I'm booked for my first jab on Wednesday, the 30th. Daughter is a volunteer firefighter so she had hers yesterday and only suffering a bit of soreness and extreme tiredness.

I am find it difficult to focus lately, apart from reading engaging books. I'm enjoying Tana French's latest which is holding my attention even though her use of the word "cookie" all over the place is a little annoying. In Ireland, cookies are "biscuits" and biscuits are "scones". But trivial, right? It shows how petty minded I can be.

I'm using this as a meditation point as I can't seem to get ripping on a knitting piece that didn't work out and needs to be redesigned. It's a belated wedding gift for a niece. Really belated now. And I'm foostering and dawdling and sighing and hand wringing but nothing is being generated.

I love these beautiful shapes and the subtle colours. And each piece has a little memory inside it of places I've been and who I was with.

My energy is pathetic. This week I'll be 5 weeks on the iron and doc had said between 4 and 8 weeks for any effects to be felt.

I'm still working on my new card. The prose/poem is evading me. 

Writers' and knitters' blocks All at once.

I can hardly wait for each of them to lift.

Gone: One Red Brick Wall

Sometimes you have to take a good long run at the thing and kick it to the ground. I did. I gathered some thoughts I'd had on aging and what a total crock our perceptions of aging are, it being a 7 billion dollar a year industry to convince us to buy everything from anti-aging creams to sexual dysfunction products as we are falling apart at the seams doncha know and ewww so disgusting with our incontinence and bad teeth and saggy boobs and varicosey everything elses.

Re-pul-sive us olders are I tell ya.

NOT.

So I exploded a few myths, read some of 98 year old "Dad's Tomato Garden", and put the thing to bed. On time.

And FACT. Did you know that MOST(80%)seniors go directly from independent living to the grave?

See what bullshit crocks of brainwashing we've had?

The Red Brick Wall

I'm one of those people. I never run out of stuff to talk about or to write about or to read about. The inside of my skull has been a very busy place since I was toddling around. I can never remember a time I've been bored. I would look forward to being banished to my room when I was growing up. Delighted in fact. Books, writing, drawing, gazing out the window at the neighbours, watching the birds or the neighbourhood kids or what the missus next door was doing to her clothesline or her roses. Without interruption or correction.

And here I am stuck for a column for the newspaper that is due in a day. I'm at the point where I'm refusing to think about it; as the brick wall, which began building itself a day or so ago, is rising brick by brick the more I ponder this dilemma. I can even visualize this wall. Red bricks, white mortar. Very plain. I'd prefer if it was a dry stone wall of the Irish countryside, but I gather one can't be choosy in such matters. So it's very Canadian - red clay bricks and pristine white mortar and I'd love a bit of ivy planted at the base to give it a bit of interest but that's not allowed either. Even some nice cast iron railings at the top. But no. Just this symmetrical red brick monstrosity getting bigger and bigger and more boring each time my brain jumps to the column.

So, I share it. In the hope the muse strikes soon. It always does.

On Writing

A hard to get along with dose of writer’s block is behind me. I try not to put judgements around that anymore, it just is, it happens to all writers, I had a hard time with it but don’t we all.
It’s behind me now is all I can say and I’m living and writing to tell about it and there’s a bonus of a couple of new stories for the collection. The characters stir and stretch for a while, sometimes it takes a while for them to introduce themselves. They’re shy. Or in the case of this new one, who remains nameless, she’s always made a habit of waiting so she took her own sweet time coming over and then took another long ream of it before she filled me in, just a little on what exactly made her this way. Not that she had any understanding of it at all, even after her years of therapy. But I thought I could understand it, and have compassion for it and hope that my precious readers do as well when they finally get to meet her and not be as impatient with her as I was at the beginning. For an ideal life for someone else could be far, far from what we’d want for ourselves.
Some people are meant to react to life most of the time. And some of us are gifted with a proactive gene. I know I’m the latter, I was born that way but then it got submerged for more years than I’d like to think about but when it blossomed again, I was pretty thrilled to welcome it back. I’d forgotten about it, you see. Thought it dead and buried. But it was only sleeping. I had put all those years of excellence: winning writing competitions and publishing the school magazine and writing school plays behind me. I diminished them by telling myself I was under twenty then and those were childish things. I put them all away.
And they all woke up about ten years ago. And I started writing again. There were huge globs of it inside me waiting to see the light. And before I knew it, I was published and people were writing to me and telling me I’d helped them in some way to get their own feet stuck by the side of the fire when they’d been out in the cold so long.
And that’s it, I say. Now you’ve got it, there’s room for all of us, it’s a nice big fire giving off loads of heat.
And I quote myself at myself and whoever else would care to listen:
“It is only because I’ve felt the deepest cold that I appreciate so much the warm sunshine”.