Category: ListifyLife

After listening to any song thirty times in a row, I can get tired of it. But these are some of the songs that always appeal to me:

They are in no order, just as they popped to mind. There are a lot more songs on my list, but basically I am attracted to anything with a lot of piano or a bit of blues, or a bit of melancholy. I like songs that tug on my heartstrings. If they make me want to cry, great!

• Stairway to Heaven – Led Zeppelin. Guitar! Plus, great social commentary on materialism. Loved playing this on the piano in my twenties. Lyrics. YouTube.
• Bohemian Rhapsody – Queen. I just love the crazy story in the lyrics. YouTube. And Freddy Mercury’s vocals are astounding. As is the whole theatricality.
• Downstream – SuperTramp. This was the first song my husband and I danced to at our wedding. We each went to university near an ocean/sea, and when you get to those words in the song, just substitute ocean/sea with lake – we each either grew up on a lake or near a lake, or overlooking a lake. Read the lyrics and tell me this isn’t a great song to start a marriage. YouTube. Very romantic, and gorgeous to play on the piano.
• Breakin’ Me – Jonny Lang. The entire Wander this World CD is amazing. Jonny Lang was very young when he put out this album, and the entire thing captures me, but Breakin’ Me is my fav of his songs. Lyrics. YouTube.
• Falling Down Blue – Blue Rodeo. Another song about loss and love. These kinds of songs make my heart ache in the most wonderful way. Lyrics. YouTube.
• Reminiscing – Little River Band. This song came out around the year I met my husband. I was 18 and he 19. I went away to university four months after meeting him, and while we knew we loved each other we didn’t realize then that we would be spending the rest of our lives together. Once I moved away, he traveled often to see me, and he had me listen to these lyrics. He said, “I want this to be us.” (With the exception that neither of us knew who “Miller’s Band” was–The Steve Miller Band? Nope). And damned if we aren’t well on our way. YouTube. (BTW, the reference is to The Glenn Miller Orchestra, I believe, before our time).

What songs do you never tire of hearing?

Ooh, this week’s theme might open up a can of worms! Finally, you all get to see just how weird I am! (I understand some of you realize this already).

Things I Collect…

• Face Masks and Pottery Heads. This collection started when my best friend and maid of honor gave me a pottery head/cookie jar of a guy who looked like he might have been an extra in the original Mad Max movie. That led to me buying a second head by a different potter, which led to my sister-in-law buying me a funky face mask of a guy with huge red lips and sunglasses smoking a cigarette, which led to me buying a companion face mask from the same artist of a woman in hair curlers and an earring that says, “You’ll have to marry me first.” Which led to at least half-a-dozen face masks since then. I only have room for one or two more face masks above my desk, so I’m getting pickier.
• Weird Cat Statues. Okay, I have three floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and while I have a lot of books, they would look boring (to me) if they only had books on them. So I started collecting weird cat statues. I must have at least twenty of these statues in various places–on my roll-top desk, on my bookshelves, on top of my grandmother’s china cabinet–but I’ve heard about other folks’ animal collections, elephants and such, and I don’t think I’m too out to lunch with this one.
• Leather-Bound Classics. For years I collected leather-bound books, and I have about 110 of them on my bookshelves (but have only read about 50; gotta get moving on that again) along with contemporary hardcovers and trade paperbacks. I don’t keep many mass market paperbacks, just my absolute favorites. The books were the reason for the bookshelves, which then begged to be filled with cats and pottery heads and other stuff, such as…
• Unique Bookends. I have at least a dozen quirky bookend sets, and not all of them get to sit on the same shelf as their pair. I need maybe one more set of bookends so I can get rid of the last tin set.
• Wooden Body Parts. Yes, I know it sounds odd, but it’s not, really. I found this life-sized wooden foot in a store in Mexico, and it was a nice change from wooden ducks, etc., so I bought it. Then we went to Cuba, and I found a Cuban clenched fist. That seemed to go along. I have a couple of mom and daughter wooden heads my parents picked up in a foreign country ages ago. I’m open to more wooden body parts, so if you have some, send them along! *Note, I have no need to collect skulls. I will leave that to some of my relatives.

