Lydia Schoch

Here is this week’s list of comic strips, essays, poems, short stories, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

The First Warm Day via CuriousSnowflak. Toronto has already had its first warm day of 2016. I hope the same can be said for all of my readers who live in cold places.

What Happens to Old Batteries. This made me a little sad.

Zip the Drapeline via cdthieringer. What I liked the most about this essay was how the last paragraph tied everything together. Very nicely done.

The Revenant. Fair warning: this poem is snarky and irreverent. It was also extremely funny, though.

Ten Simple Ways to Serve Your Local Community via OperationWarm. The most interesting thing about this list to me is that it didn’t include anything that was flashy or glamorous. It was all quiet, simple stuff that won’t get you a spot on the evening news but that is desperately needed in a lot of communities.

From Why Your Brain Actually Works Better in Winter:

You could even think of this reduced winter neural activity as your brain entering a kind of “eco mode,” allowing it to perform as well as it does in summer but while consuming fewer resources.

From Anabaptist:

Once we got started, my brother and I talked for hours on end. We talked about what heaven was like. We wondered what life was like outside of New Lancaster. We talked about the best way to button suspenders— for some reason Jakob just couldn’t see that one strap running over the right shoulder was superior. We argued over the best way to milk and who was the better singer of hymns, but we never questioned where the light came from, until we lost it.

What have you been reading?

This question has been bouncing around in my mind as I follow the Marco Muzzo trial.

For anyone who hasn’t heard of this case yet, Marco is a man who drove with a blood alcohol level almost three times the legal limit last September. He crashed his car into another vehicle, killing three young children and their grandfather as well as seriously injuring two other members of that family.

The children’s’ names were Daniel, Harry, and Milly Neville-Lake.  They were 9, 5, and 2 years old. Their grandfather was named Gary. You can read the rest of the details of the crash in the link above.

Every article that I’ve read about this case has talked about how devastating their deaths have been for their family. Their parents lost a father and all of their children in one terrible day.

This is the first article I’ve found that talks about how Marco has been affected by this. His sentencing hearing has been going on this week, so this case has been featured regularly in our local news. No one knows yet how long he might be in prison, but some people are guessing it could be between 10 and 12 years.

I’m hoping it’s much longer than that.

I went to school with someone who is now serving a 20+ year sentence for killing one person. While the circumstances of that case were nothing like this one, it has sprung to mind several times over the last six months. Stolen property can be returned, but nothing in this world can ever bring someone back from the dead. Murder is one of those crimes that can’t be undone.

So causing the deaths of four people should have a similar sentence, especially in cases like this where the accused was knowingly breaking the law and endangering other people’s safety.

If this was a situation where an old piece of equipment broke down at exactly the wrong place and time, it would be different.

If this was a situation where someone temporarily lost control of their vehicle due to a seizure or asthma attack that they’d done everything they could to prevent, it would be different.

If this was a situation where a patch of black ice on a dark night caused a car to suddenly spin out of control, it would be different.

It wasn’t, though.

This was all completely preventable.

Nothing can bring the victims back, but I’m hoping an appropriately long sentence will make it clear that their lives mattered.

We’ll see what the judge says…..

My knowledge of Japanese history is sadly pretty limited, so I can’t say for sure how true any of this is other than the World War II section.

It was highly entertaining, though!

The topic of this post was suggested by a reader.

Get in touch with your inner rock. That is, start behaving as neutrally and blandly as possible when you’re around the person who is pushing your buttons. Make your responses as interesting as it would be to talk to a rock. Sometimes people act like jerks because they enjoy stirring up conflict. If you can succeed at disengaging, they’re (probably) going to grow tired of you and move onto someone else.

Change your environment. If it’s possible, change when, where, or how you spend time with them. Sometimes people are much more aware of how they’re behaving if they have to interact with you in public or in a place they don’t find quite as comfortable. It can also be helpful to change who you have around you if you’re able to influence who else is in the room. Some combinations of personalities work better in these situations than others do.

