Katdish.net

Today I turn 48. I’m absolutely positive I turned 48 today.Unlike last year when I turned 47 and I wrote the following post:

image courtesy of photobucket.com

The first week of August around here is referred to as Birthday Palooza. My son’s birthday is July 31, my dad’s is August 1, my daughter and my sister share an August 2 birthday and mine is August 5. And that’s just my immediate family. I also have a brother-in-law, sister-in-law and niece with birthdays in either late July or early August.

My birthday always has and most probably always will be shared with family, and I’m okay with that. What better way to celebrate your birthday than your family? My sister found a birthday card which sums up this sentiment rather nicely:

inside card

It’s funny because it’s true. We put the fun in dysfunctional.

Anyway, this year I turned 47, which is weird, because for the life of me I thought I turned 47 LAST year. As a matter of fact, if you were to search blog posts I’ve written over the past year, you will find that I’ve often referred to myself as being 47. When I was 46. Weird, huh?

Many of you may be thinking to yourselves, “How can a person not know how old they are? Was she born under mysterious circumstances? Was she left on her parents’ doorstep as a baby and her actual age is merely a educated guess?”

No. I know the day I was born. August 5, 1965. I have my birth certificate as proof. My only defense is that I honestly don’t think much about my age. Also, I suck at math.

How did I come to the realization that I was turning 47 and not 48?

Because a couple of weeks ago, my husband asked me what I wanted for my birthday. This question lead to the next:

“How old are you, again?”

Me: “Okay then. Good to know.”

So, Happy 47th birthday to me again! I’m not sure whether to be glad not to be 48 yet or sad that I never enjoyed being 46.

No matter. I’m just grateful to have celebrated another birthday. Whichever one it happens to be.

Thanks to you all for the birthday greetings via Facebook and Twitter. You made my 40-somethingth birthday that much more special.

image courtesy of photobucket.com

The first week of August around here is referred to as Birthday Palooza. My son’s birthday is July 31, my dad’s is August 1, my daughter and my sister share an August 2 birthday and mine is August 5. And that’s just my immediate family. I also have a brother-in-law, sister-in-law and niece with birthdays in either late July or early August.

My birthday always has and most probably always will be shared with family, and I’m okay with that. What better way to celebrate your birthday than your family? My sister found a birthday card which sums up this sentiment rather nicely:

inside card

It’s funny because it’s true. We put the fun in dysfunctional.

Anyway, this year I turned 47, which is weird, because for the life of me I thought I turned 47 LAST year. As a matter of fact, if you were to search blog posts I’ve written over the past year, you will find that I’ve often referred to myself as being 47. When I was 46. Weird, huh?

Many of you may be thinking to yourselves, “How can a person not know how old they are? Was she born under mysterious circumstances? Was she left on her parents’ doorstep as a baby and her actual age is merely a educated guess?”

No. I know the day I was born. August 5, 1965. I have my birth certificate as proof. My only defense is that I honestly don’t think much about my age. Also, I suck at math.

How did I come to the realization that I was turning 47 and not 48?

Because a couple of weeks ago, my husband asked me what I wanted for my birthday. This question lead to the next:

“How old are you, again?”

“I’m 47…I think. I’m pretty sure I’m 47,” I said.

“What year were you born?”

“1965.”

“It’s 2012. If you were born in 1965, how old does that make you?” he asked.

Me: “You know I suck at math.”

Him: “You’re 46. You’ll be 47 on your birthday.”

Me: “Okay then. Good to know.”

So, Happy 47th birthday to me again! I’m not sure whether to be glad not to be 48 yet or sad that I never enjoyed being 46.

No matter. I’m just grateful to have celebrated another birthday. Whichever one it happens to be.

Thanks to you all for the birthday greetings via Facebook and Twitter. You made my 40-somethingth birthday that much more special.

(Subtitled: Why my laundry still isn’t finished.)

1. With the full understanding that leaving the house today is on the agenda, you decide to wear something a bit more formal than the fuzzy polka dot pajama pants and the bright green “Whose Your Daddy?” t-shirt.
   

