Hey y’all. I’m a boomer. How do you know? Well, the first personal computer I owned was the original IBM PC. It had two genuinely floppy disk drives. One held WordPerfect and the other held my dissertation or assignments for students. My PC was extra cool because it had an amber monitor. Ooh. You didn’t need colors, because there were no pictures. I paid a LOT of money for it. But wow, was it better than typing or using a mainframe line editor.
The sky was nice in the morning.
There. I blogged even though I struggled a lot today. I have been getting lots of bad news, and today it was about work. I’ll live.
The evening sky brought sun dogs.
Plus both horses were pretty bad. They don’t feel well. I think Apache’s feet hurt. No clue what’s up with Drew but now he tries to kick me. It’s so weird. We will figure it out.
Ready to chomp. My feets hurt.
I also feel bad. Maybe there’s something in the air.
So here’s a little flower. They are all over the yard. Never seen them before!
Write about a few of your favorite family traditions.
Ah, I’m sitting in a clean, quiet hotel room, with mindless television and knitting. It’s a perfect time to reminisce about family traditions.
Yep, it’s a hotel room.
My current family is a bit too chaotic to have a lot of traditions. It’s always something different every day. But my family of origin had a couple I enjoyed at the time and remember fondly.
I’m not home so I can’t scan photos. Here’s our foggy morning.
One I loved was when we lived in south Florida in a family-oriented neighborhood of little cement-block houses. We had a dachshund mix dog named Pumpkin during my college and grad school years. I thought of her as my sister, because she was great to talk to and hang out with. I’m not kidding, I often forgot she was a dog.
Ha! I found a photo of Pumpkin, Dad, and two neighbors.
Anyway, it was my parents’ tradition to take a walk with Pumpkin every evening after dinner. Whenever I was home, I went along with them and my brother. The walk only went to the end of the block, because Mom couldn’t go very far (she was sick a long time, and died when I was 26).
The front of the house, on my 16th birthday. Stylish for 1974.
However, the walks were always fun. We’d talk and joke and comment on the quality of Pumpkin’s poop, which always happened at the corner. (Dad had to go clean it up once a week or so, because they we’d never heard of poop bags in the 80s.) In the winter we’d check to see if she’d produced a “steamer.” Dad loved those.
Re-enactment?
The walks were often long in time, compared to their length. That’s because we often stopped to talk to the neighbors. My dad and brother were very social. I enjoyed listening to them. It felt so comfortable and convivial. They could talk about all topics, drink beer, tell stories, and get along. They were just nice, hard-working folks. I miss those times.
I realize that hanging out with my family and watching the dog poop is probably a weird tradition, but we all enjoyed it. It was something Mom could do with us, which was so nice. And my Dad and brother were so funny. I’ll treasure our quirky family togetherness time.
Before I left for my 6.5-hour drive to Arkansas, I did get in a little bird watching during the foggy morning. (I haven’t seen the sun since last Saturday.) I’m going to declare our resident loggerhead shrike the Daily Bird, because it matches the sky and trees. Plus, I love watching them grab bugs.
Gray bird in fog.
I’m sure the shrike is wishful for the grasshopper season to start! They go into overdrive then.
Can you share a positive example of where you’ve felt loved?
Woo hoo. Today’s prompt goes with my day’s experience. So, let’s blog.
I’ve figured out that one of my “love languages” is the one about giving time and effort. When someone spends time doing something to make my life better, I feel love.
One example is how incredibly grateful and loved I felt when I came home from a trip expecting improvements to my horse area, but was blown away to see that two portable buildings we had were now a beautiful and large hen house with the interior painted “my” colors and a HUGE new tack room that would hold all my horse supplies and have a sitting area. I was blown away.
Note that they painted the hay storage container to match the building.
Every time I go in either of those buildings I have warm feelings about the two guys in my family who worked so hard on it. They were my son’s first two carpentry projects, so there are imperfections, but they’re charming to me. And I think of the stories behind how they got all the furnishings and built the saddle racks and pegs for halters, etc.
Chicken world.
