The Sad Tale of my Little Brother and the coming of Doom 2

Cracked up when doom 2 first came out, my younger bro was so excited, camped out to get it the whole deal.

He was a fanboy over it in every way—in a manly man, gamer person kind of way though, right? Right?

So he gets it home, gets it installed, it’s the dead of night, all the lights out except his monitor right?

The opening screen came up and the music started and he said it was like the epitome of heaven and the pits of hell came out of his computer, and the music was just “ahhhhhh!”

……and then it crashed his whole system.

*room goes dark, ambient, painfully slow sounds of system shutting down, then utter silence, heavy silence. A “the universe has murdered my computer and what the hell am I supposed to do now” kind of silence*

*lmaorofl*

It murdered his computer’s face.

The look on his face was just the height of happy to “you shot my puppy” in .02 seconds.

He had to build a whole new computer to run it.

It was a mutual but silent understanding for everyone involved that we would never speak of the “computer assassination incident” ever again.

I fear for my life.

vlog #22 - a late night ramble

avsongbird vlog #21 challenging myself and upcoming events

Family is everything vlog

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HellNKQzIMc&feature=youtu.be

Lessons learned

If there’s one lesson I’ve learned more than anything else in my life,

It’s that happiness is something worth fighting and struggling for.

I've known intense pain so I seek pleasure.

I've known hatred so I seek to love and be loved.

I've known grief, despair, loss

so I strive for and celebrate happiness

Wherever and whenever I find it.

With every lesson learned,

Every hardship faced,

I find myself coming closer and closer

to the peace and the happiness I've always wanted

in my life.

And I'm grateful every day that my husband and my stepsons

and my friends and now my readers, viewers, followers,

are a part of that journey.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjae1ZveiHw&feature=youtu.be

it's been a long week - drabble by avsongbird- in word form and read aloud for those of you who prefer it

It’s been a long week. A productive one, don’t get me wrong, but still a long week.

The running training is going well—I’m doing the ten miles on my treadmill, five on a slow day, or when I’m just not quite feeling up to the ten. I’m taking two days off a week, just to let my body recharge before I start into it the following week, all over again.

I’m still crocheting—I just put down a half-finished green scarf I’m a little more than halfway done with, and then there’s the writing, the youtube, the family, the garden.

I’m tired, but it’s a good kind of tired, you know? Like the tired you feel after a good long run. The kind where you can take a step back and see everything you’ve accomplished so far, before you turn to see how much you have left to do.

It’s so important to take the time to do that from time to time—to take the step back and to not look at how much you have left to do (because that’ll leave you feeling tired, drained), but to look at what you have done, and how far you’ve come.

It may not be any huge milestone to anyone else, or even to you, but any progress is better than none at all.

Take me—I’m tickled shitless over ten miles a day, and five on slow days. Career runners and Olympic athletes wouldn’t think twice of such things. But I’m not doing this for the athletes. I’m not trying to win any medals.

I do it for my husband, for my stepsons, for myself. So that my family can see me pushing towards something, instead of always staying in the same place.

Goals keep you moving, keep you productive, healthy. And I figured it was about time I got working on mine.

My husband says he’s thrilled to see me working towards something I believe in—something I love—and we both agree that it’s important for the boys to see us both pursuing the things we love. And even if we fail at some point down the road, at least we can say we tried.

And even trying to pursue your goals and failing is better than being haunted by the “what if” for the rest of your life.

avsongbird vlog #16 frustration, running, new idea, online presence

Keeping busy- a drabble from my blogs read audiobook style and discussed on my youtube channel

why songbird- a drabble (and an explanation) by avsongbird- read audiobook style on my youtube channel

Why songbird?

               My husband asked me about my blogger name the other day.

               Why, he asked. Why songbird? He said people will think I'm a musician of some kind.

               Music has always been a big part of my life.

               When I was growing up, every morning when I'd wake up, I would find my mom had already been up for hours, and the radio would already be on.

               And it would stay on all day long.

               Big band, jazz, swing, blues, oldies, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s-- she listened to pretty much everything.

               My dad had so many records I couldn't count them all. Some of it my mom liked, some she didn't.

               Suffice it to say, I had a lot of music constantly moving through my head back then.

               I was an impressionable, curious little sponge with a pulse. And my mom was always singing under her breath with the radio-- Jim Croce, Tom T. Hall, Gordon Lightfoot (God I love his voice). Singing came as natural as breathing then. Out of everything it could've been-- my induction into the wide world of music-- it was "you are my sunshine" that ended up being the first thing I sang, and of course others naturally followed.

