Z is for Zydeco

Growing up in New England, I wasn't exposed to much zydeco. In fact, altho' I can’t remember if my first experience came from Mary Chapin Carpenter singing about Beausoleil, or if it was while watching the movie, “Big Easy”, I know I was already an adult living on my own when that door was opened for me.

Zydeco is a funny little word for a marvelously big sound. 

No one can really decide where the word came from - whether it’s West African, Atakapan, or Louisiana French Creole, but it’s been a musical term at least since the late 1920’s.

For once, however, I’m completely uninterested in the etymology.

What’s important to me about zydeco is that it’s a danged fine form of music - one that provides the perfect background to the “I Finished The A-Z Challenge!" Happy Dance.

C’mon! Out of your chair and dance with me!

Oh, and lest we forget that it’s also a Spock Sunday, here's an extremely rare photo of Spock

... jamming with Buckwheat Zydeco.

            Aaaaaah, chere!

Y is for You

When SP suggested “you” as the Y word, my first thought was, "Hell, no!" - but then I got intrigued...

Because when you think about it, “you” is kind of the bad-ass of the pronoun world, isn’t it? Much more precise than a vague "it", "you" has identity, yet still gets to mean whatever the heck it feels like meaning in any one instance. Sometimes that’s the individual being addressed, sometimes a specific group of people… and sometimes it’s even just a bunch of hypothetical people who may or may not actually exist. “You” is a word that creates its own validity from context, not some external definition.

Nonetheless, it generally makes itself quite clear, doesn't it?

I'm pretty sure, after all, that you (my readers) can guess which one of these is directed at a particular individual, which to a specific group, and which to those potentially hypothetical folk.

(Hint: you guys are the specific group!)

As a matter of fact, “you” is so powerful that it exists even when we leave it out completely.

(“In an imperative, the you is understood.”)

Have a nice day!   :-D

X is for X-Acto

When it  came to gadgets and household tools, my parents didn’t belong so much to the school of “Keep it away from the children” as they did “Teach your child how to use this safely.” I know there must have been safety scissors in my life because there’s still a pair floating around in the junk drawer (Hey, you never know when a child might descend upon your house!) but I don’t recall ever being forced to use them. From when I can remember, at least, I was allowed regular grown up scissors. (Except Mom’s best pinking shears, but that was to protect her shears, not my fingers.)

Razors, however, were an exception to this liberality. I wasn’t allowed near any kind of box cutter, glass scraper, or X-Acto knife. And despite great temptation (from both the forbidden nature and the cool things you could do with these devices,) I obeyed. (What a model child!)

Even after the ban was lifted, the habit stuck with me. (Probably because age had brought a greater understanding of just how much damage I could actually inflict on myself, generally without even trying… says the woman who has cut her finger on a cucumber.)

But it can be hard to do a lot of crafty-type things without a good sharp cutting device, so when I finally moved away from home, I decided it was time to buy myself an X-Acto knife set - and a very nice set I got, indeed. (Altho’ it didn’t have the cool chisel tool you can get now - and I’m still deciding if I feel bitter about that or not.) I didn’t need the set right away, so it sat on the shelf in pristine condition for several months, but finally, time for the first craft project arrived…

Ah-ha! I am READY!

Well, sort of ready. I don’t really have a good work surface… but that’s OK. I’ll just sit cross-legged on the rug over here under the window (for good light!) and use a big piece of cardboard set in my lap.

Gentle readers, let’s pause to think about that scenario for a moment...

I was about to sit, femoral artery turned upward and protected only by a flimsy, penetrable surface, over which I would hunch while slicing objects with a dangerously sharp blade.

Aaaand, it went about as well as might be expected…

      (Altho' obviously, it wasn't a complete disaster, since I lived to tell the tale.)

I managed to miss the artery and just score briefly (albeit deeply) into the soft tissue of my inner thigh. But it was a clean cut, so it healed well. (*ahem*)

But I have to tell you - the X-Acto knives have been relegated to “Blade of Last Resort” standing… and their pristine condition is marred only by the dust of thirty-odd years.

