a round tuit » for fun

full frontal wack-a-doodle

kate — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 21:23:03 +0000

I’m definitely sympatico with Chuck Lorre on this one!

Chuck Lorre Production #359
Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 8:35PM

“Okay, I’m just gonna say it out loud. There are times when going crazy looks attractive. And I’m not talking about becoming charmingly eccentric. I’ve already got that covered none ways to Sunday. No, I’m talking about purposely emigrating to the land of lunacy. That special psychological zip code where The Ancient Laws of Behave Yourself no longer apply. My “reasoning” is simple. It takes a great deal of effort to sustain a conservative, trustworthy persona. Surrendering that effort would involve, from a Freudian perspective, a conscious dismantling of the super ego-that part of the psyche entrusted with enforcing parental and socially approved actions. And therein lies the allure of going full frontal wack-a-doodle. The constant energy required to pass as normal would suddenly become available for doing and saying whatever pleases me in the moment. Imagine it. The id and libido completely unbound by any and all mortal or cultural restrictions. Hmm… Probably won’t need the shrink anymore… might need a lawyer.”
~ Chuck Lorre

annual leaf-crunching hike

kate — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 18:46:58 +0000

Leaf-crunching. It’s part of not growing up. (I refuse to grow up.)

I love autumn. I love the colors, the smells, the sounds, all of it. I love the crunching sound when I walk over/on/in fallen and dried autumn leaves. So every year I devote at least one day completely to experiencing autumn with all the senses. Whenever I’ve lived in a home with a yard, I’ve really enjoyed raking leaves. Then un-raking them by jumping and playing in the piles, throwing them about, rolling in them.

But sigh, I live in the concrete jungle now. So I follow a tradition I started 40 years ago — the walk in the woods. It has to be mainly deciduous, of course. Here on the BC coast of Canada, there are a lot of evergreens in the woods, so it takes some research to find the right place. Each year I try to find someplace I’ve never leaf-crunched before.

Yesterday it was Wm. Griffin Park for a lovely walk along Mosquito Creek. It’s right in the city, but you’d never know it. It’s huge enough that you don’t even hear city sounds, just the splash of the fairly big creek that’s currently running quite rapidly down the hillside terrain.

It was a glorious autumn day, sunshine, warm enough for shirtsleeves. The earth smells were especially rich from the recent rainy days. It makes me so happy to be alive!

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DAY 29 – taking the day off

kate — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 19:56:14 +0000

Second-last day of the 30DLBL challenge/project. Today’s assignment — take the day off! Strange assignment for the day before the project will end. Makes me wonder what tomorrow will bring….

Here’s me taking the day off. Well, me and my cat, and somebody had to snap the pic.

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DAY 29 – taking the day off

kate — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 19:47:57 +0000

Second-last day of the 30DLBL challenge/project. Today’s assignment — take the day off! Strange assignment for the day before the project will end. Makes me wonder what tomorrow will bring….

Here’s me taking the day off. Well, me and my cat, and somebody had to snap the pic.

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advice from my Future Self

kate — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 18:54:14 +0000

I’m a day behind in my 30DLBL assignments because I celebrated the last day of summer yesterday by going sailing instead of sitting at my computer!

The one question in today’s 30DLBL assignment that hit home is the one I’ll get my Future Self to address. “What are the biggest things your Present Self should do from now on to live your life to the fullest?” First, I’m going to change the “should” to “can”. (I have worked hard on removing the word “should” from my vocabulary.) So, here’s my question for my Future Self:

“What are the biggest things your Present Self can do from now on to live your life to the fullest?”

My Future Self answered the following. My Future Self apparently has a purple-ink pen. Glad to see her color preferences are consistent with mine .

Kate, seek more often to enjoy the variety that life offers you. Be more willing to fit adventures into your days. To do things you don’t usually do. I know you find a deep contentment, even joy, in your lifestyle and routines. I know you’re happy being a hermit. Still, I’d like you to also give this a try: When some idea for an activity crosses your mind or appears before you, and it appeals to you, make a plan to do it. Hey! I know you too well…. I’m saying, make A Definite Plan, don’t just say the usual, “I’ll do it when I get a round tuit.” Try this, instead: Accept and do more of those ideas. You tend to put them on the back burner. I’m saying, put them on the front burner instead!

Here’s the rub. You just never know when an opportunity will disappear, or when your health may change so that you can’t do as much, or when your partner will no longer be around so you can enjoy doing things with him. You cannot anticipate what changes will come, or when. So….

