I love this shot of Yoli’s hair in the lake breeze!!!
https://ceenphotography.com/2016/05/29/cees-odd-ball-photo-challenge-2016-week-22/
Wild Hair Day––Cee’s Odd Ball Challenge 2016, Week 22
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Author Archives: lifelessons
Golden Shower Tree––Flower of the Day May 29, 2016
I couldn’t reisist three more shots of the “Lluvia de Oro” or Golden Shower Tree. The sun was right today and they are so exotic up close.
https://ceenphotography.com/2016/05/28/flower-of-the-day-may-29-2016-peony/
Orderly
Fulfilling Order
How does one get orderly? I fear I must confess
the only way to get there is by first making a mess!
Since I have put this off for years, the fault is all my own.
Procrastinatiion is a fault for which I must atone.
I sort the photos into piles by topics or by years––
photographs of family and landscapes and my peers.
I wish my album stuffing were not in such arrears.
They’ll take a month to organize, or now it so appears.
I locate half-filled albums and plastic sleeves and pages.
It seems I haven’t filed a single photograph for ages.
I try to be most organized and get them into line,
then fall into reflection of the lives of me and mine.
I have company coming and a meal that I must cook.
I’ll find the table easier to clear if I don’t look,
but oh that slumber party that the boys decided to crash
and all those tame adventures where we thought we were so rash.
Who knew that all this sorting would lead to this great mess?
and yet I am enjoying it. Who would ever guess
that sorting under pressure would still lead me to this?
Memories of parties, of camp and that first kiss.
Sixty-seven years of life all spread out on my table.
I’ll clear them all by nightfall, then cook if I am able.
Too bad the nearest Colonel Sanders is so far away,
or I would save the cooking for another day.
One “find” in the thousands of photos I have yet to stow away in the headboard filing cabinet of my bed that has been recently cleared of poems was these photos of the night John Kuckleberg and Doug Tedrow raided our slumber party.
PJ’s!!!!!
This was not as racy as it looks. The fellas were there before the shortie pajamas were donned, and by the looks of it, boys danced with boys and girls with girls. The fish, by the way, were plastic ones from my dad’s den in the next room. There has been some progress since the 7th and 8th grade party. Looks like I’d tiled the floor, my sister Patti and I had painted the walls and she had painted a somewhat strange mural of a man leaning against a cactus to take a siesta. I think this was my junior year. The ceiling had not yet been installed by my dad and me! It must have been Rita’s birthday as we seem to have been giving her a spank for each year.
The prompt for today was “Orderly” https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/orderly/
Child of the Fifties
These folks were the epitomes of every her and him.
The men were all smooth-shaven with haircuts short and trim.
The ladies of the fifties had their pearls and curly hair,
and fancy little house dresses were what they chose to wear.
Their kids were the epitomes of reproductive joy
who could serve as patterns for the perfect girl or boy.
They came out cute and perfect, created just to please.
They never fought or cheated or brought home F’s or D’s.
How do I know that what I say is not stretching the truth?
How do I know these folks were all red-blooded, honest, couth;
and that every one of them maintained the stauts quo?
I know for I’m that perfect child in the very front row
who somehow by the sixties got somewhat out of step
and later by the seventies had misplaced all her “hep,”
did not become a hippie until nineteen eighty seven,
and will join the moral majority much too late to get to heaven.
I am not the epitome of any group you know.
I do not wear the clothes you wear or go where you may go.
Epitome’s a talent that I forgot to hone,
and ever since I’ve chosen a pattern all my own.
The daily prompt was “Epitome.” https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/epitome/
(These nice people were my parents and neighbors in the little town where I grew up and this poem is in no way meant to denigrate them. I’m sure they were all unique individuals, as well. It is the tendency of eras to turn into cliches that I am satirizing, not them.)
Partying 50’s and 60’s Style
When I was in the eighth grade, I had a party for 8th and 7th graders in our big unfinished basement. We must have borrowed the chairs and screens from the Methodist church, as I recognize the ugly screens in these photos. I wonder what we were hiding behind them? Possibly water pumps used to pump water out of the basement during a snow melt the winter before, although I doubt that was a problem as a year later, I spent the summer tiling and painting this basement. I remember my dad having to jack up the house a bit as he increased the height of the foundations when the ground settled one year, so perhaps this was going on at that time.
