Category Archives: humor

The Writing is on the Wall

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handwriting

 

As our culture moves away from cursive writing and becomes more and more reliant on keyboarding, texting, Skype, video sharing, and the myriad other forms of digital communication, penmanship is rapidly falling by the wayside.

Once a required course in elementary schools, handwriting is no longer generally seen as valuable or relevant enough to take up school curriculum time. While that may or may not be the case, learning penmanship can still be beneficial.

penmanship

 

Handwriting proponents point to advantages such as improved brain development, greater retention of information when one takes notes manually, and the ability to read historical documents that were written in cursive.

As with handwriting, many skills lose relevance as we evolve. I guess we pick and choose which to keep alive. Maybe learning penmanship in this day and age is akin to students of my generation learning Latin. Or the Macarena.

Latin

 

I hope my grandchildren learn penmanship. I will gladly teach them if they are interested. I hope I continue learning skills for communicating digitally. Maybe my grandkids will offer to teach me.

I kind of doubt that I will ever learn Latin. I can live with that. And the Macarena… well, that’s another story.

Auld Lang Syne (and all that)

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I’m not a big fan of strolling down memory lane, and yet the end of the year seems to oblige one to contemplate upon “times gone by.”

I don’t intend to take that auld lang stroll through my memorable moments of 2015. With my poor memory, it would be a pretty short stroll anyway. Instead, I’ll just take a quick little sprint to thank you all for sharing this year with me.

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My memory lane is usually quite foggy… and often gated as well.

 

This inaugural year for “What Rhymes with Stanza?” has been fun, challenging and inspiring for me, and hopefully entertaining/thought-provoking/utterly mind blowing (take your pick) for you as well.

I started this blog in February of this year. The subtitle I selected, “Words at Rest; Words at Play,” pretty much sums up my intended purpose.

I like to play with words (and with my food, too, but that’s probably irrelevant at the moment). And sometimes I like to pick up my camera and give words a rest as I attempt to express myself visually.

It’s great to have a place to share my creativity, but the best part of it is when you share yourself with me, through comments on my site, through your own blogs, through mind-melding… oh, wait, that wasn’t you.

Anyway, before my sprint turns into a marathon, I will leave you with my best wishes for a safe/pleasant/wild and crazy (take your pick) New Year’s eve.

And I’ll indulge myself with a repost of my favorite “words at play” moment from 2015. Cheers!

cat you

My favorite post of 2015: “Cat Plight”

Oops! The Case of the Runaway Hole in the Wall

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So there I was, sitting in my living room staring once again at that little bulging hole in the wall underneath the window. It was about the size of a thumbnail, with a couple of cracks running about three inches out from it.
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Its location under the window made me concerned that the window might be leaking water and causing the damage. But aside from my water concerns, that little hole just irritated the heck out of me every time I looked at it.

For some reason this year I got it into my head that I was going to be some kind of do-it-yourself super warrior. So even though I’d never done any type of wall repair before, I set out to fix that annoying anomaly.

First I took my handy dandy utility knife (I absolutely LOVE my utility knife; it’s just so… utile), and cut out some of the wall sheetrock to see what I was dealing with.
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Then I accidentally cut into a prior mesh patch (oops!) and ended up removing it. So I had a bigger hole to fix.
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This was more than I had bargained for. I paused to consider my options. While pausing, I made a temporary patch using a pizza box and duct tape (I absolutely LOVE duct tape. It’s just so… ducky).
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At least I didn’t have to look at that little hole in the wall anymore.

As the saying goes, “In for a penny, in for a pound.” I forged ahead, replacing the pizza box with sheetrock, and taping and mudding and sanding the new repair. The offending little hole spot now looked like this:
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A little texture spray and new paint, and the wall under the window looks as good as new, except for the missing baseboard that I tore off. But that’s a totally different do-it-myself super warrior story.
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Daily Post weekly photo challenge:  Oops!

B&W: B and W

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Bird on a Wire

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Budding Branches with Winged Warbler
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Bent Buoyant Bystander Watching Waning Water

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You can see the Blue Heron in blue at my prior post about Portland, Oregon’s “Blue Heron Day.”

Cee’s Black and White Photo Challenge (CB&W) topic this week is “Starts with the Letters B or W.”

NaBloPoMo ~ NoMore

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We made it! It’s the last day of November, and the last day of the 2015 National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) challenge. I succeeded in posting to this blog daily for 30 days and — as promised — I didn’t resort to regaling you with endless photos of my cat and dog. Well, maybe I did. But they’re so stinkin’ cute!

