Meandering Thoughts About Grittiness While Meandering Through A Bookstore

September 9, 2025 / Ally Bean / 226 Comments

✅ I WAS WANDERING AROUND Barnes & Nobles enjoying the positive vibe that comes from being around people who like books when I saw a copy of the latest book about Gwyneth Paltrow. I’d ~~read~~ skimmed a few reviews of Amy Odell’s Gwyneth: The Biography, so I knew it existed, but hadn’t seen it in the wild.

Yet there I was face-to-face with Gwyneth’s smiling face.

Or at least a portion of it.

• • •

✅ SEEING THIS BOOK sent my addled brain into overdrive.

My first thought was decidedly practical: I wonder what brand and shade of eyebrow pencil/powder Gwyneth has on. As my blonde hair has gotten grayer on its way to, I hope, silvery white, I’ve had a difficult time finding very pale blonde/light warm gray eyebrow colors.

My second thought was happily snarky: I wonder if she knows she looks like Janice on The Muppet Show? The resemblance is amazing to me. I bet Gwyneth can play an electric guitar as well as Janice.

My third thought was idly curious: I wonder what it’d be like to be a Hollywood nepo baby who’s lived your entire life with a financial safety net under you.

Not that Gwyneth hasn’t been successful, but is it because she knew she couldn’t fail, free to give her career her best shot unencumbered by the soul-sucking tedious financial realities most people face?

Is it because she’s so innately talented, filled with drive and grit that regardless of anything in her life she was destined to be a star?

• • •

✅ THIS LAST THOUGHT REMINDED ME that years ago I read psychologist Angela Duckworth’s book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. According to Duckworth:

Grit is passion and perseverance for longterm goals…. Talent and luck matter to success. But talent and luck are no guarantee of grit. And in the very long run, I think grit may matter as least as much, if not more.

I remember feeling empowered and comforted by her sensible assessment of what it takes to succeed— and how grit, something I possess, plays into a person’s success.

Back when I read the book I took a free online 10-question quiz that is still available for you to take. It is the GRIT SCALE QUIZ. From my results I learned that my Grit Score is 4.20 meaning that I’m grittier than 80% of Americans.

Discussion about whether this grittiness has helped me become the swell blogger I am today is something I’ll leave for another time.

• • •

✅ I DIDN’T PICK UP the book about Paltrow because, as you my little chickadees can probably guess, my interest in biographies of Hollywood stars is nonexistent.

Do. not. care.

But seeing it did remind me that I was in this store to buy a book and that if I was going to read a book about a real person I’d best mosey meself to the memoir section of the store where I could find books that are presumably truthful, blessedly idiosyncratic, and often inspiring.

That’s what interests me.

Thus I ended up buying and enjoying Peggy Orenstein’s funny thoughtful pandemic memoir, Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater.

Which, as fate would have it, also had a compelling up-close photo of a face on the front cover.

QUESTIONS OF THE DAY

Do you enjoy shopping for books in a brick and mortar store? If so, do you meander around like I do enjoying the atmosphere before purchasing anything?

Do you ever read biographies? Or memoirs?

Thinking back to where you were 5 years ago when we first started grappling with + adapting to the new Covid 19 pandemic realities, what did you do to keep yourself sane, assuming you stayed sane?

If you took the quiz, how gritty are you?

+ • + • +

Because You Asked: This Is How I Decide What To Write About In My Personal Blog

April 22, 2025April 22, 2025 / Ally Bean / 266 Comments

EARLY THE OTHER MORNING the 6:30 a.m. temp was 71º F and sitting outside in nature with my morning mug of coffee was my plan. It was too nice outside to not take advantage of it.

I told Z-D, I’m going to go outside and look at the moon I can’t see.

I sauntered outside onto the deck and plopped down on a chair. I looked up into the sky where a few wandering clouds obscured the bright waning gibbous moon, making the scene look indistinct and otherworldly.

I liked it.

• • •

Once upon a time a light-hearted blogger named KizzyLou created a blogging club for laid-back bloggers. She made personalized membership cards for everyone. This is mine.

• • •

THUS WHILE BASKING IN the hazy moonlight I began to contemplate what I could write about next on ye olde bloggy. I was feeling woo-woo in the moment, allowing my mind to attend to whatever floated into it.

Point of fact, I usually have an idea about what I’ll be talking about before I sit down to write it. I rarely do stream of consciousness posts wherein my unedited disjointed thoughts spill out. Instead I lean into thinking beforehand about what specifically I’ll be going on about, then sit down and write – edit – rewrite – edit – edit some more – then publish.

Don’t bore us, get to the chorus!

[The subtext of how I write everything here.]

Of course as a blogger who primarily writes a character-driven blog the foregoing makes sense. I adore reading plot-driven blogs, which seem to be more the done thing now, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable telling y’all everything I do in a linear Dear Diary approach to personal blogging.

