Piggin Handel

I’ve a feeling it was Pete who said that blog posts are like buses. You wait for ages, and finally three come along at once. I try not to crowd them all together, so it can put me in a bit of a quandary.

Anyway, maybe I’ll just put this one in as a scheduled post, so I can type it now (right after publishing ‘Brycian Worlds‘) and it will come roaring up to the blogstop by itself later!

In town today I was feeling absolutely allrighto. No wooziness or giddiness or wanting to crawl into a dark shadow somewhere. And there were enough people around, so sometimes you really have no idea why on some occasions you feel woozy and want to go home, and other times you’re perfectly happy.

At least… I say there were enough people around, but I’m trying a bit hard to convince myself of that. We generally had plenty of elbow-room. When people started treading on our heels in one narrow little street, I got a tad unhappy again, but then we escaped into our new favourite coffee shop (the last one closed down) and I forgot all about it.

The only thing that it seems to positively confirm for me is my theory that I need long rests from things! The more I do something or go somewhere, the more stressed out I get. But if I take a break and stay at home for a while, and get really involved in some project of my own (like Bryce), then the next time I go out, it’s as though the ’stress slate’ has been wiped clean. “All good things in moderation”, they say!

Anyway… I bought an old record (see the following photo). The manager of the charity shop was sadly disappointed when she said something about Handel being on TV, if I was interested, and Mum popped up and gave away my guilty secret: “she only bought it for the picture!” And everybody rolled their eyes and sighed.

Whaaaatt?? A picture takes just as much work as a piece of music, and deserves as much appreciation… LOL.

(Click photo to see bigger size).

PS: When I went to upload the Handel photos, I reached round to attach my card reader to the Mac’s tail, and accidentally knocked something down behind the desk! I hadn’t seen it was there. It was a small glass pyramid (the one in the photo below).

It was such a solid, heavy thing, though, that it came down with a crash. I was worried it had smashed into smithereens, but when I crawled under the desk to get it, it was intact.

I think it was Mum who gave it to me, and it looks nice on window sills with the sunshine streaming through it, and then it gets in the way when you go to pull down the blinds. So it ends up not on the window sill; instead lurking in a dark, dusty corner behind the iMac.

Looking at it just now, I was thinking “but what is it FOR?”

From the expression on his face, I don’t think the Piggin is sure, either.

Piggin Paperweight!

Losing My Way in the Comments

I find comment hierarchies confusing… on this blog, I put all my replies in the one main comments place by writing in the main reply box right at the bottom. But I notice now that each individual comment has a little ‘reply’ link under it. (How long has it been there?)

Now I’m wondering if folks get my replies when I’m not hitting the individual reply links? Would that nix the usual method of doing a big ‘answer everybody’ comment such as “Aaron — I hear you; Beth — still laughing!”?

DeviantArt does something similar, and it catches me out every time. I dash off a reply and then realize it will never get in that person’s inbox.

More scrabbling about in the WordPress helpfile coming up…

Bloggy Hush

My blog went a bit quiet, didn’t it? I took a shot at working out why in my journal.

Sunday 15th Feb 2009

Feeling different today — not sure why. Elizabeth’s latest writing challenge is ‘A Feeling of Harmony‘ — would like to try, if I could get it together. (Is there something ironic about that?)

Feeling slightly scattered today. PC struggling. It was making quite a racket tonight so I shut it down and turned it off at the mains. There’s a risk it won’t ever turn on again when I finally try, but I won’t lose much of importance — the stuff  is backed up.

Just had a realization — been quiet on blog. I think it’s because I got so into writing this journal again, which is ironic, as I stopped journalling when I got deep into the blog a while back. Then I realized something important was missing from my life, and picked up the journal again. I only seem able to run both of them at full whack for a while, and then something gives.

I need to express my thoughts somehow, and they’re not all blogworthy… but if my journal was just a few lines or half a page a day, it wouldn’t have the same ‘gravity pull’ that this monster has, and the blog would stand a better chance.

I’m curious now; if I had to summarize today in a few lines, what would I choose to highlight? I’ll try that at the end of this entry.

Song in head is still Don’t Cry for Me Argentina by the Shadows.

When I was looking on the PC, I found a folder of ‘cat movies’. Truly dreadful they are, and all too short, but they are of Thor, Fusspot, Sharky. I didn’t want to look at them but couldn’t help myself. I started with ‘Fusspot talking’, and went on to all the rest. I smiled at them, even chuckled, but when I turned back to the Mac, I got sad.

