SoCS: where?

Where I’ve been was a topic I addressed in a recent post. The short answer is Slovenia. I have done a number of posts about the trip with more to come.

The long answer, aside from my physical location at home, is in the ozone. Well, not literally. Or in a fog. Not literally that, either.

I’ve been juggling a lot of things for a long time, primarily caretaking for various people. After my mom, known as Nana here at TJCM, passed away in May and after the immediate busy-ness of the funeral and the bunch of paperwork and phone calling that needed to happen, I had hoped that I could be more organized and not feeling like my mind is scattered most of the time, but no. At least, not so far.

A friend reassured me that it is still early days, that my sense of clarity will return, but that it takes a long time.

Admittedly, it doesn’t make sense to reorganize my life now anyways. We are in the final weeks of having daughter E and granddaughter ABC in residence. We expect her visa to come through sometime soon and then she will need to move to London within 30 days. I am expecting that, when they leave after 2+ years of living here, there will be another period that is like mourning, too.

So, I guess it may be a long time before I feel like I can think, plan, write, organize, as I used to.

Before I feel like I know where I am going.
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “where.” Join us! Find out how here:  https://lindaghill.com/2019/08/09/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-august-10-19/

SoCS badge by Pamela, at https://achronicalofhope.com/

SoCS: Ljubljana

As you can see from my One-Liner Wednesday post this week, B and I have recently returned from Slovenia. We stayed for the week in the capital, Ljubljana, and went on sightseeing excursions from its central location.

One thing that impressed us about Ljubljana is how clean it is. There was almost no litter. I did see someone who I assumed was a municipal employee picking up a stray piece of paper with one of those sticks with a claw on the end – but only once in the many hours we were out and about in the Old City, which is mostly pedestrian and busy with residents and tourists, visiting the sites, shops, and open air markets.

Slovenia rightly prides itself on its environmental stewardship. As part of their green credentials, along the streets are small dumpsters for glass, paper, plastics, organic waste, and things that don’t fit in any of those categories. People are very diligent about dealing with trash, which goes a long way in keeping the streets clean.

Some of the people in our group were surprised to see some graffiti here and there. B and I were not surprised to see some in a city of 300,000. Graffiti is a combination of artistic expression and social commentary. I don’t think of it as being dirty.

Maybe this weekend, I will get some time to start organizing photos and writing some posts about details of our trip…
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “clean/dirty.” Join us! find out how here:  https://lindaghill.com/2019/07/26/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-july-27-19/

SoCS badge by Pamela, at https://achronicalofhope.com/

SoCS: a trip to the grocery store

When we bring ABC to Wegman’s (our biggest grocery store), there are two things she wants to see.

One is the cow in the dairy section. It’s not real, of course, but does move. ABC says, “Mooooo. Cow! Mooooo.”

The other is a toy train on an elevated track over the bulk food section. ABC says, “Choo, choo. Train. Choo, choo.” Fortunately, she says this very quietly, not at train volume.

Would it be too silly to say we go to the store to get something to chew?

(There is a third thing at Wegman’s that ABC looks for when we go to the Asian foods section. There is a red and gold paper dragon over the aisle. ABC does not know how to make a dragon sound.)
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “chew/choo.” Join us!  Find out how here:  https://lindaghill.com/2019/07/05/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-july-6-19/

SoCS: Mom

When a loved one dies and leaves us behind, there is a lot to do, which can make one too busy to write. This is very short because I just finished a long-for-me post about the remembrances for my mom. There is a lot to do today, so I will leave it at that.
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Linda’s prompt for today’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “leaves.” Join us! Find out how here:  https://lindaghill.com/2019/06/21/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-june-22-19/

SoCS: social justice

During the struggle against fracking in New York, one of my roles was writing comments on related articles. I was part of the rapid response team, so I spent a lot of time doing it, so much so that if I was at an in-person event that drew people from around the state, people recognized my name if we were introduced. I had done a lot of research, so I was able to present my point of view on many different aspects of the effects.

What I seldom wrote of was the personal basis of my views, which was Catholic social justice doctrine, which was always in my heart, even as my mind was filled with science and statistics and personal stories from our neighbors in Pennsylvania.

