Category Archives: mama kat

mama kat, music, writer's challenge

Ahhh, I Don’t Hardly Know Her …

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Once more dear friends, into the breech we go. Time for Mama Kat’s Writer’s Challenge. This week I have choosen to do only one topic:

1.) A song you can’t escape.
(inspired by Stefanie from I’m not much into health food, I am into champagne)

My take is a bit different than the standard lyrics rattling around the skull driving me to distraction. The other night I was listening to music as I finished working on some work work. What to my wondering ears should appear but

followed by

I was struck, in that off-hand stunning way that coincidence slaps you up side the head, by the fact that these songs are associated in my mind with two milestones in the journey to adulthood.

What milestones you ask? Well, Louie, Louie was the first rock song I ever heard performed by a live band. Granted it was a group of fellow junior high classmates playing at the first school dance of my seventh grade career, but it is cemented forever in my mind as the epitome of live and music. To this day more than 40 years later I cannot hear Louie, Louie (or Sitting On The Dock In The Bay by Otis Redding) without casting my mind back to the excitement and sheer joy the live sound brought me. The body throbbing bass, the impact of the drums, the crisp drone of the electric guitars – there is nothing better in the world.

A couple of years later it was 1969 and Crimson & Clover was dominating the AM airwaves. It coincided with the time when I was first seriously entranced by the idea of feminine companionship. Yup, that was when I suffered my first crush on a {*gasp*} girl. Heck, it was the first time I even seriously thought of girls as truly desirable to hang out with for reasons different than guys. Every time I hear Crimson & Clover, I am immediately back in the heady brew of feelings and desires and hormones and melancholy thoughts from that time. Not to mention all the drugs and hallucinogens that were rampant in the world as the 60’s came to a close.

The powerful associations formed by music with our emotional and mental state when we first heard it is spooky and wonderful. Hearing the music brings the memories flooding back. But I wonder if the additional social element of community commonality that my generation had continues today. (Stick with me here – you’ll soon understand what I’m blithering about!) When I was going through adolescence, we all heard the same songs at the same times on the AM and then FM radio. You and all your cohorts heard the same music at the same time, sharing the same music with a common set of experiences. It was only in college that non-synchronous introduction of different music via {*gasp*} vinyl records began to separate out tastes and preferences.

Contrast that experience with kids of the same age today. Each of them tends to listen to their own collection based more on the intesection of exposure and their social networking. Even a group as small as two is likely to have two separate iPods in their individual ears, listening to different sounds. Thus, I suspect that the common music/experience phenomenon is lost in the generations of today. The commonality is no longer in the experience of and while listening, it is the selection of what to add to the collection and to play. A very different set of memories.

What do you think?

advice, mama kat, writer's challenge

Advice For The Lovelorn

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OK, so I lied. But the title go you to read didn’t it. It’s that time of the week – time for Mama Kat’s Writer’s Challenge. This week featured a number of prompts that didn’t enthuse me to the point of taking quill in hand (or finger to keyboard as the case may be). But at least number one came through and spoke to me:

1.) Share one piece of great advice you’ve received from someone who knows stuff…

Rather than one piece of advice, I thought I’d share several.

  • Water flows toward money. (From my grandfather, in reference to the fact that money can abrogate water rights quicker than a lightning flash.)
  • If a simple physical model can’t explain it, you have the wrong idea. (Richard P. Feynman on why complex mathematical models of reality are often wrong.)
  • There will be many people you can love and who can love you in your life. The one you marry will be the one you are in love with at the same time you both want to get married. (A paraphrase of a discussion with my mother.)
  • Don’t tease the sow. (My uncle, warning us to stay away from the vicious man-eater that was the old breding pig.)

So what is your good advice?

BTW, here are some tidbits of advice I found floating around Google:

Which one do you think is better?

houses, mama kat, synopsis, writer's challenge

Writer’s Challenge A Go Go

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It’s that time of the week – time for Mama Kat’s Writer’s Challenge. So here are this weeks topics:

1.) I recently read all about the importance of us bloggers developing an “Elevator Pitch” via one of my new favorite blogs. According Wikipedia and Elevator Pitch is “an overview of an idea for a product, service, or project. The name reflects the fact that an elevator pitch can be delivered in the time span of an elevator ride (for example, thirty seconds or 100-150 words).” Create one short (a sentence long) and one longer (100 – 150 words) Elevator Pitch describing what your blog is about.
(inspired by Darren from Problogger)

2.) The strangest dream ever…
(inspired by Amo from Where A Woman Shakes Her Tablecloth.)

