No Strings Attached

Posted By Kathleen David on January 22, 2016

I watch the weather. I love that I have places on the Internet to find out what is coming down the pike and what to expect the rest of the day and the evening. I watch patterns and temperatures and the like. I am a weather junkie.

I take most dire forecasts with a grain of salt especially when I see the meteorologists rubbing their hands together with glee.

My ace in the hole is that we have a meteorologist who lives across the street and works for the federal government. His forecasts I believe because he has never steered me wrong. Also, unless he knows without a doubt, he will give me the range of what might happen and then what he is predicting.

This up and coming No’reaster is going to be a pain for several reasons including that the models keep changing based on a dry front coming down from Canada. However now it looks like it will be a bit of a doozy with whiteout conditions and lots of high winds making the possibility of power lines down much higher.

I have walked the property and picked up the fallen limbs. I have checked the trees and made sure that we have secured our garbage cans and the like. Shovels are at the ready and in the house so they will be in reach. I have the village approved salt ready to go. I have found clothing to wear while shoveling including gloves. I have dug out the snow boots.

I went to the pharmacy and made sure we have all that we need from there. I went to the grocery store to find that they were rearranging it so things were everywhere except where things were not. Apparently a lot of people are making French toast from the condition of the milk, bread, and egg sections of the store. I got a few things we needed but I would have gone and gotten them yesterday anyway because that’s when I tend to do the weekend shop.

I have crafty supplies at the ready. Caroline and I have a project or two we want to work on. We have DVDs at the ready. Tonight we will plug in all the electronics to charge including nooks and kindles. We have stacks of books to read. We are ready for this.

The downside is that Caroline’s Lego Robot competition is postponed for two weeks but that’s an upside too as the girls will have more time to work on their project board and robots. A few other things we were going to do are now by the wayside and we rework our schedule.

I have done everything I can to minimize the impact of the storm on us. I am really hoping that we don’t end up in the endless cold and snowy conditions we had last year.

Now let’s see what the storm is going to do.

I am grateful for things that help prepare us for the storm.

Category: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tags:

Posted By Kathleen David on January 21, 2016

I can tell within about ten minutes of waking up what kind of hand day I am going to have. There most days when things are perfectly normal. There are the days that I can feel muscles contracting and releasing without my telling them to. And there are the days where I have to think my way through holding things and use two hands at all times less I drop what I am doing with a hand spasm.

I think I hate the hand spasm days the most. Probably because I can’t predict when my hands are going to work and when they are not. I have learned to see the signs that I am about to lose my grip and if I am careful I can compensate for it. It just can take me twice to three times as long to do a simple task.

Apparently I have had these tremors for a while but only recently have they become problematic. What I put down to being a klutz was early versions of things going on now. At least I know what is going on and know how to deal with it.

But it is frustrating at times that I have to plan my activities based on what my hands will let me do today. I can’t tell you the number of times while writing this I have had to backspace and correct an errant keystroke from a finger that just decided that it wanted to push a key as well. So it takes me longer to type and make sure things are spelled correctly. Auto correct can only do so much.

Sewing can be an adventure in itself and I think I am shying away from doing so because I am worried what I will and will not be able to do. I just need to bite the bullet and see what I can do today.

I do know that I have catboxes in my near future and that will be an exercise in itself.

Again none of this is life threatening. I am not losing one iota of my life span because my hands shake. It is a life annoying problem and I just have to deal with it and considering what some of my other friends are dealing with, this is minor.

I am grateful for a good grip.

Category: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tags:

Posted By Kathleen David on January 20, 2016

David G. Hartwell, editor at TOR, passed away last night due to a massive brain hemorrhage. I had been on panels with him and talked to him about various topics over the years. Nice guy with a collection of ties to be commented on. This was sudden and unexpected. My sympathies to his friends and family.

I found out that two other people I have worked with passed away over the weekend.

I swear it seems like every time I open Facebook, I am finding that someone else has passed away.

Me, I am doing much better thank you. Haven’t even coughing this morning and when I do, it is not the body wracking coughs that caused me to strain some muscles. I can breath through my nose, which is nice. Just seem to be sleeping a lot for some reason. And a headache that won’t go away but that pretty typical of me so no biggie. It’s nice to feel human again.

It seems like two steps forward and one step back in getting caught up on things. One of the steps back may be this up and coming storm that might or might not hit the area over the weekend. We had plans and now we are playing it by ear.

I think some sewing is in my near future. I found out that one project needs to get done before too long.

I have been reading a lot about the mind recently. I go on these binges of one subject or another that I am interested in. There are some that are a life long love like folktales and myths that I read anytime I find new material. I tend to read non-fiction when I am writing fiction.

I am also heading for a list binge. I can tell. I have found my stash of notebooks and have an itch to sort out my head which, once I put it down on paper, my head seems to clear out. Weird but it works for me.

