Black & White

If you are on Facebook, you most likely have seen the black and white challenge. In the challenge, people are to post one black and white photo each day for seven days, no people and no explanations.

I participated in the challenge a couple of weeks ago and enjoyed it very much. Below you will find some of the photos that didn’t make it on to the Facebook end of the challenge.

 

 

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Just A Smidgeon

Just a paragraph of the current NaNoWriMo project. First draft.

 

God, he was good looking! He actually looked even better in the morning than he had looked the night before. Angela wondered how she could find out his first name without asking him. She didn’t want him to know that she hadn’t paid attention. She didn’t want him to know that she hadn’t been interested in his name or anything else. She had only been interested in one particular activity the night before. She wasn’t like that. She blushed again. She had never doen anything like that before. She had always been more than careful; more than safe. But things were different now. She would never see him again. Who cared what Tommy, Teddy, Timmy thought? Timmy! That was it. It was actually Timothy, so much more grownup and sophisticated than Timmy.

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When In Times Of Trouble

We live in very troubled times. Troubled in a lot of ways but I am thinking about politically troubled. We seem to have more than the usual number of flawed leaders. We are left with no where to turn.

I have been turning to TV. To streaming, really. What do I stream? I have chosen The West Wing. It’s seven seasons. I’ve turned to it several times. I watch the entire series from pilot to Tomorrow (the title of the last episode of season seven). This is a show that shows how leaders should be; how they should comport themselves. Yes, they are flawed at times but they genuinely want to do the right thing for the people that elected them, for the country in general.

This year, I’ve felt that unsettled feeling of desperation with regard to our political leaders so much that I am currently on my ninth time watching this series from start to finish. It gives me hope that some day, hopefully sooner than later, we’ll have the right kind of leadership. We’ll have sincere, concerned, devoted, and honest leadership. One can only hope.

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This Is Where…

…my time goes:

Just as I think I am going to start something or take a short nap, it never fails, I get a text from my daughter to go rock the baby to sleep or hold her so she can get word done. And off I go because I never learned to pronounce the most difficult word in many languages — “no.”  Sometimes I don’t eat because I am over there. Like tonight. She asked me over just after five. I was supposed to eat between six and seven. (Because my insulin lasts about four and a half hours and I have to eat shortly after that so I can take the insulin again before my blood sugar sky rockets.) I thought I would just need to rock her to sleep and then come home. When I got there, she told me that Anderson tried to do a somersault and landed on the pack ‘n play with all his weight and broke it. They use the pack ‘n play as the baby’s bed because a crib doesn’t fit in her bedroom. So she was asking in all of her free groups on Facebook if anyone had an extra one she could have or even borrow. And that also meant that when Maya fell asleep in my arms, she had to stay in my arms because her bed was broken.

She was lucky enough to find one to keep in one of the groups so off she went to pick it up and to the grocery store to get the rent money order because she’s going to be out of town until late Sunday and she can’t trust her husband to get the money order and follow through with turning it in. And all that while I was sitting on the couch with a sleeping baby in my arms.

The baby woke up and cried and fussed because she’s working on cutting another tooth and I think she missed her mama, too. When they got back, Spencer didn’t want me to leave. He does this thing where he wraps his arms around my legs so I won’t leave and looks up at me and says “pease Nana pease, don’t go, pease.” How can I say no to that? By then it was nine and I still had not eaten or taken my insulin so I told Spencer I could stay a little longer if his mommy had food for me because I was three hours late eating and taking my medicine. Spencer got a chair and pulled it to the freezer to look for food for me! So I stayed just about another hour. I ate there then played with Spencer (no school on Fridays at Head Start so he got to stay up late) for a little bit then came home.

And I am exhausted. I am supposed to do some writing so I don’t fall behind on my NaNoWriMo project (and I will most likely fall behind this weekend because I am helping Chris out with kids while Tina is out of town) and I was supposed to write this blog post. I got that done but I don’t think I will have the energy to do any writing on my NaNoWriMo project. Maybe if I go to sleep now I will wake up early tomorrow?

Anyway, if Maya was such a cutie pie, awake or asleep, it wouldn’t be so difficult to say that unpronouncable word! Darn, just my luck to have the cutest little granddaughter!

 

 

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An Old Familiar Memory

I was driving home from Seattle on Friday and didn’t have an audio book ready to listen to. I turned on the radio but couldn’t tune in to anything while I was driving. I hit the “scan” button and all I got was static until, just at the point of giving up, I heard a song starting up. I immediately recognized the song. It brought a smile to my face as it reminded me of my brother, David.

All of my brothers were Raider fans, especially David and Richard. They were very enthusiastic fans and everyone knew it. When the Raiders played (we’re talking Oakland Raiders) David had a song cued on the radio, ready to go when the Raiders scored. And so, if you lived I David’s neighborhood, you didn’t have to listen to the game or watch it because you would know the score…every time the Raiders scored, David would play, at full volume, Another One Bites the Dust! The volume was so loud that the whole house shook. No one ever complained because he lived in Raider territory so it continued.

That’s a story that reminds me of one side of David, a side that makes me smile. So when I heard the beginning beats of the song, even before any lyrics, I knew the song and it made me smile and sing out loud every time that lyric came up…another one bites the dust!

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One Word

This story, fiction at that, is a result of the one word prompt found at oneword.com.

I couldn’t believe it. What had been a well planned getaway had turned into a nightmare. First i had not been able to sleep the night before my trip then, sleep deprived as I was, I stopped for coffee and as I took my first sip, I scalded my mouth and it blistered right away. I ended up having to spit the hot coffee all over myself. Then I jumped on the freeway only to find that there was an accident and then I got a flat tire. No way! I had just had them checked a few days before but sure enough, it was flat. I had to wait  auto club to come rescue me and by then it had started to rain and the traffic was all backed up.

