Category Archives: mama kat

have you?, mama kat, writer's challenge

Have You Ever Lost …

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Time once more for for Mama Kat’s Writer’s Challenge. Today we will attempt the death defying feat of tackling prompts 2 and 4. To wit:

2.) “What did you once lose? Write about your search to find it again.” (inspired by writingfix.com)

4.) Begin each line of your post with “have you ever”. (inspired by Vikki from Live. Laugh. Pull Your Hair Out)



#2 – I have lost many things over the course my life. Some have been trivial material things, some have been things that only come to mind in an odd moment, and some are of a more subjective nature (like my sanity?). Some have been people. Some have been abilities.

The most perplexing thing that I lose periodically is the ability to enjoy life as it happens. Like most scientists and engineers, I am sometimes obsessive about things going according to plan. When I am in that phase, it feels like I have lost the ability to enjoy life as it occurs in real time. I start planning everything and anxiously waiting for each and every event to happen. Even small deviations from the expected occurrence stream can suck the joy out of the whole sequence of events. Needless to say, it is not a good state to be in. Nor is it fun to hang out with me when I’m in the state.

It took me a long time to realize that the way out of that state of mind and back to enjoyment is to wear mental blinders. I have to consciously decide to experience each event without expectation and correlated observation. You might say it requires practicing Zen to achieve a zen-like state. I always thought that the explanation from the Wikipedia article on Zen captured the essence:

Zen emphasizes experiential prajñā in the attainment of enlightenment. As such, it de-emphasizes theoretical knowledge in favor of direct realization through meditation and Dharma practice.

So maybe happiness and enjoyment of life *is* Zen enlightenment. {*grin*}

#4 – Have you ever? I have.

Have you ever chopped alfalfa? With a 40 foot head on a Field Queen? While dragging a semi trailer behind?

Have you ever changed oil in heavy equipment, lying on the ground, in the field, at night, trying to get done before all the rattle snakes finish homing in on the heat of the cooling engine?

Have you ever set a new land wriggle and crawl record due to the above?

Have you ever been in a fatal automobile accident?

Have you ever won a science fair?

Have you ever gotten drunk? With your faculty advisor?

Have you ever had your work published?

Have you ever held elected office?

Have you ever lived in Colorado? New Hampshire? California? Illinois? New York?

Have you ever wondered what happened to your kindergarten classmates?

Have you ever had a hole in one on the golf course?

Have you ever broken a bone? More than one?

Have you ever had surgery? More than one?

Have you ever played college athletics?

Have you ever shot a shotgun? Pistol? Rifle?

Have you ever thought that you have written more than enough “have you”‘s? 

mama kat, wedding, writer's challenge

Two for the Challenge

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Once more dear friends, into the breech we go. Time for Mama Kat’s Writer’s Challenge. This week I am tempted by prompts 1 and 2 – to wit:

1.) Describe a time when you had difficulty communicating with someone who speaks a different language than you. (inspired by Jen from Hamster Central)

2.) If you could do your wedding over, how would you do it? (Inspired by this tweet “I am watching TLC’s wedding shows and this makes me want to get married again. Same groom but a totally different ceremony.” by Jen@BuriedWithKids)

#1 – I was designated to give a presentation to a visiting team of Korean executives. They were all high muckety mucks and I was the designated expert in the topic area. Nothing too out of the ordinary.

But then corporate began to get worried. So we got a crash course in doing all the right things in the visitors culture. Things like always presenting your business card facing them so they could read it (a sign of respect), etc. Accept the gift they will present to you in appreciation for your time, let corporate deal with the ethical issues after the visitors have gone, etc. What no one thought through was that the visitors would have almost zero knowledge of the English language. Couple that lack with the fact that my talk was on computer and network security, a technical area full of jargon and engineering acronyms, and I’m sure you can see a disaster looming on the horizon.

Sure enough, the visitors arrived at our site in the middle of nowhere, clearly a high up executive team. I have never seen so many $2000 suits in one room in my life. Of course I am in khaki’s and a short sleeved shirt. Really impressive.