Delilah came and looked at me, and I gave her a long hug, and played with the woodpecker-on-a-pole toy. She put her nose against it as though to feel its vibrations.

Don’t cry for me…

I need a new computer. I wish Apple would hurry up and update the iMac. I wonder if I should get a PC… even a little one would probably be faster and roomier… the old one is more than 10 years old. It has been around for Thor, Fusspot, Sharky, Lucky and all their photos.

That’s why I feel different. I’m contemplating change. The PC reminds me of the old cats and the old house, and I’m having to give it up now. And it’s also because I’m looking back more vividly (the movies). And there’s a funny smell around here — it came in through my bedroom window and all the cracks in the house. On some days I think “what’s that weird smell?” and it turns out to be ’sea haar’ or something… but I’m not sure about today. It’s like varnish. So… it smells different and it makes me feel different… living a different life!

Oh, my little experiment — today in a few lines:

Beanfrog 1st. Ate 2 dragonflies. Worked on picture. PC v. noisy, have turned it off. Found some movies of Sharky and co on the PC — they made me sad. Song in head: Don’t Cry for Me Argentina. Read Elizabeth’s blog post ‘About Heart Day‘ and commented. Fish pie, peas and evil tinned macaroni cheese for supper — didn’t eat much.

It was so short I ran out of things to say! About the Heart Day blog post, I said to Elizabeth I used to like the quiet mystery of Valentine’s Day, but it’s become a kind of parade for established couples.

I don’t intend to give up either blog or journal…  or truncate them; not if I can help it. My world focuses on imagery and ideas. Even the the fish pie doesn’t get much of a look-in. At this rate I’ll end up meditating in a cave high in the hills somewhere… but only if I can run my computer from there.

I looked for a photo of Fusspot to go with this post but they were mostly bad scans or taken by a very poor quality digital camera (1.3 megapixels! It wasn’t long before mobile phones could do better than that). He passed on a little while after I got the new Canon. He was already quite old and lanky. I found one half-decent photo and tried to brighten it, but the contrast went haywire. He looked out of the picture at me with his soulful blue eyes, and I had to close it.

We think we’re taking pictures for ourselves, but they’re really for other people. Others can look and say things like “oh, that’s what he looked like?” but we just want to close our eyes and remember quietly.

The day after watching the movies of the cats, I was resting my ears (no hearing aids) so I couldn’t hear a thing. And then I heard Fusspot yowl…  just once. I sat up and looked around, but Delilah continued to sleep peacefully. I think my brain manufactured it, the same way it creates a suitable ’sound’ for every vibration.

I posted a pic of him before… I’ll just reuse that one. It’s one of my favourites anyway.

My Email Address Wasn’t Working

I thought I better write a post about this, in case people have been emailing me (especially over the Christmas season), wondering why I wasn’t answering. My Bloglines email address hasn’t been receiving email… I looked at it today, and there’s a line that says “last updated Dec 5, 2008.”

That’s the date they were moving their data. The blog and news feeds at Bloglines have been well-behaved for some months, but I didn’t realize my email address had just stopped.

I’ve sent a query about it, so maybe it will be fixed, but meanwhile I’ve switched my blog contact to another email address.

Tune Out the Baas

Elizabeth wrote a good post about the internal voices of criticism that hold us back. It made me think about how I started to hear those voices more clearly when reading the words of others — those who say to the world at large:

• Why do you write blogs nobody wants to read?
• Why do you upload pictures nobody likes?
• ‘Amongst’ and ‘whilst’ are archaic and pompous. [Not true!]
• Open-toed sandals are ugly.
• Don’t write about cats, or anthropomorphize inanimate objects (Totty the Toaster or some such).
• If you don’t speak as you write, it means your writing style is fake. [If I wrote as I speak, you wouldn't understand me half the time. I do write as I think, however – with plenty of editing!]
• We won’t read blogs with truncated feeds, as we imagine we’re being forced onto your blog and get irate, when really you had other reasons for doing it that way.
• Why should you write about things from our culture when you’re not of it? What do you know about riders in the sky, or trolls?

…and so on.

The clamour is deafening. Perhaps they’re the sheep from Animal Farm, drowning out the urge to be individual. Actually, they’re only opinions. Sometimes reasonable, sometimes not. We have to learn to weigh them up for ourselves.

