Oops..I can see this video here but not when I try to view it on Notifications or the Reader. Please let me know if it works for you. It should last about 15 seconds, but it looks like this video doesn’t work except on Facebook. I’ll see if she can send it in another format. Sorry.
I received this message from my friend Kristina who is housesitting for me on my birthday. Hope you can see this video of Ollie and another who remained his playmate and not his prey, but I fear the worst.
Today on July 10th. 2021, I woke up thinking I had to record a very very strange dream and instead saw a message from Forgottenman that I had received my millionth view on my blog as I slept, so now at 8:55 AM, checking my stats, I see that I’ve had l,000,052 views. I guess I’ll never know who was the millionth. When I get home, I’m going to celebrate by actually starting the ball rolling on formatting my two completed books for publication. Please let me be as dedicated to that goal as I’ve been to the blog. My alarm just went off. Must be a signal that I ‘m on the right track??? I can see a bit of sun through a slight opening in the blackout curtain of the motel where I am staying. We’ll head back to St. Paul in a few hours. Then in a few hours more I’ll head to Wyoming. Life goes on….
Click on photos to enlarge.
Today was the second day of our family reunion and we were sitting outside in my nephew’s backyard in Des Moines, minding our own business and talking one over the other when suddenly we were outshouted by a tremendous hailstorm with huge stones. Here are my nephews presenting some of the golfball-sized hail. Yes, I did get pelted with a few before running into the house and then grabbing a wash pan to put over my head and go back out to try to find my computer. No it wasn’t outside but safely inside in its case.
One Millionth View Coming Up!!!!
I started this blog in March of 2013 and started posting a poem a day for NaPoWriMo for the month of April. Then in 2014 after I had posted a poem a day for NaPoWriMo, I continued to write a poem a day to prompts, a practice I’ve continued every day since and today, on July 10, 2021, I will hit my millionth view. Chances are when this happens, I will be riding back to St. Paul from Des Moines, where I came for a memorial and family reunion, so I likely won’t even realize when it happens and will never know who my millionth viewer is, but since my views now stand at 999,982, it is bound to happen.
At any rate, I want to thank all of you who have both viewed my blog and furnished me with the entertainment of viewing yours all these years. There are a few of you who have viewed me and been viewed by me from the very first and I want to thank you, especially, for being part of the reason why I kept going.
In that time, I have posted 8,365 blogs. Over 2,657 of them have been poems and another 996 have been daily posts of photos of flowers for Cee’s Flower of the Day blog which as far as I can tell, I have posted every day since October 18, 2018. The rest of the posts are additional stories, poems, essays and my own photography posted for various prompts and I thank those who faithfully publish these prompts every day or every week.
I had declared earlier that when I hit my millionth view, I would stop blogging, but recently I’ve established another blog in addition to my WordPress blog, so looks like retirement is not in my near future. I will, of course, continue with the WordPress blog as well.
Happy blogging. For now, I’ll continue to see you here as always. oxooxox Judy
Withholding with One Hand and Giving with Another
She feared that too much dieting would make her moribund,
and so she kept on dining until she was rotund.
She viewed dieting with horror yet felt terror when she viewed
her own form in the mirror, be it fully–clothed or nude.
Of all those excess curves and rolls, she wanted to be free.
Her rosy cheeks were garish, and she willed them not to be.
Yet her psychology of wishing misplaced not a single ounce.
She shed no flesh or inches, lost not one single bounce.
Until she fell in love one day and grew over-excited
when her amorous feelings led to passions unrequited.
And so she lost her taste for food and other worldly pleasures,
this lovelorn depression supplanting former measures
of trying to lose inches around her thighs and trunk,
and so her mass diminished as she slowly shrunk
from size eighteen to fifteen and eventually ten
and that girl in the mirror turned willowly and thin.
Men started to walk by her house and one man chose to linger,
and within the year there was a gold band on her finger.
Thus did she learn the lesson that our wishes might be met
by simply being deprived of what we want to get.
Sometimes deprivation triggers something we need more,
for we do not always know what life may have in store
when it withholds its blessings. It may be that when we wait,
exactly what we’ve wanted is dished out to us by fate!
Prompt words today are free, garish, terror, horror, rotund and psychology.
This flower grows on a very very long stalk outside my niece’s kitchen window. Does anyone know what it is? Since I know Janet will ask to see more of the plant, here are other shots. The stalks are 5 or 6 feet high:
For Cee’s FOTD
Human Drama
The wings of destiny are stilled, waiting for our play.
Astonished at our slowness, confused at the delay.
Disappointment in mankind by now’s a usual thing.
What new human horror will the future bring?
We’ve poisoned oceans, sullied air and burdened earth with junk.
Enough to put Ma Nature in a perpetual funk.
She balks and sends out warriors to try to curb our lusts,
but still mankind continues to turn shouldn’ts into musts.
She now sees she was misguided in creating human fools,
with all of their excesses flaunting all her rules.
Soon she’ll find another way to try to clear her slate of them
as destiny stands waiting to see what is the fate of them.
Prompt words today are disappointment, astonish, delay, destiny and wing,
Miser
Money was his nemesis. He rued its silvery glow.
The piles of it below his bed had nowhere else to go.
For although he was a hoarder, always craving more of it,
his life was not made better even by just a bit.
His clothes were all in tatters. His house was falling down.
He had outstanding debts and bills in every store in town.
Not one thing about him suggested his success.
Every single outward sign only signaled distress.
He lived his life in misery. Inadequate. Alone.
Miserly and miserable, life stripped to the bone.
But when he finally passed away, his name slipped into lore.
He was the man who wasted life simply by wanting more.
Prompt words today are nemesis, inadequate, silvery, while and signal.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 