I just received this notice from a friend and have to share it here. I receive at least one scam email a day and if this will help one person to escape being cheated by this new scheme, it will be worth the post:
(They didn’t enclose the letter that arrived with the machine, but I take it it claimed to make banking easier.)
Lost
Lost my dolly, don’t know where.
She’s got no clothes and got no hair.
She’s somewhere out there lost and bare,
thinking that I do not care.
I’d go out looking, but don’t dare.
That babysitter over there
(My mother calls her our au pair)
came by foot and ship and air
from a country named Zaire
to sit here on her derriere
and watch me with her icy stare.
I open up our Frigidaire.
Could my dolly be in there?
I climb up on a bedroom chair
and go through Mommy’s underwear.
I do not think that she would care.
I find my brother’s whistle there,
hidden in that lacy lair,
and think it really isn’t fair.
It’s every mother’s cruel nightmare.
My dolly isn’t anywhere!
I had to stop the car to take this photo. I wish I knew the true story behind it. I can’t imagine any little girl throwing out her doll, and the lot was surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Someone must have tossed it in there. A mean boy? A jealous brother? Was it unwanted loot from a burglary? My mom and I once rode all the way back out to the dump from town to retrieve a doll’s head we’d thrown away. All the way home, we’d both been thinking about it, sitting there amidst coffee grounds and broken light bulbs. We had pulled into the garage when my mom turned to look at me and said, “Do you want to go back out and get that doll’s head?” I nodded. We did, and I have that head to this very day. If my mom had been with me, one or the other of us would have gotten through that barbed wire somehow. As it is, this image is the only part of the doll that I was able to rescue.
For the Weekly Prompts Weekend Challenge: Lost (I’m rerunning this poem written long ago because it fits the prompt so well.)
Click on photos to enlarge and see detail.
Looking up to take these photos, I felt I was in a dream world.
Such an eerie night. I ended up going out late in the evening to exercise in the pool which was hot from being filled during the day. This is the sight that greeted me…plus a shot from late afternoon/early evening. Can’t decide which I like best, although I did delete 4. Help me decide? I like the sense of distance in the first shot of the gallery, but like the clouds in the first main shot and second gallery shot. They seem to actually wrap around the trees.
The Roads Both Taken (Rejecting Manic-depression)
Two roads diverged in my mellow mood,
and happy I could then travel both,
I laughed. Then I commenced to brood,
and found, at length that I was loath
to forego one and choose them both!!!!
(Overview. Bipolar disorder (formerly called manic-depressive illness or manic depression) is a mental illness that causes unusual shifts in a person’s mood, energy, activity levels, and concentration. These shifts can make it difficult to carry out day-to-day tasks. There are three types of bipolar disorder.)
For Forgottenman’s Prompt, he wanted us to do a switcheroo on Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” by writing a poem using the lines “Two roads diverged in my mellow mood,
and happy I could then travel both,” as our first two lines. Above is my submission to the prompt.
To see my parody of “Mending Wall” go here: https://judydykstrabrown.com/2014/09/17/mending-pants-with-apologies-to-robert-frost/
And now click on this link to see the prompt and make your own submission: https://okcforgottenman.wordpress.com/2023/10/13/the-roads-both-taken-a-poetry-prompt-challenge-offering/
For Cee’s FOTD
Click on photos to enlarge and read captions.
Isolation for a year during Covid gave me more hammock time and more time to peruse the lot below me that I had bought tens year before. It had been a dumping spot for the entire neighborhood for years, and although I had tried to clear out the ten-foot high castor bean plants and other weeds once a year, I suddenly developed a yen to do more. This is the result so far!
Click on photos to enlarge.
Those berries look delicious, but don’t taste! They are the berries of the lantana plant whose beautiful flowers belie the fact that its berries are poisonous enough to kill a dog. I dug up all the lantana bushes in my backyard because the dogs were eating even the flowers! Just yesterday I discovered this plant growing on my lower lot, and although it is still very small, here they actually can grow into trees. Since I don’t let the dogs onto the lower lot (except for when Coco detects that I am down there and so jumps down there) I am letting this plant remain. I must admit that when I first saw the berries, I didn’t notice the bloom and thought they were blackberries and almost picked one to taste! Shhh. Don’t tell.
For Cee’s FOTD
These photos were all taken over the period of a few hours in 2018. The painted trees I found lakeside. Obviously, they had been painted by children, perhaps by the children of the Ajijic Lake Chapala Society art class, since these trees were just outside its lakeside gates.
The tree “sculpture” was found somewhere in Ajijic, although I don’t remember ever seeing it on the Lake Chapala Society grounds. Whether it is a natural product of the tree or whether its shape was helped along by some local artist, I can’t tell. There were no obvious marks indicating that it had been sculpted, but perhaps some of the limbs and body parts had been rounded off a bit, but very skillfully if so.
The wall built around the tree I believe I photographed in Chapala. It is not unusual to see walls and even roads constructed around trees here. There is a whole avenue of trees popping up out of the road bed in Ajijic as well on Aquilles Serdan.
For CFFC-Wood
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 