Murage Monday

murage ~ tax for the upkeep of walls

If you’re not one of my Facebook friends, then you missed my big news from last week: I finally got my tattoo.

That picture was taken by my tattoo artist just after he was done, which is why it looks a little red and swollen. I’d have taken a new one for this post but I’ve just entered the flaking and peeling stage. It’s not itchy, but I’m finding it really hard to resist peeling it like I would a healing sunburn. ;-)

Other than that it was a fairly quiet week. I spent a lot of time going through the kitchen cupboards ferreting out glassware to add to my growing pile of stuff to be donated. Despite the fact that a lot of it hadn’t been used in more than ten years, some of it even longer than that, if ever, it was surprisingly hard to part with some of it. But I put on my big girl underpants and sucked it up.

After the daughter added some clothes and toys, I had a full load for the car. Including, I might add, five boxes of books! Then my friend and I drove up to Peterborough to a thrift store that raises money for the Children’s Wish Foundation.

And you know that after unloading all that we naturally had to check the store out. They were having a half price sale on toys, so it’s safe to say the grandbaby made out like a bandit. I found her a large set of plastic dishes and a whole fleet of cars and trucks.

I also found a couple of pair of shoes for her (that weren’t on sale), a pair for me, a bisque dragon to paint, and - don’t judge me - a Slap Chop. I confess, I’ve wanted one for ages. My mother had a similar device she used for chopping nuts. I hate having to mince onions or garlic or whatever, so it’s going to come in handy. If nothing else, my fried egg breakfast sandwiches are going to be more interesting.

Friday the son-in-law had an emergency so he dropped the grandbaby off early. She discovered the bag of peanuts I keep for the blue jays in the kitchen and insisted on putting some out for the birds. Then she stood on the deck yelling: “Blue jays, come get peanuts!”

I tried to interest her in helping me pick up sticks in the back yard but she was more interested in moving the peanuts from the table on the deck to the table on the patio. At least I thought that’s what she was doing. The hubby later fished 16 of them out of the pool when he was cleaning it. :-D

She was having so much fun she didn’t want to go back to her house for lunch, so I bribed her with a trip to the park. We went to one of the smaller parks that had a big slide structure, two dinosaurs to sit on, and most importantly, no swings. It’s almost impossible to get her off a swing once she’s on one.

As it was, I had to bribe her with a trip to see Grappy at the office to get her away from the park. It may have been a round about route to get her home, but we did get there.

Eventually.

Mortiferous Monday

mortiferous ~ death-bringing; fatal

So ... when we last met over the soap opera that is my life, my vacation was a bust but my bookcases were pretty much finished. Life was beginning to return to normal. More or less.

Over the course of the week I began weeding out books and knick knacks we don’t need/use/are tired of to donate to charity, further de-cluttering the house. I gotta admit, it was nice coming home after babysitting to a tidy house.

This lasted for a week.

Late Saturday afternoon, the hubby decided to sand the kitchen ceiling in a prelude to painting it. I might not have been quite so willing to go along with this had I realized he was going to be using the electric sander. Don’t ask me why, but I had the impression there were only a couple of spots he needed to sand and he was going to do it by hand.

Anyway, he moved most of the stuff we had on the counters onto the dining room table, and then I helped him tape up plastic over the doorway, over the fridge and stove, over the shelves above the pantry, and over the passthru and doorway into the dining room.

Doesn’t matter whether you’re sanding filler, drywall, or painted walls, when you’re using an electric sander the dust is super fine and super insidious. While most of the house was spared, thanks to a six inch gap in the bottom of the plastic over the dining room opening, everything in the dining room had a fine coating of white. Inside the kitchen the plastic over everything helped somewhat, but the dust still got into the cupboards.

I might mention at this point how much I hate dusting. I would rather scrub the public toilets at a chili cook-off than dust. Needless to say, I was not a happy camper. And he’s not done yet.

I’d been working in my office when this started, and at one point I was going down to the basement for something and I noticed the living room looked a little foggy. I quickly blocked the gap in the dining room with some boxes, which helped, and the living room wasn’t too badly covered.

My office came out of this the best, mainly because I worked with the door closed (which the cats really hated) and when I had to have it open I had the fan on the bookcase in front of my desk pointed towards the door. It’s still going.

Sunday morning I had to dust off the coffee maker and the stove to make breakfast, and then I discovered the dust had made its way inside the cupboards when I had to dust off my plate and coffee cup.

Going forward, I’ll dust what I have to in order to use it but I’m not going to worry about the cleanup until after the dust has settled. Again.

And if the hubby ever feels the urge to sand walls or ceilings again, he’s going to find himself wearing that electric sander where the sun don’t shine.

Fair warning.

Twofer

This week I made my poetry selection from my archives. Because the first one is so short I added a second to give you a two-for-one deal. :-D

This first poem was part of the Writer’s Digest PAD challenge I partook of several years ago. The idea was to write a poem a day, to their prompts, over the month of April. If nothing else, the challenge was interesting, and it introduced me to the Sestina, which set me on an exploration of other forms.

