Six Quirks

I’ve been tagged!

Stella threw this meme my way, which is marvelous and flattering. But. I’ve had a very difficult time identifying 6 quirks. My beloved husband, who tells me that I am participating in a quirk pyramid scheme, suggested a few of my “bad” habits, some of which are not really all that bad (he just doesn’t like them), and many of which are unfit for public consumption. I should know better than to consult with him about blogging.

The Rules:

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Mention the rules on your blog.
3. Tell about six unspectacular quirks of yours.
4. Tag six fellow bloggers by linking them.
5. Leave a comment on each of the six blogger’s blogs letting them know they’ve been tagged.


My Quirks:

1. For several weeks, if not months, I have been showering while sitting down or crouching. I guess I’m closer to the soap and shampoo that way, and don’t have to stretch my aching back so much. Maybe it’s time for a shower caddy.
   
2. I like eating. I’m not fussy, and I enjoy the flavours, textures and colours of food, often too much. I have trained myself to refrain from licking the plate after meals, but I still lick my fingers- some would say that I even suck them clean. Oh yeah, by the way, I prefer to eat with my hands whenever I can get away with it. (But I manage to do okay in public settings, I think.)
   
3. I have allergies. This shows up on the skin of my hands, in my asthma, and with frequent bouts of sneezing, runny nose and itchy eyes. I’ve had allergies a long time, since puberty, and one of the big culprits is cats. But I LOVE cats. And I keep cats, and work at a cat clinic. Thing is, I sneeze lots. And I have to blow my nose lots. Which I do- loudly. Another personal habit in which I show no restraint. Sigh
   
4. I like going barefoot. I have for a very long time. This often disturbs other people, which seems so silly to me. I wear sandals year round, except for the two days in wintertime when it snows in Victoria- then I wear boots, generally without socks. I like to have slip-off footwear- I might need to pick something up with my feet, which I couldn’t do if I had to contend with laces or socks. And I wouldn’t want to bend over to pick something up- see quirk #1 for a continuing theme.
   
5. All of these quirks seem to underline my refusal to grow-up. My religious preference echoes that, in a way. Douglas Adams said in an introduction to Hitchhiker’s Guide something about a guy getting nailed to a cross 2000 years ago for suggesting that it might be nice if we could all just get along for a change. I like his approach. My actual religious affiliation, such as it is, also comes from SciFi. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, created a series called Andromeda, which references a religion called Wayism, the point of which is inclusion, pacifism and “getting along”. This is right up my alley- a fictional religion, espousing the concepts we drill into pre-schoolers, which ensures my ability to keep up.
   
6. I am more than a little attached to my computer. It goes everywhere with me- on dates, to counselling, to the bathroom, to bed, occasionally to meals (if I can get away with it). I use it at work as well as at home, which is one of the reasons it looks so beat up. What did I use for a security blanket before I had a computer?
   

I tag:

1. Andrea
   
2. Kathi
   
3. Michelle
   
4. Noelle
   
5. Tanja
   
6. Todd
   

The Big Read

Got this from Annie;

There are some on the list I may have read, or tried to and do not recollect, and there are some I may read at some point, but have no firm intention in that regard.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline* the books you LOVE. 

(*After fiddling with this list off an on for hours, and being unable to underline my loved books, I have elected to bold and italicize the books I love...) (Update- I peeked at another blogger's code, and I got it! Tee Hee) (And I borrowed Alicia's idea, of colouring my books seen as movies.)