2. Attempts to find a pair of clean jeans prove futile. Instead, you hastily decide on a pair of red cotton capris circa 2001 and a peasant type t-shirt the same color as Oscar the Grouch. A gigantic claw hair clip and black flip flops complete the ensemble. Make a mental note that the laundry fairy has ignored numerous requests. Drastic measures must be taken.
   
3. After “errands”, i.e. – getting your kids out of the house before they drive you to drink, you reluctantly return home and begin tackling the huge piles of laundry.
   
4. Lots of random things happen, you manage to wash and dry 2 loads of whites and 2 loads of jeans. Hang up jeans and begin sorting underwear and socks.
   
5. End up with an inordinately high number of mismatched socks. Suspect the dog has found a “special place” for their sock mates.
   
   
6. Decide to put the socks in a basket on top of the dryer. Hate this idea because how are you supposed to remember which socks are in there? You may throw their sockmate right in the same basket, and that ain’t right.
7. Begin to feel bad for the socks. Serenade the socks with the 3 Dog Night Hit, “One”. “One…..is the loneliest number that you’ll ever know. Two can be as bad as one, it’s the loneliest number since the number one, Ahhhh Ewwww!”
   
   
8. Frustrated that you have no fabulous ideas about how to store the socks until reunited with their drawer mates, your mind begins to wander…
   
9. You notice a metal sign that you bought at Ross on the clearance aisle a couple of months ago. It says “Children are the anchors that hold a mother’s heart.” Which you hate, because it reminds you of that children’s book “The Giving Tree”, which makes you want to leg drop that selfish little kid/man in that book. But, it was 2 bucks, and there’s no law saying you have to keep that dumb saying on there once you own it free and clear, now is there?
   
10. Get the Goo-Off and scraper from your handy dandy tool bag and get to gettin’ on that quote. Oh, yeah. At this point, the wheels are turning in that little ADD mind of yours. You have begun the actual labor portion of the creative process.
    
    
11. While the Goo-Off soaks in a bit, you manage to get the SWSO’s (socks with significant others) and the miscellaneous unmentionables (underwear) safely to their assigned drawers. (HA! Underwear humor.)
    
12. Over the next 2 days, hem and haw over what kind of lettering you want to use on your “sock sign”. Waste an incredible amount of time and energy on this.
    
13. Finally decide on the size and type of lettering. Print out new quote, and put on sign using a stylus and transfer paper. Fill in letters with paint pen. Clear coat.
    
14. Hot glue clothespins to sign.
    
15. Hang sign above dryer, hang sock singles on clothespins.
    
16. Stand back and admire your work. You are pleased, but something is missing.
    

17. More random things happen — New Year’s Eve party, etc.
    
18. Friends come over for dinner. You show them your work. Since they are weird like you, they like the sign very much.
    
19. Moments later, one of your friends gives you an idea that will be the “piece de la resistance” to your sock sign.
    
20. After your friends leave, you immediately begin working on the final piece of your sign. It takes only a few minutes, but you are well pleased.
    
    

    As a matter of fact, you’d go so far as to say that it was…

SOCKTACULAR!

After the recent and not so recent acquisitions of several electronic devices beginning with the letter “i”, the discovery of some yet to be redeemed iTunes gift cards around the house, and the realization that a 9 hour car ride over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house can get a tad boring, the members of my family decided it would be a good idea to search for and download a few apps for the aforementioned electronic devices.

The first and most obvious choice for both of the kids was Angry Birds, which I was delighted to download for them because I am a wonderful mother and because I was tired of being constantly asked, “Can I play Angry Birds on your phone?” I’m a tad possessive of my iPhone. (Ahem.)

As captivating and addicting as those little pig killing kamikaze birds can be, one needs a little diversity in one’s distractions. After a few minutes of searching the app store, my son asked, “Can I download The Moron Test?” I looked up said app on my iPhone and decided that it was well worth the 99 cent investment. For those of you unfamiliar with The Moron Test, here’s a brief walk thru of the first level:

Pretty simple and straightforward huh? Yes and no. My guess is that was probably at least the 3rd or 4th time the person on that video played the game, and I’m being generous. How do I know this? Because it took me at least that many times to get through that level, and clearly I am not a moron. (Although I do play one on the internets on occasion.)

