Posts Tagged ‘blogging’
Feeling Thankful
I’m particularly thankful on this final day of the US Thanksgiving holiday weekend. The good fortunes bestowed upon us by the universe, chance, choices, and a smattering of genuine efforts are beyond measure. As such, engaging in the exercise of naming a few that come to mind provides valuable perspective for a immeasurable phenomenon.
When I realized the automatic waterer for the horses in the paddocks was getting warmer than a hot tub, I looked up the temp control details online. Upon opening the access panel of the waterer, I found there was no thermocouple to adjust. After I got over the shock and traced wires several times, suddenly my fingers landed on the leads to the unit that was just dangling in air. I don’t know what caused it to slide out but I’m extremely thankful the fix was so easy and the water is now a reasonable temperature that won’t sting the horses’ lips.
- The surgical incisions on Cyndie’s ankle have a ways to go before the skin has healed fully. Still, already she is experiencing joyful relief over the absence of the screws and plates that once held the shattered bones together. They eventually became a problem of their own. I’m really thankful for the good work of the surgeon and staff of the hospital and Tria Orthopedic for their excellent treatment of Cyndie’s injury.
- This is an ongoing appreciation but lately, I’m feeling particularly aware of the mental benefits of successfully treating the depression that dominated much of my life from childhood through roughly mid-life. I am so very thankful for the doctors and therapists who guided and educated me, some of whom I can’t even recall names or faces. I guess I wasn’t focused on the guides but on the destination.
- Lastly, for this exercise, I want to tell you how thankful I am that you are reading the odd chronicles I decide to post here every day on Relative Something. To the worldwide audience of WordPress bloggers who happen upon random posts and end up returning for more and the friends and family who understand I don’t use other social media and keep in touch by reading me here. Even if I don’t know you are following along, if you are reading these words right now it means something to me and I am thankful internet stranger(s).
Maybe by exercising my thankfulness muscles in this way, I will continue to gain prowess in my journey toward optimum health. Mental “planks” as compared to the back-saving core exercise I continue to employ. Thankfully, those seem to be helping me to avoid prolonged repeated episodes of debilitating pain.
Happy last day of this (U.S.) holiday weekend!
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Today’s Post
Today’s post is brought to you by:
- Last night’s Stanley Cup Playoff game three which went into overtime. Who has a mind to think about blogging after staying up late watching hockey?
and also by:
- The bike ride I’m taking today with my friend, Paul. Who has time to write when they are leaving to go biking?
plus:
- The fact that Asher ran away from me into the neighbor’s woods for almost an hour yesterday. Who can write when still distracted by dog frustration?
also:
- Thursdays are exhausting anyway after the drive to and from St. Paul that sandwich an hour-long intense obedience training class. I’m still tired. Apparently, it didn’t tire Asher nearly as much.
and:
- The weeding of Cyndie’s garden of perennials basically involved cutting unwanted trees that were sprouting in almost equal density to her desired plantings, but it doesn’t really deserve paragraphs being written about it.
- The bees, butterflies, and other insects are loving that garden, and [hoping I don’t jinx them] none of the hostas have been munched yet.
not to mention:
- Whatever critter is digging up the turf of the north loop pathway is making it almost impossible to mow.
Today’s post is also sponsored by the letter S.
- As in, Silly. Not to be confused with Cute or Creative because those words start with the letter C, which sounds like, sea or see, which just so happen to start with the letter S.
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Meeting Again
How did you find this blog? Back in 2009 when I started, I emailed family and friends to invite them to check it out. WordPress folks with no previous knowledge of me have slowly grown my followers to over a thousand and I regularly see visiting traffic from countries all around the world. In March of this year, I learned of a regular reader whose name I recognized from high school in 1977.
Patty was in the class behind mine and I think we agree our interactions were somewhat limited. She doesn’t recall the exact path she followed to discovering my blog but the probable route through links from old Eden Prairie people and social media sharing seems logical. Her affinities for log homes, horses, and dogs drew her in but she didn’t exactly remember who I was. Since she was in the same class as Cyndie’s brother, she recognized the Friswold connection.
Honestly, I don’t always know who I am writing for, and learning of people like Patty who resonate with my stories the way she does is a real treat that inspires me to write even more.
When Cyndie’s brother, Steve, sent a text (re)introducing us to Patty with a mention she and her husband, Steve (a different one; don’t get confused) would love to visit Wintervale, we were thrilled. Checking calendars produced a target date for a get-together in April. How many nice weekends do you remember occurring in April this year? We rescheduled twice due to precipitation of the slush variety under cold temperatures and unpleasant winds.