The other time I felt loved like this was when Lee gave me my bird journal. I couldn’t believe he’d spent so much time collecting bird photos then made the book by hand. I get to feel loved every day when I write in it!
He also made this cute book cover for the journal.
Love Birds of the Day
The highlight of my day today was all about love. After making many trips back and forth to the horse trough with water, I decided to go listen to birds for a while. Today got down to 12°F but then warmed up to 45°. That felt balmy!
You probably can’t tell, but the pond iced over.
As I headed towards the woods with my empty water containers, I saw movement. It was the pair of red-tailed hawks I’ve been watching for a few weeks. They were doing an awesome love dance. I was transfixed as I watched them soar and glide, then dive down near the ground and up through the trees.
The only photo I got of them flying. I was too busy watching most of the time.
It was so graceful yet strong. I felt privileged to get to see this up close. It was the closest I’ve ever been to flying hawks. They flew right past me a couple of times. At last, they rested in the trees for a bit.
They are both in this picture. One flying low in front of the trees, one higher, behind trees.
Then, off they went, flashing their wings at me. That made up for the hard work. I loved those love birds.
I made it a loop
PS: thanks to everyone who tells me they read my blog. I feel like the lady on Romper Room (a television show from my youth), who would look in her magic mirror and say, “I see Susie and Donny…” or whoever’s parents had sent her a postcard.
Do be a Do Bee!
I see you, Mike, Donita, Lory, Libba, Catherine, Barbara, Debi…and so many more!
Greetings from the Polar Vortex where it finally got cold, even way down here in Texas.
We’ve been busy keeping ourselves and the dogs warm
Today’s question is harder than it seems. It forces me to admit something that kind of makes me sad: I’m no longer an internet pioneer. Y’all, I’m even in a couple of books for being an early feminist voice on the ‘net. I made websites before color monitors existed. I had email way before most people did, thanks to being at the University of Illinois.
I helped make online communities before Facebook. So what? Yep. That’s the past. Zzz.
I no longer keep up with things. Twitter bored me, I have to admit. I also don’t enjoy watching videos for very long (amusing since I create them every day at work). So I’m not on YouTube for hours. And I cannot tell you how annoying and boring I find Tik Tok and Reels and social media influencers.
Please enjoy them and tell me about it, though. I am fine experiencing those things second hand.
So. Boring senior citizen Suna communicates online mainly in Facebook and communities there, and by reading and writing blogs.
I text friends and family a lot, and enjoy my text groups with them. Certainly I’m up on Cameron news thanks to that! I also really enjoy online Zoom meetings that started in the pandemic but are now just nice ways to keep in touch with people I used to email a lot. I feel so close to friends all over the place!
Email is there still, but mostly for work or nonprofit stuff. The few email lists I’m still on don’t get much of my attention these days, because I run out of time.
For what it’s worth, that’s that. I enjoy the online communities as much as the in-person ones, though. I like blog comments and interacting with readers, a lot. So thanks to you commenters and silent readers. You know who you are!
It’s too cold to have a daily bird, though I did enjoy looking at puffy sparrows today. It’s supposed to snow tomorrow. I know the chickens are enjoying their heat lamps and the horses appreciate the new shelter. I tested both of them out today!
Thanks.
Our heater is still working, so us humans are coping well with 19° F weather. The heat pump unit got wrapped in insulation, so it’s not failing when it got into the 20s like it used to. We are getting stuff figured out, thanks to the brain power of the ranch commune.
The far left square is today. That’s the coldest day I’ve recorded!
It may snow tomorrow! I bet I take pictures. What do you think?
Describe an item you were incredibly attached to as a youth. What became of it?
I’ll answer this question about the first and second items I became attached to as a baby. I was one of those babies who had to have their beloved object with them at all times. I guess my attachment issues started early? Anyway, here’s me as a round baby with Hee Haw, whom I may have mentioned before.
I don’t think I owned clothing as a baby.
Hee Haw was a stuffed giraffe. I thought it was a horse. Mom told me horses said “Hee Haw” so there you go. I know Mom knew horses. But she liked what donkeys say better.
