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.
It’s significant to me that Lee and I made it to 15 years of marriage. When you get married at age 50 you just hope you get some good years together!
Is the day after the wedding, opening cards. Lee looks like someone I don’t know. We’ve both gone a lot grayer.
We have done so. There have been times when we were both out of work and times when we were doing better than we ever expected. Now it’s medium! I’ll take it.
The emotional highs and lows have evened out, too, and I’m glad for that. It took a lot to get through some of the drama in our families, and that hasn’t changed. We just cope better now.
20082023At least I have the same smile
We’ve both done a lot of soul searching and gotten more emotionally stable, which helps when you have two people who don’t argue with each other well. It’s good to be able to step back and not react to each other’s quirky ways of being upset. You learn that through time.
I think this is the only time Lee has been clean-shaven since I knew him.
Anyway, I’m happy to have Lee to face the coming “interesting” times with. We are each other’s stability, I think.
We went to dinner in Rockdale, the next town over, where there’s a new Italian restaurant off the lobby of a motel. Yep. Small town living. It was excellent and a good change of pace since we still don’t go out much since COVID. All good.
Daily Bird
Today I’m going with the white-crowned sparrow, another friendly winter resident. They’re all over the place right now, with their white-throated friends. They don’t sing as much, but they have a pretty song in addition to a lot of chirping.
Mostly I enjoy watching them in the brush piles scratching for food. The younger ones completely blend in with their surroundings. See if you can find any immature birds in these photos of shiny adults!
It rained and rained and I worked and worked today, so I didn’t have any “adventures” to write about. I was glad to see the blog prompt for today, since it fit in with my day’s activities.
Still rainy
Have you guessed my favorite subject in school? It’s pretty obvious, though after sixth grade there were really two.
Since I have the condition where I’m just driven to write (hypergraphia, self diagnosed), it’s no surprise that I loved English grammar and composition. I still do, though I’ve cut out all the convoluted sentences and polysyllabic vocabulary of my youth, at least in public.
I don’t have any photos from today, so consider these old collages as writing prompts.
There’s nothing I liked better than to be assigned to diagram me some sentences or write a nice, juicy composition. Term papers with lots o’ footnotes were also my idea of fun. In high school the only way I got a boyfriend was to find the guy who liked fancy sentences as much as I did (he’s an English/film studies professor now).
How do you see yourself as a writer?
But I did have another passion, which, probably not coincidentally, involved arranging words in certain ways. It was my second love, choral music. I loved how chords worked, harmonies intertwined, and crescendos followed decrescendos. While writing was a solo activity, chorus involved working with others, blending and matching in tone.
I’m the red dress in the tenor section.
I learned a lot about discipline, learning rules so you can later break them, cooperation, and vulnerability through these activities. Sharing your writing and performing in public are not easy until you get a lot of practice and learn to take feedback constructively. (My high school chorus teacher and grad school advisor are still alive and could tell you how much I had to learn in that area.) (Note that there’s still work to be done.)
I feel like the kid in this one.
Thanks for being an audience for my blog. It’s a nice break from job aids and meeting minutes, which I wrote all day today. I’m lucky to have a place to be a “real,” person, not an influencer or manufactured celebrity.
These SoulCollage cards can make you think.
Go out and read some other great blogs by real people! I love learning what I have in common with others, as well as our differences. I learn a lot, and you can, too.
We learn more if we look. Right now looking can be hard.
One of the odder things I do in my job is record myself talking about software. It’s nice and low-tech, using a fairly nice headset and inexpensive recording software (Audacity). I’m not making a fancy podcast or recording music, so this works fine.
I listened to her all afternoon.
Of course, I have to edit the recordings, which requires a lot of listening to myself talk. I’ve gotten good at just pausing when I mess up and starting again at the previous place where I paused, so no one can tell I edited the recording. You have to use the same pitch and volume to do a good job. Sometimes I don’t.
Just like sometimes my photos are dang blurry.
Over the years I’ve trained myself not to gasp before I talk, not to make clicking sounds between words, to put ending consonants at the ends of words without sounding overly precise, and to vary my pitch so people won’t fall asleep. Doing it right the first time makes the process much less tedious.
My friend Melissa taught me all that.
I write out a script, so I won’t forget important details, but do my best to write words I can say naturally. My love of parenthetical expressions doesn’t get to come out much in the scripts. And I keep my sentences fairly short, as much as I can with talking about computers.
The best outcome of recording training videos is that I’ve become comfortable with the sound of my own voice. Like many people, I used to cringe at recordings of myself, because it didn’t sound like my voice does in my head when I’m talking. But now I think I sound fine. It’s sorta southern, but just a bit, not like my informal voice. I’d probably cringe to hear a recording of me telling a story like I did tonight at the Master Naturalist Meeting.
My fancy recording voice is like my shadow self. It’s very bland.
The only reason I wrote this blog entry is that it’s what was passing through my mind as I was about to fall asleep from another busy day. I guess I dragged whoever reads this through my sleepy thoughts.
Drew wanted me to write about his new browband. And that his head is healing fine.
