Friday, March 30, 2012

The Ides of April

The ides of April - our national day of reconciliation on tithing to the government.  Did we do it correctly?  Meh.

The biggies are done.  Still have a city form to go, but I let them do it for me, beg if necessary.  It's a small city and the staff is much more knowledgeable on which block to pull out and what else to look for.  I've seen them zip it out - including corrections on my feeble attempt, saving me another $20 in the process -- in less than five minutes.  Definitely a plus to let them do it for me.  (And fewer mistakes for them to fix.)

Time for celebratory low-carb CHOCOLATE ice cream and some malted milk stuff on top.  Will share with dog, who let all the tax forms fall onto his head out of the printer without licking the ink off.

Tax Day
It's tax day, it's tax day --
"Off with her head," they said.
It's tax day, it's tax day --
"Let them eat brioche," she said.

They cried over pain perdu ('lost bread' to me and you)
The queen was in shock
And shown to her rooms
In the Palais des Tuileries,
As accusations flew
About queen and brood
And sexual depravities.

[It's ages past now, but one would hae thought
These fine folks were a bit overwrought!
Sporting red, white and blue, in service godly and true,
Did nae see how their war chests went thru.]

"Hae they forgot the brothers we saved --
& it hae Cost us an arm and a laig!?!!
-- Fighting in th' land o'er the bountiful sea
'Gainst King George and his much-hated Tea?"

 "Milady, my Queen, so it may seem,
But this tax is such a terrible bed.
Lie down we may must,
And to sleep in the dust,
Lest the mice run away with our head."



Thursday, March 29, 2012

Perfection for Evermore, Evermore


The Raven Leaves a Note
 
Jostling through the crowd
While cabmen lean on their horns,
Businessmen on their phones,
& Coffee fumes escape a  Starbucks
Like steam from a manhole cover,
A remnant of his fragrance
Lingers on my face and pulls
Me forward through the morning rush
On a cloud of ethereal beauty.

Not for this I toil in vain,
This pitiful species of man;
But to find my fear and feel its name,
To whisper in morning’s first light,
To feel the fear released again
By love’s tenderest caress
Of the blade to the throat through the blood
And the light
And the oxygen that colors
The brightness to dark
And sweet perfection is saved, spared
The aging decrepitness.
Perfection for evermore, evermore.

Quoth – The Raven (It is I.)


Three-word Wednesdays provides three words each Wednesday that are used to create something.  This week 3WW chose jostle, fragrant, and remnant.  After I found the image where these three words coalesced in my mind, I chose to go a little further because I always want to have a bit of mystery, murder, or mayhem afoot.  Hopefully you picked up on that, and also picked up that this is the note "The Raven" sent or left for the police, the reporters, and ultimately the public, to explain.  Why do you think The Raven does what (s)he does?  Can you think of a serial killer in fiction who thought like this? 

Friday, March 23, 2012

Tackling Goals: Where this blog is headed

One might look at my blog and say "What the heck is she doing?" if they knew this (blog) mostly talked about weight loss and changing one's lifestyle in order to be healthier.  Even the title "Luvs2zumba" seems more designed to discuss Zumba - which is at least part of a healthier lifestyle than the poetry and commentaries I've been posting more recently. 

So what has happened?  The tag line says:  "Eating Elephants One Bite at a Time, or How I Ate One Too (812)" and that is a better clue. 

Almost everything worth undertaking is going to take time, energy, patience, and a lot of effort.  Whether we're changing our lifestyles to live healthier, or more energetic, or whether we're learning how to program our computer, build a space rocket, or teach a 2- year old how to tie his shoes, whoever is on the learning side is going to do this one step at a time.  Big projects especially.

How do you do them?  You break them down into smaller steps or tasks and focus on those.  You make sure that those lead to your larger goal, so there is always that "eye on the prize" but you try to stay "in the moment" by focusing on the one step or task in front of you.

As it is with lifestyle changes, my goal of becoming a novelist is going to be filled with lots of baby steps, small steps in the general direction of where I'm going, sometimes falling down, always brushing myself off and getting back up. 

The little ditties (poems) and other commentaries, essays, etc., which don't seem to focus on lifestyle changes or eating better, drinking water and exercising, are my sharing some of my little steps with you - putting them out there in the open.  You may not get to watch me create them, just as you can't see me drink a bottle of water, but you are sharing in the quality of them.