3.) Write a list of 10 things that can be done to stave off boredom.
(inspired by Lourie from CA Girl).

4.) “How many homes have you had? Write a journal entry about ALL the places you’ve called ‘home’ in your life.”
(inspired by writingfix.com).

5.) “Why wouldn’t they just start over? Write a story where a character refuses to go back to square one.”
(inpired by writingfix.com).

Given that I am running a bit short of time, I am going to only do #s 1, 2, 3, and 4. You’ll have to visit Mama Kat to see about those who tackled #5.

#1 – First the short version:

The random ramblings of an over-observant obsessive.

Then the longer version:

My day to day rants, raves, observations, and punish humor. Originally started to get my writing muscles back in tone, but now continuing because it is fun. One of the few blogs with absolutely no commercial interest. No solicited reviews, giveaways, ads, or pushes to go see the ring of connected commercialism that is much of blogging.

#2 -  I already brushed on this topic in this post. The full version runs thus.

I had a very vivid dream. As I was strolling down the path, I was accosted by a group of pygmies chanting and dancing. Since they spoke no English and I spoke no Pygmy, communication was difficult. Eventually it became somewhat clear that the pygmies had formed a company to commercialize and market their rib sauce that had been passed down from elder to younger since the dawn of time. Their claim was that it was the world’s best rib sauce. Suddenly I was buried under a mass of pygmies who were all chanting

Bar Be Que
Bar Be Que
We Eat You!

And then I woke up.

#3 – Some quick time wasters:

  • Read Google’s News Headlines
  • Conduct random web searches
  • Add up the numbers of your social security number, your date of birth, and your telephone number to see if the total is divisible by eleven
  • Chew the end of a ballpoint pen
  • Practice levitating 
  • Write your obituary 
  • Visit Ask500People.com  
  • Visit AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com
  • Send and read twits via Twitter
  • Write on your blog

 

#4 – I have lived in 13 places since birth. It starts with the little house on the left side in this aerial picture:

I spent from age 0 to ~3 living there.

Next we moved into town to a house that I remember primarily because it had wagon wheels painted green and white for a fence. The wheels were taller than I was and fascinated me greatly.  We were there a year or so. (The house still stands today, but the wagon wheels disappeared sometime in the 80’s)

From there we moved to a small stucco house with a large picture window on the edge of dry land field. I talked about this house here. It was in an unincorporated oil field exploration community of maybe 30 houses and not much else.

Then we moved to a town of about 350 in Nebraska. That was where I attended kindergarten through third grade. I remember that house because it has a big back yard and grape vines. Perfect for my brother and I and the neighborhood kids to play army and cowboys and indians. One of the adjacent houses was built underground since the area got hit with tornadoes year after year and they got tired of rebuilding. I suffered my first crush on an older woman when the neighbor’s daughter gave me an old pair of her roller skates.

We moved back here to this town in time for me to start fourth grade. It is the house that mom still lives in today. What I remember from the early years is that the house had been built in the first quarter of the century by a local craftsman who used no milled lumber. Every piece of the frame was hand adzed to size and shape and no two were the same. So when we remodeled it was an interesting type of do-it-your-self project. It was also full of mysterious things like a family bible from the old country in German, etc. Fortunately the next door neighbor knew a bit about the history and the family who had lived there.

Then I went away to college and lived in a dorm and then a frat house. On the way from college to graduate school, L and I got married and arrived in California to find no housing available for us due to a snafu. We eventually found an apartment in a complex after spending some time on a fellow grad students spare bunk bed set. The complex stands out for being painted in brown, brown, and more brown as was typical in California at the time. After a couple of years we rented a nice little duplex that had a private patio and a fireplace. It sat less than half a block from the green belt through the town and was a gorgeous place.

After graduate school, we moved to the suburbs of Chicago and a ground floor apartment in Naperville. It was all white and had shag carpeting. We lived there for three years and experienced some real firsts there. The first time we had a car stolen, the first time with -50F temperatures causing ice to form on the inside walls even with the heat on, and the first time living near an abusive couple. Needless to say, we were ready to move on from the Chicago area.

