And I quote …

Posted in Education, Humor, Reflections, writing by Shelley Sackier

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”

~ Oscar Wilde

I pay attention to words. As a writer, I am encouraged to scrutinize my words — and everyone else’s.

And I have been known to give voice to animals, insects and inanimate objects purely because I am convinced they are trying to communicate. I will be their translator.

Oftentimes, it’s like converting African Khoisan clicking into Klingon and sprinkling it with a bit of Dothraki and Pig Latin. Yeah, that hodgepodge is probably not going to catch on.

Even though I have a nerdish penchant for individual words, and when asked for the title of my favorite book, I awkwardly admit it is Roget’s International Thesaurus, the next level up on my scale of linguistic admiration is that of the quote.

I am addicted to adages, transfixed by truisms and wild about witticisms. In my opinion, reading the words that express other people’s wisdom in bite-sized format is an appealing approach to acquiring needed knowledge. The quotes I’m drawn to are powerful pearls of astute insight that have experienced countless retweets in the grand scope of the overall twittering universe we inhabit. Some have taken off like wildfire, a quick strike of a match that hungrily spreads from one combustible source to another, and others are smoldering embers—words that have been around like the coals of a dampened fire in the hearth—ready to be repeatedly brought back to heat-giving life in the morning, yet will continue a slow, hourly seep through the house of many minds.

Look through any bathroom in my house. You’ll find most of the reading material is short and quippy. I don’t encourage anyone to hunker down in there, but if you find it unavoidable, I hope the words invite you to ponder.

I’ve even taken to painting quotes on the walls of bathrooms and bedrooms because they’ve moved me to feel they deserve permanence within my humble abode.

Three quotes I feel worthy of daily reflection are:

Anyone can count the seeds in an apple. ~ No one can count the apples in a seed.

Do not follow where the path may lead … go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

And most importantly,

If you didn’t see it with your own eyes, or hear it with your own ears, don’t invent it with your small mind and share it with your big mouth.

Okay, that last one is just another version of what was drilled in to me as a kid only in the less graceful form—You keep your nose out of other people’s business and they’ll keep their fist of your nose.

It worked for me.

As it is, everywhere I turn seems to sprout yet another worldly proverb or sagacious aphorism. Desperate to memorize these slick and savvy sayings, I’ve taken to writing them with a pen on my skin with the hopes that they’ll remain there long enough for the philosophy to penetrate before the ink departs.

If I went with the more indelible route–and tattooed myself with these many mottoes–I’d be a side show attraction at one of the county fairs. Plus, I’d rather not have small children run from me if I’m filled to the brim with all this wordy wisdom and no one to share it with.

I could start a Bookmobile that could rival my massive library system strictly with the number of volumes I possess that are only filled with the blunt, but brilliant quotes of others. They are everywhere around me: in my car, by my bedside, scattered across my desk, strapped to the belly of the dog for when we go take a walk and I’m in the mood to chew on a mouthful of metaphysics.

Everywhere.

These quotes are at the bottom of people’s emailed notes, on the first pages of great novels, spray-painted across the arch of a bridge, on the tear sheets of all my calendars, etched onto my bars of soap—that one isn’t the most cunning use of marketing dollars, but oh well, I suppose the point is that the shower is a reflective place.

And of course, I find laudable quotations from the world’s greatest source for anonymous pithiness with a pen: the public bathroom stall.

I’m not fussed where all this acumen comes from, or indignant from Oscar Wilde’s slight that the majority of us will never realize an original idea and only spout those from the cool kids of the past.

I am prepared to receive the world’s collective enlightenment as it comes and from whichever direction it blows. There are an inordinate number of clever folks out there, adept at stringing together a sentence or two that have touched me to the very core.

I leave you with two last quotes and hope you might have one to share with me. The first I’m guessing might have been the rough draft of a speech somebody in Congress was about to deliver, but then ditched. The second is simply one I would have loved to have penned myself.

We, the unwilling,

led by the unknowing,

are doing the impossible

for the ungrateful.

We have done so much,

for so long,

with so little,

we are now qualified to do anything

with nothing.

And lastly,

Some people are like a slinky … not really good for anything, but you still can’t help but smile when you shove them down the stairs.

~Shelley

Don’t forget to check out what we’re cookin’ in the Scullery and what we all talked about down in the pub. Plus, you can see more of Robin Gott‘s humor–all from the only pen carved from a human funny bone.

