lyddieonwed

"I haven't posted in forever" post

2009-05-16T17:29:16Z

I have a few of these posts in the journal. The ones that apologize for not posting. I just haven't been on the computer for a long time.

I used to get on almost every night. I brew up a pot of coffee, open up a pack of cloves, and live in the world of the internet until the sun rose. I just don't do that anymore. Which is probably a relief for my heart, lungs, and eyes.

For starters, my fiance would probably get pretty grumpy about it- but also because I finally have a steady job. One that is 8-5 everyday and gives you weekends off. Its not permanent- but really what is these days?

I find myself doing more activities off of the computer. However, I don't want to get completely behind on my writing- so I may be coming back to the internet. I just wanted to stop by and say hello. Now I'm going to go paint some walls purple (and not in a strangely manic way- I swear) with my honey and then eat some pizza. :-)

catching up- clearing the fog

2008-11-16T08:16:14Z

I haven't posted for quite some time. I haven't been able to write for a long time and I've had an emotional summer and fall. I find that the winter chill brings a certain clarity and renewed purpose. I've overcome some personal hurdles and I've started writing again.

I started reading a Polish poet named Wislawa Szymborska and I've fallen in love. Her poems are beautiful. They have a quality of truth that follows me through my day banging about inside my head and nudging my muse towards unearthed ideas. I thought I'd stop by and share one before I return to writing. Hopefully, I will be posting stories again soon!

The Joy of Writing

Where through the written forest runs that written doe?
Is it to drink from the written water,
which will copy her gentle mouth like carbon paper?
Why does she raise her head, is it something she hears?
Poised on four fragile legs borrowed from truth
she pricks up her ears under my fingers.
Stillness- this word also rustles across the paper
and parts
the branches brought forth by the word "forest."

Above the blank page lurking, set to spring
are letters that may compose themselves all wrong,
besieging sentences
from which there is no rescue.

In a drop of ink there's a goodly reserve
of huntsmen with eyes squinting to take aim,
ready to dash down the steep pen,
surround the doe and level their guns.

They forget that this is not real life.
Other laws, black on white, here hold sway.
The twinkling of an eye will last as long as I wish,
will consent to be divided into small eternities
full of bullets stopped in flight.
Forever, if I command it , nothing will happen to her.
Against my will no leaf will fall
nor blade of grass bend under the full stop of a hoof.

Is there then such a world
over which I rule sole and absolute?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence perpetuated at my command?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
The revenge of the mortal hand.

-Wislawa Szymborska

A book meme

2008-07-12T00:30:29Z

I saw this over on blueraccoon's livejournal and had to snag it and share.

According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on their list.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ ~~so we can try and track down these people who've only read 6 and force books upon them ;-)~~

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell.
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (Isn't this the same as #33?)
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

lyddieonwed @ 2008-04-24T00:27:00

2008-04-24T04:35:37Z

This page is now friends locked.

I will extend friend status to almost anyone who asks- so please, if you would like access to my stories, just comment in this entry and I will extend my friendship asap.

~lyddie

a quote

2007-10-30T00:31:25Z

" Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth."
~Benjamin Disraeli

My cat is a bitch- I think its why I love him...

2007-08-31T14:00:24Z

My poor cat Cary has fleas. He also has very thick, very dense, and very long black hair. Therefore, in order to truly get rid of his fleas I have to shave him so that he is all poodle-esque and more easily bathable and brushable. I went to the store and bought a pet shave kit and watched the instructional video.

Ah, the instructional video. Which, by the way, only showed dogs. If I ever need to groom a terrier or a poodle, then I'm set because the instructional video showed how to groom these fine little creatures in english and in french. I actually sat through the french part, hoping that there would be a cat grooming section afterwards. Sadly, there was not. There were, however, the two best behaved dogs I've ever seen. They stood there and took it like pros. They probably were pros.

Feeling thusly prepared (but not really at all) I set up the shaver and prepared to shave my cat. Cary loves to have his hair short. He purrs more, he jumps around more, their is a certain perkiness to his pounce when his hair is short.

However, what Cary does not like is being shaved. Cary is roughly the size of a small dog and he has got a lot of hair. He also likes to bite. He screams and bites and generally throws up a very big fuss. I tell him to get over himself and stop trying to act like a tough guy and to let me get on with it.

He growls and gets all flattened-ear-angry while he waves around his long tail and knocks over everything in the vicinity. The problem is that after he has broken the flesh of my hand with his fangs, I get a little grumpy. It really pisses him off when I growl and howl back at him like a cat, so of course, that's what I do. I know. I am very mature and have an accute sense of self preservation. My temper is not very tempered.

Through the whole thing my mother stands in the doorway with a mug of coffee and a cigarette laughing at the entire scene. I am sure that we do look quite humorous sitting at the kitchen table where I am covered in clumps of fur and bleeding while Cary and I bitch and growl at each other. The entire process is quite tiresome. My father walks by with a look of pity for the cat and perhaps a little bit of fear at me. Is it because he thinks I'm crazy or tough? I like to think crazy. My mother tells him that she is waiting for Cary to start talking back to me. I think she is enjoying the show entirely too much. She has that look on her face that grandmother's get when they get to sit back and watch the grandkids misbehave. A little smug and a lot amused. Was I really that troublesome of a child?

