Home Archive by category "Bloggish Things" (Page 29)

Category: Bloggish Things

Thoughts, essays, and comments from the writers of Turtleduck.

Happy Surprises

As I’ve confessed before, I’m super good at finding ways to procrastinate. Or maybe I should call it vegetating? Self-care? Anyway. It’s been a rough week for me, with tons of stuff to do and a good amount at home, so naturally I’ve been wasting time, this go-around on YouTube. Yes. I’m watching competition-show auditions. I just love watching the joy–the happy judges, the jumping families, the contestant’s realization that they really are pretty blasted awesome, that this dream isn’t silly, that their work wasn’t wasted… And I just love love LOVE when Simon Cowell’s eyebrows go up. And that happy sigh as he watches Susan Boyle in that first audition. (You’ve seen this one, haven’t you?) Just remember, if you’re needing happy and you want more music from one of these stars, for sanity’s sake, search on YouTube or specifically search “so and so MUSIC” because otherwise you get all these click-baity articles like how this group broke up or that singer “slammed” the people on the show that discovered her. Now let’s get back to the music and the happy. This lady has everyone dancing! And how cute are these two? And now we’re just posting some videos. Because you deserve to have your socks knocked off. I mean, what’s not to love? Look at this young lady from Ukraine. If you haven’t seen this already, you HAVE to see this girl. Such a sweet voice, so much talent, and she writes songs too. And she’s overcoming one…

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This post is brought to you by the word “Sleep”

Ah, yes. Sleep. Curling up in your bed, under your covers just so, your brain refreshing and resetting for the next day. It’s awesome. Except when it’s habitually interrupted. Say what? Well, you see, my mother just had her second knee replacement surgery. For those of you who don’t know, it’s incapacitating those first few months. So my sister and I are helping her with things. She also has an elderly, sick dog who needs practically round-the-clock care. And he sometimes gets up as early as 5am. And sometimes doesn’t go back to sleep after he eats and is let out. Luckily, that’s not a regular occurrence. However, there’s his feeding/medication schedule: he’s fed three times a day and given various medications also three times a day. I had to set alarms for everything or I’d forget something. Now I’m a bit better, but if I get absorbed in something I still may forget. And then there’s letting him out to do his business. He could theoretically go out ten times in a row and only pee once or twice. But because we’re afraid to have accidents, we let him out every single time. And that’s exhausting because you have to watch him and then make sure he gets a treat afterward. But I am not complaining. Honest. He’s a sweet dog, and loving, and I know somewhere in that little brain of his he appreciates our love and care. He’s a former puppy mill dog, and when my mom…

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Ten Things I Learned On My Spring Vacation

I’m back from vacation! Did you miss me? (Don’t answer that.) If you’re anything like me, coming back to real life is always hard, although it’s also good to be home. And if you’re anything like me, you love to overthink analyze everything. So here goes: Things I Have Learned About Myself On Vacation. 1. When I’m on vacation, I really just want to go on leisurely walks…explore neighborhoods to find delicious restaurants and fun coffee shops…nap/lounge around…rinse and repeat. This is also true on long weekends at home, or even longer staycations–except of course it’s cheaper to do it at home. 2. But it’s nice to be away from all the “shoulds” of home, and my ongoing mental to-do list. 3. I always think I’m going to get lots of writing done. This is a lie, especially if seeing/visiting family is involved. (I miss my folks and want to spend tons of time with them when I can. Thank goodness I’m an introvert and need recharge time, and thank goodness they’re all fine with that.) The only time it ever happens is if the vacation is designated as a writing retreat and nothing else. Even then, 4 or 5 solid hours a day is my limit. Otherwise, it’s 1 or 2 hours, tops. 4. Maybe that’s okay. After all, a person needs some time off from the little niggling voice in the back of the brain that says “You should be writing!” 5. My mattress is clearly too soft,…

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KD’s Kitchen Adventures

Often when making small talk with friends and acquaintances, I tell people that I don’t cook. It’s just easier than admitting the truth–that I can cook, and when I have a good clear recipe or some experience with what I’m doing, I can actually cook well. Most of the time, though? I just don’t. I mean, effort. And then you do, and there’s dirty dishes! And people who say they want things like ribs and then you put all the effort and time into making ribs and they don’t eat them. (looking at you, my child…) There are, however, bunches of reasons to cook one’s own food. Health, for one–pretty much anything you make at home is going to be better for you than that same thing bought in most restaurants. All that sugar and salt and nasty stuff they put in there? That’s not a bug. That’s a feature. They are trying to get you addicted to their food! And it works. Oh my yes, it works. If I drive by Burger King and the smoke from the broiler drifts through my car…yeah. I love my Whopper with cheese. They are seven hundred fifty calories, but I love them. Another issue, of course, is cost. A Whopper with cheese (as if I only get a Whopper when BK lures me in!) is now what, $5? Take the family and I’ll spend $25-30 easily. For that I could buy all the fixings for a meal at home, and still have…

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Forty-two: the answer to life, the universe, and everything

So, next Tuesday, March 27th, I will be forty-two years old. To this I say: Wut is this madness? I was JUST twenty last year! No, I haven’t done any time travel shenanigans. I just can’t believe how much time has passed since my twenties. When I was twenty, forty seemed decades away. Millions of years, really. A really long time. When I was thirty, I was definitely creeping up there. But it still felt like an eternity. When I turned forty, I really didn’t feel any different. Forty is the new thirty and all that. But now…I must confess…I feel older. It could be that I have been coping with chronic illness for many years. It could be that I divorced my ex-husband when I was thirty (how’s that for a birthday pressie?). Or it just could be the realization that gee, I graduated college TWENTY YEARS AGO. Gulp. Yep. I have done a lot, though. No doubts there. But when I think of my life then and my life now, it’s eerie because I have completely changed in almost every way since my twenties (except my hair. That hasn’t changed at all). For example, in my twenties, I didn’t really care about health stuff. I was thin, I could eat anything I wanted, and health problems were clearly for older people. But then I was hit with severe anemia (the worst my doctor had EVER seen) when I was twenty-two and I also was in a car accident…

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Life!