When the tow arrived, they couldn’t change the tire because the spare tire I had wasn’t good enough so they ended up having to tow my car into the tire shop and I had to buy a new tire. Just what I didn’t need as my funds were quite low!

Once the tire was fixed I ended back on the freeway behind that accident. I found an alternate route, courtesy of my cell phone’s GPS, only to discover five minutes late that it was not an acceptable alternate route.

By the time I got it all sorted out, I had to deal with a torrential downpour and a multitude of accidents caused primarily by the bad weather.

When it was all over, I just wanted to go back  home. Forget about that condo at the beach which I was supposed to stay at. Forget the beautiful sunsets over the Pacific Ocean that I would be missing. Forget the delicious Margaritas at Don Francisco’s where I had planned to enjoy my favorite beverage with an order of pollo en mole. I just wanted to go home.

So much for that careful planning.

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Oneword.com gives you a single word as a writing prompt and then they time you to sixty minutes. What you put into it is what you get out. Give it a try!

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They Arrived Sick

I was doing a lesson about Thanksgiving with Anderson. We watched some kid videos on the first Thanksgiving and about the pilgrims landing at Plymouth. We talked about what it means to be grateful or thankful for something and about what we each could list as what we are thankful for. He made a turkey out of construction paper and we listed something to be thankful for on each feather.

One thing stands out for me from this lesson that I can’t really discuss much with my six year old grandson. Not yet. But I will get there. What is it?

When the pilgrims arrived, they arrived sick. They spread their disease to the natives who had no resistance to any illnesses coming from Europe. So they died. A lot of them died. And what did Squanto do after most of his people died? He helped the pilgrims learn to hunt and plant things they could harvest for the winter. He helped them to learn how to fight the cold and snow that would come in the winter. And when the pilgrims decided to feast, the tribe came and brought them food.

And what did “we” do? We not only brought them diseases they could not fight but we also took their land and drove them to isolated and barren lands; lands that would bear no crops to sustain them; lands that were harsh. And it continues today as “we” take their sacred land and water and dignity. We take and take and take some more and forget the spirit of giving and helping that the natives showed “us” that first Thanksgiving.

Talk about a sickness.

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Heart Attack — #WeeklySmile

Last week, Anderson (6) and I went to feed my daughter’s cats (she was out of town). We ran a few errands and stopped at IHOP. I’m teaching him to read and as part of that effort, I point out signs and store names and whatever print I see that might be easy enough for him to try to read or sound out the letters. So we are driving home and we were passing the hospital when this happened:

Anderson: ER. What is that, Nana? Why does it say ER.

Me: That means Emergency Room. E for Emergency and R for Room.

Anderson: What’s Emergency Room?

Me: That’s part of the hospital and people that are very sick and cannot wait to see the doctor go there. When people are in accidents, ambulances might bring them here to the Emergency Room if they are hurt.

Anderson: I never been to the Emergency Room, right Nana?

Me: Actually, you have. When you were a baby you got very sick and your mommy and I brought you here to this Emergency Room. And in the summer, we brought your mommy here, too. Remember?

Anderson: Oh, yeah. Have you ever been to the Emergency Room?

Me: Yes, a few years ago I had to come here.

Anderson: Why did you come here?

Me: Well, I had some very bad pains in my chest and your mommy brought me here to see if I might be having a heart attack.

Anderson: I had a heart attack too. I get that some time.

Me: You did? When was that? Why did you have a heart attack?

Anderson: (First he thinks about it then…) Well, I was playing and something happened and there was a very loud very bad noise or something and I my heart stopped and I thought I was going to die so I had a heart attack!

Children say the funniest things!

The #WeeklySmile is a blog link up hosted by Trent. Come check it out. Remember that humor is the anesthetic of the brain. We all need that these days. Come see!

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Protest Songs, #2

This one is probably very familiar to anyone over the age of 40. You might not know the background. It was written by John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival in 1969, during the Vietnam war.

It talks about those who are all gung ho for war and wave their red, white and blue and say we should give the government what it asks of, yet they aren’t following through on their own. Fogerty says he wrote it after he was drafted. He saw that everyone was being drafted and wasn’t able to fight it, even if they didn’t support the war . Yet, there were those moneyed people that were able to get out of the draft because their money spoke for them (or their daddy’s money).

Fortunate Son

Some folks are born, made to wave the flag
Ooh, they’re red, white and blue
And when the band plays, ‘Hail to the chief’
Ooh, they point the cannon at you, Lord

But it ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no senator’s son, son
It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no fortunate one, no

Some folks are born with silver spoon in hand
Lord, don’t they help themselves? Oh
But when the taxman come to the door
Lord, the house look like a rummage sale, yes

It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no millionaire’s son, no, no
It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no fortunate one, no

Yeah, yeah, some folks inherit star spangled eyes
Ooh, they send you down to war, Lord
And when you ask them, how much should we give
Ooh, they only answer, more, more, more, yo

It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no military son, son, no
It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no fortunate one, no, no

It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no fortunate one, no, no, no
It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no fortunate son, son
It ain’t me

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Protest Songs #1

Some of our greatest songs were written in protest of movements, events, and politics. Every protest movement has its song. Sometimes we hear the songs and sing them without realizing that it/they was/were written as a protest. I bet you’ve done it.

Bob Dylan has written many of these protest songs. Here’s one:

Blowin’ In the Wind

How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man ?
How many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand ?
Yes, how many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they’re forever banned ?
The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

Yes, how many years can a mountain exist
Before it’s washed to the sea ?
Yes, how many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free ?
Yes, how many times can a man turn his head
Pretending he just doesn’t see ?
The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

Yes, how many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky ?
Yes, how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry ?
Yes, how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died ?
The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

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