Tag Archives: words

I Lollygagged About Making My Resolution

Some people are making New Year’s Resolutions.  Others are loftily saying they refuse to have self-improvement dictated by a calendar; when they see something that needs fixing, they fix it.  Still others feel they are already perfect (you know who you are).  Of course, everybody must do what works for themselves.  Personally, I believe in making a New Year’s Resolution right around Thanksgiving.  Then you have a perfect excuse to overindulge during the subsequent holidays:  “I can eat these cookies; I’m going on a diet January 1st!”  Alas for me, I neglected to do so and had to overindulge with no excuse.

Random picture to denote passage of time while I get more coffee.

What could be more festive that Joan Crawford with an ax?  At least candy is seasonal.  For accuracy’s sake, I point out that I am nobody’s mommy.  I was Mama Q to the boys in my national guard unit, back in the early ’00s, but that was a long time ago.  But I digress.

I think New Year’s Resolutions can be a useful tool.  New year, new beginnings, new hopes.  They don’t always work, of course, but then nothing works all the time in every case. What a lot of pressure to put on a little bitty resolution, not to mention to our own psyches.   “I WILL improve my life, starting on this arbitrary date, and if I do not, I am clearly dirt!”  To me, that is not a helpful way to do it.  Then again, “I will NOT make a New Year’s Resolution, because they clearly do not work!  I will stay just the way I am, so there!”  Well, that is fine if you are one of those perfect people I mentioned earlier.  A friend once said she had some goals.  I like that.  Words matter, and to some of us, having a goal can seem much more attainable than a Resolution (the song about “A Resolution! On Independency!” from 1776  is playing in my head).

Some people have no perception.

I guess this has been a whole lot of half-baked philosophy, more worthy of Lame Post Friday.  Then again, many people find themselves confused about what day it is this time of year.  As regular readers know, I am no stranger to confusion.    I would like to just mention I have made this entire post with a whanging headache (autocorrect thought I meant “changing.”  I would like it to change!) (and autocorrect seems to think autocorrect is not a word, but does not change it) (again, I digress).  Thus I prove to myself that I can so make a blog post when I have a headache.  There goes another excuse!

My skull is screaming.

I close with a shot from The Screaming Skull, another beloved cheesy horror movie, with or without robot heads.  I see I am over 400 words.  Wow!  That must be some good coffee I made!

 

Blank or Blob, It’s a Blog

Is it true that the longer one stares at a blank computer screen (or a blank page) the harder it becomes to put down just one word?  Asking for a friend.

Just kidding.  I am not even really asking, I just couldn’t think of anything else to put down after staring at my blank Add Post screen for a good half a cup of coffee (the coffee is half-caff, so one could argue that it was really only a quarter cup) (but I am no hand at argument).  Anyways, I fear this is going to be another post about I Can’t Possibly Make a Blog Post Today. Or more writing about not writing.

How I am afraid my post will turn out.

I throw in a picture to illustrate my state of mine.  A corollary (ooh, did I get that word right on the first try?) to the first sentence of this post is that words follow words.  In other words (see what I did there?), write something, anything, and you will probably be able to continue writing.  Sometimes it works.   I am not promising good writing will necessarily follow, but one can’t have everything.

 

What my brain feels like.

When I started this blog, I wanted it to be about something, not just me babbling on about my random thoughts (except maybe on Lame Post Friday).  Well, one can always strive for improvement.  Tomorrow I will try for a walk or a run or a visit to a local business.

One of the all-time great endings for a movie.

In the meantime, I will try not to lose my head (sorry, saw the picture in my Media Library and couldn’t resist).

 

Burning Questions on Monstrous Monday

Am I no longer a daily blogger or am I just going through a bad patch? If I return to posting daily will I truly be a daily blogger, considering the number of missed posts? Will I ever return to making a blog post daily? These are the burning questions that plague me on this Monstrous Monday.

I’m not loving the rest of the days either right now.

There is no point in iterating the various points of stress currently monsterizing my life (I’ll be damned: iterating and monsterizing are both words, according to autocorrect. I thought iterating was like a lost positive: you know, you can reiterate something, but nobody ever iterates anything. Monsterizing, I thought I just made up) (but I digress).

Nosferatu stands up to his problems.

I throw in Nosferatu just because he is my favorite. You may have guessed by now (if anybody is still reading) that I got nuthin’. In my defense, I finished and emailed my article to Mohawk Valley Living magazine. In my detriment, I don’t know if it was a very good article. Perhaps I am not the best judge of these things.

Totally me.

I close with a kind of a self portrait. OK, it’s not really me, but it is how I often feel lately. I believe I am not alone.

