Guest blog #4 - A Daft Scots Lass - Midnight Adventures

The latest guest blog I'm featuring A Daft Scots Lass is not for the faint hearted. The f word is sprinkled about like confetti after a wedding. Reminds me a bit of those on the edge nights in a Glasgow pub. I thought I'd use this one rather than the one about the dying of public hair. Keep those guest blogs coming....

Last night I had one of my epic adventure dreams again. It was a cracker!


I dreamt I was dueling with an alligator's tail. He was a fekkin monster, thrashing his tail and bearing his teeth, making growling noises and spitting at me (I don't think aligators can spit but its MY dream remember).

Nevertheless, I had the manoevers and grace of a professional fencer - advance lunging all over the place and swishing my impressive blade in Ballestra. Oh yes, I was on top form...

After a lengthy struggle with the hideous beast who was now foaming at the mouth, I gave him the Prise de Fer and lobbed his tail right off with one swift chop! He ran away like cowardly lizard that's just lost his tail (somehow, I don't think aligators tails grow back) but I managed to run after him and finish him off. I pounded my sword into his leather like skin over and over to make sure he was completely defeated (quite horrific, if I think about it now)

But in my dream I was jubilant with a HUGE smile plastered on my face!

The huge alligator just lay there, still and quiet and I started jumping up and down with my hands in the air, like I had just won a gold medal at the olympics. I was full of joy and was whooping triumphantly. I took a picture of the dead alligator with my cellphone to share on my blog (I even blog in my dreams).


Now comes the bizarre bit...I decided to skin the alligator and chop him up tiny cubes. Skinning the alligator was easy (in my dreams) I peeled that Bastid like a fucking banana. Then, I used his skin to make a killer pair of Hooker Heels and matching clutch bag. Bonus!

I used the cubes of meat to make an enormous pot a bubbling alligator stew and sold it at the local fair wearing my new heels and clutch bag!

With the left-overs I made alligator kebabs and stored them in my freezer.

Am I a sick puppy or what???








http://gillianhefer.blogspot.com/2010/03/midnight-adventures.html

Guest blog #3 - Dancing with Daisy - It runs in the family

In the prelude to her blog Daisy writes "Life is a dance full of poetry, music, joy, sadness, inspiration, and gratitude." This just about sums it up. I thought this post from November was poignant because it touches on the unremarkable but also remarkable aspects of an everyday life which, in the words of Anthony Powell, is a dance to the music of time.

I have come to the conclusion that my family has a hard time saying goodbye. I can remember when I was growing up and the aunts and uncles and cousins would come to our house for a visit. They would stay for a while. Maybe we would have dinner together or play cards, maybe we wouldn't.


One thing we could always count on, though, from the time they first mentioned that it was time for them to go home until the time came for them to actually pull out of the driveway and start to head for home, at least half an hour if not forty-five minutes or maybe even an hour would have passed.


They would say something like, "It's getting late. We probably ought to go home."


Then we would talk and say how nice it had been to see them and how we'd have to get together again really soon. Then we'd get off on a tangent about something or other and talk for another ten or twenty minutes. This would all happen while our guests were still sitting firmly planted on the couch, not having even made a move in the direction of the door yet. Eventually, they would remember that it was indeed getting late, even later now than when they had first noticed it, and they really did need to get home.


They would then stand up from their seats and head toward the door. On the way to the door and then standing just inside the door, not yet actually opening it, we would pretty much repeat what we had said earlier on the couch about how nice it was that they had come to visit and not to wait so long until we saw each other again. Once again we would somehow start talking about the garden or how we kids were doing in school or perhaps a bit of news about someone in the family we had forgotten to discuss earlier, and still the door is closed and no one is leaving the house.


Stage three of saying goodbye began when our guests finally opened the door and headed outside. Of course, being the good hosts that they were, my parents would walk out to the car with them, and we kids would tag along behind too, all of us chatting all the way. Now the guests have finally arrived at their car and are sitting inside and ready to head off. They have the car windows rolled down and my folks are leaning over looking in and all of them are still talking away and saying goodbye. At last, the car is put into gear, and it rolls out of the driveway with everybody inside it waving at us and we standing there in the driveway waving back at them until they are out of sight. This is how my family says goodbye.


