If I Look a Little Deeper Thru the Pile in the Spare Room, I Will Probably Find the Lost Chord

I simply cannot believe my incredible foresight, good sense and just plain damned- all dumb good luck.  

I have been going bonkers for the past few days trying to research some way to turn my warbled audio bits into some medium able to be plugged into a blog.  I have partially digested mounds of totally indigestible material from Wikipedia, Google, YouTube and  You-Name-It and have emerged bleary, exhausted and despondent over my stupidity or the lack of decent information.....I do not know which is most to blame.  Worse yet, I am stuffed full of those indigestible fragments of information I really do not want and fear I will never be able to get rid  of. Sigh.

Anyway, my oxlike stubborn streak is all that saved me from finding a bridge to jump off of.  (For those of you who do not know, Los Angeles is NOT a city of bridges.....we have no rivers, lakes, creeks or streams.....it was a damned desert before we fucked it up....,well, there is that concrete ditch euphemistically called the Los Angeles River which is simply a huge drainage channel for those few days in the so-called rainy season when we get more rain than the sewers can handle and they all overflow somehow draining into the river and then water gurgles thru it down to the ocean, but it is usually a dry, cement  eyesore and  even if there were a bridge over it, I would not be caught dead jumping off of it into the Los Angeles River.....I'd be a laughingstock and I'd probably break both legs.........oh dear.....I do believe I digress).



Well, as I was saying, I did some very hard thinking and recalled vividly that at some point in the past decade or two I had purchased a Camcorder for the purpose of photographing all of my objects and furniture for insurance purposes and, naturally, never did a damned thing about actually doing it.   It had to be somewhere in the house, because god  and everyone else knows that Lois NEVER throws anything away, except for an important document now and then, and the logical place for it to  be would be the room I used to call the Office before it became too cluttered with discarded and/or outdated electronic equipment to the point of ridiculousness (otherwise known as the Place Where Everything Goes to Die or Become Obsolete).  I have not had the courage to look for anything in that room for about 3 years, and yet, I somehow summoned up courage I did not even know I had, marched in there today, went unhesitatingly to the corner where I felt it might be buried, rummaged around through a daunting stack of dreck and found a carton containing a Mini Camcorder  including Invoice and Instruction Book, no less.  (What?......no gasps, cheers,applause, huzzahs?......well, I sure as hell cheered and even huzzahed a little.)

I am not going to draw this out interminably.  (I think I have already done that ).  I immediately recruited the trusty Florence and demanded  (read that "begged") her to read the instructions and figure out how the thing worked and teach me......if at all possible.  We had a raucous and rousing afternoon of taking cockeyed videos of each other  (and the ceiling and many times of my thumb) while making obscene comments which, we found, were faithfully picked up by the recording device inside.  The day ended with me taking a video of Gussie sitting on my computer with me singing to her as she turned her back on me and marched away.  Tsk.  She seems to hate my singing.......I can't imagine why. 

Of course, all of this will take a bit of practicing with this, yet another, damned gadget, but I have high hopes of someday being able to take a video of the hummers or even Gussie while I serenade her.  When we downloaded our tests to the computer I was amazed at how reasonably decent the pictures were and even the sound from that teensy mic came out fairly well thru the computer's teensy speakers. 

So now I have the means, if not the courage to post a video of my warbling.  Now comes the 2nd hardest part.......managing to get through an entire song without hitting a clinker, gasping for breath or bursting out laughing.  The 3rd hardest thing will be the actual attempt to upload the file to the blog, and, needless to say, the most excruciating part will be making myself hit "Publish".  I dunno about that.

Well, as you can see, one never knows what tomorrow will bring around here.  If you had told me 10 years ago what I might someday be using that camcorder for I would have been nonplussed or worse.  (What IS nonplussed.........is anyone ever "plussed"?)   Who could believe......?

Tune in tomorrow or the next dayor maybe the one after that for the next installment.
(and I gotta warn you, folks.......you are bound to be crushingly disappointed  or, who knows, uproariously amused.  

Or not.
.

Going To Pot and I Don't Mean That Kind....

