With all of these nationwide No Kings rallies..up to 200,000 strong, what do folks do when they need a restroom? Were portapotties provided? Must have been a formidable task…
I must pose an indelicate question….
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“Bad Sport” for SOCS
Bad Sport
I don’t do sports, nor watch them, either.
A one block jog? I’d need a breather.
At volleyball, I don’t excel.
Touch football is a sort of hell.
For passing time, by hook or crook,
Jog on alone. I’ll read a book!!!
The Stream of Consciousness Prompt for Oct 18 is “Hook.”
Poolside Picnic
Click on photos to enlarge.
Lately, my water delivery has begun any time from midnight to 5:30 A.M. I drain the hot tub and remove about 1/3 of the water from the pool the day before as by then the water is cold. It streams into my cistern to be used for watering the garden and spare lot/sculpture garden below (no water wasted) and the nearly boiling-hot thermal water from Colima vocano 80 miles away comes streaming into my pool and hot tub to cool down a bit so I can actually make use of it by evening or the next morning.
Today I got up at 5:30 when I heard it streaming in. By 8, I noticed the hot tub was full and running over into the pool and when I went down to turn off the water, I noticed dozens of tiny black ants swarming over the 2-foot wide surface of the edging around the pool. Unable to see the purpose for their swarming, I nonetheless was able to see that a number of wasps were also swooping down to the stone surround. Then I realized that the wasps were actually feeding on the ants! I ran in to get my phone to take photos to document this surprising event, but alas, when I returned, only ants remained. No wasps. I then returned to the house to try to find something on the internet to back up what I’d viewed and Meta Al informed me that:
Yes, some wasps eat small black ants, while others do not. Some wasps are predators that hunt and eat insects, including ants, which can be a protein source for their larvae. However, other species are either parasitoids that lay eggs inside ants, or they may attack ants defensively when competing for resources, rather than eating them. (Info derived from AI)
“Boogaloo” and Other Mysteries Solved, for Fibbing Friday
(Image created with help from AI)
The Fibbing Friday task-at-hand is:
1. Why is there no ‘three quarters back’ in American Football (you have a quarterback, halfback and full back) ? Because you already have one quarterback. It would redundant to have two more.
2. What is a stickleback? A French back-scratcher.
3. What is a boogaloo? Quarters for an Eskimo ghost.
4. What is Victoria’s Secret? Falsies.
5. What is in a Victoria sandwich? Coins kept in a tiny coin purse tucked into her cleavage.
6. What is the secret of the Black Magic Box? All of its magic leaked out long ago.
7. Why do mice squeak? Not enough oil in the cheese.
8. Where will you find a TRV? Usually, right after a TOPSY.
9. What is a Demo? Someone who didn’t vote for Trump.
10. What is a toadstool? A poorly-placed stool often run into in the dark. Ouch!
Meeting Mr. Right for Weekly Writer’s Workshop
Meeting Mr. Right
Scrabble, Dice and Mexican Train—
I play them once and then again,
while he won’t play a single game
of any sort or any name.
I like to travel. He sits at home.
Walmart’s as far as he will roam.
Won’t go to movie theaters, clubs,
exhibitions, galleries, pubs,
museums, fiestas, meetings, for
such crowding makes him hit the door.
Tourist attractions leave him numb
and make him wonder why he’s come.
I fill my house with Mexican art
that drains my purse but fills my heart,
but my artful clutter makes him frown.
His décor? Purely hand-me-down.
I like people. He sits alone.
His desk chair is his chosen throne
where he supervises the internet—
the biggest nerd you’ve ever met.
I dance whenever I’ve the chance,
but you might have guessed—he doesn’t dance!
He’s six-foot-two. I’m five-foot-six.
Yet tall and short just seem to mix.
I know our friends and family
find us an anomaly.
for these differences are just a start.
We’re 1600 miles apart!
So how can he be my best friend
when our differences never end:
a scorpion talking to a crab,
a Chihuahua running with a Lab?
What makes our congress less absurd?
We’re both addicted to the written word!
We both love puns and definition.
Apostrophe errors? Pure sedition!
While others discuss films or drama,
we dissect uses of the comma.
We discuss dashes from en to em,
and how the world misuses them!
Splitting hairs but not infinitives,
sound editing advice he gives
for everything I write online.
