Slooooowly
My top five from this week’s WPC:
Weekly Photo Challenge: On the Move
Author Archives: beeblu
Class of Whatever
“Banker,
gay,
no kids”,
he says,
as he snips my fringe.
“That’s what I tell them,
then take it from there.”
We agree
school reunions
are best avoided.
Search Engine Poetry, Cryptically
After the response I got to my Search Engine Poetry challenge last year, I thought it would be fun to do it again this year. But, sadly, due to the reasons reported by Timethief over at
Google has gone and torpedoed all that – Pfffft!
(Christine, can you please have a mother-to-son chat about this! 🙂 )
What to do? What to do?
A Blog Title Poetry Challenge, perhaps?
Hmmm, doesn’t quite have the same ring to it…
..but it could be fun, and who knows what blogging gems we might discover along the way.
So, here’s my BTP challenge:
- Write a poem from WordPress blog titles (use the Explore Topics Tags in the WordPress Reader to help you).
- Be sure to hyperlink to the blog titles in your poem.
- Post the poem on your blog and leave a comment on this post linking to it.
- Read and comment on at least one post on the blogs whose titles you’ve used.
- Have fun!
I’ll go first:
Ducks in a row,
Let’s go!
——————————————————————————————————–
1000 Great Smoothies –
Cigars and Cupcakes,
The only Cin…
And whether or not you feel like participating in the BTP challenge, do yourself a huge favour and subscribe to one cool site; Timethief knows her blogging stuff and can help you with yours. One of her many really useful posts for bloggers can be found here. Thank you, Timethief.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Spring
Of course, spring is nowhere to be seen right now in the Antipodes, so there aren’t any current suitable subjects, unless one thinks outside the spiral. And I’m (supposed to be) in the depths of a brain-clogging university assignment on business ethics, so am not in much of a lateral thinking mode. I took this one back in December at the Ashcombe Maze and Lavender Gardens on the Mornington Peninsula.
Five entries with an alternative take on this week’s WPC:
- DC Montreal: Blowing the Whistle on Society (for those who need a good laugh)
- Flickr Comments (not for those with ovinophobia)
- Eliza Eliza (paint your own)
- Beyond the Brush (spring is not just about flowers)
- Nomad Nurpu (pets share the joy)
Weekly Photo Challenge: Letters
I was born in an era of typewriters, snail-mail letters, no mobile phones, no emails, no personal computers. I still write letters by (untidy) hand and send them through the post. I’ve a treasure trove of letters written to me over a lifetime stashed away in my kist, including a love note from my husband, typed on a typewriter on a phone message note about 25 years ago :-), and a wonderful letter from a stranger regarding my father’s death notice in the newspaper.
And a few years ago, I discovered the many letters and postcards I’d written to my youngest niece over the years after I emigrated adorned the inside of her cupboard doors – she’d kept them all. We both prize what people have taken the time to write with us in mind.
There is one letter, though, that really breaks my heart when I re-read it now. It’s from a boy who grew up in South Africa in the years just after Apartheid officially ended. His name is Freedom and, at the time that he wrote this letter, he was a child without very many worldly possessions at all, but he was loved, and was full of joy and hope. And, as his letter shows, he had a genuine appreciation for so very little. 
Freedom’s mum, widowed early in her marriage, worked beyond hard to give him a good education, and she had high hopes for his future. He is now a young man but, unfortunately, due to some nefarious influences and bad choices, his life isn’t turning out so well.
My 5 picks from this week’s photo challenge at The Daily Post:
Weekly Photo Challenge: On Top
We played golf in Canberra this weekend, and this pink galah, in his lofty abode, was our audience on the 6th.
For more entries to this week’s WPC, see The Daily Post.
Lena Maree
Tonight,
I think of my maternal grandmother,
(Chelsea buns, vetkoek, hugs to save the world)
passed some 30-odd years ago –
“Kari, Kari…”, her loving voice as I drift to sleep
and remember that stark day
she fell crossing the road
outside the Durban Museum
And I, five, thinking she was dead,
screamed!
But she did not let go
of my hand, and smiled
in her usual, generous way
as strangers helped her to her feet.
Always the comforter of souls –
Sweet, wonderful Lena Maree.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Reflections
9/11 Memorial – NYC
For more entries, see The Daily Post.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Inside
Kant’s principle of respect for persons states that we should never use people as means to an end.
Kant obviously had no sense of humour.
This morning inside a train somewhere in Sydney
For more entries to this week’s, last week’s, the week before last’s WPC, see The Daily Post.
For Gabrielle Bryden – Perchance to Dream
Perspective: Ways of Seeing
‘Look Both Ways’ is one of my favourite Australian movies. The worst-case-scenario imaginings of its main character, Meryl, are depicted in ghoulish animations, which are juxtaposed with the realistic elements of the unfolding storyline. It’s a wonderfully quirky and inspired way of bringing Meryl’s inner life to the audience and providing light relief to a film that has death at its heart: the director—the late Sarah Watt—was diagnosed with breast cancer during its making.
The film’s black humour resonates with me because, despite my scientific rationalist leanings, I think in much the same way as Meryl: worst-case-scenario is my oldest imaginary friend defensive tactic.