Most of the tasks on the test are ridiculously simple. With few exceptions, all a person needs to do to pass the test with flying colors is to

Pay attention,

follow directions carefully,

wait for further instructions,

slow down when necessary,

and be patient.

Which is why I suspect 90 percent of the people who have played that game failed the test miserably the first time through. Why? Because the faster we can get through something the faster we can get to the next NEW thing, and heaven forbid we miss out on anything.

We’re so busy trying to pay attention to everything that we rarely give full attention to anything.

What we need to do as a society is exactly what is required to master The Moron Test:

and be patient.

I wonder if there’s an app for that?

Note: This post was originally published on July 21, 2009. You will note at the end of the post that I mention Billy Coffey’s regular Monday post and a guest post every Wednesday. I’m taking a break from the Wednesday guest posts for now, but if you’re interested in sending in a guest post, email me at katdishrich@gmail.com for more details. I’ll resume guest posts when this series re-run is complete.

How to Draw a Picture (Part 6)
(Excerpt from Duma Key by Stephen King)

Keep your focus. It’s the difference between a good picture and one more image cluttering up a world filled with them
 
Some questions I have never answered to my satisfaction, but I have drawn my own pictures and I know that when it comes to art, it’s perfectly okay to paraphrase Nietzsche: if you keep your focus, eventually your focus will keep you.

Sometimes without parole.

It is a bit of a misconception that the ADD afflicted cannot focus. As a matter of fact, I have found myself so focused on a particular project that everything else simply goes undone. My struggle is not to stay focused, but to un-focus long enough at the task at hand to attend to all the other things that demand my attention.

I used to be an avid scrapbooker. The maternal instinct kicked in and I felt compelled to document every major and minor moment of my first born’s life. This just so happened to coincide with an invitation to a Scrapbooking home party invite given to me by a friend from church. I had never heard of such a thing, but once I saw it, I was hooked.

I had to stop scrapbooking. It consumed me. While everyone else was putting together entire scrapbooks in record time, I became so obsessed with creating the perfect page for a particular picture or set of pictures that I would literally stay up all night until I got it just right. While my friends simply found a few stickers and/or coordinating papers and called it a day, that just wasn’t enough for me. Mine had to be a perfect representation of my emotional connection to the moment in which the picture was taken.

I am mostly ADD with some shining OCD moments. Allow me to give you a couple of examples:

Those are just three examples. On almost every page, I painstakingly recreated one or more elements in the picture. They’re not even that artistic, but they were accurate! At the rate I was going, I would have my son’s baby pictures finished by the time he graduated high school. I just got overwhelmed by it. I still take pictures of my kids. My daughter wants to do her own scrapbooks. At almost 8 years old, she has given me every indication that her creative prowess puts her mother to shame. So, I’m all for that.

Fast forward to May 2008. I didn’t even know what a blog was until I read my friend and pastor Jeff’s blog. What a difference a year and a couple of months can make. What started as an outlet for my outright silliness and occasional prosperity gospel rants has turned into something so much more. It is a community. Some blogs are strictly informational. Mine could hardly be called that on my best day. My husband told me his favorite part of my blog is reading the comments. I tend to agree. I know I have many readers who rarely or never leave comments. I have some readers who only stop by on Mondays, and that’s okay, too.

So what’s my focus right now? Writing. My own and the writing of people who actually know what they’re doing. Because it’s not enough to be good or even great. You need exposure. And while this blog is not exactly breaking records for traffic, it’s nothing to sneeze at.

That’s why I have two guest posts a week.

Monday will be reserved for Billy Coffey until such time as he simply gets too busy to post here. Thank you, Billy. What a privilege it is to feature your work here every week, and what a pleasure it is to know you, my friend. I won’t even say something silly like, “Don’t forget me when you’re a famous author”, because I know you better than that. You’re a real class act and I’m thrilled that the rest of the world is about to be blessed by your words just as your regular readers have been over this past year.

Each Wednesday I will feature another new guest blogger. I have been really overwhelmed at the response to this. I thought I would be scrambling to find someone willing to write for this blog, but people have been so gracious, and the result has been some excellent posts and hopefully some new readers for my guest bloggers.

