Tag Archives: RDP

Breaking Her Diet

24 Replies

IMG_0683

Breaking Her Diet

I measure her cat food with care from the vat,
but she has such an aptitude, my little cat
for flushing out lizards and others like that.
With delicate paw thrusts, she gives them a bat
’til they barely know where it is that they’re at,
then unleashes her claws for a more severe pat.

Be it lizard or bird or scorpion or rat,
she defeats it as though it were merely a gnat
and lays it out nicely on my front door mat:
one scorpion sting less or a feather for my hat,
then returns to the stool where she formerly sat,
licking her chops, and that’s why she’s so fat!!!

 

The prompts were cat, aptitude and delicate.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/08/11/rdp-72-cat/

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/08/11/fowc-with-fandango-aptitude/

https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/delicate

The Recipe

9 Replies
IMG_0575

My vegan concoction

The Recipe

It was not in her nature to follow the dictatorial demands of the recipe. She cared not a piffle that it required a precise list of ingredients. She added a can of 7-up for effervescence and a can of plums for their pure aplomb. When she found a blank spot in the space where she usually kept her vinegar, she added sweet pickle juice instead. She mixed and then blended, added the finely chopped vegetables she’d found in her vegetable tray of the refrigerator, stirred as she cooked until the chunky ingredients were medium soft, the way she liked them.  Now and then, she tasted—a vacant look in her eyes as she tried to decide if it was right or not. A bit of cinnamon. A whiff of curry. A handful of almonds, finely minced, white wine salt. And finally, it was perfect! That night when her dinner guests asked for the recipe, it was not in her realm of possibilities to give it. When she cooked, she entered another world and it was impossible to take anyone else there with her. (By jdb)

The words of the day are effervescent, ingredients, piffle and vacant. The above is fiction based on a reality of my personality re/ cooking. My 22-year-old nephew Ryan arrived yesterday. For the past few days, creating vegan dishes he could eat required some special shopping and a lot of chopping, but it was so much fun and I’m so grateful for these nine wonderful days we are going to have to get to know each other. We were up till 4 a.m. last night, sitting in the hot tub talking talking talking.  When I discovered he kept a journal, I gave him today’s prompts for an assignment and he wrote the below little slice of life in about ten minutes. my piece, given above, took a bit longer.  Here is what Ryan has to say to the prompts:

We woke one morning and the house was vacant.  Trotting around, we made our way downstairs and began to talk, act, and be in a state of piffle.  The energy of the night before rang within the home’s core. Any subtle changes in the air and atmosphere of the home could be noticed as fresh ingredients.  Fresh ingredients that gave the surrounding walls, floor, ceilings and doors an auspicious sparkle and solace. The flow of the home exuded an effervescent and illuminated feeling of comfort and mystery. This home was to us unknown, but it never hid, it was always shown. (Judy’s note: This was written by my nephew Ryan Wilcox on the first morning of his Mexican adventure. Perhaps I’ll persuade him to share more of it as we go along. )

 

IMG_2082

Ryan tucks into vegan Indian food at the Ajijic mall after a long flight with only a packet of cookies to sustain him.

IMG_2086

Casa Domeneche’s vegan dish. Kristina and I decided to go vegan as well and this was what I ordered.  It was incredible.  Maybe Ryan will convert me!  Would be good for my diet.

 

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/08/10/rdp-71-effervescent/

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/08/10/fowc-with-fandango-ingredients/

https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/08/10/piffle/

https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/Vacant

Intergalactic Anthropology

1 Reply

 

jdbphoto, badlands, South Dakota

Intergalactic Anthropology

Our world may be the nucleus of a constellation
viewed elsewhere in the universe, and to their consternation,
they may not be able to determine if we’re able
to support a life form both intelligent and stable.

They’ve watched as we developed fire and the wheel,
the industrial revolution , the ability to heal.
They’ve watched the growth of tyrants and they’ve watched our revolutions—
all our massive problems and our tries for the solutions.