               Nerd that I am, growing up with two brothers-- one younger, one older-- I'm pretty sure there's a copy of a home movie out there somewhere with little impressionable sponge-like me doing the typical little-kid "look at me" stomp dance, singing the Thundercats theme song at the top of my lungs.

               Yeah, you heard me. And I knew every word by heart.

               The older I got, the more I started branching out and getting into music on my own. Of course, growing up with the music I did, I still find myself coming back to it, listening to the songs I grew up with the same way I still like to go back to old movies and old books I read when I was younger, to remember what I was going through when I first read it, and to feel what I felt back then, when I first picked them up.

               I love anything with a good rhythm, anything with a good beat you can dance to. My mom and I used to dance in the aisles in stores, and when people laughed or shook their heads, we'd just laugh and shrug them off.

               Who am I kidding? I went to visit her up north a few years back, and when one of "our songs" came on the radio, we danced like we did all those years ago. Take that, Big Lots.

               I dance in my car. Sometimes I sing backup, and funnily enough? Now that they're getting older and discovering music, my stepsons join in. It's great.

               When I was in elementary school, my class took a field trip to see some random symphony play, and I remember that being the first time I ever actually saw people play on real instruments in person.

               I decided sometime after that, that I wanted to learn how to play piano. But not wanting to bug my parents with the idea of lessons, I signed up for choir in school, figuring it would be a good way to learn how to read music.

               From that first year, I was hooked on it. I learned how to read music, how to recognize the rhythm and how to feel it more definitively. And I loved it.

               And when my parents bought me a keyboard, I labeled my keys with masking tape and a sharpie, and I taught myself a few simple songs. Nothing incredible, but enough to make me smile. Every now and again, I still find myself going back to those songs. A few years ago, I taught our youngest how to play a couple. Now he's talking about wanting to play piano, though his love is the drums.

               It might've kind of been my fault, or his dad's. My husband was a drummer in high school, in band. He still has an old snare in the garage, but he swears he's "moved past it" and that he "Doesn't miss it."

               And yet, last October, when we were at Six Flags Fright Fest, watching the live band, I could see his foot tapping to the rhythm, the way his eyes were glued to the drummer, and to the drums themselves.

               As a writer I've always found inspiration everywhere, and music was always one of my constants.

               To this day, I'll come across random songs and find myself running for a notebook, driven by the picture or the story or the scene the music put into my head.

               I've been known to listen to the same song on repeat over and over ad nauseum (On my headphones to protect my family's sanity), just to keep the idea fresh in my mind.

               Why songbird, he asked me. I was in seventh grade when I first took the name, the first email address I ever had, and my mom still gets a kick out of the fact that I came home from school telling her about the "cool new band Fleetwood Mac", at which point she proceeded to cross to the record cabinet and pull out all her old Fleetwood Mac records and lay them out on the kitchen table.

               In my defense, I thought their music kicked ass, and looking over her records, I realized I'd heard them all a hundred times before, if not more. But with all the music and all the albums and all the bands I'd grown up listening to, I couldn't remember all the names of each and every one of them.

               Growing up with a name like Jennifer, knowing as many of them as I did growing up, I remember 7th grade being the first time I had a name that was just mine, something that was just mine, the way my writing always has been.

               So when I sat down this month to start my blog, to try and get my writing out there and to give it an honest shot, and I found myself trying to figure out what name I'd use, it seemed only fitting to use songbird. Why not? I'm still the same curious, impressionable and open-minded sponge, a little older now, but still here. I still love music now as I always have. My collection is still just as eclectic, and just as rhythm and inspiration driven.

               I don't follow any specific bands, necessarily, but I do tend to revisit specific ones from time to time. At the end of the day, I go where the inspiration is, same as I always have.

               Why songbird, he asked me. I had to smile at the question.

               "Because it's who I am," I told him.

Keeping Busy

               Most people I meet on a daily basis hear that I'm a housewife and automatically assume that means I have a lot of spare time to waste. And that's not necessarily true. But I'm guessing it's the same for a lot of people. It's just that a lot of the work I do is behind the scenes.

               During the week, I share my home with my husband, his 21 year old son, four small dogs, and his oldest son's German shepherd. Every weekend, we're joined by his two youngest sons, who are 12 and 10. And during the summer, his two youngest are with us even more often than they are the rest of the year.

               If not for our smallest and youngest dog, Gwen, I'd be the only female in my household, people and dogs included.

               That many people and dogs in one house makes for a busy household on its own. Some days it feels like Grand Central Station-- everyone always in the midst of either coming or going, with dogs running every which way.

