NaBloPoMo

As Per NaBloPoMo: Make New Friends, But Keep The Old

/ Ally Bean / 22 Comments

I.  I’ve enjoyed June 2014 NaBloPoMo [done my way].  The theme of this month’s challenge is: COMMENTS.  There are daily prompts associated with this challenge, but I haven’t answered any of them.  I’ve been lazy, but admit to feeling guilty about my behavior.

• • • 

II.  To make up for my slothiness re: answering specific prompts, I thought that right here, right now I’d share MY GENERAL PHILOSOPHY ON PERSONAL BLOG COMMENTS.

  1. I like them.  I leave them.  And so should you.
  2. My blog, my rules.  Therefore, if I consider a commenter to be a troll, flying monkey or spammer, I’ll delete what he/she/it says without comment.  [Yes, that’s a bit of irony.]
  3. Blogs have comment sections.  I won’t return to a personal blog without a comment section because a blog without comments is just another webpage.

• • • 

III.  Today’s prompt is: “Write on Someone Else’s Blog Day: instead of writing a post on your own blog, go leave five comments. It still counts as writing!”  Here are the 5 NaBloPoMo bloggers who did as instructed [or other first time commenters who came here] to LEAVE A COMMENT FOR ME.  I’ll fill this in later because today I’ll be out leaving comments on other NaBloPoMo bloggers’ blogs.  [Obviously.]

  1. Jennie at Jen’s Rambling Thoughts
  2. Maria at FOREST TREE NUT
  3. ?
  4. ?
  5. ?

• • • 

IV.  So there you have it, my gentle readers.  A confession.  A summary. A list.  And now, as I end this post, A THANK YOU FOR PAYING ATTENTION to my sweet little bloggy and taking the time to get involved in the conversation.  I appreciate your gift of comments.  Always.

• • •

V.  And as reward for getting this far in a lengthy meta post, I leave you all, new and old bloggy friends, with the funniest video I’ve seen in ages.  WORDS OF WISDOM, gentle readers.  Words of wisdom.

“You can’t hit people because you want pancakes.”

Sunshine, Paperweights & The Magic Of Perspective

/ Ally Bean / 16 Comments

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I noticed that in the late afternoon the sun shines into our dining room through the French doors.  I have a paperweight collection on a table that happens to be in the path of the sunshine.

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When the light passes through the paperweights it makes beautiful patterns on the wall.  The patterns are easy to see, weirdly shaped and fun to capture with my camera.

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On a whim I adjusted my camera focus to distort the sunshine as it went through the paperweights and I found something different to see.  Something vaguely familiar, yet unique.  Proving once again, that what you see is all in how you go about looking at things.

An Observation On The Unintended Consequences Of The Behavior Of Elderly In-laws Who Watch The Weather Channel

/ Ally Bean / 14 Comments

Not covering any new ground here, but needs to be said.  Love is a strange thing.

Every time the Weather Channel shows bad weather where we live, my in-laws, who live hours away from here, phone us to make sure that we’re okay.

At age 80+ they do not believe in calling a cell phone number because they believe that talking on the phone while driving a car is dangerous.  And because they do not know if either one of us will be in our car when we answer our cell phones, they leave a message on our landline answering machine.

The messages are all about the same.  First, they say our names, then tell us who is calling.  Then they hang up without telling us why they called.  No good-bye, just click and the line goes dead.

It is from this pattern of behavior that we have come to know when bad weather is headed our way.  The lack of concrete message is the clue.

Because we both are too busy to spend much time in front of the TV this sort of non-message phone message has come to be our own special, personalized form of the Weather Channel.  And we love it.

And them for doing it.

In Which I Just Keep Truckin On, Like The Do-Dah Man

/ Ally Bean / 15 Comments

“Sometimes the lights all shinin on me;
Other times I can barely see.
Lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip its been.”

~ Truckin, Grateful Dead

~ • ~ 

If weeks had subtexts, then I’d say that this week’s subtext has been: HIPPIE-NESS.  [a word?]  Do you, gentle readers, have weeks like this when one unusual subject keeps turning up repeatedly?

I’m not kidding, every day this week I’ve been part of a conversation that has centered one way or another around topics that belong smack dab in the late 1960s or early 1970s.

Sock it to me, sock it to me. 

~ • ~ 

I’ve talked about:

Birkenstocks [which are now fashion forward again, btw]

AND

senior citizens who like a little toke to start the day [former neighbors, in case you’re wondering]

AND

a slightly insane off-the-grid genius who spent most of the 60s building a castle from stones he found along a river bank [photos coming next week]

AND

Colorado vacations [where weed is now legal, like you didn’t know]

AND

mothers in the 1960s who dressed their children in brightly colored matching outfits [not sure if this is technically hippie-ness, but it was a thing back then].

~ • ~ 

Yes, it’s been a groovy week– and I’ve loved it.  I’d forgotten how the hippie culture which influenced the late 1960s and early 1970s was so much less uptight and so much more in the moment than today’s world of goals and analytics and marketing and– oh, whatever.

Like, far out, man.

So what better way to end this post than to leave you, my gentle readers, with this song by the Grateful Dead that has run through my head all week?

Guess I’ll just hang it up now and see what tomorrow brings!  😉