Tag: SoCS

SoCS: Is it really almost over?

Is it really almost over?

I have been AWOL from One-Liner Wednesday and Stream of Consciousness Saturday for the last several weeks as I have been visiting my daughter in Honolulu. Her husband has been away doing research for his PhD dissertation in London, as well as visiting his family there.

My husband came out with me for the first two weeks, during which time we stayed in a hotel. Then, he had to return to go on a business trip. I moved to my daughter’s apartment and have been staying with her for almost three weeks.

It is less like vacationing and more like living here, which is cool! I have been blogging about it, such as this post about settling into the Kaimuki neighborhood where she lives, but there are others to check out at Top of JC’s Mind, if you are interested. (Shameless plug!)

I fly out on Tuesday, but I’m having trouble wrapping my head around it. Just a few more days and I’ll be back – and six-hours-of-time-change jet-lagged – in upstate New York. Back to the stuff that is filling up my calendar back home – appointments and meetings – and the catching up on mail and errands and visits.

I’m not sure I’m ready – but it is what it is.
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Linda’s prompt for this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “is” Please join us! Find out how here:  http://lindaghill.com/2015/07/03/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-july-415/

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SoCS: You’re leaving when?

I am almost ready to go to Hawai’i for five weeks. On second thought, that is almost entirely untrue.

In fairness,  I have been making preparations, beyond the obligatory travel arrangements. I’ve just been making them for other people – helping T move to Albany for the summer to start an exciting internship with the NYS DEC, getting things as squared away as possible with the elders, making plans for the spirituality group I facilitate to carry on without me, etc.

What I haven’t done yet are things like packing and making arrangements for the mail to be held and printing itineraries and copying important documents and emails into the cloud so that I can access them when I am 5,000 miles from my desktop.

So, now It’s crunch time and I have three days.

Ready, set, go!
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This post is part of Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday. The prompt this week is: “almost.”  Come join us!  Find out how here:  http://lindaghill.com/2015/05/29/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-may-3015/

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SoCS: What I would like

I would like to spend a leisurely time writing an amazing SoCS post. I would like to snap my fingers and get everything organized and accomplished because there are many appointments and obligations coming up in the next week and a half, including helping a daughter move to another city for her summer internship.

Obviously, snapping my fingers isn’t going to cut it.

So, short and sweet and on to the next…
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This week, Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “ke.”  Use the letter combination at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of the word you choose to base your post on.

Join us! Find out how here:  http://lindaghill.com/2015/05/22/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-may-2315/

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SoCS: growing up in the sticks

I grew up in the sticks.

It’s an expression I don’t hear much anymore. OK – I don’t hear it at all anymore. I’m not sure how widespread its usage was but it means to grow up in an out-of-the-way place. I grew up in a town of 200 people, give or take, in western Massachusetts along the Vermont border. We had a little general store which had the post office in it. We had a paper mill where most of the people in town worked. We had a school that went up through eighth grade. We even had a little bar/restaurant called “The Club.”

Everything else – big grocery stores, clothing stores, the high school, doctors, banks, etc. – was twenty miles away.

So, to me, where I lived was the definition of  “the sticks.”

I was surprised after I moved to Broome County NY – aka Greater Binghamton – that the definition of “the sticks” was different. In New York State, it seems that everything gets compared to New York City. There is The City, its suburbs and Long Island – and everything else becomes “upstate,” mashing together large cities like Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse, with smaller cities, towns, villages, and very rural areas, such as the Adirondacks.

So even though I live on the southern border of the state, just a few miles from the state line with Pennsylvania, I am “upstate.” I live in a town that is a hundred times larger in population than my hometown, about the size of the twenty-mile-away city that we used to go to for shopping and services when I was growing up. My current town is a suburb of Binghamton, which is a city with its own opera company, symphony, minor league baseball and hockey teams, and all kinds of other amenities that were much further afield when I was growing up.

Yet, because we are small compared to NYC, we are considered to be “the sticks.”

Go figure.
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is: “stick.”  Come join in the fun! Find out how here: http://lindaghill.com/2015/05/15/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-may-1615/

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badge by Doobster @MindfulDigressions

 

SoCS: the meaning of names

On Wednesday, I went to hear my friend Pat Raube and Martha Spong  of RevGalBlogPals read from their new book, There’s a Woman in the Pulpit. It’s one of those rare times when a publisher offered a book deal because of a blog.  It was great to be able to attend the reading and get my book signed.

Pat’s reading included a reference to her daughter’s name – Joan – and for whom she was named. I immediately thought of a welcome ceremony that Pat’s soul-sisters of Sarah’s Circle had held for Joan as an infant, which featured a coat of many colors that Pat had made for Joan.  It also included a personal blessing from each person in attendance, given verbally at the time and recorded in a book which Pat gave to Joan when she turned sixteen.

When we had a bite to eat together after the reading, the Sarah’s Circle members in attendance were reminiscing about that day and telling stories about names and their meanings and how we came to be called what we are called.

Even though Joan is about to graduate from Oberlin later this month – with Michelle Obama as commencement speaker! – I remember that I had written my blessing to her about the origin of our name. Joan (and Joanne) come from a Hebrew root and I have heard them translated as “God is gracious” or “gift of God” or my favorite “God’s gracious gift.” The last is the one I chose to incorporate into my blessing for Joan.

