Author: Becky

Photo Friday, No. 849

Current Photo Friday theme: Two

These two… Margot and Guinness, on St. Patrick’s Day 2007. They came to us as rescues in September 2000 and January 2001. They were so different yet became the best sisters to each other and companions to us we could ever have wanted. They were patient with all this foolish dressing up and photographing. They left us gently in November 2015 and September 2016. What fantastic lives they lived and how much love they gave and received. In the end, as dog people know, we didn’t rescue them at all. They rescued us.

A random but specific hope

I previously posted a photo of Jackson Pollock’s painting Number 31, painted in 1949.

“My mind is a jumble,” Riley wrote in a poem (I mentioned this here once before, sometime in 2020). I tell the people who live with me or interact with me now, and who’ll hopefully be around if I, like my parents before me, grapple with some form or degree of dementia in my last years, that they must, absolutely must, tell the people in whose care I’m placed that the population I talk about, the people whose skins and brains and lives I seem to shift in and out of, are not a sign of madness, multiple personality disorder, or some brand of schizophrenia (a disease I barely understand and probably shouldn’t even reference).

No, I am afflicted by characters. I contain multitudes of lives and minds and hearts who never leave me. Each of them can, all at once or at different times, be my own heart, my soul, my memory, my past, present, future. In all the folds of my brain, they coexist among a lifetime of friends, colleagues, family members, heartbreakers, healers, poets, liars: shining examples of all that is flawed and sublime about humans. When my last chapter unfolds, I may not be able to say who is real and who is imagined.

In the end, everyone is a bit of both, probably.

Two quotes from the world of Three Pines


Despite my eyes dealing with Their Troubles, I found that I could read this physical book (one of my Christmas gifts) more easily than an ebook. A World of Curiosities is the eighteenth Inspector Gamache novel from Louise Penny. This is a favorite series of mine, and this one is darker than they usually are, darker than I would usually read.

For me, there’s a trust that must happen between a writer and a reader, especially in a series. I trust Penny to the point that when I was absolutely sickened by a crime from the past, when I got a hard look at evil of a type that I can’t bear, and when a suspension of disbelief was required to accept that Gamache has been, in either his thoughts or his life, absorbed by people from the past who were never mentioned in the seventeen books previous, I kept reading. Even if this journey was going to be a challenging one, with tears and anxieties and sometimes revulsion, I held on to that trust. I realized, along the way, that the characters who’ve come to be familiar friends were on the same journey; they, too, grappled with the kinds of things or events that often haunt me.

I came away with two quotes (there are always bits of poetry or conversation in Penny’s books that stay around long after the last page) that held powerful meaning for me.

“You’re lying on your deathbed. You have one hour to live. Who is it, exactly, you have needed all these years to forgive?”

And a bit of dialogue that encapsulates more than I wish to expound on here:

“Anne Lamarque…was punished for many things, including being happy. So I wanted to capture that. The power of it. Happiness as an act of defiance. A revolutionary act.”

This isn’t a book review, because I don’t do those, but I give up very little writing space/time to things I don’t like. I’m glad and relieved to say that in the end, I trusted Penny and Gamache, and they didn’t let me down.

Tiny Tuesday!

May as well stay with a theme, right?

My deeply valued Hot Toys 2011 Superman I ordered in 2019 because they really got Christopher Reeve right (a year later, I was a LOT more cautious about ordering items from outside the US because they were sometimes NOT as advertised, lol). Here with his tiny friends, Action Figure DC Superman, DC Super Friends Little People Super Man, and his League of SuperPets dog, Krypto.

Button Sunday

Most particularly, Thin Mints. What’s your favorite?

Today is National Girl Scout Day, and as the Internet reminds me, scouting isn’t just about the cookies, but that “These little entrepreneurs teach young girls essential skills such as business, leadership, and community service.” Let’s hear it for girls and an organization run by women for women.

Today is also the birthday of my talented, funny, smart, hardworking nephew Josh. To be his aunt is one of the joys of my life. Happy birthday, Josh!


Photo credit A. Johnson

Some Sinatra for your Saturday redux


Frank… I’ve never taken Frank Sinatra out of the box since I found him at an estate sale before the Pandemic Years™.

Since I haven’t been writing, I wasn’t pulling music from my K to R binder, though I know exactly where I left off. Because of the migraine vision, I haven’t done much at all since March 1. I appreciate your kind words, but I’m fine. Or I will be fine. I’m mostly frustrated. I have to figure out some way to work around the vision thing, like maybe very limited periods on the computer which will be used for writing only. No research. No scrolling social media. If I get two hours a day, I need them for writing. I couldn’t get scheduled for surgery until June 12. Three months make a season. My season of… adapting? Accepting? Accommodating? I don’t know.

Back to Frank. I didn’t go without music. When I made myself rest, eyes closed, remembering to breathe correctly, I listened to Frank Sinatra: The Best of the Columbia Years (a four-CD set), and Frank Sinatra: The Capitol Years (a three-CD set). At some point around the time of the Harvey flood, I lost the third CD in the Capitol set. I finally repurchased the entire collection and gave the two extra first and second CDs to Debby.

Thus ends my blogging time for the day. There isn’t a version of this song by anyone I don’t love, even though it always gives me a knot in my throat. It was written/published in 1938, so just before WW2, but it will forever make me think of lovers in the war years.

Shame on the moon?

Extra points if you know the song my title quotes.

Is it the full moon this week that’s made things…complicated? My eye issues that keep me offline and off the phone and unable to really even write by hand if I could write that way, or do research for when I can write again? A week when I have to go places (three doctors this week, plus one meeting with a friend who’s generously chosen to help me with post-pandemic “re-entry”), meaning that when I drive, I have to stop if my vision messes up and wait it out.

One of those doctor visits is tomorrow, when we’ll be discussing eye surgery. Here’s your hold music while we wait for an update. =)

International Women’s Day

Despite my urge to say more related to International Women’s Day about what’s going on in the U.S. and worldwide, I can express it no better than this. Be you. Be kind. Persevere.

On a personal note, thinking a lot about Riley on the date of his birth. It never mattered how much of our lives were lived away from each other, or all we never had enough time to tell each other. The core connection was unbreakable… and remains so.

It’s a false narrative that being a feminist means hating men. A desire for equality, inclusion, and parity are not indicators of hate. The desire to prevent and eradicate those things… That’s hate.