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Category Archives: True Life

Jailbreak?

09 Mar

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Scaling walls to find creative freedom

It’s been years since I’ve done any creative writing. Once I hit high school, writing became strictly research papers, persuasive essays, and lab reports. I’ve gone through random spells of journaling in the past two decades, but there’s been no creative writing. No poetry, no short stories, and certainly no novels. And it wasn’t just that I wasn’t writing creatively…I wasn’t even thinking creatively anymore. As I got older and life filled with more and more responsibilities, I allowed all of my creative outlets to shut down–writing went first, then crafty projects followed, and for several years I even stopped reading because there was “no time.”

Making this commitment to blog daily throughout 2013 might just be my own personal prison break. I’ve scaled the wall of responsibilities, both real and imagined, crawled carefully over the barbed-wire of my own inhibitions, and now find myself standing, somewhat bemused, in the world of anything is possible. I’ve read three books since January, and have two currently in progress (that doesn’t hold a candle to my high school reading pace, but it’s a vast improvement over the wordless drought that’s parched my life since the mid-90s). For my first tentative attempts at fiction in more than twenty years, I’ve found great support from other writers in the blogosphere, and I credit that encouragement for a marked increase in the number of spontaneous creative thoughts I’ve been having the past week. I hope the trickle implies that a dam burst is imminent. For the first time, I feel like a notebook that goes everywhere I go might actually be an ally in capturing some of these thoughts for future use, rather than an enemy sitting in silent accusation, adding more pressure because of its disuse. The taste of creative freedom is as addictive as Oreos, and I find myself willing, even eager, to spend more and more time in front of the computer chasing words and ideas down long-disused pathways, brushing aside cobwebs with every step. Maybe there’s a glimmer of hope, after all, that I can be a writer, not just in thought, but also in deed.

 
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Posted by on March 9, 2013 in How It Is, On Me, On Writing, True Life

 

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Brwaak!

06 Mar

Yesterday, on a windy little country road, I found myself playing a game of chicken with…wait for it…a chicken!  I’d just come ’round a bend at about 40 mph (20 mph below the posted speed limit, thankfully) and found myself hood to beak with a puffy brown hen strutting around in my lane. I fully expected that when she looked up and saw my little silver cheese-wedge of a car bearing down on her, she’d make tracks for the safety of the grassy shoulder. Not this gal. She stopped dead in her tracks and faced me head on, not the least bit ruffled by the rapidly decreasing distance between us. I nearly punched a hole through the floorboard trying to brake in time, closing my eyes at the final second in anticipation of a sickening thud and an explosion of fluffy brown feathers. The car stopped; the thud never came. I squinted one eye open, and I could see the hen’s red comb hovering just beyond the nose of the car. It was at a height that I was confident I hadn’t squished her, so I opened the other eye and idled in the middle of the road, waiting for her to brwaak in victory and parade her bad self to the shoulder. Apparently, she had not yet learned the finer points of sportsmanship, for she wouldn’t budge; I was forced to make a 90-degree turn from a complete standstill in order to swerve around her. In the rearview mirror, I could see her pivot on the spot to follow my progress, unabashedly gloating as I slunk off in defeat.

As the surge of adrenalin slowly drained away, the vision of my car eating up the limited pavement between the hen and me replayed itself on an endless loop, accompanied by a soundtrack of increasingly ridiculous questions.

  • What should I have done if I had hit and killed the chicken?
  • Is a chicken considered livestock, and if so, is there a law in the UK that I must find the owner and report the incident?
  • If I find the owner, do I have to pay for the chicken?
  • How much do chickens cost? Do I have enough cash?
  • If I pay for the chicken, do I get to keep the dead body?
  • If I get to keep the dead body, can I take it home for dinner?
  • How does one clean a chicken?
  • Do I have anything sharp enough to cut off the head and feet?
  • How many feathers does a chicken have, and how long does it take to pluck one?
  • How do you clean out the guts? Can you just reach in the top end, grab hold of the bottom end, and pull it all inside out on itself like peeling off a sock? (Perdue always makes everything so neat and tidy, tucked discretely away in that little plastic bag.)
  • Is there going to be a lot of blood? I don’t want to have to mop up a crime scene in my white-tile kitchen.
  • What will the garbage collectors think when a pile of guts and feathers comes tumbling out of my “garden waste and other compostable items” bin on Friday?
  • Will the naked chicken have a big bruise where the car hit it? If so, is that part still edible?
  • Fry it? Bake it? Put it in the crockpot with some wine and garlic?
  • If I eat a chicken I killed with my car, is that the same as eating roadkill?
  • Does that officially make me a redneck? Or worse??

