Category: Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Simple Pleasures. ..

jacquelineobyikocha12 Comments

Instead of oooohing and aaaahing, it was more like hmming and more hmming last night when I submitted my back to my daughter for some home therapy and massage.

She kneeded my bunched up expansive back and neck muscles with eucalyptus oil and that sent me to sleep.

Then the deep ooooh’s and aaaah’s was emitted over today’s decadent breakfast of hash browns, pancakes, omelette, bacon and a hot cup of Karak Chai. Life is sweet with food 😉

I shamelessly indulged in every single calorie-laden bite with gratitude to God.

Truly, the best things in life that make us ooooh and aaaah are simple pleasures and a lot of times they are homemade.

© Jacqueline

Thank you to Dan our moderator and weekend host for the interesting prompt ‘Ooooh aaaah,’ for today’s SoCS.

You are all invited to my monthly blog party going on right now. Come on in.

 

Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Exhale…#SoCS

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I am literally pausing and going on the slow this weekend to smell the roses, coffee, freshly mown grass and all the wonderful blends out there.

I have been running on full steam all week, pausing to catch fleeting whiffs of a smell now and again, but the ache in a shoulder tells me that it’s time to apply the brakes, to exhale and pamper myself with a weekend rest so that I don’t grow weary and feel faint, lest I find myself in need of smelling salts.

Keeping it brief, enjoy your weekend. Do find time to put up your feet and inhale the wonderful smell of life deeply.

Jacqueline

Smell – SoCS

P.S. We’ll be having a Welcome to June blog party on 31st May/1st June. Dust your dancing shoes 🙂

Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Speaking with Proficiency

jacquelineobyikocha32 Comments

I love learning new languages and believe that I have an ear for it. I find it amusing that Linda gave us language as our prompt for SoCS because I was just finished looking at my test result.

I took my French Language evaluation test in March and the result just came back from Paris yesterday. My result makes me feel like a Top dog. For a language that I haven’t used consistently for years, close to 10 years now – after spending five years of my life, learning, eating and breathing the French language, my result is absolutely great.

Phew! What a relief! I must tell you that I was a bit concerned before the exam, during and after.

I just couldn’t afford to fail – ha, ha! I’m not sure how I would have explained to my children that I failed a French language proficiency exam when they always look at me as a guru. Thank God for small mercies.

As for other languages, I speak Igbo, which is my mother tongue, a smattering of Yoruba, Hausa, and Spanish. Now I am experimenting with Arabic. Who knows, maybe by the time I leave The Middle-East my command of Arabic language would be un peu passable.

Bon weekend à tous 🙂

Jacqueline

Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Roller-coaster and intermissions – #SoCS

jacquelineobyikocha12 Comments

Parenting is by far the hardest job that I have ever done in my life. It’s interesting, challenging, full of ups and downs and sadly there’s no one size fit all manual that intercedes to help you wade through this amazing experience.
Sure there are helpful materials out there that one could read for sensible tips and advice, however, the truth is that no two children are the same and their interbehavioural attitudes differ and keep changing as they grow more independent.

This interdependent relationship that involves every human emotion and part of me that I can think of, is one relationship that I can’t even imagine what my life would be without it because our lives are completely intertwined. Sometimes as a parent I am completely overcome with fierce love and pride for my family and at other times I am as mad as ever but learning to handle these things has thought me more than any book will ever teach me. I had no idea before walking into wife-dom and motherhood that I had such deep well of internal patience.

Now, as I write this, in between thinking interesting thoughts of what I want to write, thoughts of what’s for lunch, dinner, tomorrow, a reminder to add toilet duck to the shopping list and to call the school to find out why I have to pay extra for inter-house sports rudely interrupt my train of thinking. My days are continuous roller-coasters with intermissions here and there, but that’s just life.

Jacqueline

#SoCS – Inter

P.S. You are invited to our monthly blog party taking place right now. Just check this link. 

Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

The Whole Nine Yards – Stream of Consciousness Saturday

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My dad used to say ‘be careful in giving someone a yard, the next thing you know they would want a mile,’ and my mother would say ‘be that yardstick of the best quality and do it better than your best,’ which not surprisingly always seemed to follow house chores that didn’t meet her yardstick of measuring cleanliness.

I never quite knew what that yardstick of hers was except she liked us polishing the floor till it was shiny enough to eat food off it and somehow we always managed to spill our food, then we picked it up, dusted if off and ate it. It’s amazing how strong we were back then and we had no worries about microbes. Now, even with all the advancement in technology and medical sciences, the names of diseases keep growing in numbers.

I like the saying ‘going the whole nine yards,’ though I have always wondered why nine yards and not ten, eleven, twelve or seven yards even. I am the going the whole nine yards kinda girl. I would give it my all till I’ve got nothing more to give – I guess when a person has taken all the nine yards that I can afford to give them I stop cutting them any more slack and fabric lest I find myself naked and in need of yards myself and that’s when I remember my dad’s words about those who would want a mile.

So, are you the whole nine yards type of person or do you hold back some of the yardages as backup 😉

Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha

Yard – SoCS

Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Spell it Out! #SoCS

jacquelineobyikocha8 Comments

The ‘spell’ prompt that Linda gave us makes me think of a two-pronged approach. I automatically thought of my spelling which seems to get dodgier by the day and the need for people to communicate properly.

I am not a mind-reader,
I can’t tell what you think,
so, why don’t you spell it out?

Say what you mean,
mean what you say,
just simply spell it out.

I don’t like guessing games
I prefer to communicate in clear terms,
for heaven’s sake, please spell it out.

Spelling errors! Quel horreur! I used to be a buzzing bee in spelling and read dictionaries as one would read a book. These days – I don’t know if it’s accountable to ageing, to being too busy, or the fault of the auto-correct that simply jumps to offer a helping hand and provides us with the correct options – my spellings are no longer of the Spelling Bee Champion category.

I have found lots of misplaced e’s and undotted double i’s with crooked t’s and what have you turning up at odd places and some days when I re-read an old article and find myself totally embarrassed to find silly little spelling mistakes here.

Somewhere in my mind lies the correct spelling but my fingers jump ahead of themselves to type something else. Maybe, it’s time again to start taking the dictionary to bed and yes, I shall blame all the spelling faults on auto correct. I think it has cast a spell on people and we now depend far too much on it.

Like most things in our digital lives these days, everything is going autopilot, everything has an app, and the spelling of the younger generation sucks. They don’t even bother to spell fully anymore. Full sentences are broken down into abbreviated jargon and trying to read it simply gives me a headache that most times, I spell out what is written to make any sense of it.

© Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha

Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

What Are You Willing To Give? #SoCS

jacquelineobyikocha15 Comments

Giving my thoughts free rein this morning, my mind automatically rests on thoughts of Jesus Christ and yesterday’s sermon of Good Friday where we recalled how he was betrayed by Judas and crucified.

His Life was traded and given away for 30 pieces of Silver and though it happened over 2,000 years ago and for many, it reads like an old tale from the storybooks, it’s a fact and always leaves me in shivers.

I wonder to myself how horrifying and beyond pain it must be to be clubbed to the inch of one’s life and nailed to a cross to slowly die.

From the beginning of time, man’s attitude towards what they don’t understand has always been to destroy it because it just doesn’t fit into the frame of their mind and plan.

We forget that the minds we’ve been given can only grow in proportion to our way of thinking, that our sojourn on Earth is only for mere years and that there are things that our human mind may never, ever comprehend.

I ask myself, would I willingly give my life and submit to such inhumane treatment for the benefit of others and I don’t have a ready answer to such complicated question though a little part of my mind whispers ‘you are not Jesus Christ.’

How difficult it is for us to give a neighbor a helping hand in their time of need, to give out of what we have, yet we willingly take and take.

