Seems like the season for woolly hats and blankets is almost over.
I’m looking forward to spring, to being able to get outside for walks more. I’m not looking forward to the increasing wind and storms that are sure to show up again. The areas around us are planning for fire season already too—not something I’ve ever seen before in this area of the country.
It all feels a bit too apocalyptic for my tastes. For my comfort level.
So yeah, I’m looking forward to woolly hat and blanket season again even more than spring and summer, and even fall, my previous favorite season of all.
Sure, we still get the winds in the winter, but without the resistance from the bulk of the leaves on the trees, they don’t tend to fall on houses as often.
*sigh*
Maybe it’s just me getting older.
But the world out there is getting increasingly scary.
The fact that I didn’t post at all in the last two weeks aside from the prompts …
Seems to signal that I haven’t changed my ways after all.
But it’s not for lack of trying.
It’s been a stressful couple of weeks here, worrying about Alex and getting busy with a new proofreading job. Plus, I have to drive to Ottawa on Tuesday, so that’s got me stressed out too.
I hate writing posts that sound like “woe is me,” because I’m not actually feeling sorry for myself, and neither should you. It’s just life. You take the ups and the downs.
I do plan to do better with my posting. Maybe not this week because I have a lot going on, and I’m going to have to catch up after Tuesday’s all-day trip.
Despite everything, despite all precautions, I have failed.
We have a cold.
Two of my kids came down with it first—the two who haven’t left the house in a month—and now I have it.
I blame it on chicken.
I ordered out for Valentine’s Day. Swiss Chalet. Do you have Swiss Chalet in the US? They specialize in roasted chicken dinners.
The two kids had chicken, I had ribs.
I figure someone sneezed on their chicken skin. It’s the only explanation.
I know the very moment I caught this cold. Standing in the hallway beside the bathroom door, Alex yelled at me (we were playing around) from only a few inches away. I felt his breath on my face and had a moment of absolute clarity.
There was a time long ago, back when I walked to school uphill both ways, when I was very careful about the photos I took. There were only so many available on the film, after all. I didn’t want to waste them! I had to buy the film, take it to the store when it was full of pictures, then pay to wait a week until it was developed.
Now that kids have it easier and presumably walk downhill both ways to school (like seriously, did the schools move?), I can take a thousand pictures of nothing and it doesn’t cost me a cent. AND I have them immediately—no waiting a week.
Why am I going on about this? I’m getting there, young whippersnapper.
Because we were so careful, we’d make sure not to get strangers in the backgrounds of our photos if we could help it. And yeah, I still try to be careful, but I can take ten of the same picture to make sure the majority of the strangers are facing the other way.
There’s always been the danger of getting sued by someone who ended up in your picture, especially if you post it publicly. But we take so many pictures these days without really thinking about it. Videos too. It’s a national pastime to photograph as many things as we can.
So that got me thinking—how many strangers have taken pictures of me? Not because they wanted to, but just because I was there at the time.
I noticed last month that my blog stats were a little light on the views. And by a little light, I mean it was the second-worst January I’ve had in ten years of Just Jot it January. 2024 was tied with 2015.
And only just now, I realized why.
(I’m so behind the times, but that’s what you get when you pretty much drop off the face of the blog-earth for three years.)
What darkness came to light?
It’s because of the whole subscription thing. The fact that we don’t follow blogs anymore, we have to subscribe to them.
When I look at my email opens, I find they sometimes weigh heavier than my views on my blog.
Friends don’t need to visit anymore. They can just read in their emails.
Which is great! Don’t get me wrong. WordPress is still as clunky and unreasonable as ever, maybe more so.
(Definitely more so when you have to sign in fifteen times a day because you made the mistake of trying to comment on a blog you’ve never visited before. Grrr.)
I’m just glad to have figured out why my stats were so dismal, despite following the prompts every day. 🙂
Photo: “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” ~ Unknown
My new calendar for 2024, I’ve discovered, has a quote at the bottom of the page on every month. This one has an illustration of a child in a green hooded jacket playing with a toy dump truck full of snow.
If you would like to participate in this prompt, 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.
Here are the simple JusJoJan Rules:
1. Just Jot It January starts January 1st, but it’s never too late to join in! Here, we run on the honour system; the “jot it” part of JusJoJan means that anything you jot down, anywhere (it doesn’t have to be a post, it can even be a grocery list), counts as a “jot.” If it makes it to your blog that day, great! If it waits a week to get from a sticky note to your screen, no problem!