Fortunately, there is a junior gofer with the visiting team who can manage a little pidgin English who will attempt to translate my talk for the suits. Since I have a white board plus diagrams, the talk gets started. And then immediately side-tracked. Turns out that, at that point in time, the cultural moires in Korea left the executives unable to fathom the idea that someone might attempt to use a resource they were not authorized for. In particular, the mainframe system running their multi-billion dollar company had no password. Only those who should be using it would dare to try, no need for user ids or passwords. Once I got my jaw off the floor and managed to pantomime “bad guy” and “unauthorized access”, we were ready to continue.

When I got to the concept of outward facing systems and the “no man’s land” between them and internal systems, communication came to a stand-still. I could not seem to convey the idea of “no man’s land” in any way shape, or form. Finally in a fit of desperation, I called it the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ). The entire visiting team had light bulbs go over their heads – they all knew very well about DMZ given the division between North and South Korea.

I’m not sure how much knowledge the visitors took home with them, but DMZ became the standard terminology in the security area within a couple of years. After all, letting a scientist or engineer see an acronym leads to immediate use.

I did get a nice gift from the visitors:

The doodads on the tie clasp and cuff links are plated versions of the highest capacity memory chip dies in the world at the time – the company had just put them into production at the time. (The curious can figure out the company by reading the silk print in the back of the box. {*grin*})

#2 – I don’t think I would change a thing about our wedding. To understand why, let me re-print this story.

Some background is in order before we get to the gist of the tale. Now would be a good time to put your Coke down if you are prone to snorting all over the keyboard!

L and I got married here in Colorado in the midst of going from New Hampshire (undergrad) to California (graduate school). L had arrived in Colorado well ahead of me to attend to such minor details as the wedding arrangements and her ring and all the showers and … You get the idea. She was undergoing a whirl of showers and preparation and worry. Pretty stressed to say the least.

In the mean time I was journeying from New Hampshire with a friend from college with all our earthly goods in a U-Haul behind his old clunker of a car. To make the trip more exciting, we decided to visit the Smokey mountains on our way to Texas to drop his stuff off at his home. Now let me remind you that this was 34+ years ago and there was no such thing as a cell phone, for which I am eternally grateful. Otherwise I am sure I would have been on the phone to L hundreds of times a day. {*grin*}

Nelson, the friend I was traveling with, and I finally hit Colorado a couple of days before the wedding. He and some other friends from college were staying in the upstairs of mom and dad’s house. Since we had a day free before the wedding, we all piled into Nelson’s car and headed for Rocky Mountain National Park for the day since they had never been there. Of course L was stuck back down in the flatlands doing wedding type things. (Do you detect a pattern here?)

The day of the wedding, mom and dad’s house was a total zoo. Mom was the cake decorator for the wedding, so we had wedding cake everywhere on every flat surface to be found. In addition, mom and dad’s house only had one bathroom, so mom, dad, my brother, myself, and all my friends sleeping upstairs in the attic were sharing the one bathroom as we got ready. Then to top it all off, mom discovered that some of the wedding mints had gone bad. So there we are all sitting around the kitchen table molding mints like mad as we got ready for the wedding. Your only exit from the mint making line was when your turn in the bathroom was called. It may sound a bit insane, but some of my friends thought that the panic drill of sitting around the table stuffing and pressing the molds to create new mints, switching positions as the bathroom cycled, talking and laughing, half dressed for the wedding, was one of the high points of the wedding.

When I finally arrived at the church and joined up with my groomsmen, we were shuttled off to one of the warren of little rooms in the upstairs of the church. So we got to sit there and talk and wonder what was going on and when they would come to get us to get the show on the road. Unfortunately the young lady that put us in the room forgot to tell anyone else where she put us and as the time for the wedding to begin came and went, we were still sitting serenely and visiting without a clue. At long last, my future FIL happened to open the door and spot us. I think he was both relieved to have found us and disappointed – his money was on the groom (me!) having cold feet and departing post-haste.

The wedding itself went off without a hitch. Well except for the fact that I was reading the ceremony from the reverend’s book upside down as he did the service and just about got lost when he skipped a bit. It is amazing how moved and shaken one is when those vows are finally said in front of all.

After the wedding, we had a reception in the church dining area. That was where the cake and mints and the food and basically a lot of visiting was going on. L and I were the oldest grandkids on both sides and were blessed to have our our grandparents in attendance. Thus there were a lot of pictures and people to be talked to at the wedding and reception. Our wedding was not small, it seemed like thousands but was probably more like 250-300 people. Once the cake was cut and the first wave of hunger assuaged, it was time for the party to get going. This was an early afternoon reception at the church with dinner that night over at MIL and FIL’s.