I’m told putting this toy in the laundry traumatized me, as did the time I dropped it in a store. Luckily it was found. By the time Hee Haw disintegrated I’d moved on to my next and final security objective, a literal security blanket.
I’m sure I have photos of Lovin’ Blanket, or LB as Mom called it, but none scanned. It originally was a quilted satin layette blanket with a lovely binding that Granny Kendall gave me. I held it as I went to sleep each night.
Like, I did that a long time. By the time I was in high school all the quilted satin was gone, and it was just an edge. It was all knotted up, and I draped it over my bedpost. It stayed there through college. I guess Dad gave it a dignified farewell when he moved to North Carolina after Mom died.
There. I got that tired old story out of my system.
Imagine dozens of white-crowned sparrows here.
I don’t have any exciting birds for today, so I’ll give you some pictures of my current fuzzy security item. Sara and I both agree that Apache has the greatest neck for hugging. He makes everything all better.
His neck and his new halter. Hard photo to get, because the sun wanted to shine between us
He is still a bit lame from the abscess. I keep treating him. Here is his bad hoof. Send healing thoughts!
There is redness but the vertical things are grass shadows.
Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?
This is another trick question. I’m doing my best to stop myself if I start dwelling on the past (except good memories!). And I don’t think it’s healthy to do what I call pre-worrying about what might happen if circumstances go in ways we would like to avoid. That leads people like me to worse anxiety or even ulcers.
This chain got up on the gate thanks to worrying about future dog escapes. The big dogs could climb it.
I think one of the most helpful things I’ve learned from studying Buddhism is the idea of living in the moment. The more I do this, the more content I am in my life and the more joy I can find.
A part of the past I do like to think about is when this cute kitchen was built. We want to preserve it in our renovation. Retro chic.
No one can prevent thinking about the past and future all the time. What I try to do is see what can be learned from past events, and I try to figure out what I can control or affect positively in the future. I learned that from my spouse’s study of Stoicism. It’s made a huge difference for both of us.
Daily Birds
Today was wet and chilly. In the morning there were mostly the usual birds. But it was so quiet that I could hear wing flaps from vultures flying over. Merlin identified three birds that were surprising because we aren’t in their range: Swainson’s thrush, Black-capped chickadee, and Western wood pewee. Maybe the storms brought them over. Or maybe there was a software glitch. The chickadees look really similar but have different calls, so you’d think that would be right. It’s a mystery.
I turned the app on in the late afternoon to see if there were any different birds, and sure enough, there were two ducks, the common mallard and blue-winged teal. I’m hearing lots more ducks and geese this year!
Well, that’s a question with a lot of assumptions behind it. Who says all bloggers go to college? I’d have preferred something like, “Where did you get your education?” (From where?) I realize there are people would give flippant answers, like “the school of hard knocks,” but you’d also get interesting insights into folks with non-traditional paths.
Mother Nature is also a great teacher.
I was VERY traditional. After four years of attending a large high school in suburban Ft Lauderdale, Florida (unfortunately named Plantation High School), I spent four years at a large state university. The years at the University of Florida had a lot of good parts. I learned a lot, screwed up my personal life irreparably, and thoroughly enjoyed living in my home town again. My studies focused on linguistics, Japanese, and cinema studies (my boyfriend’s major). I’m extremely grateful to the National Merit Scholarship system, which allowed me to attend college even though my family was not well off and my mother had many medical bills.
See the bright spot under the sun? That’s the bit of flooding we got last night. It was a good rain.
I then went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for graduate school. Fun fact: both the schools I attended have orange and blue as their school colors. At least gators add green to the mix. UI are the Fighting Illini, which I was shocked to discover pronounced the last two vowels like “eye,” not “ee.”
There I studied pragmatics, syntax, and semantics. I learned to write well and to teach adults. I loved teaching. Academic writing, not so much. My topic got really boring, which is why I’m not a professor right now.
My favorite thing on campus was the beautiful statue of Alma Mater welcoming students and graduates, by Lorado Taft. It was always a happy sight.