I go to the nursing home three times a week to visit my mother. As you might think, each time I visit her and then tell her goodbye as I'm leaving, I can't help but wonder if this will be the last time I have a chance to tell her goodbye. As far as I know, she is not at death's door quite yet, but yes, she is in a nursing home, not in very good health, and she has had a full life. Her birthday is this Friday. She will be turning 80 years old.


When I am ready to leave after visiting her, she always wants me to push her in her wheelchair from her room down to the lobby by the nurse's desk so that she can wave goodbye to me while I am walking out the door there, and again as she watches out the window at me in my car as I pull away. It is part of her being a good hostess this saying goodbye. Even now, when some days she struggles so much with her speech that even getting a "goodbye" out is a major feat, this continues to be something she wants to do. If nothing else, she can still wave at me. I know those waves of hers say so much more than goodbye. They say, "I'm so glad I got to see you," and "God be with you as you go," and "Take care of yourself," and "Don't forget to come back," and "I love you."


When my grandmother (my mother's mother) was about the same age my mother is now, and we would go to visit her, always when we left her, she would say, "Come again when you can stay longer." It didn't matter how long we had been visiting her. Even if we had been with her all day long, she would still say that. She had trouble saying goodbye. She didn't want us to leave. My mother is the same way. When I go to visit her, she doesn't want me to leave. She doesn't say what my Grandmother said, but perhaps she would if she could. It is easy to see she is reluctant to have me go. The longer we can drag out the goodbyes that we say, the more time we can spend together.


I am reluctant to have her go too. I think we both know that with each time that I visit her, it is me that is telling her goodbye, and it is me that is walking away and leaving her, but each of our goodbyes these days are practice ones much like the ones from the family visits of my youth. These goodbyes are the ones said while still on the couch in the house. These are the goodbyes said while walking to the door and pausing there before opening it. These are the goodbyes said while sitting in the car in the driveway with the windows rolled down.


Although it appears with these goodbyes that I am the one who is leaving, it is actually my mother who is leaving. These are the goodbyes said before the car drives away. I know when the time comes for that final goodbye, when the window is rolled up and the car is put in gear, she will actually be the one leaving, looking back and waving at me. I'm not looking forward to that time. In fact, I am having a difficult time thinking about it. I, like my mother, and like her mother before her, have a hard time saying goodbye. It runs in the family. It's just the way we are.

http://dancingwithdaisy.blogspot.com/

Guest Blog #2 - This, That and the Other One: Thanksgiving Leftovers

This, That and the Other One is a blog by PM Taylor. She's only been writing it for a few months but I always make a point of reading it when I can because it's profound, poignant and just a bit melancholy..

Don't forget to send me guest blog postings in guest blog week - email to maccaz17@hotmail .com or leave a link here.

Thanksgiving Leftovers ...


Not your usual fare in this post ...


I was sitting in the kitchen sipping on some coffee this morning, when my younger daughter asked me -

"Remember last Thanksgiving weekend?"

"Yes," I replied.

It was the tone of her voice and not the content of her inquiry that piqued my maternal antennae.

"We went to the Jim Gaffigan show at The Grove that weekend, remember?"

She knows I have an uncanny memory and I'd already told her I remembered last Thanksgiving, so she was going somewhere with this.

"*He* (name redacted for the sake of my sanity) and I used to do all Jim Gaffigan's funny lines, remember? We used to do the Ihop routine."

"I remember."

Gulp, blink back tears I never let her see. His was not a name that she had mentioned in months. At least not to me.


"Remember he and *son's name* went to that Lacrosse tournament in Palm Springs and his car battery died? And we were going to drive out with your Triple A card, but somebody on the team jumped his battery so he could get to their condo."

How the hell does she remember these things? I'd actually forgotten the car battery detail.

"Do you think *he's* doing okay? And *his son's name*? Do you think he's okay, too?"

"I'm sure they are doing fine. In fact, I'll bet they are doing great."

Fake smile. Confident tone.

