Loose Leaf Notes

1. Speaking with a friend on Monday, he asked, “What have you been up to?”  I went blank for a few seconds and then blurted out, “Oh, just killing possums and playing with grandkids,” to which he replied, “At least you’re not playing with possums and killing grandkids.”

2. Sometimes life seems like a series of haikus strung together in a ‘things to do” list.

3. Watching a trailer of The Best Marigold Hotel Part 2, I said to Joe, “It’s like Hangover for older people.”

4. Joe forgets that I’m squeamish and that I will scream like a girl when he enlists my help in catching and killing wild animals that get in the chicken coop.

5. Last night I dreamt that I got fired from a job for using the F word.

6. I once got fired for real (at least that was my understanding) for taking an American flag out of the display window in a shop where I worked during the U.S.  invasion into Iraq.

7. Over the weekend I posted THIS picture.  It was titled Music Score and the haiku that went with it read: Empty sheet of paper / Unwritten winter notes / Footsteps wait to play. I posted it on Facebook too and got an interesting comment that said, “In the key of See.”

8. Except for the writing of an occasional true haiku, I don’t like rules of poetic forms, like I don’t like choreographed dancing. For me, writing in poetic form is like dancing with a partner when I really just want to dance freestyle by myself.

9. “Most writers don’t know what’s going to happen until they start writing,” I told my 6 year old grandson Bryce.  He was working on a stapled series of booklets titled Villager News, a newsprint about the newsprint.  According to Bryce’s imagination, people were reading Villager News in the pool while and throwing basketballs, a man woke up from sleep because his baby was reading Villager News, a fisherman caught a Villager News instead of a fish and a man flying a plane was reading while flying and crashed into a rock. Another person in a restaurant asked a friend, “Do you like your Villager News?” The friend answered, “The sandwiches are better.”

10. Three things you should listen to: Your muse, your mother, and the real nightingale as opposed to the gilded one.  – Taken from a 2006 blog post titled The Three Things Thingy

11. I call the first photo above of me and Bryce: Miming the News.

12. It was taken at Roanoke’s Center in the Square Science Museum, along with THESE shots of the museum’s Water Logged Lobby.

13. Speaking of weather, HERE is a weird shot of a Nantucket ocean wave that looks like a carpet being rolled out.

______________Thirteen Thursday