At this point you have to know that L’s maid of honor (her lifelong friend) and my best man (a friend of mine and L)are both all out jokesters. In addition, I have a huge crew of uncles that all love to give one and all a ribbing just to see them squirm. In fact it was after I first took L to a Christmas scrum at my grandpa and grandma’s house and she was able to handle being around the uncles without killing me that I knew I had a real keeper.

The aforementioned crew of jokesters and fun loving rowdies then decided it would be a great idea to chivaree the bride. So the groomsmen and maid of honor, my brother, my uncles, and any other guilty looking souls they could corral kidnapped the bride. They didn’t inform my new MIL and FIL of what they were doing either. So there I was surrounded by all the females at the wedding (and in on the whole affair) in an apparent flirt fest and no sign of their daughter who had just gotten married to me.

The rowdy crew took L to the local cemetery and tied her to a headstone. Then they just left. After they had left her there for a while, they came back and took her to the lowest and cheapest cowboy bar in town. So L got to drink and dance with all the toothless old cowboys in the place. And of course all of these impressive events were captured on film for later enjoyment. While that was going on, I was beginning to get the 3rd degree from my FIL, since he was convinced I knew what the heck had happened to his daughter. Boy was I happy to see the crew return with L in tow.

That evening we had a picnic type affair at MIL and FIL’s house. I remember the line going out and around the house and down the block. It was a great good time for all. It was also funny because as I was standing in line with a friend I had first met in college in New Hampshire, he turned to me and said “I’ve been in this house before! It used to belong to the XXX family didn’t it?” Sure enough it had – turned out that he used to get sent out to the wilds to stay with the XXX’s in the summers. Talk about a small world.

L and I were staying in town for a few days before heading off to California, so we were at mom and dad’s in the sewing room (it had been the room shared by my brother and I until we shuffled up to the larger space in the attic). But all those friends there for the wedding were staying in the attic now. The only way from the attic into the rest of the house was (you guessed it) through the sewing room. In addition, remember that mom and dad’s house only had one bathroom and the only way to get there from the attic was through the sewing room where L and I were ensconced. We heard nary a peep from the captive guests in the attic all night – of course that may be because we were busy doing other things. {*grin*} In any case, L and I had to be up moderately early in the morning and elsewhere, so we got up and left, not even thinking that we should have perhaps shouted up the stairs that the coast was clear to the bathroom. You wouldn’t believe the razzing I have gotten about that from the attic captives over the years.

The upshot of all this is that L and I have a litterally priceless wedding album. Any time friends drop by, all we have to do is bring it out and everyone relives one of the best times ever. And because of the chivaree and cowboy bar and the attic and the mints and … Everyone has their own unique memory from the event. And those that weren’t there can’t believe they missed such an outrageous good time. Don’t you wish you had been there?


mama kat, writer's challenge

I’m Mad

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(Before proceeding, the answer to yesterday’s question is octopus. Odd huh?)
 
(And no, I’m not literally mad in either sense fo the word.)
 

This weeks topics:

1.) “I’m mad at myself. I’m embarrassed. I can’t believe after all these years, I’m still talking about my weight.” Poor Ope. What are you mad at yourself about?

2.) Divorce Dreams…a tempting alternative? A disaster to be avoided? Ever an option? Advice? What’s your take?

3.) What is the joy in your present moment?

4.) List 10 rules you’ve unlearned (meaning 10 things you thought were expected of you or were the “right way” of doing things, but that you now ignore).

5.) Mother’s Day is coming…what is the secret behind the close bond you have with your mom? OR What do you do to create that close bond with your kids?

#1 – I’m Mad
(I think that if I were Oprah, I would just leave it at that: I’m mad!)

I suspect that we all have multiple subjects to be mad or obsessed about. The problem is narrow it down to just one thing. I’m going to say weight for the moment.

I have spent my entire life in the 3 standard deviation range for size (except for a week or two sometime in infancy). I was born a small preemie, one of the smallest to survive at the hospital at the time. I have always claimed that they over cooked me in the oxygen tent after birth. The growth that followed led to me being one of the biggest (both tallest and heaviest) in my class throughout school. That is why I have been 6’5″ and 300 lbs. since high school.

