I really enjoy doing theme blog hops and challenges. I like the discipline of writing daily or writing on a specific topic or in a particular style. That's one of the reasons I enjoy October Poetry Writing Month (OctPoWriMo) each Fall. This year I have decided to take part in an A-Z challenge. Each participant tries to blog daily (except Sundays) on a subject beginning with that date's letter of the alphabet. All the participants are linked up at a web site (see the link below for further details) and try to read at least one or two new blogs each day. Its a great way to encounter new ideas and writers, and it can be a lot of fun.
At the suggestion of my daughter, a book lover who puts even myself to shame, I am going to blog about a book beginning with the appropriate letter of the alphabet. Some will be old favorites that I have read many times, some will be books I haven't looked at since the children outgrew them, while others will be books I have just recently discovered.
As we journey through the month I will also write on other topics that come to mind for that particular letter.
I hope we will have fun this month, and hope to connect with other book lovers as well.
When my children first went on Facebook, I set certain rules for myself. I would not tag them in photos unless they asked, I would not send friend requests to their friends (though I accepted requests when their friends friended me). And I would not leave cutesy but embarrassing messages on their pages.
I have mostly adhered to these rules, but somehow I managed to embarrass my children on social media anyway. In fact I did it twice in two days last week, and several other times recently as well, according to the highest authorities on this topic, namely the kids themselves.
Here are examples of ways I have managed to mortify the children lately, including their responses.
Post Selfies.
Recently I was experimenting with taking self portraits with my cell phone. When I had one the that seemed to have turned out well, and had the added benefit of showing off the new necklace and sweater I had received as Christmas gifts, I posted it to Facebook.
The immediate reaction from my daughter was "Oh dear god, my mother took a selfie. Help me." Observing this, her older brother decided to join in with the fun:
"I agree. This is scary. Please find ANY other picture that does not involved you being the one who directly took the picture (this includes but is not limited to: turning aa camera around and being in the picture ("selfie"), using a rear facing camera to take a selfie or setting a timer on a picture in order to photograph yourself or having another person taking a selfie with you in the view of the camera.) These measures must be taken for the safety of all your Facebook Friends, and the facebook community as a whole. Thank you for your co-operation."
(If the whole environmental science/history thing does work out for him he has a great future in contract law.)
Use Hashtags on places other than Twitter
The very next day I managed to embarrass them again. This time I was posting a throwback thursday picture on Facebook, and one that was in fact in direct response to another college photo posted by one of my friends. Naturally I labelled my photo the same as he had his namely #throwbackthursday. Again the daughter reacted with dismay and again her brother took up her cause:
"MOM! See previous comment on your profile picture. Now replace it with the numerical sign ("hashtag"). You are not able to use a hashtag as it scares your daughter. The cease of use of the proverbial hashtag is requested."
I know, everyone's a comedian. It is flattering they pay that much attention to what I'm posting, except of course when they don't want to pay attention, which brings me to another way I annoy at least one of the offspring on line.
Turn up in social media when they don't expect you
I use Twitter. The Boy uses Twitter. We do not follow each others' accounts, but there are accounts we both follow (mostly sports related), as well as some mutual friends. Since I use twitter to promote the blog, and since others are kind enough to promote it as well, he occasionally discovers my tweets being passed along by others. He has informed me more than once that he is annoyed when a mutual friend retweets me "if I wanted to see your Twitter feed I'd subscribe to it."
One thing that doesn't seem to embarrass or annoy them is this blog.
Both read and are usually complimentary about what I write. In fact when I spent so much time this past month getting my posts established at Lefty Pop, I was informed by The Boy that I wasn't posting enough blog entries.
I suppose its sweet of them to even care what their mother is doing out there, so I will take their suggestions under consideration, and attempt to avoid further embarrassing and annoying them on the internet.
All hail the Vernal Equinox, the return of the sun, and the arrival of spring!
Yes today we start a new season, the time of growing things and new beginnings.
Of course when I went outside this morning we had snow flurries.
The only thing blooming around here is the daffodil I bought at the store last week.
My new shamrock plant took one look at the great outdoors and said "Nothing doing, call me in May."
Thanks to daylight savings time, the sunsets are later. Unfortunately for me, it means the sunrises are as well, leaving me in the dark on my way to the bus stop each morning.
OK so its about the promise of Spring. Gaia is just getting started. Give the girl some time. Maybe by Easter. (What Easter is a month away, yet?)
