Monthly Archives: January 2017

2017, Lessons From, life

Lessons from friends

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No, you don’t have to share my political views to enjoy this bit of humor.

A friend of ours who delivers and sets up equipment has encountered mind boggling beliefs and behavior. I’m almost afraid to write it down. It feels like committing it to print makes it more understandable.

He has come across a growing number of people who don’t want to go through all the hassles of changing their address when they move, so they take their mailbox with them. Yep, you got it. They imagine that the mailbox determines the address, not the location of said mailbox. And, those people vote.

I know I’ve made some (according to friends and family who claim to love me) stupid mistakes, but that one doesn’t happen to be one of mine. The people who dislike me probably have a bigger list of my errors. Moving your mailbox makes sense in a very warped and one sided way. I wish it worked. The USPS has a hard enough time getting all our mail to us in a timely manner the way it is. What if our addresses were portable like some home phone numbers? What a nightmare for the letter carriers! “I know it was here yesterday.”

I still collect words I don’t know in my word box. I hope you do, too.

Your words of the week (or fortnight) are as follows:

mendacity: lying, corruption, untruthfulness,

oubliette: a secret dungeon accessible through a hole in the ceiling. According to some websites, the holes were too deep to crawl out of and frequently so tiny that a prisoner couldn’t even turn around!

perspicacity: perception, having a ready insight into and understanding of events and motives, keen, sharp, discerning

poltroon: utter coward, a weakling, a yellowbelly (Why, he’s got a yellow stripe a mile wide down his back.)

taciturn: saying little, reserved to the point of appearing snooty, uncommunicative in speech.

Blessings,

Lorelei

Isaiah 40:31

2017, advice, important lessons, Lessons From, life

Lessons from . . . the farm.

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Yes, I think I’ll continue with five words for the week for you.  I also think that this year I’ll try to make my blogs about Lessons I’ve Learned. I think the world is more than ready to teach us if we are ready to learn. I was reminded of just how ready the world is this weekend when I was hiking with my husband.

We’d been to The Farm to visit my mother. Please note my use of upper case letters. The Farm refers to the tiny portion of NW Oklahoma where I was raised. Mom is 81 and tires easily. We took a walk so she could nap. We hiked to The Pond. Again, more capital letters are used to denote a special place. I’m 58 years-old. We built that pond when I was a 2nd grader. Yes, it is a special place. It is about a half mile as the crow flies from the house to the pond, but I’m not a crow. It was a tiny adventure.

On our walk through the pasture to the pond, we did not encounter any cattle.  While this isn’t normal, it isn’t out of the realm of possibilities. We did notice that cattle had been on the same trails recently.  As we walked across skinny little dams that delineate ponds either full and dry, up and down hills, and up and down more hills, I noticed a few things.

  1. It seems that there are always more uphills than down.
  2. The cattle leave behind more (How do I say this in a genteel way?) plops on the uphill portions than the downhill ones.
    1. Yes, I hear your voice. The uphill and the downhill slopes are the same slopes; the difference is the direction you’re heading at the moment.
    2. Yes, but I was raised on this farm, remember?
  3. So, why more plop on the uphills?  Well, I’m glad you asked that. It seems that when we have to expend more effort to accomplish things–we must let go of the (pardon my vulgarity) crap that weights us down. When life is hard, we have to let go of crap and just move on.

There is our lesson from the farm. Let go of crap and get on to better things and places!

Blessings

Isaiah 40:31

Lorelei

Your words for the week are:

  1. macabre: horrible, horrific, gruesome, awful, gory, dreadful, disturbing
  2. melancholy: lasting and pervasive sadness. A couple of dictionaries I consulted called it Black Bile.
  3. blowsy: this usually refers to a red-faced, coarse or untidy woman
  4. execrable: extremely bad or unpleasant, in Late Middle English it usually involved a curse.
  5. hubris: excessive pride or self-confidence (I think we all know one or two of these people.) Perhaps I’ll do one of this year’s “Lessons From” on someone with this personality flaw.

🙂