If You Were One Of The Seven Dwarfs, Which One Would You Be?

Right now I am Grumpy, Sneezy, Sleepy, and Dopey. For the last two weeks I have pretty much felt this way. I don't know what the problem is, I just know I am having trouble focusing. I have three drafts saved on Blogger with only the titles filled in because I am not sure how to start writing them. I have three books that I have started and am not reading anymore. I have taken to recording my favorite TV shows so I can fast forward though them when I do watch them. And I am having time slips.

Time slips, for me, are when you are doing something and all of a sudden you realize you are not at the point in the action that you think you should be. Clear? For example, when my husband and I run the dogs up at the cemetery we make three loops around the road that circle the grounds. The other day we were walking and I wasn't sure how many loops we had walked. I didn't even know how I had reached the point where we were at that instant. I remember starting to walk and then, like a rubber band snapping, I was jerked to where I now stood. I asked my husband how many times we had walked around cemetery and he looked at me strangely and said we were still on the first loop.

I've had that snap happen when walking to the post office. I remembered leaving my house and then, snap, I was walking in the alley when I felt as if I should already be at the post office building. I've had it happen while driving home from the grocery store. I got in my truck and the next thing I knew I was a block away while my body and mind thought I should be pulling up in front of my house. In a way it is like being in a dream. Then I remembered.

At this time three years ago I was in Spain walking the Camino. At this time three years ago I was having the same dream-like disconnect with time. What is going on? Am I having some sort of flash back? Am I suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome? How long will this feeling of disconnect last? I don't know but I do know that right now blogging is not high on my list of things to do. This could change tomorrow or it could last until the end of October. It was at the end of October that I finished my Camino walk. I'm not saying I am going to stop blogging again but I know it won't be as frequent for a little bit. Keep checking back.


(BTW, the names of the seven dwarfs are, Doc, Grumpy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Happy, Dopey, and Bashful.)

Laziness

That indolent but agreeable condition of doing nothing.
-Pliny The younger

Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.
-Jules Renard

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.
-Edgar Bergen (Charlie McCarthy)


Well, this is my state of mind right now. I think I'll go lie down for awhile until the feeling passes.

Well, Mr. Bush, How Is The War In Iraq Going?

Iraq Update

Show Us Your Skyline

Got this idea from Stu Savory's Blog by way of Easy Bake Coven. Stu is trying to start a new blog meme and is asking everyone to put a photo of the skyline in their neck of the woods on their blog. After you have posted drop Stu a line and he will link to you.

My view was taken on top of the hill were the town cemetery is located. The tallest thing in the photo (left of center) is the water tower. The water tower is right across the street from the high school. A couple of years ago the town had the water tower repainted. There are several companies that do water tower painting and each one of them uses a certain color for the roofs of the towers they paint. The company the town officials pick to do the repainting uses the color red. Now our high school's colors are green and white. Red is one of the school colors of our school's arch rival. When the tower was finished and people looked up and saw that new red roof they went ballistic. Why it was an insult- to the school, the football team, the students, and the town. So the town officials quickly called around until they found someone who could repaint the roof. He climbed up the tower and repainted the roof green. The roof is not the same shade of green as the high school's green but that seems to be alright with the town. They are just happy the roof is no longer red.

Where The Wind Comes Sweepin' Down The Plain

And the wavin' wheat can sure smell sweet
When the wind comes right behind the rain.
-Oklahoma,written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein


Hello from Denver. Make the drive here Friday for another dress fitting in preparation for my sister's wedding next month and am still here. I was planning on going home yesterday but my husband called and told me he thought it would be a good idea if I stayed another day because the Weather Service was forecasting winds from the south gusting up to 60 mph/96.5kmph on the plains.

Now, I want you all to stop reading and go find a map of the USA. Go on, I'll wait.........Got your map? See how empty the land is between the Gulf of Mexico and the Canadian border? This means winds coming from the South have nothing to slow them down as they race to Canada. That makes driving...interesting. On a two-lane highway, frightening. On a two-lane highway that is laid out between plowed fields, terrifying.

First, your car can be blown into the oncoming traffic or an oncoming car or truck can be blown into you. Second, you can drive into a dirt storm created by the wind picking up a lot of the top soil in the fields. This dirt is traveling so fast it is like driving through a sandblaster. I once foolishly drove through a wall of dirt that rose to a height of about 1,000 feet and at least ten miles wide. I was lucky because it was only about 50 feet thick so I drove out of it quickly.

The last thing to fear is the herds of wild tumbleweeds. They can be anywhere from dodgeballs to beachballs or larger in size. They travel in packs of 20 to 30 in number. As you drive you can see them off in the distance tumbling quickly across the fields, racing toward the highway. When they reach the road they throw themselves onto the blacktop and skidder across it to the other side in their mad dash to Canada. Even when the road drops in between two berms the tumbleweeds keep coming, not even pausing as they fling themselves off the top of the berm in a suicidal plunge to the tarmac below. As they hit the asphalt they bounce high off the road and into wall of the berm on the other side, only to be tangled up in the mass of tumbleweeds that have made the jump before them.