Wanting to keep the answers to those questions on a strictly need-to-know basis, I very cautiously approached that fateful bend in the road today. The pavement was clear, but pecking around in the tall grass of the shoulder were my opponent and at least a dozen of her closest friends. It wasn’t clear as I inched past whether they were daring each other to reenact yesterday’s classic game of chicken, or working on their material for the ever popular “Why did the chicken cross the road?” gag, but they all looked decidedly shady.

I am fully aware that is a rooster in the photograph–I had to dig through my personal archives for a poultry picture as I was late for work yesterday and had no time to jump out of the car to snap a portrait of my feathered foe standing victoriously in the road.

 
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Posted by on March 6, 2013 in True Life, What's She On About?

 

Details

04 Mar

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No one can argue that Mother Nature creates some spectacular sunset displays, especially for those lucky enough to find themselves on a beach in Jamaica. But sometimes the scene painted across the canvas of the sky isn’t the most beautiful artwork in the gallery. If you can tear your eyes away from the classic, clichéd picture-postcard features of gilded clouds and fishing boats silhouetted against a fiery horizon, you might notice the fading rays also play with often over-looked elements in the scene, highlighting unique textures in ordinary objects and drawing forth unexpected colors from normally unremarkable surfaces. In this case, I was particularly taken with the colors and patterns surfacing, frolicking, then dissolving across the undulating surface of the ocean.

Today’s post is my entry in The Weekly Photo Challenge: Lost in the Details, in which we were encouraged to examine the typical scene we’d normally frame in our camera’s viewfinder then look for new and unexpected angles and details to capture.

 
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Posted by on March 4, 2013 in Observations, True Life, Weekly Photo Challenge

 

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Martha

02 Mar

HPIM1619Like I really need another project…

Hey handsome! Because you are away on business this weekend, I was unchaperoned at the local auction today, which meant all my, “Ooh, I could use this old ______ for ______” ideas went unvoiced, which meant there were no exasperated eye-rolls to curb my enthusiasm for crafty DIY projects, which meant I bid on more junk than I normally would have. Good news, though! I only won one lot, a stack of 46 2-foot by 2-foot tin(ish) ceiling tiles. Yes, I can hear you…”What are you going to do with THOSE??”

Well, here’s what the Martha Stewart side of me was thinking while I was waving my bidding number around. I don’t plan on actually sticking them to the ceiling, because they collectively weigh a ton (four trips to load them all in the car), and I don’t fancy them dropping on our sleeping heads in the middle of the night. Instead, I envisioned them as a headboard whenever we finally get rid of the sleigh bed, or possibly as wainscoting in the dining room. But when I got home and started looking on the internet, there’s all sorts of cool things I could do with them…tile them into a backsplash in the kitchen (these may not be the best size/pattern for that), hang them as wall art in the living room, substitute them as the panels in the kitchen cabinets, bend them into funky birdhouses for the garden. Dishfunctional Designs has all sorts of ideas I hadn’t even considered!

And wait, babe, here’s some even better news. I got all 46 of them for the ridiculous price of just £24 (about $36). If worse comes to worst, and my inner Martha never gets this project off the ground, we can just sell them on for a serious profit–they go for upwards of $9.50 EACH online. Trust me, it could have been worse; I could have come home with a pair of tortoiseshell veneered display cabinets, purchased by the original owners for £85,000, but now fire-damaged and “requiring major restoration.” Common sense didn’t totally desert me in your absence; I realize there are some limits to the projects I should tackle! Love you!!

 
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Posted by on March 2, 2013 in How It Is, On Me, True Life

 

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Puffin’

27 Feb

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After a very early start and a full-throttle, pedal to the medal kind of day, I was up till after midnight last night scanning 150 pages worth of dead tree back to our finance company in the States. So I hoped that when I finally crawled into bed and curled up next to the hubby, it would be a deep and dreamless sleep kinda night. I should have known better. I don’t know the last time my brain just shut off and let me sleep peacefully through the night; Alice’s Wonderland’s got nothing on the wackiness between my ears when the lights go out. If the tendency toward crazy, colorful dreams is genetic, I blame my grandfather–my mom says he was always recounting screwball tales conjured in the wee hours by his supposedly sleeping brain.

