Category — Friday Blog Roundup

The ChickieNob asked me a question I couldn’t answer, so I pass it along to you.  Who is this?

It’s a playing card from her Good and Evil Harry Potter set.  I’ve seen all the movies six dozen times, but I am completely blanking on ever seeing this actor in any film.  And beyond that, that he’s an important enough character to be included in the deck.  I mean, poor Justin Finch-Fletchley doesn’t have a card, and that boy was petrified by a basilisk.  But this guy is the three of hearts?

No, really, who is he?

By the way, this set is the worst idea ever.  We’re only on book five, so the cards are a bit of a spoiler.  And anyway, the whole point of the series is that all of us have these good and bad impulses, and it’s up to us to decide which way we’re going to go.  And that it’s never too late to do the right thing.  I’m looking at you, Narcissa.  To mark them as good or evil flattens out dynamic, complicated characters.

So… right.  Anyway, who is this guy?  I’m guessing someone at the Ministry?  Or in the Order?

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Finally started Mockingjay.  Unlike the other two books, this one hasn’t grown on me yet.  It may be because the setting is so dreary.  Whereas in the other two books, the setting added interest to the plotline.  I’m sticking with it to the end, but I’m not devouring it like I did the first two.

I’ve heard that kids hate Mockingjay and adults appreciate Mockingjay because while it isn’t the satisfyingly happy ending we crave, it’s the more realistic ending.  Trying to figure out where I’ll fall on the likey/no likey spectrum.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Anger” (The Adventures of Chicken and Ham)
• “How far along were you? IT DOESN’T MATTER. (And neither does a BFP.)” (The Unexpected Journey)
• “Narrative therapy and neuroscience: Blogging and the storying of infertility” (The Unexpected Journey)
• “Mother” (The Empress and the Fool)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Only Nuts in May could make life going ass-over-teakettle sound both amusing and horrifying at the same time.  As they wait to start their FET, her hormones mess with her mind in a way that only hormones can.  Sending her good thoughts on her FET as well as a tongue lashing to Cute Ute to stash its vile personality as they embark on the cycle.

River Runs Dry has a post about marathon training that could soooooo easily be a stand-in for cycling in general.  How that failed cycle can throw off your confidence, make you second guess your next decisions.  She writes, “Because the fact is, running a marathon is an exercise in happiness AND pain. It hurts and you ache and you wonder why you’re doing it in the first place. Distance running is about how you get through discomfort to find a place of contentment.”  Could we not say the same thing about assisted family building?  Love the honesty of this post.  She needs to know we are cheering her on.

I didn’t see the movie but The Road Less Travelled made me wish I had seen Inside Llewyn Davis in her post tying the film into living child-free after infertility and loss.  She writes: “I know a little something about loss & grief, about not achieving your dreams. I know that my story doesn’t exactly shout success and hope, at least in conventional story terms and triumph-over-infertility narratives. But that doesn’t mean that I consider myself a loser, someone whose life is ‘shrinking, hope diminishing, aspiration dissolving… ghosts and disappointment… not meeting the challenge of life’.”  Wonderful post.

Lastly, It is What It is (or is it) has an eye-opening post about searching for her birth-father, which is really about finding herself.  I especially love the insight she gives with: “It is really hard to explain the juxtaposition between how badly I want to know who he is/what his life story is and how paralyzed I feel to actually do the searching.”  It’s a beautiful post that captures that strong need to know something.

The roundup to the Roundup: Who is that on the card?  In the middle of Mockingjay.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between January 17th and January 24th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

I had big plans to take two days to relax after turning in the manuscript, but — of course — I had to clean up life a little bit first.  Sort of like giving my life an eyebrow waxing; just taking care of all those little stray hairs that had popped up while I was head down, trying to meet my deadline.  So I woke up on Thursday and started making what I like to call liquid gold.  I am more than a little disturbed that Kraft Macaroni and Cheese has started using this phrase to describe their product because macaroni and cheese horrifies me and my liquid gold is like… liquid gold.  It’s a vegetable stock that I use in place of water.  I boil rice in it, I make soup with it, I’ve even boiled noodles in it.  It imparts this rich flavour that is the “how the hell did you make this?” in most of my recipes.

It takes about three hours to make four small containers of liquid gold, so I usually make it an all day activity, keeping the pot continuously running until our freezer is full of containers.

I did this because the kids have endured way too many dinners courtesy of Morningstar Farms the last few weeks, and I felt like I needed to provide something homemade on this first day back in reality.

They did not appreciate the liquid gold.  They would have been fine having another faux chicken patty.  I’m glad I used those hours wisely.

I also needed to start cleaning the house and making some muffins and returning emails and clearing out the piles of post-it notes that have built up over the last few months while I worked on this rewrite.

