(Taken by me in late May. The
ETA: Kristen pointed out those aren't daffodils. They're Stella d'Oro lilies. No wonder they came late. LOL
Friday, August 6, 2010
A Bit of Pretty
While I'm working on edits, please enjoy a little bit of pretty.
(Taken by me in late May. Thedaffodils came late this year.)
ETA: Kristen pointed out those aren't daffodils. They're Stella d'Oro lilies. No wonder they came late. LOL
(Taken by me in late May. The
ETA: Kristen pointed out those aren't daffodils. They're Stella d'Oro lilies. No wonder they came late. LOL
Thursday, August 5, 2010
The Brain-Damaged Writer: Word Finding Difficulty
I've been thinking about last night's post and I decided that perhaps I should explain a little better. If you've been following this blog, you probably already know I suffered brain damage in 1994. I try not to make that a focus of my life or my writing - which is why the blog is called The Writing Spectacle and not 'The Brain-Damaged Writer' - but occasionally some brain-related issue pops up and draws attention to itself. And since I also don't try to hide my brain thing, I thought why not talk about it this morning.
First off, I'm mostly normal now (as in you can't readily tell I'm afflicted). One of the few things that still gives me trouble, though, is something my therapists called 'Word Finding Difficulty'. For a good layman's explanation see: Understanding Word Finding Difficulty. I'm sure we've all had to deal with the whole 'it's on the tip of my tongue' thing from time to time. For me, it's more frequent and sometimes more pronounced.
What I suffer from is more specifically Anomic Aphasia. (A term I only just heard this morning. It's cool to have a technical term for what this is.)
From the above site:
The typical characteristics of anomic aphasia are:
I'm not so much troubled with the first - not remembering people's names is another brain thing entirely - or with the reading ability impairment. (Thank goodness for that. Impaired reading ability would kill me.) The rest of the characteristics are definitely mine. And where it says severity levels vary from one person to another? Well, severity levels also vary for me from day to day and from activity to activity.
Now, one of the funny things about this for me is that sometimes I can't think of the simple word for something, but I can remember the obscure word for it. That's why sometimes both my writing and my speech are littered with 'big words'. Yay for the English language and its many ways to say things, but Boo for people who think using big words makes you snooty. And Yay for my thesaurus, so I can type the big word in and find the common word I can't think of. (This happened last night, but I can't remember the exact problem to save myself. LOL)
In the end, this brain problem is like any other for me. I learned the tools for finding a way around it - like the thesaurus to back track and in verbal communication, having all those other 'big' words to explain myself. In the end, though, all the tools in the world still might fail me. :shrug: During those times I just try to muddle through. You might even catch me doing what the above site refers to as circumlocution.
"You know, the big sticky-uppy thing on the highway. Long legs with the ball on top. Holds water? Has the town's name on it. Yeah, that's right, the water tower."
LOL, it definitely makes life interesting.
Any questions?
First off, I'm mostly normal now (as in you can't readily tell I'm afflicted). One of the few things that still gives me trouble, though, is something my therapists called 'Word Finding Difficulty'. For a good layman's explanation see: Understanding Word Finding Difficulty. I'm sure we've all had to deal with the whole 'it's on the tip of my tongue' thing from time to time. For me, it's more frequent and sometimes more pronounced.
What I suffer from is more specifically Anomic Aphasia. (A term I only just heard this morning. It's cool to have a technical term for what this is.)
From the above site:
The typical characteristics of anomic aphasia are:
- Trouble using correct names for people, places, or things
- Speaking hesitantly because of difficulty naming words
- Grammatical skills are unaffected
- Comprehension is normal
- Difficulty finding words may be evident in writing as well as speech
- Reading ability may be impaired
- Having knowledge of what to do with an object, but still unable to name to the object
- Severity levels vary from one person to another
I'm not so much troubled with the first - not remembering people's names is another brain thing entirely - or with the reading ability impairment. (Thank goodness for that. Impaired reading ability would kill me.) The rest of the characteristics are definitely mine. And where it says severity levels vary from one person to another? Well, severity levels also vary for me from day to day and from activity to activity.