This can be exciting to watch but since they are tumbling blind they sometimes cross the road so close to the front end of your car you end up smashing into them and they then get caught in the under carriage of the car body. Or they slam into the side of the car with a loud, "Thunk," and disintegrate. Later, when you reach home, you'll find sections of broken tumbleweeds wedged between the front grill and the radiator. Smaller pieces, from when the weeds slammed into the side of your car, will fall out of the cracks in the doors. All in all, the experience is pretty exhausting.

Since the wind is still blowing I am staying another day. Hopefully, I can drive home tomorrow.

Pop Quiz

True Or False?

A mixture of aspirin and Coca-Cola will get you high.

(Everyone will be graded on the curve.)


Answer.

Work

The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

All work done mindfully rounds us out, helps complete us as persons.
-Marsha Sinetar

There is no substitute for hard work.
-Thomas Edison

Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
-J.M. Barrie

Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all cost of tedium and distaste. The gain in self-confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labor is immense.
-Thomas Arnold Bennett


I am now half way through Step Two on my porch project and feel good about both that and what I am accomplishing-It's a nice feeling. But, my, my, is it tiring me out.

Never Start Something You Can't Finish

Never start something you don't want to finish.
-Me

I am still at step one of my porch resurfacing project..... I am in home improvement hell.

Elvis died in the Army.
- John Lennon on Elvis Presley's death

The beginning stages of this is what I have been doing all day. It is one of the summer projects I had hoped to get done by the end of August. What I did all afternoon yesterday is one of the reasons why I am behind. Every now and then I like to type a topic into Google and see where it takes me. Yesterday I typed in "pop culture" and these are some of the sites I visited and/or learned something from:

1.The False Advertising Gallery. Click on "view contents" and then the word "oil" in column one and the word "clean" in column five for two of my favorite ads.

2. Do you ever think about an actor you haven't seen in awhile and wonder where they are? I found this article about the 1970's show Get Christy Love and was saddened to read that the star, Teresa Graves, had died in a house fire back in 2002 at the fifty-four. Get Christ Love was on for one season and I only saw a couple of episodes but I do remember her from Laugh-In.

3. Confused by some of the things mentioned in the songs recorded by The Beatles? How To Speak Beatlish can help you.

4. Want to see a photo of the first IBM Portable Computer? (click on IBM5100 in Timeline) It weighed 55 pounds and cost just this side of $20,000. At that weight and price I bet it wasn't flying off the shelves.

5. Evidence that people collect everything including TV Tickets. You know, the tickets that the networks hand out so they will have an audience for their life shows. Did you know you could have seen the Beatles or Elvis for free at one time?
(Scroll down to the bottom of the TV Tickets page to see proof.)

6. For my readers in Britain. Did you know that a pilot for an American version of Red Dwarf was filmed? It was called Red Dwarf USA (Again scroll down to the bottom of the linked page). It didn't work out. In fact, it didn't work out twice.

Now, about that John Lennon quote at the top of the page. I bought three new CD's last week and have been playing them almost constantly. They are, Wanda Jackson's Queen Of Rockabilly , Very Best of Ray Charles, and Elvis 56.

Wanda Jackson is a country/western singer who, back in the 1950's, got interested in Rock and Roll. Thank God for that. Man, is she good. She is so good that back then she was know as "the female Elvis." If you don't believe me just listen to her versions of Riot In Cellblock #9 and Money Honey.

As you know Ray Charles died last June. I had forgotten this until I walked into the music section of Barnes and Noble. Copies of Very Best Of Ray Charles were the first thing you saw as you entered the store. I felt the pain again as I remembered he was gone. I love this man's voice and think he and Hoagy Carmichael (the man who wrote the music) recorded the best versions of Georgia On My Mind. Great CD.

I've never been a Elvis fan and never could understand why people thought he was so great. The Elvis I knew was the one from his movies and the guy with no taste in the white jumpsuit. Then I picked up Elvis 56 and saw the light. All recordings were made in 1956 the year he was picked up by RCA. This is Elvis rougher than he was later in life. The later stuff, after the army, doesn't compare. Lennon's remark now makes sense.

Bonus link
Hey, Elsie, this is for you.

What's In The Salad?

-B. Kliban

I knew I was right about the Carrots and Raisins (aka Carrots and Rabbit Turds) salad they served in the lunchroom cafeteria at school!

