Tuesday blog

There's an interesting meme site where you can find memes attuned to certain days of the week.  That's where I usually get my Friday memes when I do those.  I have been so zonked today because Lucy the Wonder Dog barked, I kid you not, ALL night long and my brain is toast.  I thought that I might not do a meme or an entry at all today (and perhaps I should have gone with that thought) but I've been thinking about yesterday's quote from my Mary Engelbreit calendar for a couple of days.  The quote is, "A friend is someone you can be quiet with."  There's a lot to that, isn't there?  How many friends do you have that you can be quiet with?  I don't think I have many that I am quiet with.  By the time I get around another adult who's willing to talk, I'm certainly willing to hold up my end of the conversational chain.  Yak yak yak!  I do think that I could be quiet with most of those women but the person that this holds true with the most is Friend Husband.  Lately, after the children are in bed, we sit on the big couch, side by side, and do our thing.  I knit or read and he works on the computer or reads.  It's kinda nice.  We just sit and enjoy being next to one another.  I can see us doing that when we're old...sitting and communing without words.

So, I'm blipping through the memes today and there's one where they give you a prompt and you're supposed to write about it.  Today's quote was from Jack London:  "You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."  This reminded me of a story I read about him in my daughters' Highlights Magazine.  He said that it was important to work at the pastime of writing, not to just wait for the muse to strike.  His policy was to go to his office after breakfast and crank out some specified number of words before lunch.  He said that even if it was trash, you've still accomplished something and more often than not, you've got something decent to go with.  So I had to laugh when I read about going after inspiration with a club.  I'm not sure that I agree that you should go after it with a club but I think that it presents itself more often in a guise which is usable, if you've been preparing for it and perhaps persuing it all along.

I have five children, three of whom I homeschool and two of which are two-year-old toddlers.  If I waited for the muse to appear, I'm sure I'd be waiting for a while.  Although the children inspire me to write about a lot of things as I'm slowly going mad, I don't think I'd take the time to put anything down if I wasn't insistent on doing so.  That insistence is my club, I guess.  I do what I can when I can and occasionally I have to be pretty insistent that I get a little extra time to do something in order to finish what I started.

Like today.  We have this ironclad rule that you don't get interrupted during your computer time.  It's ironclad on my part but not on the part of my children.  I've been interrupted no fewer than five times while I've been attempting to write this measly post (now you know why I have some continuity issues) and once I've had to go upstairs to wrestle David into clean diapers and clothes.  But I've noticed that the more I attempt to write (knit, quilt, read) on a regular basis, the better I get at the work.  So I persevere. 

Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but occasionally you get something out of it.

Posted by CarpeBanana

LOL at "continuity issues." I have decided homeschooling Moms live a life of continuous interruption.

Our homeschool has this CS Lewis quote as my theme: The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come.

Posted by AcceptanceWithJoy

[A friend is someone you can be quiet with] and I would add that the silence was comfortable, like a warm blanket. I have been with people when the silence was so awkward, you could cut it with a knife.

We have the same ironclad rule. Marissa told me if I wanted her not to bug me on the computer, I should do it in the morning before she wakes up. Aren't teenagers cute?