Comments are appreciated and answered.
Today, Tom, David, Debby and I went to Nineteenth Street in the Heights for a little browsing and shopping. Here are some of the random shots I took.
This was the most popular good citizen strolling down the sidewalk. Everyone kept asking to meet and pet him, and he enjoyed it all. I never got his name!
Pulled Scrabble® tiles from this basket to celebrate being with family.
Houndstooth fashion!
I finished a mystery I was reading on Friday; I have unlimited respect for Louise Penny and her work. Her characters are like friends I rely on for humor, sanity, intelligence, integrity, and compassion. The most recent novel’s written with her usual deft ability to lure readers back to a world they’ve visited for twenty books. The plots can be heart-stopping, sometimes heartbreaking, but there’s comfort that somehow, all will be well in the end. This time was no exception except that The Grey Wolf ventured a little too close to a reality that frequently costs me sleep and peace of mind. Maybe because a lot of the current real world exhibits very little humor, sanity, intelligence, integrity, and compassion.
The next novel in the series is due by year’s end, and I hope to be a little better prepared in heart and mind. Maybe reality will cooperate and improve, as well.
After finishing Penny’s book, I looked forward to a very different novel for my next selection, the fifth in a historical fantasy/supernatural series, Deborah Harkness’s The Black Bird Oracle. I was racing through it before it came to a natural stopping place at my bedtime. I fell asleep easily, but the last section I’d read made its vivid way into my dreams with its concept of “bottled memories.” Literally, a human (or ghost, or witch, or vampire, etc.) can choose to pour their memories into a bottle and seal them inside before…well, whatever comes next.
What came next for me was a 4:30 a.m. wide-awakeness and seal-breaking on some of my own bottled memories. ETA: Over the following days, I published a series of posts that I later made private. If you read and commented on those, I can still see your comments and I thank you. I was grateful to have the opportunity to express thoughts and feelings about some of my memories.
This photo included items connected to memories in my bottle that became part of those now-private posts.
Jim is visiting, and Saturday night, after a game of cards, he retired to his guest room, Tim went home to bed, and Tom and I were almost finished washing dishes (he washed; I dried and put away) when I noticed some water leaking out under the dishwasher door. We almost never use the dishwasher, because when I cook, I wash as I go; other times, we take shifts washing up afterward depending on who cooks. It’s recommended that you DO use your dishwasher, at least once a week, but with only the two of us, it seems like a waste of water. Plus I’m one of those people who finds dishwashing relaxing.
Apparently, for some reason, water was pooling in the bottom of the dishwasher. We hadn’t had any backup into our sink and no problem with the garbage disposal, so we weren’t sure where the water came from or how long it had been there. Tom and I together used two of the small cups I save from our laundry detergent (to use as water cups when I paint) to bail water from the dishwasher into a tub, which we emptied outside twice. Then he used towels to soak up the rest and dry out the dishwasher, then threw the towels into the washing machine. And we crossed our fingers, hoped for the best, and went to bed.
This morning, I woke up to find he’d moved about half of the contents under our sink onto the kitchen counter. The rest of that stuff was in a movable rack we keep under the sink. We’d cleaned out a couple of filters inside the dishwasher Saturday night, and he cleaned out a hose that had some gunk in it this morning. Then I cleaned and partly reorganized under the sink.
Tonight after dinner, we had the real test: doing a load in the dishwasher. All went as it should normally, so we’re hoping that’s the end of the drama. I’ll finish organizing the cabinet under the sink Monday.
I suppose my theme for the week will be house and home projects: cleaning, maybe some organizing, and a few other things that have been on my to-do list for a while.
Sometimes, it’s all about poetry. Bottom left, my three new sticker books with words and phrases that can be arranged into poetry or thoughts. The Magnetic Poetry™ refrigerator tin that holds words and also provides a fridge “door’s” magnetic surface for assembling them. A Write The Poem book that offers many writing prompts. Three works of contemporary poetry to get me away from my go-to poets like Dickinson, Frost, etc., and read (or re-read) and enjoy Lynn Domina’s Corporal Works; Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems with over 101 contributors; and Aaron Fagan’s Garage Poems. Joseph Fasano’s The Magic Words: Simple Poetry Prompts That Unlock the Creativity in Everyone.
