Wordless Wednesday - Logos, which one?

For this Wordless Wednesday, tah dah!  Images!  But of course I am never really wordless, now am I?  

Just ran across this image that I had forgotten that I created.  I've posted it here before, I am sure. 

I had forgotten all about this image I created last fall for a Done Nesting "logo" sometime last fall.  I like the focus on all the activities once again open to me without needing to check with someone.

There are several of these logos now.  Which one do you like?  The one above?

Or this one:

 

that includes the previous one with more info such as the URL.

Or maybe this one, where the URL is missing.  I do have versions with the URL too:

 

Or something simpler?  Such as:

 A bit more retro, no?  For some reason this one reminds me of "Leave it to Beaver."

Really.  I would like to have your input. 

Erma Bombeck Warned Us

We are all Erma Bombeck now.  I was perusing the Pinterest pins and surfed over to a site containing Erma Bombeck quotes when I realized that at least half of the bloggers I read are following in the ink stained trail of Erma's wit and wisdom.    But then I've always thought Erma was far more political and downright cagey than she was ever given credit for being. 

Some of the best quotes of hers from the page on women's history on about.com:

• When mothers talk about the depression of the empty nest, they're not mourning the passing of all those wet towels on the floor, or the music that numbs your teeth, or even the bottle of capless shampoo dribbling down the shower drain. They're upset because they've gone from supervisor of a child's life to a spectator. It's like being the vice president of the United States.

• It is not until you become a mother that your judgment slowly turns to compassion and understanding. 

• Graduation day is tough for adults. They go to the ceremony as parents. They come home as contemporaries. After twenty-two years of child-rearing, they are unemployed.

But I think my favorite one is this one:

• We've got a generation now who were born with semiequality. They don't know how it was before, so they think, this isn't too bad. We're working. We have our attaché cases and our three-piece suits. I get very disgusted with the younger generation of women. We had a torch to pass, and they are just sitting there. They don't realize it can be taken away. Things are going to have to get worse before they join in fighting the battle.

What, oh what, wisdom would Erma have for us in these days when men with severe and degenerative cases of '50s-ism? (def: mental illness in which an illogical and irrational desire to return to a non-existent time period during which June Cleaver and Donna Reed existed and roamed the Earth).   Pssst.  Wake up!  I think right now is the "worse" she was talking about! 

So what are you going to do for International Women's Day this year?  I think we should all do something.  Ideas?  Oh, International Women's Day is March 8th. 

Solo Road Tripping

Road trips have always seemed like they should be relaxed meanderings over highways and byways.  For me they never seem to turn out that way though.  I have a place to get to and while I might be able to have a bit of wiggle room in the dates and the stops along way to and from the main stopover of the trip.

Before I left in an old Toyota 4-Runner loaded down with some furniture, some art, clothing, bedding and kitchenware to help my daughter start her new life with her honey, Tree Boy, I had opportunity to have lunch with a blogger who really knows how to travel.  Becky blogs at Kinexxions, a genealogical blog that focuses on the area and families from my old "neck of the woods."  I do love genealogy, local history, stories of community, and someone who can string words together in an entertaining way.  I stumbled across Becky's blog quite a while back and return to it because she is a darn fine writer from whom I can learn a thing or three!  It turns out I was the first of her readers with whom she had ever met.  I can't imagine that she hasn't met others as she is such an enchanting teller of stories of people, places, and procedures. 

She has been traveling and living out of her mobile blogging studio for quite a while now, her comfortably equipped van. That is so inspiring!  I met an actual woman who travels by herself, going places and doing research, taking photographs, and sharing the info unearthed along the way in her blog.  Of course as an anthropologist I have known  many women researchers and scientists who obviously travel, but to find a woman who lived the normal sedentary life, except for that stint in the military during the 1960s and 1970s, and only allowed her happy feet to dance across the country after retirement.  Hers is a generous practice, and an inspiring one.  Women who have a nomadic streak are not all that rare.  Women who act on the urge are however a bit harder to find.  She planned, met with a financial advisor, sticks to her budget, has a very well organized van, goals for her research, and does the research she is obviously meant to do. 

