I have another wordpress site sevenlevelssite.wordpress.com which I started to talk about the housekeeping issues. Fine. I’ve been doing a survey of a book, How to Manage Without a Maid from 1942. I published the last piece of this today, have two different bloggers who’ve “liked” the post. Great!
My stats only show one person having seen it, in England.
How is that possible?
Like I said, I’m confused!
J
Posted in blogging, learning, Website, publication, status
Tagged problems, blogs, blog questions, I don't understand!
Well, I just took two word-a-day quizzes at dictionary.com . Fine, I blew both of them, which I get, my vocabulary has been stagnant for a while now. I know that, it’s the reason I went looking to begin with.
My gripe is that the answers don’t tell you if you’re right — but how many people agree with you? I really don’t give a F about whether or not there’s consensus about a definition, I care a lot about knowing what is right. And I can’t tell from the way the quizzes are set up. Especially with words where the definitions are nuanced it would be helpful to know if the consensual answer is the correct one?
So, I’m looking for a site I can use to build my vocab., without consensus. Honestly the entire world is NOT about crowd approval and group-think.
There ARE things which are right and wrong, and there are facts — not subject to whether someone agrees, or not. Word definitions, in dictionaries, are supposed to be absolute. For multiple definitions, they list all of them. Why group think?
Posted in behaviors, Dealing with Tech., experts, learning, Life Lessons
Tagged definitions, dictionary.com, finding ways to learn, group-think, learning, learning new words, vocabulary
The pharmacy auto calling was driving DH nuts, so he told me to do something already!
So, I did what I had intended to do, that is, I called our insurance company. In the process I learned a few things, at least one I will probably use the rest of my life.
It had NEVER occurred to me that there might be coupons for prescription drugs! I use coupons and try to be frugal in almost every way I can, but this is a new one on me!
I was who was so traumatized has caused me a lot of problems, because I don’t know what she decided or thought in many cases until there’s an issue. It’s my flashback to be swamped with pain, fear, or panic and possibly no apparent reason for the reaction.
For a long, long time, shame held me back, but I didn’t realize it until one day in therapy I blurted out, “I don’t deserve to heal; I killed my mother.”
I remembered feeling that way as a small child, but I thought it was survivor guilt, and I thought I’d dealt with it. I hadn’t. I did after that.
That same little girl has me trapped in the street car dealing with whatever it is related to cleaning or knitting.
One of the most difficult things is at 60+ is to “get” that what’s going on with my body/mind has not much if anything to do with who I am now and figure out how to undo whatever it is. In many ways, it’s rather like trying to talk to an alien.
That said? She also did me a really, really good turn by her lack of understanding in one critical area. A few years back, I started to slide into clinical depression. I thought I was going insane, finally. My therapist and I talked about how I felt, and what was happening to me and she diagnosed it as clinical depression.
A while later, I put it together. What I had always been afraid of was losing control — “going insane.” That was what I’d fought internally for decades. It was keeping myself out of that. But it wasn’t insanity; it was clinical depression.
It meant that when I started to slide down that path in my 50s-60s, a remote part of me — at a distance — noticed and said, “What are you doing?”
My internal response was, “I don’t know. I don’t care.”
But that monitor said. “Hm. Maybe we’ll read this piece, it usually makes us feel better.”
“Nothing will make it better.”
“Let’s try.”
“If you insist.”
I did two or three other things: read the pieces which make me feel better, walked to the place which makes me feel good, etc. with no hope they would work. But eventually, they did.
So, yes, I’ve been depressed. And I’ve been close to succumbing to clinical depression.
But that plucky little girl wasn’t going to “go insane” no matter what! She kept finding ways to avoid it.
This puts me at a loss with people who ARE depressed, because my magic, most effective tool against depression’s devastation is that I made it absolutely illegal and forbidden for myself, when I was 3.
I just looked at the “laundry list” for the adult children of alcoholics or dysfunctional families. Here’s a link. Almost all of that pertained to me in the past. Almost none of it fits me now, thankfully.
If you look down the page, you’ll find the flip side of that list. My problem is with #5. This one:
We stop living life from the standpoint of victims and are not attracted by this trait in our important relationships.
That’s pretty easy to see. What I don’t see addressed here (and haven’t found elsewhere) is how you deal with those who were in your life before — getting them to change the unspoken “givens” in your relationship? Demands don’t work. At least in my case, neither does asking reasonably. My answer has been to cut off my family and all but one of my oldest friends. I’d like to have relationships with them, but in most cases I’ve moved on and they haven’t. Or, in a few exceptional cases, they’ve moved on and I’m not enough like I was to be “interesting” any more.
Says a lot about your value to someone, ‘eh? Either you’re valuable because you’re someone to be “better” than or “entertaining” or you have no value. If I did something extraordinary, that made me well known, these people would almost all in my estimation reclaim their relationship with me, whatever it is. But as an ex-victim, ex-emotionally unstable, non-victim, stable, older, housewife, who lives in the middle of nowhere, without drama — I’m unimportant.
And if I did something important, why would I want to be connected to these folks?
My old friends, I thought would be happy for me, because they cared about me, and I was stable and happy. Nope. Almost without fail, they were bored by me, because I wasn’t “exciting” any more.
My family? Well, that’s more complicated. I think they’d also claim their relationship with me if I did something “important.” But it’s probably easier to call me “overly sensitive” or some such, now, than realize that the only way I will allow them to have any but the most casual contact with me is to rewrite the premises. I’m not less than them. Different? Yes. Less? No!
Much of the problem of course is of my own creation. I thought for decades that being less and interesting/unconventional were some of the only real assets I had, as I was damned with some undefined piece. So, I started all relationships with the idea that I was less.
I changed, but that doesn’t mean that others want or need to.
My job today is to pick up food, specifically non-red tomatoes (seconds) at the farm so I can make a large batch of stewed tomatoes to freeze. (I really need to learn to can some day!)
Why stewed tomatoes? What I make the most with tomatoes is marinara or chili. I have other favorites: a tomato-potato-cheese casserole and a tomato-potato soup. (The casserole is from the Vegetarian Epicure #2; the soup from Joy of Cooking.)
I was trying to find a common base to freeze, rather than making separate batches, like last year. It seemed that what I was describing was old-fashioned stewed tomatoes. If I freeze cooked tomatoes with onion, bell pepper, a little basil, and parsley, I can add pesto, garlic, etc. for marinara or add chilis or salsa verde for chili or other Mexican food. I can use the mix for marinara, chili, or the tomato-potato dishes. Win!
So rather than making 4 different recipes this year, I intend to make one. (Last year I froze batches of marinara and chili base with both red and non-red tomatoes: 2 recipes, 2 different ways.) With my much smaller freezer area, I don’t have room! I ran out of non-red tomatoes sometime in Januray.
I needed a different solution and this is it! A dozen quarts of stewed tomatoes in the pantry would greatly help, but as I said, I don’t can . . . .
As usual the image isn’t mine. Genius Kitchen via images.google.com .
