July 2, 2014

My husband is an excellent cook.  I, on the other hand, am not.  I do not like to cook.  I like to bake, not cook.  He would give anything if he could quit his job and open his own restaurant, but things like our mortgage and other bills are kinda priority right now.  His best meal is crab cakes, they are insanely good.  When we friends over, he cooks huge meals for them and they absolutely love them.  So do I because I don't have to cook.  His cooking skills get better with every new recipe he tries and his favorite thing to watch is cooking shows.  He will see something that he likes on one of the shows and buys the ingredients and will cook it that night.  I am in awe of his talent.  He is a truck driver now and wishes he could be home more to cook for his family and friends.  My children do not look to me for any amazing meals like he can cook, but that is just fine with me, because as I said, I do not like to cook.  It's funny how life works out like it does.  Why do some people  have jobs that they go to everyday that they  would rather not be doing and their passion in life is left to the wayside. I have heard of this time and again and when you ask why not do what you love and the answer is mostly because they are committed to all that they have in their life and there is no extra funds for anything else.  I hope he continues to cook, he is making those wonderful crab cakes this weekend for his friend that just came home from the hospital so she does not have to worry about dinner for her family one night.  He's Awesome like that.  

July 1, 2014

Sometimes when I'm blogging it feels like therapy.  So I decided to look this up and sure enough there are many, many articles on this.  From what I understand, it gives you a chance to let it all out, but this can be done in a good way.

Here is a quote from, We Blog Better.com, written by Margaret Keely, "What I have learned from blogging is that it gives you time to reflect on the things you are writing down, giving you a clearer perspective on the real underlying issue."  This sounds pretty much what it feels like to me too.
As I am blogging, my mind is racing about what I'm blogging about and what it means to me.  When trying to come up with blogging ideas, I am searching my mind and going over my past, my future, what I like, what I don't like.  Then it will rest, so to speak, on what I want to blog about, and it all spills out in 300 words or more.Today it rested on how much it feels like therapy.  I find myself thinking during the day about what I want to blog about that night.

Another quote from the article mentioned above is , "Everything does not require a professional to solve problems that persist in our lives. We sometimes just need to let it all out, whatever it is that bothers us." This makes total sense to me.  I can see now why people like to do this.  When you just let it out, you are thinking about how to solve it or how to deal with it.  Anything that can make my life better I am all for.  When starting this blogging assignment I had no idea that this could be part of it.  I wasn't too sure that I would keep this blog after this class was over, but now I am rethinking that decision. 

June 30, 2014

After asking form writing prompts from Ms. A, she gave me the instructions for a cinquain and then to free write about the experience of the process of writing the cinquain.  I have never heard of this before and it sounded quite easy so i thought I would give it a try.  Here goes.



A Cinquain 

Baking
Fun, Easy
Gives people joy
Makes me feel peaceful
Create

Writing the cinquain was easy and it made me think about how I really feel about baking.  Creating something with your own two hands that people love to eat and actually enjoy eating.  After just writing the 5 short lines my mind is flooded with the images of creating brownies and cookies and cakes and the joy it gives people to recieive fresh baked goods.  My youngest daughter makes the best banana bread that I have ever had.  She did this at eleven.  She is quite a good cook and can make very good homemade pot stickers.  She makes the wrappers from scratch, they are really good.  My last baking adventure was a new sugar cookie recipe and I made cookies for Easter shaped like chicks and eggs and bunnies.  I took them all to work and they were gone by the end of the day.  I made four dozen.  I am still amazed about how the cinquain could create such a vast amount of thought from just five lines.  I will definitely be trying this again.  THANK YOU MS. A!!!!! for the idea.  If anybody else reads this blog you have to try this it really is awesome!  i am still thinking about my baking escapades and how they gave me such joy and peace.  While your baking your mind is only on the process and getting it right.  The measurements have to be exact or the whole recipe is a wash.  But when it turns out right, you have created a thing of beauty.   A 300 word blog in seconds,  AMAZING!!

June 29, 2014

The world we live in cannot exist without typists.  Yes folks, typists, and I am one of them.  I have been a secretary for over 20 years and the need for typists has grown every year, especially now in the age of web sites and internet advertising and the increasing use of electronics everywhere.   Someone has to type all that you read on news websites, magazine websites, as a matter of fact all websites. 

Ever since I can remember I wanted to be a secretary.  That's right, a secretary.  I know this does not seem like a lofty goal, like a doctor or lawyer but to me it was all I could think about being.  I have no explanation for this desire, I just know that it has always been there.  When I was little my mom would bring home office supplies from her job and would give them to me.  I loved them all.  There were accounting journals and file folders and empty log books.  I thought they were the best and I played secretary with them all the time.  Then one day my dad told me about my older sister, that lived in Indianapolis at the time, had gotten her first job as as a secretary in a lawyer's office and was so excited about it.  I was so envious and could only imagine what that would be like.