Play bingo. I’ll admit that this is one of my sillier tools for dealing with people who really rub me the wrong way. If you know they’re going to say the exact same things every time you see them, start playing bingo with their monologues. I like to keep a mental scorecard of what I expect them to say and then check things off as they’re introduced into the conversation. (No, I don’t randomly exclaim Bingo! out loud. This is only something that goes on in my private thoughts).

Reward yourself. I do give myself small rewards later on for earning bingos, though, and I usually spend little to no money on them. Watching an old, favourite episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer can soothe a lot of irritation away. Long walks work well if the weather is decent, and chocolate is appropriate for almost everything else.

Get really comfortable with silence. Not everything the unavoidable jerk says actually requires a response. Sometimes the best thing you can say to them is nothing at all. I’ve just started to use this technique, and it can be a good way to keep yourself from getting sucked into conflicts that you never wanted to be part of in the first place. I’ll admit that it feels extremely awkward in the beginning. If you can stick with it, though, it can be a great way to keep some emotional distance between you and them.

Here is this week’s list of essays, poems, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border. Here’s hoping that all of us live to see this day.

Why I Sit Out the Pass-the-Baby Game. I don’t go quite this far, but I definitely do share the author’s questions about what it is babies would tell us if they could speak. I suspect that some of them would strongly prefer not to be passed around so much. (Others might love it, of course). What I try to do is pay close attention to the body language of the littles ones in my life. If they don’t want to be held or keep reaching out for their parents, I don’t press the issue. There will be plenty of time to bond when they’re older, after all. 🙂

How Intelligent Do You Have to Be to Be a Parent? What an intriguing question. I don’t have an answer to it, but I found this article to be incredibly thought-provoking.

839 Reasons You Are Buying the Wrong Lettuce via TheSarahFader. Need to laugh? Click on this link.

Is It Stupid to Look on the Bright Side? via amysanomalies. I couldn’t agree with this more.

From Celtic Time-Keeping via word_seeker:

The first ploughing begins at the start of February when the ground is warmer and softer following ‘cold-time’ (December/January) and lambs are born, which perhaps is why January-February was known by the Celts as ‘Anagantios’ (stay-home time). No point jetting off on that late winter-sun holiday when all the pregnant sheep are about to drop!

What have you been reading?

I’ve been on a gratitude binge lately.

Now it’s my readers turn.

Thank you for reading this blog.

Thank you for your comments.

Thank you for supporting my books.

Thank you for leaving reviews of them.

Thank you for your encouragement.

Thank you for your retweets and reposts.

You’re all amazing.

This makes me picture a mermaid culture that developed the idea of underwater animal husbandry in order to maintain a steady supply of fish for their dinner tables.

Sharks were gradually domesticated in this society as a result of them hanging around the merpeople when they were culling their fish stocks.

Now shark teeth are the strongest currency and status symbol of mermaid society. Keeping your pet sharks healthy is as important as keeping yourself healthy, so mermaid culture unravels when the sharks mysteriously begin disappearing. Where did they go? Will the shark shepherds be able to track them down before it’s too late?

Someone hurry up and write this book. I can’t wait to see how it ends!

My RSS feed is filled with dozens of amazing blogs. Some of them belong to friends of mine, but many more are written by people I’ve never met and don’t know at all outside of what they post about themselves on their sites.

Lately I’ve been thinking about what people do and don’t blog about. The sites I follow talk about everything from science news to snapshots of cute animals to the online diaries of foster and adoptive parents. Some of these blogs reveal a ton of information about the person writing them. Others give away virtually no hints about the bloggers and their personal lives at all.

Regardless of what type of site it is, though, there are a few things I wish I could find more often in all of the blogs I follow.

