08 07 11 Save As

Save As

“Document one, Microsoft Word, print, edit.”

I have heard those words spoken a lot these past few months. They are the words that my screen reader, Jaws, reads to me when I open up a new blank Microsoft Worddocument. I have opened up a ton of new word documents lately

I have always loved to write. I remember the first real piece that I ever wrote. It was in 2^nd grade. Mrs Johnson had the class write a short poem, and I wrote about our dog Scruffy.

My dog Scruffy is one year old.

She is small, but strong, and very bold.

She has a little bed of her own,

And when she gets up, you can hear her groan.

I remember it like  it was the day after tomorrow, and I can still see her face. I can also still hear my mom screaming when she used to go up the street and roll in cowmanure at the Stevens farm. That wasn’t what caused her to scream. The thing that caused the reaction from mom was when  Scruffy used to get into the house after, all covered in the stinky poop, and make a bee line for the living room where she would run and dive under the couch.

Someone could write a country song  about this. I smell a hit, ha-ha. I think that those screams of my mom are also one of the things that is still orbiting the planet along with all the other hardware up there.

Side note, it has just started raining. We need the rain. I hope it rains all day.

I used to have a hard time getting past the voice of my screen reader. I was always consumed with his voice, and not the content. I have moved past that for the  most part now. I know he is talking to me, but I seem to slide past his digital monotone voice and am able to gobble up most of the content now. It is my concentration level that causes me grief now.

When I am reading articles, or letters, or basically anything, I tend to wander off on any number of parallel tangents as I am reading. Some of them are not so parallel. I hear a certain word, or a phrase, or just think of something else, and I am off and running. I feel like the dogs in the Pixar movie, “up”, when someone hollers,”Squirrel!”, and the dogs lose all focus.

I can not seem to stop my mind from wandering.

See? There it goes again.

I don’t really mind my mind wandering. Usually it runs back to happy times. At least I would like to think that it runs to the happier stuff most of the time.

. I have done a lot of recalling this past year. From my earliest recollections, to an hour ago, my thoughts and memories never seem to rest. Even my dreams seem to run here and there.

I have never had as many vivid dreams as I have this past year. This morning I woke up with Coco the dog, barking at Charlie the wood chuck,andfrom that point, until I finally got up, I had at least three very real dreams.

I never hardly ever used to remember my dreams as frequently as I do now.

I love to write, and wow, did I ever lose focus just then. Smile. I am currently working on a series of short stories of my mobility lessons from this year, and I hope to keep working on those until I have compiled enough of them to maybe try and get published. We’ll see.

I also have several childrens stories about Jack and his grandparents home. Those stories take me away as I write them. They are such vivid tales that have come alive inside my head. I am right there as I write them, and it is truly a wonderful feeling.

My writing has always been able to take me away from here to there, wherever “there” is. I don’t ask questions, I just sit down, and buckle up.

I wrote in my last entry about traveling through the state in my mind. My writing takes me on those  journeys as well. I hope I am getting good gas mileage, because the miles are adding up.

One of the pieces I submitted to one of my writers groups was about the wind, and dancing a lifting tune in my mind. One of the group members told me that she thought I wrote a lot about the wind and flying. I could not disagree. She told me that it was, “pretty cool” that I wrote about flying and breezy stories.

All I can think of right  now is the Lynyrd Skynyrd sond, “the Breeze”. I keep blowing down the road.

Non-parallel tangent detour.

I have written a bunch of poems, and they usually wrap themselves around my loss of vision and the trials and tribulations of said loss. Some of them are dark and gloomy, and some of them are light and fluffy. They are all me though, and I have to keep writing them for my own reasons. They are who I am, and I welcome them into my life.

I guess you could call writing a form of medicine. For me, it seems to scour my mind for fragments of my life, and gathers them and collects them in a nice and neat little basket of me. Through my fingers, it is sorting these tidbits one by one.

I hope I have enough hard drive space.

Now, let’s see. I need to hit control S to save this. So let’s hit these two keys and see what Mr. Jaws says…

““Control S, Save As Dialog,File Name, Edit Combo, Document One, Alt Plus N.”

There, now, what should I call this one?.