Finally, my Inspire Journal, because I intend to use all these different means to write a poem every day this week which directly corresponds to the voices or experiences of characters in the Neverending Saga.
Today, I used The Healing Words Kit™ from Magnetic Poetry™ to pull words and arrange them on a magnetic board for one of the four main voices in my series. In case you have trouble reading from the photo, her poem is:
©Becky Cochrane, 2025
The planets aligned last week (literally!). These are some of the things that happened as a result.
I went on a mending spree.
Repaired the decorative top of this soapstone box I featured last Sunday.
This ornament was already damaged when I bought it last December, but the parts were there and just needed to be glued. However, it was so fragile that even though I was able to attach the broken piece, in doing so, part of the front disintegrated in my hands and wasn’t fixable. Solution: glue a couple of gold, flowery sequins in place on the bottom right. Tom said I made a country music guitar fancy.
The first photo I posted in 2024 (i.e., last year) was of this Christmas ornament, which has always been special to me.
When I removed all the ornaments from the tree a few days after posting that photo, it was the only one I dropped. Not only was it broken in several places, so was my heart. I couldn’t throw it away. I had an idea for it and bought what I needed, but somehow it sat waiting over a year for repair and a new way to shine. Finally, last week, I put it all together.
Repaired with glue as best it could be and hanging in its own shadow box, surrounded by glistening snowflakes. Not lost; only changed; still loved.
For several years, I’ve had fifteen wooden, unpainted cigar boxes that once had a purpose they no longer served. I always wondered if I’d eventually do something crafty with them.
Yep. Paint and an old piece of my jewelry repurposed a wooden cigar box into a fairy box filled with goodies for Debby in a late celebration of her February birthday.
Paint and embellishments (including a star, the one remaining earring of a pair) repurposed a wooden cigar box into a steampunk box filled with goodies for Lindsey in a late celebration of her January birthday.
More craftiness will be shared in the coming days.
I don’t think I’ve ever featured this book on here before, though I see it’s in a shot of a group of journals and other books I took in June of 2021, so it’s been around a while. The Magic of Mindset is a journal, by Johanna Wright, to be written in, so if I had filled in any of the pages (I haven’t), it’s likely what I wrote would be too private to share.
That’s still true with the page I’m featuring, where under the title “Expect Resistance,” a girl meeting a dragon says, “Oh, hi.” The text on the accompanying page says, “RESISTANCE is A NORMAL PART OF THE PROCESS. LIST all of the REASONS WHY IT FEELS impossible TO LET GO OF YOUR OLD MINDSET AND MOVE OUT OF the stuck PLACE.
Those little items on the plate are like small talismans (crystal ball held in cupped palms; a wee dachshund carved of wood; a soapstone container, lid off, to show a variety of tiny stones; a small river rock in the shape of a heart; a sunflower incense burner holding a stick of sandalwood incense) that are either from or reference people, all a part of my history, who at one time or another were a force that could either subdue my voice or inspire and encourage it.
Relationships are complicated, and more than once, I’ve allowed them to block the flow of my creative energy. This time, I want to face that dragon and make a choice truer to myself.
This week’s theme may be arriving organically on each new day.
Photo of a much-loved novel; a gift (the ball with swirly paint) from the person who got me reading Tom Robbins; mushrooms and a butterfly that connect me to the book’s cover; the “magic” star, because there’s always something magical in Tom Robbins’s writing; and that lovely gold book pin because books are magic, too, and will forever link me to the writers who create them and impact my life.
I mentioned how on my recently-joined social media account, I’d been doing a book-cover challenge, posting a photo a day of a book that impacted me, but NO WORDS or EXPLANATIONS. Just the cover. On February 7, I posted the cover of Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins (his first novel from 1971). Yesterday, I found out Tom Robbins died on February 9. I’ve decided to reread all his books in order. I’m not really sure yet what my week’s theme will be, but I arranged those items because they made me feel connected to the novel/its cover/Tom Robbins.
Symbols: Portent or Promise?
Tools: Colette Baron Reed’s The Good Tarot deck; a crystal ball; wooden box of coins, including a “Walking Liberty” half-dollar; five randomly rolled dice show a one, two fours, a six, and a two; a three card spread: “Messenger of Earth”; 10: “Fortune’s Wheel”; 7: “Chariot.”