"Do you think *son* is still playing Lacrosse? Do you think he's doing okay in school?"

It's something I wonder about all the time. Do I tell her what I think, or what I hope?

"I hope *son* is doing great."

"You still haven't talked to *him*?"

There it was ... somehow this is what she was getting to.

"Not since February. Not one word since he said "I'll call you later." I would tell you if I had talked to him."

I hate this conversation. I hate that she remembers, because if she remembers, she still cares and if she still cares, it still hurts her. Leftover memories and feelings from last Thanksgiving and beyond.

"What if he called? Would you want to talk to him?"

It must be a wonderful thing to be thirteen and to still be able to visit the world of "What if ..." rather than to live in the world of "What is ..."

"He isn't going to call. He made his decision about the life he wants, and I'm not part of it."

"We're not part of it."

Ouch. That one really hurt.

"But I'm just saying what if, Mom. What if he knocked on the door?"

When he knocked, it was always two sharp knocks, followed by him opening the front door and calling out "Princess ..."

"What if he knocked on the door. What would you say?"

"I guess I'd say ... welcome home."

She'd know if I lied to her and what would be the point, anyway?

"Ok. I was just wondering. I'm going to have a piece of banana bread. Do you want one?"

"Yeah, I do, thanks."

"Okay, love you, Mom."

"Love you too, baby."
 
Until next time.

http://thisthattheotherone.blogspot.com/

Guest blog #1 - from Life of Riles: Netflix Guilt

I will be running guest blogs all of this week. This is a blog from Tim Riley, one of the nicest blokes you will meet in the blogisphere....

Newsweek coined a great phrase a few years ago: Netflix Guilt. If you use Netflix, chances are you've experienced this condition.

Netflix Guilt results when a movie shows up at the house, and for whatever reason, you never get around to watching it. The guilt intensifies every time you watch something else, but you just can't bring yourself to watch it. You really want to, but the mood is never right. Finally, after months of excuses, you shamefully place the movie in your mailbox before skulking off to work.



I am currently experiencing a bout of Netflix Guilt over The Last Station. I want to watch it, I really do. Helen Mirren is in it, and she was great in The Queen, right? It's about Tolstoy, and I read War and Peace, didn't I? Hell, Meg and I even toured Tolstoy's old house when we were in Moscow years ago. Tolstoy was cool, I should want to watch a movie about the guy.


I like to consider myslf a bit of a cineast, so I hate to give up on any film. I'm also a realist, and it's time to admit defeat and move on. This isn't my first run-in with Netflix Guilt, and I'm sure it won't be my last. So, my fellow Netflixers, what movies have you had to send back unwatched?

 http://tjriles.blogspot.com/

Announcing .... guest blogger week

OK because this week will be Work 101 and I'm feeling generally lazy and uninspired about blogging, I'm dedicating it as guest blogger week.

I hope you are all as excited as I so obviously am not.

But in all seriousness, there are so many great bloggers out there who I follow and who follow me that I think this will be a great opportunity to showcase you....

Not to mention the fact you will make me feel less guity about feeling lazy and uninspired.

Sooo email me your favorite blog entry to maccaz17@hotmail.com or send me a link or a pic. You know how it works. And I'll say a couple of (justifiably) nice things about you and run your blog and the link.

I hoped to invite some big name celebrity bloggers such as Cotton Mather (see above), the early American puritan writer, who was going to write about how people can take you seriously in Wal-Mart with big, silly white wig hair.

Sadly Mather, who gave his rather inflexible feedback to the Salem Witch trials, appears to be just a bit dead.

Which is a shame really becase now society has no idea what to do with Christine O'Donnell and her big sister Rosie.

Happy Monday (almost)

Who or what is Justin Bieber?

Well 2010 went a bit too quickly for my liking.

It almost fooled us at the end too; we spent so long lounging around in a hotel drinking champagne and beer and getting prickly with the receptionist over that missing taxi, that we almost missed midnight.

As an aside why do we ever think it's a good idea for a receptionist at a hotel to call us a cab rather than making the effort to call it ourselves?

