Better Idea!

Note to Bloggers:

Never post post a pint of Guinness.  It makes for a warm glow, poor grammar and nonsensical reading.

Happy Wednesday!

New Construction; Warm Memories

      

    

There is a house under construction in our neighborhood.  It does not seem very remarkable from the outside.  It looks nice and will make a lovely place for some family; clean, contemporary and new.

My parents had the house I grew up in, built.  Some of my earliest memories are of driving to the site, walking around the rising structure and painting the last triangle of wall on the northern side of my bedroom, a gentle yellow. Ours was the last house on the street when we moved in, except for the neighbors all the way at the end of the cul-de-sac, so far down that we could neither see, nor hear, them.  

The street filled in with new houses as I grew up. Then a new street behind ours emerged and was also developed, one house at a time, each a bit different according to the year it was constructed.  I spent my childhood in construction sites.  We played Star Trek, ( I was always Bones or Scotty) Batman (I was always Robin since I had black bloomers from school, which looked just like Robin's)  It was wonderful.

One neighbor let all the kids on the street dig his basement, he was actually building his house himself.  We had a blast that summer, until Ronny hit his brother with a pick by mistake.  They were fine, but a back-hoe was there the next day and school started a couple of weeks later.

During our later, pre-teen and teen years, my neighbors and I would run all over these sites.  We climbed ladders and spanned floors of 2x4s. We smoked in basements and on rooftops, we talked about anything and everything.  We grew up.

When the footings were laid in some of the houses, after the workmen had left for the day, we wrote our initials in the damp concrete, leaving our mark for posterity.  One of my friends died in the eighties; but his name remains in the neighborhood, in the footings. 

I loved spending time in the bones of a house.  It is really the mere suggestion of a house, full of possibilities without the suffocating separation of walls.  Air flows freely and bits of sky hide in the rafters. At night the animals creep through, as we had earlier in the day.  They seek bits of food or shelter and they hunt; they live.

I see the lines of the houses like the lines of ancient ruins, but rather than disrepair, destruction and a sorrowful past, there is wonder of the future, of our capacity to provide such housing and at the knowledge and skill of those who build.  I do not know how to build a house: I admire that very much. 

I wish I could live in a half built structure, the warm wood and the lines remind me of the awe of the Acropolis. The unfinished quality lets my mind expand, to take any space to a different completion in my mind, each day. It smells of fresh wood fiber and has the warm glow of pine and late afternoon. 

In an unfinished house I can still hear the warm, young voices of the past on a pleasant summer evening, engaged in living, breathing conversation, side by side, in sawdust and friendship.

                                 
       

                           

                   

    

Dark and Stormy

A headache in the making...Dark and Stormy; and I was this morning.

Gin and Tonic tonight; much calmer weather.

It is a good thing I get hangovers or I would be the worst souse you have ever met.  It is also useful that smoking has so many issues or I would be spending a fortune on tobacco, which I dearly love. Coffee in non negotiable in my life, just ask my doc.

I have another insidious habit, the internet; clean internet, but still social media seemingly wastes my time. I stick with it though because my friends are so interesting and I have more contact with a broad range of thinkers than I have had in years.  I read articles which would never have crossed my desk, and I see art exhibitions, studios and media which would live in relative isolation without the web.  

So while I am more cautious about drink and tobacco, the net I will keep as a companion.

Techno Challenged

Technology challenges; I have them. People I know who are computer savvy have them too.   I am not a computer fool, but there are times I feel hopelessly lost.  Usually I rely on Google searches to help me and they often succeed.  Tonight for instance I password protected my router because my Netflix signal kept dropping out;  people were stealing my bandwidth!  It has taken me three months to work up the courage to potentially lose all my network connections while trying to fix the problem; and I did - for a minute or two. It helps that my kids are not home, I would hate to bear the consequences of an error in that circumstance.

I read an article tonight about not using the "like" button on Facebook, in order to change the tenor of one's "feed."  This led to a prompt to read another article in which a person described liking almost everything in his feed, which led to a home page of almost entirely publication articles and ads.  It seems that a lot of people do not realize that their posts and reactions are fed through an algorithm that determines what appears on your home page.  If we saw everything our friends post, we could never keep up with the volume of information, we would simply be overwhelmed, so Facebook slims down the trend by "watching" what we do.

