Day: November 23, 2022

One Regret

Fandango12 Comments

“Was they guy who gave you that tattoo high when he did it?” Alex asked Annette.

“We did share a bottle of wine before he got started,” Annette said, holding up her arm for Alex to admire. “It was really quite invigorating. Don’t you love it?”

“I certainly understand the sentiment,” Alex said, “but did you take a close look at what your tattoo actually says?”

“Of course I did,” Annette said. “No Regrets.”

“You know, Annette,” Alex said, “when I proofread my draft blog posts, sometimes my eyes see what my brain expects them to see, not what is actually there.”

“What, exactly, are you trying to say?”

“The word ‘regrets’ is misspelled.”

Annette held her arm out and looked carefully at her new tattoo. “Okay,” she said. “Maybe one regret.”

Written for these daily prompts: Ragtag Daily Prompt tattoo), Fandango’s One Word Challenge (high), The Daily Spur (wine), and My Vivid Blog (invigorating).

Stream of Consciousness Wednesday

Fandango20 Comments

I know that it’s not Saturday, when Linda G. Hill posts her Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt. But as you’ll read below, I wrote some stream of consciousness thoughts as I was waiting for a new battery to be installed in my iPhone. Here is what I wrote:

I’m sitting in my car outside of an cellphone repair store having the battery in my iPhone replaced. Remember the good old days when you could just open up the back of your cellphone, pull out the old battery and replace it with a brand new one? Well, those days are long gone. Now you need to go to a store that specializes in repairing cellphones just to replace a worn battery. They said it would take about an hour. Sheesh!

But I had no choice, really. The battery on my iPhone was dropping below a 20% charge by early afternoon each day. Given that I spend much of my waking time on my iPhone, that was unacceptable. So it was either spending more than a grand to buy a new iPhone or going to a shop that can install a new battery in an iPhone and having them replace the old battery with a new one for about 10% of the cost of a new iPhone. No brainer, right?

Right now I’m composing this post on an old iPod. Not an old iPhone or an old iPad, but an old iPod. Remember those? I’m offline because my iPod has no cellular capabilities and there’s no WiFi connection in this car or anywhere near where I’m sitting.

I really feel isolated. I can’t even call or text my wife to let her know that it will take an hour for them to crack open my iPhone, remove the old battery, and replace it with a new one! And I can’t access wordpress.com to draft this post because, again, no access to the internet. No newsfeed, no Google. Just me, sitting in my car tapping away at the virtual keypad on my ancient iPod!

The good news, though, is that I was able to pair my iPod via Bluetooth to my car’s sound system, so I can serenade myself with my vast collections of songs in iTunes on my iPod.

Only a half hour left. I hope you don’t mind helping me kill time until my new battery has been instaled and I can get my iPhone back with its brand new battery. I can’t wait.

On an entirely different note, today is Sadje’s birthday. She’s 61. So why don’t you stop by and wish her a happy birthday? I’m sure she’d appreciate it.

15 minutes left. You know what? I’m going to go inside and sit in the lobby of that repair shop. I bet they have WiFi there.

Post script

My iPhone was done, new battery installed, early. Yay. And it seems to be working fine. It’s 1:50 pm and I’ve still got 75% of battery life left.

But I did notice one thing that gives me pause. This notice keeps popping up on my iPhone’s screen:

Uh oh. Did I make a mistake?

One-Liner Wednesday — Freedom of Speech

Fandango7 Comments

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought, which they seldom use.”

Søren Kierkegaard, Danish theologian, philosopher, poet, and social critic, who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher

Could this man, who died in 1855, have been prescient enough to have foreseen Twitter?

Written for Linda G. Hill’s One-Liner Wednesday prompt. Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Fandango’s Provocative Question #191

Fandango23 Comments
FPQ

Welcome once again to Fandango’s Provocative Question. Each week I will pose what I think is a provocative question for your consideration.

By provocative, I don’t mean a question that will cause annoyance or anger. Nor do I mean a question intended to arouse sexual desire or interest.

What I do mean is a question that is likely to get you to think, to be creative, and to provoke a response. Hopefully a positive response.

There was a time in my life when I was a voracious reader. Yes, reader, not eater. I was never a voracious eater. But I digress. My point is, in the days before the internet, before WordPress, before Facebook and Twitter and TikTok and YouTube and binge-watching on Netflix; in the days before having the world at you fingertips with newsfeeds on mobile phones, before…well you get my drift…I used to devour between three and five books a week. Mostly novels.

But these days, I don’t read books much anymore. Maybe I read three to five books a year, not three to five a week. But I don’t think I’m that unusual in that regard. Or maybe I am, which brings me to this week’s provocative question.

With all of the distractions mentioned above, do you read books as much nowadays as you used to ten, twenty, or thirty years ago? Why or why not?

If you choose to participate, write a post with your response to the question. Once you are done, tag your post with #FPQ 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. But remember to check to confirm that your pingback or your link shows up in the comments.

FOWC with Fandango — High

Fandango34 Comments
FOWC

It’s November 23, 2022. Welcome to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (U.S.).

Today’s word is “high.”

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. Please check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, please manually add your link in the comments.

And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. Show them some love.