Oh dear oh dear, oh dear!  Here's a Lo you may not have met before.  Truly dejected.  My vision is so bad that I can no longer draw anything.  My hearing is going downhill and I am becoming one of those wretched old ladies who keeps shouting, "Speak up, speak up  dammit, why is everyone mumbling and whispering?"  I would sell my soul AND my body for one of those old fashioned ear trumpets.....it would fit my current image perfectly.  I am just a handful of  stale crumbs of my former self. OY GEVALT, I cannot believe this is me whining like this.  Even Pollyanna  moans and groans sometimes.. 
 
 I think my soul is spoiled too. I must have left it on the kitchen counter one nite and forgotten to put it in the frig and it has turned sour, curdled, with horrid black and green mold growing all over it.  I am not sure it can  be saved. Perhaps tomorrow I will try and see if there is any hope of salvaging anything underneath the mold on the surface.......aaaaarrrrggghh.

And that lovely blue flame that  burned in its niche below my rib cage has gone out. Kaput.  I took a look today and there is nothing there but a cold grate and a few  burnt matches underneath.  I do not know what I did with the directions (if I ever had any) so I have no clue about how to light it again.  

All of this does not bode well for Lois, I am afraid. And yet I fear one does not die of these calamities......I just don't know how one keeps on living when your soul has curdled and your fire has gone out.   Perhaps it is like an oven thermocouple.......when you turn the knob the thermocouple heats up and when it is hot enough the gas valve opens and the gas comes on and the hot thingy ignites it.  Now all I need to do is figure out where the oven control is........ 

......and yet.........there may still be a spark or smouldering ember somewhere because I have been driven to sing today and, I think I may not have completely ruined my so-called voice with those damned singing lessons after all.  Actually, I went to the ENT doctor the other day and found that nothing was terribly wrong........a slight infection which antibiotics should cure, some inflammation which might go awayif I shut up for a while, and a lot of heavy mucous from my post nasal drip which might respond to Mucinex.  Omigod....I have been watching those revolting TV ads for years now and never dreamed that I would fall so low as to have to take that product in order to banish all those wretched green, lumpy creatures from my esophagus and voice box.  Sigh.  Will there be no end to my deterioration?  Guess not, but, as I said, I was inspired to pipe a few notes today and I found I kind of liked the hoarse, throaty quality which has overtaken my sweet, dulcet tones.  Perhaps I shall simply give up the Mucinex and see what happens.

I must confess, during my wretchedness I have been playing around with recording some of my warbling and am finding it most......hmmmm..... amusing....... and sometimes totally horrifying.   There is nothing quite as humbling as hitting an awful clinker and bursting out laughing in the middle of recordinga heartfelt ballad.  If I can ever learn how to transfer my recording to this blog I may just include one of those less than memorable performances for your amusement.  You have been clamoring for it....I should punish/reward you by doing it.  But how?

Which brings me to the most important poin of this soggy excuse for a blog.....assuming I recover from this curdling of the soul and such.  Which of you dear folk out there is willing to help me, guide me, instruct me.....dumkopff that I am.....in how to go about transferring an audio file to a blog?  (No, my dears, I have no intention of trying to make a video of my singing.......seeing me in my bathrobe and slippers crooning away over my coffee and bran flakes would destroy any illusions you may have about me.......perhaps later on, but not now.)

I am quite serious about asking for your help.  I know a lot of you include audios and videos in your blogs so I know it is possible.  The question is....is it within the realm of possibility for ME?

Any and all advice will be welcomed eagerly and gratefully.  My thanks will be boundless.   I may even sing for you.

Love,   What Once Was Lo 
 

So What Is Hyperthymesia?.....Don't Worry....It Is Not Catching

Hyperthymesia – A Newly Discovered Memory In Which People Remember Every Day Of Their Lives

 I just recently read a mind boggling story on aol news.
It seems there is  this guy who can remember every minute of his life from almost the beginning.     I don't remember his name (though I remember reading somewhere that Marilou Henner of
"Taxi" had the gift too...one of about 7 in the world) but it hardly matters. what boggles the mind is......how much storage space in bits, bytes and megabytes does that string of recollections take? And further, how could our brains possibly hold that much info and the multiplication tables besides?  

I have recently been pondering the fact that it seems unlikely that that several pounds of grey stuff in our skulls could possibly hold all of our memories plus how to do long division.  I don't care how sophisticated our equipment is.........there just ain't enough room  for everything in there is my contention.

