is sunshine magic
does it always inspire you
does it give you strength?
JSmith 02/17/2017
Oh look, another episode…
16 Feb 2017 6 Comments
In this new paradigm where the girl half of the merger isn’t on Facebook or other social media all evening while pretending to keep up with whatever’s on TV, we’re bingeing on Netflix like mad fools and it’s wonderful. We were shockingly behind on the good stuff, so we started with Breaking Bad and took a break halfway through to watch every tantalizing second of Peaky Blinders before coming smack up against their filming hiatus, which is leaving us in a serious state of withdrawal. The incredible cinematography, the soundtrack, the cast, the exquisite level of acting that feels every minute like real life happening in front of us – we’re enchanted, all the blood and gore notwithstanding since art without authenticity fails.
We weren’t quite ready to pick up Breaking Bad again, so we started Too Young to Die, a series of eleven one-hour documentaries about people who were exactly that. The first is Heath Ledger’s story and it was beautifully done so we’ll gradually watch the other ten. And last night we once again immersed ourselves in the world of Frank and Claire Underwood, House of Cards Seasons 3 & 4, which we somehow never finished. Watching now, it seems clear somebody had access to a crystal ball in 2014.
My sister Rita is anxious for us to get into This Is Us and so are we – it’s next. What mini- or maxi-series are on your must-see list and why? I’m hoping a few sleepers will be among the recommendations, titles that don’t show up on everybody’s agenda, so bring surprises.
Annnnd…GO.
Keep peace in your soul …
15 Feb 2017 2 Comments
self-care is hard-learned
after all options used up
rest has to happen
JSmith 02/15/2016
Behind every good woman is a good man!
14 Feb 2017 Comments Off on Behind every good woman is a good man!
Rerunning a four-year-old Valentine post because it’s still a true story…
I’ve been blogging on WordPress for a week now and haven’t really said much about my husband, so today is his day. I have to be careful when I talk about him because I can easily take …
Doesn’t apply, just saying…*
13 Feb 2017 Leave a comment
when it’s down to just
two pancakes topped with cherries
t-shirts are the shiz
JSmith 02/13/2017
* Some days are all about the corn.
Just get through it…
11 Feb 2017 5 Comments
days informed by pain
must be survived in one piece
life takes a back seat
JSmith 02/11/2016
Ignorance is blistering…
10 Feb 2017 3 Comments
I read a stunning statistic this morning* that blew both Kim and me away – over half of Americans believe it should be illegal for a woman to keep her last name after marriage, WHAAAT??
Of course that represents people who were actually polled, which I’d like to think means half of those surveyed in rural areas, remote hollers, and socially isolated mountain ranges rather than honest-to-goodness 21st Century Americans who know what’s up, because this finding is both laughable and disturbing.
Events until recently seemed to indicate that we were steadily moving toward a better world informed by human equality in every direction, but here we are still fighting the same old shit that first raised our collective consciousness in the 60s. Unbelievable.
A world without women and our influence is not to be contemplated, so why is the focus so rarely on what’s good for us? (Simple question for the Luddites among us, please show your work.) All you pathetic cases of arrested male development endlessly stuck in junior high need a brighter awareness of truth: Women have 100% of the babies. Just the facts, Jack, and your ideal little world starts to go downhill after one generation, so what are you thinking? Oh wait…
This crap is so silly I thought it must be “fake news” but no such luck, so I’m sitting here hoping I don’t know anyone with this attitude and outlook, it would shatter my heart, hyperbolically-speaking.
Prejudices, stereotypes, and backward thinking are buried so deep in our nation’s psyche, how is it we believe we’ll ever dig out, but women are fierce and we don’t quit. That alone should show you what we’re made of, but that’s okay – we’ll keep doing what we do because – what else? Respect is owed, but we’re used to working without it, so don’t give it another thought, you guys all persevere in your empire-building and let us know how that’s workin’ out for ya’. But here’s how it is: Brains are the new tits and you’re falling behind.
Namasté…
09 Feb 2017 Leave a comment
clear out the cobwebs
brain engages as it will
worth the good effort
JSmith 02/09/2016
#ShePersisted
No snowmobiles on sidewalk…
08 Feb 2017 Leave a comment
We need the kind of winter we aren’t having this year – with plenty of snow and cold to replenish the soil and annihilate every bug. So far it’s been “string of mild days” followed by “plummet into the cellar” for a couple, shampoo, rinse, repeat, and with only a dusting of white to show for those few wintery days. The photo above was taken in the 1950s, my two little sisters and me atop the fifteen-foot snowdrifts in our grandparents’ orchard, which was endless fun for us but sobering in the destruction the storm left behind.