Maybe over time, you will be able to see some improvement.  I certainly hope I do.  Maybe you can see some of yourself in them. As the writer, that's definitely something I hope you do, and I hope you are entertained, have a moment of escaping the travails that surround us -- reminder to self:  finish taxes today -- and a little more stress is released. 

If that doesn't work, try a few hours on a step-master, or a punching bag, or a yoga class, or simply lie down on the floor and breathe deeply and slowly, focusing on your breathing only.  Nothing else. 

In this way, you too can take a small step toward reducing stress.  Thanks for visiting.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Job Market Evolution (a 3WW inspired poem)

Job Market Evolution


Slowly ploddingly – alone
I
Diligently nurturing an amateur
She
--Quickly acquired my job
--Rapidly became the boss
--Sent me home to rot

Diligently nurturing a grudge
I
Slowly plotting along
She
--Quickly acquires a stench
--Rapidly begins her decay
--Sent home in a box

Brought to you by the combination of 3-Word Wednesday's word prompts of Amateur, Diligent, and Nurture, and today's fun lessons of job searching while being a middle-aged over-educated woman, plus the little bit of murder and mayhem we all so dearly love to read.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

[FGC #7] The Greatest Tanka Ever Told

The Golden Butterfly

Hidden amongst leaves
is a thistle growing wild
forgotten by all
save a golden butterfly
lost in the dance of summer.

The above is posted in creative response to Write Anything's Form and Genre Challenge #7.  The tanka is new for me but, having lived in Japan, the haiku form of 5-7-5 which is a part of it is not.  Dusted off a little something old, added a little something new.  Tinkered again.  Posted for you.  Maybe you like.  I have a sweet affinity for the golden butterfly dancing around that thistle....

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Heart Disease Unmasked: Low Carbs Win!!

A recent posting in Sign of the Times has another MD (not Dr. Atkins) explaining that it's not cholesterol PER SE that causes heart disease, but an inflammation in the arteries that causes the cholesterol (which our body uses) to stick to the sides and cause blockages, etc. 

So, what causes the inflammation?

He goes on to explain how our processed foods (and the oils they use, which he identifies specifically) and the carbohydrate diets which are LOW FAT have cause all these ills, including diabetes and pre-diabetes.  It's well worth reading the whole article to see what he has to say and weigh the information for yourself. 

I've done a similar study on myself, but not being an MD or a medical researcher, couldn't and wouldn't say that it applied to others, but I saw how ingesting carbohydrates while I was on a low-carb diet that was higher in protein (as well as salads) affected me.  
  • I crashed -- immediately and with no control. 
  • I could feel the arteries slugging down when I ate some of my favorite carby foods. 
  • I had a lot more energy, which was also even across my whole day.
Alas, this also means that I need to get back on the wagon before it runs over me.  Still, I am thinking of joining a gym again so I can have safety supports around me when I start working out again - in case I fall down, pass out, or have a heart attack because I've been eating a lot of those bad sugars and sitting on my duff for the past two years.  Maybe I should see if there's a gym beneath the ER. . . .

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

3-word Wednesday Strikes Again

Today's three words are:  Baffle, Elegant, and Negate, which brought to mind the following:


Nothing could negate that her elegant arms baffled the detective;  after all, it was well-known that Venus de Milo had lost both of them years ago.  How she now came to have them, from one day to the next whilst in the Louvre, was a mystery.

Friday, March 9, 2012

How Luther Went Viral

The following takes a look at "How Luther Went Viral" and in this sense also helps to spread the original article (from the economist) and send it viralling off into the darkness -- er, "cloud."

While the author draws a neat
parallel
between social activism in the 1500s
and the riots in Arabic countries
in 2011
based on people making connections through new and growing social media
of their times, he seems content
to shine a light on Luther’s progress and to
reiterate the adage that “History repeats itself” by stating “History tells us
that there is nothing new under the sun.”

Even though we have newer technology
by which these connections were
made for the riots in 2011
(the internet, tv, social media like Facebook and Twitter),
these are simply comparable to the older technology when it was new in the 1500s:
cheap pamphlets, crude political/religious drawings, and easily learned ditties.