What I am is over 200 words. I call that a blog post. Can I do it again tomorrow? Can I make a better post? More burning questions to ponder.

Not a Timely Post

I have wussed out on Wednesday to this extent before, but let’s not talk about that.  I guess all my posts this week are going to be I Missed Posting on the Day, So Here’s a Late Post.  Can I break the pattern?  Time will tell.  Time is certainly a blabbermouth.  That is a joke I like to make.  My sister Diane says, “Time is relative.  Not our relative. But I digress.

At first I made those jokes in parentheses, but then I thought of the headline and brought them out into the main text. I wonder if the words feel better out in the open or safer in the parentheses?  Yes, I anthropomorphize almost anything.  But with words, I am not the first. I distinctly remember in Alice in Wonderland (which I read more than once as a child, although I refused to watch the movie in later years) the Caterpillar misusing a word and saying, “When I used a word, it means when I pay it to mean!”  That may not be the exact quote, but he goes on to speak fondly about how they all eagerly await their wages on payday.

Well, now I’m talking about time AND Alice in Wonderland (which I ought to read again; perhaps I could find the annotated version), the the headline is less apt.  Then again, I’m posting Wuss-out Wednesday at 4:30 on Non-Sequitur Thursday morning.  I say it’ll do.  Will I break the late post curse?  I hope you’ll stay tuned to find out.

 

Wanted: A Better Blog Post

How did he make those little people?

I was going to go for a Wordless Wednesday and wanted to use a picture I hadn’t used yet.  I looked all through our Downloads on this laptop but could not find anything I liked. Then I saw the picture I downloaded for Monstrous Monday then lost when my laptop cut out.  Score!  It is Ernest Thesiger as Dr. Pretorius in The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

As you may have noticed, I cannot actually have a blog post without words.  I have mentioned that before.  I like words.  I like to talk, I like to write, even if I have nothing in particular to say.  I suppose this renders me tiresome upon occasion, but, as they say, I gotta be me.

If being tiresome were a crime, perhaps my Wanted poster would look something like this.

This is an older picture of me, with a frame added by a theatre friend of mine.  It was back in 2015, when the Herkimer County Historical Society and Ilion Little Theatre presented the play Roxy by Jack Sherman.  I was honored to play the title role.

This was actually a pretty entertaining flick.

I decided to go to my Media Library for a third picture to round out the post.  I picked this one purely for the alliteration.  Look at all the W’s!  Wasp Woman on Wordless Wednesday!  Or is that Wuss-out Wednesday?  Maybe I should have a glass of wine.

 

Wordless? Not So Much. Christmas Decorations? You Got It!

I thought I would try one of them there Wordless Wednesdays.  For one reason, Steven and I have to get our Christmas cards written tonight, so I can’t sit here with the computer on my lap pondering what to say.  Of course, being me, it will not be entirely wordless.  I enjoy words far too much for that.  But I took a few pictures of our Christmas decorations I would like to share.

“Jolly good tree, don’t you think, m’dear?”

My Mom and Dad gave me this fiber optic tree some years ago.  It is our only tree these days, for reason I believe I explained in an earlier post (and if I didn’t, it’s not that interesting anyways).  The cool bears we purchased at Michael’s in August, GA, when I was in the Army, an increasing number of years ago.

Busy, cluttered, a little random… just like my life.

I guess I got kind of a weird angle on this picture, and you can’t really see all our little things very well, but you can get an idea of the fun surrounding our CD player.  On this CD player, each year I attempt to listen to every one of our Christmas CDs, including as well as a wide variety of music, a couple of versions of A Christmas Carol.  I usually miss a few.  We have a large collection (who, us, go overboard?  Say it ain’t so!).

This is not all our DVDs and videos either.

I randomly hung the Christmas trees up, and Steven added the stocking.  The stocking belonged first to Tabby, then to Spunky.  If we ever get another dog, it will be his or hers.  The Christmas trees are an invention of mine, a kind of a granny triangle (regular readers may recall that the only thing I know how to crochet is a granny square).  I’ve been making them for years, sometimes as individual ornaments, sometimes as garlands like this one.

Well will you look at that?  I am over 300 words. Wordless Wednesday indeed!  I can’t do anything right!

 

Another Post in Haste

Or posthaste, if you like to use old fashioned words (and I do).  I don’t know if I will have time to make a real post later, so I’m going to write a few words now.  Who knows, if I have a chance to get on the internet later, I may post again.  It isn’t likely, though, knowing me (and I do).