Yet in a split second, selfish and savage tendencies can overpower the thinking faculties of men that they bay for the blood of other men whom we didn’t give life to.

Crucifying has not gone out of fashion, it has merely morphed into different ugly methods. Just take a hard and long look around you.

We’ve been given so much by life, what are we willing to give?

Most times all we are required to give is to love while we are here and to stop thinking of only how we can receive. How difficult can that be?

© Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha

SoCS –  “give/given/giving.”

Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

March Along… #SoCS

jacquelineobyikocha15 Comments

March is the month of my birth so I have a fond affinity for this month. It’s also my mama’s birthday and one of my younger brothers. March is quite the month in my family.

Of course, people do talk about the Ides of March, which was the usual way of saying March 15th, but I don’t identify with the superstition attached to it. A soothsayer’s dire warning to Julius Caesar and several other mishaps of centuries past is insufficient to make me live in fear of a particular date in the calendar.

Superstitions are quite the thing and in some places, superstitions weigh in so strong that it’s almost difficult to outmarch the people stuck in time and to move on with logical reasoning.

Isn’t it amazing how fast time runs? Sometimes, I feel as though time is frogmarching me through living at its own pace with barely enough room to exhale. Well, we’ve got no choice, but to march along and make the best of it while we can.

Jacqueline

SoCS – March

Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Managing Life… SoCS

jacquelineobyikocha25 Comments

‘Managing life,’ that’s the way people back home tend to answer you when you ask them how they are doing.

How I dislike that phrase!

Life is meant to be lived with all your senses wide awake to it and not to be managed. Life has manifolds that could take you on a surprising journey. It’s not something that you can command or manipulate.

In my opinion, managing life sounds as if you are simply gritting your teeth, hanging in there by your mandibles and just existing.

Almost as though life is such a painstaking experience that lacks all manners of joy in it and only meant to be endured. I honestly don’t know why this phrase manifests negative connotations of life in my mind.

I am thinking that maybe it’s because the word ‘manage’ is used in a myriad of things that present difficulty, such as: manage pain, manage weight, manage health, manage illness, manage work et cetera.

Life is certainly full of mangy issues, but you can definitely try to maneuver through the routes that the journey of life presents you with some joie de vivre in your survival kitty and instead of ‘managing life‘ I’d rather think that I’m a mastering living a conscious, mindful, and spirited life.

Jacqueline

Man – SoCS

Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

The Tall and Short of Things…

jacquelineobyikocha30 Comments

Shortness is something that I don’t experience in most things except being short of funds and short of time. I am hardly ever short of thoughts, ideas and things to say.
I can’t quite recollect when I became physically conscious as a child that I’m not short. At 5 ft 11 inches tall, I remember my growing up years of gangly arms and long legs and standing a head above my peers.

The height invited teasing and taunting from male peers who for some shortness of genes didn’t get to grow tall fast enough. For a while, I recall praying not to grow too tall and hunching to appear shorter to blend in with others and not get teased as such. My mother and grandma used to straighten out my shoulders and reminded me often to stand tall and look the person in the eye.

Eventually, I grew into the arms and legs and became comfortable with my height especially when I got invitations to model clothes and calendar pages.
Fast forward to my present day, the roundness of motherhood and age has made me shorter especially in the presence of my young 14-year-old son who’s 6 ft 4 inches and growing and his siblings who are fast catching up.

I am no longer bothered about my height since that was long settled, I am more concerned with the plumper parts that jiggle and wobble these days.

I am fighting the gravitational force of nature to keep the jiggle-wobble on a short leash. I guess nature will take its course eventually though we must do our best in a healthy manner to help it along and prolong the shortness of things. I guess I’ve got that figured out if only I can get a handle on my shortage of funds and time.

P.S. I couldn’t resist adding this throwback photo of mine that my husband dug up from God knows where.

Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha

SoCS – Short 

Tall, Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha, My photos