From both, people of geographic disparity learned that others shared their views,
and this created a growth and an impact for change to occur.
The author ends his brilliant discussion
-- of Luther’s use of media and propaganda to flame the passions of the common people --
with a mediocre stab that seems more intent at ending the article than saying anything:
that they “do not just connect us to each other: they also link us to the past.”
How this links us to the past (other than being a parallel) is not part of the article.
Even Hitler used media and propaganda,
and the new media he used was FILM.

Seems this was a clever idea on how
to showcase the author’s knowledge of Luther.
If one wants to know more about the riots of 2011 (not much was
mentioned of them in the article), there is a link below this one to another
Economist.com article. It’s located
under “Religion” rather than “Politics.”

One is further provided choices to “LIKE” this on Facebook (4k so far),
“TWEET” this on Twitter (3890 so far, so perhaps the same 4k),
Comment on it (40 so far),
Email, Print it, or Reprint it (with permissions).
One can also recommend it on the Economist (504 so far),
reddit (unknown), Google +1 (199 so far), and
LinkedIn Share it (857 so far).

I would say this article has not gone viral yet.

Given that it was first published/posted in Dec 2011, it’s not likely to get much more attention, but it is a possibility. (Here's one post that might help that, eh?)

And, yes, the author likened Luther’s popularity and his movement to “going viral.”

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Whacky Wednesday goes Deviant

Over at 3-word Wednesdays, three words are tossed out like mullet from a shrimp boat onto the dock and our role is to catch them and shape them into some creative mess of words which include the three words tossed out first. To keep it short, I'm following Tony Noland's method of a short, not quite serious, poem. Given that my genre is mystery, it follows that mine has a bit of murder or mayhem, or maybe even a sociopath or two in it. Enjoy!

Don't call me Trivial
There once was a man with a tool
That a lass labeled cute yet miniscule.
A deviant he become--
A murderous scum
--And off with her head went the fool.

The three words? Deviant, miniscule, and trivial. Yeah, I cheated with the title. The alarm clock went off. And the lesson for today? Sometimes you just have to do it.

To Thine Own Self Be True (Part Deux)

It's AMAZING what you can live through.

People are starting to call me a 'survivor' and I don't think I deserve that, have earned it, or want that title. I may not survive.

This blog went thru a hiatus from fall 2009 to fall 2011 to now, or later. I'm a groundhog starting to wake up, to come to. Sometimes I don't think I'm going to poke my head out. Ever feel that way?

My method for dealing with stress usually involves doing the opposite of whatever I was doing before. If I was dieting, I pig out. If I was pigging out, I lose my appetite. Call me stubborn or a rebel, but if you try to tell me what to do, I'm likely to do the opposite nowadays. Just because I can. And because it would thwart your plans to control my life. I've had enough of that, and I'm taking it back. That's all I'll say about what happened.

***

On to more important things.

***

If you were following my blog, you know I was dieting, starting to lose my metabolic rate, not getting in enough zumba classes, living near no bike trails, having a couch-potato man in my life (no support personnel, in other words), and then some computer issues. Computers were the least of my problems it turned out, but where that has left me is back to needing to straighten out my life and get healthy - again. And so, who do I turn to? ME!

LOL - it's true. I have done this before, and I know that I know how to do it again. So, I have started re-reading some of my earlier posts. This one even says that I did it, and did it again: http://luvs2zumba.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html

The only thing it doesn't tell me is how to prevent this again. I'm thinking "no men in my life" which should reduce the emotional turmoil. But we don't live that way, any of us, without having significant others in our lives. Perhaps the lesson is to be a lot more pickier in finding someone(s) who fit my lifestyle, or my preferred lifestyle, better.

So, my new year's motto (same one every year) "To Thine Own Self Be True" has a little extra oomph behind it this year.

I'll also be changing the format for the blog as I rediscover my voice. For most, it will simply be more entertaining (I hope) and less yak-yak-yak about weight loss, recipes, and healthy living. Those will still be here, but more as background or a subplot - or maybe a theme. Who knows? They are part and parcel of who I am when I'm not trying to kill myself slowly, and now I'm working on trying to use my pen as a needle and paper as a voodoo doll; and to mix metaphors a bit, I'm going to exorcise the devil out of my life. Hang on, it's going to be a heck of a ride.