1.  Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
   
2.  The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 
   
3.  Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
   
4.  Harry Potter series - JK Rowling 
   
5.  To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
   
6.  The Bible
   
7.  Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
   
8.  Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
   
9.  His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
   
10.  Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
    
11.  Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
    
12.  Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
    
13.  Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
    
14.  Complete Works of Shakespeare
    
15.  Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
    
16.  The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
    
17.  Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
    
18.  Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
    
19.  The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
    
20.  Middlemarch - George Eliot
    
21.  Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
    
22.  The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald 
    
23.  Bleak House - Charles Dickens
    
24.  War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
    
25.  The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
    
26.  Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
    
27.  Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
    
28.  Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
    
29.  Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
    
30.  The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
    
31.  Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
    
32.  David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
    
33.  Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
    
34.  Emma - Jane Austen
    
35.  Persuasion - Jane Austen
    
36.  The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
    
37.  The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
    
38.  Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
    
39.  Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
    
40.  Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
    
41.  Animal Farm - George Orwell
    
42.  The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
    
43.  One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
    
44.  44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
    
45.  The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
    
46.  Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery 
    
47.  Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
    
48.  The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood 
    
49.  Lord of the Flies - William Golding
    
50.  Atonement - Ian McEwan
    
51.  51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
    
52.  Dune - Frank Herbert
    
53.  Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
    
54.  Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
    
55.  A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
    
56.  The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
    
57.  A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
    
58.  Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
    
59.  The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
    
60.  Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
    
61.  Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
    
62.  Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
    
63.  The Secret History - Donna Tartt
    
64.  The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
    
65.  Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
    
66.  On The Road - Jack Kerouac
    
67.  Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
    
68.  Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding 
    
69.  Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
    
70.  Moby Dick - Herman Melville 
    
71.  Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
    
72.  Dracula - Bram Stoker
    
73.  The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
    
74.  Notes From A Small Island - Bill
    
75.  Ulysses - James Joyce
    
76.  The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
    
77.  Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
    
78.  Germinal - Emile Zola
    
79.  Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray 
    
80.  Possession - AS Byatt
    
81.  A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens 
    
82.  Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
    
83.  The Color Purple - Alice Walker 
    
84.  The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
    
85.  Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
    
86.  A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
    
87.  Charlotte’s Web - EB White
    
88.  The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom 
    
89.  Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
    
90.  The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
    
91.  Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
    
92.  The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
    
93.  The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
    
94.  Watership Down - Richard Adams
    
95.  A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
    
96.  A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute 
    
97.  The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
    
98.  Hamlet - William Shakespeare
    
99.  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
    
100.  Les Miserables - Victor Hugo 
     

I think I'm at 31- how 'bout you? Anyway- enjoy and proceed!

Now what?

Remember Sparkles?

Her coat was getting matted, perhaps from her predilection for hiding beneath the bushes.

Anyone up for spinning some rabbit fur?

Postus Interruptus

I start so many more posts than I finish, or even attend to, and I want to be okay with that. My blog shouldn’t add a layer of obligation to my life- it’s supposed to be a helpful, joyful thing.

That said, let’s see if I can sneak some snippets of stuff into here:

•I missed my nephew’s birthday- he turned 9, and I haven’t acknowledged it in any way. I haven’t ever sent last year’s gift to him, either. I am so disorganized!

•I love my “husband”- he is a real gift in my life.

•I miss my husband- I wish I could recall more of his quirks to mind more readily. Yesterday, as Rob was leaning over the bathroom sink in shorts, no top and socks and slippers, I caught sight of his mid-section first. The body shape, posture, texture and pattern of hair, all said Willis to me- it was very disorienting to see Rob’s face on Willis- the mind is a funny creature that way. The socks and slippers were clearly characteristic of Rob, but the problem my poor, tired mind cannot solve is whatever would Willis have been wearing on his feet if it had been him? I absolutely cannot remember or picture it. And, much as I love Rob, I sometimes ache for one more hug with Willis- I love(d) him, too, and I never did get a final hug with him (lying my head on his lifeless chest in the trauma room doesn’t count).

•When I hug Rob, I get a powerful and profound feeling of “rightness” and “calmness”. We are clearly meant to be together, or at least, we clearly belong to each other. I love that a hug with Rob can often put my world to rights- how cool is that? (And Annie, just like with you and your Rob, it goes waaay beyond hugging. Note the title of this post? Bet you can figure out what interrupted this particular piece a couple of nights back... ;))

•The other day, I left Sam in the boy’s wear department, happily picking out some summer gear for himself, while Sydney and I were in the girl’s wear, a couple of aisles over. Turns out, Sam wasn’t actually paying attention to the fact that I had moved on, found himself alone, and got worried. He saw a cashier in the jewelry department, and thought about asking her for help, but was feeling a little too shy to go up to her. He took himself behind a rack of clothes, talked to himself reassuringly, then went up to her to ask for help. I was paged to pick up my “package” in the jewelry department, which I did with alacrity, and was able to greet my not-quite-grownup boy with a big hug. I’m so proud of him for overcoming his shyness and doing the right thing, and not panicking. I still believe that “free-range” (with shades of “attachment”) parenting is absolutely the best style for me, and my kids do okay with it, too, which is an added bonus.

