I used to look forward to the mailman’s arrival
To the handwritten letters and postcards from friends
But now my mail is mostly just flyers, brochures, and bills
All but the bills go right into the trash
(Exactly 37 words)
Written for Sammi Cox’s Weekend Writing Prompt, where the word is “mail” in exactly 37 words.
For her Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt this week, Linda G. Hill has given us the phrase “back of the fridge” and asked us to write the first thing that comes to mind when we think of the phrase.
We have three “trash” bins where we live. The blue bin is for recyclables, the green been is for compostables, and the black bin is for non-recyclable, non-compostable trash that ends up in a landfill. The trash, recycling, and compost trucks show up early on Tuesday mornings, and one of my jobs is to put the three bins out by the curb before I go to sleep on Monday nights.
And every Monday night, after we’ve finish eating our dinner and cleaning up afterward, I start gathering everything to put into the respective bins. And every Monday night, just as I’m starting that chore, my wife invariable calls out to me, “Don’t forget to check the back of the fridge.”
I have learned to be very thorough when I check the back of the fridge because on several occasions I missed some items that definitely needed to be thrown out. And when my wife discovered that I failed to check the back of the fridge, well, let’s just say…
Hell hath no fury like a woman who found items that her husband missed when he checked the back of the fridge.
Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of your earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.
How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Friday Flashback post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.
If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 28th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.
This was originally posted on January 28, 2018.
There’s been a litter problem of late at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. Some people are leaving their trash on the sand when they leave that beautiful beach.
It’s annoying and it’s disappointing that there are people who just don’t care enough to gather up their litter and put it in the trash cans that are located about every 40 feet on the sidewalk just off the beach.
Apparently some geniuses at the National Park Service came up with what they thought to be a foolproof plan to reduce the amount of litter left at Ocean Beach.
The idea is that having fewer trash cans will encourage beach visitors to be more responsible and to “properly dispose of their garbage” by taking it home with them when they leave the beach and disposing of it there.
And so, in a seemingly counterintuitive move, the National Park Service has removed most of the trash cans along Ocean Beach.
“People will start to take personal responsibility for the beach that they use,” according to a public affairs specialist for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
Do these geniuses at the National Park Service have any inkling into human behavior? Have they ever met any actual people?
Written for today’s one-word prompt, “inkling.”
From midnight Monday until noon on today. That’s 36 hours. That’s 2,160 minutes.
And in that 36 hour — 2,160 minute — period, my blog received 1,000 spam comments and 232 comments that went directly to trash. For a grand total of 1,232 bogus comments.
That’s an average of 34.2 spam and trash comments an hour, or more than 1.2 bogus comments every other minute for 36 straight hours.
There’s no way I can manually go through that many spam and trash comments manually. So I am mass deleting the comments in both my spam and trash folders. I apologize to any of you whose legitimate comments got caught up in these folders that were deleted.
I’m tired of this shit.
Frank, aka PCGuy, has published another one of his Truthful Tuesday posts, and this week Frank wants to know…
Does it ever surprise you that people pay attention to your blog?
“Surprise” is not the word I’d use. I put a lot of time and effort into my blog, so the word I’d use to answer Frank’s question is “delighted.” I’m truly delighted that people visit, read, like, and comment on my posts.
What I am surprised by is the number of spam comments I’ve been getting over the past few weeks. Literally thousands of spam comments. Last night, between the time I went to sleep at around 11:15 and the time I woke up this morning at 6:45, there were 250 new comments in my spam folder and an additional 60 in my trash folder.
Prior to a few weeks ago I rarely got more than a few dozen comments daily in my spam folder and even fewer in my trash folder. I wish I knew what triggered this significant uptick in spam comments. But at least they are all being swept up by Akismet and few are actually making it into legitimate comments on my blog.
This, That, and the Other 