I am toying with the concept that nothing much is really stored in our brain as it exists in our skull.    We must have a storage source elsewhere that we can access, add to and, possibly delete from using just keywords to find the file.   Nothing else makes any sense whatsoever....... I don't care how incredible our brain is supposed to be.....no way can that small gray mushy, squiggly mass hold enough chips, no matter how small God made them, to hold all the info we use.  We must have a personal Google.....or Wikipedia......or perhaps a huge communal Google.  Yes, yes.  Seems I have read about such a thing in esoteric writings.  By gum, I am becoming convinced that it must  be so,  especially since our brains have major work to do aside from remembering stuff.  Haven't I heard that much of it is taken up with somewhat more important tasks  like regulating our various cells, organs and  bodily functions?  The way I am seeing it, there must be a small area in the brain for stuff I call very short term memory.....like when you look up a phone number and have to remember it long enough to dial it.  In my own case this area only rates a "D"  grade for quality and performance ...or is it just me who has to go back and look up the number several times or else admit defeat and write it down?  Anyway, aside from that area I see a section which I call Control panel.  It is filled with icons like your computer desktop or perhaps a thousand "apps" buttons.  When clicked upon, these take you to your files in the Cloud Computer where you can search ad infinitum for a gazillion memories or bits or chunks of information you have noted as worthy of saving. 

The guy with the incredible memory of his life must have been a very obsessive compulsive type who sort of wrote each day into his diary with all the minute detail like weather and what he ate and what his mother said to him at breakfast and he carefully filed each day away in the cloud by clicking on "save".    When he pushes the lifetime memories App and fills in a search key by date, his brain sends out to the cloud,  grabs the diary entry for that day in all its glory and downloads it into temp storage.  The rest of us are much less obsessed and only store the more special or memorable days or moments of our life in the cloud file.  And I must confess that to make my theory plausible, there must  be stuff that gets stored  by accident rather than design.

From my own experience I would say that what I've got stored in the cloud is more than enough......maybe in some cases too much.   For instance, I wish to hell I could forget the time in the 6th grade when I was feeling uncommonly devilish and found myself called upon to answer the question, "Why did the Founding Fathers choose  Thomas Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence?  
To this day I remember vividly the expression of horror, disbelief and disgust on Mrs. Huckins' face when her, up till then, favorite pupil disgraced herself and fell from grace forever.

Somehow, I simply could not control myself from answering, "Because he had the best handwriting." 

Sometimes memory sucks.

   

Forget Global Warming, Terrorism......It's the War Within that'll Do You In

Note:  My apologies if you think you are having deja vu and could swear that  you read this one before......actually, 4 of you have.

  Funny thing seems to have happened.  I posted this on 2/4 and then received the funny joke which I posted same day or on 2/5.  I did not realize this......thought this was the last post and for days have been checking this blog for reads and/or comments because.......well, because I always do.  I knows this wasn't the best stuff I ever wrote, but when only 3 people show up to read my words I am upset, confounded and demoralized......also pissed off.  Finally, I could stand it no longer and asked my blessed follower, Bobbie Howder of  "Cottlestone Pie", to take a look and see if the damned thing had disappeared or was visible only to my eyes. 
When she reported that she had trouble finding it among previous posts, I suddenly realized what had happened.    Everyone reads the latest entry.....hardly anyone goes back to see if they missed the previous one.  I had neatly stepped on my own punch line....or something.

Sooooo......being a skinflint who wastes nothing, particularly not a batch of good words, I am presenting this post again, as if I had just hatched it.  You may or may not like it, but, dammit, I intend to make you choose.

Love,
  herself
                                **********************



2/4/13
So here I sat slurping my breakfast Mocha Cappucchino the other day, snickering at a news item revealing the downfall of yet another politician who could not keep his mind out of his pants (or out of some female's pants).  It seems that the Lt. Governor of the great state of Nebraska was forced to resign in shame when it was discovered that he was using his state-govt. issued cell phone for non-state purposes like phoning some 4000 women during just the last month.  

Well.......I dunno.....at first glance, misusing your state issued cell phone for personal reasons does not seem to be an act warranting severe punishment.......maybe take away his parking space for a few months.....but, coupled with the use to which he put the instrument, it becomes a heinous crime indeed. Hmmmmm......4000 phone calls to women.....it leads one to wonder when did he have time to do any work for the State of Nebraska?