But as the rich get richer, they’re more heedless of the poor.
The more that they accumulate, the more they lust for more.
Heedless of our artful world with beauties unsurpassed,
the practices that they pursue assure that they won’t last.

Should they contact and help us or leave us as we are—
an anthropological study of another distant star?

The prompt words were: contact, nucleus, constellation, practice

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/08/09/rdp-70-contact/

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/08/09/fowc-with-fandango-nucleus/

https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/08/09/constellation/

https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/practice

Play Date

14 Replies

Image

Play Date

 

My sister’s house has sold and they are cleaning out her attic. My niece and I make one trip more and I find my old dollhouse, collapsed, in the garbage can. I take the pieces out—some of them—and stash them in her trunk. I’d thought them gone forty years ago when the tornado took the roof off my parents’ house, but now, here they are like the leaves of memory blown miraculously back to me.

When she sees I’ve taken them, my niece asks what she should do with the dolls she found in the back recesses of her mother’s attic storage room—the one I hadn’t got to on my last visit—perhaps because of the roofing nails sticking through the wood which made reaching back behind the eaves a physical danger.

I find them where she has stashed them In a suitcase in her garage, and when I open the case and see the first doll staring up at me, I think it is a “find” from some antique store, like the dishes in my sister’s China cabinet or the tiny figures on her shelves. One rubber arm, sticky with age, has burst open and streams kapok like a froth of bleached and fermented blood. Other limbs have decayed to nothing but empty puddles of congealed rubber. Only the torso, held in place by a sagging pink fancy gown; and the face, stained red in places from some surface it’s been pressed against for too long, are still intact. As I lift the first doll from the suitcase, the other doll—the size of a toddler—stares up at me, one eye unhinged, her hair in pigtails sealed with rubber bands. When I lift her by one arm, her head turns, her legs pump and I realize this is my Ideal walking doll. When you raise her arms, one at a time, she walks toward you and her head swings, side-to-side. Hard and beautiful, she was not a doll to cuddle and she would not sit. She stood propped up against one corner of my room, rarely played with. What, I wonder, has happened to the bright blue dress she wore? Then I look closer and see that she’s still wearing it—faded to paleness even in the dark. What is here is original—her hair, her limbs, her dress, her petticoat—but her shoes and socks have been lost to another little girl, perhaps, or have jiggled off in some trunk and been left behind.

I’m 1500 miles away from home, yet I load the child-sized dollies into my boyfriend’s trunk: my sister’s doll in it’s fancy pink floor-length formal, my doll with her eye gone wild in its socket. They won’t make it home to Mexico in my suitcase this time, but it is impossible to leave them there in the suitcase to be thrown away by someone who has no memory of them. They are not collector’s items. They have been too neglected in their lives since they stood propped up in the corners of our rooms, then in the corners of our closets, the basement, my sister’s trunk and then her attic 800 miles from where they called us their owners and stimulated our imaginations to the extent they were able.

They’ll now reside in my boyfriend’s garage in Missouri until the time comes when I can carry them back in an extra suitcase or he can mule them down for me. If they were miniatures, I could include them in a retablo or a memory box, but each head is larger than the largest assemblage I’ve ever made. The closets of my house are full and overflowing, as are the wall-to-ceiling cabinets in my garage and studio and every area of my house where I’ve had room to build a closet. But I must use them. Give them some purpose for still existing other than to fill up room in some box on some cupboard shelf.

I imagine a memory box of gigantic proportions and suddenly, I have to make it, even if it takes up all the work room of my studio, and I start to plan how I could take my own doll back with me and what I’ll have to leave: the case of books that I’ve just had printed or my clothes or all the cartridges for my laser printer? If I wear a baby carrier, will they believe it is my baby, sound asleep? And what sensation will I cause when I try to stuff her into the overhead rack?

When I start to plan what else will go in the memory box with her, I remember the metal dollhouse sides and suddenly, I’m planning another trip back to Missouri, where I will make the mother of memory boxes—four feet square—and I wonder how my boyfriend will react to this and what I’ll do with it when it is finished. But somehow all these practicalities do not matter, because this dolly, relegated to corners for its whole life, is finally going to get played with!!!