Well at least the calender says its Spring. For now I'll settle for that.
This year was the first in 10 years that my daughter didn't take dance classes. Ever since she was in kindergarten our lives had included the ritual of spending at least one night a week at the dance school. By the time she was in middle school she was taking classes 2 or 3 nights a week, sometimes more than one class a night. Usually her father picked her up at school, fed her, then dropped her off at the dance school, while I headed out there after work and waited for her to finish.
The school she attended was one of the best in the state, with an excellent program geared to training professional dancers. She seemed to enjoy her classes, and thrived under the rigorous instruction. When her strict but fair teacher gave her a rare compliment she bloomed all week. She danced through the pain, and at the expense of a social life. She knew lessons were costly, so seldom asked for anything else.
As she approached the high school years though, it became clear she was having issues. Most of the more casual dancers had dropped off long before, and the girls around her were committed to a professional career. They were also members of the dance company that was attached to the school. These girls thought nothing of taking 8, 10 or even more classes a week. Many were home schooled to give them more time for classes. Really topnotch students were taking pricey private lessons as well. All of this was beyond both our financial and time capacity. But she perservered as best she could.
What became clear last year however, was that dance was exceeding the Girl's physical level as well. 4 classes a week, including an hour of Pointe, were wearing her out. More and more she was not just coming home sore at night (typical for dancers) she was sore for days after. She actually took more than a month off from Pointe classes in the middle of the year, with Achilles issues--something she had never done before.
Also it was clear that as much as she loved dance, it was not her whole life, nor was it something she wished to pursue to the detriment of everything else she loved: Choir, Orchestra, Girl Scouts, summer activities and vacations. We had come to an impasse.
Then she auditioned for and was accepted into our school systems performing arts program. She had tried and failed several times in the past to be admitted to the dance program. In a bittersweet irony, she now gained entrance through the orchestra program. Clearly she would be having to devote increasing time to her music, since her continuance in the program depended on it.
This year, more than ever, the arrival of May and the end of the dance year came as a huge relief. Usually by July she was hungry for dance to begin again but not this summer. She went to one dance class at a different school, and although she had fun, she found she wasn't really missing it. So without our ever really discussing it, she came to her decision. Early in August she came to me and said she wanted a year off to see how it felt.
High school started, and she did not resume dance. It felt strange to go home from work every night instead of heading to the dance school several evenings a week. As a theatre person, I missed the atmosphere of the dance school, the moms I had come to be friends with. I don't think the Girl has though.
She has been so busy with the demands of orchestra, several after school clubs and a full load of high school honors classes. Although she no doubt misses it at times, a whole new circle of friends and activities has taken precedence in her life. About the only time discussion of dance came up was when she would critique what we saw on television.
And yet, I think there is a part of her that still thinks of herself as a dancer, just as I never stopped being a writer all through the years that i did nothing except write letters and occasionally scribble unrelated notes on scrap paper. Also. although I don't think she wishes to pursue ballet seriously anymore, I think in a year or two she will take up jazz or hip hop or some other form of less stressful dance art that will be a better fit with all the other activities she is pursuing now.
Like most teenagers she evolves so quickly that one feels U-turn signals are called for, but a part of her will always be our dancer.
Yesterday we celebrated both St Patrick's Day (a day early) and my mom's birthday (a few days late) because that is what happens when everyone's kids are in school and things must happen on weekends. But today is St Patrick's day, and as I have mentioned before my grandmother's birthday. So in honor of her, a lot of other ancestors, and the day, here is my second annual collection of music and quotes from some notable persons of Irish ancestry.
The fine folks at Finish The Sentence Friday would like to know what my favorite decade is. This is a question to which I have given some consideration without coming to a solid decision. To me the issues divides into two sections, which decade has produced the art and entertainment as well as the history,that has given me the most pleasure, or the most challenges, secondly which decade has been the most enjoyable to me personally.
For the sake of conciseness as well as sanity, I am confining myself to the decades I have lived in.(Although this deprives me of 30's horror movies, everything to do with WWII and 50's rock and roll, I am trying to keep this from becoming too unwieldy.) Conveniently enough I was born right at the top of one, so we can easily work with the standard decades from 1960 on.
