A trip down memory lane

I was trying to remember the name of someone I went to college with, so I went and pulled out my journals I kept in college.

I was a great journal writer during those years.  I wrote everyday.  I wrote about classes, homework assignments, trips to the library to study or watch movies, going out with friends, leaving the apartment at 10 at night to go to a dance on campus, campouts, band recitals, football games...  I was a busy girl.

It's interesting because every entry ended with my signature and the time that I finished writing.  Most of the times were late, often around 11:30 at night.  It was so amusing to read those entries, especially the ones that I wrote really late, because they are often full of funny sleepy writings.  I would randomly capitalize letters or I would substitute words, instead of saying, "I had a lot of work,"  I would write, "I had a lot of world."  Writing in your sleep can be very funny.  One entry had some random sentence about cranberry sauce.  I later wrote that I had been dreaming about a guy offering me some cranberry sauce.  Let me tell you, it takes talent to write in your sleep!

Every Sunday's entry mentioned if I watched SeaQuest or not.  It came on Sunday evenings and I loved watching it.

I wish I had written the last names of more people.  I wrote about Stephen who did this, and Holly who did that, and how I saw Sean and Kristy on campus.  Now I'm reading these again and wondering who are these people? Still, I'm grateful that I wrote what I did down.  It's been fun to go back and read about my college years.  They were so very, very different from my life now.

One thing I did write down were the names of some of the music we played in band.  This is great! I looked up these songs on YouTube!  There are videos of bands performing these concert songs, so right now, while I'm typing, I'm listening to a recording of a concert band performing "Scenes From the Louvre, Movement 3." The music is familiar.  It's been so very long since I played in the band.  I miss playing my bassoon!  YouTube is great!

I'm so thankful for those late night journal writings.  It's a time in my life that I loved, but as the years go by, those memories become more vague.  I'll always remember my time in college and I'll always remember certain parts of it, but it's those details that are so easily forgotten that I'm grateful for my journals.  The heartaches and celebrations of everyday college life.  What fun it was!

Those crazy kids and their music!

Permit me a little rant here, OK?

The kids have been home for the summer for the last two months.  We've had a lot of fun, but there are a few things that go on each summer that kind of bug me. 

Cue old lady voice: Back when I was young, I respected my elders!

Well, to really know the truth, you would have to ask my mother...
When I was 11 years old, the Monkees were in their 20 year reunion.  I loved watching the show on TV, everyday.  I got the cassette tapes of their albums and listen to and sang along with all the songs.  My parents really didn't like the Monkees.  Wrong generation, I guess.  They were fine with me watching the TV show and listening to the music, but I knew that they didn't like them.  I tried to be considerate of this and I only listened to the music in my room.  I never watched the TV show when they were around and I tried not to talk about them much when my parents were around.

Now, we move ahead 25 years and I've got my own kids.  They have their own music that they like.  I don't like everything they do, but that's OK.  However! They play their music on my computer in the living room, very, very loudly.  Some of the music, I like, but even then, I get tired of it blasting in the living room.  They have music players in their room that they can use, but I guess they just love the sound of the music in the front room.  They know I don't like a lot of their music, but they play it anyway.  The front room opens to the kitchen, so I hear it when I'm in the kitchen.  My loom is in the front room...  You get the idea.  I knew my parents didn't like the Monkees and I respected that.  My kids don't respect the fact that I can't stand most of their music.

Am I sounding old???
Yep, I guess I am.  Old lady voice again: Them youngens and their music.  I just don't understand what those whippersnappers hear in all that noise. 

Alright, rant over.  Thank you for your patience.  Time to go watch some Monkees.

Approaching a milestone

This blog entry will be entry #493.  I have almost reached 500 blog entries!

I'm not sure if that is pathetic or something to be celebrated.  Celebrating is a lot more fun, so that's what I want to do.

How should I celebrate my 500th entry?  What should I write about?  Does anyone have any ideas?  If I don't plan this, I could end up blogging about something mundane, like the kids going back to school in a few weeks.

Any ideas??? 

Philosophical ideas

About a year ago, I discovered the Philosophy and Pop Culture series.  Before then, I had never studied philosophy and really didn't know much about it.  These series of books are essays people have written about the pop culture topic.