1Mar2014

Breaking my silence

Posted in Education, Humor, Nature, Nocturnal hours, Technology by Shelley Sackier

I owe my ears to a bug and a meditative master. Well, maybe more so to the meditative master because he’s the one who gave me a gift.

He taught me how to listen.

I don’t mean he advised me in the art of paying attention to people’s words and the message they endeavored to convey. I mean he instructed me to hear sounds, and tone, and vibration.

In absolutely everything.

At the time, I thought I had a fairly well-developed ear. I was a musician, trained to hear intonation and pitch with a considerable degree of competency. But he had a level of attention to sound that was mystifying to me. His auditory skills were on par with most owls and marine animals. Mice feared for their lives around him. Beluga whales bowed down in his presence. I just wanted a little piece of that magic.

But be careful what you wish for, right? Because a boon can just as easily become a blight.

I cannot find silence. I can’t remember the last time I have heard … nothing.

This man was a sound engineer, someone my music producer had hired to mix the final cuts of the album we were making, the film score we had finished and the commercials we whipped out. My job was done. I was excused and told to go work on the next project, but sometimes I’d plop down on the studio couch, make myself as invisible as possible and watch what unfolded.

And what unfolded was a brain twisting mystery. This man would sit in front of the sound board console and hold his breath. He was as still as the Buddha, who probably would have slapped him on the back with a thump of well done! Then he would crawl around on the floor, beneath the equipment, searching for an elusive something-or-other. Sometimes it would be hours before he actually played our music.

When I finally dredged up enough courage to ask him what he was doing, he’d answered, “I’m noticing.”

“Noticing what?” I asked.

“A lot,” he said.

And during the next year I began ‘noticing’ too. He showed me how to find the buzz in each cable, the hum in all the machinery and the layer upon layer of sonance everywhere.

I went a little wild with my practice and drove my producer crazy with my newfound enthusiasm and belief that we would both benefit from this exciting auditory adventure I pulled him along on. At one point when recording the vocals for a lush and abundantly orchestrated song, I made him stop and pull out track after track after track, positive I could “hear” something that didn’t belong there.

We found it. It was a cricket in the recording booth. Finding the cricket to pitch him out proved impossible. Finding the musicians to bring them back in proved expensive.

No one was happy with me.

Except the sound engineer.

But now I can’t go anywhere without listening for the layers. It’s not as if I’ve developed the auditory capability to hear dog whistles, but rather I’ve stopped tuning things out. And I practiced this for so many years now I can NEVER tune them out.

I lay awake at night, and hear the usual things.

The clock ticking, the dog breathing, the cat licking, the stinkbugs flying … and then smacking into walls and dropping onto the floor.

There is the sink dripping, the toilet running, the wind rattling, a coyote howling and an aircraft droning.

And when I have categorized these sounds, I am left with others that pull me out of bed and ask me to hunt them down.

The fridge has a little hum. The freezer has a funky hiss. The DVR has a purring motor that churns and roils, keeping something tiny inside of it cool and protecting it from combusting.

Down the hall in the family room I find two speakers, softly throwing out sound in the key of A. I bend down along the floorboards and hear muffled scratching—someone is busy making a tiny nest in the wall. I crawl beneath my desk and trace a treble tone to my computer’s hard drive. I start at an unexpected sound and bump my head, taken by surprise at the vibration above me where my smart phone was set to silently buzz with an incoming email.

I hear the heat vent whir to life, the soft whooshing of air, spongy and constant. Then the generator which lives halfway down the hill to the sheep barn clicks on for its weekly test drive. I open the back porch door and stand on the icy cold steps to count the multilayers of sound the generator is generating.

Far off, on the other side of the house, the wind chimes chingle.

And then I hear the birds chirping and something high-pitched and tiny. The sound takes me up the porch steps and back into my bedroom.

And right next to my bed.

It’s my alarm clock.

It’s time to start another day. Another day filled with sound.

I’m thinking the sounds will most likely be my yawns.

~Shelley

February Gotta Have a Gott winner

In January, Rob and I announced that his sketches will be available toward the end of the year in the form of a 2015 calendar! And our readers would get to be the judges and voters for which doodles they’d like to see selected for each month. We’ll reveal the winners one by one, and come November, If you’ve Gotta have a GOTT, you can place your order. Jump on over to see the cartoon winner for February!

22Feb2014

Just how nosy are you?

Posted in Education, emotions, Humor, Science, Sense of smell by Shelley Sackier

I’m not asking are you a meddling snoop and all up in somebody else’s bidness nosy, I mean how much do you treasure your schnoz?