X-Acto knives are wonderful things,

       but some of us should be legally prevented from using them.

W is for Waterskiing

Classic Beginner Style

I’ve been waterskiing since I was quite young. 

When I was a kid, a big bunch of us would waterski every weekend of the summer - and the odd weeknight, as well.

Then we got older, we all had jobs to work around, drift set in, and the skiing time got spaced out to intervals of once every 2-3 weeks. (With nary a weeknight in sight.)

Later still, in full adulthood, it dropped to maybe 4-5 times a summer.

And ever since that pesky skull fracture/concussion event of several years ago, my new friend Vertigo has made waterskiing a thing of the past.

But in my dreams, I still fly across the water…

Hit It!!

Now, I never did get the hang of slaloming. Our boat didn’t have enough oomph to pull me up on slalom, so I had to start on two skies (kinda like this) and drop one… which I could do.

I could even ski on one leg…

I could just never get my free foot into the back binding. Something about that action sent me head over teakettle every time. Eventually, I got tired of skiing on one leg with my free foot wrapped around the back of my calf like a stork, and I decided that I’d much rather enjoy the skiing I could do rather than make myself nuts trying to conquer the slalom.

Because, really, there wasn’t all that much difference to me between the two. (Other than, you know, stability...) Granted, I couldn’t do the really deep cuts to create gorgeous plumes of water… and yeah, that would be fun. But I could still whip out to the side so fast that I got ahead of the boat and needed to take up the slack with my arms. (By pulling in or pulling up.)

Wheeeee!!!!

I could still jump the wake like a woman possessed... 

Yes, yes, she's on a slalom - I couldn't find a decent picture of a wake jumper on two skis.
BIAS! Bias, I tell you!

I could still do a digger...

Head Smack = Bad

I could even still do this... 

Not on purpose, I grant you, but it's been known to happen...

Really, I was perfectly happy skiing with both feet solidly atop the water - and I really miss it.

(*sigh*)

But if I can’t ski myself, maybe there’s some way I can think of to manage it…?

I'm particularly fond of the wings... 

Hmmmm…. Thinking, thinking hard…. thinking...

V is for Vignette

V is a funny letter… there are plenty of words that start with it - but they are often not words that call to me. Since I really didn’t feel like writing about vanity, or volatility, or voluptuousness, or, or, or…, I started flipping through the dictionary. 

In browsing past the word “vignette”, I saw that it was defined as a small illustration used at the beginning or end of a book or chapter. That surprised me a little, as I’d only ever thought of vignettes as stories… so I went digging farther, looking at alternate definitions and explanations, until I finally found the above illustration… and the internal monologue began. 

I will not tax your patience with the many bounces and turns my train of thought took - the salient point here is the comment that Jz the Talker ended up making - which completely stopped Jz the Listener dead in her tracks. 

“No plot, no story, just a series of vignettes… sounds like my life!”

I joked during the theme reveal that my words would be random because I write like I live. 

       Ha-ha, right?

But that spontaneous flippancy made me think…

I may have been teasing but I really do write like I see my life - in a series of vignettes.

Small, descriptive scenes, of both highs and lows, all with their own theme or idea, all of which fit together to comprise the whole of my life… 

Yet they all stand alone, without plot or unifying arc to unite them into one big Story of My Life. 

In my head, I don’t have a story of my life.

Instead, I hopscotch along, jumping from vignette to another.

What about you?

Does your life have an intricate plot? A story line? 

Or are you another hopscotcher, like me?

U is for Unicorn

(you can thank SP for this one, too!)

In a memorable phrase from “Artemis Fowl”, Foaly reassures Commander Root, “It's like learning to ride a unicorn. You never forget.” ... Of course, this is sci-fi fantasy but none the less, it got me thinking about unicorns… and I have to tell you, I don’t think I’d just hop up on the back of one of them. I mean, what do we really know about how safe it would be to ride a unicorn? You never see pictures of anyone astride one. I’d be asking questions first, I tell you!

