Category Archives: joy

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Daily Evil: R is for Ridiculous

This is Donkey Oatie and Sancho Panda. Helen Burling Ottaway did a series for a book or a show or something in the early 1990s. I do not know if it was ever published. There is no date on this. This is colored pencil and the drawing is 9 by 12 inches. I think she did larger watercolors as the final project.

Is being ridiculous evil? I read that today is National Humorous Day. We need humor to let go of stress and blow off steam and to go from the fight or flight sympathetic nervous system to the parasympathetic relaxed one. Humor is a really good way to go. So watch those silly cat videos and laugh. Ok, not when you are at work. But even at work, my office manager and I needed to blow off steam and laugh. One day she was playing whale songs. I heard her say very seriously into the phone, “Oh, those are whale songs. Dr. Ottaway insists on whale songs.” I howled, because she had picked them. For revenge I made whale noises at her between patients all day. Anybody walking into clinic might have thought we were loons. I can do loon songs very well, better than whale songs.

I know a slightly different tune for The Dummy Line, a variation. There seem to be a bunch!

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Daily Evil: I is for irritated

I am feeling a bit like this elf: irritated about the rain.

Ok, yeah, I did move to the Pacific Northwest 23 years ago, and I could have moved away. I love the beaches and the mountains here. But when we are having sun once every 10 days or two weeks in the season they call “spring” here, I do get a little irritated at the rain. Yesterday and today the wind is howling too. Whitecaps and I am very happy not to be out in a boat.

This etching is 2.5 by 3 inches, titled Rain Forest, number 5 out of 25, 1985.

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Memory trip

The Swinging by the Sound dance weekend was a memory trip for me.

I met my future husband dancing, back in 1986. We met contra dancing, but he was already learning Lindy Hop. We took a class together and met people that I am still in touch with. We went to dances at the Spanish Ballroom, in Cabin John, Maryland, with 400+ people. We had an hour of teaching and three hours of dancing, in the old park which did not allow alcohol. The Ballroom was not heated in the winter and would be in the upper 90s in the summer. I remember winter dances with the band needing space heaters. The dancers did not need heat: we were generating it.

I took this photograph at a Swinging by the Sound class. People choose Lead or Follow and the instructors have the Leads rotate every few dances. I am happy seeing so many people learning both, because it makes you a much better dancer.

We loved our bands too, and Daryl Davis and his band played at our wedding.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: trip.

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Holding a sing

My parents did not do karaoke. They held sings.

In college, late 1950s and on, they would have a sing. My father played guitar, they would invite all their friends, and sing folk songs. They used the book in the photograph, Song Fest, edited by Dick and Beth Best. Last published in 1955, I think.

I have no memory of the book itself. However, a friend of my father’s bound his copy in 2003 in leather. When I saw it, I searched on line and bought my own. It has words AND MUSIC and a chord progression. When I opened it, I know a song from about every third or fourth page.

My sister and I memorized the songs. We both had hundreds of songs memorized, many from this book, or from records. We photocopied a Beatles record insert and memorized all the words on a long car trip once.

I don’t know much about the Intercollegiate Outing Club Association, but there are still copies of Song Fest on line. My parents had to edit a number of the songs for two small children, since we were picking them up. They chose silly songs, “Dead Girl Songs” (Banks of the Ohio, Long Black Veil, My Darling Clementine, Cockles and Mussels) and work/protest songs. They rarely sang sentimental songs, except for lullabies. I loved to sing. We used to have reel to reel tape with my little sister singing a fifth off when she was three or four, but it disintegrated.

My father, Malcolm Kenyon Ottaway, was a fabulous musician. He sang in prep school, in college, in choruses on the east coast, in Rainshadow Chorale from 1997 until his death in 2013. He loved Bach and the Band and loved to encourage other people to sing. He was in our Community Chorus for years, to help new singers. People must try out for Rainshadow Chorale, but Community Chorus is for anyone who wants to join and sing. After my father died, men would say, “I would try to stand near your father in Community Chorus, to help learn the part. He was so good.”

Here is one of the lullabies from Song Fest:

At the Sings, my parents would start with a song and then go around the room, asking other people to pick songs. Sometimes people were shy, but my folks were really good at getting people to sing. Sometimes we’d have multiple guitars and other instruments. My sister and I had favorite songs too!