As time has gone on and my public role has lessened, I have more often spoken of the role of social justice in my life. This became easier when Pope Francis published his encyclical Laudato’ Si. While people knew that it would be about climate change, they didn’t realize how much of it would center around human relationships with each other. Francis calls this approach “integral ecology” and it demonstrates one of the basic tenets of social justice doctrine, care for creation, and another, care for other people, especially those most vulnerable. These are viewpoints that many people of good will hold and there are many routes to them; I just want to acknowledge the impact of Catholic social doctrine for me, which combined with other influences to bring me to this point.

(The link above has the entire text of the encyclical with the option to read it in about a dozen languages. It was written prior to the Paris climate change meetings which led to the accord signed by over 190 nations. Francis addressed it to “all people of good will” because climate change affects everyone on earth.)
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “social.” Join us! Find out how here:  https://lindaghill.com/2019/06/14/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-june-15-19/

SoCS badge by Pamela, at https://achronicalofhope.com/

SoCS: after

Silence takes on new meaning after the death of a loved one. Perhaps it is in that silence that we can still hear our loved one in our hearts.
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “silent/silence.” Learn more about SoCS here:  https://lindaghill.com/2019/05/31/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-june-1-19/

SoCS: contribution

I wanted to make a contribution to Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week, but I had another post that I needed to write.

And, yes, I am shamelessly using this post to promote this post from yesterday about my parents’ 65th anniversary and the follow-on post I just finished minutes ago.

So, yes, a sneaky SoCS contribution from me this week…
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “rib” or a word with “rib” in it. Join us! Find out how here:  https://lindaghill.com/2019/04/19/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-april-20-19/

SoCS: ellipsis

I am very fond of using ellipses.

(I resisted the urge to end the prior sentence/paragraph with one.)

I find myself using them quite a lot on comments on Facebook or here at WordPress. I like that they are more open-ended than periods, when I mean to be less conclusive or expect continuing discussion, although it doesn’t always work out that way.

I probably use them more often than is warranted for that purpose. I do sometimes still use them when I have left something out of a quote, as I was taught to do by Mrs. England in sophomore English class at Drury High School. And, yes, I did have an English teacher named Mrs. England…

(You know I had to put an ellipsis in this post!)
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week was the word “lip” or a word that contained lip. Join us! Find out how here:  https://lindaghill.com/2019/04/12/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-april-13-19/

SoCS: more things on my walls

A while back, Linda’s prompt had to do with things that we had hanging on our walls – or art we owned or something like that…

At any rate, I didn’t share some things I have hung that are made of fabric.

In the living room, I have an art quilt of trees that I really love:

In the dining room, we have framed some piecework that my husband’s great-grandmother had done. She was planning to make them into a coverlet, but never got around to it. His mom had the top piece in her cedar chest, and we cut it into pieces that worked with frames. The cloth she used was very interesting. It came from sample books from Arnold Print Works, where B’s grandfather worked. I love to look at the different fabric prints of the time. It is a bit strange to see some swastikas, though. The fabric is so old that it was well before the time of Hitler when the symbol was called a Teutonic cross, among other names.

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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “fab”. Join us! Find out how here: https://lindaghill.com/2019/04/05/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-april-6-19/ 

SoCS: dough

Today, E and I took ABC to her first theater experience, a performance of Sesame Street Live. The theme was magic, but a lot of the story revolved around things that turned out to be science. One of those things was making cookie dough out of flour, butter, eggs, and sugar and adding heat to make it into cookies.

My other dough experience of the week was making pie dough for a birthday pie for Paco who turned 94 on Tuesday. I wanted to make him a prune-apricot pie. Unfortunately, it had been a loooong time since I had baked a pie from dried fruit. And I was super tired because I had been up at night with ABC and then had trouble getting back to sleep. I realized too late that I had forgotten the salt in the crust. D’oh! I also didn’t put as much water in the fruit when I stewed it as I should have, so the apricots didn’t soften as much as I would have liked and I didn’t have very much juice to thicken. Still, it all worked out okay as Paco enjoyed it very much.

I thought that doing an unsweetened pie might also appeal to Nana, who hasn’t had much appetite lately, but it didn’t sound good to her. She is still eating breakfast, but usually not much for lunch and supper and she doesn’t like things that are too sweet. One of the hospice rules is that she can eat whatever she wants and we are following that. We have gotten some coffee ice cream to keep on hand because it was always one of her favorites, the bitterness of the coffee cutting the sugar. We’ll see if she wants to try some someday soon.
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “dough/d’oh”. Join us! Find out how here:  https://lindaghill.com/2019/03/29/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-march-30-19/