Tag Archives: Blogging

Going Batty

“She’s got bats in the belfry, squirrels in the attic, owls up in the loft. She’s apeshit, bughouse, batty, mad as a march hare” –by gramaticon

Bats are interesting. I have heard their echolocating cries in the evening. They do eat insects which helps control the insect population. I am glad we do not have any in our attic or any nearby belfries however.

When I first started posting daily for NaBloPoMo and Nano Poblano I thought I would go batty. I have gotten a bit less batty lately coping with the demands of writing.

I do attempt to read others blogs and courteously check in on most of the people who like mine. It has been nice to meet some new blogger friends.

One of my goals has been to connect with other writers and I think these events have helped.

So thanks to all the bloggers who have visited, liked and commented on my blog. Hope you keep visiting and I get to know you better. And welcome to anyone who may not have visited yet.

|LindaGHillSoCS|

Different

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” Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” –Apple Inc.

Abolitionist and Suffragette

Too Passionate

I think there is a passionate temperament. A person that can feel so strongly. There have been many times when I have been standing upon my soapbox and declaring my opinion about something I found wrong in the world.

During those times of strong emotion I have noted others looking on calmly, almost disinterested. I have thought to myself how can they not feel anything about this? How can anyone not feel strongly about this ? How can people feel so dispassionately about things? It is like they are already dead.

I realized that I was different.

It is not just passionate indignation that I feel. When you have the capacity for strong feelings you can feel great joy and elation as well. Like when you see something you find beautiful or hear music that you love.

I am glad I am different if it means to feel deeply and be more aware in the world. Maybe this is why I always wanted to stand up for people’s right to be different. To be who they truly are.

Have you ever felt different or been told you are different?

|Nano Poblano| among other things.

Silver Threading Event Writer’s Quote Wednesday

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Here is my contribution to my fellow blogger’s Silver Threading event. Hope you like it. 😉

How to Defeat Aging

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This is day 4 of the post a day challenge. I am basing this post on a prompt on the Nano Poblano site. Tell everyone how you have defeated aging.

I have to say that I have not defeated aging and I do not want to. What I would like to defeat is Ageism.

All this anti-aging talk is because people have a real prejudice and fear about older people and getting older. And the current definition of older is pretty young. This is pathetic and sad. We are all going to get old. You may be able to delude yourself and invest in all manner of plastic surgery and end up looking like Jim Carey in The Mask with The Mask on.

I am not saying you can’t use moisturizer, some makeup or color your hair and try to stay in shape and healthy. I am talking about this exaggerated reaction to the appearance of aging where we are all trying to look like we are in our 30s or 40s when we are in our 50s and 60s.

I am not afraid of aging and do not desire to defeat it. Aging to me is not a negative thing. It is part of life and very natural. Of course I hope to remain healthy and with an intact mind but none of us knows what the future holds. I refuse to live in fear.

I hate the way old people are devalued by many in our society. It is such a mistake and a loss to everyone when this great resource is neglected. It is a valuable thing to have the older generations interacting with the younger ones.

Children benefit so much from relationships with grandparents. The elders are the keepers of our history and culture. We can learn a lot from listening to their life stories and hearing about their experiences and struggles.

People should not be marginalized and shunned because they are old. This is such a pernicious trend in our culture. It is like a bad science fiction or a dystopian film. The old go off to some disintegration machine because our youth obsessed culture can’t bear to look at them any more.

All the negativity about aging is dispiriting and discouraging. I believe that it can actually make people feel depressed about themselves and adopt a hopeless attitude about their lives. It certainly is not empowering is it?

It is really discouraging to me to hear older people denigrating themselves on top of it by making stereotyping statements or ageist remarks. It is like they have been so saturated with this prejudice that it has become part of them. Almost a kind of self-hatred or a way of ingratiating themselves with biased younger people.

It is pretty difficult to combat this prejudice because it is so ingrained. We have all internalized it to some degree. But that does not mean it is not worth it to fight to change this negative image of age.

