Soundtrack of my Life…

This and That

Play it again, Sam…

SOMETIMES

If there were a movie about my life, there would be a certain song or instrumental for each segment.
Childhood: Itty Bitty Fishie in the Itty Bitty Pool
Mares Eat Oats and Does Eat Oats, and Little Lambs Eat Ivy

Teen: Vaughan Monroe, Ghost Riders in the Sky
Mabelline
Bill Haley and the Comets, Thirteen Women…on the flip side of Rock Around the Clock.
Third Man Theme
Peg O’My Heart

Work Era: Bizet, Carmen
Mario Lanza, Song Angels Sing
Be My Love
David Carroll’s band, In a Persian Market
Scherezade
I Love Paris
Song of India

CCR, Heard it on the Grapevine
CCR, Bad Moon Rising
CCR, Green River

Stevie Nicks, Edge of 17
Knights in White Satin long version

Roberta Flack, Sometimes…all I need is the air that I breathe and to love you

I Think I love you

Juke Box Hero

Nal Diamond, Holly Holy

Im Saving my…

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159 thoughts on “Soundtrack of my Life…”

    1. hmmm…I see the comments were closed, not sure if that is by WP routine or what. I didn’t personally close any. Maybe there’s a limit? I’ll see what I can do to find out.

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      2. try leaving a comment on my “pink spaceship” post yesterday. It is a true thing with my oldest great granddaughter, now 12, when she was about four. She chatted about her pink spaceship that was coming to take her home all the time she was here, and when we went outside to take her home she was visibly disappointed because her “pink spaceship” was gone.

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      3. She is the same kid that at about 8 or 9 months old, sitting between me and her grandma/my daughter on the couch, one day. She recited a long comment about something, looked from one of us to the other, using punctuation and syntax and all that stuff. It was “babble” but like listening to someone in a foreign language who one doesn’t understand but know from listening that the person is indeed saying something important. BTW, she did NOT repeat her comments to her mother…who thinks we are all nutty anyway.

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      4. Kids are amazing. The Offspring started ‘talking’ at a young age as well. Gah it seems like just yesterday instead of 30 years ago.

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      5. My oldest son spoke in single word bytes until he was about three… cookie, doggy, outside…etc then all of a sudden he started speaking in sentences and using all the parts of the language.

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      7. That he did! We lived in a housing development at the time, and his bedroom was close to the driveway of the house next door, which included several teenage boys who spent a lot of time tinkering with their cars….using some colorful language. He learned some terrible rhetoric that way. :-0

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      8. lmao!!!!! My parents said much the same thing about me! I was just 4 when we first arrived in Australia and didn’t speak any English. I hung around with the neighbourhood kids for 3 months without saying a word then suddenly I began speaking fluent English – of the colourful variety!

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      13. Daughter says that I go into “lecture mode” and expound endlessly. That is often when we are discussing some point that is well-known to one of us but not the other.

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      15. Well sometimes I have pertinent vital information about things that the “listener” needs to know, especially about city ordinances and stuff like that. I don’t expound about subjects that I know little about, and don’t deal in conjecture.

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      17. well, one thing we all learn later than sooner is that the “elders” are the treasure troves of information…to ignore them is to deprive oneself of vital info.

        Example: my Florida kin are looking for my mother’s mayonnaise cake recipe. I related it word for word from my recipe card which is decades old. It calls for specific measurements and ingredients…real cocoa powder, not drink mix…two egg yolks…etc. When a recipe is desired to be reproduced…if ANY changes are made to the recipe, (less salt or whatever) I will not guarantee results to be authentic. Jeez…and use yer heads on the baking time…temp is 375…don’t argue with me, use a freakin toothpick!

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      18. -giggles- Yes! My Mum taught me to cook the basics when I was just a kid, including the techniques that go with the recipes. You can make changes to recipes once you know exactly how they work, but substituting ingredients right off the bat is asking for failure.
        I’m so glad you still cook with ‘real’ ingredients. It’s not that much harder and the difference in flavour is huge.

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      19. uh…what cooking I still do I use my old techniques that served me well back in the day…but it just galls me to give someone a recipe and hear “well, I’ll leave out the salt, and substitute applesauce for the shortening, and use skim milk instead of heavy cream…” uh, OK, but don’t complain to me when the result is disappointing and “nothing like the real thing.” :-0

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      21. a clue to the one that wouldn;’t go through to you… my comment when I was trying to get through was: “,,, was it what I said about Putin being so handsome?”

