Day: October 5, 2019

Weekend Writing Prompt — Safe Haven

Fandango5 Comments

1A3DB945-1DD1-4F6D-BB8E-FD4BCE00B58D Amidst all this sound and fury swirling around us,

This esoteric national catastrophe happening right before our eyes,

I need to grab my backpack

And take us to find a safe haven.

(32 words)

C632B506-D5BC-4556-81F2-F090D423EE12Written for Sammi Cox’s Weekend Writing Prompt, where we are challenged to write a poem or piece of prose using the word “haven” in exactly 32 words. Also written for these daily prompts: Ragtag Daily Prompt (amidst), The Daily Spur (sound), Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (esoteric), Word of the Day Challenge (national), and Daily Addictions (backpack).

#writephoto — I Miss This

Fandango23 Comments

4E6FE625-ED1F-4609-9D28-2C75214C5B47I don’t miss the hot, muggy, oppressive summers, the frequent and sometimes severe thunderstorms, the mosquitoes and ticks. I don’t miss the dismal, gray, bone-chillingly cold, snowy, icy winters. I don’t miss paying the outrageous winter heating bills and summer air conditioning bills.

But, since moving from New England to San Francisco a decade ago, I do miss one thing. I do miss the colors of autumn.

The temperatures in San Francisco are generally temperate throughout the year. With relatively rare exceptions, the city is blessed with mild winters and cool summers. The only real weather changes are the rains in winter (it’s dry for months at a time in summer), and a slight warm-up in September and October.

Hence, few trees in the city in which I now live shed their leaves in the fall. And for those few trees that do, their leaves go from green to brown to the ground. No reds. No oranges. No yellows. Just green to brown to gone.

In order to see any colorful fall foliage around the Bay Area, you need to travel outside of the city. But even then, it just doesn’t match the symphony of colors you can experience in the northeast United States.

And I miss that.

But the good news is that there are no leaves to rake.

Written for Sue Vincent’s Thursday Photo Prompt.

Does Anybody Know What This Is?

Fandango30 Comments

DA213B82-3F47-43F2-B32D-8DB55152BCC6Ever since I loaded iOS 13 on my iPhone about a week ago, whenever I am using my iPhone’s Safari browser to compose posts in WordPress.com, this message keeps popping up.

Sometimes I tap “Don’t Allow” and sometimes I tap “Allow.” As soon as I do, the message disappears. And then it randomly pops back up again sometime later.

I have 256 GB of data storage on my iPhone and when I just checked my iPhone storage, I’ve only used 36.1 GB, so there’s plenty of storage available. Safari accounts for 1.22 GB of the 36.1, and WordPress accounts for only 270 MB.

I have no idea why this message keeps popping up, what it means, or what, exactly, it’s asking of me.

If any of you out there know what this is all about, I’d appreciate it if you would enlighten me.

Thanks.

SoCS — Tast

Fandango16 Comments

Linda, Linda, Linda. What are you doing to us? You ask us to write a post for this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt that contains “tast” and to use it in our posts. Do you realize that there are almost 100 words in the English language that contain “tast?” Almost 100!

Of course, many are built around the word taste. Like tasteful or distasteful, tasty, tasted, and tasting.

And then there is fantastic, metastasize, catastrophe, and all the derivative words thereof.
E91921AC-4244-4406-B588-8D44B2F5047AAnd one of the derivatives of catastrophe is catastrophic. And that’s the word I would use to describe Donald Trump. I’d say he’s like a cancer that is metastasizing through the body politic of the United States, and, if left unchecked, will result in the death of democracy in America.

Yes, I know that to many of you, talking about Donald Trump and his administration is very distasteful. I didn’t intend to go there in this post, but this kind of thing happens when directed to write a stream of consciousness post.

So it’s all Linda’s fault for asking me to let my mind wander, resulting in this post, which is anything but fantastic. Please accept my sincerest apology for distastefully bringing up Donald Trump and for potentially ruining what otherwise might have been the start of a pleasant weekend for you. I will try to demonstrate better taste in my next posts.

Photo credit: Getty Images.