Now, one of the funny things about this for me is that sometimes I can't think of the simple word for something, but I can remember the obscure word for it. That's why sometimes both my writing and my speech are littered with 'big words'. Yay for the English language and its many ways to say things, but Boo for people who think using big words makes you snooty. And Yay for my thesaurus, so I can type the big word in and find the common word I can't think of. (This happened last night, but I can't remember the exact problem to save myself. LOL)
In the end, this brain problem is like any other for me. I learned the tools for finding a way around it - like the thesaurus to back track and in verbal communication, having all those other 'big' words to explain myself. In the end, though, all the tools in the world still might fail me. :shrug: During those times I just try to muddle through. You might even catch me doing what the above site refers to as circumlocution.
"You know, the big sticky-uppy thing on the highway. Long legs with the ball on top. Holds water? Has the town's name on it. Yeah, that's right, the water tower."
LOL, it definitely makes life interesting.
Any questions?
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Bad Bwain Days
Just a quick note to apologize for the plethora of errors in recent posts. It appears I'm having a series of bad bwain days. (You should hear me talk out loud - it's worse.) Yesterday I substituted the word 'would' for the word 'wonder' and it took me until just now to notice. Nothing to worry about. Just a function of my weird ass brain, being tired and having a lot on my mind. It should clear up soon. If not, don't think of it as a reflection of my writing. Please. I edit that. I don't really edit here.
Thanks for your time and patience. =o)
Thanks for your time and patience. =o)
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Fun With Spam
Emptying my spam folder just now, I got one with the subject 'Be her carnal monster' and I thought to myself that could work into an awesome title for a paranormal romance. "Her Carnal Monster" or just "Carnal Monster". I'd probably buy it on impulse if I saw it at Borders.
I wonder what the plot of such a novel could be. Any ideas? Have fun with the title in the comments. If it sparks your muse, feel free to use whatever you can cull from it.
(And no, I'm not planning on using it myself, so have at it.)
=o)
I wonder what the plot of such a novel could be. Any ideas? Have fun with the title in the comments. If it sparks your muse, feel free to use whatever you can cull from it.
(And no, I'm not planning on using it myself, so have at it.)
=o)
Monday, August 2, 2010
Max - An Update
Today Max got the wires removed from his jaw, and OMG, his tongue works again! I was so happy I almost cried. I thought he'd never be able to use it again. The doc even said he thought the tongue had nerve damage and probably would never be right.
Okay, so it's not working perfectly, but considering that it never left his mouth - even to clean his paws - I'm counting this as a win. He spent some quality time washing his paws when we got home, and then he washed his face. Double win. Of course, he still hasn't figured out how to drink water from a bowl with it, but he'll get it eventually. After not using his tongue for at least a year and a half, he's got some re-learning to do. Every little bit of progress is awesome.
If he ever licks my face, I'm definitely going to cry.
Okay, so it's not working perfectly, but considering that it never left his mouth - even to clean his paws - I'm counting this as a win. He spent some quality time washing his paws when we got home, and then he washed his face. Double win. Of course, he still hasn't figured out how to drink water from a bowl with it, but he'll get it eventually. After not using his tongue for at least a year and a half, he's got some re-learning to do. Every little bit of progress is awesome.
If he ever licks my face, I'm definitely going to cry.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
My Must Read List
Migrated from my old blog...