Many older people are continuing to live fulfilling lives in spite of what is expected of them or not expected. They go on enjoying pursuits, being creative and engaged with life. They are usually not noticed by the mainstream.

There are many organizations and websites that are working to combat all the negative spin about ageing. Some are the National Center for Creative Ageing or NCCA, Encore, AARP, Engage and Senior Planet.

I hope we can turn the tide against ageism because it will benefit all of us. It is a human rights issue. No one has the right to put limits on the lives of others on the basis of gender, race, religion or age.

I challenge you to promote tolerance and become aware of ageist speech and stereotypes. See if you can catch yourself before you continue to spread these negative attitudes in your families and to your children. Do you have any older friends or family members in your life? Have you believed a stereotype about an older person?

|Nano Poblano| among other things 🙂

Taking on Challenges

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You can’t just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood. What mood is that? Last minute panic.–Bill Watterson

I first saw this quote on my friend Natso’s blog. It was at a time when I was wrestling with the demands of writing a blog. I am new to blogging and began writing posts as an experiment to see if I had a talent for writing and if it would develop through blogging.

The demands to write something on a frequent basis and connect with people in the blogosphere, view who liked my posts and read their blogs was getting to me. I have written a few blogs on this topic, Blogger Burnout and Disconnections, that I thought were pretty good.

So here I go throwing myself into another experiment with the daily posts for November. I think I like pushing the envelope of my comfort zone. Taking risks. I have been known to do this before during other times in my life. I have taken on big challenges. Jumped into things that were outside my comfort zone.

When I decided to go back to college and enter an accelerated teacher training program is one example. Note the word accelerated. Not only did I go back to college at 60. I went into a super demanding program. I was to complete this program in 1 year. It consisted of 21 units the first semester and 19 units the second. The second semester included student teaching. This is when you are placed in a classroom and get on the job training. You need to prepare lessons for your students and have separate written assignments related to it and this added to the work you are already doing in your other classes.

This is not the first time I have thought something sounded like a good idea in theory, to get through quickly, and turned out not to be in practice. I had sound reasons to want to get my teaching credential quickly. As mentioned earlier I was not getting any younger. I hoped to make a quick transition into another field. My first career had been in Nursing. Another determining factor was the cost. If I could do it faster it would not cost as much. The California State University tuition was less than other programs as well.

There were many things I liked about Nursing. I love learning in general. I was very interested in medicine and physiology. I am an idealist and wanted to work in a profession that does good and helps the world.

Although I liked these aspects of Nursing it was not a good fit for me in other ways. I am an empathic type who can take on the suffering of others. Being an idealist can put you into conflict with situations where the bottom line is more important to the companies or hospitals you are working for than the employees or the people you are caring for.

I have read that when your work puts you in conflict with your values it can cause tremendous stress. I can say in my case I found this to be true. I tended to be very self-critical, a perfectionist and a worry wart in addition. So this combined with everything else was not a healthy situation. I did not give up right away. I stayed in Nursing off and on for many years.

I worked in many different areas of Nursing until I felt I had come to the end of it for me. So that is when I thought about teaching. I had done teaching as a Nurse in that you do a lot of patient and family teaching about their conditions, medications and self-care.

I had some experience in the classroom working part-time as a teacher’s aide. I wanted to work with kids who had learning problems. I felt I needed more education to do that. So that is how I ended up in the ACT Program as California State University Northridge.

It is a big challenge to go back to college after so many years. I was barely computer literate. This caused many little challenges. Like learning to order books online from the school book store for my classes, learning how to register online for classes, learning how to access and use the college library online. You notice a lot of these things involved getting comfortable with the computer quickly.

Then it was the whole thing of being the oldest student in the class. I had to learn to relate to people my kids’ age or younger. Thankfully there were some who were open to being my friend. I think others really did see me like their parents. So there was this barrier. But gradually I found I was able to work with most of them pretty well.

I was not the only one who found this accelerated program stressful. I discovered that the 20 year olds were having just as hard a time with the demands of the coursework as I was. I also found out I still had a brain in my head and could learn all this new information and get good grades and cope with learning the technology.