Last night I dreamt of puffer fish. Dozens of them. I was standing shin-deep in the clear waters of a shallow ocean cove. A few yards out, the sandy sea floor dropped off sharply, but that did not cause any waves to break as they rolled in…the surface just undulated gently. Puffer fish rode the currents from deeper waters into the cove, and when they reached the shelf on the sea floor, they rolled over onto their backs and drifted upside down, barely fluttering their pectoral fins to maintain a course that would bring them within my reach. Whenever one was near enough to touch, I leaned down and stroked its belly, just once from chin to tail, before it righted itself, grinned at me appreciatively, and swam back out to the deep. I repeated this over and over, as the fish ignored the other waders in the cove and headed only for me, like I was some kind of fish whisperer.

Needless to say, I’ve been thinking about puffer fish all day today, so I finally broke down and Googled their meaning on a dream interpretation website. In someone’s expert opinion, “To see a puffer fish in your dream signifies suppressed or unexpressed anger. You are holding something in that is on the verge of erupting at any moment. Alternatively, the dream indicates that others tend to underestimate your abilities or misjudge you.”

If anger is going to erupt at any moment, it’s going to be a surprise to me as much as anyone else. I am not currently aware of being angry at any person or situation, much less suppressing a boiling cauldron of wrath. Sure, I have a peevish moment every now and again, but it takes a lot to make me truly angry, angry enough that I’d summon an army of puffer fish. As to the other interpretation, it wouldn’t surprise me if people underestimate me, especially if they don’t know me well. But again, I’m not aware of anyone misjudging me or my abilities recently, and even if they had, I don’t feel like it would have troubled me enough for my subconscious to rally a school of puffers. Besides, the fish in my dream were all as laid-back as the Hawaiian one in my photo…not a single one of them was “puffed” and ready for battle. It seems that the so-called experts may have gotten this one wrong; I think I’ll just chalk it up to weird family genes. Thanks, Granddad!

 
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Posted by on February 27, 2013 in On Me, True Life

 

Uncle

23 Feb

100_1548Longing for an end to winter

I guess when I saw the sun for the entire day on Monday and was able to shed the outermost layer of my typical winter armor, my mind and body got this crazy idea that winter was on its way out. Tuesday tried to ease me out of that idea by bringing back the clouds while maintaining the mild temperatures, but Wednesday blew in to remind me that both calendar-ly and meteorologically, it is still winter. Thursday and Friday conspired to reinforce that knowledge by becoming progressively cloudier and colder, and then today, that big bully Saturday thought it’d be fun to spit snow at me all day while Winter pinned me down.

Uncle. I cry uncle. Winter, please let me up now. I’m tired of layering sweaters to survive at work, tired of pulling on three pairs of socks when I wear my wellies, tired of slathering endless layers of moisturizer on my wind-chapped cheeks, tired of scraping frost off my car windows, tired of counting down the hours until the end of each day when I can go home and defrost my aching bones in a steaming hot shower. Please, give me a chance to pack away my flannel pajamas and woolen mittens. Let me open the windows to air out the house. Make way for lambs, daffodils, green grass, and most of all, sunshine. Uncle, Winter, UNCLE!!

 
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Posted by on February 23, 2013 in How It Is, True Life

 

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Forward

22 Feb

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I’m really not exaggerating very much when I say it’s been raining here in England since last April. Almost as soon as the Met Office updated its drought declarations to cover the lower three-fourths of the country and instituted hose-pipe bans that affected 20 million people, precipitation began to fall. And fall. And fall. It has not rained all day every day for these last ten months, but breaks of sunshine have been depressingly few and far between. I took this photo in December during one of those blessed breaks. Standing in the shadows and aiming my camera into the sun without benefit of any filters is probably one of the first mistakes they tell you not to make in Photography 101, but the resulting image really moves me, body, mind, and soul.

I want to move forward down this path, out of the darkness and out of the debris scattered by the latest round of floodwaters, to the higher ground I can see just beyond the curve. Whatever is up ahead, the future shrouded in the mist, holds no fear for me, because ahead there is light. The luster of the sodden path beckons hypnotically, propelling me onward in search of its source, until all I want is to feel that light pressing its warmth into my scalp, beating against the flimsy defenses of my closed eyelids as I tip my face to the sky. I want to wrap my entire self in this light, and stuff my pockets with it so I can take it out and revel in its brilliance whenever I feel the darkness closing in. This light is freedom…freedom not just from a string of bad weather, but freedom to get out of the house and out of my head. I’ve been closed in and closed up for too long, though not realizing the enormity of the oppression until it was lifted. Moving forward into the light, I feel weightless and clean and strengthened and renewed. I am alive again, right down to the last cell, and dazzled by the possibilities exposed before me in the light.

Today’s blog is in response to “Forward,” the Weekly Photo Challenge over at The Daily Post.

 
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Posted by on February 22, 2013 in On Me, True Life, Weekly Photo Challenge

 

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