Life in progress

Tag Archives: Humor


by 37 Comments

The Cycles of Mother’s Day

I have memories as a child of preparing breakfast, with my father’s help, to bring to my mother in bed on Mother’s Day. I knew as well as he did that it would be no surprise, but we pretended, he and I. I remember a few odd gifts I gave her over the years, but the one that stands out the most was a garbage bag full of well-fermented horse shit I brought home in my car from the ranch where I worked. Her roses loved it and yet she still rolls her eyes over it.

As a new mother myself, my very first Mother’s Day was a revelation. Being pampered by my son’s father was a dream come true. Those beginning years were special indeed – breakfast in bed was mine, although sometimes those breakfasts were inedible having been made with love by my young children. I grinned and did my best to eat them without gagging anyway.

Today I find the cycle has changed once again. I made the coffee last night so Alex, my youngest, could come downstairs ahead of me and push the button to start the coffeemaker. I’m in the not-so-unique position of being single, having my three sons at home, and soon I will be picking my own mother up to spend the day caring for her, though she’d never concede to the idea that it’s the other way around. She wants me to depend on her and I’m okay with that. It’s like a dance, graceful in its complexity with me agreeing to almost anything and her… I’m not sure if she still understands that I’m doing it or not, but the grand act of denial, if that’s what she does, is Oscar-worthy. And of course there are my own children. To an extent my eldest is taking care of me, helping me not to pull my hair out both with his physical aid in babysitting and housework and his awesome sense of humour.

So it goes. The child becomes the mother, the caregiver; the giver of life as she comes closer to the end of her own, becomes dependent once again.

I love being a mother, but in the end it can be likened to a bag of horse shit. For the amount of work it takes, the load of stress that accompanies it, and the headache-inducing number of eyerolls, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.


by 7 Comments

Y is for Yielding – it’s a two-parter!

To yield – to give under the weight of something. How relieving it is to yield. We live in a world where we feel we must harden ourselves to most things. Never give up, never give in is our motto most of the time. We fight the system, we advocate for our kids, we push and push ourselves to do better, get more done, find more time, improve ourselves and our way of living… the list is endless.

But how good is it to yield to sleep at night? I find myself wishing often not to give up, but to have a chance to give in, just a little and not fight quite as hard, yet giving just a bit feels like defeat.

“Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.”
― Bruce Lee

Yielding is a way to survive. Thank you, Bruce Lee.

****

On a completely different note, I can’t leave this post without mentioning what I found in my thesaurus. One synonym in particular jumps out at me. “Quaggy.” Yes, “quaggy.” I’d never heard this word before five minutes ago. So I’ll look it up. From dictionary.com:

quaggy
[kwag-ee, kwog-ee]

adjective, quaggier, quaggiest.
1. of the nature of or resembling a quagmire; marshy; boggy.
2. soft or flabby: quaggy flesh.

I’ll never view Family Guy quite the same again. Giggidy.


by 28 Comments

One-Liner Wednesday – Aha!!

Found at: https://www.facebook.com/quantumactivistmovie?fref=photo

10710924_10154583205495693_3566903278359228979_n

__________________________________________________________________________________________

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. Please ensure that the One-Liner Wednesday you’re pinging back to is this week’s! Otherwise, no one will likely see it but me.

As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS), 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.

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. Make it either funny or inspirational.

Have fun!


by 14 Comments

W is for Weigh

There are way lots of things you can weigh, eh? You can weigh the odds, weigh the elephant (if you can find scales big enough), or you can weigh down the competition and squash ’em completely.

According to google’s suggestions I can weigh the pig, weigh the pros and cons, weigh the same as a duck,

MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA

weigh the options, weigh the anchor, weigh the wangdoodle (?), or hey! weigh thesaurus! I wonder if that’s anything like weighing a velociraptor?

I can weigh a plane without scales (there’s a trick I’d like to see), weigh a ton, a package, a fish, a dog, or a lot. I can even weigh a pie… somewhere over the rainbow. (Took me a few seconds to get that one. Hint: you’ve gotta sing it.)

And on that horrible note, I’m outta here. Enjoy the ducks!


by 28 Comments

T is for Titter

Another fun word thanks to my thesaurus and the page I flipped to today! 😀

Titter means laugh, but I always imagine it more to be done from behind a hand, hidden lest anyone should catch you doing it. It’s a sneaky laugh, a giggle caused by something that shouldn’t be laughed at, or something just plain naughty.