In the case of the first category, there is no doubt in my mind that the answer would be the sixties. Certainly it is the source of most of the music I love (One word--Beatles) although I did pick up a lot of music in the 70's as well. A lot of my favorite films were made in the 60's as well, a diverse group that would include, Lawrence of Arabia, To Kill a Mockingbird, Planet of the Apes, The Manchurian Candidate, and many others. The down side of all this great creativity of course, is the political turmoil of the time. As I have written before the first public memory of my childhood is the JFK assassination; and a long string of sad tragedies follow in its wake.
When it comes to my personal life, it becomes more complicated. The 60's and 70's, my childhood were happy enough at home, not always so much at school. After all the upheaval of Vietnam and Watergate, everyone seemed to go to sleep for awhile. I often had the feeling of being born in the wrong time. I should have been a little older, so I could be involved in all that was going on; or else I should have been a little younger so I could be clueless with the rest.
The 80's were a miserable time politically (Ronald Reagan and the trickle down theory that never seemed to even make it to the middle class, let alone the poor) but personally it was a great time. I spent most of the decade slowly but surely working my way to a bachelors degree, I was lucky enough to fall in with a wonderful group of theatre people, form many of the friendships that have mattered the most over the years, created some excellent plays, worked on many more, got married. They were some very good years.
The 90's saw me into civil service, which provided security and benefits, even if the pay wasn't always what it should be. We had our children (enough to make any decade memorable), and mostly became the people we are today.
The 2000's began badly, as everyone knows that divides their lives into before and after 9/11/01. It made my professional life far more complicated as we had to process all sorts of information about terror alerts and weapons of mass destruction, while the proliferation of cell phones greatly increased our work load. But the children were doing well, and things were, overall, quite good.
Now here we are at the present decade. One child partway out of the nest, the other working on it. Retirement as a realistic option looms on the horizon. Then we will probably reboot our lifestyles again, as we will be able to focus back upon ourselves again.
John Lennon, in his last interview, made the observation that "we're still alive, we're still all here, and while there's life there's hope." In the end, the best decade should always be the one we are living in, because that's the only one we can do anything with.
This post is part of Finish the Sentence Friday. To see how other writers chose to finish today's sentance, click on the link below:
Hey friends, it's Monday morning again and we all know how that is. Got to get off to work, get the kids back to school, start another week. In my case its the morning the trash goes out, so I spend Sunday night in a panic trying to cram all the trash into the city mandated containers. But that's every Monday right?
Well today isn't just any Monday. Today is the Monday after Daylight Saving Time went into effect for most of the US. If you gave it any thought at all it was probably about how nice it will be to come home from work in something remotely resembling day light.
But the truth of the matter is that today is one of the most dangerous days of the year, as a number of scientific studies have shown.
Traffic accidents, including fatal traffic accidents spike the Monday after DST. So do heart attacks. Workplace accidents also increase, both in number and severity. Suicide rates (for males) go up in the first weeks after DST too.
Why does all this happen? According to Marc Schlossburg of the Washington Hospital Sleep Center our circadian rhythms are totally thrown out of whack by the time shift. Simply sleeping in on Sunday Morning isn't enough to reset them, especially as they are driven by light more than the clock.
Remember that daylight we will be looking this evening? Well it means that most of us will head off to work and school in a world that is abruptly much darker than it was on Friday. Most of us are setting out in that darkness sleep deprived and suffering from jet lag. No wonder we aren't as alert, and more likely to get into accidents.
There are some precautions we can take. If its dark when you leave for work, get out into the daylight as soon as possible, it helps reset your time clock. Try going to bed a little early for the next few nights till your system adjusts. Most importantly, now that you know about the risks of the time change, try to be more careful and aware of the dangers. Take extra time with your commute, and with any complicated tasks.
Because we all know, its the little things we neglect that will get us in the end.
Seems like only yesterday that my backyard looked like this:
OK it wasn't yesterday, more like the day before.
But today it was, miracle of miracles, sunny and 55, and the world looked like this:
For the first time in months, I didn't have to bundle myself in my winter coat and hood, but tossed caution to the (not howling today) winds
and went forth garbed only in my new Lefty Pop Hoodie,
to greet the sunshine.
It was so nice standing at the bus stop I was almost sorry when the bus arrived.
For the first time in ages I looked forward to the walk to my destination after I got off.
There are rumors of some snow tomorrow, but the day after they are saying 40's.
I have too much experience of Ohio winters (wait 5 minutes, the weather will change) to think that it's all over. In fact there are rumors of snow tomorrow, and I will probably be back in the parka.
But today was the first in a long time that really promised spring.
And that's as good a reason as one needs to celebrate.
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