I have an idea for a short story so I am going to write that down and then get back to my novel.

I am grateful for my brain and its strange ways of working.

Category: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tags:

Posted By Kathleen David on January 19, 2016

As of today this web log is twelve years old. Caroline was one and a bit. We were still measuring her age in months.

In those twelve years this journal has chronicled my life and the life of my family. I have talked about adventures I have gone on, conventions I have been to, and my own personal thoughts and feelings on various subjects. I have some people who have been reading since I started it (waves at my parents) and others that picked it up later (waves at Caroline). I have been rather honest and blunt here. Except those few times I wrote total fiction, and labeled it as such, this has been a pretty good accounting of the last twelve years of my life or the part I am willing to share in public.

I have been doing Crafty Tuesday since 2012 so that’s 4 years of talking about crafts and crafty things on Tuesday. I have talked about the business of crafting. I have given formulas to figure out what one should sell one’s artwork for. I have shown things in progress. It has been a day to talk about the craft.

Writing is another skill I have been honing over the years. This past year I sold a couple of stories and got a challenge to complete a novel. I have some opportunities this year I plan to take.

But a lot of my writing has been improved right here. The act of writing every day keeps my brain working on other things. I find this blog a brain clearing exercising for the rest of the day.

I am grateful for everyone who has been reading this for 12 years.

Category: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tags:

Posted By Kathleen David on January 18, 2016

On the health front, not perfect but better than yesterday. Currently the cough is only really showing up in the afternoon/evening but the periods between coughing fits is getting longer so on the mend. I will be happy once my tongue heals.

We got our first snow of any significance yesterday. If this is the way our winter storms are going to be, I can deal with that. However we might have another storm next weekend with more snow or we could get nothing. I am also fine with snow on weekends so it doesn’t play havoc with Caroline’s school schedule.

Back to the topic on my mind which happened because of a couple of things that came out over the week.

I have a Tumblr account and I know many of the people on there are younger. Not as young as Federator, but still on the young side. Sort of what Facebook use to look like back in the beginning of time. I use the account to post puppet photos and keep up with a number of fandoms that seem to thrive on Tumblr. My account is Puppetmaker40 for the general stuff and Puppetmaker52 for my way back machine of puppets I have made.

A couple of people passed away last week that had an impact on people for various reasons including the suddenness of the passing for us. I have a feeling that the families had been bracing themselves for that day for a while but that was their story to tell not mine.

On one of the Tumblr logs, someone expressed how they were dealing with the death of a person of significance to them that they never met but had helped them through some hard times. They had created some art to express their feelings and a crafty friend made them a bracelet with the name of the deceased and the quote that meant some thing to the person. They were expressing their grief.

Then comes along someone else who posts that they, the Tumblr person, never met the famous person. The famous person didn’t know that they existed so they needed to stop being so maudlin about this person and stop being such a downer. Go back to making happy art and don’t make me sad was the message.

The person in mourning did not cross post what she was saying. She put all the tags for trigger warnings so if one didn’t want to see it, it could be filtered easily out of their feed. This was their space to express themselves, which they do by giving us some splendid art that makes one smile. It is also their space to express anything else they care to express.

And this was not the only incident I saw of this behavior this week.

My web logs and other pieces of my social media footprint are my space to a point. Whoever is hosting the place I have these do have rules and the like that must be followed but for the most part I have autonomy in those places.

I write here what I want to write or what I want to show you the reader. You the reader have a choice to read or look or not to do so.

This is my space and I will express myself as I want to. Don’t like it? Well there are plenty of other web logs to read out there. I am one of millions. Of course then you miss out on some pretty neat stuff but that’s your loss not mine.

I first started writing a web log to keep my parents and family informed about my life and that of my family. Friends found it and found that it was a good way to keep up with me since the info dumps could be long at times. Other people found me one way or another and have enjoyed reading what I write so they keep up with things. I have even made new friends with people through my web log.

Since then I have refined what I say a bit. I did take down some earlier things that really didn’t need to be out there. I have worked my way through various quagmires of social media and gotten to the point I am at now.

But again this is my space. I decide which comments will stand. Compliments to those who do comment, I have only had to delete less than a dozen comments over what will be 12 years tomorrow so that’s less than a comment a year.

Yikes, it will be 12 years tomorrow since I first posted my first blog entry. Caroline was one when I started it.

I plan to continue to write about my life and what’s on my mind. I plan to continue crafty Tuesday and the other set topics I have. I don’t plan on censoring myself or limited myself to topics people like.

My Space My Rules which boil down to be polite to me and the other commenters. You can disagree with me but personal attacks are not allowed. I don’t discuss politics or religion often for good reasons.

I am grateful that most commenters are supportive of those people who put themselves out there on the net.

Category: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tags: