Click on any photo to enlarge all.
Locks, rocks, docks, clocks (tic tocks) and socks!!!
(Here are a couple of other “ock” posts. Just pretend they are in black and white: )
For: cees-black-white-photo-challenge-words-that-end-in-ock/
(This poem evolved from notes that I scribbled into the margin
of our Mexican Train score sheet while visiting my friend Gloria.)
Green Brownies
The brownie that she serves me
crumbles when I try to break it in half.
Her sense of humor allows it and so I tease her.
“Gloria, this looks like the kind of food
my grandmother tried to pawn off on us—
weeks old and crusty from the refrigerator.”
“Those chocolate chips were like that when I bought them!”
she insists, even before I question their green tinge.
I think that this is even worse than the alternative,
and say so and we both laugh as she eats her brownie
and I reduce mine to dust. Not a hard task, as it turns out.
She’s had a bad infection for a week or more.
“I’m not contagious,” she insists each time she coughs
a long low rasping rumble that threatens to avalanche.
“Now stop!” she tells the sounds that explode
without permission from her chest.
“Perhaps,” I say, “These brownies are a godsend
and that’s penicillin growing on the chocolate chips.”
Then her deep coughs transform into
gasps of laughter that echo mine.
The young man there to rake the garden
looks up at us and shakes his head
at two old ladies drinking rum and
eating something chocolate,
and it occurs to me that perhaps
what the world sees as senility
is simply evolution
out of adulthood
to a higher
stage.
Are you feeling a sense of deja vu? This is a reblog of a piece I wrote four years ago. The WordPress prompt word today was infect.
Click on any photo to enlarge all.
Loud Music in the Rainy Season
Up above me, such a din!
I feel my patience growing thin.
Cross fingers that they do not fall
as workmen scamper over all,
balancing on domes and peaks,
replacing roof tiles, sealing leaks.
They’re taking the old surface off
all my domes and drainage trough,
putting membrane down and goo
that will not let the water through
in June when rains beat hard and steady,
although, alas, they’ve come already!
The dogs are sent into a tizzy.
Looking up, I just get dizzy.
In this world that I love so,
down here in lovely Mexico,
now the grinder joins the din.
In a noise Olympics, it would win!
My thoughts all center on escaping
this chipping, drilling, pounding, scraping.
How I’d like to leave this all
for relative quiet at the mall!
But, alas, I must remain
a martyr to construction pain.
Ear plugs having no effect,
before my sanity is wrecked,
I turn up music to a SHOUT
to let Bob Dylan drown them out.
Now Caitlin Cary croons and sings
that she is “Sorry” and other things.
Eliza Gilkyson’s rough croon
is over oh too soon, too soon.
The silence that her true love speaks
replaced now by the sander’s shrieks,
I turn the iPod on again,
full force, to drown out all the din.
I’ve no sympathy for the neighbors’ plight.
Their damn dog kept me up all night,
and if my eardrums are to be shot
I would rather that it’s not
by machines like those above,
but rather by a sound I love.
The prompt word today is “thin.”
It took me a while to notice the little visitor on this bougainvillea branch.
See Cee’s lovely bud HERE.
Mongrel Maven
My bloodline’s scattered here and there—
a genealogist’s nightmare.
Racially, I’m broadly mixed.
The KKK would have me fixed.
My lineage being under-par,
I cannot join the D.A.R.
I have no claims to royalty,
so my name is title-free.
Who I am is merely me.
For this I need no pedigree!
The prompt word today is pedigree.
Every so often, nosy Cee wants to know what we’ve been up to. I often forget to play, but here are my answers for this week along with some extra info:
Complete this sentence: This sandwich could really use some …teeth in it.
What is your least favorite candy? Licorice
What sign are you? Do you believe in astrology? Cancer. I have the same attitude toward astrology as I do toward religion. I would like to believe in it and at times behave as though I do but I am skeptical. I would still always read my horoscope if I subscribed to a paper, as I occasionally pray when in an extremely harrowing situation. I am a great believer in synchronicity and the interconnectedness of the universe. Perhaps they are all one and the same thing.
What did you appreciate or what made you smile this past week? So, my week has been a time of dinner out with friends complete with Mexican dancers, Mexican train, film nights at my house, swims in the pool between rainstorms, trees blooming all over town, smashed fingers, cut fingers, burned fingers, roof repairs, hurricane-strength winds, trees down, electrical outages, picking up after hurricane-strength winds, rainfall, towels and bowls under leaks, cats in every corner of the house escaping the rain, broken fingernails and removing the domed clear skylight (which is cracked in two places and leaking during rainstorms) in the middle of my 18 foot high dome. After they removed the frosted skylight, the sky shone bright blue through the opening and clouds drifted by. All too soon, however, they’d covered it with a clear piece of plastic and tarps which plunged the room into a gloomy darkness. It will be this way until they return with a new domed skylight custom-crafted to fit exactly as the old one did.
I had always known how responsible that skylight was for the light in the room, but I was surprised at the degree to which it served as a sun for my world. In spite of glass walls on 1 ½ sides, the otherwise cheerful room developed shadows and an all-over sort of gloominess that had me turning on every light available. Still, I feel the gloom of my shadowed world as I type this. Here are a few photos to illustrate:
Click on any photo to enlarge all, read captions and see slide series.
One question, though. Why do I keep hurting my fingers????
For: https://ceenphotography.com/2018/05/14/share-your-world-may-14-2018/
Chocolate
You’re being good and I am not.
I broke my diet and got caught.
I’d have resisted if I could,
but chocolate cake just looked so good.
I bought a piece, not a whole cake.
I thought a meal of it I’d make.
But now you feel you must rebut
my obvious need for chocolate.
Will you soon go? It’s getting late,
and there’s this chocolate on my plate.
And though I know it’s impolite,
the chances that I’ll share are slight.
Of your smug lecture I’ve had enough
and now it’s my turn to be tough.
If you must fall from your high throne
and dine on cake, go buy your own!
The prompt word today is slight.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 