Hey, Suna, what subject might that be, I hear the chorus asking. Well, that subject is sort of two things, but both ways of thinking about the world that sadden me, because they eliminate so much potential people AND they are self perpetuating: the poverty mindset and entitlement.
Mandi is celebrating a birthday. She looks like someone who’s doing good.
My friend Mandi has loads of personal experience in this area, and I’m happy to let her speak. She spent much of her life in a “poverty mindset” when it came to finances, especially, and she’s seen what people who feel they are entitled to a good living just because they exist. Check out these three posts she wrote over where she blogs, our Hermit Haus Redevelopment site:
As I have pointed out before, I am not super wealthy person. I am overcoming the poverty mindset myself. I read a great article, found here that states, “38% of American households making $40,000-$100,000 per year could not cover $400 for an emergency without going into debt.”
Hermit Haus Redevelopment blog, December 5, 2020
Scary, huh? She doesn’t want to be one of those people anymore.
Look at that. I called people doofuses. Shame on me. That’s about the worst thing I like to fling around, though.
This is me, talking to my friend.
In our current troubled times, I see (and read) a lot of nasty name-calling going on. I know it’s not new, because I’ve read some doozies in old letters to the editor, which were at least more creative than some of the 2020 ones. I read something on Facebook today, written by J., a minister friend of mine, too, that got me going:
People don’t have to agree with me politically to remain my Facebook friends. People may also criticize people whom I like and won’t get deleted. However, calling me or anyone else a snowflake or a libtard seems to make me press delete every time. Lack of kindness, not content, is what I gauge.
I just don’t like name calling. One thing I’m proud of in my child-rearing is that my kids didn’t call each other names or engage in derogatory name calling toward other kids. I admire them both for their adult selves staying that way, too (as far as I know).
When the world seems to be falling apart even more than usual, when your efforts at doing good fall short, when you’re floundering around other people’s schedules…take a break. Sit in the sun. Watch the light change.
Long shadows on the back porch.
Pet each dog who jumps on your lap in turn. Watch the dogs be goofy and play.
I gots a stick in my mouth.
Watch the light as it fades, and hope tomorrow brings peace.
If it doesn’t, know the live you send out is helping, even if you can’t see it.
The light is never exactly the same on any two days. Shalom.
Hey readers! If any of you happen to visit the website for this blog, you will see a few new pages on the top menu.
New topics, ooh aah!
I saw a feature on someone else’s blog that I decided to imitate (especially since someone actually ASKED for this). You can now see a list of blog posts on some of the most popular topics from the past year or so. They have little excerpts of the posts, so you can decide if you want to read more. I’ve made:
Rants and Ramblings: These are the posts where I talk about issues that matter to me or what currently makes me annoyed. Always a favorite.
Animal Tales: For those of you who love our dogs, the equines, or the chickens. Here they are, in all their glory.
Nature and Travel: Naturalists and lovers of scenery might enjoy this section.
I’m hoping this might help anyone looking for old favorites, or wants to browse and see a little about each post.
Ooh, this is a controversial topic in my family right now. When I first started this blog, I wrote that my main goal was to live in the moment. I’m basically sticking with that one, along with:
Keep learning
Be kind
Like myself just as I am
There. I’m done. My yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily goals are right there.
On the other hand…
Ah. Blank.
My Cameron housemates, Lee and Kathleen, are very big on goals. They have fancy goal-monitoring journals that take a long time to set up. The journals help them set their goals for every period of time, and encourage them to evaluate how they are going, whether they are reasonable or not, and whether they need to be changed, due to life or whatever.
A blogger I enjoy (V, of Millennial Life Crisis), posted her top posts of 2019. I wondered what mine were, so I checked. Here ya go.
Suna’s Top Five Posts of 2019. Go Suna.
What were these about? I’ll share in a bit. But what really interests me is that they aren’t necessarily my most fascinating posts; instead at least the first few are on there because someone else shared them. Thanks, other people!
