What Have You Done in Your Life?

Well on Saturday I wrote six pages. On Sunday I deleted them all.
 All in all it was a pretty good weekend.

And this week I spun about as a Real Estate Agent.

I would never have known lis pendens from an appendix had I not taken a Real Estate course. Daughter number two said lis pendens sounded like a body part. (It means "suit pending" the most common is the notice served beginning a foreclosure procedure.)

My Real Estate license is now parked with the state--that is I am not associated with any agency and thus I have lost my lofty title REALTOR. I read a quote by Billy Crystal, "I learned over the years that if you're not happy doing what you're doing, then you shouldn't be doing it." that pretty much sums up my relationship in being an agent. I have not, however, given up on houses...

Here is an example of the feeling a person gets when doing what they love. Daughter number one's counselor asked her what she was doing for herself--that was on top of working plus caring for her son, husband and house. "Oh," she said, "taking walks, soaking in the tub, but afterword I feel just just as exhausted as before." The counselor said, "What about your art?" 

Daughter awakened the next morning raring to sculpt. Thus this carved avocado pit. And it put a smile on her face too.

 http://foodlifeeverything.wordpress.com

Dragoncado

I don't know how she held that slippery pit. I know she peeled off the pit's brown thin film revealing a white pit beneath. The white turns this coppery color after being exposed to air.

If we were to talk about juxtapositions Daughter number one and I would be a great example. While she is into preparing food--and photographing it, I get out of cooking every chance I can.


Finally before I sail off into the blue, I am offering, for a limited time,  a FREE ebook, Mother's Letters...and mine. This book is not for everybody, but it will be for somebody. Are you one of those bodies? To determine if you are check out:

 free-ebookletters.blogspot.com

If you are sure you want it click on this email. 

grattisebook@gmail.com 

(Just copy and paste, I hate it when the computer asks for tons of information. It's just an email address for heavens sake..)

The eBook will come as a Pdf file on your computer. 
Many thanks,
Joyce

Wishing You “The Luck of the Irish”

Is this St Pat’s day? I think it is. Normally I don’t keep track of such things—I have to be reminded of Thanksgiving Day and such, but I wrote the date for this blog, and saw that it was time to go out for a green beer.

St. Patrick was born around 387 C.E. in Scotland, and turned to God once he was kidnapped by slave traders and brought to Ireland to be a shepherd.  He is accredited to bringing Christianity to Ireland and he used the shamrock, a three leafed plant, to explain the trinity to the people.

According to Catholic Online. St Patrick said, "I prayed in the woods and on the mountain, even before dawn. I felt no hurt from the snow or ice or rain."

For decades following the Great Famine in the mid-nineteenth century, the shamrock was popular among the Irish as an icon promoting, at least for a day, the rejection of British rule in Ireland. And because the church lifted the ban on drinking on the Sabbath on that day, everyone went out for a beer.

But, I wondered, why has the four leaf clover become associated with St Patrick?

Apparently it was a mix-up. The luck of the Irish, the green, the shamrock, and the four leaf clover which is a good luck charm. This is the stuff of myths, and symbolism, and since we love celebrations, that too. My grandson would call this a “mixel.”

During the gold rush in America, the most famous and successful miners were Irish or of Irish American birth. Over time this association with mining fortunes led to the expression, “The Luck of the Irish.” Of course it could have been that it was not so much luck as brains.

Fascinating, that some of the most down-trodden people have risen above adversary to become great. And these once thought to be less-than people are now celebrated.

Ha ha. To life! the ancestors must be laughing.

Picture of Cinderella's Castle, Disneyland Paris France, green for St. Pat's day.

I am Woman

My morning read—I stumbled upon it, didn’t mean to go there, but here it is:

“The reality is that girls make up almost a quarter of the world’s population yet still face the greatest discrimination of any group in the world.” (Movie I am A Girl.)

Anyone in their right mind ought to be outraged.

Why or why would anyone treat their mother less-than, their sister, their aunt, their girlfriend? Someday these individuals might get their sorry asses saved by a woman doctor, or kept out of prison by a woman lawyer, or their despicable childhood healed by a lady psychologist—you got it. Although it took millennium for women to be allowed into those professions.

When I attended the University of Oklahoma that also sported a Veterinary program, I considered applying for their Vet school, but I was only a sophomore, and we moved away that year, but I remember the Vet professor saying that women were seldom admitted. They didn’t want to waste their time on someone who would get married, have babies and not practice.

Now, ha ha professor, the majority of Veterinarian graduates are women.  I was married then, and I did have children later, still I could have practiced for 50 years—that would match any man. No regrets, just the facts.

Remember the Trojan Women denied sex to their men until they stopped warring. That worked. Yet when a girl loses her virginity at twelve years of age that sets her up for a lifetime of submissiveness—not power.

