Best Blogging Buddies Award

Jen at My Humble Opinion gave me this Best Blogging Buddies award. Thank you, Jen for the nice things you said about me.

Jen didn't say how many awards I could pass along. I'm going to limit my list to a special few, my reason being that if I went beyond that I'd have to choose among all my other dear blogging friends by playing eeny-miney-mo!
1. Mary Ann, at Peacock Blue, my first-found blogging friend, very dear to me and a joy to turn to daily.
2. Marianne, whose constant comments, humorous, quirky or flattering, brighten my day.
3. Tumblewords, poet and artist.
4. Inland Empire Girl at Gathering Around the Table, whose gracious invitation always draws me in.

Spring has been with us for several weeks, and is a joy for me to get out in it even though I still have to be very careful with my back. The pink-flowering plum along the streets has already dropped its petals and has tender new burgundy-clored leaves. Many yards are lush right now with Japanese Magnolia blossoms, and I had Otto stop the car a couple of times so that I could snap these photos (we were on our way to the grocery store - one of my first shopping trips in a long time!).

Playing Tag

First I’d like to catch up on some things I’ve been wanting to post but haven’t gotten around to. Myrtle’s and Byron’s visit was a delight, and they spoiled me dreadfully with delicious food and good company.


Good things seem to come in threes! Mary Ann at Peacock Blue tagged me a while ago for a list of six things about me. Then, just today, Bella Mocha tagged me for the same thing! I will post my list today (see below), but I’d better hurry, since Bella Mocha was one of the ones I intended to tag! I’ll run out of tagees if this keeps up! Can it be that memes are the new spring fever going around? And Jen at My Humble Opinion has just given me that best blog buddies award that appears at right. I won’t pass it on today, since this post will be long enough!

Well here is my list of a few of my quirks and foibles:

1. I hum almost all the time. Nine tenths of the time I am unaware of it. There is always music playing in my head. Especially when I am consciously thinking of something else (which is most of the time) someone will call attention to it - in grocery lines, libraries, or at home when I will get stuck on one particular song. My family knows better than to say, “ Don’t hum!” They know I will only start again when I again become preoccupied with something else. Instead they say, “Please change the phonograph record.” My husband once wrote a song for me called Hum Sweet Hum.

2. Back when a slightly younger physique enabled me to walk to it, I often sneaked into the playground of a park at midmorning when the children were in school. My goal was the tall swing-set with long chains, the one intended for older children. There I would pump my swing
as high as I did as a child. Occasionally I would encounter another oldster engaged in the same clandestine activity.

3. Given a newspaper to read, I will turn first to the Sudoku puzzle and second to the Crossword puzzle. Then I read the funnies and only then turn to the news - which these days often makes me cry.

4. I can think up all sorts of good reasons to eat chocolate - I really need the calories, They say it’s full of anti-oxidants, It’s a holiday today, I need the caffiene in it ... And my husband serves me choclate-mint ice cream as a bedtime snack.

5. I love dragons. Not the actual creatures, of course, but pictures, stories, poetry and songs about them. One of my favorite movies is Dragonheart, the story of a brave and ultimately self-sacrificing dragon who deserves his place in the firmament. (Draco). I also like other reptiles. My first pet was a little garter snake.

6. My hero is my husband, who (at the age of 90) still works 12 hours or more a day on energy conservation, preventing global warming, and promoting peace and justice. I wish for the same things that he works so hard for. (And yes, that’s a dangling participal that I’m ending this list with!)

My tagees:

1. Josie (aka Jonstermom) at Jonster's Days. And this should to be about her, not Jon, adorable though he is!

2. Stan at Blue Heron in love with old cars and wife Dianne.

3. Dianne at The Rat's Nest a sweet, brave and busy lady with a sense of humor. Check out the URL on her blog!

4. Tealeaves, hoping that she has not already been tagged!

5. Daria at Daria's Day, journalist, photographer extraordinaire and she also has a couple of cute kids!

TIGER

adopt your own virtual pet!

Move your mouse around this kitty. Than try the "more" at bottom right of pic. To stop playing with "more" just set it back again at lower right.

THE GIFT OF TIME (sunday scribblings)

In the year before the calendar changed its digits
we bought (as a gift to us) an atomic clock.

Cessium atoms quivered in Colorado, to relay radio signals
that told the second-hand when to jerk from mark to mark
around the clock-face disk that hangs now on our wall,
framed in polished wood like school-room clocks that I remember
from when another century was young.

Back then my father, earphones clamped to head,
would tune his crystal radio to Naval Observatory frequency
and listen for the beep that marked the hour.
The gold watch in his hand was reward his father gave him
for turning twenty-one without having

smoked
or drunk hard liquor
or gambled.

But Daddy prized his watch for its to-the-second accuracy.