When I told my beloved caregiver, Ann, about this newest evidence (that suggests if we want political servants to keep their minds on their jobs we should probably have a law that demands that they be castrated before they are allowed to take office) she shook her head in exasperation.

 "Oh, how could he be so stupid?", she said.    And then a flash of brilliance struck me.  "No, no", I replied, "stupidity has nothing to do with it.    He just lost the battle within."  

The poor fool  may or may not  be a bit short on intelligence, but that is neither here nor there......he certainly was a total wimp and abysmal failure when it came to his ability to fight lust with any kind of thought or better judgment.   He simply became the victim of his own internal war.......the war between the Intellect and the Emotions.  Now, the Intellect is a noble and fantastic instrument but it has no feelings of its own and hence no real weapons to fight the flames of burning desire.....or whatever.  How often does common sense and logic ever win the big ones?

You must understand, we are talking about intelligence not the gross organ known as the brain....I  have heard several interesting things about the brain here and there but I am not completely sure that intelligence lives there. (There may be a whole other blog about that one of these days.)  I seem to remember reading that brain tissue itself does not feel pain,  but if you stimulate or poke the brain in certain places you get a reaction like, for instance, your left leg will inadvertently fly up due to activating  a particular nerve.....those are a totally different kind of feelings than we are talking about.   But of course, you all know that.    Ah, but, I seem to be wandering a bit, aren't I?.......

  To get back to the point  the feelings responsible for all of the joy and all of the misery and everything in between are located elsewhere.   Somewhere vaguely in the middle of us, perhaps next to the liver,  is that unconfined, huge, tangled, all powerful mass of conflicting emotions which writhes and wrestles with itself almost constantly, and which has  no intellect at all.  None.  And no respect for it either.   And the saddest part of all is that therein resides not only Lust and the Seven Deadlies but Fear and Shame and of course Guilt, all of which are often much stronger than our finer emotions such as Love.  

Incidentally, speaking of love, there is a post script to the article mentioning  that the Lt. Gov's wife, of I don't remember how many years, upon learning the lurid, horrid facts, had just filed for Divorce.  Some stand by their man and some run.......feelings again.

So here is a man.....an ordinary man, probably no better or not much worse than most, who threw away his marriage, his job and possibly his career (though in politics you never know) because he let the cravings to talk dirty to 4000 women triumph not only over his intellect, but over everything.     Tsk.


And isn't this the story of us all?  Not that we all fall victim to lust, but often to fear, shame, guilt or, worse yet, the treacherous, insatiable need for instant gratification from chocolate.......we are all so pitifully vulnerable to the forces of Emotion and so incredibly adept  at resisting the interference of the Intellect, our own good sense and our nobler selves.......What chance has the human race got at all when sometimes we just gotta  be bad, bad, BAD?

And, no, I do not have the answer.......just the question.  Sorry about that.   Some days, I'm bad too.

Just a Little Dose of Cheer

You do not expect me to blog brilliantly 3 days in a row, do you?  Too bad if you do, but I am able to pass along a little candle to light the darkness thanks to the wonderful Bob Ringwald (who sent The Pickle Slicer which I posted a few days ago).


SOME GANG BANGERS GO TO HEAVEN

A couple of Gang Bangers show up at the Peary Gates, seeking admission into Heaven.

St. Peter says, "Wait here a minute. I'll be right back."

St. Peter goes over to God's chambers and tells him who is waiting for entrance.

God says to Peter: "How many times do I have to tell you, you can't be racist and

judgmental here. This is heaven. Everyone is loved. Everyone is a brother.

Go back and let them in!"

St. Peter goes back to the Gates, looks around, and lets out a heavy sigh.

He returns to God's chambers and says, "Well, they're gone."

"The Gang Bangers?" asked God.

"No.  The Pearly Gates."

-Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Amateur (ham) Radio Operator K6YBV
916/ 806-9551

"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence -- and then success is sure."
-Mark Twain

                                        *********************************************

You can thank me later, or, why not thank Bob Ringwald.  He deserves lots of love.