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: karaoke.

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Valedictionary

The Ragtag Daily Prompt is valediction. Perpetua is starting the first (to my knowledge) Valedictionary, of letter sign offs. Cool beans.

Valedictionary is a new word. Mine, all mine, but you may use it! I will generously allow everyone to use it! It is valedictionariable! Another new word. I will accept suggestions as to the meaning. For now it will mean whatever I want it to mean when I use it. Words being malleable.

Now, Perpetua, you sign your post “Yours Robotically”. What does that valediction mean? You are an AI? You would like to be an AI? You are a robot? Your post was written with ChatGPT? I am curious.

How do I sign letters off?

Yours sincerely
Yours truly,
Love,
SWAK,*
Respectfully submitted,
Your corporate policies grieve me,
My father has been dead for 13 years, stop mailing him your catalogs,
Holy cats,
Holy catwoman, batman,
Aaaaarghhhhh,
Love.

_________________________

*SWAK stands for Sealed With A Kiss, and we used that when we were kids. Not recommended for professional mail or during outbreaks of covid, influenza, RSV and other plagues.

Isn’t a real piece of snail mail a treasure now? I have quite a lot of blank cards that I’ve collected over the years. Good thing, because cards are now $4-8.00 each! OUCH! I mailed letters to all my children yesterday with recipe cards, from Maline’s memorial. A friend put her photograph on one side and copies of her recipes in her handwriting on the other. Maline was a fabulous cook, fine artist, record collector, made earrings and jewelry from antique buttons, I could go on and on. It was lovely to send the recipes to my children.

I took the photograph in Marshall, Michigan in March. I would LOVE to work in a ridiculous department. Hooray for Dark Horse Brewing Company. Next time I go there, maybe I can have a tour.

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Nano-influencer

I am thinking about what to say about what I do when I meet new people.

I am getting rather tired of saying I’m a family doc, but I am only working a little because I had my fourth pneumonia, on oxygen for a year and a half, blah, blah, blah. Too much information. I also am tired of the reaction to “doctor”. People are weird about jobs, they categorize and are often hierarchical.

So, how do I describe myself?

Disabled divorcee, not employed? Um, still TMI.

Writer? I have one friend who introduces himself as a “junk mail writer”. He won’t tell them that his clients are the Smithsonian and the Kennedy Center and so forth unless they ask more questions. Some people just dismiss him instantly.

Blogger? No, I don’t think so.

I looked up an article on “influencers”. It is ostensibly written for companies looking to place products on blogs or whatever platform and it breaks the influencers down into groups. With 1000 followers, I am categorized as a “nano-influencer”. That cracked me up. I think it would be fun to see what reaction I get to that instead of to Family Practice doctor.

I just repaid my license for two more years. I still am very interested in working with Long Covid people, but I do not want to run my own business again. So, I am considering approaches. And do I really want to risk another pneumonia? Well, being alive is a risk, after all. And it always ends the same way.

Blessings from your nano-influencer!

_____________________

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: influencer.

I took the photograph at the start of the Swinging by the Sound dance weekend.

Here is a fabulous video of a Shag Dance warm up and then couple dancing. Wow!

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Daily Evil: B is for Brag

Ooooo, B is for Brag. I can brag about my mother artist AND I got to do work with her. In the 1980s I ask if I can write poems that she will do etchings to illustrate them. She had done a series with a friend when I was a baby. I was jealous and wanted her to illustrate mine.

“Yes, BUT,” she replies, “The poems have to rhyme. I don’t like free verse.”

I laugh, because the man she did etchings and poems with before did all free verse.

This was right after I had finished college and wanted to write, but was certainly rather terrified about submitting anything. My degree was in Zoology and Scandinavian Studies, so I did not exactly have the writing connections.

I sent my mother ten poems, all rhyming. One was written with a finished etching in mind, but she did etchings for the rest. Almost all are about animals.

She had a friend who runs the Lead and Bread Press print 50 of each poem on etching paper and then started running the editions. We had a gallery opening together in the 1980s in Alexandria, Virginia. This did not make me rich but it certainly made me pleased and proud. Bragging rights are mine. The prints and poems are in a book as well, of women sibling artists. We got in even though we were mother-daughter rather than siblings.