I have a soft spot for the raging blizzards of my childhood despite their danger, mostly because they seem to have gone out of vogue. Pretty sure, after observing weather patterns over a lifetime, that the climate change phenomenon at work in Lawrence America and around the globe is a thing to be dealt with, sooner rather than later, and the changes we’re seeing will continue to proliferate until we’re in real trouble, maybe as early as yesterday.
Not my circus, not my monkeys, however, I’m just along for the ride, so might as well enjoy the warmer days as they roll through. Forecast says 53º today, 37 tomorrow, with only a hint of any precip on the horizon. Life IS and we roll with it, you know it’s true. The bitching and whining we do is all window dressing, which of course doesn’t apply only to weather, amirite?
Go out there and make your Wednesday a happy one for you and everyone within range of your influence, why not? Staying alive continues to be a good thing, I’m in line to kick it in the fanny one day at a time, and the whole thing gets easier if we team up, so let’s just do it.
Warm Winter Savings
Honeybun cake…
07 Feb 2017 4 Comments
I find it hilariously revealing that my all-time most-visited blog post is one entitled “Heeeyyy, good lookin’, whaaatcha’ got cookin’ …?” It’s a recipe for coffee cake, which people might not be expecting to find under that title, but had I called it “World’s Best Coffee Cake, Trust Me,” I can’t imagine that it would have outperformed everything else I’ve ever published by 1000 to 1. Since I put it up three years ago it’s never left top spot on my “most viewed.” People are so freaking predictable.
And yet…and yet…92 people have taken the time to give it a rating, for an average four stars, and a lot of comments have been left, so you know what? This probably IS the world’s best coffee cake, trust me. So simple to make, so yummy to eat – we should all bake one this morning just to get the week started on a good note. You know you want to…
Don’t forget…
06 Feb 2017 Leave a comment
Not nearly enough paeans to Monday mornings have been penned over the years, would you agree? After surviving almost seven decades of them I’m finally learning to appreciate them for what they are – the lull before the actual week – which runs Tuesday through Thursday – cranks up. The privilege of this is not wasted on me nor unappreciated and it was worth the slog to get here, she says, not suffering pangs of guilt, not ever, at all, but given enough coffee and therapy she’ll get over it.
There’s a Monday Morning level of quiet that happens – a hush composed of minute layers of sound and aroma: coffee on the warmer, the laundry gurgling and sloshing at the far end of the loft, the faint scent of detergent and softener, muted traffic noises under my windows, faraway voices muffled by winter humidity, people walking to work but not hurrying, because Monday. Faint construction sounds, too, and the now-familiar slight moans and groans of our steel and concrete building. If home is a state of mind, that was the nickel tour of mine, free today just for you.
And now assorted sirens from a few blocks over are saying it’s time to move it, so I think I will. Make your Monday feel like a Friday if you can. And then there are only three actual days until Real Friday – you’re gonna love it.
Fun things to do while we wait out the war…
06 Feb 2017 2 Comments
- Record all those accumulated websites and their logins in your handy-dandy password keeper, which works like a dream when fully utilized.
- And just like that you’ve also checked task #2 off your bucket list: Get rid of every last coffee-stained note on your desk, and stop DOING this.
- And oh look, what’s this but another bill, fortunately an ACH this time, whew. Girl, you have got to reform at last, and hey, with all this free time on our hands…
- Establish a login for each of those sweet lil’ apps you’ve downloaded to your phone, and figure out how the heck they work anyway.
- Meticulously purge every folder on every device. Every folder. Get real – all those recipes? There’s enough there for three or four lifetimes, you don’t cook anymore, and Kim is not the scullery maid. Pick five from each category and lighten the load – this is not brain science.
- Heartlessly ditch contacts whose names you no longer recognize, and get totally realistic about the rest. Unless you’re a Young Turk who’s still networking nonstop you will never need a goodly number of those contacts, nor have a use for what they represent.
- Dive into and finish that major closet purge you’ve been postponing since you moved three years ago. That was SO not difficult, WHAT IS YOUR FREAKING PROBLEM?