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      23. there were a few days there when I didn’t get anything from you, and nothing I tried got through either. So I asked if it was something I said. I know…unlikely,

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      24. No. There’s something about chatting via the comments that is the problem. I think there must be some kind of storage limit perhaps. -shrug- No idea. 😦

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      29. well, I just switched internet/cable/phone service. Everything went off without a hitch so far except porting over my existing phone number that I’ve had for 40 years…maybe 50 years… so I have several new chat friends with whom I chat about my telephone, or lack there of.

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      30. I’m glad it went well. We only have the two mobile phones and the ADSL line now. That line is only used for the internet so now we have to always remember to charge our phones. 🙂

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      31. Even the “porting over” of my telephone number that I have had for 50 years went smoothly…the other cancellation of service with the company Wow!… yes … went well. The drawback of this combining or bundling of phone/TV/internet is in the keeping of one’s own original number. I discussed this with one of the techs…my new pal from Tennessee who said that her whole family switched to new service and lost their numbers….she is the only one who has their original from years ago, so she says she gets calls from obscure people she hasn’t heard from in years that are looking for her mom, or sisters’ etc new numbers.

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      33. We are urged to keep landlines for 911 emergency purposes. Now the cell phones apparently have powers to connect to emergency even from a “dead” phone. Progress…with ominous overtones!

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      35. ha…exactly. The new phones have really scary capabilities. Now with the “burn phones” now, though, one can conduct and complete their dastardly business and toss the phone in the trash…with only limited traceability.

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      37. actually in my humble opinion, the gadgets have been active for a long long time.. I just went to a new cable/internet/phone service. I have a little old TV that I want to hook up in my office, but the tech told me they can’t use those old tv sets because they need specific connectors.

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      38. It’s like the GPS… my friend (for one) relies on the voice we call “Millie” to get us where we are going. I laugh when we end up out in a field somewhere with a cow looking at us… I am not making this up!… and Millie tells us “You have NOT reached your destination.” Yes, I’m a Luddite…give me a paper map any time. 🙂

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      39. wow! just had a message from yahoo that my book about Billy Graham has sold. I just updated the listing last week when he died, usually my marketing skills are pretty lax.

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      41. I love selling books online. The vast majority of mine are “scarce” or unusual titles from the mid 20th Century that were once big sellers but now are obscure. I bought out the collections of a handful of educators, historians and teachers. I have about 1500 books listed (Amazon, Alibris, Biblio…etc.) and twice that waiting to be listed.

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      43. I do enjoy the sideline. At the moment though I have a customer in Hawaii that hasn’t gotten her book yet. Theoretically Hawaii is the same cost for postage rates as any of the other 50 states (except Alaska.) The package is “lost somewhere in San Francisco.” USPS tracking says its left SF… God knows where it is, probably languishing somewhere . The big issue with this sale is that the book is scarce, mine one of very few on the Amazon list, and I can’t replace it. It isn’t terribly expensive, but that isn’t the point, the buyer wants her book and I want the transaction to go smoothly. Some sellers don’t ship to Hawaii and state so in their listings…I’m beginning to see why. Media mail cost is trivial, but any other postage would be exhorbitant in most cases.

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      45. Some dealers won’t send packages to Hawaii. I’m beginning to realize the reasoning. Books, etc. go for Media Mail, of course, but First Class packages are limited to 13 ounces. I am tracking the movement but all it says is “in transit from [hub] to destination.” Which I am afraid translates to “in Limbo somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.”
        Stuck in some corner of a bin somewhere? I can refund the buyer’s order, but the specific book is in Fine condition like-new, super duper Dust Jacket, and at a very reasonable price…$8.95 I think.

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      51. I think if I were stranded on a desert island with a few reams of paper and lots of pencils…I would write a book to entertain myself. I am fair about my work, though…I am critical (“omg I did not write this crap!”) as readily as “omg this is good!”)

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      54. I have all my notes, papers, other paraphernalia from all my college and university courses. Looking back over papers there is a lot of red ink with remarks like “you can do better than this.” 🙂 Indeed usually some half-assed thing I threw together at the last minute.

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      56. yep. Furthermore I also have all of my old steno notebooks from my news reporter days, board and council meetings, interviews. These have no practical value, and my old Gregg shorthand (the single best course ever from high school) is still readable, sort of. 🙂 I used my shorthand in every job I ever had…well, except selling roasted nuts at the dime store downtown when I was 16. 🙂

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      58. No. Except for a few feature stories there is nothing interesting in those notebooks unless someone wants to re-fight the old land development tales.