I know I joke around about shamelessly self promoting myself on twitter, but I’d much rather promote someone more worthy of attention than myself. It’s the least I can do. Because it’s not about me anyway…

image courtesy of photobucket.com

Howdy, folks! It seems I’ve temporarily come out of retirement to do a couple of small painting jobs. I painted all day yesterday, and will be painting most of the day today. Creative writing must temporarily take a backseat to other creative endeavors–the kind that I actually get paid for. Hope you don’t mind leftovers. For those of you who missed this post the first time around, here’s a glimpse into how my mind works. Be afraid….be very afraid

(Subtitled: Why my laundry still isn’t finished)

With the full understanding that leaving the house today is on the agenda, you decide to wear something a bit more formal than the fuzzy polka dot pajama pants and the bright green “Whose Your Daddy?” t-shirt.

Attempts to find a pair of clean jeans prove futile. Instead, you hastily decide on a pair of red cotton capris circa 2001 and a peasant type t-shirt the same color as Oscar the Grouch. A gigantic claw hair clip and black flip flops complete the ensemble. Make a mental note that the laundry fairy has ignored numerous requests. Drastic measures must be taken.    

After “errands”, i.e. – getting your kids out of the house before they drive you to drink, you reluctantly return home and begin tackling the huge piles of laundry.    

Lots of random things happen, you manage to wash and dry 2 loads of whites and 2 loads of jeans. Hang up jeans and begin sorting underwear and socks.    

End up with an inordinately high number of mismatched socks. Suspect the dog has found a “special place” for their sock mates.    

Decide to put the socks in a basket on top of the dryer. Hate this idea because how are you supposed to remember which socks are in there? You may throw their sockmate right in the same basket, and that ain’t right.

Begin to feel bad for the socks. Serenade the socks with the 3 Dog Night Hit, “One”. “One…..is the loneliest number that you’ll ever know. Two can be as bad as one, it’s the loneliest number since the number one, Ahhhh Ewwww!”    

Frustrated that you have no fabulous ideas about how to store the socks until reunited with their drawer mates, your mind begins to wander…    

You notice a metal sign that you bought at Ross on the clearance aisle a couple of months ago. It says “Children are the anchors that hold a mother’s heart.” Which you hate, because it reminds you of that children’s book “The Giving Tree”, which makes you want to leg drop that selfish little kid/man in that book. But, it was 2 bucks, and there’s no law saying you have to keep that dumb saying on there once you own it free and clear, now is there?    

Get the Goo-Off and scraper from your handy dandy tool bag and get to gettin’ on that quote. Oh, yeah. At this point, the wheels are turning in that little ADD mind of yours. You have begun the actual labor portion of the creative process.    

While the Goo-Off soaks in a bit, you manage to get the SWSO’s (socks with significant others) and the miscellaneous unmentionables (underwear) safely to their assigned drawers. (HA! Underwear humor.)    

Over the next 2 days, hem and haw over what kind of lettering you want to use on your “sock sign”. Waste an incredible amount of time and energy on this.    

Finally decide on the size and type of lettering. Print out new quote, and put on sign using a stylus and transfer paper. Fill in letters with paint pen. Clear coat.    

Hot glue clothespins to sign.    

Hang sign above dryer, hang sock singles on clothespins.    

Stand back and admire your work. You are pleased, but something is missing.

 More random things happen — New Year’s Eve party, etc.    

Friends come over for dinner. You show them your work. Since they are weird like you, they like the sign very much.    

Moments later, one of your friends gives you an idea that will be the “piece de la resistance” to your sock sign.    

After your friends leave, you immediately begin working on the final piece of your sign. It takes only a few minutes, but you are well pleased.    

As a matter of fact, you’d go so far as to say that it was…

(Oh, come on. You knew that was coming!)

Sorry/you’re welcome!

image courtesy of photobucket.com

I’m guest posting elsewhere today:

The inspiration for this guest post is the process my sad, little ADD brain went through when Bridget first asked me to write a guest post. Also the second and third time she asked me…

To read the rest of my rambling diatribe, follow me over One Word at a Time, the blog of my lovely and talented friend, Bridget Chumbley.

To celebrate the fact that I’m still busy, I thought I would expound upon my post on Tuesday. Because you see, not only were there frigintastic comments about that dumb book “The Giving Tree”, there were also numerous other tangents and rabbit trails within the confines of the comments section. As a matter of fact, that comments section could provide me with blog fodder for the foreseeable future and beyond.