The only time I get perturbed is when people design doors too short and chairs too small, when people drive cars so small that even one of my size 16 feet won’t fit in the door, etc. But at least I can see above the crowd.

#2 – Divorce Dreams

I think that everyone in a long term marriage has occasional thoughts of divorce. L and I have been married for close to 35 years and I know I have had such thoughts. I suspect L has as well.

Such thoughts tend to occur in the throes or aftermath of a particular disappointment or unmet need. Usually the thought of divorce is completely unrealistic. A few hours or days later, the cold hard light of reality intrudes and you realize that divorce is not going to meet the unmet need. You realize that the shared memories and experiences are more important than the problem. That history and belief in each other will let you work the triggering problem out.

The other big trigger for such thoughts seems to be a crisis of self belief. It is a dangerous trap to start believing you are not good enough and that divorce is a way to let your partner find happiness (or even yourself). Usually the delusion fades away and with it the contemplation of divorce.

The divorce dream becomes problematic when it becomes the wedge that prevents you from working on the underlying problem(s). We’ve all know couples where the idea of divorce was the axe that sundered the marriage because it stopped the ability to function as a team to solve the underlying problem.

(Confused enough?)

#3 – The Joy

The current joy is the coming of summer. The glorious days of never ending sunshine and green growing things all around. The satisfaction of mowing the lawn and working in the garden. The late evening twilight with the cicadas and birds and even the coyotes.

#4 – 10 Broken Rules

  • The best person always wins
  • Belief is sufficient to impel action
  • People are always honest
  • Life is fair
  • Liars never prosper
  • Change is not a constant
  • People never change
  • Good plans always work well
  • Managing people is easy
  • Sleep is always attainable

#5 – Relation to Mom

It’s getting late, so I’ll just point you to this post from last year.

dad, mama kat, writer's challenge

The Dad Things

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This weeks topic of interest to me:

3.) What does that tell you about your father?  List five products your father used (or uses).  Write a longer piece about, at least, one of them.
(writingfix.com)

There are a lot of things that come to mind when I think of all the things dad used, but given that it is spring, I’ll stick with yard and garden related things.

The five things I remember dad using in the yard and garden:

  • lawn chair
  • hand sprinkler
  • lawn mower
  • spading shovel
  • push hoe

The lawn chair and hand sprinkler go together. Many the afternoon and evening I would find dad sitting on his folding lawn chair with sprinkler in hand watering the lawn. He seemed to achieve a zen state sitting there, moving his arm back and forth, watering. Every so often he would bestir himself, move the chair, and resume sprinkling in a new area. He much preferred to water that way over any other. No sprinkling system or stationary sprinkler held a candle to sitting in the breeze amidst the cooling mist and hand sprinkling for dad.

Dad was also lawn mowing fanatic. From the time we were old enough to operate a mower until we found a “real” summer job, we all had lawns all over town to mow. I can remember being so happy when I got a job in a furniture store as the carpet layer’s assistant in 9th grade. No more lawns! Carrying rolls of carpet and moving furniture was a snap compared to mowing multiple lawns day after day. But dad actually enjoyed mowing. When dad retired, he started mowing pretty much all the lawns on the block just for the pleasure of mowing. I think he was mowing 7 or more of the neighborhood lawns at his peak. It was one of the sure signs of his final decline and impending death when he could no longer mow.

Dad was also a spader. He liked to spade, sometimes huge tracts. In his later years when he got a roto-tiller, he still liked to spade. Unfortunately he was not a discriminating spader. Seedlings and weeds and … were all treated to equal opportunity before the shovel when dad spaded. Along with the spading was digging. I can remember dad digging out the stump of an entire mature tree in a day, using shovel and hatchet and a lot of back breaking labor.

When garden season was in swing, dad loved to use a push hoe to keep the weeds and sand burrs down. Like his spading, his push hoeing sometimes lacked discrimination. Mom was often exasperated as her seedlings and young plants joined the weeds in being cut off at the roots and removed.