What’s a topic or issue about which you’ve changed your mind?
I was going to be flip and answer this one with “golf.” I thought it was boring and elitist when I was young, and getting my head cracked open by a golf club in bad ole 8th grade didn’t help (when I mentioned this earlier I forgot to add that as I stumbled my way alone and bleeding to the school nurse, I rubbed blood all over the exterior of Plantation Middle School, to express my disgust with my situation. They never did golf again in middle school PE. However, I’ve come to enjoy watching golf on television and have fun at Top Golf.
No golf photos, but here’s a painted lady.
My more serious answer is that I’ve changed my mind about Christianity. I have gradually come to realize that I am not fond of institutional religion in general, not just Christianity. Also, I realized that what upsets me most about certain Christian sects is how bizarrely they’ve distorted the message of peace, kindness, and caring that the historical Christ preached into a war-mongering, cruel, and disdainful way of enforcing power over the masses in favor of a privileged few.
Snow on the prairie looking elegant.
It turns out that there are Christians with whom I agree very much and whose ideas I’m happy to incorporate into my life, along with wise people from other traditions. So, I am still quite unimpressed with many versions of Christianity, but I’m very comfortable with the teachings of Christ (not Paul’s version).
A bee I’d never seen before. ID not confirmed.
Enough of that. Huzzah! Today was the day! Pleasant weather arrived! I even had to wear a sweatshirt getting Drew ready to go to a horse clinic. I just basked all day and couldn’t make myself stay inside even after I got home. I wandered around taking pictures for the pollinator BioBlitz that’s going on.
Texas nightshade (Solanum triquetrum) is a pretty plant that only grows in one spot on our property.
The nice weather made the clinic lots of fun, even though Drew was not on his best behavior much of the time, because he was very distracted by a beautiful mare (I don’t know what makes a mare beautiful to a hormonal gelding, but she is very pretty.
I love her. What a butt!
Eventually he settled down, but not after I had to trot him in a circle so many times I was getting dizzy. He was distracted. Once we switched to obstacles, he did better. We jumped! And we went around a corner backwards. There were challenges due to my lack of skill, but I got through the day.
I’ve got my eye on her.
It was funny that all three horses in my group were gray. Drew’s the tiny one that doesn’t cost tens of thousands of dollars. But he is just fine.
Brilliantly, we separated Drew from Luna for the photo.
Hanging out with the horse gang again was just great. I’m glad summer is over so we can have fun and learn more. There’s lots to learn!
Sara got this picture of Drew not grasping the concept of sharing space with Aragorn.
I have a healthy amount of Imposter Syndrome going on, stemming mainly from feeling so horribly untalented at what I went to grad school for, even though I loved it. But mostly I’ve been able to blend in, make conversation, or at least get by in whatever situation I get thrown in.
It’s because I meditate.
I admit I felt uncomfortable during the years we were studying real estate renovations and investment, especially when we got labeled as “big investors” and getting invited to special receptions and events (like a sky box at a football game—I couldn’t do rich people small talk so I sat in the seats and watched the game. I’m good at football watching. I grew up working class or barely middle class, so I missed out on rich people issues and topics. They talked a lot about taxes when just a year or two before mine were easily done by Turbo Tax.
Now, though, I understand horse expenses.
But the time I felt most out of place was the 1971-72 school year, when I was removed from a junior high school where I fit in, had my advanced classes, and was popular among the smart hippie kids. I was placed in a new town, which was a kinda snobby suburb. That was ok. But the school was an “open classroom.” Three grades, 6-8, were all in a giant room with lockers delineating learning areas. Black kids were bussed in from miles away and not thrilled about it. All abilities were in the same classroom, which was supposed to be just fine for learners and teachers, because we were supposed to teach ourselves, each at our own pace.
It was hell. Science class was good, because we all learned at the same time, mainly how to hurt each other with lab equipment. Much of the year, the white kids would have nothing to do with a hippie kid. The black girls were more friendly. Eventually I had friends.
But this whole system was chaos. By halfway through the year I’d finished English and social studies, so three of us would go to the open air library and crawl under a table to read plays to each other. Shakespeare was quite naughty, we thought. Probably it’s banned today.
But I couldn’t teach myself algebra, even with a friend trying with me. She was brilliant. But we needed a teacher, and Mr. Schecter had no interest in teaching, just grading papers. So my friend and I crocheted purses. Hmm. I did a lot of extra-curricular stuff.
Anyway, that was the year I fainted in volleyball and took a golf club to my head. Only chorus was fun. Made lifelong friends there!
I was a square peg in that giant round hole of a school building. I lost a year of math, too. I had to do Algebra I again, so I was behind many of my friends.
I had no deep pool to hide in.
I’m sure I drove my parents up a wall, as we used to say, that year. I felt like a complete misfit, but these memories reminded me there was plenty of fun. Change was just hard for an adolescent with severe anxiety. I didn’t even know what anxiety was. I was just “too sensitive.”
I’m glad I have my circle of human and animal friends to support me now!
The Hermits' Rest 