Yesterday, the third time was the charm. The weather was so much better, the wait was easily justified. Plus, there are now leaves on the trees!
Asher couldn’t get enough of Patty and Steve, usually wanting to climb all over them. The horses –mostly Swings– showed more interest than usual in receiving attention.
We enjoyed brunch on our deck and then did a walking tour of the grounds that I hoped would bring all my writing to life for them. It’s hard for me to imagine what sense of the place readers get when they only have my words and pictures to rely on. Patty tells me their real-life visit was very much like the sense they had formed in their minds.
I firmly believe our sanctuary becomes more precious when visitors spend time here. Yesterday, the preciousness was cranked up to 11 with the presence of Patty and Steve’s energies resonating with all that Wintervale has to offer.
Writing Words
Relative Something is a blog. The word blog is short for weblog, as in, world wide web + log [regular record of incidents]. Blogs are written in an informal conversational style. I write about my experiences like I would describe them if we were just hanging out, minus the pauses when I can’t think of the word I want to use. A thesaurus is my friend.
It would embarrass me greatly if the frequency of my error in using a word were prominently displayed on my posts. I am forever grateful for the intuition to double-check a dictionary and thesaurus. I don’t write exactly like I talk but I do write the way thoughts and ideas come into my head. Another thing I am forever grateful for is the dialogue I was surrounded by growing up. My vocabulary came from hearing the words my mom and dad used while WCCO radio and television broadcasts ran as a background soundtrack.
It is not rare that a sentence will come into my head with a word that I don’t recognize as coming from my own common usage but feels connected to something my mother would say.
Yesterday, as I steeled myself against a biting wind chill, I caught myself doing the classic “air whistle” that is an obvious habit my mom displayed. I have tried to grow out of that natural tendency, with little success beyond increased awareness of occasions when I am doing it. At the same time, it’s a habit that always draws memories of my mom from deep in my soul and brings a feeling of pride over being one of her kids.
Why would I try to get myself to stop this behavior? Maybe it’s a remnant of the urge to grow up and become my own person.
I am unabashedly a product of my upbringing and my ancestral heritage but I have the desire to grow well beyond simply being like my parents. Striving to be healthier in mind, body, and spirit has helped me to interrupt a pattern of familial depression and the use of alcohol as (an ineffective –even detrimental) treatment.
I don’t have a memory of my parents writing poetry but I have read the poems of another of my ancestral relatives. My inclination is to assemble words in a rhythmic pattern that appeals to my senses. That often drives the selection of a word more than the meaning of the word itself. When the collection of words is stacked up, the variety of possible intentions often surprises me. I don’t always know what the poems are saying about me but I have learned that readers often come to their own conclusions.
Helping Cyndie to shape and reshape a story she hopes to tell in a week and a half has been a fun experience for me. It is blurring the differences between verbal stories and written chronicles. Either way, readers or listeners are forming their own interpretations in their minds, conjuring mental images and feeling whatever emotions the words inspire.
I have a feeling her project could help me to become a better writer of stories about the experiences of *this* John W. Hays.
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Grand Slam
One of the things Cyndie decided to do to occupy herself during the months she was laid up with a broken ankle was to explore storytelling. “The Moth” level of storytelling. She bought their book about storytelling and started writing down details of stories from her life experiences that seemed worthy of telling. She picked the date of a local Moth story slam at the end of this month and has been working on honing one of her stories down to an effective 5-minute version.
Last night, we drove to St. Paul to get an in-person taste of Moth storytelling at the Fitzgerald Theater. It was their GrandSLAM Championship where nine winners of previous story slams competed against each other with 5-minute stories based on a common theme of “Crash Course.”
At the end of the night, my first question to her was, “Did that change your mind about throwing your name in the hat?”
It didn’t. I find it difficult to understand that she won’t even know if she will have a chance to try until the night of the event because they pull 10 names out of a hat to determine whose stories will be told. I don’t know how many people show up hoping to be selected to stand on stage in front of a microphone under a bright light in front of a large audience, but I’d guess it will be more than ten.
Last night we got the chance to see what aspects of the storytelling worked well and what Cyndie might want to keep in mind if she gets the chance to tell her story of baking and assembling a wedding cake for our niece’s wedding. The versions Cyndie has been trying out have changed a lot from when she started. The Moth asks that stories be “known by heart but not rote memorization.”
Whittling down the entire experience of a compelling story into a 5-minute version forces you to figure out what details are essential and which ones don’t contribute to the main point. Moving from reading it to “telling” it by memory gets tricky with multiple versions floating around in her mind.