Bar Blogging: This post from April was me “live blogging” a performance by a young woman named Emma G, who is a friend of my ranch neighbors. Anita and I went with Sara to see her, and had a great time. Someone must have linked to my post from their page, because it keeps getting hits every day or so. it really makes me wonder why it’s gotten MORE popular in recent months.
So, I have fired up the Google Search Console, and when it finishes processing, I’ll let y’all know why this post is so popular.
Book Review: Dignity: I know why this one from June got lots of hits. In addition to being a review of a really interesting book about the underclasses in the US, the author saw my review and tweeted it. I wrote a little bit about it (in one of my posts that got the fewest hits this year, as a matter of fact). I was glad the author enjoyed my review. I hope lots of people are reading it. This is by FAR my most popular book review (usually they get a middling number of hits).
Crisis of Faith – Or Denomination: This is the post from last August where I share that I have decided to not be affiliated with any church or denomination, after many years as a Unitarian Universalist. I think a lot of people who are my UU friends read it and shared it. It turned out a LOT of people were thinking along the same lines. I think I made a good point about why an institutional fixation on political correctness can really alienate people, even those who basically agree with you.
Yep. I’ve found another gap in the skill set needed on my path to serenity.
I have got to learn to go with the flow
I go with the flow, sez Fiona
Today I was supposed to stay at the ranch so we could work on the chicken coop. It’s nearly sunset. I got in a whole day of Planview work. I fed the horses. I walked the dogs. I’m worried Carlton has been killed by a cow, because I tried twice to get him to come home but he kept going back. Then it got silent.
Whew. I hear him again.
The chickens still aren’t dead either.
But, no chicken coop material is here. See I thought there was a plan. I stuck to it. I did NOT go with the flow and accept that by the time the day was over, many new plans, distractions, and duties would come up.
Just like yesterday when we went to get coop material and ended up with a mattress.
Chill Suna
It’s no big deal. The coop will happen. I just might have done something else with my day. Some people are planners. Some are spontaneous. I’m in with a spontaneous group right now.
I’m not dead
What a perfect time to learn to understand that plans are just possibilities. I’m going to go back and breathe some more and greet my dirty cattle-chasing dog. He still has plenty of energy.
Here I sit, alone with my fellow Hermit, each of us typing on our separate keyboards, listening to a dog bark in the distance. Ah, Christmas Eve.
More than one of my friends, and one family member in particular, has asked why I’ve gone out of town for the past three Christmases. So, I’ll answer that instead of giving another boring nature report (I’ll do that tomorrow; I did cool stuff today). The short answer is: self preservation. The longer answer, and how I plan to deal with my holiday angst follows.
We interrupt this angst for a cowboy Christmas display. Carry on.
Background on how I’m wired: One of my major “love languages” is gifts. I’m one of those people who hang on to things for years, just because they remind me of the person who gave them. I have my Kathy Dettwyler Faberge pansy thing, my cake cover and weird quilts from my Granny Kendall, a pod sculpture and a goddess from my friends in Illinois…on and on.
Because of this, I always loved Christmas. I treasured so many gifts, even ones I didn’t actually like, because I knew some family member or friend took time and effort to choose it. That made me feel loved. I looked forward to my sister’s gifts, as well as those from my brother and later my boyfriend, because they were just what I liked (all three of them have the gift knack, which I don’t think I actually got). I just loved being with family and enjoying each other as we exchanged thoughtful and fun gifts (we were never much for expensive ones).
Pause to enjoy a ranch in Bandera County.
When my kids came along, I just loved buying and making gifts for them, because I loved them so much and wanted to see them happy. Same for the rest of the family.
At some point, I realized I was going way overboard and buying too many things for too many people I cared for. It became clear when I found many carefully chosen and hand-made gifts discarded when Declan’s first girlfriend moved out. I realized many of the nice/carefully chosen things I’d given my own kids weren’t treasured; they were just tossed in a pile in their rooms to be found when I cleaned them out. (I KNOW some kid gifts are just for fun and don’t last forever!)
Mr and Mrs Goose honk a holiday hello.
Then it dawned on me that no one in my current family was big on giving gifts. I guess it isn’t their love language. (My spouse likes to give surprise gifts, but doesn’t like Christmas.)