Becky was going through Tucson and we had arranged to meet.  I'm so glad it worked out.  We met at the patio section of The Cup Cafe of The Hotel Congress for Tortilla Soup and conversation.  Turns out we are shirt-tail relations! Hans Jakob Brubaker III who lived in the late 18th and early 19th Century was our last common ancestor from what we can tell.  The link was found through the South Whitley Brubakers.  We chatted about Whitley and Kosciusko Counties in Indiana, the place from which we both hail.  Becky is not a gregarious person, does not like driving in big cities, and met up with me with a bit of skepticism.  It was a bit out of character for me to just say, "Can we meet?" to someone I don't know, but I so am glad I did.  It really helped me frame the trip of the last two weeks and plot about how I might be able to do a trip much more like one Becky might do the next time I head out on the road.

Holiday Juggling Squared Feeds A Writing Experiment

Oh I wish I had time to write the way I would like to write. The coming Holidays, my 21 year old's graduation from university, her birthday, my husband's 35 year old daughter, her husband who is adapting to have a prosthetic lower leg, and their twin 1 year old daughters, and her birthday all arrive within a few days of each other.

I am challenging myself to write through the frenzy of the next month. Writing provides comfort, entertainment, solace, political engagement, and occasionally income for me. I have always written on a keyboard. My first big purchase in life was when I was 16 and I purchased a professional office model Royal electric typewriter. Crisp, tidy, inviting words that I put on a page have been a near daily occurrence for decades of my life. I like to revise, edit, and hone each piece. Many, many times my creative thoughts and fingers are racing so very much faster than my internal editor can run.

Feel free to click and copy this graphic for your non-commercial blog!

Blogging, especially on a daily basis, requires a spontaneous, yet rigorous, process of writing to create a product. At least it does in my world where I don't have hour upon hour to spend crafting a final Blog product every day. Writing poetry, and writing, and rewriting papers and research reports were the mainstays of my "keyboarded" writing for ages, letter writing and journaling were the purview of pen-in-hand. Blogging combines these modes of writing that, for those of us who learned to compose on paper and then transcribe via a typewriter, come into being through different brain to hand, neural pathways and processes.

A further difference, for old fogey types' such as "Done Nesters," is that we would also nearly always do a complete rewrite as we retyped from penultimate draft to final copy. This is how we learned to create coherent pieces of writing. This differs from how the bloggers who learned to write on personal computers and laptops create their product. Most blogs also require a personality-infused style of writing that is somewhat at odds with the multiple edits and more formal style of writing that lots of 40-plus writers have as their default.

So, I am giving myself permission, in this coming month of tightly scheduled events and impromptu family activities, to write for two hours every morning. This will keep me sane. This also will require getting up at an absolutely ungodly hour and going to the gym, then writing from 7 until 9 a.m., and letting my family know that joint enterprise breakfasts will begin to be made by us as a group endeavor at 9 a.m. What this will also promote, at least that is my plan, is the honing of my quick write skills when time is crunched but there is a wealth of material from which to draw upon in those limited moments of writing time.

This wealth truly is a wealth that is made up of many rich blessings: my darling baby all grown up and moving away to go to grad school, twin one year old grand baby girls visiting our home for the first time, a son-in-law who is a wonderful writer and is adjusting amazingly well to a changed body after life-altering boating accident, and my wonderful step daughter who works in the New York publishing industry and has said she might be able to shop around my memoir about growing up in rural, bucolic isolation on one of the last truly old fashioned farms while surviving the rearing of a mother who today would be classified as suffering from the factitious disorder, Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.  These are all very exciting elements in and pf themselves, let alone together!

I know my limiting and enabling constraints; I can churn out acceptable copy the first thing in the morning. Without fail this is when my best writing is done. While there is the occasional instance to prove my generalization wrong, the quality of my writing decreases with every passing hour of the day.  With so much that I want to capture there should not be any lack of subject or motivation, so I just have to stick to the schedule and work on what I guess I will think of as flow for lack of a better word.  Flow for me means combining the personal creativity of what I think of as journal and letter writing energy with the final draft polish and editing vibes that keyboarding provides for me. 