Carpe Diem!!!

Riffing on this theme, with the help of Wikipedia:

In Horace, the phrase is part of the longer Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero — “Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the future.” The ode says that the future is unknowable, and that instead one should scale back one’s hopes to a brief future, and drink one’s wine. This phrase is usually understood against Horace’s Epicurean background

A Rabbinic version of this idea: “And if not now, when?” (Pirkei Avoth 1:14)

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.” The first line from the poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” by Robert Herrick.

Horace himself parodies his Carpe Diem phrase in another of his poems, The town mouse and the country mouse. He uses the phrase Carpe Viam meaning “seize the road” to compare the two different attitudes to life of a person (or in this case, a mouse) living in a city and in the countryside.

Robin Williams’s character in the film Dead Poets Society (1989) says, “Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.” The American Film Institute ranked this line number 95 in its list of the 100 best quotations in American film history.

Thanks, Future Self. I think you probably approve of my choice yesterday to get off my butt and go sailing. Why did it take so much coaxing-of-Self to get going and do that? It was great once I got out there! I was glad to get away from the demands and to-do’s that I had been imagining held power over my day. They didn’t really. They just really needed me to give them each some time on the back burner. When I got home, I realized that putting those items on the back burner had actually burned off some of their power over me. (I think those thoughts, too, came from my wiser Future Self.) Good to know!

Your advice, Future Self, rings very true, and is synchronous with my Mission Statement:

To live in the now and to do everything that my Future Self will wish she’d done.
To live so that I have no regrets.

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I Oprahfied myself

kate — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 15:49:32 +0000

The Oprah website has this fun tool as part of celebrating the Oprah TV show’s 25th and final season. Want to Oprahfy yourself? Here’s the place: http://www.oprah.com/packages/oprahfy-yourself.html

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wasting time

kate — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:57:14 +0000

“Time you enjoyed wasting was not wasted.” [John Lennon]

(Photo taken in English Bay, Vancouver, aboard Chi-Ling)

“Honor yourself in deciding how to spend your time, and then let yourself be and enjoy it. Moments come and go too quickly to waste one worrying about another that’s past. So enjoy your moments today, whatever that means to you, and know in doing that you’ve had a successful day.” [from tinybuddha.com]

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slurls

kate — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 17:34:22 +0000

A new term for me today, “slurls” — slurred URLs. The sometimes unfortunate results of putting company names into URLs without spaces. Read the following URLs. I mean read them.

www.whorepresents.com – Who Represents, celebrity agent database
www.lesbocages.com – Les Bocages, tree nursery
www.expertsexchange.com - Experts Exchange, where programmers can trade advice
www.ladrape.co.uk – La Drape sells high-end quilted bedspreads
www.angelfire.com/alt/americanscrapmetal – American Scrap Metal, recycling
www.speedofart.com – Speed of Art, art designers collective
www.therapistfinder.com – Therapist Finder directory

Andy Geldman, author, has compiled 150 pages of slurls in his book Slurls: They Called Their Website What? Gelman said, “In a world without spaces we mentally insert out own. And you might not stick yours where I stick mine.”

Check out the hilarious slurls quiz on Facebook.

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see your website in 1996 design style

kate — Tue, 04 May 2010 20:23:07 +0000

This is absolutely hilarious — the Geocities-izer. Hilarious because I was there designing pages like this back then. Go to this website and enter the URL for your own website (or any). When you click submit, you’ll see (and hear!) your site “like something created by a 13 year old in 1996” (as the WinXP newsletter describes it; thanks for the link guys).

Don’t worry, it’s not a permanent change to the site. But if you link from the 1996-ized site, the next site will be 1996ized too. You have to close the window/tab to cancel the process. What’s even more fun is that if you then open a new window and go and do it again, you get a different 1996 design entirely.

http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/index.php

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retirement goal: become a Child Who Knows

kate — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 20:35:33 +0000

“But the adult is not the highest stage of development. The end of the cycle is that of the independent, clear-minded, all-seeing Child. That is the level known as wisdom. When the Tao te Ching and other wise books say things like, ‘Return to the beginning; become a child again’ that’s what they are referring to. Why do the enlightened seem filled with light and happiness like children? Why do they sometimes even look and talk like children? Because they are. The wise are Children Who Know. Their minds have been emptied of the countless minute somethings of small learning and filled with the great wisdom of the Great Nothing, the Way of the Universe.”

~ The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff ~

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