And as soon as I arrived at the bar/club I suddenly felt horribly sober and horribly old. There wasn't much of a countdown to midnight, but I have had worse New Years.

Like the one I spent working the late cops shift standing at the edge of a chilly highway looking at a dead body under a blanket. A couple of fireworks going off was the only signal that another year had started. "Happy New Year," I muttered to the police press officer as she gave me some clipped details of the time and manner of death.

Talking of death, a lot of interesting and worthwhile people passed away in 2010. Foremost in my mind are Dennis Hopper, Elizabeth Edwards, Tony Curtis and Leslie Nielsen, but there were many others.

And on a more positive note 2010 came and went without me getting to know any more about who or what is Justin Bieber, beyond some kind of celebrity who looks like he should be ferried around on a yellow bus.

I wouldn't know a Bieber song if it slapped me round the chops. I think I want it to remain that way in 2011.

Happy New Year - I'm off to the beach

It's New Year's Eve and we're off to the beach....

Not this one. This is a beach near Obidos in Portugal on the west coast, far from the Algarve that was turned into another Costa long ago by loud tattooed Brits.

The best places, inevitably are those that few people have discovered in the same way as the best restaurants are those frequented by the locals that look from the outside like the sort of joints you would take your dog to be put down.

New Year's Eves can be like that too. The big venues seldom fail to disappoint, unless you like freezing half to death for hours for the honor of having beer tipped over your head, in Time Square or Tralfalgar Square or Edinburgh's Tron.

In saying that the low key New Years have disappointed too. As a teenager growing up in suburbia there was such a crush of expectation placed on one night, that New Years inevitably proved to be damp squibs.

They'd often end up in cold bowling alleys, exchanging germs with a nefarious and frightening looking girl from the local comprehensive school, who you'd jump in an icy river to avoid making eye contact with the next week.

A bad New Year's Eve was failing to exchange germs with  a nefarious and frightening looking girl from the local comprehensive school, and having to watch your friend in the aforementioned germ exchange.

Actually a bad New Year's Eve was walking for hours in a sullen huddle with a group of no hopers looking for a non existent party and ending up back at the home of one of these no hopers polishing off a bottle of Thunderbird.

Of course, we are more evolved now. We have also recognized that New Year's Eves can be what's technically referred to as a pile of old cat poo.

But tonight we are free of the kids and out partying at the beach down at the Outer Banks. It should be enjoyable in a 40-something, semi-responsible, almost grown-up kind of way.

Happy New Year to all my fantastic blog friends. Here's to 2011.

Dreams of nakedness and the school bully

This is how dreams should look; like the Birth of Venus by Botticelli in which the goddess emerges from the sea as a full grown woman. There are lots of aqua colors, shells and nice wavy edges.

Sadly my dreams don't look anything like this.
Take last night, for instance. I had that recurring no clothes dream. I was in a town square, somewhere in Dreamland when somebody suggested everybody should take off their clothes. Of course, I obliged.

But some time later I realized that I was the only person wearing no undergarments. Funnily enough I was walking around and talking to people and nobody seemed to notice. But I was keen, to say the least, to get to a bus stop where my undergarments were located. But every time I showed up at the bus stop, they no longer seemed to be there. When I asked people: "Have you seen my underpants," they just blithely shrugged their shoulders.

The unusual thing about this is if I was at a bus stop and some guy with no clothes showed up and asked if I had seen his underpants, I would probably dial 911.

According to the website Dreammoods.com the naked dream is fairly common. It may be telling you that you are trying to be something that you really are not. Yeah - successful.

The other bizarre aspect to my dreams is they frequently include the fat kid from school, who I will call Adam. In my daily life I haven't given a flying thought to this guy for 27 years. So how come he shows up in my dreams all the time?

The stereotypical fat kid story, from the Lord of the Flies on, would have it that the class fat kid is weak, bespectacled and a target for bullies. Well Adam wasn't like that. He was the school bully. His unexpected belly attacks on entering the changing room are part and parcel of the heart of darkness that was my schooling.

So it's rather disconcerting that I still dream of Adam rather than the pretty girls who were in my class. Come to think of it, that's stretching it somewhat. There was a lot of inbreeding in our neighborhood.