And I had to farm.

My farm on Hay Day is a wonder to behold.  Bagmomma warned me that it would take forever to level up after Level 20, but she doubted my craziness.  I am on Level 30 and I’ve been playing under three weeks.  I know this because I wrote about Hay Day for the first time in the 474th Roundup.  I have the boat orders, the fishing boat, the mine, the smelter, the cake oven, the pie oven, the juicer, and all the other common items that a person can amass in the game.  I have 10 pigs, 5 cows, 12 chickens, and 5 sheep.  My farm is a freakin’ machine.

Josh calls my arrangement with the kids the Electronic Giving Tree.  I make not only all of my boat order items, but I make most of the Wolvog’s.  I make him 4 cheesecakes to sell daily for money in his stand.  I give the ChickieNob butter for her buttered popcorn.  I sell them everything for one coin per transaction so they don’t have to use any of their money to get the stuff.  I buy and use all the items they can’t afford such as the smelter or the fishing boat, and then pass them the finished items so they can fill their orders.  It is a beautiful system.

I’ve found that using my virtual money on Hay Day is just as satisfying as actual retail therapy.  It’s akin to the trips to the library that I take when I’m trying to conserve cash, and I walk out with 10 new books.  It feels as if I’ve acquired 10 new books (they are certainly taking up space in my house), and by the time that acquiring high wears off, it’s time to return the books anyway and do it all over again.  I love amassing coins in Hay Day and then buying a new item.  I especially love that I have spent no actual money to do so.

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Best money spent this week was the Frozen soundtrack for the ChickieNob.  She is not much of a performer and prefers to never be on stage, but she is so deeply in love with Frozen that she immediately went into the living room and started belting out the songs with the album.  She even sang a bit of one song over the phone for my brother — a major step for her — and allowed me to make a few recordings for posterity.  She whispered to me that when she sings these songs, she isn’t just playing a part.  She feels as if she is Elsa.  That’s a pretty powerful story when it touches a kid that way.  I am willing to bet that there are thousands of other kids (and probably more than a few adults) out there right now who have finally found their hero — someone to emulate — in Elsa and Anna.  Well done, Disney.

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Just want to draw your attention to the annual March 9th Random Act of Kindness Day for Thomas.  328 people have already signed up and it’s still months away.  Msfitzita is one of our own, and I love participating every year.  It is especially great when I tell the person that I did it for Thomas.  If you don’t know what you want to do as your random act of kindness (and I’m still trying to come up with mine this year), Msfitzita linked to a list of 101 ideas.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “What I Lost” (The Second Bedroom)
• “Adoption on the Internet” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Northern Star!
• “Sticking it in a Bag, and Worrying about it Later” (Hapa Hopes)
• “My Books are Your Books” (Stumbling Gracefully)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I Won’t Fear Love has a post about the 86 times the moon has gone through its phases since the death of her son.  It’s a beautiful post about measuring time by the lunar calendar, and she writes, “The moon’s been full eighty six more times since I rested my boy’s head on that one spot above my heart, since I willed my body to remember the feeling of his head there. So many things are hazy now, but if I bid it, that one spot, it still responds.”  As she says, time is a strange thing.

No Kidding in NZ writes the post she wishes another writer had written thanking child-free women.  Whereas the other writer came from a space where child-free women choose not to build families, she points out how this ignores a percentage of the population who do try to build families and need to stop before they have the family they want (or, adding to that, women who want to be a mother but logistics in life get in the way).  I love Mali’s list, and there are many more thank yous that could go on it.  I’d also like to thank child-free men.

Lastly, a non-IF, mainstream article but one that touches so deeply on things that we often talk about in our community — where our story ends and another person’s story begins; such as when we write about adoption or donor gametes, and our story overlaps with another person who may not be able to give you consent to write (especially if you don’t know what you’re going to write before you sit down).  Jay Neugeboren (my former advisor) writes in Opinionator about writing about his brother, Robert.  And I love the end.  My gut tells me that if you follow that and come from a place of trust that it will guide the story as it comes onto the screen.

The roundup to the Roundup: Life post turning in manuscript.  ChickieNob sings Frozen.  Do a random act of kindness.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between January 10th and January 17th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

Do you know what doesn’t go together?  The polar vortex and my muscle relaxants.  People kept asking me all week if the cold was making my back feel worse.  My back already feels like hell, so no, once you’re already at too-painful-to-breathe, there isn’t a big difference between terrible and horrible.

But the muscle relaxants made my mind so fuzzy that every time I heard the term polar vortex, my limbic system would send out a warning siren as a mental image of a slow-motion cloud of swirling polar bears descending over our town, sucking all the houses into its core, popped into my brain.  And then I’d have to remind myself that there is no swirling cloud composed of polar bears, just as there is no Sharknado.  My brain would calmly turn off the alarm until the next time I heard the term polar vortex and my brain silently screamed at me to take cover!