This is a reblog from a 2014 piece. Since their prompt was “Play,” I’m reblogging it for the Ragtag Daily Prompt.

Spiral!!!

15 Replies

img_6420

The Ragtag prompt was spiral.

Realistic Wedding Vows, Aug 5, 2018

12 Replies
scan085

Photo by Alan Steed

 

Realistic Wedding Vows

I will abide your ego if you will abide mine—
If you ignore my awkward habits, I can exist with thine.
I’ll overlook socks on the floor or an abandoned shoe
if you promise not to mention an extra line or two
you might detect in years to come, scribed onto the place
where I hope you’ll still plant kisses on my aging face.

I won’t make you eat okra if you won’t bring home fish
expecting me to transform them into a tasty dish.
I’ll try to love your mother if you’ll put up with mine.
Poker evenings with your friends that stretch ’til dawn are fine
so long as you won’t rush on through from front door to the fridge
when I have my friends over for a game of bridge.

Stop and talk awhile. Get to know their names.
The sexes aren’t so different. We just play different games.
Our love is a given, so it requires no vow.
The things that I promise thee, in public, here and now
are fidelity and an effort to be the easiest me
that, given what your vows are, it’s possible to be.

Photo by Alan Steed

Hard to believe these photos were taken 31 years ago. Both the generous friend who took them for us as a surprise and the groom are now departed, but not the memories. We actually did not write our vows back then, even though we were both writers. I wonder why? I think it was because I was trying to coordinate publicity for a show being shot in Tahiti, planning a wedding and acting as the go-between for three house closings as we sold each of ours and bought a new house in northern California. The wedding was simple, but wonderful with surprise guests showing up from every stage of my life: childhood, college, Australia, old students from Wyoming, poet friends, friends from work, all my family from three different states, Bob’s kids and friends and even one lady I’d never met who flew in from Wyoming because she thought it sounded like fun. Ha. I’d sent out the invitations as an announcement, but everyone came. Guess they had decided this was never going to happen and they had to see the evidence for themselves. The photos are used as an illustration only and were an afterthought. Bob wasn’t a fisherman. I hadn’t played bridge since college!

The prompts: abide, ego, awkward, detect. Below are the links.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/08/05/rdp66-abide/

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/08/05/fowc-with-fandango-ego/

https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/08/05/awkward/

https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/08/05/daily-addictions-2018-week-31/ (Detect)

In a Nutshell

6 Replies

img_8800

In a Nutshell

The problems in America? What started the commotion?
A borborygmus businessman got a big promotion.

 

Fandango‘s prompt word today was commotion.
Ragtag‘s prompt word was borborygmus.

The Naming of Gassy Dan

7 Replies

 

 

The Naming of Gassy Dan

I’ll tell you of a man I knew by name of Gassy Dan.
It’s true he was a glutton—a mountain of a man.
A sopper-up of every bowl, a scraper of each pan.

He wasn’t the most pleasant guest to ever grace one’s table,
for his appetite was something of legend and of fable
as he gobbled up more than his share whenever he was able.

Once seated at the table, though, he never had enough
of pork chop and of gravy, still he’d commence to huff
and puff about some gossip with language rude and rough.

With his slanderous assertions, his posturings and brayings,
his sanctimonious protests and all of his trite sayings,
he punished all our eardrums with incessant oral flayings.

Thus the rumblings at our table as we commenced to sup
were not his gastric gasses growling like a pup.
His borborygmus rumblings came from farther up. 


The Ragtag prompt for the day is borborygmus. bor·bo·ryg·mus (a rumbling or gurgling noise made by the movement of fluid and gas in the intestines.)

