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Showing posts from February, 2014

Stay in your lane

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I was roller skating on my local rail trail recently and coming up to an intersection, so I was slaloming slightly (barely more than C-cuts) to slow down. Someone on a bike came up behind me and said, "On your left!" Alerting people that you're passing is customary and courteous, though I don't know if there are signs suggesting we do that on this trail, like there are on the trails where I skate in Florida. There are also no alligators or exotic birds on my local trail. I was startled and swerved back towards the far right. "Thank you," I answered with a little wave. As the guy passed, he tossed over his shoulder, "Stay in your lane!" My initial reaction was WTF, dude!? You @$$ 4073! However, I said nothing. First of all, are there lanes on the trail? No. The picture above is the actual trail, and that person on the bike is the actual guy. Is he in a lane? No, he's right in the middle of the trail. ( Hypocrite! ) Furthermore, a g...

My expired yoga pass

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How sad is it that I couldn't use a 10-class pass in six months? I had all sorts of good intentions when I bought it back in August. I was ready to make the investment in myself. "Is it really an investment?" I was asked. "Yes, it is -- not just the money, but the time." As it turned out, time was the biggest challenge. It always is. Lack of it is the same reason I have eight stories in progress and haven't had time to write in weeks. My other half says, "How can you say you don't have enough time when there are in a week?" (He knows the number offhand, but I do not -- he's really good with numbers.) I don't know. I guess maybe it is because it is so rare that I actually have the two hours I need for a yoga class (or to do any writing) available at any one time. Often I might find 15 minutes to myself and might do half a treadmill workout (but even then it's rare that no one wants to either talk to me or ask me to do something.) Ju...

Lorem ipsum dolor -- in other words, "blah blah blah"

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.  I had a blast from the past today when I was using a template to construct an email promotional message. I was supposed to fill in the placeholder text with my own customized message. I learned on wikipedia that this comes from sections 1.10.32–3 of Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum ( On the Ends of Goods and Evils , or alternatively [About] The Purposes of Good and Evil ). The original passage began: Neque porro quisquam est qui do lorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet consectetur adipisci v elit (translation: "Neither is there anyone who loves, pursues or desires pain itself because it is pain").  I first became acquainted with it maybe 20 years ago when it was used as placeholder text in graphic design programs. My mom and I used to s...

My Singing Monsters

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I was telling my son's friend's mom, "Oh, I meant to write back to you to let you know we're all set with the homework, but it's the first time I had a chance to sit down all day and I checked my phone and got caught up with this game, 'My Singing Monsters.' Literally, I am right here in front of my computer, but that's where my phone was charging..." my voice trailed off because I realized the whole things sounded so ridiculous. We'd had a snow day that day and one of my boys was worried (so much so that he couldn't sleep in) about an assignment he had due the next day and he'd expected to have time in class to work on in class that day, and in any case, he didn't have the assignment with him, so I had asked the mom if she could text me a picture of it (which is probably weird to her to begin with, but my fax machine is broken). I'd wound up getting a hold of the teacher and getting a real copy of the assignment, but apparently...

The shape of a family

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"This is my sons' brothers' mother," I told my plumber, who I ran into at the restaurant that one of my older sons' older brothers manages. He shook his head and did a double take. We were there to celebrate my oldest's birthday, at the invitation of his older brother. His other older brother and sister were not with us as one of them has moved to California and the other had a previous engagement. "Yeah, we both have the same ex-husband." "Well, it's nice that you can get along." "We actually have a lot in common, aside from the fact that our kids are siblings." And we do. We've gone to church together and women's events together. We network about jobs. We get our nails done together. We celebrate birthdays and holidays and have other mutual friends now. We have even since returned to this restaurant for a ladies' outing with some of them. I am certain that families come in many shapes and sizes. Nuclear families...

The rice experiment

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“Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.” ~St. Augustine   We are doing an experiment about the power of our words. What happens when we use good words; what happens when we use bad words. We got the idea from a Facebook friend who posted a link to this story about Scientific Proof That Thoughts and Intentions Can Alter the World Around Us. We have three containers of plain white rice in the boys' bathroom. If you zoom in on the picture, you can see that one of them says, "I love you" and "Thank you" on it. Another says "You fool." The third says, "I do not see you" and "You do not exist." In the video that accompanies the above article, the experimenter, Steve, conducted his experiment for 147 days. His "thank you" rice still looks white. "The 'ignore rice' is the worst," according to Steve. "It looks like sh**." The "fool rice" looks pret...

Status symbol

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"You have to change your status? What is that, like hashtag in the car on the way to the bus, hashtag swag, hashtag doctor's appointment, hashtag YOLO, hashtag status update. Cackle snort." "No, honey, it's nothing that exciting. It's just letting people know I'm not at my desk." It was only 7:15 but I'd been working a little because my colleagues across the globe were getting ready to end their day. Not that anyone in our time zone would expect me to be working...or maybe they would. I just closed my work laptop and it's the middle of the Super Bowl, for example. Regardless, I set my status to "I am away from my computer right now." I'd told my hashtag son I'd drive him to the bus stop before I took his brother to his before school doctor's appointment for the foot pain he's been having (turns out he just needs to listen to his body and quit overdoing it -- like playing on three basketball teams might be a bit over ...