No More

 

Most of the time it was fun, sometimes tedious. It certainly did force me to crank up my creative juices, and to acknowledge that I don’t have to wait around like some mutt underfoot begging for table scraps, hoping my muse tosses a few ideas my way.

Okay, so it’s never been that bad. My usual writing process is that some notion begins buzzing around my head like an annoying insect. I roll up a metaphorical newspaper and swat it. When it falls to the ground, I poke at it to see if there’s any life left in it. If there is, then maybe I write about it. The metaphorical insect, that is.

If it’s a real insect, I try to get the dog to catch it and either escort it outside or ensure its demise. He usually just sniffs at it and walks away. As does the insect.

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Outdoors: live and let live.

 

Outdoors, my bug philosophy is “live and let live.” Indoors, the rule is if it won’t go away or if it creeps me out, it dies. Kind of like a blind date. But I digress.

There aren’t many insects flying around my part of the world at this time of year. Except stink bugs. And who wants to write about a stink bug, metaphorical or otherwise?

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Indoors: sic ’em, Chules!

 

The point of all this is to say that I will write with less frequency from now on, that I’ll try not to write if I have nothing to say, and that you probably shouldn’t go on a blind date with me.

Thanks for seeing me through this month, and for reading each and every one of my posts. You did that, right?

Life Squared: The Instagram Junk Drawer

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insta picI try to not get sucked into social media: Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Flickr… whatever else is out there with cute misspelled names. I have a love/hate/hate/hate relationship with Facebook, and I probably definitely give it much more space in my life than it deserves.

And Instagram? At first I couldn’t see any point in taking photos with a cell phone, formatting them into tiny little squares and then posting them to… exactly where was it they were posted to???

When I finally got a cell phone that had capabilities beyond conveying conversations,  however, I simply couldn’t resist the urge to document all the minutiae of my daily life. And of course once one goes to all that bother of snapping a photo, they need to share it with someone, right? Enter, Instagram.

I see it as my photo “junk drawer.” Junk drawers don’t really contain junk. They hold any number of useful things that just don’t have a designated spot to hang out. Sometimes I take photos that I simply find amusing or pretty or whatever, but don’t really want to share on Facebook for the whole world to see.

Today I thought I’d pull out a few items from my Instagram junk drawer to share with you, but don’t show them to the whole rest of the world like Facebook does, okay? Promise?

Instagrams seem to fall into certain categories. We have…

the oddities:

insta gate

A gate held shut by chains and a padlock, but there’s no fence. Anyone see a security risk here?

insta glove

A glove balloon in the shrubbery outside a hospital. Bored interns?

the beautiful:

insta flowers

Summer flowers, autumn leaves, winter snow, spring flower and leaf buds and melting snow…

insta sunrise

The obligatory sunrise/sunset taken through power lines.

silly captions:

insta seagull

“I think I’m lost. Has anyone seen the ocean? Big… blue… wavy…”

insta pun

Rare sighting today: the yellow-bellied sap maker.

pets: (silly captions optional)

insta leaves

I wanted to continue our walk today, but Chules just wanted to leaf.

adventures:

insta wrench

When you forget where you packed your utensils, you have to get creative.

and of course, Selfies!!!!

insta selfie

Taking selfies isn’t as easy as it looks, kitty.

Now I’ve shown you mine… What’s in your junk drawer?

NaBloPoMo ~~ Halftime Entertainment

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writingI’m halfway through the National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo) challenge of writing a post each day for the entire month of November. It has, indeed, been a challenge. And perhaps a challenge for you, too, in receiving daily posts from me.

Take heart. After this month I fully intend to return to my sporadic “as the mood strikes” posting schedule. Or non-schedule, I guess.

So I promised halftime entertainment… a bit misleading, I confess. There won’t be any scantily clad cheerleaders and megastar wardrobe malfunctions. I don’t even have any clever, funny stories to regale you with today. Mostly, I just thought it made for a catchy post title.

The last time I tried to entertain anyone was when I was serenading my pets with a medley of Neil Diamond tunes. I soon found both of them hiding under the bed. Hmmm… everyone’s a critic.

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It surely couldn’t have been my singing, so it must be that they just aren’t Neil Diamond fans. Next time I’ll try Cat Stevens or Three Dog Night.

Okay, halftime is over. Time to get back into the game.

A shout out to Susie Lindau , wild rider extraordinaire, for her mid-challenge inspiration and post ideas.