The Numbers Game #57, Jan 20, 2025. Please Play Along!

Welcome to “The Numbers Game #57.”  Today’s number is 178. To play along, go to your photos file and type that number into the search bar. Then post a selection of the photos you find that include that number and  post a link to your blog in my Numbers Game blog of the day. If instead of numbers, you have changed the identifiers of all your photos into words, pick a word or words to use instead, and show us a variety of photos that contain that word in the title.This prompt will repeat each Monday with a new number. If you want to play along, please put a link to your blog in comments below. Here are my contributions to the album.

An Apple a Day, for The Sunday Whirl Wordle, Jan 19, 2025

An Apple A Day

Witches use them for enchantment.  Kids give them to their teachers.
Trees dangle them from tree limbs to turn passersby to reachers.
Everyone craves apples at one time in their life.
Even Adam reached for one offered by his wife.
Latchkey kids  would miss them as a snack when home from school.
We’d miss them in our stocking toes if absent from our Yule.

It would be a small catastrophe if apples were not able
to snuggle with bananas and peaches on the table
or for folks with bows and arrows to use cucumbers instead
of apples for their targets, balanced on the head
of some trusting  assistant who surely would be pissed
if that smaller target meant that the archer missed!

Wouldn’t it cause chatter? The story would take wings
It would become that ballad that everybody sings
About the gifted archer whose limits were revealed
when he struck an unplanned target which alas, has never healed!
And, alas, no catalyst has ever been suggested
to solve the riddle of just how an apple might be bested!!!

(While posting this poem, I looked for an illustration in my photo file, I finally found the photo of the cored apple I had taken in the past so I used it.  Then I went out to the beach and found this apple lodged under the support of my beach chair. How it came to be there, I have no idea. I needed an apple and nature provided! So I had to post it as well.)

For The Sunday Whirl Wordle  the prompt words are: enchantment latch apples chatter crave catalyst catastrophe wings gift sing miss limit

More Beach Shots, La Manzanilla Jan. 16-18, 2025

Click on photos to enlarge.

For Cellpic Sunday

That’s my friend Christine Anfossie singing at a local beach venue.  The little boys worked for hours to dig a big box in the beach, then to build three rounded chairs in it  to sit in so they could observe the sardines they collected in buckets along with sea water to fill it.  Their own aquarium. I asked if they were going to eat them and they said no, just watch them.

Seascape Sunsets, Jan 18, 2025

Hard to pick a favorite sunset in La Manzanilla.

FOTD Jan 19, 2025

For Cee’s FOTD

When We Let Our Leaders Fail Us for the Daily Prompt, Jan 18, 2025

 
 

IMG_0991

When We Let Our Leaders Fail Us

Way back in my innocence, I thought the world was fair.
My biggest daily decision was what I chose to wear.
The probability of danger then was very rare.
The world, not yet insidious, was still one I could bear.
I knew I could accomplish all that I would dare.
I didn’t fear the water or anguish o’er the air.
The very thought of fire did not move me to despair.
But as men work to turn the dream of nature to nightmare,
most of those in power do not seem to care,
letting some wreak damage as others simply stare,
mouths open in horror over  the whole affair.
Protestors standing in the street, protestors on the stairs,
poets writing poetry, crouched within their lairs,
looking at what God hath wrought and tearing at their hair.
Will our help come from heaven or approach us through the air,
coming from other galaxies to see how we might fare,
finally making contact not to conquer but to share,
setting down amongst us not to pillage, rape or tear,
but rather as our saviors, bent upon repair.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Daily writing prompt
What makes a good leader?

Geometrical Shapes for Becky’s Squares

Click on photos to enlarge.

Geometric Squares for Becky’s Squares

Dumbfounded for MVB, Jan 18, 2025

It’s never too late to experience growing pains. If it is our onus in life to grow and to change, with no cutoff point after which we are absolved of this duty, then why are we dumbfounded when those pains of adolescence occur again and again at each stage of life? We perhaps grow more serious over the years, but need we become less sensitized? Does the snub, the willful wounding, the being overlooked, the derision become less important? If so, why? Perhaps it is a mark of self-worth, and that is good, but if it is merely the building of a cocoon around ourselves, except in the direst of circumstances, it becomes more of a punishment than a defense.

We are born into this world to experience and therefore, are given defenses to deal with the negative, but when those defenses grow to isolate us, then they become more than protective blankets. They become walls which become our prisons. We were meant to experience and to be vulnerable to changes. And lest we atrophy, from the cradle to the crematorium, we need to fight to keep ourselves open to those experiences that invite change.

For MVB the prompt is “Dumfounded.”
I wrote this advice to myself four years ago on my birthday, but decided to remind myself again of its message.

“Pick”led for SOCS, Jan 17, 2025

“Pick”led

Pack a peck of pickle parts
in a silver jar.
If you feed them to a lover,
he will not stray too far.
Neither pocket book nor hockey puck
will sway his thoughts for long.
You’ll have him humming melodies,
then you’ll pick out your song
repeated in sweet harmony
as he sings along.

For SOCS the prompt is: “pack/peck/pick/“pock/puck.” Use one or use ’em all for bonus points—it’s up to you!  https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/24840312/posts/5529707414

“Unprompted” for The Daily Prompt, Jan 17, 2025

Un-
prompted,
they’d be single-tasked,
In fact, if she had not been asked,
she would never have de-masked,
the wine would not have been de-casked,
his shy love not
so quickly-tasked
in saying  yes to
the question asked.

The Daily Prompt is “Unprompted.”