You would yawn.

Instead I allow what happens within me to be the catalyst for blog posts creating what has been described as an old-fashioned newspaper Lifestyle Column approach to personal blogging.

[More information on the difference between plot-driven versus character-driven HERE.]

• • •

Currently WordPress explains who writes & edits this blog as a team of one— meaning I’m chief cook and bottle washer.

• • •

HENCE I SHOW UP to my blog ready to answer the question “What up Buttercup?” not with the exact details of my daily life, but with my subjective thoughts & feelings gleaned, then noted, whilst living my midwest suburban life.

Thoughts that I hope are not stupid, tedious, or pedantic.

Because those, my little moonbeams, are my nagging fears as a personal blogger who’s been writing a blog for decades now— and who would have thought I’d have lasted this long‽

QUESTIONS OF THE DAY

If you write a personal blog, do you generally favor a plot-driven or character-driven approach to your blog?

How do you decide what you’ll write about next?

What worries you about how your blog posts will be received? Do you have any small nagging fears like I do? Or maybe some large ones I haven’t thought of?

Any other questions you’d like to ask me about personal blogging?

~ ~ 🔹 ~ ~

The One About The Stink Bug Hunter & His Preferred Tools Of The Trade

May 29, 2024September 24, 2024 / Ally Bean / 286 Comments

Photo via Washington Post

Our May temperatures have been warmer than normal, enticing brown marmorated stink bugs to emerge earlier than usual from their winter digs. While they cause no structural damage to buildings, they are a nuisance.

Kind of creepy to see in my opinion.

We rarely find them inside the house [unlike the roller shade situation earlier this year], but notice them when we sit on our screened-in porch.

One of us [not me] has decided to wage war against them, like the semi-retired suburbanite that he is. While Indiana Jones had his hat & a whip, Zen-Den has his fly swatter & toilet paper.

The fly swatter he uses to slap stink bugs off the screens or walls; the toilet paper he uses to pick them up and squish them before he flushes them down the toilet. He is on a mission, carrying these items with him whenever he steps onto the porch.

The Stink Bug Hunter’s preferred weapons.

Thus equipped with the items seen in the photo immediately above Zen-Den has become a menace to stink bugs. He stalks them while we sit, ostensibly to relax, on the screened-in porch.

He is ever vigilant.

Hence I’ve learned to put my preferred beverage into a Tervis with a lid so that stink bugs, pursued by ~~my sweet baboo~~ the Stink Bug Hunter don’t land in my drink.

As they are wont to do.

And further, as a long-time married person who sees humor in many things, I’m entertained, enthralled even, by the tenacity of a man who has decided to attempt to reign victorious over stink bugs.

As if that’s going to happen. 🙄

• • •

QUESTIONS OF THE DAY

What kind of insect do you dislike the most? When confronted with them do you jump into action like Zen-Den to kill said insect?

Are you, like me, a fan of sitting outside with a beverage at hand? If so, factoring in the time of day, what is your preferred beverage? Do you need to have a lid to put on top of it?

What’s new with you? Got any tales to tell about your life in the merry month of May?

• • 🤔 • •

When Writing A Blog Post: The Importance Of Respecting Manufactured Victories

October 11, 2023October 11, 2023 / Ally Bean / 219 Comments

Captain Benjamin Sisko with a baseball in his hand.

THE PHRASE a manufactured victory is from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine [DS9]. The phrase, used in an episode called Take Me Out to the Holosuite, refers to a story in which the plucky DS9 gang attempts to play a baseball game on the holodeck.

It’s the 24th Century and Captain Benjamin Sisko, who is in charge of Deep Space Nine, is a nut about the old-fashioned game called baseball. He insists that the Federation crew + others living on Deep Space Nine learn the game, then play it.

Just once.

For him.

In what comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with the somewhat dysfunctional inhabitants of DS9, the uncoordinated, dare I say tetchy, DS9 team loses the game to a team of organized Vulcans.

However the DS9 team decides to call the experience a win because, from their point of view, showing up together and trying was a victory. The Vulcans balk at the idea that the DS9 team could call their defeat a success, telling them theirs is merely a “manufactured victory”— to which the undaunted team joyfully agrees and keeps on celebrating.

~ ~ ⚾️ ~ ~

OCCASIONALLY I think of this episode when I sit down to write a blog post, like I did this morning. I can want to be a prolific articulate blogger living a fabulous life full of amazing details and drama, BUT you know what?

That’s not my reality.

I’m much more DS9 crew member, stumbling along with good intentions, giving it a go, than a Vulcan who is perfectly logically organized and fascinating.

Thus by explaining the foregoing, which is to say that nothing much has been happening in my real life lately, yet mindful of my commitment to show up here weekly, I’ll end this post having written what I believe is an example of a truthful blogger’s manufactured victory.

And a darned good one at that.

~ ~ • ~ ~