"The Last Goodbye" - A Song for Us Hobbits

There's a song at the end of The Battle of the Five Armies (from the Hobbit trilogy) that's become one of my favorite songs.  I feel this song, especially the line about "Many places I have been, many sorrows I have seen..."  That's kinda been my last several years: many sorrows I have seen.  Many trials.  Many heartbreaks.  (Everyone who lives long enough will have many of these.)

Most recently, I had the awful experience of being on the witness stand for three hours, giving testimony against my mom.  And after nearly a week of trial, she was found guilty of ... well, of something really bad.  (She insists she didn't do it, but we think otherwise.  It's not exactly like the prosecution says, but close enough.)  And now she will spend her life in prison.  

Many sorrows I have seen.

"Honestly, I Need to be Broken"

I would like to dedicate the following song to anyone who is breaking down right now - like how I broke down this past weekend, sobbing to my husband about everything that's wrong in life and then vomiting uncontrollably for 11 hours because of tension in my neck that triggers my "throw up" button.  

Is anyone else exhausted from trying to bear up under the pressures of this fallen, evil, upside-down, post-Covid world, from watching all their expectations crumble, from feeling like the future is just one big blackhole for you and your kids, from not knowing where to turn or what to do or how to do it anymore, and from knowing that you have to testify against a close relative in court very soon?  (Okay, maybe that last one is just me.  I've been dizzy every day since just hours before I got the subpoena to appear in court.  I'm trying to figure out if it's from stress or something else, like a vitamin deficiency or something.)

Anyway, to anyone else who's breaking down too, I dedicate this song:  

"Honestly" by The City Harmonic.

Preach It, Tricia Lindsay!

A 10-minute speech we all need to hear and take to heart, before it's too late:

FreedomConvoy USA: "We have a right to resist and we have an obligation and duty to do so!" - Tricia Lindsay

And just in case social media decides to erase it, to silence her, I wrote out Tricia Lindsay’s phenomenal speech, as best I could.  And here it is:

Panic Buying

(Okay, I'm finally getting back to books.  I already brought this up, but I'm doing it again.)  

I admit it ... when lockdown happened last year (or was it two years ago?  I can't remember anymore; it's all a big blur.), I freaked out and started "panic buying."  Not toilet paper (well, a little ... okay, a lot) but a different kind of paper.  You see, shortly after the world went on lockdown, our library closed for remodeling ... and all of a sudden, I found myself in a panic.  A "what if books become unavailable" panic.  

Roses and Peonies, filtered

It's been a long time since I put any garden photos on this blog, and so I decided to post some favorites now (from my picture blog).  Because I could use a little "pretty and pleasant" in my life right now.  I took pictures I already had and put various filters on them, just to see what it would look like.  And I like it a lot.  

The Anthem of the Common People

I was just driving back from the grocery store today, listening to a mixed CD I made, and as soon as one particular song came on, I went "Oh my goodness.  If any song is the perfect anthem of the common people nowadays - a response to the heavy-handed, over-reaching governments of the world right now - it would be this one."  

And so here it is, a song for the people:

We're Not Gonna Take It by Twisted Sister  (Skip ahead to the 2:55 minute mark if you want to skip the talking in the beginning)

As one of the commenters in the comment section put it "You probably had no clue this would become the battle cry for freedom all over the world.  Love it and it fits so well with the citizens being fed up..." (LPS Lizzy Studios)

Are you sure your "vaccine" is approved?

So are you really sure that you're really going to get an FDA-approved jab next time you roll up your sleeves?

Read this (I have no idea what these websites are, I'm just sharing these articles) and see if you still think that:

FDA Does Bait and Switch with Moderna's COVID Vaccine, Fully Approved "Spikevax"

This sounds to me like the same thing that happened with the Pfizer jab.

Giggle Translate #16: Flying Tic Tacs

Every so often, for a giggle (or to distract myself from anxious thoughts), I will run something I wrote through many different languages on google translate, just to see the wonky results.  Here’s my newest one.  The original paragraph is something I mailed to a friend recently (I may have already done a giggle translate on my embarrassing tic-tac story, I can’t remember.  But there’s always room for more.)  I did this one several times, just to see what came up.  If there's any inappropriate translation, blame google translate.

 

If They Mated ...

(I posted this Jan 1, 2020, but I thought I'd repost it again, just for fun.) 

I think I stumbled upon the perfect "If They Mated ..." scenario for who I look like and how I act.  (You know, when they take two people and morph their faces into one to show what their offspring would look like if they mated.)  I wasn't trying to figure this out or anything; it just came to me as I was watching The Hobbit recently.  And once I saw it in my mind, I couldn't unsee it.  Then after I thought about possibly sharing it with all of you, my mind won't let it go until I do.  And so here it is, much to my chagrin ...

What we did when we got the virus

We always expected the virus would eventually hit us, but we managed to escape it … until last month.  We knew it was going around my husband’s work, and so, feeling it heading our way, I stocked up on a bunch of food and vitamins and immune-boosters.  Just in case. 

And several days later, we got our first positive.  Not through my husband’s work, ironically, but through my son’s.  Three days later, two more of us tested positive.  I expected all six of us to get it, but only three of us got it (the 12-21-year-olds).  (And yes, we all quarantined for 14 days.  Because that’s the incubation period for those still testing negative.) 

Thankfully, it ended up being quite mild for us.  (Who knows, but maybe if us 40+-year-olds got it, it might’ve been worse.  I know a few adults around my age who got it pretty rough, and a few elderly people who died from it.)  

The first to get it was already getting better before he even tested positive.  He had one or two days of a 101-degree temperature which went down to the 99-degree range for a few more days, and he lost his taste/smell on the third day, but that’s about all he got.  The second had a mild fever (mostly 99.4-100.5) for a week, which spiked to 101.9 after he took a bath on day 6, and a small cough (which sounded maybe a little "goose-like," the only way I can think to describe it).  And the third son was barely sick at all, just a very mild temp and the feeling of being a little “under the weather,” but we tested him anyway and it was positive, but with a super-faint line because he was already almost all done with it before we even knew he was sick.  And my fourth son who normally gets hit the hardest with illness, who gets the highest temperatures and picks up infections easier than the rest of us, never got sick.  (Thank you, God!) 

All in all, it was about 10-12 days of mild fever in the house (fevers lasted about 6 days per person).  10-12 days of me running around taking temperatures, checking coughs, making soup, serving tea, and dishing out various immune-boosters to help us as much as possible.  And I thought I’d share what we did to treat it, in case anyone else is looking for ideas.