Am I a tad behind on blog challenge posts? Absolutely. An entire month behind, in fact. It has been a hectic month, but it’s always a hectic month. Got my first and second lanreotide shots for the lung cancer issue, with mixed results. First month was impressive; second month was lackluster. But I know what it really boils down to is depression–we are coming up on it being 10 years since my brother was murdered, and that has me quite sad. I’ll probably address that in a 10 year check-in post in a couple weeks.

Anywho, back to the blog challenge. The next prompt is “Parenchymal opacity projects below the right hemidiaphragm

Wait, no, that’s not it–must have not hit CTRL-C.

“Pick a favorite quote and describe why” (that’s better).

I don’t know if I have a favorite quote, but I have had philosophies that have changed a bit over the years.

When I was younger, my motto in life was “live and let live”. Honestly, as long as someone’s actions or opinions weren’t directly impacting me, more power to ’em. People should be allowed to be themselves and do as they please. If it brings them pleasure, even if it’s not my jam, have at it. One of my children told me the current version of this is “don’t yuck someone’s yum”.

These days, I still feel that people should be allowed to do what makes them happy, but I do draw a little harder line if what makes them happy is causing other people trauma. I’m not a fan of people spewing hatred gleefully.

I soon learned there was one quote I needed to actively avoid–“it can’t get any worse”. I assure you, reader, it most certainly can and will get worse. Now I am older and understand the concept of manifestation and putting something out into the universe and getting it back threefold. Not a fan of that. 2 or 3 family members out of 6 get the stomach flu? Don’t say it unless you want everyone fighting the porcelain gods. Flat tire? Zip your lip unless you want the transmission to bite the dust. Just. Don’t. Do. It.

The phrase that traipses through my brain daily now? “There but for the grace of God go I”. It rattles my chains when I see someone scoffing at someone less fortunate than they, because I know how fast life can change. Bankruptcy or financial ruin takes only one huge medical issue with an astronomical hospital bill. Slip and fall and crack your head open, lose your job, can’t pay the mortgage–hello homelessness. Hidden genetics or a bad reaction to a medication that leads to mental illness so severe that you can’t carry on a conversation or interact with polite society and suddenly all of your friends and opportunities vanish. No one can control every single component of their lives so that nothing bad happens, because if the universe thinks you need to be taught a lesson, you will be taught that lesson. Tuck yourself away in a bubble so you can stay safe and sound, but is it paradise or a cage at that point?

So yeah–Let people live their lives but don’t be a hater. Think positively and help where you can, because tomorrow you might need a helping hand.

This blog challenge is to use AI to write a poem. We covered how I feel about AI in the last post. Those feelings haven’t changed.

AI poem:

“In a kingdom where felines hold sway,
On soft thrones, they lounge every day,
With a flick of their tail,
They command without fail,
While we serve them in all of their play.”

I’m glad there are no more AI prompts in this challenge. See y’all next week.

This week’s blog challenge prompt is to use AI to create a post.

I am not a fan of AI. I think the pictures people create are cool, but I like to keep my creativity human-based. Still pisses me off that NaNoWriMo sold out to the AI hype and decided it was acceptable to let the computers write the novels. I didn’t even know where to find an AI generator to create a post, but Google helped me solve that issue.

So–here you go: AI.

“Alright, let me tell you a little story about my tumultuous relationship with AI. Picture this: I’m sipping my morning coffee, trying to wake up, and I decide to let my fancy new virtual assistant help me out. But instead of playing my favorite playlist, it starts blasting motivational podcasts that make me cringe. Seriously, who needs a cheerleader at 8 AM?

Then there’s the time I asked it to help me with a recipe. I thought I’d be treated to a gourmet dish. Instead, I ended up with something that resembled a science experiment gone wrong—a gooey mess that would make a food critic weep. So yeah, while AI promises to make life easier, sometimes I feel like it’s just trying to make me question my culinary skills and sanity! It’s definitely the bane of my existence.”

I’m going to go mentally throw up in a corner now.

This week’s blog challenge prompt is “Write about what you would do if you had to unplug from your devices for an entire day.”

So… like life before (for me) 1992?