I am not saying that at times it was not a pretty rough go because there were times when I felt like I was barely making it. But it was encouraging to find out that the other students were feeling the same. I was not the only one. It was a tough program.

So now why am I worried about this daily post. It’s a piece of cake.

|Nano Poblano| among other things. 🙂

Fall Back

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Spring forward, Fall Back.

Today, November 2, 2014 at 2 am in California we turned our clocks back by 1 hour to Standard Time. DST or daylight savings time is over until Spring of 2015. Hooray!

I have never liked Daylight Savings Time. I am not a morning person and the idea of getting 1 hour less sleep did not appeal to me. Depending on where you live in the world and in the United States the time changes differ. Some countries do not observe it at all as well as two states in the US which are Arizona and Hawaii.

So today we go around the house and reset our clocks and wrist watches and the clocks on our stove, microwave and in our cars. Usually some of these gets missed. I am pretty good at doing the mental calculations if I realize the car clock is off by 1 hour. It really doesn’t confuse me. What time is it again?

There have been many reasons given for why we need DST. Conserve coal energy during WWI, more daylight to play golf, sports, watch sporting events or search for insects after work hours among other things. The insect idea was from an entomologist from New Zealand.

All I know is I love the Fall Back and do not like the Spring Forward. There is scientific information that all this artificial time changing is not good for our health. It messes with our natural circadian rhythms. There are more car accidents and heart attacks from this man-made sleep deprivation. Would you rather have more time to hunt for insects even if it may lead to your death? Well, I guess it depends how passionate you are about these evening hours pursuits.

Ask Smithsonian: How Does Daylight Savings Affect the Body? | Smithsonian.

What do you think? Do you have the time changes where you live? What time is it there?

|Nano Poblano|

|NoBloPoMo| still trying to figure this one out 😦

A Post A Day Will Not Cause An Emotional Breakdown I Hope

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All right. I have committed to write a post a day for, and I am terrible at acronyms and why do we need them anyway, NaBloPoMo and Nano Poblano. OK I know poblano is a type of chile pepper and not an acronym.

This is the first day of November and we have had our first rain of the season all last night here in Southern California. It really gave me such a great feeling. In case you are unaware, we are going through a drought here.

I usually love listening to the rain at night but last night was particularly wonderful. I had just finished writing a post. My husband had the radio on in the bedroom. I think that blocked the sound of the rain at first. Then I heard a loud drip, drip, drip like there was a leak somewhere. Our plumbing has been noisy lately so I couldn’t be sure.

Then I thought maybe it is rain. It had been predicted for last night. I turned on the light over the backyard patio. I was so happy to see the dripping noise was the rain running off the edge of our tile roof.

It is like any everyday thing that you haven’t experienced for a long, long time and when it happens again it is so special. As if it has never happened before and this is the first time.

|Nanopoblano| among other things.

SoCS-Memento Means Remember

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The origin of the word memento was, according to Thesaurus.com, from “c.1400…in the Canon of the Mass which began with the Latin word memento and in which the dead are commemorated.” The Latin word memento means remember. The English definition is: an object that reminds us of a person or event. Two synonyms for the word memento are a souvenir and curio.

We have a curio cabinet that belonged to my husband’s maternal grandmother, Nana. We acquired it when she died several years ago. Some of the items we kept in it were hers or gifts from her as well. The cabinet and some of its contents are our mementos of her.

When we were putting in new floors in the living room the furniture was being moved around and the curio cabinet tipped over and the mirror inside shattered. I was upset because this cabinet meant something to me.

It has been lying on its back on an old table ever since while we try to decide what to do with it. My daughter said it looked like it was waiting for surgery. A brother-in-law said it looked like a coffin. This evening I did have some candles on top of it for Halloween which goes along with the coffin image.

The broken curio cabinet reminds me how fragile things are and that they do not last forever. Although I may not always have this memento of Nana we will still have our memories of her and her love.