Motivate/meditate

Cleaning out my purse for the BIG MOG3 adventure I found one of the inspirational words I drew from a fishbowl at a nature education leadership institute last summer. It was right next to a fossilized stick of gum.

The inspirational word was not MEMORY. I have little motivational slips of paper on the desk to help me center, breathe in breathe out, stay in the moment, find joy, and pack toothbrush . They say:

COMB
eyebrows
WATER PLANTS



© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

Who was...?

Who was...? is the name of a surprisingly popular series of biographies for children. Surprisingly, because adults like them as much as kids, and because the cover illustrations creep me out. They look like Famous Bobble-heads You Should Know, much like the U.S. Presidents who race around the bases at D.C. Nationals baseball games.

Example A:

  

Example B:

Example C:  Who is Jeff Kinney?

Of course Jeff Kinney, from McCook, Nebraska led the 1969 Huskers in rushing, scoring, and receiving as a sophomore. In 1971 "Kinney’s finest game as a Husker may have come against Oklahoma in the “Game of the Century”. Most people remember Johnny Rodgers electrifying 72-yard punt return, but forget that Kinney carried the Huskers offensively. Kinney ran for a season best 171 yards and four touchdowns."

Oh, not that Jeff Kinney? Apparently there's some guy who draws stick figures.

The characters in my current Ancestry.com family tree project are showing up in my dreams with enormous bobble heads. Big heads who drowned in the Allegheny, carpenters who cut themselves at work and died of blood poisoning, a guy who married two sisters, but only one at a time.

What about the family tree bobble-head women? Their strength blows my mind. Their stories will be in a different post, as I've run out of time in my own race around the bases. 

Check out some biographies at your library! It's okay to read the kid ones, they tell you the basics and cut to the chase.

© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

IMG on a memory stink

This just in from the You'll Wish You Labeled Your Files Division of the Overloaded Memory Stink Department, (YWYLYFD of the OMSD):

IMG is a LaBrea tar pit of searching frustration. I meant to get back to those scanned photos and documents to identify them, but it never happened. The photos I seek are on one of several unnamed flash thumb stick gizmos. Each gizmo has hundreds of files with only IMG and a number for a name. Doing a Henry Fonda "On Golden Pond" imitation wondering who the hell is in these photos.

Just laughing about these IMGs from a 1946 parade in Pierce, Nebraska, especially the truck that looks like a crepe paper streamer Pekingese pooch. Bet it was quite the event in this one stop-light town.

© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

IMG on a memory stink

This just in from the You'll Wish You Labeled Your Files Division of the Overloaded Memory Stink Department, (YWYLYFD of the OMSD):

IMG is a LaBrea tar pit of searching frustration. I meant to get back to those scanned photos and documents to identify them, but it never happened. The photos I seek are on one of several unnamed flash thumb stick gizmos. Each gizmo has hundreds of files with only IMG and a number for a name. Doing a Henry Fonda "On Golden Pond" imitation wondering who the hell is in these photos.

Just laughing about these IMGs from a 1946 parade in Pierce, Nebraska, especially the truck that looks like a crepe paper streamer Pekingese pooch. Bet it was quite the event in this one stop-light town.

© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

Sam and Janet evening

Just two weeks from now I'll have to say goodbye to my wedded skinny son and new daughter-in-law on the island of Sardinia. They will be as cute and starry-eyed as my parents look in this snapshot from September 1951.

If one doesn't know, the black and white photos hold endless outfit color possibilities. But I know. My mom's snazzy jacket with matching belt was this color green. It was the Peter Pan costume in our red dress-up box. Was the dress black and white? Maybe navy? Maybe the wavy signal when the little black and white tv with rabbit ear antennae had difficulties...

Added this new biography of Mary Martin to the library collection this week. I hear the songs playing on the mono hi-fi. My parents had many Mary Martin musical soundtracks on 33 1/3 and 78 rpm.





© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

Demented emoticons drive dump trucks

:-)


Teeny tiny Tonkas queue to bring loads of itty bitty problems and catalog snarls to dump across my desk and keyboard. What to I do but give a demented emoticon smile and nod and thank the library gods for catalog maintenance job security?

So many codes of happy faces and smileys and Munch's "Scream" emojis filling up our brains -- I bet that was the space where the Polynesians stored their star navigation knowledge.

Grandma used to sign her birthday cards "X O X", probably my introduction to symbols. Hugs and kisses from Grandma were loaded with flavors, scents, sounds, along with the hugs.  I thought understanding the symbols meant I was reading.

If you are happy and you know it, use your thumbs to type text messages. Yes, your old thumbs can learn new tricks. The piling on of cataloging weirdness will abate. Then we will all dot i with pinky-purple hearts and smiles.

 I'm so happy I could cry listening to The House at the Edge of Night audiobook. 

:-)

© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

Flora, fauna, and Cheerios in the stroller

Did the first waterlily sunprint this morning. My fascination with waterlilies preceded my awareness of Monet, Claude. In my imagination, my mom Fritzi, Monet, Claude, and I would sit on a stone bench by the lily pond in the Depression era public works Sunken Gardens in Lincoln, Nebraska, munching dry Cheerios and watching dragonflies. Fritzi would have been 88 on her birthday yesterday. Claude died two years before Fritzi was born, but he is still sitting with us in the morning sunshine watching clouds reflected in the lily pond. I'm in the stroller, my Cheerios on its little dashboard tray wearing a little yellow sweater with an appliqued giraffe.

Monet, Claude did not join us those mornings Fritzi and I had Animal Crackers at the old Lincoln Zoo. Sometimes Rousseau, Henri would wander out of the humid zoo stench to distract me while Fritzi cut my fingernails with those roseate spoonbill baby scissors.


© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder

It started at the end of May

Often noting the month of acquisition on library materials, I write month-'year. So May was 5-16. Right? Right.

Much as I can't make Excel dance through hoops to repeat or generate a sequence, I can't get my brain to stop doing the month-year jig.

So for half of June I kept writing 6-17, then backing up to correct to 6-16. By the end of the month I got my head straight, just in time for July.

7-18 was wrongo, wrongo! The oft-reinforced error was gaining strength and momentum, but I almost broke its will by the anniversary of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon on Janice's birthday in 1969.

Then it was August and Alan Shepard used a six-iron on my mental lunar landscape. 8-19 is not correct, but it's difficult to stop writing it on the labels.

When I get back from Sardinia I'll probably write 9- ? ...Maybe I will finally break the habit!

© 2013-2016 Nancy L. Ruder