Then it was off to Manhattan Beach, CA. We rented a house for the first year and it was a typical beach community bungalow, with a full size swimming pool in the back yard. It had roses in the front yard and a huge hedge along one side of the lot. It also had termites.

The next year, L and I bought our first place – a unit in a triplex in Redondo Beach – just up the road a ways. Our unit was gray stucco and 3 stories tall with an underground garage. It was during our years there that we found out we were going to have the Son.

Finally, we moved back here where we have lived for the last 20+ years. The Son was born and grew up here. You can see what the interior of the house looks like here. It is a big ranch style house with a brick exterior and attached garage. It was built in the 60’s and the only other owner is the the doctor that is my eye specialist. I went to school with some of his kids, including a younger one named Dan, so you might say it has come full circle.

mama kat, writer's challenge

Nostradamus Strikes Again

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Time for some distraction from the snow and wind outside (not to mention the sub-zero temperatures). I.e. it is time once more for Mama Kat’s Writer’s Challenge. This week’s topics:

1.) Describe what you would change about yourself if you could.
2.) Book Review! What children’s book do you hate reading to your child?
(inspired by E. from Mommy’s Still Fabulous)
3.) What do you predict will happen this decade? (You can be funny or serious if you like).
(inspired by Christopher from CaJoh)
4.) Choose the 7th picture you took from last January and write a poem.
5.) Write about a heated argument you had with your parents (real or fictitious).
(inspired by Writer’s Digest)

Hi ho and away we go.

#1 – There are a lot of things about me I would like to change. Unfortunately most of them are things that there is no realistic way to change and if I iterated them all, this post could reach epic lengths. So I will limit myself to a few day to day nits.

  • My hair to return or go away entirely.
  • My hair to finally just be all gray or return to black. Trying to “style” half a head of 95% gray hair isn’t easy.
  • To stop aching. All the broken bones and stretched ligaments of a lifetime make me an acute weather predictor. If the left shoulder hurts, it is going to storm. If the right hand hurts, it will be cold. If the feet throb like mad it is going to be clear. And the worst thing is that I can still remember when nothing hurt and weather was a thing to watch and not predict.
  • To return to the flexible strength of my twenties.
  • And of course if we can ask for anything, I’d love to be handsome, lantern jawed, with abs of steel, have perfect eyesight, have an awesome super power or two, and rule the world in my spare time. {*grin*}

#2 – I need to modify this one a bit to say which book I *hated* to read. Given it has been more than a decade since reading to the Son, some of the pain is beginning to fade. {*grin*}

When I was a kid, my favorite book was Digger Dan. Of course it re-surfaced (thanks mom) to read to the Son. Somehow the prose lost much appeal over the interleaving 30+ years and the happy ending became less of a surprise. So Digger Dan is one selection.

The other book is actually any one of the Richard Scarry books, especially Busytown. Not only the interminable reading packed with alliteration, there was also the computer game that could drive one close to distraction with its continuous verbalization. Admittedly they are all great books and were loved by the Son, just a bit repetitive for me. Not only that, but the books were all complex enough that the Son wanted them read to him night after night and then to read them aloud still more times as he learned to read.

#3 – Things I predict will happen this decade:

Technology:

  • The smartphone hardware market will consolidate.
  • The number of smartphone operating systems will shrink to 3 – iPhone, Android, and probably RIM.
  • Microsoft will buy one of the other smartphone OSs (like Palm) and so badly bungle the subsequent marketing effort that the OS will die.
  • Hard copy books will disappear in favor of eBooks of various forms.

and finally, I’ll go a little farther out on the limb with

  • Home PCs will disappear in favor of an interface unit that connects via the net to a cloud of computing resources and storage.

Personal:

  • I will lose more hair.
  • My hair will finally turn completely gray.
  • My joints will ache more.
  • Getting up in the morning will become more of a task.
  • I will continue to be amazed at the important things youngsters don’t know how to do.

#4 – I took no pictures last January, so I have nothing to show nor exposit upon.

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense. – Buddha

#5 – The topic inspires me not. Instead I’ll put forth an old chesnut and see if it tickles your brain.

A mother make tasty toast in a small pan. After toasting one side of a slice, she turns it over. Each side takes 30 seconds. The pan can only hold 2 slices. How can she toast both sides of three slices in 90 seconds?

The answer is in the first comment.