Oh, friends, I had such plans for yesterday. I was going to go to the gym and do some cycling, because I’d like to do a triathlon this year (though I haven’t found one to do, because so far I have conflicts for all of them). And then I was going to spend a ton of time working on a chapter to send to Siri. Instead I snapped something in my hand and spent four hours at the hospital. And then I came home and mopped the floor, like you do. (I have done triathlons before, the last one in June 2016. I came in 4th and was hoping to try again this year and possibly make the podium, but alas, timing.) (Also I felt like I had to do something productive after not doing anything for four hours, and mopping seemed the least likely thing on my list to hurt my hand.) Doesn’t this always seem to happen? You make plans and life comes along just to laugh at you. I mean, normally the big plans are okay. Maybe because you spend so much more time preparing them. But the daily plans, yikes. It’s an argument against procrastination, if nothing else. And the good news is that my hand is not broken and will probably be fine in a week or so. And the splint I have to wear until then isn’t too itchy. How are you? Things breaking your plans too?

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Ooh, Shiny! The Art of Learning New Things

Late last year, I accidentally started learning the guitar. I didn’t mean to. See, we were cleaning up for the holidays, and my spouse’s guitar has been sitting on a stand in the corner of the living room, looking decorative and getting dusty. He picked it up to dust it and ended up plucking away on it, for the first time in a couple of years. Then I stole it and started plucking away on it. Then we started looking up chords for Christmas songs so we could sing and play together. Four weeks later, I bought my own guitar. Of course, a month after that I got hit by this year’s Death!Cold and have had no energy to practice until just these last few days. But in the intervening time, I built my calluses, learned all the common chords, can muddle my way through a couple of songs, learned the blues scale, and am working through some basic bluegrass stuff. It’s intoxicating, learning a new thing. Last year it was French. Spouse and I decided to brush up on our rusty high-school French, mostly by way of reading Harry Potter et la Chambre des secrets out loud during our commute. It worked surprisingly well. We got to the point of carrying on conversations with each other, and just barely making ourselves understood during a trip to Montreal, before running out of steam. But I haven’t lost everything. I’m still quite a bit better at reading French, and slightly better…

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Lessons Learned

I have been unemployed/self-employed for seven months now. It seems like just yesterday that I was laid off. But time has gone by, and I have learned a few things. I had originally decided to focus on editing and virtual assisting, things I can do from home. And I have applied literally everywhere. And, for the most part, I haven’t had much luck. Have I given up? Hell no. Here are some things I have learned from this experience so far: 1. Anything that is worth it is worth fighting for. I have a number of health issues, and I knew once I was laid off that the type of work I was doing wasn’t going to work for me anymore. I took a risk in not pursuing that type of work in favor of work from home jobs. It’s not that I don’t want to work. I realized I was in a unique position to try to change careers. It hasn’t been easy, and it hasn’t been fun, but I still believe this is the best thing for me at this stage of my life. And so I keep keeping on. 2. Sometimes you simply need a break. My former job was very stressful, especially toward the end. I had been living in a constant state of stress so severe I had lost 2/3 of my hair. I just realized about a month ago that gee, my hair came back. Because the stress was mostly gone. I had been working through severe…

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We Must Escape!

In honor of V-Day, friends, I’m going to tell you about what we did for V-Day. I surprised my husband with a trip to a local escape room. Do you guys have these where you live? In case you don’t, these are places that offer a number of rooms (and they are literal rooms) filled with clues and puzzles. You have one hour to solve all the puzzles and escape! (A lot of them are literally that–figure out how to get out of the room–but some have a goal you have to achieve before escaping, such as solving a mystery.) We quite a few around here, and they’ve been on my radar for a while, but we haven’t managed to get to one before. But Friday we had a free night, so I booked us a room at a new one close by because they wouldn’t smoosh us in with random people (some places will stick small groups with other small groups, and that did not sound like a good date). The end goal for our room was to steal the diamond before the detectives arrived. Our gamemaster was very sweet, giving us a rundown on how the whole process worked since we’d never done one before. She warned us that it might be a little hard for just two people, especially first-timers, and let us know how to ask for a clue if we needed one. And then she locked our phones away and let us into the room. It was…

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Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin

Did you all hear the news that legendary SF author Ursula K. Le Guin passed away recently? Her death leaves a great disturbance in the Force, to cross a few genre threads. She was one of the giants of science fiction and fantasy. And, thankfully, she was acknowledged for it during her lifetime — she won all the major genre awards (Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and the World Fantasy Award) and was only the second woman to be named a Grand Master of Science Fiction (after Andre Norton). I was always awed by her mastery of storytelling at any length, whether short story or novella or full-length novel. And storytelling for all ages, from picture books to YA to adult — very few writers can do that! Her writing was both precise and poetic, crystalline and immediately recognizable. She was interested in ethnography and sociology, how peoples relate to each other, what cultural assumptions we make without knowing. (For example, The Left Hand of Darkness is, famously, all about deconstructing gender.) But she was brilliant at character, too, and worldbuilding. How can one person be so good at so many aspects of writing? Yet she was. Personally, I’ve read about 10 or 15 of her books. Earthsea (a trilogy at the time) was my first exposure, as it was for many. Later I went on to The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, her later Earthsea books and her collections of shorter works. I never got as far as her poetry…

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