Friday, March 15, 11:24pm
Were you worried?
It’s okay. I’m still alive.
The offspring posed many challenges today.
Least of them was his refusal to wear a coat.
Such is the life of a Canadian mother. Though I had to hand it to him: it was above freezing.
Meanwhile, the dog was under the weather.
Perhaps both of them were attempting to wring sympathy from me.
… or perhaps not.
Either way, I won.
I survived March Break 2019.
*does happy dance*
Thursday, March 14, 7:13pm
The offspring is attempting to pry me away from the computer to do housework.
But he’ll only do it until I join in, and then he’ll stop.
He thinks he can get one over on me, but I’m smarter than him.
I’ll not be tricked!
One more day to go.
Wednesday, March 13, 8:45pm
For once in his life, the offspring didn’t want photographic evidence of what he was up to.
Here he is, dodging the camera at the library.
Meanwhile, the dog is still up to no good.
I think the two of them may be planning a coup.
More tomorrow, if I’m still around.
Tuesday, March 12, 8:00pm
The dog keeps stealing paper out of the recycling bin. When I call him over to drop it, he comes and drops it and I give him a treat.
At first it was cute.
Now I’m on to him.
Still holding down the fort.
Monday, March 11, 2:30pm
The offspring is keeping himself busy.
So far, no unusual outbursts or requests to go out.
All is well.
I’m abashed to realize that I am, again, late to my own bash.
Meaning my prompt.
‘Coz I ain’t gonna make it before midnight.
But I needed a break. Alex has finally gone to his dad’s for the weekend, for the second time this year, and I’ve spent most of the day either working or catching up on the things I needed to get done.
Did I get a break? I got a break from the pressure I usually have hanging over me … but to really take a break,
you’d have to bash me over the head and drag me away.
What I need is an honest to goodness vacation.
Somewhere I have no access to social media,
somewhere that the sky is blue, the beach is warm, the sea spread out before me with waves glittering under the sunlight,
somewhere I can close my eyes.
And drift away, without a care in the world.
Hell, I’d even take a dingy hotel room in the middle of a strange city at this rate.
Tokyo is strange.
Why did the angry chicken cross the road? To get away from KFC …?
SoCS badge by Pamela, at https://achronicalofhope.com/
This rather late post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Click the following link to find all the other posts in the comments, and join in! It’s fun! https://lindaghill.com/2019/03/08/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-march-9-19/
The thing about anniversaries is, if you think about them too much, you’ll realize how much time has passed and not only that, how old you’re getting. A milestone is just that–a marker to indicate how many miles you’ve gone. And a reminder of the toll they’ve taken on you.
But it’s not all necessarily bad. (Keep in mind I’m typing as I think, so this could easily go wonky on me.) With the miles come experience. Experience is golden in that if you let it, it provides an excellent teacher. On the other hand, if you let it, experience can provide you with bitterness. Because, let’s face it, not all experiences are positive, and not everyone can find the good in a negative experience. It could be said that some have no positives … unless you really REALLY dig deep.
My question is, if we celebrate a little every day the little things that happen, no matter how small or positive or even negative, does it make the bigger celebrations less like milestones? Yeah, probably not. (See my “wonky” disclaimer above.)
Little things I’m celebrating today?
I’ve been clumsy. I almost dropped Alex’s $750 feeding pump (but didn’t!), and somehow I managed to get butter in the dog biscuit box and dog biscuit crumbs on my toast. Honestly? Not as good as marmalade.
The positive in this? I get to tell you about it. And hopefully in the telling there won’t be a third thing. …who am I kidding? There’s always a third thing. But it likely won’t be falling down the stairs and throwing my laptop over my shoulder in the process (the last majorly clumsy thing I did), because I learned to pay attention to what I’m doing when I come down the stairs.
Something to celebrate!
Me and my buddy Winston, taken five minutes ago. I really need to go on a celery diet.
SoCS badge by Pamela, at https://achronicalofhope.com/
This wonky post is brought to you by Stream of Consciousness Saturday, which is officially celebrating its fifth anniversary today! Click the link to find all the other participants’ posts in the comments, and join in. It’s fun! https://lindaghill.com/2019/03/01/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-march-2-19/
It was interesting enough waking up to my eldest son’s cat on Saturday morning, since he (the cat) is supposed to stay in the basement,
but it was even more interesting to find out Alex was riding him (the cat).