Of course, no one call pull off a tangent with quite the style and grace as my good friend Beth (aka @HerbieGookins). Here’s her comment from my post, The Creative Process: A Step by Step Guide. (Which if you haven’t read yet, you totally should.):

I missed out yesterday…This sign rules in so many ways. If I let other people see my laundry room, I would totally want one.

I have a box of socks.
Call me Dr. Seuss. When the box gets full and no one has clean socks anymore, I recruit my kids and call it the sock matching game. So far they haven’t caught on to the fact that they are helping me do a chore.

Incidentally, my mom came up with a great use for lonely socks. She took them to one of her writing classes and made her students make a puppet out of them and write about it. So someone out there has a sock puppet that used to be my dad’s sock. That’s weird.
I am nothing like my mother….

Thank you, Beth for that uh….Thank you, Beth!

Now, if you don’t know me very well, you may not know that I will employ just about any creative outlet in order to avoid doing laundry. It is my arch nemesis. Well, actually math is my arch nemesis, but laundry is a close second followed by balancing a checkbook. (Okay, not really – I never balance my checkbook. Who the heck writes checks anymore anyway?) But I digress…

When I read Beth’s comment, my creative/avoidance juices really started flowing. Ladies and Gentlemen, for you viewing pleasure I give you

Socks in the Box:

(And no, I can’t make you one. Like I said – I”M BUSY! Besides, the laundry is really starting to pile up…)

How to Draw a Picture (Part 6)
(Excerpt from Duma Key by Stephen King)

Keep your focus. It’s the difference between a good picture and one more image cluttering up a world filled with them…
It is a bit of a misconception that the ADD afflicted cannot focus. As a matter of fact, I have found myself so focused on a particular project that everything else simply goes undone. My struggle is not to stay focused, but to un-focus long enough at the task at hand to attend to all the other things that demand my attention.

Some questions I have never answered to my satisfaction, but I have drawn my own pictures and I know that when it comes to art, it’s perfectly okay to paraphrase Nietzsche: if you keep your focus, eventually your focus will keep you.

Sometimes without parole.

I used to be an avid scrapbooker. The maternal instinct kicked in and I felt compelled to document every major and minor moment of my first born’s life. This just so happened to coincide with an invitation to a Scrapbooking home party invite given to me by a friend from church. I had never heard of such a thing, but once I saw it, I was hooked.

I had to stop scrapbooking. It consumed me. While everyone else was putting together entire scrapbooks in record time, I became so obsessed with creating the perfect page for a particular picture or set of pictures that I would literally stay up all night until I got it just right. While my friends simply found a few stickers and/or coordinating papers and called it a day, that just wasn’t enough for me. Mine had to be a perfect representation of my emotional connection to the moment in which the picture was taken.

I am mostly ADD with some shining OCD moments. Allow me to give you a couple of examples:

Those are just three examples. On almost every page, I painstakingly recreated one or more elements in the picture. At the rate I was going, I would have my son’s baby pictures finished by the time he graduated high school. I just got overwhelmed by it. I still take pictures of my kids. My daughter wants to do her own scrapbooks. At almost 8 years old, she has given me every indication that her creative prowess puts her mother to shame. So, I’m all for that.

Fast forward to May 2008. I didn’t even know what a blog was until I read my friend and pastor Jeff’s blog. What a difference a year and a couple of months can make. What started as an outlet for my outright silliness and occasional prosperity gospel rants has turned into something so much more. It is a community. Some blogs are strictly informational. Mine could hardly be called that on my best day. My husband told me his favorite part of my blog is reading the comments. I tend to agree. I know I have many readers who rarely or never leave comments. I have some readers who only stop by on Mondays, and that’s okay, too.

So what’s my focus right now? Writing. My own and the writing of people who actually know what they’re doing. Because it’s not enough to be good or even great. You need exposure. And while this blog is not exactly breaking records for traffic, it’s nothing to sneeze at.

That’s why I have two guest posts a week.