Dog Day

Yesterday

Morning
My dog Emma is very good at finding other animals on her daily runs. She has found snakes, turkeys, deer, mice, squirrels, badgers, fish, frogs, turtles, and lizards. Yesterday, she found an abandoned puppy. My husband said she was barking at a yucca bush and he, worried that she had found a snake, rushed over to keep her from being bit. When he got about two steps away from the bush he saw a black and white terrier puppy laying on the ground under the bush. The second the dog saw him it ran over to him with its tail wagging. My husband put the puppy and our dogs in the truck and drove around, stopping at all the farmhouses he could see from the spot where he found the dog. He asked anyone he met if the dog belonged to them. No. One of the farmers did say a lot of dogs were abandoned where my husband found the puppy.

Afternoon
We took the puppy to an animal shelter run by a woman who lives in the town 30 miles south of us. We had heard good things about her. She told us she would find the puppy a nice home and that she was very careful about who she gave dogs too. But first she would deworm him and give him the shots she was sure he hadn't had yet. We estimated his age at 11 weeks. I felt good about leaving the puppy with her.

On the way back home we stopped to look at a newly built adobe-style house just outside our town. When we turned into the driveway we saw someone spraying the ground with a garden hose at some outbuildings about 50 yards from the house and drove over to him. As we got closer I was dismayed to see the buildings housed dogs, lots and lots of dogs. It was a puppy mill. The woman who lived in the house told us she bred the puppies to sell in Denver.

Evening
On the evening news they ran a story about a company in California that is going to clone cats and dogs. Starting at $50,000 for cats (more for dogs) you can have your pet copied. The company is calling itself Pet Savings and Clone.



These stories tell us disturbing things about both our society and our views on animals. Right now I cannot face this. I just wanted to write these stories down and get them out of my head.

Suffer The Little Children

Senseless
School standoff in Russia ends; at least 250 killed
-Rocky Mountain News, Saturday, September 4, 2004

Grief, blame in Russia
Death in school siege top 350; angry Putin rips security services
-Rocky Mountain News, Sunday, September 5, 2004

Russia buries victims of school hostage horror
Search on for 180 missing
-Rocky Mountain News, Monday, September 6, 2004

The genocidal war against the people of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria and the criminal-terrorist policy of the Kremlin regime are the detonator for destabilization in the entire Caucasus and in Russia itself. The countless crimes against humanity, committed by Russia on Caucasian soil, are making possible desperate, inhuman reciprocal steps, like today's action by people who have lost their senses because of grief and losses, because of cynicism and injustice.
-Umar Khanbiyev, General Representative of the President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria

Man aggresses not only out of frustration and fear but out of joy, plenitude, love of life. Men kill lavishly out of the sublime joy of heroic triumph over evil... Most men will not usually kill unless it is under the banner of some kind of fight against evil...I think it is time for social scientists to catch up with Hitler as a psychologist, and to realize that men will do anything for heroic belonging to a victorious cause if they are persuaded about the legitimacy of that cause.
-Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil

Baby, I'm Back! *

See you in September
See you when the summer's through...
Will I see you in September
Or lose you
To a summer love?
-See You In September by S. Wayne and S. Edward sung by The Tempos


Well, did everyone have a good summer? I did, thank you. Staying away from the blogging community wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. There were times I wanted to check other people's blogs or write about something that had happened in the world on my own blog but each time I managed to grab the thought by the throat and wrestle it into submission. The closer I got to the end of my time-out the harder it became but now the waiting is over and I'm back.

I've been mulling over how to jump back into this blogging thing and I thought I would begin by writing about some of the things I would have written about if I had been blogging this summer. But I also want to catch up on all the other blogs I usually read and I know that doing both will take some time so here is the plan. This week I spend my time reading blogs and next week I start writing again. So instead of my thoughts on the things that happened while I was gone I have found other thoughts that reflect mine and have linked to them. In no particular order:

1. In July the Democratic National Convention put on the same old high school pep rally as usual("We're going to win! We're going to win!"), only they had more money to spend than most high schools do.(The Republican convention is going on as I type-same show-different cast.) The most interesting part of the Democratic convention was the speech by Illinois State Senator Barack Obama. He started talking and it was "I Had A Dream" time. This is what a speech should be; one that gives you hope and touches your soul.

2. Ronald Reagan died.

3. The amazing Julia Child died.

4. Fay Wray died. For those of you too young to know, she was in the original King Kong.

5. The opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics were wonderful. Just the way we (USA) would have done it if we (USA) had taste. The television coverage of it here was a different story.

6.(Sigh) George Bush. Just a couple of things here, not going to go over the same-old-same-old stuff.

First, from the "Civil Rights? You Don't Need No Stinking Civil Rights!" file.

Next, Michael Moore released a tape of Bush's nominee for head of the CIA, Porter Goss, talking about how he is unqualified to work for the CIA.

7. Only saw one new movie this summer but I seem to have had a good reason.

The Bad Review Revue at Defective Yeti :
June here and here.
July here.
August here, here and, here.

Finally, this quote from Anchorman director Adam McKay about actor Will Ferrell, "Will's a master at playing mediocre American men, quys who aren't as great as they think they are, like George W. Bush."