13 Hallowe’ens ~ ~ Evening Two
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Category Archives: humor
13 Hallowe’ens ~ ~ Evening One
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(Extra)ordinary Construction Worker
I was having some windows installed in my home last week, and one of the construction crew members, while walking through my living room, stopped and pointed to the wall behind me.
“What’s that?” he asked in a way that made me wonder if someone had perhaps snuck in a boar’s head and mounted it on my unsuspecting wall. I turned to look. Oh, that.
“It’s a dulcimer,” I told him, and proceeded to answer his questions about the instrument. Where it originated, what type of music one played on it, etc.
“Wow!” He continued to stare at it with that boar’s-head-on-the-wall type of fascination. “That’s a real conversation piece!”
This week’s Daily Press photo challenge asks, “What’s mundane yet meaningful to you? What’s a beautiful everyday thing?”
I guess my dulcimer would fall into that category. I think it’s beautiful. It does carry special meaning for me. And yet – to me – it has become rather “mundane.” I see it hanging on my wall each day. I dust it occasionally (okay, rarely). And very rarely, I take it down and actually try to play the darn thing.
It’s interesting to think about how the term “mundane” is such a personal concept. It’s quite possible that I could walk into that construction worker’s home and see a boar’s head hanging on his wall. My reaction would likely be, “What’s that?” and he would reply, “Oh, that’s Reggie. Or what’s left of the little tyke. He was one helluva pig.”
So if you’re looking through the other entries to the photo challenge and you come across a picture of a boar’s head mounted on a wall, it’s probably a photo of Reggie that my construction worker posted on his blog.
I just hope my construction worker is as good at installing windows as he is at photography, blogging, taming wild boars, and taxidermy.
Wow! He’s a busy guy! I guess it’s no wonder he never found time to take up the dulcimer.
Weekly Photo Challenge: (Extra)ordinary
Lost and Found
Hoo boy! So I’m taking this poetry class thing from WordPress, and today’s assignment was to create a “found poem.”
The description of a found poem was given thusly:
A found poem is composed of words and letters you’ve collected — randomly or not — from other sources, whether printed, handwritten, or digital, and then (re)arranged into something meaningful.
Well… I found something alright, but I don’t know if it would qualify as poetry. Perhaps my source of these collected phrases was a determining factor in how this would go. A Trader Joe’s monthly flyer can be pretty random even before you start cutting and pasting.
The good news: I kept it short. I think my found poem would have perhaps been better off remaining lost. Oh, and there was a suggested theme (face), and a poetry device (chiasmus). I didn’t even attempt to throw those in. All for the best, I think.
Here goes:
Oh, wait! Did they say “meaningful?”
Limerick Two ~ Imperfekt
A perfectly imperfect rhyme
can give poets a difficult time.
To find the right phrase
may take hours or days, but
it always works out in due
course.
WordPress Writing 201, Assignment Four. Prompt: imperfect. Form: limerick. Device: enjambment.
Haiku Fifteen ~ On the Rise
caution when climbing don’t rise above the top rung you could lose your way
Pouting Dog
turn your back on me look away and ignore me I’ll admire your tail
Turnaround
Let’s Go Literal
I am literally challenged by this week’s Daily Press photo challenge. I am challenged by literalness.
I grow uncomfortable around ambiguous phrases or terms, like questions that begin with “How do you like…” As in “How do you like your job?”
What is the actual question here? Is it like the phrase “How do you take your coffee?” I like my coffee with cream and sugar. I like my job with very little supervision and an extremely high salary. I seem to drink a lot of black coffee. Guess we don’t always get how we like.
But maybe the question simply means “Do you like your job?” In which case, the answer might be “yes” or “no.” But when “how” is tacked on at the beginning of the question, single-syllabic answers seem no longer appropriate.
In a question format, “how” becomes an adverb (I think; don’t quote me on that), which suddenly makes it all complicated with the need for nouns and adjectives and such.
“How do you like your job?”
“Yes.”
It just doesn’t work that way.
The Daily Post’s photo challenge theme this week is Grid. “We often superimpose a mental grid over things we photograph to help with composition,” the post begins. “This week, let’s go literal.” Michelle the Daily Post person suggests, “This week, let’s take the humble grid out of the shadows, and make it the star.”
Go literal? Suddenly I am compulsively pulling up dictionary.com to look up the literal meaning of “grid.” And since a “grid” is defined as a “grating,” I have to look up “grating,” as well.
This whole thing is, indeed, grating. On my nerves. Guess I’ll have to just grid and bear it. (Ahhhh, she breaks under pressure…)
Definition of “grating” and hence, by inference, also the definition of “grid” ~
a framework of parallel or crossed bars, used as a partition, guard, cover, or the like.*
*Emphasis mine. Mostly because I’ve always wanted to say “Emphasis mine.” **
** And also because I like to use asterisks.
After all this grate research, I have determined that my photos this week are in fact literal depictions of “or the like.”
How do you like them?
Mono Fur
Cat hair
everywhere
on the floor and in the air
***
Dog fur
in a blur
mostly on the furniture
***
White fluff
on my stuff
vacuum cleaner has it rough
***
Sometimes
makes me wish
I had opted for a fish
Weekly Photo Challenge: Monochromatic
What Rhymes with Stanza? 