Baked Beans a la Sciatica with a Slight Digression to Pueblas Magica and other Threats to Back Comfort

25 Replies

Fresh from two weeks of sciatica’s debilitating influence, it is a novel experience for me to be able to walk to the kitchen, let alone to work in it. I enter the kitchen this morning armed with two tennis balls in a sock tied off at each end. Whenever my back wears out, I position the balls on either side of my spine and press against the wall, pushing the tennis balls against the sore spots.  One yoga friend says to roll them up and down. Another says to press in one spot for 30 seconds before moving on. I alter my technique, and it seems to work. 

I’m trying to build up my stamina for the visit of my twentyish grand-nephew, freshly graduated from college and coming in six days for a big Mexican adventure.  I’ve planned a one-day trip around the 60 mile long lake I live on to see the thousands of white pelicans that congregate around the local fishery. That day will be mainly driving.  No problem. A four-day trip to Guanajuato has me more worried, but I’ve resorted to booking us places with a small tour group, with guide, to see the Diego Rivera museum, the mummy museum, gardens, haciendas and a dozen other pleasures of the colonial town that is one of the few Mexican towns designated as a puebla Magica—a beautifully preserved town of a bygone era. I figure with 15 compadres, I can always flake out and send him on with the group.

In another excursion, we are visiting the round pyramids an hour and a half distant from my house as well as a few haciendas, and for that occasion, I’m hiring the son of a friend to drive us so my nephew will have someone younger to scramble around with.  I look back in my albums and see the tallest pyramid in Sri Lanka that in my twenties I climbed to the very top of, think of the twelve-mile trek through the jungle and mountains in Portuguese Timor and remember that even then such long walks tested my endurance, but now I worry about holding him back and so I plan adventures with younger friends to accompany us.  I hope it works.

I’d been trying to exercise my back by scrubbing algae from the pool and trimming in the garden, but then last night, a friend called to invite me to a pot luck this afternoon so all morning long, I have been creating a commotion in the kitchen, cooking what I thought was going to be an easy solution to tonight’s pot luck at the clubhouse.  I soaked beans overnight, but even pre-soaked, they have been cooking for four five hours and are not done. I’ve refilled the water four times, once after scorching the bottom layer and having to transfer the beans to a colander and another pot. 

I thought I’d be fancy and make American pork and beans from scratch, thinking it was a mere matter of adding ketchup, mustard, brown sugar and bacon, but after consulting the internet, it has turned into an 11-ingredient process with much chopping, frying and mixing, not to mention trying to locate all the ingredients (or near-substitutes) in my packed kitchen shelves and fridge.  Luckily, on a whim, I bought bacon yesterday.  Not a staple in my house. I didn’t buy fresh salad ingredients because I’ve found that cabbage, once shredded, goes bad quickly, but when my friend called last night to invite me to today’s pot luck, I was sorry I hadn’t. It would have been an easy solution to my problem. What did I have to make a pot luck addition that wouldn’t necessitate a trip to town? They were always overly loaded with desserts, so that was not a solution.  When I found the bag of white beans I thought I’d solved my problem, but after being in the kitchen all morning, I find it was not a very novel solution to the problem. Two and a half more hours until they have to be done enough to bake in the oven with the other ingredients added for 45 minutes.

Fingers crossed, twin tennis balls pressing into my back between my spine and my new desk chair, I finally have time to work on my blog. As a last resort, I may have to make a mad dash into town to purchase two cans of cooked beans, but it will break my heart—transform the richness of my pork and beans from scratch into a poverty of fast-food making-do.

I go to check the beans for the dozenth time since 8 this morning and when I give Yolanda a taste, she proclaims them done, but suggests a bit of salt.  Remembering that I’m cooking for other people, I mind her, in spite of the fact that I haven’t used salt in two years since I discovered my blood pressure was sky high. 

I add the beans to the other 10 ingredients, only to discover that after first swelling up to twice their size, they’ve now cooked down so much that they only half fill my large casserole.  I try graduated sizes of casseroles and baking dishes until I finally find the Baby Bear casserole that is “just right.”  But now my contribution to the pot luck looks so skimpy.  As I put it in the fridge to await the time when I put it in the oven for its final 45 minutes just  before the pot luck, I catch site of the bag of precooked Mexican refried beans on the shelf above it.  Just the slightest  suggestion of a temptation to add them to swell out the beans flashes through my mind, but my puritan ancestors tug me in another direction as I shut the fridge door.