Other things to avoid while on muscle relaxants: beat poetry, lava lamps, and strobe lights.  Oh, and Sharknado.  Wait, did I also mention polar vortexes…

Polar vortex [gasp]

Take cover!!!

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For anyone keeping score at home, no, my back isn’t better.  We’ve tried massage, muscle relaxants, painkillers, stretches and heat.  I think I’ve actually been throwing too many solutions at the problem, making my back feel even worse.  So I’m going to take the weekend to try to heal just by lying still.

And playing Hay Day.

But mostly lying still.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “It’s Not Envy; It’s Absence” (The Unexpected Trip)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Torthúil has a post about finding happiness, though the reason I loved this post is for her description of the opposite: “During the quieter times of the day and night I found myself feeling heavy. Not only because of the yummy food.  I felt like I had a hollow empty space right at my center, and every day a drop of something liquid and weighty would fall into it, like a big dollop of cement.”  Isn’t that beautiful?  You need to read the whole post to catch lovely moments like that one.

My Scar Smiles at Me has a post about blogging and conversations.  Or really, reading the blog post after having a conversation via some medium with the person.  Getting to process their words on two different levels.  And how reading a blog post aligns closer to having tea with a friend.  I love this.

When Did I Get Like This asks if blogging is dead?  She writes, “The notion of diminishing returns is also self-fulfilling, of course, because I have less motivation to post when it feels like no one is reading. But why would anyone keep checking my site when I no longer post with any regularity?”  She’s going to keep writing as long as she reaches one person who values her words.  There’s lots of food for thought in the post, even though it’s non-IF.

You will never look at Fawkes the phoenix in the same way again after reading Inconceivable’s “Burning Day.”  It will blow you away.

Lastly, Fruitful Furbishing has a post about recent nosy, thoughtless questions.  I love how the song “Let it Go” from Frozen has been applied to so many situations, and I imagine there are a lot of women walking around right now with it playing in their heads.

The roundup to the Roundup: The polar vortex is not a swirling cloud of white bears.  My back isn’t better.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between January 3rd and January 10th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

So I didn’t really have a vacation.  Whatever the opposite of a vacation is, that’s what I had.  I had a work-a-thon.

Yes, we saw the Hobbit and Frozen (and Josh and I sneaked out to see American Hustle one night).  I managed to build a farm on Hay Day and run it like a boss.  But mostly, I finished Apart at the Seams, prepped the Creme de la Creme, and wrote 22 articles.  It was a lot of writing; a lot of really long days.  I was writing 12 – 15 hours per day, day after day after day.

And it only stopped right when it was time to send the kids back to school.

So I lost it after drop off.  I cried for a half hour because I had missed their vacation.  I’m aware that I will not be working through spring break, so we have another break down the road to play.  But that break wasn’t this break.  I missed this break.  And I sort of needed a break myself.

I’ve decided not to take a break in one clump once work calms in mid-January.  Instead, I have a bunch of books stacked up (and a freakin’ farm to run and candy to crush), and I’m going to take my break in tiny sips: one day a week for four or five weeks.  Or maybe take half days once a week and spread it out over 10 weeks.  I don’t need to lounge about for five straight days; in fact, that may be a bit much for me since I’m on my own.  But a day here and there sounds really good.

The other benefit to the break-here-and-there idea is that I never have to go through that hard landing of returning to work after being out.  It’s easier to deal with a day’s worth of stuff piling up than a week’s worth (as well as getting out of my writing rhythm).  Thinking of making my off-day on Wednesdays to break up the week.

Would you rather have a lot of spread out, tiny breaks (like an extra day off per week for many weeks) or one big break running on consecutive days?

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Looking for the Creme de la Creme of 2013?  It’s right there.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Birth Story” (A Glimpse Inside)
• “The Breast is Best Campaign is Evil” (Too Many Fish to Fry)
• “Moms Who Look Good” (Teach Me to Braid)
• “You are Not Alone” (No Kidding in NZ)

Okay, now my choices this week.

I read Andmom’s post about Christmas fantasies after the Roundup last week, so I’m including it here.  It’s a wonderful post that I think touches on so many times where our fantasies don’t match up with our realities — not just Christmas.  Such as the vision we have of ourselves holding a sweet, cooing baby (and the reality of a squalling infant while you’re sleep deprived and smelling like shit after having not showered for 4 days).  I love, love, love this post.  Especially the ending.

I also read Our Crazy Ever After after last week’s roundup, so her post on Christmas is here as well.  She admits: “Perhaps I am breaking an infertile cardinal sin….but I actually enjoyed my quiet time at home sans the pitter patter of footie-pajama’d feet.”  It’s a post about not looking at what she doesn’t have, but accepting and enjoying the Christmas she got.  And her final line amused me.

