Tag: entertainment

Tiny Tuesday!

A new action figure from FCTRY has arrived at Houndstooth Hall.


It’s Mayor Pete!

Meanwhile, a question for Blue Sky Boy: Lurking in the background, is this the Katnip you were inquiring about in comments to the Sunday Sundries post?

ETA Wednesday morning: Tom: “Did you mean to put water in that vase?” Becky: “I wondered why those roses looked so sad last night.”

Explanation: One of the roses was broken, so at the same time I was starting a meal in the crockpot, I went to get that small silver vase from a cabinet, cut another rose to the same length, and put them with water in the silver vase. However, I forgot I’d never put water in the cobalt vase before I moved it to the table. When you are older, these are the moments that make you question, Is this the beginning of [dementia, Alzheimer’s, whatever]? And hope it’s just a sign of doing several things at one time.

June Is Bustin’ Out All Over

The title of this post is taken from a Rodgers & Hammerstein song from the musical Carousel, a production of which I saw at a dinner theater with my mother, nephew Daniel, and Daniel’s mother Terri in 1986. At that time, I believed (right or wrong) the musical was a favorite of Lynne’s, and since I wasn’t familiar with it, I looked forward to seeing it. Had I known some of the plot, theme, and sorrow of it, I might have realized I was seeing it at the wrong time considering my reality during 1985/86, but…as Jim likes to say, “It is what it is.” It was a night out in company I enjoyed, and I remember that part of it with affection.

One of the advantages (for me) of getting older and a little wiser is that during particularly difficult times (however that difficulty manifests), history reminds me that everything is not all bad and forever and never has been all bad and forever. Though June this year has been challenging and expensive, it’s just… June. Just right now.

Yesterday, when the dogs and I had to be out of the house from early morning to well after dinnertime, we were in a quiet, cool place together. Meanwhile, Tom was overseeing and doing lots of things at Houndstooth Hall that will be beneficial in the long run, and I got to read two of three books by a favorite author, Martin Walker, that I’d downloaded via Kobo to my iPad quite a while back (meaning I still have another ebook to look forward to from him!):

I can never regret a day spent reading this ongoing series set in France, full of people, places, dogs, horses, and gastronomical feasts (without consequences like calories and hangovers!). I read all of the short stories yesterday, and finished the novel today. It was a joy once again to be in the company of Benoît Courrèges, aka Bruno, Chief of Police, in the fictional town of St. Denis.

I’m so grateful for writers.

Button Sunday


Found this button online, a steampunk theme with cursive writing. I do so little writing by hand these days that my penmanship is atrocious. But I do know how to write that way, and I well remember all the handwritten letters I received in my younger years (truth be told, I still have most of them, though I hope all the males to whom I ever sent letters have thrown all of mine away–or could send them to me, so I can roll my eyes at my younger self).

I already had journals and journaling on my mind when I was looking at buttons today. Yesterday, as I searched for my original essential oils inventory list, which I never found (finally just started a new one and input it to a computer doc, so I’ll know where to find it when I need it again), I opened a file folder that contained a tangle of embroidery thread and a ticket stub. I suspect the embroidery thread went with a cross-stitch piece I started back in the 1990s of a white cat sitting in a window (you can read about that in an old post here).

When the stitching remained unfinished, I finally wrote a poem about it and put the partially finished piece in a frame with the poem. It hung on my wall at The Compound for years, and now I have no clue where it is. I added it to my list of inexplicably missing items.

In the same folder, I found a ticket to a matinee showing of Star Wars: The Last Jedi from February 2018. That faded ticket, at least, I could put inside my current Moleskine.

As you can see, I’ve rarely used my Moleskines for capturing my sloppy cursive writing.

Like the one above, the Moleskines (and some are Moleskine knockoffs) are filled with mementoes of all kinds, and they get very fat; too fat for shelving. So they have a bin they go into when they’re full. I do still journal from time to time, but I mostly scribble a day’s events or thoughts in whatever kind of day planner or daily appointment book I keep.

Do you still handwrite your letters? Do you journal or keep a datebook or diary?

P.S. I have now reread all five of the TJB novels. I was amazed at how many things I’ve forgotten and how moved I could still be by those characters and their stories. This book, in particular, required a box of tissues right next to me. I kept having to close the book and cry.

Now I need to get back to The Musician in the Neverending Saga before he writes mean songs about my neglect.

Saturday with thoughts


Rewriting a good chapter that needs to be better. Thinking in between revising. Coloring when I think. Coloring something that has nothing to do with these characters. I’ve had fun coloring these simple pieces because of that publication on the bottom right.
Li
In
Th
Wi
Is it a tourist guide? A novel? Self-help? I kept trying to complete the title, and here are a few I came up with:

Lions In The Wild
Lice Infesting The Wicked
Lie In The Wisteria
Life In The Winnebago
Limeade In The Wineglass
Living In The Wind

All very fine, but not my winning title, which is Liars In Thorp, Wisconsin.

Wikipedia tells me: Thorp is a city in Clark County in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. The population was 1,621 at the 2010 census. Thorp is located partially within the Town of Thorp and partially within the Town of Withee. It is located between Eau Claire and Wausau. Thorp is known for some of its popular attractions, which include: Marieke Gouda Holland’s Family Cheese, Thorp Aquatic Center, and Thorp Area Historical Society & Telephone Museum.