I believe the prompt I had to follow for this one was something to do with being dead, or things you'd like to say to people after you're dead, or something along those lines.


Now That I’m Dead
Now that I’m dead I can finally say
all the things burning inside me.
None to prevent me having my way,
to speak serious or blithely.
I can speak of my love without any fear
of derision of my choices.
I can speak all the words you never could hear
in a chorus of many voices.
Did you think with me gone my words would be too?
You don’t really have to answer.
Words, like money, often accrue.
My words will be here forever.

* ~ * ~ * ~ *

For my second poem I thought I’d lighten things up a bit. This poem is a parody. It may surprise you to learn, considering most of my poetry is rather dark, that I love parodies. I love taking a classic poem, twisting it around, and making someone chuckle over the results.

Unless you slept through English class, you should recognize what poem I used for this particular parody. For those of you who did sleep through English class, the original poem was Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s immortal How Do I Love thee. If you’d like to read the original, check this out. And now, my version:


How Do I Procrastinate?

How do I procrastinate? Let me count the ways.
I procrastinate to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling lethargic
For the ends of Boredom and ideal Laziness.
I procrastinate to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by neon and halogen-light.
I procrastinate freely, as men strive for Progress;
I procrastinate purely, as they turn from Television.
I procrastinate with a passion put to use
In my old excuses, and with my childhood’s justification.
I procrastinate with an energy I seemed to lose
When faced with work, – I procrastinate with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! – and, if the Muse choose,
I shall continue to procrastinate until death.

Mittimus Monday

mittimus ~ warrant granted for sending a charged person to jail

If you’ve been reading my Monday posts for any length of time then my next statement should come as no surprise at all. My vacation last week did not go as planned.

The prospect of a whole week of free time was mind-boggling. I was going to start on the weekend (the first weekend, which was a holiday weekend) by doing some cosmetic changes to my blogs and coming up with a workable schedule for writing during the week. Maybe I would even make a list of other stuff I’d like to get done: check out my yarn stash and get started on some Christmas presents, organize my recipes with an eye to healthier eating, sit on the deck and read, check out my material stash a do a little sewing...

Yeah, none of that happened.

You heard about the beginning of The Great Bookcase Switcheroo last week. If you haven’t, go HERE. By Wednesday I was afraid it was going to turn into the Neverending Bookcase Story.

I don’t know about you, but I have found that five shelves for a six foot high bookcase is not nearly enough. And apparently they don’t sell extra shelves for that colour of bookcase (they do for the other colours) so the hubby bought a third bookcase thinking we could just use the shelves from it. Only when we got it home he said, “Why don’t we swap out this bookcase with the last one from your office so they all match?”

I was on board with the idea because a) the bookcase left in my office was just a slightly different birch colour than the new ones, and b) the permanent shelves of the new ones were in a slightly different place so cosmetically speaking it would look better. So I emptied the last bookcase - the one with the double rows of paperbacks - and we put the new one in its place. I used the adjustable shelves from it for the other two bookcases and once I had the hubby drill extra holes for the little metal thingies that hold the shelves, I was able to finish the first two bookcases.

Looked good. Or so I thought. Until I tried to use the shelves from the old bookcase in the new one and discovered a major problem - the new bookcases were an inch and a half wider than the old ones which made the shelves useless. So the next day (which would be Tuesday) I went to Walmart and picked up another bookcase, the shorter version of the big one. This gave me six extra shelves to work with (if you count cutting down the sides).

Now it was a matter of putting all the piles, boxes, and bins of stuff back on the shelves. Believe it or not, I actually weeded out three boxes of books to donate in the process, and I did a lot of rearranging of books.

Now, one of my main reasons for wanting a bookcase on the landing (aside from using up some of that wasted space) was to make it easier for the hubby to access his CDs, and maybe have a place where we could put our DVDs. The bookcase from the dining room is perfect for CDs, you’d think it had been built for that purpose.

In fact, it holds his entire CD collection in one place with room to spare (at least there’ll be room to spare until I get some of my CDs in there) Unfortunately, it did not work so great for DVDs. However ... there’s a tall, square, bookcase in the living room that was designed for paperback books that was the perfect fit for DVDs.

Of course that meant emptying it first, finding new homes for the books that were in it, and gathering up the DVDs that were kind of spread around. Once that was finished I needed to turn my attention to the bookcases now in the dining room that were only partially filled. You can sort of see them in the above picture.

It was about Thursday by this time, and while you’d think I might have carved out a little guilt free time to do something ... I don’t know, fun? for the remainder of my vacation, I had company coming for the weekend so I kind of needed to put my dining room back together.

Believe it or not, I did have the living room and dining room put back together by lunch time on Saturday (when my company arrived).

My office, on the other hand, will be a story for another day.