From Lisa Dyer’s 321 Creative Writing Prompts journal, below is a writing prompt for you. Feel free to use the items from the fortuneteller’s table. You can also ask me questions about the three specific cards in the spread.
Just so you know, none of these watches work, and that’s fine. I’m sure most of the ones on the left have a story, but I either don’t know or remember those stories. From left to right on the rolling pin, they are my mother’s Mickey Mouse watch, and four of her “old lady” watches, at least a couple of which likely came from my father. Number six with the blue face has no numbers or hands and is more of a cuff bracelet, so I don’t know if it was ever really a watch.
The next five are my wristwatches. The first is one I bought in NYC at Macy’s when the one to its right (a gift from Tom) stopped working. Why buy a replacement battery when I could get a watch at a famous department store? Timmy went with me and picked it out. Those were my last two new watches before cell phones made them obsolete. The two to the right were my “old lady” watches, I guess, when I taught or worked in the corporate world. And that’s my Mickey Mouse graduate school watch finishing the row.
There’s a symmetry/balance in that row of Mother’s watches and mine.
The three in the shadowbox hang in the writing sanctuary now: the Spiro Agnew watch I got when he was still Nixon’s vice president; my bicentennial watch I received as a gift in 1976 from the woman and her husband who would later become my first mother-in-law (and stepfather-in-law); and my Red Ribbon watch I got in the first half of the 1990s when I was an AIDS caregiver and activist.
On the table, on the right, is a musical-themed brooch that also contains a once-functional watch, and to its left, a pendant watch on a chain (possibly a gift from my first husband? Or maybe Tom? I don’t know!). I once had another beautiful pendant watch given to me by a sweet boyfriend circa the eighth grade. A couple of years later, I had to change clothes before band practice in the women’s restroom at a different school. I set the watch on a sink and forgot it. It was probably less than ten minutes later when I raced back to the restroom, but it had been taken, and no one ever turned it in.
Over the next few days, we’ll see how I address this week’s theme: Time. Maybe I’ll tease you with some excerpts from the Neverending Saga.
I’ve heard it’s not “cool” to like Coldplay, but I always have, so I leave you with their song “Clocks,” the lyrics of which could easily have been written by one of my characters to his muse, his love, his obsession.
The lights go out and I can’t be saved
Tides that I tried to swim against
Have brought me down upon my knees
Oh, I beg, I beg and plead
Singin’ come out of things unsaid
Shoot an apple off my head
And a trouble that can’t be named
A tiger’s waiting to be tamed, singin’
You are…You are
Confusion that never stops
Closing walls and ticking clocks
Gonna come back and take you home
I could not stop that you now know
Singin’ come out upon my seas
Cursed missed opportunities
Am I a part of the cure
Or am I part of the disease? Singin’
You are…You are…You are
You are…You are…You are
And nothing else compares
Oh, no, nothing else compares
And nothing else compares
You are…You are
Home, home, where I wanted to go
Home, home, where I wanted to go
Home, home, where I wanted to go
Home, home, where I wanted to go
Things that inspire me.
Clockwise from bottom left: Crystal “create” stone from Timmy. Other stones: carnelian, the creative powerhouse; citrine, the light of inspiration; quartz crystal seer stone egg. Essential oils; pictured here: lavender. Stars and candlelight. Joseph Fasano’s The Magic Words: Simple Poetry Prompts That Unlock The Creativity in Everyone. Electric and acoustic guitars at 1:6 scale and an enamel pin showing a drum kit to represent music and musicians. Fine art, represented by postcard books with selected Mark Rothko paintings and selections from The Art of Florence.
I chose to take a poetry prompt from Fasano’s book about a new year.
Here’s how I wrote the poem.
New Year Poem: A Visitor
While everyone is counting in the year,
their hands full of confetti,
their eyes full of clocks,
I will do it differently:
I will walk out purposefully through the noise
and sit alone beneath the trees
and wait for you, muse.
Quietly, quietly, I will wait.
And if you come, if you speak,
if you reveal your wish,
I will hear.
I will be there.
