Just to allay the fears of those who emailed wondering about the lack of a Writer’s Challenge posting today:
Thank you for the concern. I have not been abducted by Venusians or Martians (as yet). Mad ravaging mobs of disgruntled (or even gruntled) citizens have not arrived to tar and feather me.
Today was full of ifs, buts, and maybes. And it must not have just been here that it was that way. How do I know?
First off, all morning and most of the afternoon, my iGoogle home page looked like it had been redesigned by a crazed color blind Tibetan monk. No info, no listing of my RSS feeds (all those lovely blog posts – ignored), no news, no anything like normal. Only a lonely search box begging forlornly for me to type at it. Worst of all, the problem seemed to be mainly affecting Firefox. Opera looked almost normal. Of course my internal ordering of browsers runs Firefox, Opera, and finally if life is nearing an end, Internet Explorer. So I was just one step away from the universe as I know and love it coming to an end.
I might have figured it was just me and my machines, but then on the Google developer forums there were confirmatory messages mentioning the same problems. So it must have been either Mozilla or Google having a bad day. Now this evening, all is back to normal and I am so happy to return to the news of Balloon Boy and all the coulda-shoulda-wanna-be sports stories written by the mid-week wound licking losers. (Anyone else notice how the Google news feeds seem to have a real emphasis on the negative slanted stories? Why is that? Have they joined the Fox News Network and I just didn’t notice?)
Then to add insult to injury, it was overcast and dark here all day. The sun seemed to run off and hide, afraid that the brown and gold and orange colors of fall just weren’t enough. It looked like a snow storm was eminent all day long. By late afternoon is was misting – you know, the billions of wanna-be snow flakes unable to make it in the real world and falling to the earth like a living fog bank. So it was damp and cool and breezy and dark all day. Weather ultimately conductive to lifting the spirit and making one happy to be alive – *not*. It was bad enough that by noon the normally chipper Molly had retreated to her bed and wasn’t going to pull her nose out from under her paws for anything short of Armageddon.
It seems that the gloom of the day must have infected others. Every call I got today had a note of gloom and doom and rant and rave in it. I can’t wait for the weather to turn sunny again.
Oh well, I have beans soaking to make soup tomorrow and Molly has decided she should come to life. So I leave you with Molly and the chew toy of death. Let the battle begin!
I was busy watching the Broncos game when it struck me that there was something I forgot ot do today – post my blog entry!
I spent much of yesterday being a house drudge. You know, vacuuming, washing, and cleaning. Finally got around to cleaning up the Son’s room so one can see the floor and close the closet doors. (Remember it was a month or more ago that we sold the bunk bed from the room in the garage sale.)
One of the things I had to do was wash a couple of quilts that had been on the bunk bed for a while. So I washed them first and then took advantage of the fact that the day was near 80 degrees (probably the only one for a week or more either side since there is a chance of snow again on Wednesday) and hung them outside to dry in the warm breeze.
As I was doing that, my mind drifted to the thought of how fortunate we have been to have all the handmade quilts throughout our life. We have quilts from my grandmother and my mom, all of which we use in day to day living. For those of you gasping in horror at the idea of heirlooms like hand sewn quilts being in day to day use, I’ll just point out the many of them were given with the proviso that we use them precisely that way. The people who put the hours of labor and love into them weren’t doing it to create a burdensome thing that needed to be handled with kid gloves and stored away. They made them to be used and for us to remember them fondly each time we use them.
In any case, that led me to the thought that we may be the last generation to be so fortunate. The concept of creating goods of enduring value and usefulness for kith and kin seems to be fading with each succeeding generation. In our generation, the handmade quilts have given way to machine sewn quilts. In the Son’s generation, I suspect that even that will begin to fade. So my question to you is: what is replacing it? There must be something?
On a somewhat different note, Molly continues to function as furball extraordinary. Vacuuming the house yielded at least 2 gallons of Molly fur. It’s one of the reason we have a Hoover WindTunnel vacuum cleaner – one can simply dump the chamber full of fur and continue on. I suspect a standard bagging model would eat us out of house and home in bags with a dog like Molly. On the other hand, having a continuously shedding long haired dog means you get used to finding hair everywhere. The wearing of black clothes is particularly challenging. The other day as I was walking out of a meeting, one of the other attendees turned to me and asked if I had a white long haired dog. i said I did and inquired as to how she knew. She pointed out the hair around my cuffs where Molly rubbed on me as I left for the meeting. She thought it was funny since she used to have a similar dog with the same hair everywhere problem a few years ago.
Finally, it is mom’s birthday tomorrow and I know she reads this blog regularly. So this is an appropriate place to say:
It’s time once more for
Last night I attended a candidate forum for the city council races. I probably should not have done so since I heard at least one candidate tell a lie, another expose their ignorance of science and facts, and yet another state projected actions in direct violation of the city charter. It was hard to sit still and not stand up and play the anti-stupid card. Thus I bring you:
More fun from Mama Kat’s Writer’s Challenge this week! I am going to concentrate on
My take on this prompt is probably a bit skewed – I gradually learned growing up that other mom’s just weren’t up to the standard of my mom. So I don’t know that there was ever a moment that I realized that my mom was more than a mom. It was more the realization that other moms were so much less than my mom.
Growing up, it seemed to me that there was nothing my mom couldn’t do and very few things that she didn’t know or at least know how to find out. I can remember my shock in first grade when I realized that my friends’ moms didn’t know how to cook just about anything – from catfish fresh from the creek to pheasants newly shot to that unknown cut of beef on special at the grocery store without consulting a cookbook. My confusion was compounded when I also learned that some of those same mothers didn’t know how to sew and make clothes and costumes. I realize now that at least some of those skills were part of survival for our family. But they seemed normal to my brother and I. I honestly have to admit that I was high school before i realized that we lived on the wrong side of the tracks. Mom and dad did such a good job of presenting life as normal that I never questioned it.
At the same time, it seemed that mom always had good books to suggest we read; books that always seemed to be just right for the maturity level we had. It was another shock when I found that most of my friends mothers made no reading suggestions and in fact seemed not to always have a book or two they themselves were reading. Even more bewildering was when I discovered that they didn’t have a library card and their moms didn’t take them to the library regularly. And that there was seldom any of what I would later learn was the Socratic method practiced every day in their homes. Some of that I attribute to the fact my friends had TV and we did not.
In spite of all this, I think the time I truly came to the realization that my mom was something out of the ordinary in the realm of momhood was in high school. As I had been growing up, I had noticed that many family members seemed to come and talk to mom about their life and problems. I assumed that was just part of being family. When I reached adolescence, my friends (and even enemies {*grin*}) started coming to the house, not to visit me, but to talk with mom.
Amazingly, I understood exactly why they did that. Mom has the gift of being able to listen absolutely and non-judgmentally. She will listen and not rise to the bait of provocation. But best of all, after listening and eliciting the full story, she is able to guide and help you to make good decisions, decisions that are good for *you*, decisions that she might not personally agree with, but decisions that are the best for you. And I found that no other mom I knew seemed to have that ability.
So in case you haven’t guessed, I think my mom is pretty special. Compared to the other moms I knew, it seemed to me that my mom was never just a mom. Or perhaps, the definition of mom was just different for us.