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It's snowing outside, and I'm marooned here with my mother and brother for another day. Mom is sleeping, exhausted just by getting up to eat. My sciatica is acting up and I have a pimple blooming on my chin. (That's such a perfect metaphor for who I am!) Several weeks ago, I waded through my stacks of poems and picked out a bunch of short ones to blog once a week. Of course, they are waiting for me in my new home, but I won't be back there until tomorrow. But today seems like a good day for a poem, especially after reading my daughter's poignant post of yesterday. So, instead of...
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Mike Brotherton, scientist and SF writer, lists this among the reasons he likes science fiction:
Seeing sides of humanity possible in no other way. How would we react to the discovery of aliens? Or aliens much smarter than us? Aliens with different belief systems and good reasons for having them? Or technology that gives us opportunities and challenges we’ve never had before? Or we will have, but not yet? As an avid science fiction reader for more than 50 years, I continue reading sci fi novels because they push the boundaries and bonds of my attitudes about societies and beings very different from what I'm used to. They challenge me to examine my beliefs...
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I'm thinking of one of my favorite childhood memories, as a result of the post today on Time Goes By where there are mentions of many of the songs that were the playlist for the first decade of my life. I can remember being about 8 or 9 years old. It is a warm, sunny summer day, and my cousin Dianne and are holding hands, skipping down Chestnut Street and singing Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay
My, oh my what a wonderful day!
Plenty of sunshine heading my way
Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay Mister Bluebird on my shoulder
It's the truth, it's actch'll
Ev'rything is satisfactch'll Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay
Wonderful feeling, wonderful day! ...
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I've decided that the opposite of learning is forgetting. Several mornings a week, as I sit at the table and drink my daily vitamin shake, my six and a half-year-old grandson gives me a memory test. Sometimes he shows me each of his little die cast airplanes and sees if I remember the name of each. He has dozens, and he knows them all. Sometimes he sets up his dinosaur models and tests me on the names of each of those. Each time I remember a few, but I forget the names of most from day to day -- even though he names each for me, speaking very clearly and explaining the distinguishing features of each. ...
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My new blog design might not be ready yet, but my new "work" space in my new Massachusetts residence is. 
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(No, I'm still not officially back, but this was something about which I just had to post.) Democrats are giddy at being back in power. But I will suggest that being in power is all about priorities. One should watch carefully to see what the priorities of the new administration are.. The above is from an piece in the Huffington Post by Ian Welsh, What Obama's Nixing Family Planning Money Tells Us And what it's telling us is that Obama's priority seems to be bipartisanship at any cost. From PlanetWire.org: Obama was reported to have asked Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), who chairs the House committee with jurisdiction over Medicaid, to drop a provision...
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I'm not officially back yet, but I couldn't help posting this one. I once blogged that if I were going to be marooned on a deserted island, the one guy I would want to have with me is Keith Olbermann. Well, sorry Keith, but Brian Williams has outdone you. I watch his NBC Nightly News show every day; I like his delivery.
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For the second time I watched him on David Letterman's Late Show. He wowed me the first time, and I was not alone This time clinched it. Williams just doesn't deliver the scripted news with clarity and style (and he has...
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While b!X is working to move this blog onto Word Press, I am surfacing to announce my upcoming redesign and resurrection. I have completed my move from the mountain to the valley, both physically and metaphorically. And now I have to figure out who I am now that I am where I am. It will not be the first time I reinvented myself, although it might be the last. In the meanwhile, you will be able to find me at Time Goes By on January 26, where I will be guest blogging for Ronni Bennett while she takes a much deserved blog break. Stay tuned.
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I forgot my 6th blogaversary, which was just about a month ago. Tonight is the longest night of the year. Like the world around me and like my country, my life is going through a major transition, and I need to take along pause at this point and readjust, get unstuck, ride the lessening night into a new and brighter era. And so I'm going to take a break from blogging, I need to come back refreshed and renewed and ready to post about more than just my current long personal and troublesome journey. I need to get back to reading other blogs, other thinkers. I need to remember how to think, again. ...
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"Jak sie lozko poscieli, tak na nim wyspacz," was what the old women in my family said when we youngsters complained. "The way you make your bed, that's how you have to sleep in it." I was thinking of this phrase as I drove from Massachusetts, via Albany, to my mother's/brother's. I was in Albany for an overnight so that I could get together with my long-time women friends for our annual holiday dinner. When I got online today and read Ronni Bennett's two most recent posts (Are You Satisfied With Your Life and The Real Economic Story), the admonitions of my female elders came to mind again. (Ronni always seems to be...
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No, not my mom. My cat. She hisses and swipes at everyone but me. My grandson keeps trying to be nice to her, but she will have none of it. We have had to put up an opaque barrier in the doorway to my rooms so that she doesn't see the other two cats in the house -- who, at first, yowled at her but now come up and sit on the other side of the gate, waiting and willing to be friends. When she notices them there, she starts caterwauling and spitting. If I pick her up, she keeps making this strange crying sound with her mouth closed. Calli is about 12...
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The ice storm hit us Thursday night, knocking out electrical power for a while. I didn't realize how bad the storm had been further north until I set out for Massachusetts this morning with the car radio reporting on the tens of thousands of New Yorkers still without power. I drove across the swaths that the ice storms devastated, paralyzing the trees along the way with thick crystalline bonds. I wished that I hadn't packed my camera (somewhere in the back of my car that was loaded to the roof with boxes and bags of my life's accumulations, including my desktop, printer, and monitor and more cables than I could possibly have use for). The landscapes I...
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It's the first snowfall here in Massachusetts. If I were at the address that I am leaving, I never would have gotten out to enjoy the day. My daughter's nuclear family went outside to play in the snow (and clear off my car). I just hung out, took some photos, and generally was delighted to be, finally, in the midst of laughter and play.  I will be driving back to my mom's/brother's tomorrow. It's supposed to be a nicer day -- for a drive, that is. At least I didn't fall down...
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Last night, Boston Legal hit one out of the ballpark for all of us elders who are tired of television programming aimed at every generation but ours. If you missed this episode, where the firm takes on the television industry for discriminating against the oldest generation, you can watch it when it shows up here. Unfortunately, this creatively funny, poignant, and topical series ends next week, and it is going out with a bang that I wish had been postponed. Like, forever. In the argument to the court that law partner Carl Sack (Emmy Award winner John Larroquette) makes, he asserts that, on the average, people over 55 watch about 6 hours of television a...
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In a way, it's a relief. I don't have to go through all the complex strategizing to get him to compromise -- only, each time, to come up against a stone wall. Actually, it's more like being dumped into a vat full of jello. Either way, I get nowhere. I'm out of energy and stamina. I give up. He can take care of our mother any way he wants. He has arranged with a female musician friend of his to come and stay with our mother. Every once in a while. No set schedule. I've met her. She's nice enough, and, as far as I can tell,...
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