I will have an overflowing basket of observations, rituals, and discoveries to provide prompts and topics aplenty to feed my urges to communicate in writing, and I have the schedule in place to facilitate my best effort; so,  there is actually method to my seeming madness. Sometimes the busiest time is the best time to blend in a new ingredient, this time the combining of types of writing into my own style of blogging that captures the best features of both types.

Do you agree, or am I taking on too much?

Smart Ass Education 101 - Responsibility to One's Self

I'm a smart ass. I married a smart ass. I gave birth to a smart ass. I think it is genetic. When I was young I kept my mouth shut in public, more or less, and only those who really knew me knew that I could have a wicked tongue occasionally backed up by a sharp sense of humor.

I suppose I'm pretty smart. I know those people around me are smart, and they wouldn't tolerate ignorance around them. But smart doesn't mean jack if you are trying to reach an audience. And why would I be writing if I did not have an audience in mind? I've been thinking a lot about persona, as you may be able to tell, but I've also been thinking about responsibility, and ethics... and having a place where I can rant as regular old me and not be stepping out of bounds of the blog, nor my online identity, nor my inner self.  

This blog is not anonymous.  I use a nom d' plume that is also a nom d' tweet.  If I had a name I liked better than the one I have, I might use it, but I don't.  If I had it all to do over... I'd change my name, study computer science or architecture... and....     That "and..." is why I didn't change my name.  If we attempt to edit our identity by actual editing it seems to me that we are attempting to lie.  I use "Nerthus" as a pseudonym because she is the proto-European Swamp Goddess.   I grew up in the boggy muck and clay of what is left of the swamp, fen and kame of the wetlands of Northeastern Indiana.  I also believe that associating oneself, if you are a woman, with a goddess helps bring the concept of the feminine divine and creation into personal understanding of the organization of the universe.  Male gods seem sterile to me.  Patriarchy does not inspire me to seek either within or without.  I'm nearly 100% European per my ancestry from what I can tell without genetic testing.  "Nerthus" encapsulates much that I am and with which I identify.  It isn't a lie. 


I own my actions and I am usually careful about what I say and do, not limited nor constrained, but careful.  This blog, that I am trying to power-boost this month by constant blogging (daily to me means constant,) will contain smart ass irreverence and more statements unsupported by links than my other blogs.  I do not want to have to research and document every single thing I say.  I can back up everything I write as nonfiction.  I have been shoving facts in my brain for close to 45 years and I know a lot.  I have been blessed with a life rich in experience and travel and education.   I'm not saying I won't share links; I'm not saying that I just want to spout bullshit.  I just want to write as though I was just sitting at a table, drinking coffee,  talking to other women who can relate to me in some way and engage in women's humor.  Maybe I remind you of your mother, daughter, sister, or friend.   I'm willing to talk to men, I've actually been VERY close, lol, to some men in my life, but I have a tendency to see guys as not really interested in just talking.  And that is what I'm doing here.  I'm just saying. 

Gonna Get This Blog Going!

Created this icon to motivate myself and gear up for 30 days of back-to-back blogging and posting every day of every week for a month. You can read about National Blog Posting Month and how it started out by clicking on the badge. That will take you to the NaBloPoMo site where you can find out about all the history and current incarnation of the event. 

Should be a good exercise. I've wanted to really get this regular old non-niche personal blog going for quite some time and the time seems right. I'm having nose surgery for a septum that is pushed way over to the left not allowing air to flow in the left while my right side takes in all the air and becomes too dry and causes all sorts of troubles. So on Friday the 10th I will be out of it, and probably on some pretty strong pain medication for a few days thereafter so my posts should I hope be somewhat amusing on those days.  Not promising they will any sense on that Friday or Saturday.  But blogging will certainly give me something to do while my freshly, and medically, broken nose heals. 

Just got the email today letting June participants know what the theme is.   It is "fan" as in the little whirly cooling thing or someone who follows a particular team or event zealously.  There is no requirement to use the theme unless you need it for inspiration.  I think there may be daily prompts too.  I will find out more as the event develops. 

Wish me luck and determination to successfully complete the challenge and become habituated to posting every day and improve my skills.