If words were grapes, he’d strip the vine
of sour grapes and slugs and weeds
and after he had done these deeds,
the wine would pour more sweet and rare,
culled out by his loving care.
And so it goes here on my blog.
In its machine he is a cog—
mending lost links and feeling free
to cut that spare apostrophe.
To wrestle errant prepositions,
question faulty suppositions,
to polish off each word writ wrong
until a ditty becomes a song.
We meet each day on the cyber page
that is the parchment of our age.
While you meet others of your type
at coffee bars, we meet on Skype.
Our discourse clever, funny, rare.
We do not pine and ache and stare
eye-to-eye hour after hour.
For us, it’s words that carry power.
The Prompt for This Week’s Writers Workshop is: Meeting
Crocs, Iguanas and Relatives for RDP
This croc and others live in the river across the road from a house I have stayed in in La Manzanilla.
One swam within 10 feet of me as I did my daily water aerobics in the ocean in front of my house. Bystanders watched it swim behind me without commenting–until later. Thanks, guys!!!
Here’s a smaller relative.
And an iguana.
An artistic rendering of an iguana by my friend Laurie.
Art or nature? You decide.
My early morning alarm clock, this fellow tried his darndest to get me to come to my sliding glass door.
He bumped his head and scratched at the door with no success.
Click on photos to enlarge and read captions.
The Ragtag Daily Prompt is Reptilian
These are all reptiles I either visited in La Manzanilla (where some of them visited me) or found in my garden. Luckily, the larger ones I left behind when I came back home to San Juan Cosala!!! Oh, and you may have detected that a couple of them are artistic renderings.
A&Wesome Burgers for the Ragtag Daily Prompt “Sandwich” Prompt
Okay, when I saw the Ragtag prompt was “sandwich,” I decided I simply must rerun this post from 2016:
Today dawned rainy and foggy with a prediction it would last all day, so instead of spending five hours on the Cabot Trail before heading southwards for another three hour journey to get my car returned to Hertz by 9 p.m., I decided to head immediately for the airport and my overnight stay at the very classy Alt hotel which is located right at the Halifax airport. Very handy. Enroute, I noticed an A&W Drive-in and had to stop. I thought they’d gone out of business years ago but here is proof that they are still alive and thriving in Nova Scotia. Thanks, WordPress, for the very timely prompt. I didn’t even know what it was until I got to the wifi of my hotel in Halifax. Nice coincidence that I was already supplied with an illustration for today’s prompt of “Sandwich!”
A&Wsome Burgers
The first drive-in I went to when I was just a kid
(before there was McDonalds or wax cups with a lid)
was an A&W sixty miles from home
with root beer served in frosty mugs and sporting heads of foam.
I haven’t seen another for years, so I believed
there weren’t any anymore—a fact that I have grieved.
So while driving into Halifax, imagine my elation
when I saw an A&W next to a filling station!
I had meant to fill my rental car before I turned it in,
‘cause the prices when Hertz fills them up are really quite a sin,
but all thoughts of filling up the car vanished in a blink
with thoughts of luscious burgers and foamy things to drink.
There’s mama burger, papa burger and even a teen,
but still no baby burgers, or anything between.
They have onion rings and French fries and something called poutine?
An addition to the menu? I found it most obscene.
Now it has been a long time since I have had the fun
of consuming family members stuffed into a bun,
but I am really very sure that poutine is a new one.
In all my life I’ve never before had the chance to chew one!
I asked the friendly sales girl for a bit of erudition
that could clue me in to this Canadian addition
to what I thought was sacrosanct—an act of pure sedition.
Just what has the world come to when franchises have permission
to add things to the menu? It simply is not right
that they can think up something new for us to bite!!!
She filled me in on what it was and said it was delicious.
French fries, cheese curd, gravy??? A mixture most pernicious.
What good are French fries served with cheese that’s certain to taste boggy,
topped off with gravy that no doubt would make the whole mess soggy?
I bought a teen burger and naked French fries at their best—
then left to eat them in my car—a sure sign of protest.
But in the end my protest was paid most dearly for.
For when I took my food to go, slamming shut the door
and roaring off to eat my food in another place,
I ended up with poutine all over my face.
For I forgot to buy my gas which would have cost a third
of what I had to pay to Hertz—a total most absurd.