               Beds to be made, meals to be cooked, laundry to be done. It keeps me busy. And I've always loved being busy.  

               I grew up in a house where my mother always kept a garden-- fruit trees, grapevines, veggies-- she made her own jellies.

               I used to dream of one day having a garden of my own. So when we bought our first house, I spent the first year settling in, getting used to being a new housewife, and learning what that meant.

               When the end of that first winter in the house was drawing to a close and the following spring was on its way, I started prepping for my first garden.

               My husband bought me miniature greenhouses, and I started my garden from seed in early February, planning on getting everything ready to go into the garden beds themselves the third week of March. (When you live in the same town for over 20 years, you learn a few things. And if there's one thing I've come to know about this town, it's that you never plant when the air first starts to feel warm that first week of March, because that second week is a mean one. No... the third week. That's when you take your plants outside, and you put them into the beds. And not a day before, otherwise you risk losing everything to the sudden cold front that always hits the second week of March.)

               That first one wasn't much to write home about, and it wouldn't have won any prizes, but I was just tickled to death to find I grew enough zucchini to make bread. It was the first time I'd ever actually planted something on my own, and sitting there, cutting those zucchini off of the vine with the boys, I remembered all those summers I spent with my mother in her garden, picking the weeds, watering the plants, harvesting the fruits and the veggies. It felt good.

               The garden is evolving year by year as I learn from my mistakes, and I learn how to change and adapt with the sometimes-unpredictable weather. The fruit trees are getting older now, and within a few years I'm hoping to get into jelly-making. Remembering the Santa Rosa plum jelly my mother used to make, and her homemade apricot jelly makes my mouth water at the thought. I want to share those memories with our boys.

               There's something about something homemade, isn't there? Homemade jellies, homemade bread (my husband makes incredible bread, but shh! Don't tell him I told you.). I've always loved homemade things. It takes thought, and time.

               My mother has always crocheted blankets of all shapes and sizes. I've seen her create amazing patterns that she just pulled out of her head, or where she'd see a picture, and she could recreate it. To this day, if you went over to her house you'd catch her curled up in her chair, working on one. Sometimes she'd work on two at a time, and she'd switch off between them whenever the store wasn't carrying the yarn she needed.

               I still to this day have blankets she made me back when I was in grade school, and I love that-- knowing they're the same blankets I had on my bed the whole time I was growing up, and that when I'm homesick or missing my parents, I can curl up in them again.

               Now I'm the one you'll catch curled up in a chair or in front of my computer, music or movie going and me working on a blanket. Mine are nowhere near as intricate or gorgeous as my mother's are, but hey, I'm learning, and I figure that's something.

               After we first moved into the house, that first winter I saw the boys huddled up on the couch in their comforters, so on a whim I sat down and made throw blankets to keep on the arm of the couch for them to use. It felt good to see them reaching instinctively for the blankets I'd made a month or so later, when I finished them, as though they'd always done it.

               My mother made them each a blanket in their favorite colors, and, remembering how I felt about the blankets she'd once made for me, I asked them if they'd like me to make them each one, and they said they would.

               His middle son picked camouflage yarn, so we brought it home and I got to work. Over the next month, I worked on it every night, sat down with my music or my movies after the house was clean and the laundry and dishes were done, waiting until my husband would come home from work. Some nights I worked all night, trying to get it done for him.

               And then, finally, the last stitch was done, and I threw it in the washer. By the time he showed up that next weekend and came walking into his room, it was on his bed.

               He's slept with it every night since. And when we curl up in the living room to watch our movies, he drags it out with him, and he curls up in it. My gaze slips over to him from time to time, and I can't help but smile to know that something I made means so much to him. It's an indescribable feeling, knowing he loves something I made just for him.

               The youngest is next-- his favorite Avenger is Captain America, so he declared his blanket HAS to be red, white, and blue. He would've liked if I could've made the blanket look like Cap's shield, but hey, I'm only human, and he understands that.

               He's my little gardener, my little chef. Every time he catches me in the kitchen or the garden, he follows me, and he helps me, determined to learn any and everything he can get his hands on.

               Our middle son loves the kitchen, and he loves learning to cook, but he's more our thinker, our dreamer, so he leaves all the dirtiest garden work to me and the youngest.

               All things considered, with everything else I have going on and getting back into my runner's training, I can't really think of any point in the day where I stop to catch my breath, aside from when I'm here, at my laptop, writing, blogging, listening to music or watching movies and working on my blanket.

               But I like it that way. Moving into our house that first day, bringing the boxes inside, it was just a house-- just four walls and a roof with a door. But after we brought our things inside, after we painted the walls and I planted my garden, my roses-- those four walls began to feel more like a home.