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      60. It was ordinary newspaper reporter coverage, a long time ago. Actually there is a story there, about how a small oligarchy of appointees consistently voted to repress development of a growing city … no shopping centers, no city water, no city sewers… obstruction big time. I know because I spent a decade or more working on it. long story…

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      61. the reason I gave up the city jobs and the newspaper was because I wanted to pursue higher education. My kids either had or were in process of finishing degrees, so it was my turn. Much of the credit goes to my late husband…who loved everything I did (except house keeping.) I have blogged about that a lot since I started the blog Sometimes in 2011.

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      64. What I would and probably will publish is some of my papers I wrote as a grad student. They require some rewriting for general audience. I was within one last draft of my doc. dissertation, which I wish now with all my back-looking wisdom that I had finished. I believe a university press would have published it, dealing with the development of the church in Mexico and Liberation theology.

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      66. Yes. The academic work had to completed in ten years; mine was, and I am officially “All but Dissertation” ABD. After the ten years was up the History department voted to give me another year to finish up (fairly common). I literally was on my last draft before approval. However, in my stupidity, I decided I was not going to finish it for various reasons. I regret it…but … However, I can and intend to publish parts of it, in short bites and major rewrites (san bibliography.) Also, I have a novel based on my research, which I started NANMO…whatever the initials are…the month long writing project headed to 60,000 words.

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      68. I saw the one about the soundtrack and liked it. Can’t remember if I commented or not. Pretty sure I didn’t get a notification on the Moon one.

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      69. the moon one is titled “Direct Line…” its from two or three years ago. I was really into writing poetry, probably when taking a WP class. I still like to write poems, but they tend to be darker than the ones I wrote for the class.

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      71. WP was hosting some fun cool courses on writing fiction, or poetry, or whatever…a lot of my best contacts came from those classes. So now when I am in a funk I go back and get something from two or three years ago and it is brand new to most of my “followers.”

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      72. lol – I’ve been revisiting old posts too! I had to curate the over 1100 I had on WP before I migrated them over to Medium. Some left me thinking ‘oh, that’s better than I thought’. Others…best forgotten. 🙂

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      76. It bothers me slightly that some Haikus are translated into forms that do not make any sense of point or anything…no rhyming, strict syllable count…but I like to have some level of meaning or logic. The master, Bansho etc. of course do Haiku well, but amateurs tend to forget they are imparting something to their readers. But I am an amateur myself, of course.

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      77. I studied Japanese at uni. but all I’ve retained is a love of the sound of the language. It’s polysyllabic [except when the men use the abrupt, male form]. They have a long, long history of writing poetry though. Samurai were supposed to be poetic warriors. The sound of Haiku in Japanese is quite musical.

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      78. I know nothing about the language. At UofA I did have a “conversation partner” (English as a second language program) from Korea. He was a 40-something Engineer and spoke virtually no English…I spoke even less Korean, none. We were able to converse more or less based on his engineering knowledge and my experience as secretary on the city zoning/planning boards.

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      80. It is amazing what Chung and I managed to find in common. He had written his thesis on the builder of our White House…and I went to the library with him to help him find books on the subject. Also he did a paper on the Battle of Lake Erie…which is “our” Great Lake…

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      83. Chung was making a drawing to illustrate what the company he worked for did, which was connect numerous tiny islands along the Korean coast to the mainland. I knew exactly what he meant because there is a lot of that land-reclamation project around here.

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      85. Land reclamation works well along coast lines and lake beds, etc. where there are tiny islands off shore that can be combined. Here in Cleveland there is an airport that was built on such property.

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      86. In Huron, Ohio there is a city park built a mile out into Lake Erie, having been formed from the dredging of the harbor by the US Corps of Engineers. 30 or so years ago my husband and I watched and photographed the progress, and I did a story for the newspaper. I did a blog post last year, but the photos I used were not excellent…actually it was the photo program that was lousy. I’ll do it again, but I want to go out there and do some new photos. I will just drive out there by myself I think, so I don’t have to listen to whining about how long I’m going to be there. (As long as it takes…)

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      88. I love the idea of haiku but it just doesn’t have the same ‘something’ in English. And I couldn’t write it even if I tried. lol

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      89. In my humble opinion Haiku is meaningful mainly in its native characters…drawn out English words just don’t capture what a character picture can. I like Haiku, but I like to make some kind of a point with the verse. (So, you say its Haiku? So, how long did it take you… to find the right words?) 5-7-5
        I am never serious enough for some diehards. lol
        Haiku is lost on those who don’t like you.

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      91. Also I think there is something in the Characters that can’t really be captured in ordinary language words. For instance, most anything sounds lovely in French, but the same exact thing would be less than lovely in Russian.