If that isn’t the perfect location–a town formed of two towns?–for a cozy mystery involving the murder of a newcomer running for town council, I don’t know what is. Feel free to steal the idea and write a book. Don’t forget to stock up on things that can distract you.


The coloring page came from this, another of my favorite coloring books. I used colored pencils and various kinds of gel pens and markers.

Mindful Monday


Learn, from my One Word Art series, December 2005

ETA: For all its complications, I can’t regret the easy access the Internet offers. My fictitious pianist is diverting himself by playing the twenty-four etudes of Chopin’s Op. 28, and thanks to YouTube, I can listen to someone perform those as I write. So can you, if you’d like to be still and relax for about forty-two minutes. You can hear what he hears.

Button Sunday

Heed the crow, friends.

Today is Great Poetry Reading Day, and you can learn more about it at that link. As for me, as soon as I realized this, I went right to the Houndstooth library and took out this book. I don’t know why I thought to check, because I rarely do this anymore, but I looked inside the front page and I had, indeed, written my name and the date I got the book, which in this case was 1997. I wonder what prompted me to purchase it that year, whether I had a hunger to read more poetry or I was in a bookstore, saw it, and decided, I need that!

I paged through the book randomly, reading poems, and came to a section with work by the American poet Robinson Jeffers, who I’ve always read with pleasure. Full disclosure: In 1995, I bought the book Safe As Houses by Alex Jeffers and wondered if he was related to Robinson Jeffers, but these were the days before I had the entire world of information at my fingertips. I reminded myself that just because two people share a last name… Lucky for me, one of my literary icons, Edmund White, had blurbed the novel on the back cover, and he shared that Alex is Robinson Jeffers’s grandson. Curiosity satisfied. Since I’m off-track already, I want to reiterate that it’s among the highlights of my writing and editing career that I queried Alex about submitting a story to Timothy and me for Best Gay Romance 2014, and I was delighted with his submission, “Shep: A Dog,” and really excited to include it in the anthology. If you have interest in reading an excerpt, I provided one at this old post.

Today, I relished Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Love the Wild Swan,” because I really hungered for more of the validation I got last week that yes, I am a writer, and no, I’m not on the wrong path, I’m on my own path, a path where I can and do love the wild swan.

I even crafted a bit today to showcase Jeffers’s poem in between periods of writing, all while listening to music. If you can’t read the words on the photo below, I’ll add the poem at the end of this post. The swan outline came from ColoringAll.com, and I bought that floral paper (to the right) the swan is on at the bookstore where I was an assistant manager in the late 1980s/early 1990s. I met so many good people there, one of whom, of course, was another of our assistant managers, Steve R.

I didn’t forget for a minute that today is Steve’s birthday, and as I do every year, I whipped up something chocolate in his honor (we’ll be adding a dollop of ice cream to those brownies). We love you always, Steve.

Love the Wild Swan

“I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade’s curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.
Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax,
The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings.”
–This wild swan of a world is no hunter’s game.
Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast,
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your. . . self? At least
Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.

Robinson Jeffers, 1935

Thank you, Taylor, for today’s creativity soundtrack. Your lyrics mean a lot to me and to some of my characters.

Fun fact: In An Aries Knows history, I launched Button Sundays on September 17, 2006.

Every morning…

…I play games. It began with one game, Spelling Bee, in my news feed. I didn’t play it the way other people played it. I had a single goal (there can be several with this game), and I waited until the next day to learn if I’d accomplished my goal (you can get immediate online solutions from many sources, but for me, waiting was a deliberate exercise in patience). I thought of the game as my mental acuity test: How well is my brain working this morning?

Through my same newsfeed, I started checking out Connections, and I was surprisingly good at it and got even better over time. Occasionally, I only correctly guess all four groups because the fourth is made up of my leftover choices, but once I see the answer, it makes sense, and I realized I sometimes have to put my logic aside and try to guess the game creators’ logic.

When the online game Wordle took off in 2022, I briefly glanced at it, but it didn’t grab me at the time. I knew several people who played, including Tom, Jim, and Timmy. Then, for whatever reason, Jim, Timothy, and I began talking about Wordle since Jim played it, and the next thing that happened was that both Tim and I began playing, and he, Jim, and I began sharing our game results in our ongoing text thread.

Online games are a slippery slope. Among the three of us, we are now playing and sharing our scores for:

And those include daily and weekly Quordle, and daily and deluxe Waffle. Other than Framed, all of them are word games (none of us, as far as I know, has interest in Sudoku, which is Tom’s numbers game, and so far, we haven’t ventured into any online crosswords games). We each have our games we’re strongest at, and let me assure you, Framed, in which you get six chances to identify a film based on six still photos from that film, is NOT my strong game. To entertain myself despite my abysmal ignorance of so many movies, I make up titles or choose actual movie titles that are so far from the actual movie that I have a secret hope the game creators have some kind of algorithm that provides them with the worst/silliest guesses.


However, it’s possible Framed has had a different impact on me. I’ve become aware of a lot of movies I might enjoy, and as a result. I’ve decided the summer months, when Houston’s heat is so daunting, will officially be  Ethan Hawke Summer. When I need a mid-afternoon writing break, and I want some passive entertainment, I’ve started a list of Ethan Hawke movies the dogs and I can watch together.

As long as Ethan doesn’t interfere with my morning games (they take about fifteen minutes total to play) and my daily writing/research or cause me to burn things in the kitchen, this should work out (and possibly save me from some of the trauma of election season).