I hurt my back a few weeks ago, cleaning (yes, it’s bad for one’s health). I’ve never had back problems, and when my condition hadn’t improved after a week of intermittent resting, the bone-cancer-metastasized-from-the-bowel-cancer-I’ve-yet-to-be-tested-for-serves-me-right-for making-jokes-about-it thought crept into my head . A lot of magical thinking for someone who doesn’t believe in fairies and ghosts.
The benign reality—that sitting behind a desk for 8 hours a day and in a car for close on 2.5 hours a day has turned me into a blob (note the passive construction of that last sentence), and my core strength just isn’t what it used to be—finally popped into my blobby brain, and off I went to the gym swimming pool, where I spent some time running through water, shocking neglected muscles back to life. And my back is suddenly better. Magical, isn’t it?!
Snow Poles in Summer – Falls Creek, Victoria, Australia
For more entries to this week’s WPC, see The Daily Post.
Five favourites out of the entries so far.
Exploratorius (who can resist a good mystery?!)
Colder Weather (an ant’s perspective)
happyface313 (look up!)
autopict (things catch the eye)
Lucid Gypsy (horseying around)
WPC: Abandoned (Tilly, don’t look!)
Abandoned: the word speaks of the ghosts of things, memories, people, activities, better times, and not a little sadness. A few weeks ago, my husband found this cicada exoskeleton still clinging to our garden fence, after its living contents had taken flight. So perfect in form and function, yet used no more.
Abandoned Cicada Exoskeleton
My five favourite interpretations from this week’s WPC:
Puncta Lucis
(Evokes wonderful images of mad-haired, smoking hacks, clacking away to meet their deadlines.)
On Dragonfly Wings with Buttercup Tea
(Who lived here? Where did they go? Why?)
Chronicles of Illusions
(A star that should have been.)
Picture the Pretty
(The tragic truth of many lives.)
365 Days of Thank You
(Reminds me of my first day of school, around 44 years ago, and the fact that BM tried to kiss me in the sandpit after the parents had left, haha.)
Treasured Trees in Three
(Sh)It’s in the mail
First came the warning letter…
..and then the package.
Sending poo in the mail: there are few things more deviant, surely?
No, it’s not what you’re thinking: I didn’t receive poo in the mail from some demented troll, but have been requested by my Government to send mine. I kid you not. In Australia, you know you’re 50 when you receive…
..your very own Government-sponsored DIY bowel cancer screening kit. With instructions in 18 languages, an information & FAQ booklet, sample sticks, test tubes, labels, return envelopes, the lot.
FAQ: Can I place my samples in the fridge?
The mind boggles, and the imagination runs riot (the unsuspecting child, home from school, thinking mum’s left them some sort of treat, a la Heston Blumenthal).
Mine would be more along the lines of: Can they tell I drank a whole bottle of champers within 15 minutes of stepping through the front door last night? (Or that I have gag reflex to shots of our PM is his red budgie smugglers?)
So, Australia, not only is Big Brother watching you, but your poo, too.
Secretly, I’m impressed.
WPC: Selfie
Selfie, Picasso-style
Self Portrait (a re-post)
They say
We know
who we are
in adulthood –
Sister,
not brother,
Wife,
not mother –
A prosaic mosaic,
fragments of a self
But don’t ask me
to complete the picture –
Time has lost
more than a few pieces.
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For other selfies, see The Daily Post.
Five favourites from this week:
The Sadsock Truth
There is a shopping bag behind the laundry door. It has a special purpose: the answer to that eternal, infernal question: Where do unmatched socks go?
I once read that they end up sunning themselves on the beaches of Tanzania. Why not? We now know that flip-flops of the world escape to Kenya’s Kiwaiyu island. So it’s not difficult to imagine a soggy sock, in the despairing depths of a dreary sock marriage (and a job that’s more than a little on the nose), slipping down the washing-machine outlet pipe, away from its unsuspecting laundry dance partner, and out into the wide wonderful ocean. And then, finding itself on some idyllic distant shore, being swept off its feet foot, so to speak, by a sock mismatch made in heaven – ‘Shirley Valentine for Socks’. Sigh…
But the truth, I fear, is as dull as wash-water – missing socks, it appears, lie so near, yet so far from their perfect match somewhere in the bowels of the dark sock-drawers of their myopic owners. In our household, these sad singles end up in the bag behind the laundry door, invariably, not far from their original sock suitors.
Time for me to go and match-make.
For other hated household chores, see The Daily Post.
WPC: Object
the objectification of bovines
moo
For more entries to this week’s WPC, see The Daily Post.
My top 5 picks from this week
WPC: Juxtaposition
For more entries to this week’s WPC, see The Daily Post. So many interesting interpretations this week.
WPC: Family
You’ve probably heard about elephants mourning their dead, but what about cockatoos?
I often pass this family of cockies on my way to work. They’re usually feeding on seeds on the verge, playfully whirling and wheeling, and creating general cacophonous havoc.
But yesterday, they were crowded around on the road; I drove back to see what they were up to: it was a heartbreaking scene.
They were very quiet except for a few plaintive squeaks and squawks.
One kept on nudging the lifeless form on the road.
I wonder if they feel grief.
For more entries to this week’s challenge, see The Daily Post.
WPC: Window
For more entries to this week’s photo challenge, see The Daily Post.
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