Over the next few days I hope you’ll all join me in welcoming our Stream of Consciousness Saturday hosts, who have graciously accepted the task of taking over while I’m away. These three wonderful bloggers will be writing posts here at Life In Progress starting tomorrow, to introduce themselves. They’ll be coming up with the Friday prompts and visiting all of your upcoming SoCS posts during the next three weekends.
I know they’ll do a fantastic job and I hope you’ll all visit their blogs and follow them if you haven’t already.
Just so you know, I’ve pre-scheduled both of the One-Liner Wednesday posts that I’ll be absent for, as well as all of the “Second Seat on the Right” posts over at my fiction site, Inspiration in Progress, so you won’t miss a thing!
I have to say, it feels really weird to just end a post without a shout-out to someone after a month of participating in NoBloMooglyWoo and Mr. Fantastic’s Team Pepper Mystery Tour. Really awkward.
So visit your hosts when you see their posts. You’ll be happy you did!!
For my final Team Pepper post I really wanted to find something profound to write. Something to uplift and inspire. Something that people far and wide will remember for years to come. Something from my own mind, rather than words regurgitated from the world wide web. Something barfed up from my own mouth… in a delicate way. A burp almost. But tangible. Something that my readers can latch onto and hold close to their hearts.
Here it goes.
Are you ready?
…
…
…
Get off the damned computer and go outside already! The internet isn’t real life! Real life exists when you get off your ass and live it!!!
You know what’s weird? The fact that now the penny has been taken out of circulation in Canada, you never find a penny on the ground anymore. The last coin I came across as I was walking was a dime. Are people more likely to just leave dimes on the ground now rather than pick them up? Or was this just some unfortunate soul who didn’t realize he or she was dumping his or her change out of his or her pocket?
Grammar really makes no sense, does it? My best friend’s brother, who was on the team that wrote spell check and grammar check, tells me that with all the different rules in all the different countries on grammar, it isn’t possible to write a grammatically correct sentence. One rule will be broken unless you completely ignore all the other countries and are never read outside of your own. Interesting stuff, that.
In other news, I have the weekend off. No kids. Lovely, eh? Yet I have so much to do, it’s hard to know where to start. I’m just plowing through everything as a result. Which is good, except I keep forgetting to eat and drink. I often make myself a cup of tea and leave it to steep… for an hour. I can’t stand cold tea, or coffee, or anything else that’s supposed to be hot when it’s cold. Except pizza. And occasionally spaghetti.
Not to diminish the severity of the impact ADD has on the lives of people who truly suffer with it, but is it possible to “catch” it in times of stress? Why do I ask? Let me tell you.
In the amount of time it took me to decide what I was going to write about today, click on my dashboard and get into “Add New Post,” I came up with six more things I want to write about – the last of which is the fact that spellcheck (I guess Firefox’s version) has finally chosen to insert its ass in my subject line. Apparently “Poblano” isn’t a word. Who knew?
So yeah, the other stuff in backwards order of the idea light bulb coming on over my head are:
1. I realized I haven’t answered any of my comments today, so I wanted to apologize for that in advance of my upcoming eye drops. I’ll try to get to some before I leave for the appointment however.
2. My battery works!! It’s ALIVE!!!! And yes, it was free. 😀
3. My occupational therapist appointment went well. I’ve got to do a few exercises, mildly limit my movement for a couple of weeks, and get my laptop into a better position. Oh, and move around once in a while. OH, and check out an aqua fitness program. OH! And get a body pillow. Good call to all of those who came up with the idea when I was considering a sleeping companion.
4. I’m working on writing enough “Scenes from the Second Seat on the Right” so they’ll keep publishing while I’m gone.
5. Beta readers!! I need a few people who are serious about wanting to beta my novel. I’ll be looking to find out if it’s interesting enough to captivate my audience, notes on any inconsistencies, and I’m planning to put a note in it of my own to ask about thoughts on splitting it into two or three books. I’d like to have it read while I’m away, if I can get it ready by the time I leave. Let me know if you want a copy! I’ll take three readers for now. Please email me at bacamjoly at gmail dot com if you’re interested.
6. … And now that I’m finally at my original idea for posting today, I’ve forgotten what it is.
What do you think? Am I ready for an ADD diagnosis yet?
My blog isn’t normally about my personal schedule, but because of the community I’ve kind of built around this site, I feel obligated to let you, my friends, know what’s going on for the next little while.