If you think my adult collections are a bit off the wall, as a child I collected:

• Pamphlets. Every time we went to a motel/hotel (not often), I would collect the tourism pamphlets. Then somehow I discovered that I could send away to companies for information on their products, and thus collect more pamphlets! I sent away at least twenty letters to places like Firestone, using up all my dad’s business stamps, just so I could get these pamphlets. I had a dresser with pretty skinny drawers, like a tallboy. One drawer was filled with pamphlets. I have no defense for this collection other than we didn’t have an encyclopedia set, it was before the Internet, I craved information, I craved words, I craved reading, I craved learning, and I craved what I would later realize might be called research. I just loved words so much I needed all the words I could find. I no longer have this collection.
• Bird Parts. Yes, I know this one is odd, and my mother put a stop to it as soon as she discovered the little wooden box in my closet with bird heads and claws that my cat left over after she finished eating a bird beneath my bed. They were petrifying nicely. This was around the time I wanted to be a pathologist, and the birds were already dead, it wasn’t like I was the cat, you know. So it made sense to me. But my mother feared collecting dead bird parts might lead to collecting, I don’t know what she thought. But I had to stop.
• Teeth. Yikes, I can see you running away. But, you see, there was a time I wanted to become a dentist. So it made total sense to collect my brother’s baby teeth as they were falling out. I had a couple of own teeth and put them under plastic wrap in my scrapbooks.

Just go ahead, tell me something weird you collect or collected as a child. Show me up. I dare you.

Sorry for the blurriness in this week’s image:

This week’s theme is Scents that Conjure up Memories…

• Fresh Pastry –> Paris. My then-boyfriend/now-husband and I backpacked through Europe during our university years. Okay, this was a long time ago, and I had never tasted croissants before! For years after visiting Paris, and even sometimes now (despite the proliferation of croissants in my part of Canada since), if I pass a bakery and catch the whiff of freshly baked pastries, I am transported back to memories of the left bank, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Eiffel Tower, and the Sewers of Paris (which was a very interesting tour, although no croissants were consumed during the informative boat trip).
• Chainsaw Oil or Sawdust –> My Husband’s Early Forestry Days. My husband is now in the business end of the forest industry, but he began as a silviculture field forester plus he logged with my dad for a brief spell. Now, whenever he gets firewood or “prunes” (his term for huge tree haircuts) in our backyard and then comes in the house, when I hug him I breathe deeply of his work shirt. I admit it, I find the scent of chainsaw oil and/or sawdust romantic! (By the by, the hero in WHERE SHE BELONGS, Adam Wright, is a forester–shameless plug).
• Mothballs –> Visiting Other Granny. My “Other Granny” was my mom’s mom, my maternal grandmother. She always lived in very small houses, and the closets smelled like mothballs. She has been gone a very long time, but I will forever associate the scent with her. And you know what? She’s not the sort who would mind it. 🙂
• Scent of Fireplace Burning (well, firewood IN fireplace) –> Watching Movies on TV with my DH and Our Kids. I love the scent of firewood burning in an open fireplace! We are lucky enough to have a wonderful chimney in the middle of our house, in the family room, which is in the basement. My family loves movies, and we watched a lot of movies with our kids with a hearty fire crackling on the hearth. When your fireplace is in the middle of the house, as opposed to an exterior wall, a fire in the fireplace heats the whole place, giving it a super cozy feeling. The scent is “home” to me.

Do you have any scents that conjure up good memories?

Welcome back to the #ListifyLife Spring Challenge! Weird Talents or Skills I Have…

• Conversing with Animals and Puppets, Especially Allie McBeagle. Now, I have enjoyed talking “for” animals and inanimate objects since I was around 18 and my then-boyfriend/now-husband bought me a Grover hand puppet. Honestly, creative folks shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near muppets, puppets, and the like. I always talked “a bit” for previous cats and dogs, but Allie McBeagle pretty much jumped into my brain and started conversing regularly with me from the time she was a few months old. She’s slowing down in that department now that she’s 14 and a half. She no longer reports on her earlier entrepreneurial endeavors (like beagle T-shirts, the Beaglah University she started in England, or “Alpha Training”), but we do okay. Believe me when I say, with a beagle around, I am never alone.
• Predicting Weather with My Knee. Eighteen seems to have been a defining year for me. In 1978 I was in a high school production of Oklahoma, and I had to dance during some dream sequence scene. There was a wagon wheel backstage, and someone (accidentally, I hear) pushed me into it right before I needed to go on-stage. I really REALLY hurt my knee, but didn’t tell the doctor about it for, oh, thirty years. It took several months for the knee to heal to the point where I only have to pop it several times a day. I really don’t know what’s wrong with it, but it’s fairly reliable at predicting rain. It’s really picking up on barometric pressure changes in the air, not actual rain. But if I tell you, “It’s gonna rain,” I usually mean within hours.
• Objects Fly Off Shelves/Out of My Hands for No Reason. I can’t quite figure this one out. All I know is that if I’m opening the bathroom medicine cabinet, 80% of the time something will fly out at me. Or I’ll drop whatever I’m holding that I just took out. This goes for kitchen cabinets, too. I gather it’s because I’m a klutz or not paying enough attention, or I lack hand-eye coordination, but I’m also the type who gets in an elevator which then refuses to go anywhere, or if I step on an escalator I’m likely to get my jacket caught in some mechanism or other. This sort of thing happens to me all of the time. I’ve just come to accept it, but my husband shakes his head.
• I Can Put My Foot Behind My…Never Mind. My chiropractor says not to do it anymore, so I haven’t practiced in awhile. It’s just one foot. The other doesn’t work as well. But putting my foot…wherever I can put it just leads to spinal problems, so we’re done with that.