So this will make three silly posts in a row (some would use other adjectives; feel free to embellish), after three “real” posts in a row.  Will this be a pattern?  Nah, I’ll just continue to go with the flow, as always.  Oh, this is simply dreadful.  I begin writing a post, because I want to get it done NOW, and I don’t have a damn thing to say.  How embarrassing!  I would even say mortifying!  Or humiliating!  And I don’t even have a thesaurus handy.

Speaking of thesaurus and words, does anybody know the word that means offended but is stronger?  You know, like “mortified” is stronger than “embarrassed.”  I was trying to think of it the other day and came up blank.  The next day I came up with “outraged,” but that wasn’t quite right either, because you can become outraged at a true injustice not only a perceived slight (incidentally, the thing I was more than offended about was not perceived, it was a slight).  I thought of “mortified,” too, but, as mentioned earlier, that is more embarrassed than offended.  I think I may have thought of another one as well, but that one escapes me.  Hey, I’ve only had one cup of coffee this morning.

Ooh, look at that; I’m over 250 words.  Goody! So what do you think: intro, foolish paragraph, paragraph that might (or might not, I admit) amuse.  I’ll call that a post.  Now I’ll hasten on to the other crap I have to get done.  Happy Saturday, everyone!

 

No Wine, No Words

Oh, could I use a couple of pictures today!  Because the words that are currently swirling around in my head are just not  coalescing into a blog post.  And I must make a post soon, because the read-through for Steel Magnolias (you know, the play I’m in a Ilion Little Theatre) is tonight.  Yes, we are heading into another few months of hurried posts before I hurry off to rehearsal or performance.  Yes!  I AM a drama queen!

I am not, unfortunately, a blogger queen.  I typed in the first paragraph and have been sitting here staring at the computer since.

Then I paused to eat supper, bacon and scrambled eggs, made by my husband, Steve.  Yum!  And I keep getting distracted by the Reba re-run on the TV.  That is a largely ignored but very fun little show.  I love Reba McEntire.  I like the rest of the cast as well.  Phew, it’s over now.  Now it’s a show I don’t like.  Watch me get interested in it in spite of myself.  I do that sometimes.  Steven just changed the channel to 20/20 on OWN.  I love true crime shows.

So I guess this is truly a Non-Sequitur Thursday post.  All I have to do now is think of a catchy headline that may or may not have anything to do with this nonsense.

Is This Literally a Bad Post?

A point to ponder:  Why would you call a premeditated murder “unthinkable”?  If it was premeditated, obviously somebody put some thought into it.

Actually (now that I THINK about it), “unthinkable” is kind of a dumb word.  I mean, you can think about anything.  Try to think of something unthinkable.  You can’t, because you just THOUGHT of it!

I know, I know, it is not a word that is meant to be taken literally.  And here I am using “literally” in its actual (literal) meaning, not the way some people use it, indiscriminately for emphasis (as in, “I’m LITERALLY starving to death!”).  I realize that “unthinkable” means “I hate to even think about it” or “I would never even think of doing that!”  or words to that effect (incidentally, that is one of my favorite expressions: “words to that effect”).

Sometimes I just wish people would learn more words so they could use a word that means what they mean it to mean (if you see what I mean).

I suppose one could argue (and there is always one that will argue) (you know who you are, although you probably deny it) that the language is always evolving.  Expressions fall out of favor, phrases are coined, slang terms magically appear.  It just bothers me when they do because people are too damn lazy to find the right word so they just use any old word that’s handy.

Then again, who am I to complain about anybody’s laziness?  I am going to be lazy enough to end this post here and call it Non-Sequitur Thursday.  I hope you are not literally mad at me.  That would be unthinkable.

 

Is Lame Post Friday Really a Thing?

Points to ponder:

Why is it a “spork” and not a “foon”?

Why is it “workaholic” and not “workic”?  After all, an alcoholic is addicted to alcohol.  Nobody is addicted to workahol. Workahol is not even a thing and if it is a thing, it is only because some smart ass made it up to prove didactic types like me wrong.

Hmmm…. the only other points I have are serious ones and I am just not up to making any serious points today.  Still,when one does a post like this, one likes to give three examples (one being me).

Oh, here’s one:  Why do people say, “It goes without saying” and then go right ahead and say it?  Sometimes when there is a lull in the conversation I say, “It goes without saying” and let it hang.

I wonder if this is 200 words.  I’m writing it in a spiral notebook while on break at work and I am disinclined to count the words myself.  Hmm… not up to making serious points, disinclined to count words, hoping I’m done with the post already… It must be Lame Post Friday!

But you already knew that.

Anyways, I am now sitting at my acer typing, and it is not quite 200 words.  Additionally, I am a little afraid I have made some of these ponderable points before.  And apparently “ponderable” is not even a word.  Let us ponder that linguistic tidbit for a while.

Happy Friday, everyone.