Top fiction books I think every adult should read at least once in their lifetime:(alphabetical by title, unless I think you should read the author's works, then by last name)
Aesop’s Fables*
Alice in Wonderland*
Animal Farm – George Orwell*
Anything by Jane Austen*
Beowulf - Anonymous*
Big Red – Jim Kjelgaard*
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley*
Bulfinch’s Mythology – Thomas Bulfinch
Call of the Wild – Jack London*
Calumet K – Merwin & Webster*
Candide - Voltaire
The Canterbury Tales – Thomas Chaucer*
Anything by Agatha Christie*
The Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis*
Cyrano de Bergerac – Edmund Rosten*
All of the books by Dante
Either The DaVinci Code or Angels & Demons by Dan Brown*
Anything by Charles Dickens* (with the exception of the Edwin Drood mystery)
Don Quixote – Miguel Cervantes
Anything by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle*
Anything by Alexandre Dumas*
At least one book by Daphne duMaurier*
El Cid – Robert Krepps
Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card*
Any book by Erle Stanley Gardner*
Exodus – Leon Uris*
The Eye of the Needle – Ken Follett*
Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury*
Any book by Ian Fleming*
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley*
The Godfather – Mario Puzo
Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
The Good Earth – Pearl Buck*
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald*
Gulliver’s Travels – Johnathan Swift*
The Harry Potter Novels – J.K. Rowling*
Anything by O. Henry*
The Horatio Hornblower books – C.S. Forrester
Anything by Victor Hugo*
I, The Jury – Mickey Spillane*
I, Robot - Isaac Asimov*
Idylls of the King – Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Iliad and The Odyssey – Homer
Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte*
The Joy Luck Club – Amy Tan*
The Jungle Book – Rudyard Kipling*
King Solomon’s Mines – H. Rider Haggard
The Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper*
Le Morte D’Arthur (find a good translation) – Thomas Mallory*
Any book by Sinclair Lewis*
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
Any book by James Michener
The Mists of Avalon – Marion Zimmer Brown*
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
The Mummy – Anne Rice*
National Velvet – Enid Bagnold
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck*
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway*
The Once and Future King – T.H. White*
One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest – Ken Kesey*
Paradise Lost – John Milton
Patriot Games – Tom Clancy*
Peter Pan – JM Barrie
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
The Pillars of Earth - Ken Follett*
Complete Works – Edgar Allan Poe*
The Prince - Machiavelli
The Promise and/or The Chosen – Chaim Potok*
The Rabbit Novels – John Updike
Everything by Ayn Rand*
Riders of the Purple Sage – Zane Grey*
Rip Van Winkle – Washington Irving
Robin Hood – Howard Pyle*
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
The Scarlet Letter – Hawthorne*
The Scarlet Pimpernel – Baroness Orczy
The Searchers – Alan le May*
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett*
A Separate Peace – John Knowles
The complete works – William Shakespeare*
The Song of Roland - Anonymous*
Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
The Stand (uncut) – Stephen King*
Stardoc series - S.L. Viehl*
State of Fear – Michael Crichton*
Anything by Robert Louis Stevenson*
Tarzan – Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Thornbirds - Colleen McCullough*
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee*
To Sir With Love – E.B. Braithwaite*
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute*
Anything by J.R.R. Tolkien*
Anything by Tolstoy
Trustee from the Toolroom – Nevil Shute*
Any book by Mark Twain
Two Years Before the Mast – R.H. Dana
Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
Everything by Jules Verne*
The Walking Drum – Louis L’Amour*
War of the Worlds – HG Wells*
The Warden – Anthony Trollope
Watership Down – Richard Adams*
Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne*
The World According to Garp – John Irving*
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
(The asterisk denotes books I have read. At some point, I'm hoping to read them all. If I made a list of all the books I was planning on reading, it would be twice this long. And if I made a list of every book I've already read, I'd be here all day.)
Enjoy and feel free to comment here or create a similar list on your own blog - just don't forget to say so in the comments, so I can link to you.PS. I know I'm forgetting somebody. I was trying to keep it to the top 100. Who do you think should be on here who's not, and why?
(Edited 6/4/07: I went over 100, so now it's just the top books. Let's face it, there are always more than 100 you should read anyway.)
(Edited 1/24/08: Google ate my original post from March of 2007, so I rebuilt this. If you commented there, please comment here.)
