Like an itch in my psyche,
your insults taunt me.
In truth, am I that abhorrent?
Niggling accusations,
crippling judgments,
peripheral flashes of
forgotten shame…
That and more, you say.
We’ve only scratched the surface.
I really hate the sound of
my own voice.
break with precision
grind sharp edges to conform
redefine wholeness
Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge: Numbers: Anything with Numbers on It
Last year I took part in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge using a secondary blog that I was maintaining at the time. The challenge, as described on the A to Z site, is,
“Can you post every day except Sundays during [the] month [of April]? And to up the bar, can you blog thematically from A to Z?”
In other words, on April 1st, the topic for a post would be something beginning with the letter A, and so on ‘til the end of the month when you reach Z. Some bloggers use themes to tie their posts for the month together. I didn’t do that last year, since I only learned of the challenge on April 1st, and was scrambling to come up with the requisite posts, let alone something thematic. But this year…
I decided that if I’m going to barrage readers with daily posts, I’ll keep them short and sweet – well, short anyway. So my “theme” is to write a 5-7-5 poem each day (a poem in the form of three lines with corresponding syllables per line of 5, 7 and 5). Some would call it haiku, and haiku purists would be aghast if you called it haiku. So I’ll just leave it at 5-7-5.
And in keeping with the alphabetical theme, each day’s poem will be on a topic beginning with the assigned letter, AND — just to make it even more challenging — each line of the poem will also begin with the letter of the day.
Confused? Yeah, me too. But with April just around the corner, it will all become clear. I hope.
Bottom line: One month (April), short posts, alphabetical, haiku-ish.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I must
attempt
being
competently
diligent
effecting
future
gaity
here
in
jovial
keeping
like
many
notable
other
posts
quite
recently
such
that
understandably
visitors
won’t
eXit
yawning
Zzzzzzzzzz’s
Two years ago I began a blog about my favorite pastime, stained glass. In my first post, I indicated that the blog, Glass Manifestations, would be about:
“glass (sort of) because working with glass is how I do a lot of my processing (thoughts, feelings, ideas, inspirations…), and hence a lot of my thoughts, feelings and ideas are made manifest in my art. But… also about insight and growth, in the hope that what I manifest tomorrow, or next week or next year – in life as well as in glass – will continue to improve. In quality, in meaningfulness, and in pure, simple pleasure.”
A month into the blog, I signed up for a WordPress Blogging U course on writing poetry. With the very first assignment, I realized that my poetry attempts might not fit into my Glass blog theme of insight and growth and meaningfulness.
Nope. That first poem was about leaky water faucets and dental floss. I decided I needed a different venue where I could express those random, ridiculous and totally irrelevant thoughts that obviously didn’t get the “meaningfulness” memo. Hence, What Rhymes with Stanza came into being.
In the two years since, my Stanza blog has grown and expanded beyond poetry to where now I express my random, silly and possibly meaningful thoughts through photography, prose, embellished conversations amongst animals, and sometimes art.
The Glass blog, in the meantime, just wasn’t as fun a place to hang out for me. And so the blog languished in neglect.
With the new year, I’ve done a bit of reassessing about my blogs and have decided to combine the two, moving some of the material from the withering glass blog over to this site. Hopefully that will occur seamlessly and behind the scene, so long as I don’t confuse the export/import process with the reblog function. (If you see fifty new posts from me in a single day, you’ll know I failed.)
This blog-meld won’t change the Stanza site to any significant degree. You’ll likely see more posts about stained glass and art, and I’ve added a gallery of my glass work for those of you who care to look. Other than that, you can expect my usual deep and evocative take on what chickens discuss when no one else is around, fascinating tips on how not to handle home improvement projects, copious photos of my pets, and maybe even a poem or two.
I’m looking forward to a fun, random, insightful, meaningful year! I hope you stick around to share it with me.
If we were having coffee, you might ask why I haven’t been posting a whole lot lately. I would tell you I hadn’t really noticed until today, but it’s probably for the best that I post when I have something to share, and not just to meet self-imposed quotas.
I have many interests that seem to ebb and flow: blogging, stained glass, gardening and landscaping (a newly formed interest), home improvement DIY projects, reading, poetry, walking my dog and taking photos, binge-watching entire seasons of my favorite programs on Netflix, playing with my grandkids, playing with my (adult) kids, playing with my food… and probably some other interests that are so far into the ebb stage I have forgotten them for now.
Blogging seems to be ebbing for a bit right now. With the rainy season coming up and more time spent indoors, my posts will likely pick back up. Be forewarned!
If we were having coffee, I would tell you that I took my dog Chules to a doggy daycare for the first time this week. It tuckered him out and he’s been napping a lot since. The daycare streams webcams of their play areas so you can see what your pet is up to at any given moment. I admit I spent a lot of time checking in on Chules.
There were a lot more white dogs in attendance than I expected, but I had no problem picking Chules out of the crowd. While other dogs walked or ran around, there was one dog that literally pranced in and out of the camera’s view. That would be my Chules. Perhaps I should have named him Prancer.
I’d better sign off for now. It’s time to attend to something that is definitely not one of my favorite pastimes: house cleaning. Thanks for stopping by and allowing me to put off my chores for a while. If you want to hang around, there’s a pile of clean laundry that needs folding.
No? Alright then. Have a good weekend. Hopefully you will find time to enjoy your favorite activities.
Thank you Diana at PartTimeMonsterBlog.com for hosting the #WeekendCoffeeShare.
If we were having coffee, I would most likely be the one sitting quietly, listening intently, and secretly thanking the gods of social interaction for having someone else here willing to carry the conversation. At the inevitable lull, when the heavy mantle of converse would fall upon me, I would mention a blogging community I just discovered through The Daily Post blog.
Connecting under the hashtag #weekendcoffeeshare, the intent is to publish a post each weekend (or with whatever regularity suits you), in which you (the blogger) write about what you’d share with your reader if you were visiting over a cup of coffee, beginning your post with “If we were having coffee…”
It sounds interesting, but a bit intimate. I’ve tried to not get too personal on this blog, and I don’t know if I want to change that. Or challenge that. Or challenge me. Or bore my readers.
I guess – in a way – whatever I post is innately personal to some degree. Each post is a glimpse into what I think is notable, beautiful, humorous, interesting…
So maybe I’m not being as elusive and anonymous as I think, posting surreptitiously from the shadows of my laptop, hiding behind my dark shades and low-brimmed hat. Maybe it’s not such a huge leap after all to sit down on a lazy Saturday morning with my warm cup of caffeine, and tell you what’s on my mind.
Maybe. I might give this weekend coffee share community a shot. Most likely not every weekend. But some. And next time… I promise to leave the dark glasses and Dick Tracy fedora at home. I can tell that the barista behind the bar is getting a bit nervous.
I’ll get this one, if you’ll leave the tip.
A big thank you to Diana at Part-Time Monster for hosting the weekly link-up where we can check out what other bloggers are discussing with their #weekendcoffeeshare.
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.
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!
My favorite post of 2015: “Cat Plight”
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!
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.
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?
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?
I’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.
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.
What Rhymes with Stanza? 