My first experience with a real electric typewriter was in 7th grade at Lincoln Junior High and I couldn't wait to get started.  From the first click of the old electric typewriter I was fascinated.  From there I took Office Technology classes in High School and went on to an Office Technology program through Winnebago County and they got me my first job at Blue Cross Blue Shield filing EOB's.  The rest they say is history, I have been a secretary ever since.  Now I am a secretary in the surgery department and love what I do, but I know that a degree could really help my chances for advancement at the hospital. Secretarial positions may not be glamorous but the are needed in almost every business.  I've helped my family financially for many years with my secretary jobs and I am very proud of that.

June 28, 2014

 Day 3 of blogging and I am sitting here thinking about the first years of my husband and I's marriage. We were dirt poor and both of our jobs paid five dollars an hour and that was not easy to live on.  We both had car payments and insurance so adding rent, utilities and groceries created some budgeting problems at times.  One of our first rentals was a trailer with very bad floors.  I don't know how we kept from going through them they were so bad.  We had roaches and every time the field across the road was bush hogged the mice would run into our trailer.  Every time one of the mouse traps snapped I would just cringe.  When you live in a place like that you have one motivation and this is to get out. 

When we had our first daughter, I did not want to bring her home to that trailer, it gave me nightmares to think about it.  I kept her bassinet right next to my bed every night and woke up every 10 minutes checking on her.  I was never so glad as to leave a place as I was when we moved out of there.

The next rental was a little better, it was a house and there weren't any roaches.  It had a wall unit for the furnace and it would build up gas inside and sporadically explode causing the vents to pop out and hit the floor.  The first time that it happened we were sleeping and we jolted out of bed ran for our daughter's room, she never heard it and was sound asleep and we had no idea what to do because we had no idea what had just happened.  The owner assured us that it he would take care of this, he never fixed it right.

Through the years we worked hard, saved money and bought the house we have now.  After living in all of the first rentals we appreciate what we have now every time we walk in the house and there are no mice, no bad floors, no roaches, and no bad furnace, in fact we have electric everything, no gas anything. 

Assignment 4.4 - Know Your Audience Analysis Blog Post

I found it surprising that I really had a hard time coming up with an answer for some of the questions like the, “if you could only keep one memory” question that was tough.  All of my family’s moments together hit my mind at once and I could not focus on just one.  Also I was surprised by the flood of emotions that some of the questions evoked, like the “being stranded on a desert island question, that one caused panic and helplessness at first, then determination that I would find a way to survive.  

Since this was week three, I had somewhat of an idea of the class as an audience, so I expected that the questions would be creative and interesting and imaginative.  I was not disappointed, they all had different elements of fiction and non-fiction, so I looked forward to a new one every day.  The superhero questions created that if only I could feeling, knowing all along that the power of having more than one of me would never be possible.  

Out of 33 questions, 7 of them related to TV, books, movies and superheroes, those were fun and really challenged my imagination.  Imagining being in “Third Rock from the Sun” made me laugh out loud.  Those characters were outrageous.   Several of them were what if questions that I would not of thought about if not for this assignment.  I will have to say that I never thought about my attitude having a color, or if I had the choice where would I have chosen to be born.    

After reading all of the responses to the questions, I realized that my writing needs to be more descriptive to capture the audience’s attention, so I think that this will impact my writing in a positive way.  I am constantly looking for ways to step up my game and so having this insight into everyone’s responses gave me an understanding of what my writing needs to be interesting.  I found myself looking for the most unique answers, knowing that we all have the same goals and values is good, but I was looking for that WOW factor in the answers.  My answers did not have that Wow factor but I will always look back at what I wrote and think I could have done better.

June 27 2014

My dad had 5 girls and he would take all of his girls to demolition derbies and the Indianapolis 500 every year.  I know that man wanted boys so bad, but he did the best he could with the girls that he had.  We also went to rodeos and on lots and lots of car trips.  His favorite places to take us all was to small towns with old restaurants that still had the soda fountains and old town squares. We would get out of the car and walk around and explore every inch of those squares.  His favorite’s streets were the brick roads that you could drive on and the tires would make that thump thump sound when you drove across them.

He loved cars and would take us girls to old car shows.  These cars were beautiful with their shiny paint jobs and the hoods were always up exposing their shiny silver engines.  I always wondered how they kept them so clean; our engine in our car didn’t look like that. 

When we would go to the demolition derby at the Ogle County Fair each of us girls would pick a car at the beginning of the derby that we thought would make it to the end.  They would start the derby with all of the cars revving their engines and they would all enter the ring slamming and banging in to each other and all the engines would be smoking and spitting oil. Between the roar of the engines and sounds of crunching metal it was so loud that you couldn't hear each other talk. The smell of burning oil and smoke would fill the air and it was awful. The drivers would all try their hardest to see who could fling mud the farthest in to the crowd by spinning their tires towards the stands, it was Awesome!  It was even better when one of the engines would catch on fire, you could hear the collective gasp when the flames would shoot out of the front of the car and the driver would jump out and run from the burning engine. When the driver broke the stick tied to the driver’s side door of their car you knew they were done.  We would watch them bow out one by one and we would sit there hoping that the one that we picked would make it the end.  My dad grinned ear to ear from start to finish, he loved them and now I do.  I haven’t been to one in years so if anyone knows where they are at around here in Missouri please let me know.