Day: February 15, 2019

3TC — The Fantasy

Fandango10 Comments

5995A0ED-57F6-4A7B-979D-4F26770701D8My Darling Harry,

I had just gotten home from the doctor’s office yesterday when your package arrived. What an incredible variety of seashells you sent. They’re really beautiful and it made me feel humble that you would take the time to gather and send them to me. I so appreciate the thought.

I took a walk along the canal after my yoga class this afternoon and I stopped into that little curio shop you love. I saw this display case that would be perfect for showing off the seashells. I admit, sweetheart, that it was a bit of an overindulgence, but I think it was well worth the money I paid and I’m sure you’ll love it as much as I do.

All my love,

Amanda

******

Amanda,

Thank you for your very letter, but I never sent you a package of seashells. We broke up over a year ago and I’m now engaged to a wonderful woman, so I wish you’d give up this fantasy of yours and get on with the rest of your life. And please stop sending me letters or I’m going to have to go to the police and get a restraining order. I’m serious, Amanda.

Harry

Written for the Three Things Challenge (now from Paula at Light Motifs II), where the words are “letter,” “seashells,” and “yoga.” Also for these daily prompts: Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (variety), Word of the Day Challenge (humble), Ragtag Daily Prompt (canal), and Your Daily Word Prompt (indulgence).

Friday Fictioneers — The Hornets’ Nest

Fandango13 Comments

D71DC9A2-A7F0-43D4-930B-C43150449349“Look up there,” Carl yelled, pointing to the second story window on the stone building.

“What is it?” Mike asked.

“It’s a hornets’ nest,” Carl answered. He bent down and scooped a handful of stones from the path and started throwing them up at the nest.

“What are you doing?” Mike asked. “The last thing you want to do is stir up a hornets’ nest.”

“I’m doing the people who live there a favor,” Carl insisted. He threw another stone at the nest, but it hit the window and broke it.

“Some favor,” Mike said. “Let’s get out of here.”

(100 words)

Written for the Friday Fictioneers prompt from Rochelle Wisoff-Fields. Photo credit: J Hardy Carroll.

Trash Talk

Fandango4 Comments

You may recall that at the end of last month I started getting tons of spam comments, most of them about something called CBD oil. I wrote about it here.

Unfortunately, this meant having to go through a couple of hundred items in my spam folder every day, looking at each “spam” comment individually to see if any were legitimate comments that somehow got caught up in my spam filter. After going through several hundred each day, there were typically one or two that were not spam, but in order to not delete these one or two legit comments, I had to manually “permanently delete” the 200+ that were spam. And it was very time consuming.

Then a blogger I follow suggested here that I go to my blog’s settings and “blacklist” comments that contain the letters “CBD” in them. Doing so, she explained, would cause those comments to go directly to my trash folder instead of to my spam folder. I did as she suggested, and oh happy day, it worked.

But I’m still getting tons of CBD oil comments. In fact, I just looked at my comments summary for the first time since Monday night and this is what I saw:5B87BC4D-966F-48ED-9F96-A365BA532944That’s right, since Monday night, there have been almost 1,100 comments containing the letters CBD that automatically got sent to my trash folder. That seems like an awful lot of trash talk to me.

But the good news is that I can, in one fell swoop, “bulk delete” all of those 1,100 trash comments. I did individually look at the 38 spam comments I also got since Monday night and they were, in fact, all spam. And all but three had the string “proxieslive.com” in them, so I added that to my blacklist.

The more you know, right?790DC87C-74D8-4AEA-A75E-9894AD544399

FOWC with Fandango — Variety

Fandango28 Comments

FOWCWelcome to February 15, 2019 and to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). It’s designed to fill the void after WordPress bailed on its daily one-word prompt.

I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (US).

Today’s word is “variety.”

Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.

Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Or you can simply include a link to your post in the comments.

And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. You will marvel at their creativity.