Yet even though my protest in my budget put a crimp,
at least I did not stoop to eating French fries that were limp!!!
The prompt for RDP is “Sandwich.”
An Autumn Garden
Click on photos to enlarge.
For the Cosmic Photo Challenge we are to post photos of our autumn garden
Books, for dVerse Poets Open Link Night
Books
The fresh bookstore smell of them,
bending the pages to crack the spine,
notes scribbled in the margins,
underlines,
hearts with initials on the flyleaf,
something to loan or to wrap for a gift,
something propped up on the bathtub edge,
it’s paper sprinkled with drops–
pages wrinkled into a Braille memory–
that rainstorm run through.
How he put it in his back pocket.
Poetry touched by fingers.
Single words met by lips.
Words pored over by candlelight or flashlight
in a sleeping bag or in a hut with no electricity.
Books pushed into backpacks
and under table legs for leveling.
Paper that soaked up
the oil from fingers
of the reader
consuming popcorn
or chocolate chip cookies
in lieu of the romance on the pages–
finger food served with brain food.
Passions wrapped in paper and ink–
the allure of a book and its tactile comfort.
The soul of a book you could touch, fold, bend.
Books are the gravestones of trees
but also the journals of our hearts.
Cities of words,
boards and bricks of letters,
insulated by hard covers or the curling skins
of paperbacks.
Something solid to transfer the dreams
of one person to another in a concrete telepathy
of fingers and eyes.
Books are the roads we build between us,
solid and substantial–
their paper the roadbed,
the words the center lines directing us
What will fill the bookcases of a modern world?
Google replacing dictionaries,
Wikipedia already an invisible bank of Encyclopaedia Britannicas.
What will we use our boards and bricks for,
if not to hold up whole tenements of books?
How will we furnish our walls?
What will boys carry to school for girls?
What will we balance on heads
to practice walking with perfect posture?
What will we throw in the direction of the horrible pun?
Will there be graveyards for books, or cities built of them?
Quaint materials for easy chairs or headboards for beds?
Will we hollow them out for cigar boxes
or grind them up for packing material?
Where do books belong in the era of Kindle and Audible?
These dinosaurs that soon will not produce more eggs––
perhaps they’ll grow as precious as antiques.
The grandchildren of our grandchildren
will ponder how to open them. Will wonder at their quaintness,
collecting them like mustache cups or carnival glass,
wondering about the use of them–as unfathomable as hieroglyphics.
That last book closing its pages––one more obsolete mystery
fueling the curiosity of a bygone era that has vanished
into a wireless universe.
For the dVerse Poets Open Link Night
And….Here is a link to another poem published today: “BEGINNING”
To see how others responded to the prompt go HERE.
Skinny-Dipping for One Word Challenge
Skinny-Dipping
Important note: This is a shape poem , (at least the last two stanzas are) but if you look at it in Reader, it distorts the shape by left margin justifying. Please click on the title again and you will view it from my blog where it will be centered and you can see the shape.
Skinny-Dipping
There’s a change in the weather, a shift in the light.
The palm trees are swaying. Three stars shining bright.
The water is cooling, my exercise through.
Clouds cover the moon. I think it’s my cue
to get out of the water before I turn blue,
then clouds shift and the moon turns its usual hue.
The wind stirs the water. I think of past times
ages ago in different climes.
All those past lives, can they really be mine?
If I put experience in a straight line,
could I see the reason for things as they were
as my life sped by–—a perpetual whirr?
What gave me the courage to do what I did
since that time long ago when I was a kid
and took that first journey out on my own,
out of the house across grass newly mown,
fresh from the bathtub, laughing with glee,
nude for the whole world to look out and see.
Running down the sidewalk until I was captured
again by my mother, winded but enraptured
by this two-year-old daughter escaped from her bath,
already set out on her singular path.
So many roadways traveled since then.
So many different lives that have been
tried and discarded in favor of others.
Surrogate fathers and surrogate mothers,
surrogate sisters and friends freshly minted,
plane tickets ordered, paid for and printed.
Travel adventures. Dangers to survive.
Making it through it all still alive.
I come up from the pool,
dripping and shivering.
Those few bold stars
above me delivering
promises that I
might still be a rover.
While there is breath left,
my life isn’t over.
For Word of the Day the prompt is “Bathtub.”
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 