The amusing part of all this is that during the time I was growing up, I always swore I’d never do any of those things. And now that I am older – I actually enjoy mowing the lawn and spading. But I still haven’t fallen in love with the hand sprinkling. {*grin*} Makes me think that dad may have been onto something.

fear of pain, mama kat, reading, writer's challenge

Writing in Code and Other Topics

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This weeks topics:

1.) Baby fever is in the air. Describe what you would do differently as a first time mom.

2.) What book captured your heart? Write about why the first book you loved is the first book you loved.

3.) Who is a bird-brain? Think about all the birds you’ve seen–from songbirds to hunters. Compare one or more people you know to different types of birds in a piece of writing.

4.) Why do we need 26? If you could change the alphabet, what would you do? Add? Subtract? Combine? Simplify? Write about it.

5.) Where does that fear come from? Write about something that frightens you that other people might find ridiculous. Write about it in a poem, a story, or whatever.

So off we go into the gloom and doom.

#1 – First Time Mom
I feel left out since I am clearly not the requisite gender to be a mom. Sexism is alive and well on the web!

#2 – Book O’My Heart
This has different answers depending on how you define first and love. (Sounds like a lawyer blithering, doesn’t it?)

The book I loved and read often as a wee tyke is “Digger Dan“, written by Patricia Lynn and illustrated by Si Frenkel.

Who can resist the story of the steam shovel that does so many interesting things? Besides, a book with my name on the cover – priceless. Thanks to my mom, I have this book around the house even now. The Son learned to read with it, but it just didn’t have the same appeal to him as he was growing up as it did to me.

The first book that I read and fell in love with for the content and the way it was handled was also my first experience of the love of science fiction. The book was Robert Heinlein’s “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress“

followed closely by “Podkayne of Mars” by the same author.

Both books appealed to my pre-teen imagination with adventure, science, emotion, and youngsters thinking deeply and doing well in an adult world. I have both books in my library today and still enjoy reading them, despite the fact they are classified as Heinlein “Juveniles”. They led me to other science fiction authors including Heinlein’s opus, “Stranger In A Strange Land“. It was a summer of intense joy and discovery as I read every science fiction book I could get from the library, my mind and horizons literally expanding with each new word. I’d love to go back to that time.

#3 – Bird of a Feather
(The name used here has no relationship to anyone in real life. If you want to get annoyed, remember it is all in *your* mind. {*grin*})

Long ago, I spent several years serving on an adjunct to the district school board known as the District Accountability Committee (DAC). The DAC did a lot of the detail and grunt work that was used by the school board to make decisions on curriculum, student accomplishment, building maintenance, etc. So we had the joy of seeing many members of the community during our meetings, almost invariably with something of great importance to them on their minds to impart to us.

It was during a DAC meeting that I saw Jim resemble a sage grouse to the point I was sure it had to be an act. You remember the sage grouse mating ritual? Where the male puffs up his chest and struts back and forth cooing and prancing to impress the female grouse. Well Jim pranced back and forth, fingers in his suspenders, chest jutting out through the whole of his speech before the committee. The only thing missing was the hen gallery to appreciate the performance.

#4 – Alphabet
I think 26 letters is too restrictive. We should switch to Mayan with close to 800 identified symbols. Of course as it turns out, there are considerably less 800 real letters. It seems the Mayans liked to represent the same sound by 6 or more different symbols. And then they went the extra step by combining several symbols into one common word/sound. But just think of the beautiful calligraphy and lack of repetition such a scheme makes possible. In any case, allow me to introduce a simple 52 letter roman alphabet mapping for your consideration:

Let me know when you have your message written. {*grin*}

#5 – Fear
Most things don’t scare me. But one thing consistently gives me the falling sensation of riding a down elevator. You know, where it feels like your stomach has just crawled up your throat and is heading for the exit? Yeah, that one.

What causes the momentary swell of panic? Stepping close to something solid and not being able to see it. I.e. walking along a path with a cinder block on the edge and not being able to see the block as I pass. Why does this particular act cause that rush of fear and panic? Because after many years as a diabetic, I have lost a lot of sensation in my feet. So if I were to kick or hit the obstruction, the pain warning me to stop comes too late and I have already rammed my foot into the object and probably broken a few toes before the pain can warn me not to do that. It happens often enough that I get that panicky feeling in anticipation of the possible happenstance quite often.

How’s that for a rational but seemingly irrational fear?