Out of all my most cherished senses, including my sense of humor, I would have to place my ability to smell at the top of the list. This perplexes at least one of my family members, as she has told me just how short-sighted I am in evaluating the importance, need and relevance of a few other senses that should come first in line. She could be right, but short-sighted I am not. I had Lasik done years ago to fix that problem, and now, neither short or far-sighted, all I do is seem to play the trombone when bringing fine print before my peepers.

Although I’m grateful for the actual ability to smell—the heady, perfumed sprig of lilac, that warm, plump strawberry dribbling juice down my chin, and the eye-watering, throat closing fumes of sulphur dioxide—it is the result of the smells that I am more appreciative of. What is this result?

The memory that is stirred by them.

I am transported back to the day when a childhood friend stuffed my school locker with armfuls of lilac blooms. I return to the hot and sticky summers of kneeling in the freshly turned, sun warmed soil of a strawberry farm where I worked eating more than I picked. I am yanked out of sleep with the sharp reminder that I allowed the dog to finish off the Mexican three bean layer dip before bedtime.

These memories are precious. And pungent. And worthy of preserving.

(Some will be burned into my brain to ensure I will not make the same error twice.)

They are curious things, one’s nose and one’s memory, and the way in which they are linked is something we humans rarely consider. Whether it’s a flashback of your second grade teacher’s smothering hug after you lost the three-legged race on Track and Field Day stirred by walking by the perfume counter at Macy’s, or the recollection of your yearly trip to the state fair anytime someone opens a jar of peanuts, a sense of smell is something that can (and should) be practiced in order to improve. Sadly, many folks have no idea just how skilled your nose can become.

If you want to learn how to play the piano, you must exercise your fingers across the keyboard. If you want to learn how to develop your sense of smell, you must exercise your nose across a variety of aroma compounds. The nasal workout is nothing more than inhaling a diverse assortment of scents, repeatedly and without peeking—no barbells necessary.

The key to great success lies in the memorization of these odors. Sure you can easily detect hay and cowpie patties when you wander on by the edges of a working dairy farm, but can you identify those same pungent barnyard aromas in that lovely glass of pinot noir you’re about to drink? And no, that earthy terroir note does not mean your glass is destined for the kitchen sink. Balance is the key.

Have you ever walked into someone’s house and immediately recognized a scent, but couldn’t place it? It might be because you came thirty seconds too late to see the gaggle of teenage girls rush up to someone’s bedroom with a truckload of freshly made popcorn. Walk into a movie theater on a Saturday night and you’ll know in an instant that very same scent. Why?Memorization. Firstly, you expect it to be there, and secondly, it’s all over the floor.

As humans, our noses generally expect to see the source of whatever aroma is perfuming the air we’re inhaling. Invisible smells have folks casting about, searching out the supplier. If we can’t see it, it causes us to test the strength of our memory. If you haven’t practiced recognizing the scent of a banana at fifty paces, or you haven’t enjoyed the romantic routine of “close your eyes and open up,” and then guessed what was on the fork, you might want to give it a go.

Word of warning though, do not hand that fork over to an eight-year old with a stinky sense of humor. A wedge of soap, although cleansing, sticks to the palate for a good chunk of time.

Science tells us that smells and memory are linked early on, as most of the “new” smells you encounter occur during your youth, and when recognizing a scent, it’s more often than not connected with the moment you first stumbled upon it.

So you may shy away from doing a laundry load of bleach-necessary whites because you are taken back to that wretched community pool where the boys poked fun at you in your first and last ever bikini. And it’s possible you refuse to get anywhere near the nectar-sweet smell of Southern Comfort after that college frat boy party where you … well, let’s say I’ve heard about the results.

On the flip side, some people burn pine-scented candles all year long because the fragrance of the holidays is so embedded with sweet childhood emotions they’d like to sit on Santa’s lap 24/7. And others keep a nearly empty bottle of cheap perfume from the time they were fourteen and first kissed at their middle school dance as an immediate recollection of their earliest crush.

Smells evoke feelings. Scents bring back memories. Aromas manipulate the “emotional brain.”

As I am a nostalgically sappy sort, I love to jog that gray matter and recapture some history. And you can do it too by finally memorizing the smell of something without actually seeing it. It’s really very simple, and actually wonderfully fun.

So to hone your nose and develop some talent in the department of aromatherapy, remember these words: In order to have a sharp sense of smell in the future, just take a whiff of your past.