Top fiction books I think every adult should read at least once in their lifetime:(alphabetical by title, unless I think you should read the author's works, then by last name)
Aesop’s Fables*
Alice in Wonderland*
Animal Farm – George Orwell*
Anything by Jane Austen*
Beowulf - Anonymous*
Big Red – Jim Kjelgaard*
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley*
Bulfinch’s Mythology – Thomas Bulfinch
Call of the Wild – Jack London*
Calumet K – Merwin & Webster*
Candide - Voltaire
The Canterbury Tales – Thomas Chaucer*
Anything by Agatha Christie*
The Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis*
Cyrano de Bergerac – Edmund Rosten*
All of the books by Dante
Either The DaVinci Code or Angels & Demons by Dan Brown*
Anything by Charles Dickens* (with the exception of the Edwin Drood mystery)
Don Quixote – Miguel Cervantes
Anything by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle*
Anything by Alexandre Dumas*
At least one book by Daphne duMaurier*
El Cid – Robert Krepps
Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card*
Any book by Erle Stanley Gardner*
Exodus – Leon Uris*
The Eye of the Needle – Ken Follett*
Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury*
Any book by Ian Fleming*
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley*
The Godfather – Mario Puzo
Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
The Good Earth – Pearl Buck*
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald*
Gulliver’s Travels – Johnathan Swift*
The Harry Potter Novels – J.K. Rowling*
Anything by O. Henry*
The Horatio Hornblower books – C.S. Forrester
Anything by Victor Hugo*
I, The Jury – Mickey Spillane*
I, Robot - Isaac Asimov*
Idylls of the King – Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Iliad and The Odyssey – Homer
Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte*
The Joy Luck Club – Amy Tan*
The Jungle Book – Rudyard Kipling*
King Solomon’s Mines – H. Rider Haggard
The Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper*
Le Morte D’Arthur (find a good translation) – Thomas Mallory*
Any book by Sinclair Lewis*
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Lord Jim – Joseph Conrad
Any book by James Michener
The Mists of Avalon – Marion Zimmer Brown*
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
The Mummy – Anne Rice*
National Velvet – Enid Bagnold
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck*
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway*
The Once and Future King – T.H. White*
One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest – Ken Kesey*
Paradise Lost – John Milton
Patriot Games – Tom Clancy*
Peter Pan – JM Barrie
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
The Pillars of Earth - Ken Follett*
Complete Works – Edgar Allan Poe*
The Prince - Machiavelli
The Promise and/or The Chosen – Chaim Potok*
The Rabbit Novels – John Updike
Everything by Ayn Rand*
Riders of the Purple Sage – Zane Grey*
Rip Van Winkle – Washington Irving
Robin Hood – Howard Pyle*
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
The Scarlet Letter – Hawthorne*
The Scarlet Pimpernel – Baroness Orczy
The Searchers – Alan le May*
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett*
A Separate Peace – John Knowles
The complete works – William Shakespeare*
The Song of Roland - Anonymous*
Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
The Stand (uncut) – Stephen King*
Stardoc series - S.L. Viehl*
State of Fear – Michael Crichton*
Anything by Robert Louis Stevenson*
Tarzan – Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Thornbirds - Colleen McCullough*
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee*
To Sir With Love – E.B. Braithwaite*
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute*
Anything by J.R.R. Tolkien*
Anything by Tolstoy
Trustee from the Toolroom – Nevil Shute*
Any book by Mark Twain
Two Years Before the Mast – R.H. Dana
Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
Everything by Jules Verne*
The Walking Drum – Louis L’Amour*
War of the Worlds – HG Wells*
The Warden – Anthony Trollope
Watership Down – Richard Adams*
Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne*
The World According to Garp – John Irving*
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
(The asterisk denotes books I have read. At some point, I'm hoping to read them all. If I made a list of all the books I was planning on reading, it would be twice this long. And if I made a list of every book I've already read, I'd be here all day.)