For my brother it would have been more like life before 1981 or 1982, because he had his hands on his first computer with Atari cassette drive waaaaay before anyone else I personally knew. That boy was never “unplugged” from that day forward for more than a few hours. As soon as he was done with work (back when it was food service before he broke into the tech field), he was set up in front of his monitor and keyboard, with a few breaks to perch at his drum kit. He tried for many years to get me to try the pleasures of computing, and I strongly resisted until the early 90s. Even then, the best he managed was getting me to use computers for drawing and writing with a little desktop publishing thrown in; I never developed a taste for the programming side like he did. Numbers and formulas, eww…

What on earth did I do with all of my free time back then if I wasn’t tap tap tapping on a computer? Or doom scrolling on a phone? I didn’t even jump on the cordless landline phone trend until 1997, and that was because I had a c-section and leaping up to go answer a phone in another room was agony. My kids all had smart phones long before I did. Don’t worry, I’m all caught up now–sort of. I’ve never had a tablet or smart watch, and my laptop is 13 years old and takes an hour to boot up, so it hasn’t been resurrected for over a year.

Cats. I always had cats around to keep my hands occupied. If I was bored, I went outside and found a cat–we always had a dozen or more roaming around the farm. I would sit on a chair on the patio and have one or more on my lap, or I would lie in the grass in the front yard and 5 or 6 of them would pile on top of me and we would watch the clouds drift by and listen to the doves coo and the sparrows chirp and the owls hoot. The wind would gust up and rustle the grass and the leaves in the trees would almost tinkle like bells. Sometimes a dirt devil would whip past and almost knock a cat off my chest, but they would dig in their claws and readjust themselves once the mini tornado had swept by.

We almost always had a gravel pile sitting just inside the fence separating the cattle pasture from the driveway. I would climb up on the gravel pile and sit and sift through the rocks looking for pretty ones. There was a lot of agate and jasper, but sometimes I would get lucky and find what my dad called a Kansas diamond. I don’t know what it really was. It was a small, opaque frosty blue stone that had smoothed, tumbled edges.

If I didn’t mind getting wet, we would trek across the road to the Saline River. We crawled through the barbed wire fence and followed tire tracks through the tall grass and yucca plants to the river bed. We climbed over fallen trees and walked on shale beds, looking for fossils. In the summer, we went up to the quonset (big metal workshop) and grabbed a couple inner tubes and aired them up and then floated up and down the river.

If I had to stay indoors, then I was either reading or drawing. I always had a pile of books to read. Biographies, mysteries, and music magazines were my main genres. And I always kept a sketchbook and pencils nearby. Sometimes I would throw colored pencils or markers into the mix. My preferred subject matter was people, but I also drew cats and rarely landscapes. It was all mostly from my imagination.

These days I am not nearly as “plugged in” as many people. I do always have my phone with me so I can quickly research whatever I need to know on my “mini computer”, and so my family members and doctors can reach me. I always have text and email notifications pinging away in the background. If I need to kill time, I scroll through Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Tiktok. I use YouTube for how-to videos. Most of my book purchases are downloaded to my Kindle so I can take it to longer appointments. I never did get into gaming like many of my peers; my kids are gamers of varying levels, but I don’t join them.

And I still always have a cat on my lap. So some things never change.

The blog challenge prompt is “Write about a memorable walk/bus/train/flight journey”.

I have done those.

When I think of walking, I remember walking in the pasture with my brother or friends and getting grabbed around the ankles by devil’s claws.

I think of walking around town with my friends. Sometimes it was to help one of our friends on her paper route. Sometimes it was tagging along with my brother and his friend, laughing as he tossed a glass bottle behind us and then ran pretending someone was throwing things at us.

I don’t have much experience with trains. The “train” I have ridden the most often is the little train at the Topeka Zoo, both when I was a kid and when I was a parent. Our daughter got her first sip of Pepsi on that train, because Kansas summers are HOT.

Then we also rode a 3 hour train when we vacationed at Branson, and that was very relaxing.

I have taken one trip by air that wasn’t a transport to a hospital (3/10 do not recommend when you are 6 months pregnant and desperately need to tinkle the entire flight). We traveled from KC to Portland, Oregon when the boys were very young (7, 5, 3) to visit my grandad. It was memorable, because our 3 year old was the only one who got searched (person and luggage) because he reached out and touched the metal detector as he walked through, and because his portable nebulizer looked like a mysterious black box in his suitcase.

I also got to tag along when one of our sons got to pilot a plane through a school program, Wright Flight.

When it comes to bus travel, I got to travel by bus to visit my parents back in the college days when none of us had reliable transportation and wanted to gather for holiday meals. The best beef & noodles was served at a little cafe in Solomon, KS when we would stop there on the route; that cafe is now a truck repair shop.