1. Stories about their bad days. I completely understand wanting to keep certain things private, but I really like reading the occasional post about what other people find frustrating or difficult in life. We all have our own strengths and weaknesses. If we share the same weaknesses, I can learn new coping skills for the things that I have trouble doing. Reading about the things people struggle with also gives me sympathy for how hard they work to accomplish something that I or you have always pulled off effortlessly.
2. Responses to other blog posts. It is so interesting to see a blog post spawn one or more responses to it. Your interpretation of a discussion could be completely different from mine, but I won’t know why you think the way you do unless you tell everyone about it. In some cases, I also haven’t even heard of the original debate or controversy yet. If a blogger I follow doesn’t mention it and it’s not something that’s covered in the mainstream news, I might not know about it for a long time.
3. Funny stories. While it’s true that not every blog is well-suited for these kinds of posts, I love seeing them show up in my RSS feed. Sometimes the best way to respond to an impossible problem is to find the humour in it. This isn’t something that comes to me naturally, so I really enjoy seeing how other people pull it off.
4. Updates to previous posts. What someone believed six months (or six years) ago might not be what they still believe today. It’s so interesting to me to read about how and why a person’s mind changes over time.
5. Off-topic posts. If your blog advertisers itself to be about underwater basket weaving, I’d prefer to be reading about stuff related to weaving and underwater adventures 90% of the time. Occasional off-topic posts can be a fascinating glimpse into the author’s life, though.

What topics do you wish more blogs talked about?

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, comic strips, poems, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

The White Rabbit. I want a sequel to this!

I’m Going Back to Minnesota Where Sadness Makes Sense. This isn’t a feeling I’ve ever had, but I sure loved the way it was expressed.

Why Parents Should Have Child-Free Friends. I agree with this 100%. There are so many important things you can learn about life from befriending people who fall outside of the norm in some way. To give one example, I love listening to my friends who have visible and invisible disabilities/illnesses talk about what it takes for them to get through the day. It’s hard to admit this, but I know that I take my good health for granted. Talking to my friends whose lives look so different from mine in certain ways has made me so much more compassionate and understanding than I might have otherwise been.

Lost in a Fishbowl via KStuckInTraffic. This is the kind of thought experiment that blows my mind.

How Graphic Is Too Graphic? via Kathleen01930. None of my stories have been graphic yet, but this is definitely something I think about when toying with new ideas. Your reason for including violent or disturbing content matters. Some plots can be just as effective without these things, but others truly cannot.

The Great Backyard Bird Count. Every February the Cornell  Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society asks volunteers from around the world to count the birds they see and send in a short report about it. The count started yesterday and will end on the fifteenth. I think I’ll be participating. It only takes 15 minutes, although you can do it for a longer period of time if you prefer.

Valentine’s Day: Like or Dislike via SusanStovall. What surprised me the most about this post was how much I ended up agreeing with the person who wrote it. As someone who has never really celebrated Valentine’s Day, I was expecting to have a totally different reaction to something with this title. I suspect we’d get along well if we lived in the same city and every struck up a friendship.

What have you been reading?

For anyone who hasn’t heard the good news yet, J.K. Rowling is revisiting the Harry Potter series. The play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child will be performed this summer in London, although all of the tickets for it have already been sold. It will also be released as a script at midnight on July 31.

I am so excited about this release because of how much I loved these books as a kid. I reread the first seven books over and over again. Sometimes I still have moments when I see or hear something in my ordinary life that instantly reminds me of a character or scene from this series.

Waiting five months to read the new instalment feels like an eternity.

How will I be passing the time?

By rereading all of the previous Harry Potter novels, of course!

I’m about 50 pages into Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone at the moment. (If there’s anyone out there who hasn’t read it yet, be prepared for mild spoilers from a nearly 20-year-old story. Haha).

As a kid, I didn’t notice – or maybe I simply didn’t remember – that Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon were never asked if they were willing to take in their nephew. They didn’t even know that he was coming to live with them after his parents were murdered until Aunt Petunia opened the door one morning and found baby Harry sitting on her doorstep with a letter tucked beside him.

Surprise!

This wasn’t something that struck me as odd back then, but I sure would be discombobulated to discover any of my nieces or nephews on my doorstep as an adult. What if they grew hungry, frightened, or cold between the time they were dropped off and the time I discovered them? Eek. That thought makes me wince.

It will be a lot of fun to see if there’s anything else I understand in a completely different light as I continue on with Harry’s story.

Who else is looking forward to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child? If you’re not a Harry Potter fan, what novels have you revisited as an adult only to realize that your opinion of certain scenes has completely changed over the years?