This "watching" also leads to those creepy ads that react to what we write.  Have you noticed that if you post that you got new shoes -shoe ads start cropping up?   I posted about my new website and now I am getting website ads.  The same thing happens in my Gmail account.  I don't really care because nothing particularly private is happening in my Facebook or Gmail accounts; glad I am not a spy, for so many reasons.

I have become pretty quick about disconnecting my power cord and then popping out the battery of my computer when I think some awful virus might be loading itself.   I start up again in safe mode, load my "Virus" user name and re-set my computer to an earlier date. These are the silly techno things I have learned to do in order, most humbly and feebly, to try to protect myself from wiser, though nastier computer savvy folk.

I hope the hackers who hijacked my blog last summer leave me alone.  Fingers crossed that their fingers have found real pies into which they may pry.

Finally a Web Site!

Years in the making......www.pennylisk.com is now live.

It needs a little more info and a few more photos, and a lot of text editing, but there is finally a less than totally embarrassing web site of my work.  Yea!

In the meantime, I must sleep to build more tomorrow.

Scrooge and Polluted Chocolate

Ask my children and they will tell you that I am an old Scrooge.  This manifests itself in many ways, but mostly in my constant concern over wasting money.  I nag: use a cloth dishtowel when possible and not paper towels.  Don't use paper napkins as paper towels, wear jeans more than once before you wash them (unless you have been mud wrestling)....little cheappie things, that can add up to money over time. It is  not just the money though, I want them to think about actions, choices and values.  Be aware of what you do and what the consequences are.

Candy is a splurge I indulge.  I do not buy fine chocolates, but I do buy candy, Hershey's Treasures and tiny Dove pieces mostly. I am also a fiend for Russell Stover Coconut Nests (despite their horrible name). My pet peeve is Nutella.  I HATE Nutella; I am Scrooge. Firstly, I do not like it (Sam I Am) and nothing will make me like it.  Add to the fact that it has virtually no nutritional value and costs a small fortune, I am Scrooge about it.  That being said I have spent a small fortune on it, since I do indulge my children, it is cheaper at BJ's and it seems to be addictive (no not literally).  I have seen a two pound jar vanish in less than a week (only two people  in my house eat it).

The company claims it uses twenty five percent of the world's hazelnut crop; one quarter of the whole world supply?  What?  Lastly, okay, the stuff is from Italy, but nooootella?  Please, the first three letters are descriptive: nut.  It is Nut - ella.  If Newt Gingrich owned the company I would call it Newtella;  it tastes like old newt skins to me anyway.  What  a terrible thing to do to chocolate. There's my real peeve eh?  "You got hazelnuts in my chocolate!"

Fortunately the bloom is off the rose, finally.  Peanut butter has won out, as it ought. Peanut butter is American, cheap and nutritious.  I hate it on any food stuff,  but nothing adorns a spoon so well as peanut butter, except perhaps Betty Crocker chocolate icing.  Even Scrooge has her shortcomings in self control.

Blue Hair, Fins and Laughs

I went to my first Jimmy Buffet concert tonight.  It was on my husband's bucket list.  We had seats indoors and it was wonderful.  It also gave me an excuse to throw the blue color in my hair.  I am officially a blue haired old lady!

The concert was a huge sing-along and everybody had a great time.  Some entertainers not only know how to have fun onstage, but to also to entice the audience to be a part of that joy; Buffet excels at this.  He had fun, we had fun.

Buffet is also a much better musician than people give him credit.  His songs are fun. but melodically very pleasing and his lyrics touch a nerve; they expose our culture concisely, but not morosely.  We have fun in his fantasy escaping from the omitted stress, which is so well implied as to be defined through absence of description.  He is very, very good.

While a capacity audience at the Susquehanna Center in Camden dances with hands pointed over head, leaning while singing "Fins to the left, fins to the right" (and yes I did it too) we realize that while the sharks may be all around us, we are dancing all together and laughing - "all the way!"