Only one storyteller last night had a moment of visibly losing their train of thought. The emcee did a great job of rallying the crowd to support all storytellers with a lot of love and we cheered the person with encouragement and her story resumed flawlessly in short order.
“The Moth’s mission is to promote the art and craft of storytelling and to honor and celebrate the diversity and commonality of human experience.”
Cyndie has countless stories worth telling. I’m thrilled she has chosen to develop greater mastery of the art of telling them well and doing so in larger venues.
It’s a bonus for me because I LOVE listening to well-told stories. That is… when I’m not too busy trying to tell one of my own. Why don’t I try getting on a Moth stage? I think it comes down to the part about knowing the story by heart and telling it in 5-minutes. On a stage.
I’d rather write my stories in a blog.
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Horse Smart
This coming April will mark two years since the four retired/rescued Thoroughbred brood mares from This Old Horse arrived at Wintervale. How well have I described the horses in my posts over the years they’ve been with us? Test your knowledge with the following 8 questions (Answer key at the bottom of this post):
- Which horse is able to move Swings off her food?
A) Mix
B) Light
C) Mia
D) All the above
E) None of the above
2. Which horse puts her nostril up to my face to breathe my scent almost every time we meet?
A) Swings
B) Mix
C) Light
D) Mia
E) All the above
F) None of the above
3. Which horse is the most skittish?
A) Swings
B) Mix
C) Light
D) Mia
E) All the above
F) None of the above
4. Which horse always stays dry under the overhang when it rains or snows?
A) Swings
B) Mix
C) Light
D) Mia
E) All the above
F) None of the above
5. When we separate the horses into two pairs, what is the most common arrangement?
A) Swings/Mix; Light/Mia
B) Mix/Mia; Swings/Light
C) Light/Mix; Swings/Mia
D) All the above
E) We never separate the horses
6. Which horse is the slowest at finishing all the feed in her pan?
A) Swings
B) Mix
C) Light
D) Mia
E) All the above
F) None of the above
7. Which two horses are currently supposed to receive an extra serving of feed at noon?
A) Swings and Mix
B) Light and Mia
C) Mix and Mia
D) Swings and Light
E) Non of the above
8. Which horse is the least likely to stand patiently for the farrier to get a complete trim of all four hooves?
A) Swings
B) Mix
C) Light
D) Mia
E) All the above
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Last night I struggled over choosing to close gates to minimize shenanigans again because it is still dangerously slippery on the slopes beyond the overhang but in the end left things open for them to move between paddocks. I’ve been watching them often enough to recognize the posturing that looks a lot like bullying tends to fade after a few spats and all four settle into a zen-like chill. My trust that it stays that way after I’m gone is about 50/50.
I witnessed Light using one of the hay-paths I created to get down to the waterer, although, once she got down there she just turned around without drinking and came right back up. At least it proves they are able to take advantage of it if they choose.
Do you feel like you have a sense of the four horse personalities?
If you scored less than 50%, I should do a better job of describing each member of the herd. Just because I know all the answers to this test doesn’t mean I can leave out these details about the four equine stars of our show.
Test answer key: 1)B 2)B 3)D 4)A 5)A 6)B 7)C 8)C
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Wayback Break2
This morning we woke up in a strange bed away from home. I’m letting the Wayback Machine determine what today’s blog post will be (from the Previous Somethings archive). Just click on the image! (One time, when I tested it, it popped me into an entire month from 2010 instead of just a single post. The powers of the Wayback Machine are mystically magical, indeed.)
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Wayback Break1
It’s February! In case you were somehow unaware. Today, Cyndie and I are heading out on a day-and-a-half adventure. After I take her to a physical therapy appointment, we are going away for an overnight at the home of friends and leaving horse care to sitters during our absence. In honor of this stepping away from the usual daily grind, I am also leaving Relative Something in the trusty control of the Wayback Machine. This way, you get to go on a couple of little adventures, too.
Just click the Wayback image to be automatically transported to a random post from any of the many years of Previous Somethings! What are the odds of it being a post about chickens?
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An Idea
I’m thinking of trying something different for posts next week while on my annual biking and camping trip.
I will post a picture a day using my phone. The last time I tried posting by way of the small touch screen it frustrated me to no end, but hope springs eternal and I will give it another try.
So, today -while my internet connection is still throttled to almost useless speed- I am constructing a test post to see if this idea seems workable for me.
Maybe I’ll learn a thing or two about effectively navigating my nemesis the touch screen.
That is a photo that I mined from the archives made available to me after following prompts.
If this works for me now, it’ll give me confidence to try it again on the road next week, subject to signal availability and battery life.
Just an idea for continued daily chronicling of my ongoing adventures.
Relative Something 