13: Save the World
1. My 8-year-old grandson Liam made a board game that says: “Choose to be good or bad. The bad take over the world. The good save it.”
2. “We do not care for what we do not know, and on the whole we do not know what we cannot name. Do we want an alphabet for children that begins ‘A is for Acorn, B is for Buttercup, C is for Conker’; or one that begins ‘A is for Attachment, B is for Block-Graph, C is for Chatroom’?” – From Oxford Junior Dictionary’s replacement of ‘natural’ words with 21st-century terms sparks outcry HERE.
3. Recent research for poetry I’m working on involves my dream journal and my diary from when I was 10 years old.
4. Joe recently called me “buttercup” in his sleep. When he’s awake he calls me “sweet pea.”
5. On Sunday he came home after being out of town for a family reunion. We were catching up when I looked at the clock and said, “Oh, I missed the news.” “I was the news,” he answered.
6. Anchorage Hits 90 Degrees for First Time in Recorded History … “We are in a climate emergency, America,” wrote meteorologist Eric Holthaus in response to the news.
7. “Save the Planet” / is a good slogan / Or is it a slow gun / we hold to our heads / a sound-bite to bypass our sins? / Is it a glossy sticker / on a gas guzzling bumper? / What does it mean to you?
8. I’m feeling pressure about canning beans in the pressure cooker because every time I do it I have to learn how to use the pressure cooker all over again and it feels like rocket science.
9. Today is my eldest son’s birthday. He has his own category side bar on my blog, Asheville Potter Son HERE.
10. I have a friend who just had a birthday and someone put butter on her nose, which is an Appalachian tradition based on the thought that if you get your nose greased, bad luck will simply slide off.
11. This got me looking into other birthday traditions, and I found that in Scotland, the UK, Ireland and Canada a common birthday practice is to give the birthday person “the bumps” or “the dumps,” which involves taking him or her by the arms and legs, and “bumping” them into the air and down onto the floor, with the number of bumps equaling the age of the person in years. In other countries, you get punches on your birthday for every year of your age. Where I grew up and in other parts of the US, the person with a birthday gets spanked for every year they are, which at least makes more sense than bumping, dumping or punching, since we are supposedly spanked at birth to get us crying/breathing.
12. When fireworks are flowers and boom is thunder HERE.
13. Lately I’ve been thinking of death as moving to a retirement home.
________Thirteen Thursday
July 10th, 2019 9:01 pm
Wait. Conker? And I thought I was keeping up.
July 11th, 2019 12:55 am
I like Liam’s game and the idea behind it. I hope someone can save the world… in time.
July 11th, 2019 7:17 am
Flower either way love it
July 11th, 2019 2:07 pm
I hope our children live long enough to save the world. I worry about the little ones and what they’re going to find if we don’t annihilate ourselves first. Liam gives me hope. Maybe he will save the world.
July 11th, 2019 5:32 pm
I don’t get why words have to be abandoned for new ones. Acorns abound in my reality. I feel sorry for kids.
I love what your husband said about the news. 🙂
July 16th, 2019 1:43 pm
Thank you for the 13 interesting conversations we just held (entirely in my mind) as a result of reading this post. “Out loud” I’ll just bore you with a couple: i’m appalled at the dictionary changes. Had no idea. …. and #13…. the retirement home where my parents lived was “on the campus” of the towns hospital … that was actually advertised as a big selling point. The cemetery was a few blocks away. In my mind, I thought of them as living in a pre-retirement home. (But I was younger then and now it’s not so funny.)
July 17th, 2019 12:06 pm
Death like going on a trip or moving. The dictionary referred to is a junior dictionary. I hope no words are removed from the standard ones, although new words are added all the time.