An Effing Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polkadot Mini-Blog...or.... The Wisdom of Da Feet (Damn, the title will be longer than the blog)

Yesterday I remember telling you of my plight in which I create in my mind a magnificent paragraph for a blog while I am lying in bed waiting to go to sleep, and, being too lazy to get up and schlepp to the dining room where the laptop lives, I try to brand into my brain a few keywords that will enable me to recreate same the next morning.  As you all already know, (why do I keep telling you things that I know you already know?....sure sign of approaching senility I fear)..... next morning this does not work so good......by then the perfection has slipped away leaving you with a few disparate keywords and the need to recreate the whole thing from scratch if you can and not nearly as perfectly as when it appeared in your mind the night before. 

Since yesterday, I suspect that things have gotten worse for me, or, perhaps I have gotten a bit smarter.  (not sure if this is possible)(no, no I did not mean it that way....remember I am nothing if not humble)  .   I have decided that whenever a bloggable thought strikes me, I will stop whatever I am doing and sit down immediately at the computer and record it in all of its glorious perfection or rough imperfection even.....I just got a new take on the situation, and I have found that it is  better to write something down today, right now, this very minute than lament its passing and loss till the end of time. HelI, I  am 85 and do not have that much time to waste waiting around for the right moment.  

Hence, I have invented the above titled Thingy which we will call a mini-blog for convenince sake and this is my first.....I think.

Now, what in hell was I going to write about?  Ah, yes.  It's like this, folks.....as the decades slip by you may find yourself in the same place where I am finding myself.........  In the middle of somewhwere or nowhere asking yourself what did I come in here for?  Of course, I know many or most......nah.....probably all of you have already  been there, done that and are nodding in boredom daring me to tell you something new.

 Well, I just got a new take on the situation, and I actually  found myself asking my feet for information.  I have no idea why my feet brought me to where I am, but perhaps Feet know..

"Feet", I said   "would you please go back and ask Brain what its intention was when it sent you that last message."

Obviously, the brain had something in mind to send my feet an order to take the rest of me from the kitchen sink, where I was preparing Gussie's Breakfast Smoothy, to the living room beside my reclining chair.......what could it possible have been?  Finally, I got a message back from my Feet which told me to look down......that was the  best that Feet could do since Feet and Brain do not always speak the same language and stuff does get lost in translation.

Well, if nothing else, I know how to follow orders, even from Feet,  so I looked down and saw Gussie's dinner dish which I had left thru the nite in case she needed a snack from her leftovers before breakfast.  Aha. the dish.....that was it......I needed the dish to dish up the Breasklfast Smoothie.

The point of all this nonsense is an odd and amazing piece of advice from the Old One.......next time you find yourself in some strange place wondering why in the hell your feet took you there......hell,......just ask them.

Fragments From A Pre-SuperBowl Deranged Mind

I just left our beloved blogger, Mary Moon of Bless Our Hearts, with something to look forward to.......a treatise to  follow up my somewhat well received pronouncements on Loss and Grieving.  The new item being one of Mary's (and everyone's) favorite, or least favorite subjects.....GUILT.  I have some fear that probably assures me that everyone but Mary will stay away from this site in droves from now on.  Oh well.  The truth is that, while I was poring over and pouring out my thoughts on the subject, I had a great insight of my own so it was definitely worth the doing even if no one comes to my The- Great- Expose- on- Guilt Party.

I already have 7 pages of notes  and I keep thinking of more to say......ain't done writing yet.  The main trouble is that I seem to be blessed with the perfect words and ideas, all exquisitely phrased,  when I am lying in bed, far from my laptop, waiting for Mr. Sandman to visit me and I struggle each night to try to memorize keywords so that I will be able to record them next day.  Sadly , by the next morning when I dig them out and dust them off they are not nearly as  brilliant as they seemed the night before, but I am relentlessly slogging forward with what I feel may be my greatest effort at trying to explain this baffling life and mishugina world.  Stay tuned, if you dare.

