Tag: daily prompt

Blather · Life

A Full Week

Sally15 Comments

I’m not sure when I’ve had such a full week.

For those who don’t know my schedule — which hopefully is the vast majority of you because it would be kind of creepy if you did know — on most days, I start work at 5 AM. Yes, you read that right — 5 AM.

Since I NEED to start my day with reading, I get up between 3:30 and 3:45 AM. I journal. I read. I sit and sip my coffee. Then it’s rush-rush-rush to go to work.

Honestly, I don’t mind that schedule. In fact, I pretty much LOVE that schedule. I love the early morning people — like me — that I get to see when they arrive to work out at the gym where I work.

Like an idiot, however, I signed up to take a lifeguarding class. A class that went from 5 – 9 PM Monday through Wednesday this past week and next.

“Whose dumb idea was this?” I asked myself more than once.

“Oh yeah, mine,” I answered myself.

So — up at 3:30, to bed at 9:30 (at best) and repeat X3.

The first night of lifeguarding class, two of the six students failed the swim test.

The second night of lifeguarding class, I excused myself at one point to go cry in the locker room. The class was physically taxing on me. If you added up the ages of the other students in the class, I still had ten years on them. I didn’t cry though. I just pulled myself together and pushed through.

By the third night I was finally in the groove and class went well.

Then it was Thursday. On Thursday night, one of my sons was arriving with his wife for a short visit. I had offered them my newly created guest room.

Of course, because they were my first guests, I still had a lot to do in the room. I mean, A LOT to do.

I’m living in the house in which I grew up. It contains all my parents’ stuff. It contains grandparent stuff from both sides of the family. It contains stuff from my brother who predeceased my parents. It contains a lot of MY stuff, my kids’ stuff. So basically, there is stuff and more stuff in this house.

The new guest room still had a lot of stuff in it. It still HAS a lot of stuff in it. Putting clean sheets on the bed and cleaning the bathroom was the easy part of getting the room ready. Dealing with the stuff was … umm… not so much.

I kept working away at it, afraid to sit down because I was afraid I would fall asleep because I was still tired from lifeguarding class. Finally, it was 7 or 7:30 and I couldn’t bear it anymore. I called it good, and went to bed.

Friday was a blur. Work and going for a walk with my visiting son are the two things that stand out.

The last thing I filled — and actually I mean OVERfilled — was my week.

Will next week be better? I don’t know. I’ve got three more days of lifeguarding class. Whose dumb idea was that?

This is in response to Linda G. Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt: the last thing you filled.

Blather

1901

Sally5 Comments

On my way to work this morning, I heard a story on the radio about an incandescent light bulb that was lit in 1901 and is still burning.

A photo of the Centennial Light Bulb pendant light in Livermore, California. This photo was taken in 2016.

In 1901, my maternal grandmother was 5 years old. My paternal grandfather hadn’t been born, and wouldn’t be for another 2 years.

However, here’s something contemporaneous with that 1901 light bulb: Walt Disney was born.

Can’t you picture a cartoon light bulb appearing over Walt Disney’s head time and time and time and time again over the course of his life as he had one idea after another? I think that light bulb would look remarkably like this light bulb that was born the same time he was.

collage · Life

Puss and Boots

Sally6 Comments

What happens when you look at a bunch of different prompts for the day? You end up with some dumb jokes and an overcrowded collage.

Doodlewash art prompt: Boots
What do you do with someone who can’t learn to tie their shoelaces?
Send them to boot camp.

Your Daily Word Prompt: Restore
I read about a temple for a giant sea cow.
My faith in huge manatee has been restored.

Word of the Day Challenge: Accumulate
When women reach a certain age, they start accumulating cats.
This is known as many-paws.

I went to work at 6 AM. Sometime in the afternoon, I noticed I had two different shoes on. Same shoe brand, but one is leather and one isn’t. I wore them all day. Still have them on. It’s been that kind of day.

Life

Twilight

Sally8 Comments

Reading through posts and looking for inspiration. Quadrille poem — nope. Spoons — fascinating, but no. Gauge — zero inspiration.

Twilight! I was looking for that word just the other day!

I was trying to tell a friend about the books that I read 15 years ago in order to relate to the teenage girls I was coaching. I said to my friend, “You know, the really stupid vampire series.”

She looked at me and said dryly, “There’s a lot of them.”

“This one was like Harlequin Romance with a vampire twist,” I said.

“That describes most of them,” she said.

“They were pretty terrible,” I said.

She nodded in agreement.

But I couldn’t think of the name.

It didn’t matter. Neither of us were vampire romance fans.

But now I have the name! Twilight!

I’ll tell her tomorrow.

_______________

Wrote my post — checked that box. Way over 23 words — did NOT check that box. Sigh.

Blather · collage · Februllage

House, Home, Property

Sally7 Comments

In America the word “home” is a synonym for “house“; it is a traveling concept, one which you carry around with you — your home is wherever you happen to be living. One might speak of a “development of new homes” in America; in England, such a phrase would be nonsensical, because a house, in England, is merely a “house”; “home” is an altogether broader concept, implying rootedness and long residence.

Ruth Brandon, A Capitalist Romance (1977)

I guess I’m not as American as I thought.

My parents bought an old farm in 1967. At that point in my life, I had lived on four different army bases and I have memories from two of them. My roots, however, are here, on this piece of property.

And they are deep.

When I first heard the concept of “thin places” — that Celtic-Christian idea of physical locations where the distance between heaven and earth is barely perceptible — I immediately thought of this place, from the river to the crest of the hill, where I am rooted and from which I draw strength.

It goes beyond my parents’ property. It’s this community, the streets in this town, the shores of this lake. It’s the seasons here — the rain, the snow, the blaze of color in autumn, the long days of summer, the short days of winter. It’s the fog that covers the road some mornings. It’s the whitetail deer. It’s the peepers in spring.

I move away. I come back. I move away. I come back. I’m here to stay.

“I worry about you,” my sister said to me the other day, “all alone in that big house.”

No, no — don’t worry about me.

I’m home.