•Sydney is a drama queen, and she is little, and the only girl in the family- this causes her issues sometimes:

•I think Girl wrote this: “The thing about recurring issues is that the better you get at spotting them, the better they get about subterfuge.  The same issues crop up constantly in our lives, in different guises, and sometimes it takes awhile to realize you’re dealing with the same old thing for the nth time.” I absolutely love this, which explains so exactly where I am in my life, and why I am talking with my therapist again. Tardiness, procrastination, avoidance, insecurity, self-doubt are constant issues, from childhood, and as I stand on the crest of my meno-pausal wave, I’d like to tame these issues a little. I’d like them to be familiar companions, rather than looming, scary monsters on the path beside me, as I walk/scamper/plod/skip down the road that is my life.

•Pretty soon, I’m gonna write my inner child a letter, as a part of the process of de-mystifying the terrors residing in my psyche. I know I can take really good care of folks, whether they be 5 or 41, two-legged or four-legged, and by writing that letter, explaining and demystifying some of the terrifying experiences of childhood, and reassuring her/myself that I can and will always be present with a calm, warm voice and a hand to hold in the dark, maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to turn the monsters in my background into pussycats at the garden gate.

•I’ll probably write a loving letter to Willis, too. His death was sudden and traumatic, if not entirely unexpected, and although I have worked through many issues and talked to him a great deal since his death, we all know how extraordinarily powerful the written word is as a way to move through emotion and come to a place of love, light and understanding.

•I’d better go get my car- they’ve changed this parking lot into a 30-minute limit, and I don’t need another ticket, do I?

Random Rantings

I want to be in charge of my life, dammit- time to stop being late all the time!

My therapist called- I’m going back there next week- maybe we can get the tardiness/insecurity better controlled this time round.

They destroyed a dam, and drowned the dad beaver in Surrey- beavers are endangered here, and this reappearance of beavers so close to an urban setting should have been a good thing, no? There was a “danger” of “flooding”- wtf? There were wild creatures returning to co-mingle with us after we as a species had abused them as a species most heinously for centuries. Death by drowning? Goddamn people anyway!

I haven’t said recently that I hate that Willis is dead. I do hate that. But. I know he’s gone, never coming back. This is my life and his death, not the other way around. I WILL NOT give up on learning out to extract the juices from my life because of adversity, no matter how intense. I will not give that message to my children. I will not.
What I will do is remember Willis, be gentle with myself, channel as many of his finest qualities as I can... I will whine as little as I possibly can, especially about things I can change, and about things I can’t change (Serenity Prayer, anyone?). I am so proud of my widda friends who have seized the brass ring and embraced life again, and so impatient with those who continue to see their immense loss as giving them the right to whine indefinitely. Yes, this sucks: none of us deserved this, it is a profound loss and it is completely disorienting to lose one’s spouse and partner, BUT, our job as inhabitants of this beautiful planet is to GROW, cherish, be thankful, do less harm, honour the planet’s other inhabitants with our thoughts, words, feelings and actions. (I may be ranting, here, and I’m gonna blame PMS and the damn beaver story.)

I met a young widow today at the clinic- 3-4 weeks out. Her cat is sick, she has no $ and her world is shattered. Do all you widdas remember how disorienting that time was? I barely do remember, but I know that the first few weeks were astonishingly raw, and the disbelief was huge. This girl surprised me by saying that she was grateful to hear that there was light at the end of the tunnel, and that things would get better. I guess that makes me “vintage” and able to mentor someone newer than me on the widow-road. It’s an odd feeling, and I hope that I truly can help her a little, if only by example and compassion, and that my tendency to impatience, as noted above, will not scar her more. Less than a month? Ouch. A very painful time, and I like to think I have all the patience in the world for her, and that I will not put her on a timeline (which I hated to have done to me).

Okay, enough ranting. Time for family and supper and joy again.

Almost!

We were close to on time for Sam's school this morning, and I was a bit late to pick Sydney up at daycare this evening, but not by much. Tomorrow, I think Sam may need to be at school 30 minutes early, so I know he will at least be on time for class...

I also spoke to Carol, and have made preliminary arrangements to pick up her kids and bring them here on Friday after school.

I still need to finalize plans with Carol, and get up and out on time tomorrow, but my comfort zone pushing has begun, in little increments.

The goings on, and an out-of-my-comfort-zone challenge

Rob's not been feeling well - 2 days now of being really sorta pitiful. Maybe it was the mussels, which nobody else ate, on account of their being nasty little things. Our Sunday clean up was even more necessary because "Rob the invalid" had not been doing his usual stirling job of keeping things clean and organized. We’d absolutely fall apart without that man. 