Image in Public Domain
If you’re still awake, I can give you my highlights of the day. First, I finished my giant three-part 2023 temperature blanket.
Part 3, on a chair.
The last square is a handy key to the colors. I included the white, silver and purple that would have indicated 0° to 25° even though it never got that cold. Maybe this year! Or not! I could do without the Polar Vortex they keep threatening us with.
Far left is 105-109, far right is 0-4.
I’ll write up an official summary once I figure out how to get a photo of the whole thing.
Daily Birds
Second, two birds made me happy today. One was the first bird Merlin heard, a yellow-bellied sapsucker. I think I’ve now recorded all the woodpeckers that live here.
When I lived in Illinois, we had a sweet gum tree in our back yard. Every year one of these little guys would come and drill a new row of holes in that tree. It was so much fun to watch it working away, and the holes were a wonderful remembrance.
The other bird that brought joy today has already been the Daily Bird, but I was excited to actually see the great horned owl today. Yes, that blob in the photograph was hooting.
I also enjoyed my sparrow buddies a lot. The Harris’s sparrows were singing and playing this afternoon. I hadn’t heard them in a few days. They fed in the trees next to me for a while, so I got good views, though obscured by branches. Here are some photos of them, the other sparrows, and cardinals in the brush and trees. Yes, it’s a brown world right now, but I like brown.
First, center yourself by meditating on the whorling shape of this red-stemmed stork’s-bill.
Okay, now read on.
Today someone who knows very well how to get under my defenses said something that I took as a passive aggressive swipe at me, the kind that on the surface seems innocuous enough, but stings. I mentioned it to my spouse, who said maybe they didn’t mean it that way. Maybe I was looking for a swipe.
I thought about it.
Then I remembered the time my neighbor cut me off for saying something mean to another neighbor that I hadn’t intended to be mean at all. I remembered the letter that our general contractor’s wife wrote to me about a set of issues she perceived in me (I’ve blotted them out of my mind). I remember the letter my ex-boyfriend wrote to tell me to stop writing him and bragging about buying a car and a house, etc. None of those things I intended the way they were interpreted. But their biases toward me were negative, so they interpreted my actions negatively.
Looking in the mirror of how people misunderstood me because they wanted to made me realize I might be doing the same. I’d learned this lesson before and have been tryingjj to interpret the person I’ve always known to be passive aggressive to me as if their intentions were good. I just fell into a decades-old pattern. I will now reset and do my best to go back to assuming good intentions, like I’ve always strived to.
Sometimes you just need a reminder to see that you’re falling off the path you want to follow. There are a couple of people in my life I’m going to work harder not to have a negative bias toward. That’s a resolution for the coming year that I can get behind.
How about you?
On that note, I’ll plod off into the sunset on my small but magnificent steed.
Tell us about your first day at something — school, work, as a parent, etc.
Maybe writing about the dim past will ease me back into writing.
When I saw this prompt, memories pushed themselves up from forgotten synapses and I remembered giving birth and the first day I became a parent. What a strange and incomprehensible new world it was for me.
How I wish babies showed up.
I’ll gloss over the birth part, which involved my spouse barfing all over the place and having to go to the ER, leaving me to labor alone (no family or close friends nearby), then included every possible birth intervention I thought I’d never have, leading up to an unplanned cesarean due to my “incompetent” cervix. I never felt so powerless and out of control.
Then, after the anesthesiologist nearly paralyzed me (and I TOLD him I had a slight scoliosis), I was presented with a small person who used to live inside me. I felt like I already knew him.
Being a new parent who’d just been drugged up, I mostly remember smells from the hospital, from me, and from the baby. I’d never been hospitalized before, and it was a smelly experience.
I fell asleep after the lengthy labor and being surgerized at 6 am, and they took the dang baby away from me. When I woke up, not only did I have to listen to some woman with no pain tolerance screeching about needing more IV meds, but there was no baby. How the heck was I supposed to get colostrum in him?