First, tomorrow, I’m going to an occupational therapist to see about my bad shoulder in the morning, and to an optometrist in the afternoon. I’ll have drops in my eyes, which probably means no screen time after that since the horrid things usually affect me for at least eight hours. I hope to be able to post tomorrow before I go.
Then this Saturday will be my last “live” SoCS entry until the 20th of December. I leave for Tokyo on Saturday the 6th and will be home on the 17th. Considering I leave Japan two hours after I arrive in Canada, I’ll be pretty bagged and doubt I’ll be online again until the 18th.
What this means for you, my dear participants in One-Liner Wednesday and SoCS, is that you’ll still be able to participate in both, except I won’t be around. I’ll have the One-Liners scheduled already for the 10th and the 17th, and for SoCS I’ll either do the same or I’ll have guest-posters here to organize things. I still have to contact the three people who said they might be willing to help out, to see if they’re still “in.”
I hope to have reliable enough wifi where I’m staying that I can check in once in a while, but I don’t plan on spending too much time online.
In the meantime, as you can probably imagine, I’ll be pretty busy getting ready to leave and doing as much Christmas shopping as humanly possible so I don’t need to do too much while I’m away. Luggage space will be limited. Again, what this means is that I won’t be able to read as many blogs as I usually do, or keep up with the comments. But I’ll do my best!
For anyone wondering how I’m paying for this (I’m looking at you, Social Services), I’ve been saving for years. There’s a reason I have only one pair of shoes, have a hair cut once every three years, and am still wearing a coat that was bought for me as a Christmas gift 30 years ago – and no, that’s not an exaggeration.
Oh, and as a side note, I just got a call from Best Buy to say my laptop battery is in – let’s hope it fits!!!
Okay, I admit it; sometimes my grammar isn’t perfect. Oh sorry, did I forget to ask you to sit down before I dropped my bombshell? That’ll heal, don’t worry.
But seriously, I get tired of trying to write right all the time. It takes, like, brain cells and stuff to make sure I edit the hell out of every single solitary sentence I compose. And so while I do try to do my best here on my blog, I don’t always make sure my comments, my emails and (oh God) my texts are the essence of grammatical excellence. In fact when I’m in a hurry, I’ve actually been known to write things like “u” instead of “you” when tapping out a message on my phone. Don’t all gasp at once!
Is it lack of professionalism? Is it laziness? Or is it a bid to preserve the ever-decreasing amount of grey matter I possess due to the many things I have to deal with in any given moment?
What’s your excuse?
This grammatically questionable post has been brought to you in conjunction with Mr. Mark’s Roadshow
I used this prompt to look up a new word. A new word for me, at least. I’d always wondered what it meant; now I know. The word is “insouciant.” It means easy-going, gay, happy-go-lucky, and untroubled.
I want to be insouciant. It’s pronounced “in-soo-see-ant” if you’re wondering. I want to be carefree and not worried about anything. And I think I can be, if I really want to. How, you may ask, would someone with as many people relying on them as I have be insouciant?
I think the key (or one of them) is in not procrastinating. I find that if I put things off I end up with a whole ball of stress sitting with me at the end of the day – stress caused by all the things I need to do tomorrow because I did none of them today. It adds up and I end up worrying. And uninsouciant. According to my spellcheck that’s not a word… and neither is spellcheck. Go figure. But will I worry about that? Hell no!
How else can I be insouciant? I think just by deciding not to worry about things I can be a little more carefree. Not to say that I don’t consider my responsibilities important… but only concentrating on what’s in front of me rather than doing things I’m supposed to be doing AND worrying that I’m not doing something else – that’s senseless. In fact, by fully focusing on the task at hand, I’m more likely to be more efficient at it than if my mind is elsewhere.
So here’s to insouciance! Practice with me, won’t you?
Team Pepper (aka Team AWESOME) captain Mr. Mark has been kind enough to conduct a social media experiment on my behalf, to get Best Buy’s attention. Check out his post and let’s see how far this can go.
THANK YOU, MR. MARK!!!
She took her broken laptop to her Geek Squad reps with a battery problem half a year ago. The battery they ordered just came in. It was the wrong battery. They want her to wait around some more.
She wondered in her little story why they don’t give her a new laptop. Take a look at the happy Geek Squad agents in the logo I culled directly from their site above? Don’t they look like they might get on the phone, call headquarters, and get the OK to…
lindaghill.com 