I started with The Chronicles of Narnia and Philosophy.  I loved it.  I didn't understand everything they talked about.  I haven't studied philosophy before and I don't know the different philosophers. Some of the essays I didn't agree with the view of the author.  Some of them really caused me to think deeply about various topics.  I loved those.  I started thinking in a more philosophical way.  Why couldn't Uncle Andrew understand the animals when they spoke, but the children could?  Deep, deep thoughts at work here.

Since then, I've read The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy, and I'm currently reading Alice in Wonderland and Philosophy and Pink Floyd and Philosophy.  The next one I want to read is The Beatles and Philosophy!

The Lord of the Rings wasn't quite as good as I had hoped it could be.  The Alice in Wonderland has been challenging to read.  It deals with nonsense and logic, as the Alice stories do.  I'm just not up on all the "great" philosophers and their theories.  I don't understand a lot of it.  It is highly illogical to me, but I'm not sure if it's nonsense or not.  Pink Floyd has been interesting.  I don't know their music that well, but such interesting music with such bizarre words and thoughts have lead to some seriously interesting essays.  I've only read a few, but I've liked them.  One of them discussed how music can form images in our heads.  Sometimes in the form of pictures and sometimes in the form of notes, music, or time.  I have found with me, there are a few specific songs that have the power to form images in my head.  When I tried to explain this to my Hubby, I just sounded dumb. This book has shown me that I'm not the only one who has that experience with music.  Weird and fascinating all at the same time.

We also have in our library Star Wars and Philosophy.  My 13 year old is attempting to read this.  I'll read it when he is done.  I would love to see a NeverEnding Story and Philosophy.  I'm sure that would be very interesting.

I never thought of myself as philosophical until I started reading these books and realized that I do have a tendency to think deeply in a philosophical way sometimes.  For good or for bad, I love to philosophise.  My husband and I are very different in several ways.  I've pondered what it is that makes me obsess about some thing in particular and Hubby doesn't give the same idea a second thought.  Hmmm, deep thinking at work here.  Too bad I'm not articulate enough to explain my ideas here like the authors of the essays in the book.

If you will excuse me, I'm going to go ponder this problem for a while.

The Crazy Week

It's been one of those crazy kind of weeks.  You know the kind, the ones that throw themselves at you and you just deal with.  It wasn't a bad week for me, thank goodness, just kind of crazy.
I won't go into long details of why it was crazy, but let me say that in the last week, we spent 24 hours in the van on the road with five kids.  CRAZY!  Actually, the kids were great.  We couldn't have asked for a better trip with the kids.  There was very little fighting or crying.  No one got car sick.  A lot of snacks were eaten and a lot of Gatorade was drunk.  There was some singing, story telling, word games played, and philosophising of life, the universe and everything.

School starts for the kids in less than a month.  The summer has just flown by.  Soon it will be time to buy school supplies.

I'm having a hard time keeping a train of thought for this blog, so I'll end now before I say something really weird.  Until next time... postcards that fly through the ocean get soggy.   Hmmm, I think I need sleep.

A train of thought moving faster than a speeding bullet

Quickly, before I forget!

Yesterday's blog post was about how my brain jumps from thought to thought very quickly.  I have a hard time thinking about just one thing sometimes.  Here is an example of what I mean.  I was in the shower this morning after my morning walk.  My mind started thinking and by the time I was done with the shower, I was way off topic of what I was originally thinking about.  I had to back track my thoughts to get back to the original one.

Here is the line of thought:
-Funny how skills can be called two different names depending on their use.  For example: manipulation is considered to be negative, but when turned around, it can be called good leadership skills. Right?
-Peanut, my three year old can be so manipulative.  We've got to get her sleeping through the night in her own bed in in a different room from Hubby and I.  I wish we had more rooms in the house. 
-The number of bedrooms in the house....  We've got too many people, too few bedrooms and five kids who don't want to share their room with anyone else. There is too much fighting is going on over who went into whose bedroom.  This kids have got to learn to share space better.
-The size of the house we are in now vs. the size of the last house we lived in.  Our current home has 500 more square feet than our last home, but the smaller home had two more rooms than this house.  I would rather have the rooms than the space.
-The longest I've ever lived in one house since getting married is 3 years 2 months.  Come December 1, we will have been here for three years and it doesn't look like we are going to move again anytime soon. We might break our record of three years and two months.  That's funny (or not) since I've wanted to get out of this house for the last two years. 
- My Mom lived in one place for 30 years.  She taught in several schools in the city, each year having 25-30 kids in her class.  She knew people from church and civic people. She knew everyone.
-Mom was always running into someone she knew at the grocery store.  I went with her to the grocery store a lot growing up and we could hardly make it through one shopping trip without her running into someone she knew.  I didn't mind, it was just funny.
-I occasionally see people I know at the grocery store, but not too often.  Of course, I don't know many people since I've only lived here for a couple of years.  Do I ever actually look at the people in the grocery store while I shop?  No, I don't think I do.  I'm just there to get my stuff and get out.  Would I notice a friend at the store if a friend was there?  Maybe.  What if one of my favorite celebrities were at the grocery store?  Would I notice?
-I should make it more of a point to look at the people around me at the store.  I might see a friend.

