Category — Microblog Mondays

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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On the day we brought home Linus, a few miles away at the airport, a family with two kids were being detained.  Not for anything they did or intended to do but because of their country of origin.

That imbalance: One family can afford to keep a rodent as a pet, another doesn’t have a safe home.

It’s not as if you only have a single refugee family to choose from if you want to note the imbalance in this country.  We are a nation that entertains itself by wasting food.  We have television shows where contestants make creative dishes with expensive ingredients so judges can critique them, and those shows are filmed in cities where there are children dreading snow days because staying home from school also means a lack of access to food provided through the FARMs program.

That is privilege.  That is advantage.

That is what is giving me pause today.  What is giving you pause?

Actually, pause is the wrong term, since that pause means taking action: Make calls.  Join a protest.  Write a post.  Get out there and change things.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I miss Truman.  I am not shy about crying in front of the kids or Josh.  I am not shy about crying in public.  I cried in the grocery store buying parsley because it was unusually crisp, and it made me so sad to think about making soup stock without my baby wheeking through the whole thing.

I cry when I’m driving, especially if I see someone walking their dog.  I am aware that Truman wasn’t a dog, but that person has their pet and I don’t.  I cry when I walk downstairs and there is no one greeting me in the morning, and I cry when I look in the corner of the room and realize anew that there is no one to say goodnight to in the living room.

But I mostly cry in the shower.  I am a shower crier.  Sometimes I can feel my sadness or frustration building in the morning, and I wait to shower until it feels like every emotion is going to spill over.  Then I get under the water and wail.  I’m not just saying now, mourning Truman, but always.  I have always been a shower crier.

Do you cry in the shower, too?  Is it safe because you’re alone?  Because the sound of the water covers up any sounds of tears?  Because you can wash your face before stepping back out of the bathroom and facing the day?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day (usually called MLK Day) in America.  It feels particularly poignant this year because we’re moving between two very different types of leaders.  Obama guided by pointing out the positive.  And Trump… well… I can’t say that we are being guided anywhere good.  Insurance companies will benefit greatly from his administration.  Individuals, not so much.

King wasn’t a perfect leader or a perfect person, but he showed up and he cared and he tried his best to guide the nation towards a better place where one group of people didn’t need to be down for another group of people to be up.

I think I miss him a little extra this year because we need leaders like that — leaders who can speak eloquently to express our hearts and energize us to keep fighting for equality.  There are strong leaders out there (Elizabeth Warren comes to mind).  We need them to get a lot louder now that Trump is leading us backwards instead of forwards.

To me, King is a great reminder that it’s not about perfection.  It’s about humanness; looking for the good in others and understanding that we’re all in this together.

What do you think makes a great leader?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I just learned about champing from Atlas Obscura, which is sort of like glamping, but in old churches.  It’s a win-win-win: You get an interesting, dry place to sleep for the night without needing to carry a tent.  The town gets money to help support the upkeep of the church.  And the ghosts in the floor tombs get a new group of people to haunt.

Win!

This would have been perfect for 22-year-old Melissa, though 42-year-old Melissa is currently cocking an eyebrow and saying, “I don’t think it’s for me.”  But once upon a time, I liked camping, and I would have jumped at the chance to stay somewhere cool.  Especially a place with floor tombs.

What do you think?  Would you champ?  And if not champing, would you tamp? (I just made up tamping, which is when countries allow you to sleep in famous tourist sites such as pitching a tent in Pompeii.)

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Every year between Christmas and New Years, we watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  The goal is to get Aragorn and Arwen’s kiss as close to midnight on New Year’s Eve as possible.  We rarely succeed.  By which I mean that we don’t succeed at all.  Like we sometimes get stuck watching the Two Towers well into January.  We suck.

But this year, we made a commitment.  Watch at least one hour, but hopefully more, daily.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  Do not allow life to get in the way of our goal.

This year, we succeeded.  Even though we had to take a few days off because the kids slept at my parents’ house, we timed it carefully and got the kiss in at 10:59 pm on New Year’s Eve.  I wanted to run around the house, screaming, because I was so proud of us.  Instead, I tiredly ate some M&Ms and said, “Well done, team.”

Sometimes it’s not the big wins.  Sometimes it’s the small victories.  What was your latest small victory?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.