In fact, I have a lot of questions about unicorns.

          For one thing, when did they morph from this:

to this:?

How did the dignified beast of myth come to be portrayed as aberrant form of puppy?

       (Do unicorn puppies piddle in all colors of the rainbow?)

What persuaded unicorns to move to the Forbidden Forest?

       …And how on earth did a recuperating, "I'm hiding my disembodied self under a turban on the back of this weenie's head" Voldemort manage to overpower one?

Why is unicorn fudge made in garish, unnatural colors when a unicorn is pure white?

       Are we certain unicorns even like fudge?

And for the love of God... 

          can somebody please help me understand what is up with a Unicorn Frappucino?!?

Important as matters of appearance, locale, and questionable marketing may be, however, the question about unicorns that plagues me the most is this:

In medieval times, a unicorn was often seen as holy thing... a representation of Christ, in fact.

Nowadays, I am reliably informed, “unicorn” is slang for "that rare find - a bisexual third party willing to join an existing couple in bed with no expectations or emotional strings attached." 

HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?!?

T is for Trees

I've long joked that I must have been a Druid in a past life, because I have such a fondness for being amid trees - the more of them, the better. Not in an, “I must hug you now” kind of way, I hasten to add, but I actually do find it mentally uncomfortable to be in an area where there are no trees. (Fortunately, that doesn’t happen a lot in New England.)

The thing is that, with a tree, there’s always something to look at that will fascinate. Tracing the ridges and gullies of the bark, highways for small insects; the imperfect symmetry of individual branches and how, together, they fashion a near-perfect shape; the stark beauty of bare branches against the sky; the mesmerizing play of light when those branches are covered with soft green leaves… No, you’re never bored around a tree.

I can’t tell you how often I head outside with my book, intending to sit under the tree and read… only to find myself far too absorbed by tree contemplation to even crack open the pages. 

Hmmm... Trees trumping books…

You know I must really like trees! :-)

(click thru for immersive experience!)

S is for Spock, too!

S is for Slipcovers

A not-so-secret secret about me: 

       I loathe sewing.

This pretty much makes me a genetic aberration, because all the other women in my family loved it. My grandma was renowned for the quality of her hand-smocking; my mom had a bureau full of fabric for projects she hadn’t even planned yet; one of the most common lullabies of my childhood was the whirring of a sewing machine…

But me?

       Hate it.

However…

While I can cheerfully bypass the trusty Singer for things like clothes and curtains, all of which can be found at a store for reasonable prices, I simply cannot bring myself to pay for slipcovers. The affordable ones are cheesy and awful, the nice ones cost more than that new washing machine I need. 

So…, I will sew slipcovers. 

However, I do not do so either often or well…

That corollary to the law of inertia which declares that the more you dislike an action, the harder it will be to begin comes into particularly strong play around any sewing project. I will stall and stall and stall before finally digging in. In fact, I’ve been doing the Dance of Avoidance around my latest project for about 3 years now. 

       -First I had to measure all the cushions. (Figure 6-8 weeks.)

       -Then I have to figure out the “pattern”… how to best arrange the pieces in order to maximize cloth usage. I do not have either the discernment or the patience to only cut on the straight grain. I avoid the bias, but a mix of cross and straight grains are just fine by me. So, I can cram the pieces together and save a few yards of fabric. This part isn’t quite as slow, because it’s kind of a logic problem, it's actually fairly fun. (Say 3 weeks.)

       -Then I had to find the fabric. (That took a good five months.)

       -Find matching thread and wind the bobbins - (A remarkable one week.) 

(Which is much better than last time I made slipcovers, when my bobbin winder was broken and I had to do them all by hand. [!!!] I’m using the fact that I was in my twenties at the time as my excuse for that particular piece of idiocy…)

After having stretched all that out over such a long period of time, I am now completely fed up with this project that I really haven’t actually started on yet and I deliberately turn my back to it.

No, I really don’t do this often.

As to the doing well… well…

Let’s talk about that last slipcover project.

My seams were certainly sturdy, I hold my head up there. But the tension (or lack thereof) in those hand-wound bobbins frequently resulted in some extremely snarled and messy lines of stitching. Granted, those were all on the inside and not visible… but the likelihood of sloppy tangles certainly put paid to any thoughts of decorative top-stitching, I can tell you.

There also wasn’t enough of the extremely lovely fabric I had chosen to actually cover the couch. I pretty much knew this ahead of time but I was so smitten by the beauty of that single, lone (and sparse) remnant that I was determined to stretch its inadequate dimensions to fit.

       Much creative piecing ensued…

I did manage it - and the sofa looked terrific… 

… …

       … … 

              …  … as long as you didn’t lift the cushions.

(Let’s just say that the pieces I patchworked in beneath there weren’t actually all that close in design or color to the lovely remnant… and draw the curtain quietly on the subject - before the words, “painful eyesore” can be uttered…)

My mama would have swatted me.

She would also have laughed her head off and told me she was proud of me for sewing at all.

(And then swatted me again for the bobbin-winding.)

Maybe this time around, I can make her (spirit) genuinely proud.

You know… when I eventually sew my Slipcovers.

R is for Readin' Recipes

I know there’s solace to be found in food (emotional eating, anyone?) but I also find it strangely comforting to simply read recipes, as well. It’s a little bit of an armchair adventure for me, to peruse the ingredients, imagine the taste, contemplate which friend might best enjoy this dish… Really, it leaves me feeling quite contented when I come across some exciting new recipe possibility.

Truly, the social component of recipe reading is a large portion of my enjoyment. I evaluate recipes with my friends in mind: Hmmm... Tiny Woman would like this one, with its large helping of crunchy raw veggies; Q would enjoy this plain meat ’n’ potatoes meal; this one will be handy for my assorted vegetarian friends; and oooh! this one contains cheesecake/jalapenos/raw herring - perfect for SP! (Even BG still tries to barge his way into my mental dinner party planning but I’m getting better at locking the door.)

But it's also true that my recipe reading pleasure also stems in part from the fact that I’m actually a pretty good judge of how a completed recipe will taste, which bolsters my cooking success. I sometimes wonder if this is some form of recipe reading talent or if it’s simply many long years of cooking and eating. (Operation Healthy would seem to indicate the latter but I prefer the fantasy of having mad skillz!)

But regardless of origin, regardless if the recipes are for sweet, sour, savory, baked, boiled, familiar, or exotic… I can generally predict what the outcome will be like.

In fact, the only place this skill seems to fail me is in evaluating recipes for disaster.

There, I completely lose all pretensions to sound judgement.

But that’s another post for another day…

;-p

Q is for Quasi

quasi

     1- to a degree but not completely 

     2- seemingly; apparently but not really

I’m not sure if SP chose his words because they reminded him of me or if they were purely random selections… but boy-howdy did this one hit home!

Intentionally or not, he managed to find the perfect word to sum up just how I’ve been feeling these past few months:

       Quasi.

Someone who is almost (some thing)…

       but not quite.

Quasi practically anything you can think of, in fact:

Happy, sad, contented, depressed, broke, flush, discouraged, enthused, loved, disdained…

The whole gamut.

       Almost… but not quite.

It's been five long months of being a quasi-Jz.

Apparently - but not really... myself.

So, the perfect word indeed for the year of the mantra, “Fake It 'til You Make It.”

But the mantra is working, ladies and gentlemen.

And even my state of quasi… is becoming quasi.
(Which makes me a quarter quasi?)

Which I was going to expound upon further, but I’m stopping now, because the letters in quasi are starting to look all funny and wrong... and kinda making me queasi.

P is for Predestination

Predestination: (a doctrine in Christian theology) the divine foreordaining of all that will happen, especially with regard to salvation.

Another word taken from SP's suggestions. This may prove interesting, as he and I are on rather divergent paths when it comes to theology, religion, and doctrines - so who knows what kind of a grade my Scholarly Professor will give me on this one. 

However, I bravely proceed…

As a deist, I don’t have a lot of truck with doctrines at the best of times. But predestination in particular has always struck me as a senseless concept, especially when taken from the strict, traditional Christian viewpoint.

Personally, I have a really hard time believing that God has nothing better to do than to form us as creatures of immutable destiny; dangle the carrot of hope for something better in the afterlife; and then sit back and watch our frantic scramblings to qualify to achieve that something… all the while knowing that our efforts are futile, and our ultimate destination is already a done deal.

That’s God as sadist, toying with humanity, and I simply do not accept that.

So, saying No to predestination.

And yet, I do have a fairly deep-seated belief in the reality of fate… and realistically, there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the two. Which leaves me with the sticky question: if predestination and fate are practically the same concept, how do I reconcile faith in one with my dismissal of the other?

I guess I see life as a journey of progress. Fate guides you within a certain path but doesn’t interfere with your ability to wander, explore, and learn. It’s not a micro-manager, but a big-picture kind of guy that can’t be bothered with the minute details. Should you choose to leave the path and go get lost in the woods, fate just shrugs and says, “OK. Plan B…”

Predestination, on the other hand, is more like an ankle monitor that prevents you from ever leaving the house.

(“Those of you heading to the sixth circle, keep together and follow me!”)

O is for Oblivious

Oddly enough, SP & I had some degree of synchronicity when it came to my O-word. I was intending “oblivious”, he suggested “oblivion”. (I went with my word but I’m calling this one a draw!)

I wish I could say that there is no particular reason to correlate this word with “me”, but I can’t pull that one off. To “stop being so oblivious to everything around you!” was one of the most frequent scoldings of my childhood years. (Oh, who am I kidding? I heard it from Dad right up to the end.) Deservedly so - when I’m thinking about something, I get tunnel vision and tune everything else out. It’s entirely possible that my obituary will read, “Died of walking into a burning building while focused on her inner thoughts…”

In researching the word, however, I ended up going down an etymological rabbit hole, trying to chase down the root word. (I had wondered if there was a shared root with “obvious”, but that doesn’t appear to be the case, at least not in the way I’d imagined.) 

      oblivious comes from oblivio or obliviosus, meaning forgetful

The more current definition of oblivious means “unmindful, unconscious, or unaware”.

Yeah, that fits the burning building scenario…

I was okay with the definitions I came across - they all felt fairly neutral, statements of fact as opposed to judgmental evaluations. The synonyms for oblivious, however, are pretty disturbing. They start with blind, deaf, and inattentive, then move on to unconcerned and uninformed, with stops at blundering, careless, and neglectful along the way.

Those words all gave me pause - especially seeing them clumped together like that, negative connotation upon negative connotation. I had been going along, happily viewing my obliviousness as a mildly charming personality quirk, but now I am having to consider the possibility that it’s actually an unpleasant character flaw. I doubt that's a self-portrait that anyone would be happy to see - I know I certainly wasn’t happy with the vision, that’s for sure.

Kind of gets me wondering if I’m being oblivious to the realities of being oblivious…

(This could get very confusing, very fast.)

What do you more attentive types think?

N is for Night Vale

This was actually going to feature in P is for Podcast but “podcast” lost out in the elimination round - and then I realized I could still sneak the post in here, just under a different letter. 

(Sorry SP…, no “nudity”… but you’re getting your “P” request, so there should be no grousing!)

Night Vale is the fictional town featured in my current podcast obsession, “Welcome to Night Vale”. It’s a small desert town “somewhere in the Southwestern United States”, where every conspiracy theory you can imagine is actually real and happening right outside the door. 