So, that is what ran through my head during my shower.  It wasn't a long shower.  My thoughts just go too fast and change too much.  Maybe I should get a water proof voice recorder to carry around with me all the time.  Then I can just talk while I think.... That might be really funny to listen to.

Now what was I thinking?

Yesterday I thought up about four great blog entries.  I wrote one.  Not sure if it’s really great or not.  The rest I’ve forgotten.  I’m so attention deficit sometimes.  My brain jumps from thought to thought faster than rabbit can jump across the desert.

Well, I’ve just gotten distracted by something else in the house, so I’m not going to finish this thought.  I’ll come back to it later.

Update on the weaving blog

It's been three months, but I finished my last weaving project and have begun a new one!  Check out
my weaving blog

Onomastics

I'm an armchair onomast.  Perhaps amateur onomast sounds better.  An onomast is a person who studies onomastics.  Onomastics is the study of names.  I LOVE names!
I don't blog about names often.  I don't want to offend.  Names are incredibly personal.  I certainly have my favorites and there are names that I really don't like.

I love to read what's popular and I've made some fairly accurate predictions about what might be popular in the future.  However, some of the names that have become popular have really surprised me.  When I was a kid, I had a great name book that talked about name trends.  At the time of publishing, the early 80's, names like Olivia, Ava, Emma, Max, and Owen were considered "Grandparent names."  Who knew they would surface again?  The three girl names I just mentioned are all in the top 10 for 2010 in the United States.  I don't particularly care for these names, but I have always tended to shun the trendy names for my own personal slightly unusual tastes.

Anytime a member of the family finds out they are expecting, I start making up lists for them.  Most of the names are intended as funny jokes, like unpronounceable Celtic names being a favorite category of mine - MacFhlannchaidh for example.  Personally I love Gaelic names and so does America right now.  There are a lot of popular names with  Gaelic origins.  I like the more unusual names.  With each baby, I tried to convince my hubby that we should use the girl name Ailish.  He didn't go for it and neither has anyone else in the family.  I also tried to get him to agree to Moira.  Nope.

Secretly, I would love to have 19 kids like that one family.  I would love the opportunity to pick names nineteen times.  So, if I could pick some names right now, what would I choose?
Ailish, Moira, Freya, Peter, Colin and Richard.  OK, my girl name choices are quite distinctly cultural, two Gaelic and one Scandinavian.  The boy names on the other hand are good ol' names that have fallen out of the top 100.  The are unused enough that they won't have several kids in their class with their name, while remaining familiar, accepted and masculine names.


I just love names.  I've had 7 or so friends have babies in the last 2 months.  I love to hear what name the parents have picked out.  Did they just find the name in a book and like it?  Is it a family name?  Is it a favorite literary or movie character?  Each name has a story and each story is, for me, fascinating.

MORE great products for sale

I love Sky Mall!  It is the greatest catalog with the most amazing things for sale.  Of course, I like to put my own twist on products.

Click on the pictures to enlarge them so you can read all about these great products.

I'm not sure why, but it Blogger won't enlarge this picture.  It's funny, but the best part is the snowman at the bottom of the picture.   A body bag for your snowman!!! What kind of sick and twisted world is this?

Enjoy!

Great products for sale

For years my sister and I have gone through catalogs, cutting out the best of all the products for sale.  We put our own twist on the products and make our own catalog.

Some of these items just make you just wonder WHY?

You'll have to click on each picture to be able to read what they say and what I wrote about each of them.  Wouldn't you just love to get a catalog like this one in the mail?  Enjoy.