But my first bus ride is probably my most memorable. It was sometime between 1979-1981, and we were down in Kansas City for one of Jon’s many surgeries. I’m going to guess it was in 1981, because that was one of the bigger surgeries and the one that ended up with complications. The surgeons removed a piece of Jon’s rib and used it to reconstruct his hard palate. Unfortunately, they messed something up and the chest tube was trying to pull out muscle along with fluid, so his stay ended up being longer than anticipated. Dad was a farmer, and you can only be gone from a farm for so long. Mom had to have the car in Kansas City so she could travel back and forth from the Ronald McDonald House and hospital, and also so she could bring Jon home when he was released. This left me and Dad with the Greyhound bus if we wanted to get home.

This isn’t it, but it has the same vibe:

There were rows of seats in the station as we waited for the bus to arrive, and it was all quite sterile and industrial as far as decor. At some point, Dad needed to use the restroom, and he came back fuming mad–it was a pay toilet. Dad had run into this in France when he was stationed there in the army in the 60s, but recently America had tried to make public restrooms pay toilets. You had to insert a dime or nickel or quarter (depending on how greedy the business was) into a slot on the door before it would unlock and let you do your business. The only thing that cheered Dad up about the situation was that he found a Susan B. Anthony dollar coin on the floor, so he made a net gain of 90 cents in the transaction.

Eventually the bus arrived, and Dad and I climbed aboard and found our seats. It was warm and stuffy, but the seats were fairly comfortable. There was a bathroom in the back of the bus, and just for the experience I did make my way back there once to see what it was like to use the facilities in a moving vehicle–spoiler alert, it was just like using the toilet in my grandparents’ RV when we went on a trip with them. Someone opted to not use the bathroom, however, so Dad and I spent the trip with our feet up off the floor watching as a small river of urine and bits of trash rolled up and down as the bus trekked through the hills of eastern KS. When we finally got to our hometown, Grandpa McCall was waiting for us at the former hotel/now record store and arcade and drove us on out to the farm.

Side note–if you have been paying attention, yes, I have way more than the standard 2 sets of grandparents. I only had one set of paternal grandparents, but on my mom’s side there were bucket loads of ’em. My granny married 4 times, and each of her former husbands remarried. It was easy enough for us to keep them straight, because we called them different titles than just Grandpa or Grandma. Granny originally married Grandad (or Grandad Oscar, as my kids know him), and Grandad remarried Lila. Husband #2 was Grandpa McCall, and he remarried Edna. Husband 3 was Max, and I have no idea who he remarried cuz we never had any further contact with him. Grandpa Jim was lucky number 4, and the longest marriage by decades until Granny died. Granny’s mom also married multiple times, and one of my aunts married 4 times, so we got lots of practice when it came to mapping out family trees.

So yep, those are some memorable journeys–I’ll be back in a few days with the next post!

The next blog challenge prompt is to write about 10 things people need to know about me. OK, sure.

1. I really really really don’t like liars. I also really don’t like being accused of lying.
2. I hate confrontation and conflict. If you need someone to go toe to toe with another person, I am not your person to do that.
3. If you want to know what I’m thinking, you will get a lot more out of me if you let me write it rather than say it. There’s a lot going on in my head at all times, so I will go down many tangents. Don’t worry–we will circle back eventually.
4. If I see a cat, I will try to pet it. I’m not a fan of dogs, but I will be civil toward them as long as they don’t hurt anyone I care about. Some dogs are quite lovely. I will swing on any aggressive fowl (think roosters and turkeys) who attacks me or my loved ones with a 2×4 or any other nearby object that can be used as a bat. I abhor snakes–I don’t care if they are venomous or helpful, they all need to be dead.
5. I prefer baking over cooking. Cooking is a necessary evil. Most of the time I don’t have the energy to produce multi-step meals, but I do love baking desserts for different occasions.
6. Don’t f**k with my kids. Or my family or friends. I am quite partial to them, and if you have done them wrong, I know about it. When I was younger, retribution would have been swift and memorable; now I am old and physically not well, so I let karma sort it out. But I don’t forget.
7. I am not impressed by the Rocky Mountains. I do, however, like the Smoky Mountains and Ozarks. I don’t know if it is an ancestral pull or what, but my heart is happy when we head east.
8. Apparently I look pissed off all the time. It’s just my face, people. I’m too tired to care about whether or not my facial expression matches my inner mood most days. Besides, I look weird when I smile since I hate wearing dentures and get along just fine with no teeth, thank you very much. It bothers all of the judgmental people in the world way more than it bothers me.
9. I am extremely not athletic. And my weight has no bearing on this–I couldn’t even do a single pull-up when I was 115 lbs throughout my teen years and young adult life. I am very happy that my children did not inherit this trait from me and can hold their own in sports and other physical feats, and I will gladly be a spectator rather than a participant. Just don’t make me climb too many stairs in the bleachers.
10. Money is annoying. When I was a kid, I thought a bartering system was superior. Now I am an adult, and I still think trading goods or services would be a better way of conducting transactions. It makes me quite sad when I am confronted with a situation where something is unobtainable simply because someone doesn’t have a hefty bank account. Realistically, I know my health would be much better if I could afford various treatments, but it’s not going to happen.