Enjoy and feel free to comment here or create a similar list on your own blog - just don't forget to say so in the comments, so I can link to you.PS. I know I'm forgetting somebody. I was trying to keep it to the top 100. Who do you think should be on here who's not, and why?
(Edited 6/4/07: I went over 100, so now it's just the top books. Let's face it, there are always more than 100 you should read anyway.)
(Edited 1/24/08: Google ate my original post from March of 2007, so I rebuilt this. If you commented there, please comment here.)
4 comments:
-
liz fenwick said...
- I have read many but not all.....so much to read and so little time :-) I've tagged you - sorry!
- January 24, 2008 11:03 PM
-
Kristin B said...
- I love that you put Victor Hugo on here. For some reason, people seem to forget him on lists of classics and must-read-before-you-die. I'll never forget when I finished reading Les Miserables...I fell asleep clutching the book to my chest, as I felt it would be a sacrilege to let it go! Ah...teenage years. =) P.S. You'll enjoy this--when I read Atlas Shrugged, I literally couldn't put it down. My mom yelled at me for cooking while reading. But hey, nothing got burned!
- January 25, 2008 7:55 AM
-
Travis Erwin said...
- Great list. I have read many but not all by any stretch. On a personal note I'd have to add Where The Red Fern Grows but Winston Rawls since it was the first book that I ever finished and immediately started rereading. Had my elementary school librarian not recommended it, I might not have turned into an avid reader or writer.
- January 25, 2008 9:56 AM
-
Zinnia Cyclamen said...
- That is indeed a great list. I too have read many but not all. I would have to add 'anything by Doris Lessing' as she is my top author (and has been since long before she won the very well-deserved Nobel prize).
- January 25, 2008 1:45 PM
Budget Saver Sunday
Anyway, if this topic is a hit, I'll post tips, hints, and recipes that will - one hopes - help my readers save a bit o' the cash. (It seemed like a good idea after an hour of tossing and turning. You let me know if it's Yay, Eh, or Bleh.)
Probably one of the best ways I pinch pennies is in my food budget. Unfortunately, it's also one of the places I tend to blow extra money because I love food so much - and good food isn't cheap. One of the hardest things to do is make good food while still keeping money in your wallet. Which is why I buy offbrand frozen chicken tenderloins in the big bag.
And chicken works so well in the ol' diet.
Around here one offbrand bag of tenderloins - not on sale - is usually $6.99-7.99. I can usually get 4-5 meals for the three of us (with leftovers) out of one bag. That's $1.40-$2.00 per meal. Of course, your mileage may vary depending on the number of people in your family, but damn, that's cheap. And if you can get it on sale, woohoo!
So, last night, I whipped out five frozen tenderloins and threw them in the oven for 40 minutes - unless they were cooked through. After they cooled a bit so I wouldn't burn my fingers, I cut them into bit sized chunks. Then I put a dribble of olive oil in the bottom of a frying pan, threw in one thinly sliced small onion and two thinly sliced stalks of celery heart. When those were lightly browned, but not mushy, I added the chicken and a can of mushrooms (not drained). While all of this was going on, I put some pasta on to boil - bow-tie this time - and by the time the meat mixture was ready, so was the pasta. I tossed the al dente pasta into the frying pan with everything else and let it cook for a few more minutes. Usually I also put in a can of mushroom soup and a dollop of fat-free sour cream - to give it a little somethin-somethin - but it's not necessary. It was quite tasty even before I started tweaking with other things.
The point is: you can have good food on the cheap. You can even mix it up and have something different every time without breaking your budget. And hey, it works for those people dieting as well. Win-win. ;o)
Any suggestions for what an enterprising penny-pincher can make with chicken tenderloins? What do you think of this as a weekly post topic? Am I telling you anything you didn't already know?
*pics pulled off the web - none of the above images were taken by me.
*All images deleted to avoid any chance of copyright infringement*
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