On Saturday night, in my private journal, the last sentence I wrote before turning out the light was, “It’s sad that we feel constrained.” We believe that only certain things are acceptable and we must work and think within those confines. The phrase ‘think outside the box’ annoys a lot of people but speaks volumes, and I won’t dismiss it in a hurry.

Every time you go out, you imagine people nudging each other and whispering “why does she wear that, it doesn’t suit her!” or “she shouldn’t be trailing that shopping trolley around; it’s getting in my way. She’s young and strong and should lump heavy carrier bags around like the rest of us.” [Why? What's the point of inventing the wheel if we don't use it?]

I guess it doesn’t happen only in the writing world; it happens all the time, and you start to hear those whispering voices everywhere. It’s not imagination… you know that someone, somewhere at some time is bound to have said these things. You hear them said about others.

I have to keep my own criticisms in check and frequently fail. When I was a child, a book I loved would be some kind of bible to me; a guide to life and ideal behaviour. As an older person, I see the ‘humbug’ — the frail human being behind the beautiful book or piece of writing: someone with agendas, fears and limitations — and I’m less inclined to be beguiled.

When you have reasons for feeling this way, it can be hard to combat. Nobody wants to be treated casually, and the fear of what others might say about us restrict the choices we make. But they’re our choices, aren’t they?

Try the perfumes, write the stories. And tell all those inner and outer critics to take a break once in a while.

ScribeFire Lake

I’ve got some suspicions about how I came to lose the draft I was working on in ScribeFire. It saves the drafts automatically… so I didn’t hit the wrong button; it just saved itself at an inopportune moment.

In this case, I opened up ScribeFire, which had my post waiting there. Before it was fully displaying, I changed my mind and closed it again. I suppose the text hadn’t had time to appear, and ScribeFire saved it like that before closing (I noticed the hesitation).

And that’s it in a nutshell.

Something else that tripped me up: it used to be that every time you changed the title of a post you were working on, you got a brand new post with the old one being left alone… as a result, you might end up with four or five posts with titles such as the following:

Changes
Changing
Changing My Mind Again
Change…

I was banking on that, and only realized ScribeFire wasn’t doing that any more when I deliberately renamed a post from Post II to Post I, then changed Post I, secure (or so I believed) in the knowledge that I still had Post II waiting in the wings for further editing.

In fact, all I had was Post I, and when I deleted blocks of it, those blocks were gone. Fortunately I had a copy in Word (because of my previous loss).

People do unexpected things like suddenly decide to close a document again… and they develop a method of working which clashes with software changes we weren’t expecting. If you take away stepping stones without replacing them with some kind of warning dialogue, we fall in the river!

Actually, this makes me think of a news item about someone who ended up dooking his vehicle in a flooded area because his Sat Nav hadn’t been updated to show that there wasn’t a road there any more. He blamed the Sat Nav, but people can’t help asking how it was he didn’t see the lake? I don’t know, I wasn’t there. But I certainly didn’t see the ScribeFire lake.

Answering a Writing Challenge III

Part III of a writing challenge by Elizabeth at 1sojournal:

I never: bungee-jump or swim with the sharks. On second thoughts, I shouldn’t say that, as I’ve been in the Indian Ocean. Perhaps there were little sharks whisking around, and a few bigger ones further away. I was only little and not looking for them, so how would I know? I’m pretty sure I haven’t bungee-jumped though…

I am curious about: what other people think when they are on their own.

I remember: the sea breaking on the beach at night. It was so hot you threw back your sheet, and you were still hot. You thought about how black the sea was outside in the night, but it wasn’t frightening, as you only thought about the sparkling breakers, the sand and the coconut palms.

I also remember: someone telling me off for typing ‘the Internet’ with a capital I, although it’s supposed to be correct. He says it will change and has probably already changed, and nobody with any sense will bother to give it a capital ‘I’. So now I see the spell checker telling me I’ve got it wrong, but I don’t do anything. I don’t like the capital I either, but it still bothers me… I want the green squiggly line to go away.

I am enlightened: by the words and experiences of others.

Answering a Writing Challenge II

Part II of a writing challenge by Elizabeth at 1sojournal:

I hear: nothing… just a vague rumble. I can feel the house buzzing under my feet; it feels as though a wind is hitting the side of the house and getting underneath the floorboards. But it could be pipes or the water tank… I don’t know.