This week’s blog challenge prompt is “Write about someone who inspires you and why”.

Well.

Have you ever thought about how the people who inspire you change over your lifetime? I can tell you right now that the people I looked up to at age 3 are quite different at age 55.

I tend to focus on my immediate surroundings, so it’s no surprise that many of my inspirations were family members and close friends and people I know personally.

My family tree is chock-full of inspirational people, so I have it pretty easy there. Some of them are downright notorious, and some of them are crazy talented; some of those people overlap. OK, all of them overlap.

When I took my ACT in high school, the writing portion was not optional. My topic was “write about someone who is your hero”. I wrote pages and pages about my brother being my hero due to all that he had endured in life up to that point. Then I went home and didn’t breathe a word of it to him for decades, because he and I constantly locked horns back when he was 17 and I was 18. But he was still a cool dude back then, and he was an even cooler dude when he left this world–I’m glad we no longer fought in adulthood like we had as children.

My granny and I started out rocky. She had lost her 2 sons and medicated with a lot of alcohol. She made no bones about favoring her grandsons over her only granddaughter for my entire childhood. It cut to the core. But eventually she kicked the bottle and then we got along great. She was amazingly talented when it came to having a green thumb and being crafty–ceramics, needle arts, you name it. We had a great time until she suddenly passed away when I was 27.

My parents were/are very awesome. They always let us kids be ourselves and supported whatever hobbies we enjoyed. They didn’t get wound up over minor stuff like hair length and hair color and clothing choices. They made sure we knew the rules and were respectable members of society, but they also let us have our freedom. I was weird and never did go through that rebellious phase of hating my parents and thinking they were idiots–I thought my parents were great people.

I have a lot of inspirational friends, too. They have all been through so much in their lives and they keep coming back fighting every time the world thinks they are down for the count. They are a tenacious bunch, and I admire that.

So yeah–I can’t really narrow down one single inspirational person in my life. So many people have shaped me into the person I am today. I think they share a lot of characteristics, too.

They value honesty. Sure, some of them are a tad delusional or can really spin a story, but when it comes down to it, there’s no patience for outright liars.

They are creative and talented. Some paint, some read, and some can build machinery that runs like a dream. Some can lead others, and some jump in and help teams achieve great things. Some can bake, some can decorate, and some can coax music out of instruments. They are visionaries who bring imagination to life.

And they care. Deeply. They will fight for what they believe in to the bitter end. They certainly do not all agree, but at the end of the day they will do what they can to make the world a better place for those they love.

I’m glad I know such beautiful people.

This week’s blog challenge prompt is “Write a funny conspiracy theory behind an important event or people.”

I’m not really big on conspiracy theories. I tend to view them as being the result of paranoia, ignorance, or drugs. There’s only 2 conspiracy theories that have ever piqued my interest:

1. Princess Anastasia Romanov survived the assassination of her family. In 1918, Tsar Nicholas Romanov, his wife Tsarina Alexandra, son Alexei, and daughters Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia were herded into a room and executed by a firing squad. According to the conspiracy theory, Anastasia and possibly her brother Alexei survived. A number of women came forward and claimed to be Princess Anastasia, most notably a woman named Anna Anderson. DNA proved that Anna was not Anastasia. When the family’s grave was excavated in 1991, 2 bodies were missing; however, in 2007, another gravesite found the 2 lost bodies and DNA proved that the entire Romanov family did perish in 1918.
2. Kaspar Hauser was from the Royal House of Baden. In 1828, a teen boy was found wandering the streets in Europe. He claimed to have been kept locked away since childhood, and seemed a bit dim mentally. Many thought that he was a descendant of the House of Baden, so several people over the years became his benefactors and supported his cause to reclaim his birthright. Unfortunately, at the age of 21, he stumbled home with a knife wound to the chest and died from his injuries. DNA analysis was done in 1996 and 2002 that showed he did not belong to the House of Baden; however, there was a problem due to the fact that the 1996 and 2003 samples also didn’t match. During Kaspar’s lifetime, quite a few came to view him as a con artist and dismissed his claims.