Last Dragonflight

You'd think, seeing as this is a repeat post from my other blog and pretty much all I have to do is copy it over here, that I could be on time with it. Sadly, the week got away from me. But better late than never, right?

This poem is an oldie but a goodie. In fact it’s one of my earliest poems, probably inspired by Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels. I wrote it for no particular reason other than the desire to write a poem that told a story.

Last Dragonflight

Slowly dawns the red sun
To mark a dragon’s birth -
Once master of the heavens,
Now master of the Earth

You found your beginning
In smoke, ash and flame -
Creature born of legend
Like the phoenix rise again.

Awake unfurl your wings,
Your time has come this night
Uncoil, cry out your challenge,
Then launch, at last take flight.

Wheeling silent skyward
Exhaling smoke and fire
Phosphor rains but still you’re
Soaring ever higher.

Silence marks your passing,
Envious eyes will stare.
Man would subjugate you
Creature of the air.

Cloaked in rage and silence
They’ve watched you on your flight
Blind with superstition.
Against your will you fight.

Belief dies too easily;
Myths vanish without care.
Rear up once in protest -
Death’s not always fair.

Slowly dies the red sun -
The dragon seeks his den.
Slowly dies the legend
Never to rise again.

Martyrium Monday

martyrium ~ shrine erected in memory of a martyr

You know, it’s really feast or famine with me lately, isn’t it? I either have nothing at all to say, or way too much. Today’s post bodes to be a long one. ;-)

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, we’ll start with a picture:

This is the landing going to the upstairs of our house. It just cries out for something, doesn’t it? I figured it would be the perfect spot for a bookcase. Maybe two. Surprisingly enough, the hubby was onboard with the idea, so when we were out of town on Saturday we stopped by one of the many Walmarts around and bought a couple of those bookcases you have to put together yourself.

Unfortunately, they no longer make the 48 inch high ones. Our choices were limited to 30 inches high, or 72 inches high. Seriously, it was a no brainer. Why buy a tiny bookcase when you can buy a huge one?

What we failed to take into consideration was the depth of it. Having those bookcases along that wall would remove 12 inches of depth from the landing. *sigh* So now we’re stuck with two, six foot high bookcases that have no home. But wait!

In the dining room, against one wall, is a smaller bookcase. It’s only 42 inches high, about 48 inches wide, and more importantly it’s only 6 inches deep. However, it also doubled as a plant stand, a CD holder, and general catch all. To be honest, it was a little unhandy as part of it was tucked away behind another table/cabinet that I also had plants on top of.

This is the stuff that came out of this bookcase:

There used to be a mirror hanging above this bookcase, but when we re-did the bathroom we relocated the mirror to there, leaving an empty space above the bookcase. Two six foot high bookcases would cover up that empty space nicely, even if they were kind of pale for that room. But wait!

In my office I have three 6 foot high book cases in a darker colour. It would be a pain in the butt to swap them out, and I was okay with having mismatched bookcases in my office in the name of having the dining room look more coordinated. But wait!

When I added the third bookcase they no longer made the maple coloured ones, so I had to get a birch coloured one. My bookcases were already mismatched, what I’d be doing is make them all coordinated.

So... the two new, birch bookcases went into my office.

The two bookcases from my office went into the dining room.

And the bookcase from the dining room went up on the landing.

So. Let’s recap shall we? The bookcase from the dining room was emptied and moved to the landing. The two new bookcases went into my office and the two matching ones from my office were emptied before going into the dining room. Now I just have to re-fill them all.

Sometimes, bright ideas grow a little dimmer with the execution. ;-)

The Blitz

Even if you’re not into poetry, you really need to give The Blitz a try. It’s the most fun you’ll ever have with a poetry form.

The form was invented by Robert Keim. The lines are super short - just a couple of words each. There’s no punctuation and it doesn’t rhyme. The first two lines both start with the same word. Lines 3 and 4 begin with the last word of line 2. Lines 5 and 6 start with the last word of line 4, and so on until you’ve written 48 lines. Line 49 is the last word of line 48, and line 50 is the last word of line 47. The title is only three words - the first word from the 3rd line joined to the first word from the 47th line by a preposition.

When writing a Blitz poem, it helps if you write it as quickly as possible. It’s a lot like one of those word association tests psychiatrists are reported to use, only faster. Give it a try, I guarantee you’ll have lots of fun.


Red With Clouds

Rose in bloom
Rose red
Red queen
Red and white
White as snow
White wine
Wine in a glass
Wine and cheese
Cheese whiz
Cheese log
Log on
Log off
Off and on
Off and running
Running amok
Running late
Late for work
Late in life
Life mate
Life and death
Death comes
Death mask
Mask your feelings
Mask the man
Man and woman
Man alive
Alive and dead
Alive for now
Now and then
Now and again
Again with this
Again with that
This and that
This and the other
Other than that
Other wise
Wise man
Wise woman
Woman rights
Woman power
Power up
Power down
Down town
Down below
Below zero
Below the clouds
Clouds of white
Clouds of blue
Blue
White