I removed my hearing aids because my ears were tired. Sometimes they get sore and I have to rest them for a day or two.

If Mum comes in behind me and wants my attention, she will stamp on the floor or thump the desk so that I feel the vibrations.

I regret: breaking things. Hurting feelings. Mishearing or misunderstanding things, or expressing myself poorly, especially when it leads to missed opportunities.

I always: support myself when going downstairs. When you live with cats, it’s sensible to be prepared!

I cry: as privately as possible. I hate funerals for that reason… I will never go to anyone’s funeral ever again if I can avoid it… but I will find my own way of remembering people. I read about those who fear people won’t come to their own funerals, and I don’t understand at all. I wouldn’t care. I will have escaped!

I don’t always: know what’s going on. In fact that’s such an understatement it’s almost funny. You miss cues and information about what everyone is doing and where they’re going. You wait for people to say goodbye to each other so that you can say goodbye too at the right moment. You wave when everyone surges forwards, only for the conversation to continue… or for those people to reappear (seemingly as arranged) at the next place. Then people finally leave, rushing off just as you’re looking the other way.

I fight: when I’m angry.

I write: more than I speak.

Answering a Writing Challenge I

Well, as I have a hard copy of this in Word now, I can use ScribeFire to post it on my blog!

Answering a writing challenge by Elizabeth at 1sojournal:

I am: enjoying blogging and other internet interactions.
When I reread this sentence later, I thought it significant that I described blogging as an ‘interaction’ rather than some kind of platform where I write and other people read.

I think: too much. A few days ago I thought myself into a low mood. It’s called ‘remembering slights and wrongs, and brooding about them’. Elizabeth pointed out it can help to work through things in a private journal. I fear some subjects and avoid them, and if I do write about something bad that happened, it unsettles me all over again to read it later… even years later. But I wonder if laying out why one feels a certain way about things might help to make it less of a bugaboo.

I know: nothing’s ever black and white.

I hate: losing things I’ve worked on. An earlier attempt at this was swallowed by ScribeFire. I can’t remember everything I wrote (up to and including the point of ‘I hear’… which comes in a later part) and so I’m putting some different answers. I can’t recreate what was going through my mind before, as I was in a different mood.

I also hate: when people criticize those they’ve not met themselves or don’t know very well, or have never personally spoken to. What makes any of them think they know everything there is to be known about another person or family, and that it’s possible to ’snap out of’ something they’ve never personally experienced? Some of those who are the most confident in their judgement are the least knowledgeable.

I miss: those days when I believed people actually listened to what you were saying and weren’t looking for an excuse to think the worst of you or anyone else.

I was starting to get a bit grumpy, but then I’d been reading some things that made my hair stand on end.

Unbalanced TV Diet (repost)

I deleted the following post by accident via ScribeFire. I was trying to delete it from the ScribeFire drafts, not as a completed, polished and published post from the actual blog, so as you can imagine, I’m pretty annoyed!

I’m also annoyed because I was working on a long post in ScribeFire, one I had already spent a couple of days on, and that just vanished. The post title is still there, but the content is gone. Remind me not to ‘work on things’ in ScribeFire again — I’ll probably continue to use it as a handy code generator, but no longer for actual blog posts.

Frasier is comforting. A show like Will and Grace never grabbed me, but you can depend on Frasier. His apartment is home — you want to sit watching TV with Martin, or go out on the balcony to gaze at a Seattle sunset and the lights coming on all over the city.

Sometimes I crave Frasier like I crave a drink when I’m thirsty.

Mum’s TV habits sometimes give me the feeling I’m eating too many sweets, or too much salty food. It’s frustrating to see her flipping through the TV guide… skipping over Frasier, Stargate, Desperate Housewives, the news and anything else I was quite in the mood for, and ending up on MASH, Britain’s Best Dish, Family Fortunes, The Weakest Link, 1 vs 100, Golden Balls, Eggheads, Judge Judy, the X Factor and anything else that drives me crazy. I’ve even got fed up with Come Dine with Me. But it’s her TV, so I don’t say anything. I’ve got my own TV upstairs, and sometimes I’m too tired, lazy or company-seeking to come up here and watch it. Some channels are not available upstairs, including the one with Frasier on it.

So I read a book instead.