When I was a first year at Smith thirty-six years ago, I studied Latin with Professor Skulsky. One day she went through the class and told us all the origin of our names, although she was disappointed that none of us had names with Latin roots, like Amanda, which means “the woman who ought to be loved.”

Years later, there was a rise in popularity of Amanda as a name for new babies. My younger daughter had a number of same age Amandas in her class. I wonder if they knew the meaning of their name…

[Update: This post now has a postscript.]
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is: “name.”  Please join us! Find out how here:  http://lindaghill.com/2015/05/08/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-may-915/

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Badge by Doobster @Mindful Digressions

SoCS: Accepting compliments

It seems that it should be the easiest thing in the word to graciously accept compliments. Someone says something nice about you or something you have done and you smile and say thank you.

Somehow though, if you tend to be the self-deprecating, or perfectionistic, or even the humble sort, it can be difficult not to go on with a “but” … it was really a team effort, or I made a mistake in the third movement, or it was just a little something – or it was nothing at all.

Sometimes, we don’t feel worthy of the compliment. It may help to look from the point of view of the complimenter instead of reflexively rejecting the substance of the compliment.

Next time, maybe, it will be just “Thank you.”  With maybe an extension of the gratitude, like, “I’m so glad you liked it.”  “It means so much to me to hear you say that.”

A gracious acceptance of the compliment with no “but”s.
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The prompt for Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is: “compliment/complement.”  Anyone can join in!  Find out how here:  http://lindaghill.com/2015/05/01/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-may-215/

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SoCS: What is seen can’t be unseen

Once something has been seen, it can’t be unseen, however much we might wish to erase it.

Part of the reason I don’t watch many scary movies is that the images haunt my dreams. I can still remember some of the shock I felt seeing the original theatrical release of “Jaws” as a young teen and the way it haunted my dreams.

Some of the most haunting things I have seen have been family medical things. A look of terror in the eyes during an intensive care disorientation episode. A bad reaction to a medication that caused uncontrollable jaw clenching with resultant biting of cheeks.  A child suffering tremors.  Seeing bones through skin when most of the flesh and muscle have wasted away.

Even years later, these memories make me shudder.  Even so, I can’t wish that I had not seen them, only that they had not existed to be seen.

This post is part of Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturdays. This week’s prompt is scene/seen.  Join us!   http://lindaghill.com/2015/01/30/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-january-3115/

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May as well finish up just Jot It January, too!  http://lindaghill.com/2015/01/01/just-jot-it-january-pingback-post-and-rules/

SoCS: Heal

Healing feels like a life theme. There have been a lot of health challenges in our family for a lot of years, some big, some small. The small ones seem to heal; the big ones – not so much. Though the situation becomes less acute, full healing isn’t possible. It’s hard…

So, instead of full physical healing, we have to work on spiritual healing, which involves coming to a state of peace and acceptance. It’s also hard, a constant challenge, but the key to moving forward in a positive direction.

This is part of Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturdays:  http://lindaghill.com/2015/01/16/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-january-1715/  Please join in!
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Badge by Doobster @MindfulDigressions

Also, Linda is hosting Just Jot It January. Join in with this, too!  http://lindaghill.com/2015/01/01/just-jot-it-january-pingback-post-and-rules/

SoCS: The T is silent

I wasn’t sure what I would write about using the prompt of including the letter T until I read this:  http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/2014s-runner-person-year about how Stephen Colbert was the runner-up to Pope Francis to be National Catholic Reporter’s Person of the Year.

We are fans of Stephen Colbert and his just-completed nine-year run of The Colbert Report. I wrote about it here.

When I told my family about the NCR piece, our daughter T immediately began to concoct a segment of “Who’s Not Honoring Me Now?” about how Stephen (in character) didn’t much care for this pope but that now it was personal.

In real life, Stephen Colbert is a practicing Catholic and I’m sure is fond of Pope Francis. That would be the Stephen who pronounces the T at the end of his last name.

From the first promos of The Colbert Report, it was pointed out that both the T at the end of Colbert and the T at the end of Report are silent. It was how you could tell that someone was familiar with the show or not. Fans would never have pronounced those Ts.

Stephen, being runner-up to Pope Francis is still a great gig!

This post is part of Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday, with the prompt being the letter T: http://lindaghill.com/2015/01/02/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-january-315/ .  It is also part of Linda’s Just Jot It January:  http://lindaghill.com/2015/01/01/just-jot-it-january-pingback-post-and-rules/ . Come join in the fun!

JJJ 2015
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Badge by Doobster @Mindful Digressions

My 2014 blog-year in review

The WordPress.com stats helper prepared a 2014 annual report for Top of JC’s Mind. Instead of a Sydney Opera House or Louvre comparison like larger blogs, I am a subway train level blog. 😉  I saw the reports for some of the larger blogs I follow first and fleetingly considered keeping my summary report private, but decided that I should share because I am proud of the progress I made as a blogger this year and proud that I managed to stay active through my first full calendar year here at WordPress, despite the topsy-turvy path life has taken.

I’m sending out a big thank you to Linda G. Hill at Life in Progress! Many of my views this year were due to participating in her One-Liner Wednesdays and Stream of Consciousness Saturdays. Everyone is invited to join in the fun! Just check her blog for links on Wednesdays and Fridays, when the prompt for SoCS is published.  I found new blogs to follow by participating and gained new followers for Top of JC’s Mind through it, too.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,600 times in 2014. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.