The format of the podcast is simply that of a radio show featuring the news, announcements, and advertisements of this small, bizarre town. It has been described as “the news from Lake Wobegon as seen through the eyes of Stephen King”, and “NPR meets The Mothman Prophecies”... both of which succeed in capturing the feel of the show.

Full of quirky characters that would fit right into The Twilight Zone, the show is intelligent, creepy, totally absurd, and extremely funny. It’s low-key, the kind of show that just mosies along, piquing your curiosity at every turn but never taking you all the way to the edge of your seat. There are running jokes, long arcs of plot lines, and the kind of complex weaving of events that happens in everyday life. It’s the outlandish presented as the mundane and I find it completely delightful.

A large part of the success of the format for this show comes directly from the narrator, host, and main character, Cecil (voiced by Cecil Baldwin.) Mr. Baldwin himself likens his voice to that of a 1950’s radio announcer - and that that quality contributes a great deal to the authentic feel of the show. He has the sound, the timing, and a superb delivery... he makes the Night Vale Radio show feel absolutely convincing, no matter how far-fetched the scenario.

It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I couldn’t argue with anyone who told me they found it too silly for words, but the bizarre mix of surrealism and deadpan humor absolutely works for me.

Are you a Night Vale fan already? 

Are you willing to give it a try and see if you could be become one? 

"M" 2.0 - Spock Style

Sorry, selkie! It only came in the evil bearded version... ;-p

M is for Meniscus

A meniscus (plural: menisci, from the Greek for "crescent") is the curve in the upper surface of a liquid close to the surface of the container or another object, caused by surface tension.

They can be convex or concave, depending on the liquid and the surfaces. So, when I go to read my oil tank gauge, I’m looking to see where the bottom of the concave curve sits. A concave meniscus is easy to deal with, not risky at all.

A convex meniscus, however…, one that bulges up at the top? 

       That one allows me to play with danger on a regular basis.

Because that burgeoning surface tension is the crapshoot I throw every morning as I overfill my coffee cup. (A trait that drove my Dad to distraction, as well as fascinating him.) It's not really that I have consciously chosen to make it my life’s goal to push the envelope of physics and see just how high I can get the coffee to bulge before it spills... Yet it’s an easy enough thing to avoid… and I never bother to do so.

Instead, I’ve spent years perfecting the skills of the proficient meniscus-manipulator. I know juuuust when to stop pouring the milk before disaster strikes; I’ve learned the precise angle and distance for slurping that enables me to siphon the surplus up and away without creating overflow or getting it all over my shirt. (I have not yet taught myself how to stir the sugar in first, however. That’s the Advanced Class.)

Menisci.

Providing family fun for over 40 years...

L is for Levity

When SP suggested the word “levity” (Hey! I’m finally doing a word off of his list!) I pretty much thought I knew where the post was going to go. Humor, laughter, blah-blah,… oh yeah, I can handle this. 

However, having been raised on the maxim, “Never shoot off your mouth unless your brain is loaded”, I decided I’d better look up the precise definition before I started to hold forth… and realized there was a very large gap in my understanding of the nuances of the word.

lev·i·ty  (ˈlevədē/)

noun:  1. humor or frivolity, especially the treatment of a serious matter with humor or in a manner lacking due respect.

That last portion is where my understanding had failed me: 

     “in a manner lacking due respect"… 

That really is one of the edges where humor can go wrong, isn’t it? Light-hearted can easily be seen as silly, joking can be seen as mockery… and any of those perspectives can trigger a feeling of disrespect.

Personally, I’m a big fan of levity. For one thing, the world is grim enough as it is and needs all the sunshine that can possibly be brought into it. So I do my part by trying to keep things light, to invite people to join me in enjoying the silly and absurd, rather than to get lost in the seriousness of It All. 

But my approach isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, I realize that. We all have our sensitivities and sensibilities and humor doesn’t always translate across personalities. So that missing nuance often ends up being the thing that bites me in the butt. Instead of amusing, I end up disdained for my inanity - and attempted quashing ensues.