Monty Roberts, a horse trainer, and you have heard me say many times “It’s all about horse training,” spent a summer observing wild mustangs. One day Roberts watched the schooling of a terrorist foal by a nun mare. While Roberts watched a colt—he figured it was between one and two years old—the colt took a run at a filly and give her a good kick. The filly hobbled off.

Then the colt committed another attack. A little foal approached him moving his mouth in a sucking motion, which in young horses indicates that they are no threat. “I’m a baby. I eat grass, not animals.” 

The colt lunged at the baby and took a bite out of his backside. Immediately after the attack the colt pretended that nothing had happened.

The dun mare was watching this activity. She was the wise one, the matriarch of the herd, and the alpha mare in charge of the day to day living. Each time the colt behaved badly she inched closer to him, showing no sign of interest, until she made her move. She pinned her ear back, ran at him, and knocked him off his feet into the dirt. As he struggled to his feet, she knocked him down again.  Then she drove the colt some three hundred yards from the herd and left him there, alone, and took vigil to keep him there. Clearly she was freezing him out.

It terrified the colt to be left alone. For a flight animal this was equivalent to a death sentence. The colt attempted to sneak back into the herd, but again the mare drove him out. He started the licking and chewing motion of a contrite young foal.

By morning Roberts saw a surprising event. The dun mare was grooming the colt. She was giving him little scrapes on his neck and hindquarters. She had let him back in and now she was giving him lots of attention. She massaged the root of his tail, his hips. Hell was behind, this was heaven.

As time went on Roberts observed that, like a child, the colt would test the disciplinary system, and each time the mare disciplined him. By the third time he sinned, he practically exiled himself, grumbling but accepting his fate.

Finally the colt’s teenage rebellion stopped, and be became so sweet he was a positive nuisance. He would wander around when the horses wanted to graze asking, “Do you need any grooming.”

Amen

P.S. From a reader. This is fascinating. Today is Pi Day  (π)
The date is 3.34.(Pi)
Later today the entire Pi number (well a large amount of it--it goes on forever) will come up with the date and time. This will not come again until 2115.

www.vox.com/215/3/13/8205807/piday


See below: "Coming In For a Landing"--my new landing page title.

This will be a place to park my books when they appear, and they (you know the publishing gurus) say that I need a "Landing Page" in case anyone googles my name, or books or whatever. 

http://www.joyceslandingpg.blogspot.com

Today Its Gold Bug Eyes

It wasn’t an epiphany. It wasn’t even the first time I had heard of it, or the first time I thought of it, but it was nice to see it in action.

I was in a coin shop where I casually told the clerk my husband had been in a few days earlier to purchase a tiny square of gold to electroplate a bug. She laughed, “Why?”

“To take its picture with an electron microscope.”  She loved microscopy she said. She used the imagery in her potting, and she showed me a coffee mug of her own design. Pure pleasure showed on her face, excitement in her voice. People love talking about what they love.

Next at the bank the teller sported a beautiful vintage engagement ring. Her face lighted when I asked her when she was getting married. “Soon,” she said. Her fiance’ was raised in Hawaii, he was flying his family to Eugene. He was Samoan, and he was taking her to Samoa so she could see his culture, and how he was raised. She was in for an adventure, and excitement reigned supreme.

Remember the movie You Can’t Take it With You (1938 Oscar winner for Best picture) where the patriarch, the Grandfather played by Lionel Barrymore collected an odd assortment of dreamers, misfits, eccentrics, and they lived together in his house where they did pretty much whatever they wanted. Someone had left behind a typewriter, and Barrymore’s  daughter, and mother of the Jean Arthur character engaged to Jimmy Stewart, picked it up and began writing a screenplay. She had written herself into a monastery and couldn’t find a way out. All through the movie she asked whoever showed up to help her get out of the monetary.  That’s a stock phrase at our house. “How can I get out of the monastery?”

Once the Barrymore character was doing business with a lack-luster accountant. He asked the man what he really wanted to do. From beneath his desk the man pulled out a bunny, a mechanical toy he had made. His face lighted. This is what he wanted to do, make mechanical toys.

Of course Grandfather convinced the accountant to come live at their house where other husbands and grandfathers made fireworks in the basement.

I look around and see few people loving what they are doing. So much of life is doing the 9 to 5.

So, what’s the secret?

How do we break out, and live the life we dreamed of when we were kids, when we thought the world had our best interests at heart and believed the world was our oyster? (Whatever that means.)

You know the story of the oyster who like a cookie under his sheet, finds a grain of sand in his shell. Without hands to pull it out, he begins to coat it with a smooth shiny substance, coating it and coating it so it no longer pokes him when he tries to sleep.  Thus the pearl is born.

I think there are two lessons here. Take your pick.