PLUS, I always wanted to have a wonderful family meal for Christmas. When it began to also include all the neighbors and many friends, I got overwhelmed, though, and the planning started to stress me out. The last time I hosted a dinner, I looked out and saw three people cooking and serving like crazy and the rest just staring at each other.
Ah, deer. They prevent angst.
That was 2016, the same year that half the people invited didn’t even have the courtesy to bring a token gift or food contribution. I’m all for giving. Honest. It just suddenly struck me as really unequal, and I felt like I was giving like crazy without even thanks (I am sure I was thanked; I was over-exaggerating, a thing I have been known to do.)
I looked around after that Christmas dinner and exchange of 90% gifts from me and very few gifts for me. I said this isn’t working for me. It’s also not working for them. Why am I trying to give them the Christmas experience I want? What do they actually want? I decided that next Christmas would be different.
High-quality fencing is all one needs for Christmas.
The next year I booked us a week in New Mexico, and my kids, the current partner of Declan, Lee, and Anita all showed up. We drove around, hiked, shopped, relaxed, and played games. It was great.
Time for a ramble! The things my eyes have been seeing…and not seeing. First off, my eyes are on my mind. Yesterday was my annual eye doctor appointment, which I generally view as all those annoying things I have to look at so that I can later have lots of fun looking at frames. I do so love me some eyeglasses frames, and Helen and Gloria at the Far West Optical Land of Fancy Frames are happy to indulge me. (I know there are fancier frame shops in the area, but you could never get me out of them.)
Yesterday, though, the new-to-me young man who did the preliminary stuff was all solemn, and informed me that my exam counted as a medical one, so my vision coverage wouldn’t accept it. He was really worried I couldn’t pay, or something. I never could get it out of my mouth that I had enough in my Flex account for it.
The exam took 1.5 hours! Mostly Barbara, the eye doctor/friend from church, was looking for some drusen in my eyes. However, she could not find them. I had no idea what the big deal was until I looked it up and found that drusen are the first stage of macular degeneration. They are also fatty deposits. Probably my recent diet change has positively affected them. Yay, I’m not going blind.
Future eyewear. The orange is more of a coral and according to the gals, made me look like Sharon Osborne.
Also I picked out some new sunglasses and regular glasses, and got a good deal on them (a rare thing in this place). The sunglasses have Liberty of London fabric in them, though Helen kept calling it Lloyd’s of London. It gave us all a chuckle. I do enjoy that place.
Other Things My Eyes Saw
I’ll just share this one other thing that made me laugh. I was trying to get holiday pictures taken for our real estate and personal assistance services companies today. No one dressed for it (because I hadn’t asked them to), so we held our packages from the float.
It was really, really hard to get us looking good, but Mandi got some really funny candid shots of the Hearts Homes and Hands team. I cannot un-see them.
I’ll be putting the GOOD pictures up on Facebook, but here is the Hermits’ Rest Enterprises team looking as good as we can:
The real estate team
And here is the HHH team:
Doing our best. I could perhaps have found a more flattering ensemble, but, hey, it has a donkey on it.
Okay, am I the only one who occasionally wakes up with a feeling that something isn’t right, but you don’t know what it is? That’s me today. I woke up with some kind of dread in the pit of my stomach, like something had gone wrong, somewhere, with someone I care about. My innards are just fine. I just have vague worries and concerns that I can’t pinpoint. Oy.
But, WHY do I have a bad feeling?
I asked a bunch of people if they were all right, then I got to worrying that it was my step-mother, so I ordered her Christmas flowers. Interesting path to guilthood there! Who knows, maybe I should call (except that phoning is this introvert’s biggest nightmare).
There’s no reason to feel this way, at least no conscious reason. I got good news today at work, got some things done, and supported a friend. Nothing bad there! But still, there the feeling is. Sitting on my psyche and squishing it.
The bright side: I checked in on people! People like that. If something’s going on with YOU, let me know. Until them I will keep randomly messaging people to be sure they’re okay.
The Hermits' Rest 