Of course, on other fronts I am embroiled in desperate but sporadic efforts to get ready for the SuperBowl this Sunday.  Actually, I kind of hate the SuperBowl .......first, because, as I have written here before, I hate the ends  of things and no matter who wins it still means the end of my football entertainment for at least another 6 months.  And secondly, I hate the lurid, idiotic hype.  It turns a valid event into a ludicrous circus and almost drains all of the real value and dignity out of the win.   And thirdly, it has seduced me into reading a gazillion tempting recipes for snacks and goodies I am supposed to prepare for the event........items I will probably never prepare and which sound devastatingly delicious but are probably disappointing and too  damned much work any way but which make me drool disgustingly so I dutifully printed them off and filed them away.  All of it forced me, however, into adding "Tostitos Chips" along with milk and eggs  to the shopping list so that I will not have to feel too deprived when the big day arrives and I find myself without a single required SuperBowl snack to stuff in my face.  (I am going on the assumption that items in my pantry such as Twizzlers, Pretzel Nuggets, Ginger Snaps and Roasted Almonds hardly count.......)

Oh, yes, I have another fascinating revelation to make re my current endlessly thrilling life.  I do not remember if I mentioned in my recent blog where I sheepishly confessed to sending away for a course of internet singing lessons,  that back in the Dark Ages when I was young, my college buddy Lu, my Mother and I used to sit around the dining room table with our songbooks open, playing our Ukuleles and singing the great Old Songs.   (You do not really expect me to go back and read my blogs to find out if I did indeed tell you this, do you?.)    Anyway, I am pretty sure I mentioned it because I swear I recall saying that I should really try to  find my old Uke from 68 years ago, even though I doubted if the strings would still be any good.  Well, the other day I had a brief moment of extreme mental clarity and I was sure that 10 or 15 years ago I had  seen it in the corner of the living room behind what my grandma used to call the  the Torchiere Floor Lamp.  After creeping over all of the boxes stashed in there, left  over from the Famous Failed Garage Sale of 2012 (the left overs from which are slated to go to the Goodwill any day now), what do you think I found?  Yep, the good old Arthur Godfrey Ukulele big as life and hardly even dusty.  I must remember to thank my wonderful cleaning lady, Ana, for keeping it thus for lo these many years.  Thrilled beyond words, I dug it out andto brought it tenderly into the light and decided I would try to tune it and if the strings popped I would just replace them,  Believe it or not, the strings did NOT pop........they tuned right up.  Only trouble was, the pegs which you turn to tighten the strings had gotten too loose and did not hold the strings in tune.   I am not going to give you the long version of this story where I got on the computer and looked up guitar and ukulele repair shops and found several in my neighborhood.  Nor will I drivel on about how the first one told me how long I would have to wait for a repair nor how bloody much it would cost (the Uke cost $1.00 in Thrifty Drug Store in 1945), nor the next guy who brushed me off saying he couldn't be bothered to try to fix it, but happened to ask me a question about whether the pegs had little screws in the ends of them.  After I finished cursing all guitar repair folk I got out the huge flashlight and the heavy duty magnifying glass and discovered that it indeed did have little screws and that by tightening them I could tighten the pegs and tune the uke without having the whole thing slip back and go out of tune.  Wow.  And the fact that, even though I had forgotten every chord position, I still remembered the little "My dog has fleas" song that enables you to tune the damned thing.  Double Wow.  But the real cherry, the icing, the triple Wow  is yet to come.  I remembered that 15 or 20 years ago I had seen in my biggest bookcase several of the song  books with the uke chords for each song displayed in them and had the vague recollection that I decided I had  better put them in a "safe place".  Of course, everyone knows that once you do that the thing is forever lost  because I, at least, can never remember where those safe places are.  However, I dug around a bit and found a big plastic covered bundle of music that used to live in the old piano bench and, sure enough,buried within were two of the books we used to play from.  Now all I have to do is cut my fingernails on my left hand, build up some callouses playing chords and I can strum away and accompany myself while I sing "Blue Tail Fly" and "Those Little White Lies".

Please, do NOT expect that audio goodie on my blog quite yet.  My so-called voice has not yet recovered from the strain of the singing lessons and I have a lot of work to do before the callouses build up.  One should never give up hope though......what if I had done that during this amazing odyssey?  You would only have gotten half a  blog......and while that is better, I guess, than no blog at all, it is nothing like a whole blog, now, is it?  But, wait.......I guess that would depend on the quality of the blog.  With a lousy blog, half a blog would probably be preferable to a whole blog.  Hmmmm.....I shall make a note to consider writing a blog about that.

Or NOT.