~Shelley

**Gotta Have a Gott**

Last month, Rob and I announced that his sketches will be available toward the end of the year in the form of a 2015 calendar! And our readers would get to be the judges and voters for which doodles they’d like to see selected for each month. We’ll reveal the winners one by one, and come November, If you’ve Gotta have a GOTT, you can place your order. Click here to see the cartoons in competition and to cast your vote.

How Smell Works (http://www.howstuffworks.com)
Fragrant Flashbacks (http://www.pychologicalscience.org)
Win by a nose (part 1) (part 2) (http://peakperspective.com/whisky-wise-2/)

15Feb2014

Coffee–it’s just not my cup of tea.

Posted in Folklore, Health, History, Humor, Leaders by Shelley Sackier

Tea.

Three tiny letters, but thousands of years of warmth. Tea has slaked the thirst in throats that reside on all patches of livable dust and dirt across the earth. It is universal, it is unifying, it is uniformly taking over the entire pantry.

This happens every winter. And no one seems particularly fussed. Least of all me.

I find when I’ve come home from the grocery store and have another box or bag to add to the stash, I just give a good grunt of effort to sweep an arm across another shelf to make room for the new arrivals. This section was the ‘Medicine Cabinet.’ Chances are I will not have use for that large ledge full of pain relievers, fever reducers, nose uncloggers and chest dehackers.

I have tea.

And tea is all you need.

Sorta.

I have herbal teas, and black teas, red teas and white, green teas and oolong and snoozy teas for night.

Whether loose or bagged, blended or bloomable, I am fairly certain I have little bits of leaves that fall into every single category.

And I love them all.

Okay, that’s not exactly true.

There are a mass of containers all at the back of the pantry’s multi-leveled shelving where tea goes to die. And if you happened to have read about my penchant for hanging on to everything until it becomes either unrecognizable or toxic, you’ll understand why I cannot give up the foul tasting “Be Normal” tea (you’ll figure it out … and if you can’t, think ‘anti-blockage’) or the one that will give me a healthy prostate.

Why? Because I figure there will come a time—probably during the apocalypse—where I am going to find myself desperate for anything to untwist the gut pretzel I carry around with me caused by eating nothing more than a repetitive diet of unripe bananas and large hunks of hard cheese. And because during that same apocalypse, I will come across a wandering elderly man whose only wish is to be able to pee for a full ten seconds.

I will grant him that ability.

With my tea.

(Okay, sometimes you just have to let me run with all that stuff. I’m a writer with an overactive imagination and no sense of realism. Which is why I specialize in fiction.)

But the fact is, if I have an ailment, or a mood swing, a hankering or a bout, there exists a plethora of answers awaiting their turn to play nursemaid to my needs.

There are teas to wake me up, and those to help me sleep. I have sachets full of leaves that will soothe sore muscles, calm convulsive coughs, alleviate my blues and brighten my brain.

You’ll find blends in my stockpile that can abolish your appetite, quiet frayed nerves and generate glowing skin. Dig deeper and you’ll discover concoctions to jump-start your joints, some to detox your liver and one that will help tone your uterus. Because God knows, that is the number one exercise busy women admit to skipping most at the end of a long day, and thank goodness someone found a simple solution to put in place of that monotonous but monumentally important workout.

Apart from the digestive, purifying, and organ-based well-being brews, I have a multi-level area that houses my stockpile of seasonal teas: blossoms for spring, zingers for summer, and earthy, toasty, nutty infusions all meant to conjure up warmth, bolstering your spirits through the dark and broody days of winter.

I cannot imagine a day when before I place fingers to keyboard or hand upon mouse, I have not found my favorite mug, picked out the lucky contender for my cup and placed it at my elbow. Once the slips of steam, escaping in tiny tendrils, have dissipated, it is time. The first sip begins the journey of a thousand cups – and the journey of a thousand trips to the loo.

If I could go back in time, nearly five thousand years ago, I’d hug the Emperor of China and say thank you for drinking that bowl of boiled water—you know the one where you found a few wind-blown leaves floating around inside? And you drank it anyway because you were one of those kinds of people who refused to waste the earth’s precious resources—or maybe it was because you’d had a long day of dispensing laws and punishing usurpers and couldn’t be bothered to get up and boil some fresh water.

It doesn’t matter.

You discovered paradise. And paradise tastes heavenly, so thank you.

And thank you for being part of the chain of discoveries that allowed some clever clod to create a tea that would exercise my uterus for me.

The world owes you a giant hug. And believe it or not, I’ve got a tea that can do that too.