But I wouldn't mind dreaming of a couple of the girls who possessed their own teeth, rather than Adam.

I wonder what Freud would make of my dream. He's probably say it alluded to the possibility of sex with an eight legged elephant.

I need to research this whole dream thing further.

The madness of snow

Increasingly I am coming to associate the color white with madness, with sheer blanched out craziness, with snow on the ground and cars skidding and hobos hobbling through the pale sludge.

My state of mind is partly the result of a four hour drive on icy roads in falling snow in a storm that turned everything we take for granted on its head. In the drive-through of a McDonalds somewhere in North Carolina we waited 15 minutes behind unmoving cars before realizing the restaurant was closed or on some crazed snow time.

Then after two 5 a.m, shifts, of long hours staring at pink walls and the unforgiving whiteness lying impassive beyond the windows, I am feeling my sanity slide as surely as my body in my chair.

The cold withers and diminishes us. In another fast food restaurant pooled with slippery slush stains on the floor two bearded men talked in a monotone. “I just smoke and eat and smoke again,” said one. The other nodded in affirmation of a life stripped down to the basics.

So the snow brings out the worst in us. The Christmas card beauty is illusory. The reality is a wind with teeth that tears and gnaws under a sky scoured of all warmth and color: it’s all the neat little assumptions we have built our life on being flushed into a dirty freezing sink hole.

The most frightening cell Brian Keenan, the half demented Beirut hostage, was held in wasn’t dark and dingy but white like the inside of an ice cube. And his captors tormented him with a radio that was off frequency and squealed all day and all night.

When I think of madness I think of Karma Police by Radiohead. I have no clue what it’s about but it reeks of insanity.

Karma police, arrest this man
He talks in maths
He buzzes like a fridge
He's like a detuned radio.

The snow makes me think of disorientation and blindness, of tracks covered up and Captain Oates with his cable knit sweater and big boots heading out into the whiteness to be gone for some time. I shiver as I think of the Antarctic expeditions of Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance trapped and crushed in pack ice and immortalized in time by Frank Hurley’s haunting photographs.

After the loss of the Endurance, Shackleton and his party camped on a large ice floe for almost two months hoping it would drift towards an island. After this failed there was a mind and body numbing expedition including five days on the freezing waters in a small boat. They arrived on solid ground in April 1916, almost five months adrift after the loss of Endurance.

But more chilling than the exploits of Shackleton’s men, who all survived their ordeal, notwithstanding  frostbitten fingers, is Napoleon’s Grande Armée's retreat from Moscow in 1812.

Few historical accounts do justice to the horrors faced as an army that was once the most formidable in Europe was reduced from almost 700,000 to 70,000 men.

After the horses died the French army hobbled across the frozen wastes into blinding snow and sub zero temperatures, in inadequate clothes under constant attack from the Russian army. Men cannibalized each other and burned their comrades alive to steal warm clothing. By the time the remnants of the army returned to cities they had marched through in triumph, citizens turned away in horror at the sight. They had turned into a squalid sub human species in rags. Their bodies and minds had been undone by the biting wind.

There are few more chilling tales than those that combine the inhumanity of the cold with the inhumanity of war. More than a century later it happened again in the bitter winter of 1943 when the German 9th Army was encircled and faced starvation in Stalingrad.

It’s not easy to imagine the desperation of the soldiers huddled below the burned and blackened buildings knowing death was making its way towards them across the freezing white plains.

We think of death as black but bones left out in the cold are blanched white.

The art of stating the bleeding obvious

Is it just me or has there been a growth of online and magazine articles recently devoted to the ancient art of saying the bleeding obvious?

I was struck by this today reading the CareerBuilder.com job seeker blog on what to say and what to not say to your boss.

So, for instance, if your boss explains how you can improve you shouldn't respond. “You give the worst feedback. Ever.”

You don't say.

Other comments you shouldn't make to your boss include "I want your job" and  "This will never work," apparently.

Maybe you also shouldn't tell your boss he or she "generally sucks" as this is potentially career limiting.

I'm not sure where The CareerBuilder gets this from. The Wal-Mart training manual, perhaps.