Do I have a funny conspiracy theory? Well, it’s not my theory, but my children do have a funny little theory they enjoy tossing about. We have an elderly acquaintance who has 2 cats as companions. According to my children, our friend and the 2 cats secretly rule the world. All events that play out on the world’s stage, be it political or financial or completely mundane, are all plotted out and set in motion from the comfort of our friend’s home with hefty contributions from the felines. If the cats don’t agree to the downfall of a regime or the rise in stocks on Wall St, it doesn’t happen and they go back to the drawing board. So yeah, cats rule.

I skipped over a blog challenge prompt a couple weeks ago, because there was no social cause I felt so strongly about that I could write about it. I knew one would surface eventually.

I was correct.

Oh looky there, a social cause I feel strongly about–clemency.

First of all, let me start by saying I have no beef with the Innocence Project. Their mission is to see to it that people who have been wrongfully convicted get a second chance at a trial to prove their innocence. If they have the evidence to back it up and they know they can prove it this time around, by all means, go for it.

Do I believe that there are innocent people in prison? Absolutely. Do I think they have the right to petition for their freedom? Absolutely.

BUT.

Do you know what I also believe?

I believe that there should be no mercy or shortened sentences or time off for good behavior or any of that other BS when a person commits a crime that is CAPTURED ON CAMERA and there is absolutely NO DOUBT that the person participated in the crime.

And you’re damned right this sounds personal, because it is.

My brother was murdered while defending his wife and himself from 4 criminals. All 4 criminals are equally guilty of murder even if only one of them fired the fatal shot, because they were all there and they all had the same intention of robbing and harming the occupants of that business. All 4 criminals received similar sentences for the crime–25 to life, with a little added on to some of them.

It was pretty much a slam dunk for the court to convict the 4, because my brother had cameras installed everywhere inside and outside of the store. He caught them on camera casing the business the week before, he caught them arriving the day of the crime, he caught them raising guns and pointing them at his wife and knocking her unconscious, he caught the assailant’s gun movement that proved they fired the first shot, and he caught his own death on those cameras.

All 4 went to prison.

One died there.

Two are doing their time–not peacefully, judging by their discipline records, but they are serving their time and we don’t hear anything out of them.

But one of them really enjoys coming back to court. He’s filed multiple appeals and one of them made it all the way to our state supreme court–they promptly reaffirmed that he was right where he belonged. Now that he’s exhausted (I hope) his appeals as far as wrongful convictions, lousy legal representation, and all of that other malarkey, he’s pulled out another trick–filing for clemency.

This criminal happens to be the one who scored highest on the violence grid and deserved the greatest punishment due to his prior crimes, even if he didn’t fire the fatal shot. He had been convicted several months prior on a felony weapons charge and was not even supposed to have a gun, but that certainly didn’t stop him from walking into the store with his little silver pistol. At the time that my brother stopped their fun, these 4 had been on a bit of a spree for several weeks, and this particular criminal had shot a clerk in the head and nearly killed him and left him with severe brain damage.

He is not the type of person we want back in the community. And yes, he would go right back to the same community. He has petitioned our governor to grant him clemency and turn him loose after almost 10 years. He feels his sentence of 25 to life is simply too harsh and depriving him of his youth and his family and all of that. We are supposed to ignore that his actions have deprived the other clerk of any sort of meaningful life or chance at earning a livelihood and providing for himself and his family. We are supposed to ignore that his actions culminated in my brother’s death and lifelong trauma for the rest of our family. We are supposed to ignore that there is not a chance in hell that he will follow the stipulations of his release this time and not use a weapon. We are supposed to ignore what we saw plain as day on that video footage the day our lives changed forever.

So no, I do not feel that all criminals deserve a second chance or clemency. And I will continue asking family, friends, and community members to contact the prison review board and voice their opposition to this criminal being released early. No one else needs to be killed by this perpetrator.