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Unlike SoCS, this is not a prompt so there’s no need to stick to the same “theme.”
The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:
1. Make it one sentence.
2. Try to make it either funny or inspirational.
3. Use our unique tag #1linerWeds.
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5. Have fun!
So let’s start with my mum. I haven’t written an update on her for a while.
She’s still in the hospital, even though her pneumonia is cleared up. For a while there she was so lethargic and unwilling to move that the doctor told me it was likely her dementia’s progression, and that she’d never get better. So last week, on her 89th birthday in fact, we had a meeting with the hospital’s discharge planner, the head nurse from her retirement home, and myself. My mother refused to get up and walk, so it was decided that I needed to start looking for nursing homes. She wouldn’t even lift her hand to feed herself.
I explained it all to her when the meeting was over, and it was as though a switch flipped. The next day she was up walking.
It took a few days, but I convinced them to go back and reassess. Yay! I thought. She’d be able to go back and live somewhat independently! But no, now her ankle is swollen and she can’t put any weight on it. The x-ray turned up nothing, so gout, maybe? The good news is she’s more alert and less confused than I’ve seen her in a long time, probably due to not smoking for a month.
And even better, she seems to have forgotten that cigarettes exist. She hasn’t asked for one in three weeks.
Fast forward to yesterday morning, I was sitting in the living room with Alex (who was supposed to go to his dad’s this weekend but didn’t–it’ll be at least 2 months again before I have a break), when my eldest son came upstairs and said he thought a pipe had burst. There was water under his desk in his room.
When I got down there, half the basement was flooded. All the cardboard boxes on the floor and everything in them, I figured, was ruined. Turned out it wasn’t the whole basement once we got stuff moved, but the leak had been ongoing for some time. The stuff that was ruined was really bad. The good news is I think we’ve managed to plug up the hole, which is half-way down the wall in the concrete behind an electrical outlet. The bad news is mold.
Fast forward again to this morning. The windy weather made Alex decide he wouldn’t get dressed to go to school. So we did our usual dance when he’s misbehaving, him screaming at me and punching me and me ignoring him the best I can until he complies. Which he always does, eventually, and usually with minimal damage until this morning when he decided to hit me in the side of the head with his sock. It wouldn’t have hurt except he got me in the eye. My only good eye. The other one is legally blind.
So I’m off to the eye doctor today, just to make sure there’s no serious injury. The sock in question was one he’d worn before, and I think he had it on downstairs yesterday. Nothing like an infection to ruin your entire life …
Happy, happy, joy, joy.
The bright side? Alex actually went to school today on the bus, even though there’s snow. Keeping my fingers crossed we’ll finally have a full week of school, the first one this year.
I don’t like criticizing people. Okay, maybe I do criticize members of my family and my best friend once in a while (shut up, John), but people I don’t know very well–people who might take my criticism the wrong way–I don’t like to criticize. Why not? Because I don’t want them to think I’m judging them. I like to think of myself as non-judgmental. Really, I don’t judge.
So what did I do? I chose editing as a career. Possibly one of the most critic-heavy jobs one can do. I criticize people’s writing for a living.
Maybe it’s being critical without being judgmental that’s the biggest challenge for me. And I do love a challenge. What I do NOT do is judge people’s writing. I don’t judge people on their ability to write a certain way, or on their lack of knowing the difference between “discrete” and “discreet,” for instance.
Look at it this way:
I can tell you your fly is open without judging you. That might be seen as criticizing your ability to remember to do your fly up, but still, I don’t judge you for it. I assume it was a mistake and that you’re not trying to flash me. My biggest reason for telling you is so you’ll do it up before someone comes along and laughs at you for it, less discreetly than I did.
The difference between that and editing? After all, ideally, I edit before someone indiscreetly points and at you and judges you for not knowing the difference between “discrete” and “discreet.”
The difference is, you don’t have to spend thousands of hours learning how to notice someone’s fly is down. You just have to have a good eye. Or a bad eye. Don’t judge me!!
SoCS badge by Pamela, at https://achronicalofhope.com/
This very late, very non-judgmental post is brought to you by Stream of Consciousness Sunday Saturday. Click the following link to find all the other critics posts for this week. It’s fun! https://lindaghill.com/2019/02/22/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-feb-23-19/
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