Talking of stores I recently saw a magazine article at the supermarket check-out on nasty and nice celebrities that contained the shocking revelation that while Tom Hanks is an all round nice guy Charlie Sheen isn't.

This would be the same Charlie Sheen who assaulted his wife and went crazy in a hotel room where a woman was locked in the bathroom?

Prepare for the latest shocking revelations. Snow, it seems, is cold and the sun can be rather warm.

http://www.theworkbuzz.com/career-advice/say-this-instead/?cobrand=msn&utm_source=MSN&utm_medium=MSNHP&utm_campaign=MSNCareers&GT1=23000

Musings on the Plague at Christmas

The definition of Sod's Law is this. I was smugly boasting to my boss about how I have taken no sick days in 2010, last week.

On Monday when I woke up I felt like somebody had placed an anvil in my head; not a big, old dirty one from a backsmith's but a bijou designer anvil. It still hurt.

Add to the pounding headache, an itchy throbbing nose, watery eyes, a hacking cough and a regular need to sneeze and you get the picture.

I was also incredibly irritable. My wife didn't pick up on any change.

I made it to work but only so as I could drone into the phone at people who replied: "Sorry, I don't understand you."

Getting Tuesday off work wasn't a problem because I still had a year's allowance of sick days. But I like to make a cast iron case by groaning loudly and limping (did I tell you flu also gives me a limp?) and then playing the nuclear option which involves a performance of one's most runny and contagious sounding sneeze close to one's boss.

This normally prompts the response: "Maybe you should have tomorrow off," as she wipes off her keyboard.

Illnesses of the most basic kind serve to remind us how fragile we really are as humans. They are also good at securing sufferers a space on a crowded public transportation system, as I found out in London.

But when people who are laid up with an illness tell you they have "the Plague" it's always a good idea to indulge in some improptu re-education. I would suggest finding the nearest imposing piece of headgear, a top hat or the like, grabbing a copy of Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year and addressing them in a booming voice along the lines of: "You most certainly do not, Sir (or Madame, if the malingerer happens to be a lady)."

A quick reading of the biography of Defoe suggests he fitted more into a short-ish 17th and 18th Century life than any 100-year-old you care to hunt down at one's nearest nursing home (admittedly not a traditional Christmas activity). Defoe wrote countless works, was involved in numerous controversies and managed to father eight kids of which six survived.

He also wrote the puncy sounding work: "A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal the Next Day after her Death to One Mrs. Bargrave at Canterbury the 8th of September, 1705."

He failed on a number of occasions to land a job as a headline writer on a tabloid newspaper.

In A Journal of the Plague Year, Defoe recounts the horror of plague afflicted London in 1665 when the bubonic plague struck brought over, like most of the ills of modern society, from the Netherlands.

in one vignette, he describes a victim who took matters into his own hands. "But after I have told you, as I have above, that one man, being tied in his bed, and finding no other way to deliver himself, set the bed on fire with his candle, which unhappily stood within his reach, and burnt himself in his bed; and how another, by the insufferable torment he bore, danced and sung naked in the streets, not knowing one ecstasy from another; I say, after I have mentioned these things, what can be added more?"

"What can be said to represent the misery of these times more lively to the reader, or to give him a more perfect idea of a complicated distress?"

Not very much. Defoe succeeded admirably in his grim task, although his account is a fictional one based on the diaries of his nephew.
 
Defoe describes a chuchyard in Aldgate, curiously a place I have driven past, quiet and half forgotten about now, but the ground zero of the plague in 1665.
 
Makeshift pits had been dug in the cemetery but with 200-400 bodies being thrown in in the course of a week, the pits were inadequate. In the end the authorities instead dug what Defoe describes as a "dreadful gulf" for the dead.
 
At the site of a great pit in open fields in Finsbury "some came and threw themselves in, and expired there, before they threw any earth on them; and that when they came to bury others, and found them there, they were quite dead, though not cold."
 
The Great Plague killed about 100,000 people, 20 percent of London's population, although it was on a far smaller scale than the Black Death pandemic of the 14th Century.
 
Happy Christmas everybody.