At any rate, my party was held before the gentrification of our basement took place, and it was a big deal. All the boys’ mothers were calling to see if it would be chaperoned and there were big discussions about whether it was appropriate to have a girl/boy party. The coach demanded that all the boys had to leave by 10 o’clock as they were in training for basketball and had a curfew. It was the only boy/girl party anyone ever had the whole time I was in junior high and high school, other than school parties where we played games but didn’t dance much.
The 7th and 8th grades were in the same room with the same teacher, who was also the grade school principal and the junior high basketball coach. (That’s his picture sitting in the stands at a district tournament with Jeff Sanderson sitting behind him.) While he taught one grade, the other one had study time and vice versa–– all in one big room. It was interesting to hear your entire 8th grade curriculum while you were in the 7th grade, so by the next year it sort of felt like a rerun, or deja vu.
I’m dancing with Alan Rada in most of these photos. He was a year younger than me and seemed to know what he was doing on the dance floor. I am wearing a different dress in the photos of the earlier part of the evening not because I was a fashionista with too wide a choice to limit myself to one garment per evening, but because I split out the underarm of my first dress when I was spun by an overzealous partner during a jitterbug. In fact, I think the girls were teaching most of the guys to dance at this party.
The two older somewhat sinister looking girls are my sister and her friend Dianne, who were recruited to chaperone, I guess. Since my sister Patti, on the left, was the one who taught me to dance, perhaps she was there to see that we were teaching the boys to dance correctly.
The boy with the crew cut wearing glasses is my across the street neighbor Billy Sorenson. The little guy who looks like he is about to slap Henrietta Oldenkamp on the butt is Keith Weigandt. Don’t you love all the girls in party dresses, bobby sox and white tennis shoes? We were soooooo cool. (Well, they were. I wore nylons and one inch heels.How ordinary of me.) This must have been 1959 or 60.
(When I took my doll collection out of my room, my mother decided to put it out in the hall. Guess which one of us never grew up? She must have taken this photo of me before the guests arrived because this is the dress that ripped out under the arm during a too-ambitious dance move.)
Fenced in, Fenced Out
From Sea Ranch in Northern California to our old ranch in South Dakota, rustic fences predominate in these photos. That fence hardly seems sufficient to fence in a dinosaur, but it has been keeping it confined for at least sixty years, when is when I first witnessed the concrete beast on my way to the Black Hills in Dakota. Petrified gardens and Wall Drug were must sees then, and still are. This cemetery sign is right across the street from the last remaining piece of land we still own in South Dakota.
http://run-a-roundranch.blogspot.mx/2016/05/good-fences-114.html
Little Purple Bush Flower: Flower of the Day, May 27, 2016
Still Unidentified!!!
Can you see the little purple flower against this backdrop?
Or now?
perhaps if I climbed up closer.
Do you see it now?
Why didn’t I think of breaking off a piece earlier? Much easier to identify it in person.
But alas, no luck.
Here are some more shots of the little purple flower that I played around with yesterday. I don’t think I gave any idea of how tiny it is, so I’m trying again today. As you can see, it is smaller than a thumbnail and difficult to see against all the color of flashier flowers and foliage surrounding it. My research didn’t yield the name of this flowering bush, although at one point I saw two pictures of it on my screen that matched exactly. I was so excited before I determined that I was looking at my own photos! Back to the drawing board. (If you want to read the captions you need to either hover over the photo or click on first photo to enlarge them all and show captions.)
https://ceenphotography.com/2016/05/26/flower-of-the-day-may-27-2016-bearded-iris/
Forked!
1967–Off on the SS Ryndam on a four month around-the-world study adventure. Ga Ga Dowd was the oldest student aboard. She seemed ancient, but was actually one year older than I am now. The other two girls, whom I had just met, were to be my best friends on the journey. They are Susan (in polka dots), who was also a U. of Wyoming student whom I had never met before and Pamn, from Berkeley. I don’t know why the wind chose to blow only my hair. Perhaps I had invested in less hairspray?
“The Zoad In The Road”
by Dr. Seuss
Did I ever tell you about the young Zoad?
Who came to a sign at the fork of the road?
He looked one way and the other way too –
the Zoad had to make up his mind what to do.
Well, the Zoad scratched his head, and his chin, and his pants.
And he said to himself, “I’ll be taking a chance.
If I go to Place One, that place may be hot
So how will I know if I like it or not.
On the other hand, though, I’ll feel such a fool
If I go to Place Two and find it’s too cool
In that case I may catch a chill and turn blue.
So Place One may be best and not Place Two.
Play safe,” cried the Zoad, “I’ll play safe, I’m no dunce.