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    2. OK, apparently I had a 14 day cut off for comments on individual posts. I changed that to 60-days because I adore appropriate helpful comments. some posts are “discovered” months later. 🙂

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      2. That’s just what happened last week when several of comments went to the “reply failed” place. Even after later comments started going through again, I tried that one and got the “reply failed” again. ? wtf

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      4. There is a way to reset your comment info. I searched WP…it shouldn’t be that obscure!…and determined that first go to My Sites, then on the dashboard go down to WP Admin then to Comments and eventually it pops up where the specs for Comments is. (maybe…maybe not)

        I had a devil of a time last year when they changed the Add Photos thing. More than once I was in tears trying to get new pics onto the library. I begged for help, and was told that it was working fine and I must be doing something wrong. wellll, it is fixed now, and I DO appreciate it. Hope I didn’t speak too soon.

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      5. Yeah, WordPress is quite a powerful tool but it’s not exactly clear as glass. Then again, I’m struggling to make sense of Medium at the moment and /it/ is like wading through mud.

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      7. -grin- Me too! It makes me the perfect tech writer coz I make the same mistakes ordinary users make. The techs, on the other hand, don’t even look at the instructions coz they already know how to do it all.

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      17. sad but true, computers are only as intelligent as their programmers … which is not a bad thing, staring down the future when AI starts programming itself. yikes!

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      23. My son had a sleep apnea test and (since he doesn’t read or write much) part of my job is to fill out such questionnaires as the “staff evaluation.” On the top of the form it says: “…are you the patient? Yes or No. If not then do not fill in this information. ” So I, good girl that I am…flagged down the nurse and pointed out that the form said only the patient was supposed to fill in the form. She said oh that’s OK, anyone could fill it out. hmmm, so I marked son’s comments on the form via the check boxes. Then when I finished I called again and asked what I should do with the completed forms…which were supposedly “top confidential.” The nurse said “oh just give them to me.” OK, except that made the whole thing a mockery…which I suppose it was just the bureaucracy at work. [The eval form was about the nurse herself…]

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      24. Gah…how ridiculous. I think these regulations are often created just so ‘they’ can blame someone if something goes wrong. :/

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      25. When I was a TA one of the “extra” perks of my job was that I occasionally did side-jobs, like tabulating instructor and teaching assistants evaluations. Such a subjective process…they had at Akron U a requirement for all students to take three World Civ courses…Middle East, Japan, Latin America…etc. Many students hated the requirement so that meant they hated the instructor…they would go on and on in the eval complaining about having to take some course that had “nothing to do with their major.” So, they took a given class because it was at (for example) 3pm Wednesday…not because they actually chose a specific content course.

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      27. It wasn’t that they were bad students, on the contrary, many were pre-medical students and science, various tech courses. Many of these were men from the Middle East etc…. not only did they resent having to take the World Nations (whatever it was called) requirements they also disdained women and any other “inferior” groups. They didn’t choose the courses because they were interested in the subjects, but because the classes were at specific day and time so they fit into their schedule.

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      28. Ah so a fair degree of resentment at the system? I can see how self-important young people would then take it out on whoever was close to hand. 😦

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      29. They saw no good reason why they were forced to take study of “third world countries_”
        and areas different than their own. Such courses were irrelevant and a nuisance to these students…

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      30. Hmm…I agree and disagree. A tertiary education should create a rounded intelligence that’s capable of questioning and thinking for itself. I guess the problem lies in how heavy handed the ’rounding’ is.

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      31. My middle daughter was a nursing student at the time, and she took a course that fit into her schedule…she said as long as it was required she might as well tackle it with enthusiasm…learn something instead of arguing and sulking against it.

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      33. well yeah, when there is something that must be done and there is no way out of it, just make the best of it and learn something in the process. The time spent grousing and bit…ing about it can be better spent by just shutting up and do it!

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      34. At Cleveland State everyone had to study “black history.” The scope included such as African Art…any course in any way relevant to black people.

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      36. Dreamtime? In my opinion, the people who write the history books and decide what needs to be “updated” are not to be trusted. Our schools are permeated with bible stories, especially in the South, well, I’m not going there this morning. Our Idiot in Charge has fired the Secretary of State (who is at least an adult, and once called trumpie a moron! F’in moron, to be exact.

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      37. Our indigenous people have creation myths that they call the Dreaming or the Dream Time. White kids are only now starting to be taught some of these amazing non-white ‘stories’. And yes, when I went to school, there was no mention of the aboriginals who were massacred when they objected to the White Fellas taking over their ancestral lands. Grrrr….

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      38. of course not… 🙂 white kids learn about things, then when they are in advanced college courses they start UN-learning them and learn some other versions. Unfortunately the first thing “we” as humans will do when we encounter an alien race will be to enslave them, or kill them.