Do you have any weird talents or skills?

This week’s #ListifyLife theme is a weird one for me, because:

1. I’m Canadian, so if I’m writing Canadian I automatically spell words “wrong,” like colour and theatre. I don’t spell them wrong for Canadians, and maybe not for the British (there is some confusion being Canadian because we spell some words the British way and others American), but I spell them “wrong” for Americans; and
2. I’m a really good speller, so I had to think extra-hard about words I spell wrong.

So we have…

• Miniscule or Minuscule? The latter is the correct spelling, but the former is becoming commonplace because it means “very small” and “mini” also now means “very small.” Here’s a link that shows I’m not in the minority getting confused!
• Barbeque or barbecue? No wonders folks just say BBQ. I use both spellings, depending on how I feel, and I think I can safely blame the barbeque spelling on the fact that Canada is supposedly bilingual and if “barbeque” isn’t French, well, it should be. 🙂 Link that says the barbeque spelling is likely Spanish…
• License or Lisence or Licence? I spell it the first way, but I often check, because a lot of times the British spelling in certain words will have an S while the American spelling has a C, or vice versa. My auto-correct says that both license and licence are correct and lisence is all types of wrong! it looks like I’m spelling American when it comes to License.
• Onomatopoeia. I always forget the last O and spell Onomoatapeia. If you look at the photo graphic, it appears I’ve also left off the i, but I haven’t. You can see the dot of the i, but my writing can get pretty messy and in this case I’ve flowed the majority of the i from that weird little E right before it. 😉
• Supercalafragalisticexpealidocious. I mean, come on, who gets that right? I’m blaming my misspelling on the fact that it’s not a “real” word, but it’s certainly in the lexicon, isn’t it? By the way, the Interwebs says the real spelling is supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, so I confused some As for Is, or the other way around.
• What words do you always spell wrong?

Welcome to the first April edition of the #ListifyLife Spring Challenge! This week we have Little Things that Make Me Happy (as a side note, I am completely blanking on whether Me should be capitalized in a title or not…)

• Blue Skies! So, so important! I am one of those folks whose moods are affected by the weather. I really do not like gray skies. Just a little bit of blue peeking through the clouds can carry me through two days of crappy weather. Blue Skies is a really little thing that goes a long way toward making me happy.
• Hiking with my Husband. I guess “walking” is a more accurate description. I don’t get to walk/hike with my husband as often I would like, because we have to work around his work schedule and his golfing. 😉 But whenever we both have a weekend morning free, we get Allie McBeagle and head off to the nearest provincial park. I walk every day with Allie, but she gets to go off-lease when Steve is around. Now, she’s starting to go pretty deaf, so we have to make sure we keep an eye on her. I think my husband really enjoys these walks, as well. He warns me that when the dog goes to the Rainbow Bridge we will lose our incentive to walk. And he’s right, a dog forces you to get outdoors. But I love the walks and hikes and would participate regardless.
• I especially love when my husband goes and fetches me a Surprise Latte before one of our walks! I can only have caffeine before, oh, 10:30 a.m. is probably safest. Maybe 11 a.m. if I want to push it. We often have coffee on our walks, but a surprise latte makes me very happy.
• A Beagle Sleeping on My Lap. Sometimes it’s a PITN when Allie is demanding to rest with “Yap” (beagle-speak for Lap, one of her nicknames for me) and “Yap” really needs to break her brain with spreadsheets or kill her back washing floors or something. But you know what? A beagle forcing Yap to take a break is not a bad thing at all. When my dog is resting with me (on me) and snoring/snuffling away, she’s content so I’m content. One of the simple joys of life. Loving a dog.
• Hugging my Kids! Anyone with kids, this pretty much goes without saying, but I only get to see Eldest Son in July and August, when he’s visiting from teaching high school overseas, so that First Hug is oh-so-wonderful! And each summer hug is so important because it needs to carry me throughout another year. And then there’s Youngest Son! He gives the greatest hugs. He only lives 90 minutes away, not a 10-hour plane ride away, but he’s over six feet, which is a lot taller than Moi, and I like to stand on this step in our mud room when I hug him. Whenever I hug him, I think of the tiny little 4 lb. 15 oz. preemie born 25 years ago. But now my preemie can squeeze and hug and lift me. I also have to get on the step to hug my DILly, so is also nearly six feet tall.

What little things make you happy?