I’ll simply start off to both places at once.”
And that’s how the Zoad who would not take a chance
Went no place at all with a split in his pants.
Born in a time before television and the internet and even private telephone lines, (we shared ours with two other households), periodicals took on a special importance. We subscribed to three newspapers: The Murdo Coyote (my hometown rag), The Mitchell Daily Republic and Grit–a newsy national weekly newspaper. My dad subscribed to Saga, Real West, True West, Argosy and probably a few others; and my Mom got Saturday Evening Post, Journal, McCall’s and Redbook.
One special feature of Redbook over the years I was growing up was that they published the poetry of Dr.Seuss. I don’t know if the poem above was ever published anywhere else, but it was one of my family’s favorites, and I think I still have it out in a plastic storage case with other old letters and paper memorabilia. It is well-worn and wrinkled and yellowed, glued to a piece of cardboard to aid in its preservation. I think I had used it as one of the poems I chose to memorize (along with “Out to Old Aunt Mary’s,” ” The Wreck of the Hesperus” and “The Children’s Hour”) when I was in grade school.
I don’t know how much I actually listened to the messages of poems back then, but I do know that something prompted me not to just dream of those forks in the road but to make a decision and to take a chance. Perhaps it was this poem. Perhaps it was the fact that my parents rarely held me back when I had a chance to travel or experience something different. Well, no, they didn’t let me take the Seventeen trip to Europe when I was eleven, but short of that, they encouraged me to reach out and experience life away from the town of 700 where I lived.
When I was a teenager, I traveled all over the state for district meetings for my MYF. I attended church camps in the Black Hills and Lake Poinsett and traveled by bus to a U.N. Seminar when I was a junior in high school.
When it came time to go to college, I was quick to choose an out-of-state college and in my junior year again chose to travel–this time around the world on the U.S.S. Ryndaam as a student on World Camput Afloat––a university extension of Chapman College in Orange, CA. We traveled for four months, stopping in countries around the world, studying their cultures, taking practicum side trips and in some cases taking off on our own. The first country I did this in was in Kenya, where my newly met friend Pamn and I rented a little Fiat and took off on our own to have a few adventures.
My sister told me afterwards that she had been the one to encourage my folks to let me go, telling them it would get the travel bug out of my system, but if you’ve been following my blog for long, you know that just didn’t happen. Immediatley after college, I emigrated to Australia and after a few years there, I traveled overland as much as possible to Africa, where I stayed for two years. After that travel was a summer and vacation experience until I moved to California thirty-five years ago and then Mexico fifteen years ago. At each of these junctures, there was a fork in the road of my ife and each time, I made the decision and took it. Nine times, by my own counting, and in that time, although I’ve split a few pants seams, it was more due to local cuisine than to indecision.
Shy One: Flower of the Day, May 26, 2016
This little flower, tiny and non-assuming, deserved a makeover. I’ll try to reclaim her “before photo” in a minute and share it with you, as well.
Poor little thing. Tiny, out of focus, a bit shriveled up, hidden by denser foliage. I’ll try to do better by her tomorrow.
https://ceenphotography.com/2016/05/26/flower-of-the-day-may-27-2016-bearded-iris/
So Strange, So Strange!!!
If you haven’t already read yesterday’s odd ball story that relates to this one, go here to read it:
https://judydykstrabrown.com/2016/05/25/what-are-the-chances-cees-odd-ball-photo-challenge-2016-week-21/
Now, on to today’s related story: I’ve been at my desk for about an hour, off and on, running to the kitchen, doing little things around the house… and I just sat down to type, happened to glance at my desk, and this is what I saw:
There has been no one else in the house. I don’t know what happened to the larger ten peso piece, but I do know I was clicking the flashlight off and on last night. I did not, however, place the coin next to it or upright!.
To test out a theory, I just now lifted up the flashlight and knocked the coin over, then put the flashlight next to it, thinking perhaps one or the other had been magnetized, but the coin stayed in place flat on the desk and did not rise to the occasion. Then I tried placing the coin on edge several times, to no avail.When I sat the coin on edge propped up against the flashlight and moved the flashlight, however, the coin stayed on its edge. When I tried tossing it on the desk or dropping it, never once has it landed on its edge. Very very strange. I know it is just a coincidence, but I’m curious about how I could have moved the coins without being aware of it and it is a huge coincidence that the small coin should wind up on edge twice in a row when in 68 years of life, I’ve never had this happen before.