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      40. It is amazing to me to see the similarities of creation myths from various parts of the world. Our soap opera “General Hospital” which is still going strong after 40 years+ had an episode once where one of the characters (the actor was really Australian) and for awhile the story line theme dealt with Australian walk-about, etc. I only remember it dimly but they introduced the theme with a haunting music theme, maybe a diregidoo. I often wish I would have known my Australian grandfather, but they always lived in California, and I always lived in Ohio….I lived in California for a year when I was five. Grandpa had a diner, and was always working, so I never got to know him. His wife Grandma came back to Ohio after Gramps died, but by that time I was married and gone.

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      42. Daughter has finished Innerscape1 + 2, and is reading 3. She loved it so far! I am now re-reading Miira, and enjoying it; I tend to get points that I missed this first time. 🙂

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      43. Once my grandson was doing a report on where his ancestors were from, and he said his great-grandfather was born in Australia. His teacher scoffed at him and said “NO ONE is born in Australia…”

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      44. -face palm- Oh my….it’s a standing joke here that everyone thinks we have kangaroos hopping down main street, but it’s kind of annoying to have our whole history dismissed like that. 😦

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      45. sometimes the stupidest people are the ones that teach our kids….shudder… just try to discuss Columbus’ discovery of America… the whole “shining city on the hill” concept, the first thing the Puritans did was kick out anyone who didn’t agree with them. Freedom of religion…ha! we need freedom from religion; the Evangelicals would really love to take over here…shades of the Taliban or whomever.

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      47. They also disliked and resented any instructors with foreign accents (those who were Americans) and usually gave low evaluation marks to any foreigners they claimed they couldn’t understand, etc. My fellow-TA one semester was a woman from Beijing, very well spoken (a grad student from China) and many of the students objected to her grading of their papers and exams.

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      52. oops if you saw any snippets of our “news” over here, #45 fired our Sec of State Tillerson, appointed a new CIA director… aye yi yi yi yi! the rabids (Rs) ended the house investigation, said no collusion…

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      53. OMG….no I missed that about Tillerson. Why? I thought he was a hand picked appointee? I guess he mouthed off about Trump accepting the North Korean ‘invitation’ without consulting. Bloody hell. His administration is literally falling apart.

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      54. Tillerson was handpicked; a very rich oil-company executive; he was, however, like the grown-up in the room, and we/I got to appreciate him, if only because of his great desire to not blow-up the world. Tillerson is also the one who famously called trumpy a “f…moron.”
        What trump wants in his appointees is undying loyalty to him…him, not the country. He has fired a lot of them, and several more are on the chopping block. It must be like living in a fantasy movie working at the White House. horrors!
        There is only one opinion trumpy cares about…and that is any one that supports what HE wants to do or say.

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      55. daughter is almost through reading Innerscape 2…she loves it, as I knew she would. When she finishes them all I plan to start reading them over from the beginning, I missed a lot of details I think.

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      56. -grin- You have no idea how happy I get when I hear that someone’s reading and /enjoying/ the story! I facilitate a small writers circle at one of the community houses I volunteer at, but none of the ladies there read sci-fi. I almost fainted when one of them said she’d read the whole story…and very seriously took me to task for a bit of an info dump in the first book! Then she said that the rest was great. I was so astonished I did not know what to say or how to wipe the smile off my face. 😀

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      57. sure I do, it would be weird if you didn’t relish good comments about your writing. I browsed my Twitter yesterday and found a comment by someone I never heard of about a poem I had forgotten that I wrote…and had to check for sure.

        Your writing style is excellent, you are able to pack information into a few sentences that less talented writers would use several paragraphs and/or pages to get across.

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      58. I attended a handful of writers’ meetings. I remember two things about one of them: my few-page segment of a novel I was writing included a “sleeper agent,” a “mole,” and the resident English teacher said it was “like something from General Hospital” (soap opera.) I was highly indignant. The other thing I recall was that someone let the hostess’s dog in from outside, and he/she dashed into the middle of the circle we had formed…looked around…dashed back out and came back with his ball. I for one loved that…he figured as long as there was a group gathered what other reason could there be but to play ball with him. haha…

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      60. Medium has a different ‘feel’ to WordPress, but I think you might like it. Instead of a ‘Reader’, there’s a kind of homepage that includes featured articles, popular articles and articles from or about the particular topics you like. Honestly, I much prefer it to the mish mash in the WordPress Reader. I used to go through the Reader a lot when it featured mostly the sites that I was interested in. Now it’s full of articles from bloggers I’ve never heard of. Waste of time when time is so precious.

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