The kids (all 4 of them, plus an overnight houseguest of Sam's) were all corralled into attending to their chore chart duties - I might as well have been asking them to eat dung for the amount of protesting I got. In the end, the house got to look alright, even in the kitchen. Since the kitchen is Rob's purview, the kids complained mightily about the “extra” chore, but I managed to explain that a kitchen piled high with 2 days worth of detritus, dishes and debris was going to make supper a non-event. They all pitched in, and the kitchen looked half way decent when we left to go out for supper (as if I was actually gonna cook; I cleaned - isn’t that enough?). I left Rob wrapped in a kid’s blanket in a sorry bundle on the love seat- I think he was grateful for the reduction in volume at home. Poor guy- at least he

 seemed okay on his birthday the day before.

We did 3 birthday parties this weekend- I guess we’re into that season again. Sometimes I wish Sam wasn’t such an easy-going, likable kid; maybe we’d have to deal with fewer birthday party invitations then.

Sam’s overnight guest (because what Rob really wanted on his birthday was another child- not!) was Evan, who’s a likable kid. He and Sam do pretty well together. They met at after-school care a couple of years ago; we see less of Evan since he moved to another school. Evan's mum called me last minute to arrange a play date, which is a good way to arrange things with me, ‘cause if they’re arranged too far

 in advance, I’ll likely forget, or double book or something; in an aside, she let me know that she and her husband, Evan's dad, are separating. She says it’s mutual and amicable and that they have just fizzled out. Over the rest of the summer, they are going to take turns living in a suite, alternating with living in the house with the kids. I'm shocked and saddened about the whole turn of events- they seemed like a particularly “together” couple- enjoying each other’s company, doing interesting things together. I am having trouble wrapping my head around the idea that two people who are still “good friends” would choose to split up- I just don’t get it. I'm sure there’s more to the story, and it’s not my place to judge, and if I ever have a relationship (other than with Pentax) that lasts more than 3.5 years, maybe I’ll understand, too. but still...

Sunday's birthday party was for Jacob. His mum Carol is a beautiful person, inside and out. She’s one of my favourite people. Jacob's dad is also gorgeous, so Jacob and his younger sister are gorgeous kids, too. Tragedy struck this family when Jacob was 10 months old. His dad was a semi-pro soccer player, and while leaping up to head the ball, was headed in the head by an opponent. Brain injury ensued, and at points during his subsequent hospitalization, he wasn’t expected to survive. He has survived, and in some ways has made a miraculous recovery, but he is definitely brain-injured. Carol had been finding her husband’s increasingly erratic and abusive behaviour more and more difficult to deal with, and she could see how damaging the abuse was for the kids. Eventually, this past winter, she made the heart-breaking decision to have her husband moved back to his mother’s house, which has been viewed as a betrayal of sorts by most of his family. Apparently, life is less stressful at home, but Carol still struggles with the guilt, logistics and ongoing trauma of the original injury, and how it has brought such a brutal disruption to all their lives. I have the barest glimmer of how painful her life has been, and I wish I could do more for her. She was first in line with support when Willis died, and I feel a kinship with her, in a way, and I love her and her kids, and her husband, too, although I don’t know him well. Carol did okay at the birthday party- gracious and gentle, as always. She, like a widow, is coming from a place not so much of “you’re so strong and brave”, but of sheer necessity. She absolutely has no choice but to keep her ship afloat, because her kids are on that ship. Necessity doesn’t preclude desperation, and I see that in her, too. I am going to have to challenge myself to make an absolute commitment to have her kids out here soon, so she can get some down time of some sort.

Maybe this’ll be my opportunity to push myself out of my comfort zone: I really do avoid making and keeping commitments. I absolutely “fly by the seat of my pants” in social situations, household habits, parenting, at work. It’s easier, more familiar, more comfortable this way. Rob is astonishingly regular. I doubt that natural disaster (and certainly not a disaster of a wife) could put him off his regular routine. This is both inspirational and annoying. Alright, there it is, out there in public: my goal for the next week(?) (maybe a day; I’m scared already about this idea) is to make commitments and stick to them, and to make and stick to a routine. Specifically, how about if I get up on time for the rest of the week, get out of the house on time, get Sam to school on time and make a date with Carol to have her kids over here- all this week. That seems doable to me. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Here’s something a little more light-hearted to finish up with:


My kids are so totally adorable!










Some Pampas Grass, up close:





Can you identify this plant?





My sweetie, being hunky, adorable and capable- I do love this man!



This post has rambled all over the place, hasn't it? It rambled kind of unexpectedly into a post I'm gonna use for Julie Pippert's Hump Day Hmm- Comfort Zone. Writing can be such a funny thing.