Of course, once I've put away the shaver and brush him and bathe him, he is suddenly a purring happy kitty who wants me to pet him and love him. He damn well should be a happy cat. After getting the kitty spa treatment! Seriously. I do get that he doesn't like to be messed with and also that he is an unhappy flea -bitten kitty. But what I do I do out of love and the hope of making him feel better. So even though what I want to do is throw him outside to hang out with the alley cats, when he gives me his neediest look and then bumps his head against my leg I can't help but take pity upon him. And he looks so ugly-cute with his short hair and his big puffy tail and the hair on his face all puffed out like a lion's mane against his shaved neck- so I pick him up and carry him with me to the computer where he purrs away on my lap. He, like babies, is just very lucky that he is cute.

Memo to world: Don't mess with me, I have a sonic screwdriver!

2007-08-28T02:01:16Z

I realize that I have been remiss in speaking of the newest addition to my collective geekiness....

Through the trade of house sitting my friend Mary's two wonderful dogs I got a ... sonic screwdriver!

(And Mary got a permanent place in my hall of people who rock- currently exhibiting in my head :-) )

And since I had a rough start this morning- with my car stalling in the middle of a busy intersection- I was reminded how very much I would appreciate a sonic screwdriver in my everyday life.

First of all, I am quite scatterbrained. "What?!" you say in astonishment! I know, it is hard to believe. But perhaps you will note (especially if you work with me) that I did in fact misplace my eyeglasses this very morning and was forced to wear my prescription sunglasses for quite some time. Luckily today was my back office day- especially since my sunglasses are Audrey Hepburn-ish in proportion. I eventually realized that I had put the case in the other pocket of my backpack. Yep. Now a sonic screwdriver may not fix my eyesight but it sure would help with the other most common thing that I misplace- which is KEYS!

With a sonic screwdriver, I could open and start my car without effort! Thus eliminating the look of *yes honey you are a dumbass* from whichever towtruck/police person/parent is beckoned upon to help me. I could get in my house when I lock myself out (more often then I like to admit) without the messy fuss of climbing through a window! I sometimes wonder what the neighbors think when they see my legs hanging out of the window- chucks kicking in the breeze... or potential thieves who are staking out houses in a home-alone-esque fashion. (Probably that they are retarded if they choose my house out of all the ones on the block. But also, perhaps- cool chucks!)

Mostly they would help with my work keys. Next time I am absent minded and leave them sitting on my desk in my locked office I won't have to go begging to one of the other supes and again reminding them why it slightly unsettling that I handle payroll and tills.

Now, I know that some of you naysayers out there- don't think I don't know who you are- are saying- but V? If you are so forgetful- won't you simply misplace the sonic screwdriver as well? And I say to you, oh naysayers, NAY! Who would lose sight of a sonic screwdriver? Its a friggin' sonic screwdriver! That thing would be by my side 24/7. You would have to rip it out of my deathlike grip (or my back pocket) because that my friends is something I would NEVER lose!

Besides, there are so many other interesting uses for a sonic screwdriver! I could unlock any door anywhere. Now, it may not be as cool as the key to the "lost room" but it's pretty close. You could pretty much go anywhere at anytime as long as you were stealthy. Hell, even if you aren't because on Dr. Who the fun always starts when they've lost their stealth. Of course, in the real world, the cops or security would probably be called but I could always make whatever advanced (or even basic) electronic device is in the vicinity explode as a distraction as I run out the backdoor leaving them with dust and a faint blue glow...

Speaking of electronic devices- hello, electronic devices! I could get the many machines that malfunction in my life to once again operate with a happy hum in the background! I could dry my clothes sans laudromat and smelly strangers! If you work with me- think of the computers! No more store support! That is just thinking locally. There are many things that I could do with devices that would probably get me in trouble and go against the whole moral code of a time lord! In every episode that sonic screwdriver can do new and amazing things!

But honestly, we all know that I would only use it for good, right? *wink*

And once I've mastered the screwdriver its only a matter of time until I get the TARDIS, too, hmm? That would require an entire book to contemplate the possibilities- or a long running television series- especially if the doctor was included- or possibly Jack? (pretty please?)

But I don't need the TARDIS- all I really require *puppy eyes* is a sonic screwdriver- and I think life would be Fantastic.

Doesn't the screwdriver make me look that extra bit dangerous? ;-)

a poem i like

2007-08-13T00:32:12Z

What she was wearing

this is my suicide dress
she told him
I only wear it on days
when I'm afraid
I might kill myself
if I don't wear it

you've been wearing it
every day since we met
he said

and these are my arson gloves

so you don't set fire to something?
he asked

exactly

and this is my terrorism lipstick
my assault and battery eyeliner
my armed robbery boots

I'd like to undress you he said
but would that make me an accomplice?

and today she said I'm wearing
my infidelity underwear
so don't get any ideas

and she put on her nervous breakdown hat
and walked out the door

-Denver Butson

Today was a long day. If I liked hats I would have totally been wearing the nervous breakdown hat. Instead I'm going to put on my strangle my father boots and go for a walk.