It reminds me of my dad who once, while putting up curtains over the kitchen sink, fell in – why he was up there when the sink was full of water I have no idea. I was a child at the time. But for years we talked about “that time my dad fell in the kitchen sink.” He was the sort of person who loved to laugh at himself, so there was no tittering going on there.

There are people we can laugh at when they do something stupid or hurt themselves and there are people who would just as soon hurt us back if we were to laugh at them openly. I wonder what it is in a person’s psyche that makes them one way or the other. Is it childhood experience – being bullied for instance? Is it what we grew up seeing how our parents reacted to being laughed at? One way or the other, I always try to gauge another’s sensitivities before I laugh at them. Sometimes it’s not easy to hide that little teehee…

What kind of person are you? I know it depends on the circumstance sometimes, but generally, do you mind if a loved one laughs at you? How about someone you know but don’t know well?


by 26 Comments

One-Liner Wednesday – Like A Rolling Stone

My mother, reading the display on the car radio at the same time the songs changed:

“You can’t always get what you …
…
…
chasing…?”

__________________________________________________________________________________________

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. Please ensure that the One-Liner Wednesday you’re pinging back to is this week’s! Otherwise, no one will likely see it but me.

As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS), 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.

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. Make it either funny or inspirational.

Have fun!


by 5 Comments

R is for Redress

Wow. Okay. “Oh Thesaurus The Great” gave me “redress” to work with today. Your guess is as good as mine where this is going…

As a verb, a few of the synonyms are adjust, correct, rectify, and repair. I suppose in blogging terms we redress our posts in that we edit them (if we’re perfectionists or even semi-perfectionists) all the time. Typos abound in my posts; if I didn’t edit them you wouldn’t be able to read half of them. But even that doesn’t seem quite right (as a definition of the word) since some of the other synonyms seem full of regret: make amends for, mend, and repay for instance. So is it fair to say that if I regret not editing my post I am full of redress? Let’s see what it means as a noun.

Atonement, indemnification, (there’s a mouthful) quittance, reparation, and restitution among others.

And here I was expecting to talk about trying on new clothes… 😉


by 14 Comments

Q is for Quash

I opened my thesaurus to the word “quash” and actually said out loud, “oooh quash!” What a great word! It’s like the lazy person’s way of saying “squash” – who needs that pesky extra letter when you can just leave it off? And bonus – it means the same thing! Unless you’re talking about the vegetable… wait, is a squash a vegetable? You’ve gotta be careful about that sort of thing. You remember what happened with the avocado, right? (Click the link for a story.)

There are so many great words associated with quash too! Words like crush, hush up, overthrow, quell, rescind, and squelch. The word “squelch” always makes me think of walking in the pouring rain when I’ve forgotten my umbrella. It’s the feeling my feet get when they’re sodden inside my shoes and socks. There’s a feeling I’d rather quash.

What have you quashed lately?


by 34 Comments

N is for Nonsensical

It’s so much fun to be silly sometimes, isn’t it? Daft. I love the word, “daft.” It’s the third synonym of the list in my thesaurus. It conjures the image of Daffy Duck with his aweththome liththp and having his head blown upside down by a shotgun. It’s incomprehensible to me how they can sensor Bugs Bunny, and yet when I read it here it sorta makes sense.

But I didn’t grow up violent because I watched Loony Toons. The coyote never made me want to mail-order in a few sticks of TNT to blow up a bird. (I used to feel so sorry for the coyote. Especially when he put up that tiny umbrella just before a gigantic boulder landed on him.) I’m glad some of those old shows still exist though.

I often write absurd scenes, like the one on my fiction blog last night: click it. You know you want to. But I’m trying to think of the last time I actually did something silly when I was alone. Like skipping down the sidewalk instead of walking. Mostly I do these things with Alex. My neighbours must think I’m crazy sometimes, dancing in my kitchen or screaming back at him for fun. I know I get some strange looks when I make faces at him as we stroll through the mall. But these are my real pleasures in life. Being a kid again. Or at least acting like one. It’s very freeing.

When was the last time you acted like a kid?


by 57 Comments

One-Liner Wednesday – End of Story

The end of a fairy tale is like a cup of hot chocolate on a snowy day, but a cliffhanger is like

__________________________________________________________________________________________

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. Please ensure that the One-Liner Wednesday you’re pinging back to is this week’s! Otherwise, no one will likely see it but me.

As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS), 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.

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. Make it either funny or inspirational.

Have fun!