It is 2:15. If I put them in the oven with bacon on the top at four o’clock, it should be just right. I set my alarm to remind me preheat the oven at three o’clock. With a Mexican oven, a thermostat, I have found, is not a true gauge but an approximation. I have two real thermostats purchased at a kitchen shop in the states that I hang on the oven racks to provide a truer gauge, but unfortunately, they always register about 10 degrees difference in different parts of the oven, so baking here is always a bit of a lottery.  Your number might be the correct one or it might not. 

After washing three pots, four casseroles, measuring spoons, spatulas, tasting spoons, measuring cups, mixing bowl and two large dutch ovens, I sit back down in my desk chair to finally begin my blog. My back twinges a bit and I adjust my sock full of balls. Tennis, anyone????

 

The final product, which I must admit doesn’t look like a 5 hour project.
I should have followed directions and bought cans of beans but hey, I thought I’d be a do-it-myself sort of girl.
Annie can’t figure out why with all this time and activity in the kitchen she hasn’t been fed her second breakfast yet.
Underneath this seemingly reasonable grouping of pots is about seven other pots, pans, casseroles and mixing bowls.
The final result, short of the final 45 minute visit to the oven, look a bit puny, doesn’t it?
Ironic that this envelope of prepared frijoles refritos is on the shelf right above my labor of love. Who wouldn’t be tempted to mix them into rest to swell its size? I resisited.
Tennis, anyone? I’ll play singles.

Click on first photo to increase size of photos and read captions.

Today’s words were novel, commotion, poverty, debilitate.
Today’s links, in case you want to follow one or all of the same prompts, are below:

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/08/03/rdp-64-novel/

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/08/03/fowc-with-fandango-commotion/

https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/  poverty

https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/08/03/debilitate/

 

Fallen Memories

1 Reply

daily life color111 (1)

The monsoon rains come like a blessing, relieving the hot humidity, building the lushness of the rice terraces. Green everywhere. Energetic monkeys in the sacred monkey forest grab my postcards from my hands, leave teethmarks that will delight your children more than anything  I might say in the postcards I send as recompense for the father I have taken off with me to another part of the world.

We grow into these long hot humid afternoons that are washed away for a mere hour or so by the seasonal rains. Shedding clothes like years, we live naked underneath sarongs wrapped tightly for security. You sit on the porch, your soon-to-be-old man’s furry pot belly proudly obscuring the tightly wound tuck of your sarong. Over twenty years later, it is that sarong made into a jalaba that I now wear almost daily,  hiding my soon-to-be-old lady’s pot as well. 

How I cope with growing old without you is to sift through these memories like playing cards or photos fallen from old albums that have lost their ability to secure. As gullible as upon our first meeting, I wipe away your inadequacies as I’m sure you would have forgotten mine if you had been the one left sorting the fallen memories in the bottom of the album box.

Monsoons, I have been told, blow both moist and dry, as we did over those fifteen years. But we endured and built each other, coping as all of those in marriages judged successful by their lasting power do. Today you are the photo fallen from the album to the floor.  Quickly, as you fell from my life, I tuck you back securely into your correct place, placing on top new albums with new memories built on the foundation of you and all those memories a life, in the end, is made of.  You slip into that middle place old loved ones eventually  are relegated to. Our way to cope. Our way to live life instead of merely remembering it. Because that is what life is. We keep trying. We keep on.

 

daily life color111 (2)

scan079

The grab bag of prompts today were cope, monsoon, gullible and energetic. Here are the links in case you’d like to play along:

https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/06/06/welcome-to-daily-addictions/ (Cope)

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/08/01/rdp-62-monsoon/

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/08/01/fowc-with-fandango-gullible/

https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/08/01/energetic/