Well, I could tolerate pain. And I figured out how to drag my IV with me and went to find my damn baby. I’m sure that was a lovely sight. Too bad.
I found the nursery about the time some nurse ran up and said I shouldn’t have walked unaccompanied. But no one was paying me any attention at all thanks to Old Screechy and I wanted my child.
Not gonna go find actual photos.
That got me the child, who I would not put down henceforth except to hand him to my spouse. He was in charge of diaper changes, which also came with new smells. I can smell breasted baby poop right now. Neither of us had ever changed a diaper before. All new to us.
I left that place as fast as I could and vowed to do everything possible to avoid getting cut open like that again, surrounded by people who just wanted me to hurry up before the shift changed. (Didn’t work out, but I sure tried.)
One photo. Me immediately upon coming home, with newborn.
That birth experience was the first time I felt like my body failed me. I asked it to do something, breathed like a yogini, and did everything right, but I got the surgery anyway. I’ve always said I’m grateful to La Leche League for helping me succeed at breastfeeding after it taking 5 days to get my milk in and having babies who had to learn to open their mouths. It was healing to know my body could do something I asked it to do, after all.
This may have been garbled. I’m having some internal weirdness going on after being around a lot of negativity. Not the fault of anyone in my immediate family!
Daily Bird
There weren’t enough birds around to pick one! It was a dreary day with morning drizzle. I heard no birds this morning and only five when I tried again in late evening. Even the owl was quiet. Even the house sparrows were quiet! Gads! The loudest bird was the kingfisher, so I salute that bird for being out and about no matter what.
What’s the hardest decision you’ve ever had to make? Why?
You ask that, do you? I agonized a very this for about three years, during which time my mother passed away followed immediately by a breakup with the love of my life that was all my fault, followed by a serious of incredibly stupid relationship decisions and total failure at my career path. 1984-87 really stunk.
Here comes the brutal honesty for which I’m noted, for better or worse.
I’d say this was the period in my life when I realized that, no, I wasn’t the brilliant, nice, ethically consistent person I thought I was. That’s hard. I realized just how mentally screwed up I was in my drive to be perfect and that I was an emotional vampire who confused sex with love. Everyone has to realize they’re imperfect eventually (if they’re honest with themselves).
Worse, I ended up unable to stomach being an academic with all the drama, pressure, and competition. It just wasn’t what I’d hoped it was and I wasn’t actually very good at it.
Dogs like me, though.
So I decided to leave my career path and all the people I cared about at the university and do something else. I felt like a failure and that I’d let my family and friends down. That was hard. Acknowledging my inadequacy was hard. Admitting I was a bad partner was hard. Owning up to my anxiety and past trauma was very hard.
But no one really cared very much about my inner turmoil. They just wanted to see me stable, happier, and more positive. I ended up free of expectations and obligations and could move forward to use all I’d learned in a perfectly good career. I learned to love in a positive way. It was OK.
Oh look I’m crocheting something. It’s a hot pad in thermal stitch.
I make decisions much faster now. I’ve learned that whatever I do will be fine. I’ll learn the lessons I need to learn and keep putting one foot ahead of the other. Today is what matters and I want more peaceful, fulfilling days than stressful ones.
Daily Bird
I enjoyed a group of Harris’s sparrows today. I realize I’ve featured a lot of sparrows but we have eight kinds here! I heard these guys by the brush pile this morning, which pleased me because there was so much traffic on our road due to an accident that it was hard to hear birds in front of the house.
Not normal traffic here.
Harris’s sparrows make a less melodic sound than some of the others, more like very loud, low barks. It’s hard to decide how to describe it. But they were chatty and friendly today.
Happy sparrows
A pair of them started out in the honey locust, then got on the ground quite close to me, so I could easily see their interesting black head and chest markings. They’re the most distinctive ones, for sure.
By the way, the house wren and Carolina wren are loudly lobbying to be featured, so I’ll get something else soon. In the other hand, I’ve seen Mexican eagles (caracaras) doing mating dances in the sky twice this week. They do some loud wing flapping! So, they’re candidates. More to come.
The Hermits' Rest 