To begin with

-
That’s not my cat.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Coping Strategies

-
Image
When I was a kid, my mother was always after me about coping. "You need to learn to cope!" she'd say when I hurt myself or something surprising caused me to cry. My Grade One report card noted that I "had a lot of potential but [cries] too much." Mum was sure that swimming lessons would help me learn to cope so I started as soon as I was tall enough to touch the bottom. I learned to swim but there always seemed to be a shortfall on the coping side. It stuck. I believed I was bad at coping until about five years ago. I almost coped myself to death that year while I managed a miscarriage mostly on my own. After I got home from the hospital and started to get over the shock, I kept thinking about how I had finally learned to cope. When I shared this insight with a colleague, he was SHOCKED. He told me that in fact I was one of the very best copers he knew.  Huh. I started looking at a lot of things and realized he was right. I completely let go of the idea that ...
Read more

Oh hello

-
Image
I bought a new laptop the other night. My old one was adopted by Dave before I got too attached and I've been trying to run my "real life" off my phone and iPad ever since. That seemed to work well enough but I ignored a lot of email and certain things seemed impossible; like writing anything more than 1000 characters long. Obviously, I haven't been writing either. I always chalked it all up to laziness; maybe that's part of it, but it dawned on me recently that I'm a touch typist and pecking things out on a screen-sized "keyboard" doesn't make any sense. It's fine for social media but it's no good for email or the rest of my "real life" writing and working.  Once I realized there was a genuine problem to solve and getting a laptop wasn't just a "want," I set out to fix it. I looked at my bank account, talked to people I know and trust well enough to help me evaluate what I needed in a machine, and I ran it by Dave...
Read more

Look Up

-
Image
  All I really want to share today are the lyrics from Mark Erelli and Dinty Child's magnificent song, Look Up . I heard it for the first time during a Rose Cousins concert (where I feel like I heard her for the first time, but I know I had before) where Mark Erelli opened. It was held in my church and there was a moment when I peered down from the balcony in the dark of the sanctuary and I was mesmerized. I followed the words of a song I was hearing for the first time but felt like I already knew, and it felt like something was being passed to me to hold. I can't quite explain it but the lyrics come back to me when I need them, and so does a sense of something calm and clear.  Sometimes it means slow down and look up. Sometimes it means stop looking down, look up. (Not cheer up, just look up) Sometimes, a lot of times, it means stop looking in, look out and look up. Sometimes it means something else. Yesterday, I was at my sister's house. One of her chickens had an unfortu...
Read more