~Shelley

Tea Facts: A-Z (http://www.finedininglovers.com)
How to make a decent cup of tea (http://www.slate.com)
10 Absorbing facts about tea (www.listverse.com)

8Feb2014

Old Man Winter has been nothing but a snow job.

Posted in Humor, Nature, Weather, Winter by Shelley Sackier

People are fickle when it comes to the weather. And Mother Nature could give one whit about what we all think.

You can pray to the sun gods, shake your fist at the rain clouds and keep your fingers crossed for as many white Christmases you care to, but in the end … it’s a crap shoot.

Okay, that’s not true. It’s actually magic.

Not true again. Yes, I know it’s science, but it is, in essence, a mysterious mishmash of all three combined.

It’s one of few phenomena that we all share at the same time—at least all the folk in your neck of the woods. And most everyone has a prediction on how much we’ll get, a story about how they got stuck, and two cents worth regarding how come this is happening.

I have raised one child and still have a couple of years left on my contract with the second. The thing they share—apart from my genetic code—is their desperate wish to be fully immersed in the season 182.5 days away from the one they are currently steeped in.

We may be splashing in a lake and taking sips from the hose, but they’re talking about how wonderful it’ll be when they can finally get their snow pants on and head to the slopes. Or as the last crimson leaves float to the ground leaving the bare-boned beauty of our forest foundations, I hear talk of jelly beans and spring break follies.

One cannot pop into a grocery store, a drug store, a shop or a showroom without being immediately transported away from the moment we’re in and hurled toward a place in the forthcoming future. I don’t want to be in next month. I don’t want to jump to next season.

I’m not counting the days till I can shed my big coat, or ditch my fur boots, locate my trowel or pluck my first berry. It is winter. It is blustery. It is cold. And tonight …

IT WILL SNOW.

I want to kiss the screen where the meteorologist gesticulates toward the cold mass of arctic air meeting head to head with the looming expanse of precipitation. I get goose bumps when my radio program must interrupt their regular broadcast for a report from the National Weather Service. I dance a little jig when I see a red banner stream across my computer that changes from a watch to an advisory and then finally a warning.

Of course, I’m aware of the dangers—the folks who get caught, or those who must clear, and worst of all, those with no choice—but in an ideal world, a world where everyone stops and misfortune pauses, the aftereffects of a snowstorm create a silence so palpable, so resonant, so clear, it is breathtaking.

Who can help but look out their window and gaze, slack jawed, at the snow globe landscape?

Okay, we may not all be feeling that warm fuzzy #let’s-make-hot-chocolate-and-build-a-fire-while-we-stay-in-our-pajamas moment. Some folks might be slack jawed and glaring at the snow with the #how-the-hell-am-I-supposed-to-get-to-work-for-a-boss-who-allows-no-excuses-except-death panic. I get it. And I’m sorry. Bosses are awful, awful people.

All of them.

Except for the ones who aren’t.

But I live for snow days and the cancelling of school. I have repeatedly been shortchanged in the snow department this winter. And I am growing desperate. In my mind, snow days are cozy, book-filled, nap-saturated hours where you dip your mug into an overflowing pot of lush hot chocolate, ladle up rich lamb stews and wait for the magic whisky hour.

In reality, I am the one making the hot chocolate and having to clean up the bubbled over, stove scorched milk because I was busy chopping veg for the stew and didn’t catch it in time.

I am sore from walking up the one mile, thousand vertical feet driveway after parking my car at the bottom of the mountain so that come the next day we are not stranded with nothing but a 5000 lb metal-encased toboggan to ride downhill in.

I am the one making the fire, stoking the fire and feeding the fire.

In reality, a nap never happens, a book is never read and I pass on the calorie-sodden brown liquid goo so I won’t feel the guilt later on. But the whisky is a must. I shall never say no, thank you and I shall never feel the guilt. If there is snow, there will be Scotland in liquid form to follow.

It really doesn’t matter, I’ll take the day in whatever form. Busy or not, just bring on the snow.

But living here where I do, it’s not just the people who are fickle about the weather, but the weather that’s fickle about the weather. No matter how sure, how certain, how promising a forecast is foretold, there have been scores of times where I am left holding a carrot and two pieces of coal with no place to shove them. Well … I do glance back at the TV and radio frequently, but that usually offers no satisfaction.

If the earth communicated to our earthly magicians that it was a sure thing to let the audience know we would soon see something magical, then by golly, somebody better be pulling a rabbit out of a hat in short order. I need an equal dose of each beautiful season.

Spring must spit out flowers.

Summer must blister with heat.

Fall must burst into flames.