               Growing up, I guess I never realized how much my mom did for us, as a mom, or for my dad, as a wife.

               Now, being a wife and a stepmom myself, I think I'm beginning to understand what it means to really be those things, to have a home and a family of my own to care for.

               And every year, the garden's getting better. Every year, the trees are growing taller, and the grapes are getting bigger.

               Every year, with each and every project undertaken, this house is becoming more a home. And I love knowing that, and that I can be a part of it. That the things I make and the things I do make a difference, even if it is just inside these walls, with my family.

               And with each and every project I finish within these walls, I find myself looking forward to my next big project. 

Another Whovian is born

               I've always been a completionist. It drives my husband crazy because he can start a new show halfway through the first season, or during a later season, and for the life of me, I just can't do it. I'm the same way with book series, movie series, and comic books. Believe me, I've tried.

               Most recently, my completionist tendencies and the obsession that many of my friends have for Dr. Who led me to seek it out on Netflix. I'll admit it, I was excited. Well, partly excited, and incredibly intimidated by the thought of the incredibly daunting task I faced-- 50 years of episodes to catch up on (Which is the main reason I put off watching it for so long). But I'd watched every available season of Sherlock (damn the hiatus), BBC Merlin, Blacklist, Walking Dead.... I was pretty much caught up on everything else, and I'd watched pretty much every scary movie Netflix had to offer aside from the really, really bad ones (And I'd even managed to muscle my way through some of those, and if you know Netflix's horror selection the way I do? You know it can get pretty bad).

               So there I was, remote in hand, bathtub-sized cup of coffee at hand, lights out, ready to go, trying really hard not to hear the echoing words of "50 years" echoing in my ears.

              And then it happened. In black and white. "Selected episodes. Not all available at this time." Gasp! No problem, right? I've always loved a good scavenger hunt. Off the couch, down the hall to my room, to the wide wonderful world of the internet, to see why there were holes in the available episode list.

               Come to find out that over the years, many of the old episodes in the first several seasons were lost to the ages, and that though a few turn up here and there, found by die-hard fans, many have been deemed to be lost forever.

               Disheartened by such thoughts that I may never come across the old episodes, and knowing full-well that one of my Aunts is a die-hard Whovian who would never take me seriously if I didn't at least attempt to watch the series from the very beginning, I crossed my fingers and toes and headed over to Hulu, to see if I'd have better luck there.

               There they were, all the (available) episodes all the way back to the very beginning of the Doctor's travels, and down I sat.

               As someone who's always loved the Twilight Zone original series, and who counts many black and white films among my all-time favorite movies, I wasn't bothered by the black and white. From the very beginning, the story was there, and as someone who's always had an overactive and fertile imagination, I'll admit I was curious from the very start. After a while, I didn't even notice that it was in black and white.

               Some of the plot lines made my eyes nearly glaze over in those first few seasons, but by the time Tom Baker took over as the fourth doctor, I'd decided that I was in for the long haul.

               It was so creative, so imaginative, so full of possibility that I couldn't help loving it. The mere idea of it.

               It took some hunting around to find out what those missing episodes were about enough to fill in all the gaps in the story, and moving back and forth from Netflix to Hulu to watch the available episodes in order, but over the course of the last few months, I made my way through the first fourteen seasons of Classic Dr. Who, and with the episodes now in full color, and the story lines becoming steadily more involved, I find myself looking forward to many, many more seasons to come.

               I was somewhere in the middle of a marathon late one Saturday night when our youngest came wandering in, unable to sleep, and, out of curiosity, he plopped down, dug into my popcorn, and asked me what I was watching.

               I rattled off a summary as we ate popcorn and got settled back in, and got him up to speed with what was happening.

               Four hours later, there he was, curled up next to me, crashed out hard on the couch, snoring away, and I had to get up to take his glasses off before they suffered an early demise if he were to roll over in his sleep.

               I just figured he was bored, couldn't sleep and heard the TV still on, wanted to know what I was up to. He does that. Over the years he's fallen in love with more than a few of the movies I've loved since I was a kid. And most of the time, his older brother wanders right in with him.

               We have Friday movie marathons every week, the three of us curled up in front of the television with a gargantuan sized bowl of popcorn. Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Back to the Future, Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, bring it on!

               The youngest wandered in a few days after he first watched the Doctor with me, asking if it was okay if he watched it on his own, and I couldn't help it, I smiled as he wandered off to seek it out, knowing it had caught his attention and his imagination just as it caught me in the weeks before.

               And so it was that two generations of Whovians were born in my house.

*****************