- Haul a couple of small truckloads full of treasures to Goodwill in honor of their recent revamp and redeeming online rep. Come home feeling not magnanimous but relieved and grateful that at least a few of the world’s goods will find their way into deserving hands instead of gathering dust bunnies on shelves that will be better put to use.
- You could make your surroundings so enchantingly Zen that you would find yourself with the psychic freedom to write your buns off, for hours every day.
- You might become so engrossed in the lovely, soothing minutiae of daily living that you entirely forget to sweat the sneaky destruction in progress around you and miss the war altogether. Could happen.
Facts of Life
05 Feb 2017 Leave a comment
move it or lose it
the experts are not kidding
leaves not to return
JSmith 02/04/2017
Random free-time calisthenics…
04 Feb 2017 2 Comments
- How could a girl be anything but happy when a beautiful man plays guitar several hours a day in their shared space? That’s just silly to contemplate.
- A potential unforeseen consequence of painting a silver head of hair with reddish-brown streaks (billed as mahogany) is that one could appear to have been beaten mercilessly about the head and shoulders with a flail. Not likely, but possible, and worth considering in advance.
- Long overdue tasks like cleaning the screens on all your toys takes mere seconds once finally begun, but the existential lift it provides can’t be measured. Ah, those smooooth, silky, flawless surfaces. You must never touch them again.
- Ridding one’s environs of prodigious amounts of needless accumulation is euphorically cathartic. If only it were a long-term high, but – sweet while it lasts.
- Without the distraction of social media during every waking hour it’s surprisingly easy to pay bills in a timely fashion and keep a steady supply of clean underwear stacked in the dresser drawers. Who knew?
- Also when you do three years’ worth of work in two days, you come face to face with the possibility that you could be a whiney-ass malingerer because look at what you can do if you really want/need to.
- When you can’t get out of bed the next morning you remember why you keep a mental list of limitations, but it’s so worth it you don’t even care for once.
- Saturday Trivia: My iPad is currently home to a library of 318 books, all of them quality and most of them acquired free or for a dollar or two on BookBub over the past five years or so. When space is at a premium but you can’t survive without books it’s the only way to go. Or, you know, there’s always the City Library. {Smacks self in forehead.}
- When you play a Rubik’s Cube-like game on your phone during all those moments away from home when you’d otherwise be checking Facebook, you get pretty dang cagey at it. I think it’s called counterbalance. Or trading one addiction for another – yeah, probably that one.
- There have been only a handful of weekends over the last twelve years when Kim hasn’t made his Saturday Breakfast, and in all that time, including this morning, the quality, flavors, and presentation haven’t varied except to get even better. Aroma, too, which is calling my name as we speak. Gotta go have some more of that slooow food with the love cooked in.
- Happy Weekend to all of you. Be sure you’re making time work for you and not the other way around.
To sleep, perchance to dream…
03 Feb 2017 2 Comments
Woke up this morning in the middle of a dream where all the people I used to know were energetically ostracizing me, turns out because I wouldn’t do whatever it was they wanted me to do. I didn’t see any family faces in the crowd, just an auditorium filled with random people from my childhood to recent past, who were now stolid in their unanimous repudiation, and there I was alone inside my bad self, feeling calm but annoyed. Unfortunately, Kim chose that moment to advance my wake cycle so we’ll never know how I would have resolved the whole thing, but I was holding my own so far.
When I told him the main theme he labeled it a nightmare, but it didn’t feel that way at the time and hasn’t left me with a sense of dread after. Sitting here I realize why. In the dream sequence I was fully in control of my present because my sleep-brain said so, thus no fear. That knowledge gives me renewed energy for staying in control of my present in my waking hours, challenging as that may prove to be.
Here’s the tricky part: It was obvious in this morning’s trip to la-la-land that every person confronting me with his or her personal rendering of truth was sincere to the gills. Each one had my shining best interests in mind and deeply wanted to impart to me the things they knew. No one seemed angry – they were all sad, not mad – disappointed to the core that I could be satisfied with being a holdout, an unbeliever.
The weight of other people’s disillusionment grows ponderous in a hurry if you soak it up like a sponge, so I’m thinking I won’t do that, this morning’s apparition being the very heads-up needed for today.
Pretty sure all my psyche wants is a decent hiatus, during which it will undoubtedly team up with Ms. Brain and Ms. Heart again so we can get back to work.
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