Day: April 9, 2024

Judy’s Numbers Game — #16

Fandango6 Comments

Judy Dykstra-Brown has come up with a new weekly prompt for the new year that she calls “The Numbers Game.” This week’s number is 137. To play along, we need to go to our media/photo file and type that number into the search bar. Then post a selection of the photos we find under that number and include a link to our blog in Judy’s Numbers Game blog of the week.

Here’s my collection of photos based upon “137.” All of the photos below have appeared in my blog posts. Some are photos posted by other bloggers as photo prompts. Some are screenshots or photos that I took. A few may have been generated by AI art apps, but most are photos I grabbed from free photo sources like Pixabay, Pexels, Pinterest, Unsplash, or Google photos.

Click on any photo to enlarge.

Answer Me This — Have At It

Fandango13 Comments

Suze, over at Obsolete Childhood has introduced a new prompt called “Answer Me This.” Suze says it’s “an alternative daily prompt” to the WordPress Daily Prompt, which she characterized as “ones that totally suck and are focused upon the young people here.

Anyway, her prompt question today is this:

What are the most rewarding things about getting older?

I never thought I’d say this, but the best thing about getting older is retirement. I didn’t really want to retire. I liked my job and I did it well. And, unfortunately, I defined myself by what I did…by my work. I thought if I didn’t have my work to define me, I’d be lost. So I planned on working as long as I could.

But then I turned 70 and I got a notification that company policy mandated retirement at age 70. I could work through the end of the year, but then I was being put out to pasture.

Egads! What was I going to do with myself? How was I going to define myself? Most importantly, would my wife put up with me being around all the time?

I’m happy to report that it’s been seven years since I retired and I am doing just fine. I started up my new blog. I have time to read what interests me, to watch TV, to fiddle around the house, to do some occasional volunteer work, and, in fulfilling my role as a crotchety old fart and curmudgeon, to tell people to fuck off if I don’t like them or what they’re saying or doing.

Oh, and senior discounts.

Fandango’s Story Starter #144

Fandango10 Comments

It’s time for my weekly Story Starter prompt. Here’s how it works. Every Tuesday morning (my time), I’m going to give you a “teaser” sentence or sentence fragment and your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to build a story (prose or poetry) around that sentence/fragment. It doesn’t have to be the first sentence in your story, and you don’t even have to use it in your post at all if you don’t want to. The purpose of the teaser is simply to spark your imagination and to get your storytelling juices flowing.

This week’s Story Starter teaser is:

When the song started playing on the radio, Vince stopped what he was doing and began to cry.

If you care to write and post a story built from this teaser, be sure to link back to this post and tag your post with #FSS. I would also encourage you to read and enjoy what your fellow bloggers do with their stories.

And most of all, have fun.

A2Z Challenge — The Letter H

Fandango28 Comments

I am unofficially participating in this year’s A to Z Challenge. My theme this year is girlfriends.

H is for Henri G.

Okay, hold on there, Buckaroo. Don’t go jumping to the wrong conclusion. Henri was her nickname. She was kind of Tomboy-like. Not masculine as much as big. I was 6’1 and she was almost as tall as me. And I’ve no doubt that she outweighed me because I was quite thin at the time.

I met her in my freshman year at college in one of my first classes. She was different and I thought she was cool, so after class on that first day I introduced myself to her. When she introduced herself to me and told me she was Henri, with an i at the end, but pronounced it like it had a y at the end. I asked her if that was her real name. She admitted that her real name was Henrietta, but she hated that name. I told her that I was going to call her Etta, not Henri, because I didn’t want to tell people I was dating someone named Henri, lest they get the wrong idea. She laughed and said, “Oh, are we dating?” and I said that I’d like that.

We dated for a couple of months until she met a sophomore athlete who was probably about 6’4 and who outweighed me and Henrietta/Henri/Etta combined. So she dumped me.

But I was pleased to hear her introducing herself to others later on in the semester as Etta and not Henri. I considered that to be a victory even though she broke my heart. Well, perhaps a pyrrhic victory, but a victory nonetheless.

Previous 2024 A2Z posts: A B C D E F G

FOWC with Fandango — Motorist

Fandango13 Comments
FOWC

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 “motorist.”

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, ÿplease 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.