At kindergarten age I asked for a “witch-watch.”
(I knew it would be magic).
My sturdy Ingersoll, nickel-encased, kept time for me
for fifteen years or more. I wound it daily.

Only in more recent years
--the years that have accelerated
and now rush past like racers nearing the finish line--
only in recent years did I wear a little Casio
bought at a drug store for thirteen dollars,
quartz-accurate, with digits instead of hands
and battery driven--no need for winding.
Its accuracy was my pride,
its correspondence to airport clocks or television times.

We watched our new clock respond to its cessium master,
atomic, inexorable, relentless.
It’s accuracy, they said, to one second in one-point-four million years.

I can live with that--

but not long enough to check it out.

METAPHORICALLY SPEAKING...

My daughter, Candace Shock, took this photo

METAPHORICALLY SPEAKING...

The one I love is sunrise on a dune
before the dawn light probes the restive sea.
The sweet slope of his body shelters me
as rising sun farewells the setting moon

The one I love is radiant warmth of noon
that heats the sand upon the hillock’s lee.
I hear the distant breakers crashing free
but sound is muffled here in our cocoon.

The one I love is sunset on the ocean.
Two pelicans fly by in silhouette,
their slow wing-beats like heartbeats, then they rest
on unseen lifts of air, their forward motion
a soaring. Crimson sun descends to set
then plunges, fanning fire across the west.

My nephew, Allen Sterling III, took this photo

Visits from Candace, Clinton and Byron

The orchid above is the gift that Candace and Clinton brought to my bedroom the day they arrived on February the eighth while I was still mostly down in bed giving my back a chance to heal. Then Clinton (after working hours with Otto to clean the yard, walks and roof of fallen leaves) went out and bought me a WIFI for our house - one of my dreams. The next day Byron came up from Santa Cruz, and he and Candace installed it and made it secure. Now I can use my laptop anywhere in the house, not just where cable is available.

Clinton had to leave on Sunday to present a paper in Colorado, but Candy stayed on until Wednesday, shopping for groceries, cooking delicious meals, and being delightful company, and setting my computer to bypass some of things I hated about the Vista operating system. Apparently groceries were not the only things that she was shopping for; although I was unable to get down the stairs to see them yet, a new micro-wave oven and a new can-opener appeared in our kitchen. The old micro-wave had been a hand-me-down from son Sterling who had already considered it obsolete. Candy went home on Wednesday.

Now that I am able to go downstairs to prepare some of the meals, I have had a chance to use both microwave and very superior can-opener. I am dazzled by the new micro-wave's many features. I'm still using it with the manual in one hand. I also keep finding other goodies here and there - a new oven mitt, for instance.

Have I ever mentioned Otto's and my fascination with sudoku puzzles? It is shared by both daughter Candy and grandson Byron. We managed to get in a lot of competition while they were here by printing up four identical copies of hard puzzles from websudoku

I can't help but think how lucky Otto and I are to have such a close-knit though far-flung family!


Icing on the cake: we expect to see Byron and Myrtle this next Friday, Myrtle newly returned from four months in Brazil.

When I Am Young Again

The prompt from Sunday Scribblings was Wild Mind

My back feels a lot better today. I guess I had a not-too-serious strain on muscle or bone. None-the-less I’m feeling far from perky or cheerful. I’m reminded of my age, which most of the time seems more imaginary than real. “How can I possibly be 86 years old?” I tend to think. “Why that would make me an old woman!”

And here is the foolish daydream into which my wild mind frequently has taken flight. I half believed that it was possible, maybe after I had lost a few pounds, took a few more courses - well, you get the idea – to achieve the turning back of time, to be what I once had been. But this dream also included things I might have done and would now never be able to do. And this is the poem that I wrote several years ago, expressing the dreams of a mind set free:

WHEN I
AM YOUNG AGAIN

when I am young again.When I am young again
I’ll toss this cane above my
Lead the parade
with spirited high-stepping prance
I’ll wear a flirty skirt
to swish and swirl
as I twirl and dance -
when I am young again

I will fly condor high
beneath translucent whispering wings
of nylon (yellow, I think, or pink)
my strong non-aching muscles braced
against the cross-bar; I’ll look down
on small foreshortened trees,
fields and houses, people, cows.
I’ll share an updraft with a circlling hawk,
above us endless sky -
when I am young again.

These bent hands will flow once more
with ease across the ivory keys,
memories in my finger tips
of Paderewski’s minuet,
Mozart’s Sonata in C Major,
evoking warm breeze through open windows
and scent of new-mown grass -
when I am young again.

I will learn Balinese and walk
barefoot on a beach, swim free
with parrot fish and manta ray
through corals of the barrier reef.
I will wear
hibiscus flowers in my hair -
when I am young again...