Yet, who judges when humor has slipped into disrespect? 

      Anyone who feels offended, or is there a perceptible universal standard?

And how do you determine who initiated the lack of respect?

      The frivolour or the judge?

Levity.

It seems like such a light little word - who knew it could be so slippery?

K is for Knickknack

I can’t ever see or hear the word knickknack without thinking of my mother.

I was, as I’m sure no one who’s read here for any length of time will be surprised to hear, a pestilentially curious child. 

         “What is that?” 

         “What makes that work like that?” 

         “What does that word mean?”

Mom bore this with fortitude for several years but somewhere around the time I turned 7, she informed me that I needed to learn to look these things up for myself. Curiosity was good but just asking other people was lazy. Here’s the dictionary and how it works - Have at it, child!

But of course, I was both lazy and a child.

A voracious reader… but lazy - and a child.

~one memorable evening, circa mid-1960's~

“Mom, what’s a… baah… baow… um….b-a-u-b-l-e?”

“Honey, I told you to stop asking me and look things up yourself.”

         uh-oh.

         busted.

         quick! fib!

“I tried but I didn’t understand what it said.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!”

Pretty sure she had caught me out, she stepped briskly into the room, fully prepared to score a parental point. She grabbed the 1936 Webster’s International from the shelf, flipped to the “B”s, and found the word.

“Baw-ble: noun…” she declaimed…, then paused ever-so-briefly, a funny look passing over her face, before concluding dramatically… “a knickknack, gewgaw, gimcrack.” 

With a definitive snap, she shut the book, looked at me, and said, “I really don’t see how they could have been any clearer than that.”

She made it almost a full two seconds before bursting into a fit of giggles.

(She loved the absurd, did my mom.)

So, to this day, whenever I hear the word “knickknack”, I inevitably mentally append, “gewgaw, gimcrack”… and think of my mom.

And smile.

J is for Jane Yellowrock

This is particularly perfect timing, as it lets me do the letter "J " and a What’cha Readin’ Wednesday, all in one fell swoop! I love serendipity!

It’s no secret that I can be found with my nose buried in a paranormal at any time but I lean even more heavily on them during times when my life is busy making me wish I was occupying someone else's, instead. (Oh, Hi, 2017!) Escapist adventure, take me away!

This winter, Faith Hunter’s Jane Yellowrock has been my vehicle of choice - I’ve been totally face-down, binge (re)reading the series lately.

I like my fantasy-type reading to be largely realistic. The kind where you have to accept one or two implausible situations, like time-travel, or that vampires are real, but then the rest of the story falls in line with reality. That lets me exercise my imagination but keeps it all relatable, as well.

And relate to Jane Yellowrock, I certainly do. She’s tall, (ok, she’s skinny too, but this is fantasy!) kind of a loner, possessed of a big heart which is frequently obscured by the big foot in her mouth. She lives by a solid moral code - yet she kills (rogue vampires) for a living. *hmmmm, what else...?* She can't be bothered with makeup (except for red lipstick on special occasions)... 

Oh, and she hates to have people cussing when she’s within earshot. :-D

She’s also completely kick-ass. (Umm, we’ve moved on from the parts I relate to, btw. This paragraph's just more stuff I like about her, with no claims of commonality.) She meets smokin' men all over the place and thoroughly enjoys the eye candy, but reserves any serious interest for her beaux. (She's had two in the series so far, both highly complex and completely drool-worthy.) There’s plenty of hot monkey sex but it is kept nicely shielded behind the bedroom door. We know it’s there, but we don’t have to have it shoved into our 'still recovering from heart-break' face, either. 

She loves her motorcycle. (OK, this should go in between the other two paragraphs, because I can relate to the loving bikes... but not to owning any.) And her Lucchese boots. (Good for both bike riding and kicking rogue vampire behind.)