Lastly, Wee Hermione has a thought-provoking post about religion.  The meat of the post begins: “Do you ever mull things over in your mind for so long that you just want to get it all down in one long explanation and ramble, just to have the peace of mind that there, you put it down?”  Uh… yes.  1000 times yes.  It’s an interesting post detailing a life very different from my own, so I loved her story.  She writes about not feeling G-d while growing up in a religious household.  And just as her parents were black sheeps with their families, she became the black sheep of her family when it came to religion.  It’s about the communities that spring up around the spiritual.  It’s about discovering where you belong.  Wonderful post.

The roundup to the Roundup: Would you rather have your break in tiny sips of days over a long period of time or a break from work all in one clump?  The Creme de la Creme of 2013 is up.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between December 27th and January 3rd) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

The Wolvog came downstairs frustrated because his friends have stopped playing Hay Day, and apparently, that has made it difficult for him to get butter.  “I’ll download Hay Day,” I told him.  “If you run the farm and do the work, you can use my farm to get whatever supplies you need.”

So I downloaded the farm and decided to do the most basic things to get it up and going so the Wolvog could start scavenging from it when he woke up in the morning.  And… it will not surprise you to learn this… I fell in love.

First I fell in love with my chickens.  Then I fell in love with my crops.  Then I fell in love with the little bakery I set up and my brand new cow (I love this cow!).  I spent an extraordinary amount of time making everything neat and pretty (plus collecting my eggs, milking my cow, planting and harvesting my crops, and visiting some stranger’s farm where he sold me an axe).

The Wolvog is going to be so disappointed when I turn on him like Bilbo with the ring and hiss that the farm is my precious and he better not touch my butter if he knows what’s good for him.  He created a monster.

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So, what was your favourite thing you got for Christmas?  As someone Jewish, I feel the need to ask this.

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Mikhail Kalashnikov died.  I misread his name at first glance as Mikhail Baryshnikov.  Heart attack (plus excessive time on YouTube watching ballet footage to calm down).  After I recovered, I thought of one of my translation assignments in graduate school.  I was translating a series of short stories, and one of them contained the term Kalashnikov.  I didn’t know what this was, and I couldn’t find it in any dictionary.  But it seemed like the object of this man’s affection, so I assumed that Kalashnikov was a male Russian immigrant that he was making love to based on the usage of male verb forms.  And this is the story I wrote; one of an affair between the main character and Kalashnikov.

I gave the story to my professor.  He returned it to me and said, “Melissa, what do you think a Kalashnikov is?”

“What is it?  Don’t you mean who?”

“No, Melissa, I mean what.  Because it is very apparent to me that you have no clue that a Kalashnikov is a gun.”

Uh… no, I didn’t.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Can You Be Fired for Doing Fertility Treatments?” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Kimberly!
• “‘Rest’ Cycle Musings” (No Bun in This Oven)
• “Questions Without Answers” (Birds, Bees, and Medicine)
• “Tree” (Baptism by Fire)

Okay, now my choices this week.

River Runs Dry has a post about seeing thestrals.  Once she learned about the messiness of life, the non-Pinterest perfect worlds we inhabit, she couldn’t stop seeing the loss and the sadness and the disappointment and the frustration that lurk amid all the normal everyday moments.  It is a sensation many have expressed in this community; about suddenly seeing infertility or loss when you never noticed it pre-diagnosis.  But she says it in an incredibly perfect way.

Life as a Dad to Donor Insemination Kids has a post about parenting DI kids after divorce.  I especially love the realization from his son: “We talked for a few minutes about how life can be complicated. Not sure how we came to referring to Donor, Dad, and StepDad but he recognized that no matter how many folks are out there always will be only one Dad.”  It leaves room for a lot of people to play a role in your child’s life, with no single person detracting from the role of any other person.

Lastly, So Close has a post that she published now even though she wrote it a while back.  It starts with a deeply honest and moving thought, “And then there is my secret, dark fear.  That this is all I, we, deserve.  Because I struggled so hard to have children, that having children with challenges is what I deserve.  That ‘normal’* children are reserved for people who conceive easily and without help.  ‘Normal’ families get to have “normal” children. People like me, families like mine, should just be happy with what we are and just shut up.”  Though she knows this isn’t the case, and she waited to hit publish until she had time to process her child’s diagnosis, I’m glad she still sent the thoughts out there in case they resonate with someone else and make them feel less alone.

The roundup to the Roundup: I have a farm on Hay Day, and it’s miiiiiiiine.  What did you get for Christmas?  What Kalashnikov means.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between December 20th and December 27th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.