2. I’ll post prompts at 2am my time (GMT -5). The prompt will be the word in quotation marks in the title of my 2am post. You don’t have to follow the prompt every day, but that will be where you leave your link for others to see. You’ll get a prompt for every day except Wednesday, when the prompt is simply my One-Liner Wednesday and on Saturday, when your prompt will be the Friday Reminder and Prompt for #SoCS, which will appear at about 9:30am Friday. Each prompt post will include the rules.
2 a) 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.
4. Add our lovely badge to your post for extra exposure!
5. Have fun!
Badge by Laura @ riddlefromthemiddle.com
3. Please ping back or link to the daily prompt. To ping back, just copy the URL from the daily prompt post, and paste it anywhere in your post. Check to make sure your link shows up where you want it to, and go back occasionally to see other bloggers’ entries – the more you visit others, the more they’ll visit you! Note: A) The newest pingbacks will be at the top of the comments section. B) Ping backs only work if you’re blogging on WordPress. Everyone else must paste a link manually.
4. Tag your post JusJoJan24 and/or #JusJoJan24.
5. Write anything! Any length will do! It can even be a photo or a drawing – you’re going to title it, right? There’s your jot!
6. If your post is NSFW, do not ping back. Please leave your link in the comments with a warning.
7. If you’d like to, use the JusJoJan badge so that others can find your post more easily.
This post is the last of my regular Just Jot it January 2024 efforts, and it’s an effort…
When I chose the word “calendar” for today’s prompt, there was no way I could have anticipated how I was going to use it.
Although, I think I’ve been here before now … at least once.
Where is here?
Here is sleep deprived. Here is a mother who stayed up all night last night with her son in the emergency room. You’ve heard this song before, right?
Anyhoo, he wasn’t admitted to hospital this time, and we were in and out of there in just ten short hours! That might be close to a record.
BUT! It did mean I missed something important. To me, at least.
I made an appointment to get my eyes checked in December—the appointment was for January 11th. A few days before that, the office called and told me the doctor wouldn’t be in, so she gave me another appointment. Guess for when?
So I called this morning from the emergency room to let them know I had to cancel the appointment this time.
I have another scheduled for February 15th. Three times lucky.
But oh, my poor wall calendar and all the covered up appointments!
This exhausted post is part of Just Jot it January! Want to join in? Just click here to get to the prompt and drop your link. It’s fun!
This post is part of Just Jot it January, and today’s prompt comes to us courtesy of Kim. Check out her blog here!
Some family members you can happily live with, some not so much.
But I don’t think you’ll disagree that there are some family members none of us want to live with: the members of the rodent family.
True story that happened many years ago:
I walked into my kitchen one morning in time to see a mouse run under my stove. I shrieked, not because I’m afraid of mice, but because it startled me. I immediately got down on my hands and knees to look for the little critter, but there was no sign of it. I pulled out the drawer under the stove—nothing. It had disappeared.
But there were droppings. Lots of droppings.
I had someone pull the stove out from the wall to see if there was a hole it could have gotten through, but nothing was obvious. The next step was to take the side panels off the stove. Sure enough, there were more droppings in the insulation between the outside and inside walls of my oven. They’d built a nest. In my stove.
So I sold the house.
…
…
Okay, the family of mice might not have been the entire reason I sold the house, but I never cooked in the oven again—I didn’t want to bake the little buggers alive!—and the oven stayed in the house when I moved.
I did leave a note for the new owners.
It went something like:
The stove is yours, but not yours alone …
This reminiscing post is part of Just Jot it January! Want to join in? Just click here to get to the prompt and drop your link. It’s fun!
This post is part of Just Jot it January, and today’s prompt was kindly provided by Fandango. Check out his blog here!
Ah, how I’ve changed.
I used to be happy to walk into places where people congregate.
Malls, planes, crowded city streets, concerts—squashed in a sea of screaming, singing people? Let’s go!
But now …
No thanks.
I wonder sometimes if I’d have changed in this way even if it hadn’t been for the pandemic.
I mean, we change as we get older. Right?
There was a time when I thought I’d be happy to live my life spending all my spare time riding a horse. Sure, I’d like to do it again, but I don’t miss it.
So yeah. Congregating online has become more my speed. I can do that and be a desk jockey at the same time.
This thought-inducing post is part of Just Jot it January! Want to join in? Just click here to get to the prompt and drop your link. It’s fun!
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