13: Can’t Touch This
1. Colleen to Joe while watching Peaky Blinders, a 1920s-family crime drama show: “This ain’t no Downton Abby.”
2. “The writing is on the wall.” That’s how I responded to a Facebook friend who posted about the Roanoke Times, which has provided local news since 1886, cutting paper content and going primarily “digital first,” just like our local paper seems to be doing. They are both owned by Lee Enterprises.
3. I keep seeing ads on Facebook trying to get me to hire a Jasper AI to write my blog posts 10 times faster than I can.
4. After 15 years of covering events, writing features and taking photos for our local paper, the company owners cut the freelance/stringer budget, which means I haven’t written for them in months and may not again. I recently discovered a webpage called muckrack.com, and found that they have most of the articles I have written over the years for The Roanoke Times, Bristol Herald Courier, SWVA Today and The Floyd Press. There’s a lot! See HERE.
5. I almost didn’t read THIS poem to my husband because I thought he might worry that I had lost it. The poem made it into the current issue of the Floyd County Moonshine literary journal.
6. A friend recently asked me if writing poetry was my passion. “No,” I said. “It’s what I do. It’s who I am. It’s work, and I don’t always want to do, but I feel inclined and sometimes compelled to.”
7. You learn to avoid it / and come to expect it / The swelling disappears / But the memory holds on / You don’t think you’ll ever / trust a wasp again / and all wasps begin / to look the same… Read The Wasp in its entirety HERE.
8. What were we celebrating? See HERE.
9. This is called the Obedient Plant because supposedly it is obedient and goes in whatever direction you put it in, but most of mine has fallen over and won’t stand up.
10. I’ve temporarily stopped watching the news because, although I think the Queen dying is news, I don’t think it warrants days and days of the wall to wall pomp and circumstance coverage it’s getting.
11. Remember the time I was on Scott Perry’s Creative on Purpose podcast speaking on Life’s essence?
12. My husband is working on a training project and just literally asked me if I had any loose-leaf paper. Duh.
13. A kin of pumpkin or a hoard of gourd?
____________Thirteen Thursday
September 14th, 2022 8:43 pm
I love the Queen news! She was royalty for 70 years!
September 15th, 2022 9:02 am
I don’t like sports and weather either. They go on too long. Just report and get to the bigger issues like the state of our world, country and climate change (which granted takes some reporting on the weather). The Queen’s death has taken up days and days with about as in depth as the tv news gets.
September 15th, 2022 1:31 pm
I’m not watching coverage from the UK either. Never been a royal watcher. I looked at that muckrack site and I apparently don’t exist. Most of my work was online at one time but then after the newspaper group was sold, the website went down and that was the end of that. And what I wrote for the Roanoke Times was pre-internet. Maybe I am not really here after all, just a phantom presence.
September 15th, 2022 5:33 pm
The Obedient Plant is pretty, even if it isn’t very obedient.