Monday will be reserved for Billy Coffey until such time as he simply gets too busy to post here. Thank you, Billy. What a privilege it is to feature your work here every week, and what a pleasure it is to know you, my friend. I won’t even say something silly like, “Don’t forget me when you’re a famous author”, because I know you better than that. You’re a real class act and I’m thrilled that the rest of the world is about to be blessed by your words just as your regular readers have been over this past year.

Each Wednesday I will feature another new guest blogger. I have been really overwhelmed at the response to this. I thought I would be scrambling to find someone willing to write for this blog, but people have been so gracious, and the result has been some excellent posts and hopefully some new readers for my guest bloggers.

I know I joke around about shamelessly self promoting myself on twitter, but I’d much rather promote someone more worthy of attention than myself. It’s the least I can do. Because it’s not about me anyway…

Be sure to be sure to catch Part One of Billy’s interview with Lynn Rush about the call that every writer dreams about.

Everybody and their brother thinks that they have ADD these days. You can’t swing a stick without hitting 10 people who think that they would benefit from a prescription for Adderall, or at the very least, a significant helping of Ginko Biloba. But trust me, unless you have a green, “do not duplicate under penalty of law” prescription from your doctor, drink your Red Bull cafe latte and relax — you’ve probably just got too much going on.

I, on the other hand, am the Tanya Tucker of Attention Deficit Disorder: I was ADD when ADD wasn’t cool. I fancy myself a bit of an expert on the subject. Or at least, how it affects my relationships with the people in my life. I don’t introduce myself as, “Hi, my name is Kathy and I have ADD”. But if I enter into any type of meaningful relationship with another human being, I need to put that on the table. Otherwise, they end up getting pissed off or offended, or both. Please don’t think I’m trying to make excuses for bad behavior. If I realize that I have been rude (intentionally or not), I deeply regret it and am the first to offer an apology and try to make amends. The problem is “realizing it” part.

I also recognize that there are people who think that ADD and ADHD are just made up conditions to excuse people with poor impulse control, bad manners and lack of discipline. I would invite these people to spend a day inside my head and then get back to me with their in-depth analysis. Good luck with all of THAT!

For those of you who have friends, family and spouses who suffer from this condition and choose to love us anyway, first let me say thank you. It means the world to us. You are the rocks of stability that anchor our crazy, mixed up lives, and I think God has a special place in heaven set aside for heroes such as you.

Now, on to the list:

1. We don’t mean to keep interrupting you. But if we don’t tell you what we want to say, it’s gonna fly out of our heads and be lost forever. And, by the way, it’s really important!
2. That comment we just made makes perfect sense. You just weren’t in on the conversation we started in our heads a couple of minutes ago.
3. When we tell you that something is going to take about an hour to complete, go ahead and add on the rest of the day. We suck at time management.
4. Please don’t ever send us to Wal-mart for just one thing. There’s just way too many things to see before we get to the liquid detergent aisle.
5. We’re really not sure how a loaf of bread, a half gallon of milk and a few other things added up to 87 dollars, but we’re pretty sure we needed that stuff. Okay, we already have 6 bottles of ketchup, but you never know when you’re going to need lots of ketchup.
6. We think it’s really cool that you’re good at complex mathematical equations, but please don’t try to explain it to us. It’s very overwhelming.
7. If you need us to run more than one or two errands within an allotted time period, please make a detailed, step by step list of instructions, then staple it to our foreheads. And be sure to call us and encourage us while were attempting to accomplish aforementioned errands.
8. If at all possible, do not allow us to handle the family finances. We will either drain the bank account by paying every bill as soon as it comes in, or will forget to pay any of them until we get the “red” ones.
9. We are actually very forgiving of what we consider to be your OCD tendencies, and hope that you will return the favor when dealing with our shortcomings. (We’re actually pretty amazed at what you are able to accomplish without any gnashing of teeth, and more than a little jealous.)
10. We crack ourselves up. Seriously, we think we’re hilarious. Please play along.

I’m sure you could add many more items to the list, but then it wouldn’t be a “Top Ten”. “Top 47” is not nearly as catchy! Since I like to add something about Jesus to my posts whenever I can, I’ll share with you my favorite quote from Him. It plays inside my head whenever I mess up (which is pretty regularly):

“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

(2 Corinthians 12:9)