action on a daily basis, now that I have a puppy in the house.

Alex is on a feeding pump at home for at least a few hours every day. The pump (which is like an IV pump) has a tube running through it which attaches to a valve in his stomach; it delivers his formula directly. There is about three feet of tubing between his belly and the machine, so if he walks away from the device, the tube sits on the floor. Alex is deathly afraid of the dog grabbing and pulling on the tube, so every time the pup comes near, he screams and pushes him away. The puppy, being a puppy, thinks this means he wants to wrestle. Which makes the situation so much worse than if he quietly held the dog at arm’s length until it got bored and walked away.

Golden Rule or Newton’s Law? Or both?

While my example doesn’t really have a lot to do with behaving ethically, honourably, or honestly, it’s a prime example of why we must react to and treat all humans and creatures as kindly as we can, with as much understanding as we are able to muster. Wouldn’t the world be so much better if puppies weren’t pushed away from enteral feeding devices? And we all just got along quietly and calmly?

The “Honorable” prompt is brought to you by Tasha at Corner Of Confessions. Please click on the link to visit her blog, and follow her if you aren’t already!

JJJ 2016

To find the rules for Just Jot It January, click here and join in today. It’s never too late! And don’t forget to ping back your January 8th post here!