Yellow Wallpaper

Tonight we watched the movie Kiki's Delivery Service , which is the story of a young witch who moves to a new city to learn how to live on her own. In the movie she is only 13, which seems awfully young (and even other characters comment on her youth), but apparently in that world it is normal for witches to do this. She mostly finds good people to help and mentor her and to become her friends, and the drama in the story is fairly low-stakes as she learns how to work through life. Then I got on the computer and read a blog post from a woman who has been teaching her preteen daughter how to use public transit to get around her city. I realized that my kids are much more sheltered and less adventurous than I was at their age.  I had an early-morning paper route starting at about age 11 that I kept through starting 9th grade (because Seminary interfered with it). Every single morning I'd wake up early, fold up all the newspapers, load them in my bags, get on my bike, and ride ar...

I've been sitting on this for a while, because I'm not sure I can write anything interesting about billboards. I even debated skipping this day, but I figured I might as well give it a shot.  When I was little, the bank my mom went to was next to Rock Liquor. We would often wait in the car while my mom went into the bank, and I was always fascinated by two large murals on the side of the liquor store. There was a painting of a bunch of people eating lunch in bright, summery dresses, and a poster advertising dancing in French. It wasn't until I was much older that I realized that the murals were reproductions of paintings by Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec, and not just liquor ads. The other billboards I remember spending a lot of time pondering were the ones I saw in Spain as a missionary. As missionaries we spent most of our day out on the streets walking around, or riding the metro or buses. We saw a lot of advertisements and billboards, and since I was learning Spanish, ...

I generally have a good memory and there are a lot of things I can remember very well--in fact, I have a bit of a reputation at work for keeping track of stuff and remembering things I have seen. However, there are plenty of things I don't, or can't, remember (and some I don't want to). For some reason I haven't memorized my library card number, despite the fact that I've had the same card for about fourteen years and use it regularly. I think it has to do with the fact that I can just scan it so I don't have to type in the numbers. I also worry that I'm not going to remember any passwords anymore now that I started using a program that remembers them for me. What if I have to log in to something from a different computer? I also have the same problem with my AppleID--I need it so infrequently that every time I need to use it, I have no idea what the password is, so I just have to reset it each time. Another thing that I cannot remember is music. I'v...

Several people I know have been following the Eight Minute Memoir prompts that Ann Dee Ellis has been posting on her blog.I'm more than a year behind, but I don't care, so I'm going to try it anyway to see if I can get back into writing and blogging. Instead of starting with the current prompt, I'm going to go back to the beginning.  I remember when gas still cost 99 cents a gallon, and it seemed incredible when the price started creeping up higher than a dollar. I also remember when we lived in Seattle in 2008 and gas prices were crazy high, and we once passed a gas station that was selling it for over $5.00 a gallon, and I thought that was outrageous so I took a picture. I used to worry a lot about gas prices, but now I don't go anywhere besides work, the library, and a few stores, so I only fill up my car about once every three weeks and gas is a small part of my budget. I remember when the kids were little and they work up early and I could put them to bed...