Jane's world centers around New Orleans, which is one of my favorite cities, even if it is stinkin’ hot. (But I can forgive much for some good cafe au lait and beignets.) Her boss is a vampire (non-rogue,) her partners are a former Army Ranger and his über-geek hacker of a kid brother, her best friend is a witch, and did I mention that Jane herself routinely shapeshifts into a mountain lion?

That’s no more than one or two implausible situations, is it? ;-D

Seriously, I love this series.

If you’ve never read Jane, give her a try!

I is for Inertia

inertia [in-ur-shuh, ih-nur-] 

noun: inertness, especially with regard to effort, motion, action, and the like; 

    inactivity; sluggishness.

Inertia defines my life these days… and I’m really not loving it.

I am not afflicted with nearly the amount of Puritan work ethic that infuses the rest of my family but I have been sufficiently inculcated with the concept that I still feel guilty when I’m not going flat out at all times. 

But I seem to have some inner gauge that tallies up the total amount of effort I’m putting out in all areas of my life. It factors in time and difficulty (and time also includes minutes spent simply worrying about accomplishing the goal of said effort, don'cha know) and when it judges that I have reached my maximum effort capacity, it kicks off all other outputs.

Lately, Operation Health and two different money-related projects (one of which is completely outside my comfort zone, thereby rating very high on the difficulty scale) have sucked up all the available effort and left me Sweet Fanny Adams for anything else.

I sit here in my comfy chair, with a 2 ft. pile of gravel that needs raking back into my driveway after the winter’s plowing, a lawn in need of more help than I am constitutionally capable of providing, gardens to turn over, and fallen tree limbs to pick up. I need to repair my chainsaw (in order to use it on said fallen tree limbs,) there is new flooring to be put down, old flooring to be pulled up, my house needs dusting, altho' it's tidy (unless you count the three piles of laundry on the floor,) and, there’s cooking for the week to be done. 

Oh, and April 15th is bearing down on us like a freight-train. (Tax day, for those non-US folk.)

Yet still I sit here in my comfy chair, diddling about with letters and words, indifferent to the demands of everyday life.

“An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.” (The Law of Inertia) 

Apparently, I need to find myself an unbalanced force!

Which probably won't be as hard as it sounds… I know rather a number of them.  ;-p

H is for Hiccups

When I was a kid, hiccups never seemed like a particularly bad thing. After all, if I got them, I was allowed to have some “hiccup sugar” - in actuality nothing more than a simple Domino cube, yet a little piece of heaven for a small child.

When I got older, however, I learned to dread hiccups. 

We think of them as a mild annoyance - but that is only true when you are not in their throes. When your whole body is convulsed by spasming diaphragm and ratcheting glottis, hiccups are the only reality in your world - it is impossible to concentrate on anything else. Your life becomes an obsessive cycle of weathering one spasm, trying to catch your breath, and frantically trying to stave off the next spasm.

And no one ever offers you hiccup sugar as an adult, dammit. 

Instead, they wait for you finish, with neither sympathy nor a whole lot of patience.
Because, can’t you control yourself, for heaven’s sake? 

Between the discomfort and the impatience, you want these things gone - and gone now! So you need to find an effective hiccup remediation technique, pronto. 

Have you found a way that works for you?

Dubious advice and wives tales abound, of course. But I actually have found a way that works for me most of the time. I take a big, deep breath, hold it..., then drink water upside down.

It’s surprisingly effective … and not that hard to do, really. 

You just bend over at the waist, carefully bring your glass of water to your lips, and drink. The only problem is that this move really only works when you’re alone. Because if there’s anyone else present in the room, inevitably you’ll both start laughing at the sight you present… and you’ll end up pouring the water into your nose instead of your mouth. (Don’t ask me how I know this.)

It’s true that the resulting gasping, choking, and spewing of water will also usually take care of your hiccups… but that’s more a case of killing, rather than curing. I do not recommend nasal lavage for hiccups. Stick to drinking water upside down.

And then go get yourself some hiccup sugar - you deserve it!