Whiny Limerick

Soon, I won't need to start every post with something along the lines of "this summer I missed *** because I didn't have Internet". Tonight, though, I am excited to finally be able to enter MadKane's Weekly Limerick-Off after my summer hiatus.

This week's theme is whining, with the given first line choices being:

"A fellow who tended to whine"

or

"A woman who tended to whine"

The theme is fitting for me right now, as I feel like three-quarters of all my mental posts are whiny, which is why they are only written in my head at the moment.  Anyway, here is my entry for this week's Limerick-off.

A fellow who tended to whine
Sure his stars would never align,
He'd bitch and he'd moan,
"a dog can't catch a bone"
While buffing his Porsche to a high shine.

I'm not altogether satisfied with this entry; if I come up with something more humorous before the week is up, I'll post it as well.

Thanks for stopping by!

Altered Text Poetry

Several years ago, I came across Tom Phillips' A Humument, and instantly fell in love. The way he transformed a random book into a completely different piece of art is incredible. And inspiring.  I have bought several books with the intent of emulating Phillips, but an entire novel seems daunting, so I have started creating altered text ATCs*-much more manageable.  I don't make them very often, part of me almost feels like I am cheating somehow, but I really enjoy the process when I do sit down to make them.

Here are two of my favorites:

 Out of the smoke

She returned to herself

but she was altered

morning and night

by the relentless question:

How?

Shadows kidnap her,

his one pale eye

memorizing the brief moment

The raven recognized it.

Motionless.

As stand-alone poems they need some work, but as miniature artsy pieces, I think they are pretty good. Sometimes, when I am having trouble focusing on what I want to write I will work on this type of thing. Like I mentioned above, I kind of feel like I am cheating when I create these; I'd love to get some other opinions on the matter, if anyone would care to chime in-even to agree that it is cheating.

*ATC=Artist Trading Card, a 2.5 x3.5 piece of art. I first found out about these when I used to participate in swaps on Swap-Bot. That's another item on my "get-back-into-eventually list"' it's a very long list!

Escape Haiku

One of the things I missed most about having unlimited access to the Internet was participating in writing challenges. I spent the summer torturing myself: each week I would sign on to various sites and read the weekly challenge, even though I knew I would not end up participating. I must say, I had some really great entries for some of them written out in my head (I'm sure you would think so too, if only I had typed them out to prove it...).

Tonight I am recommitting myself to taking part in at least one challenge a week, starting with YouKnowThatBlog's weekly haiku challenge. This week's theme for Sensational Haiku Wednesday is "Escape". Here's half of half a dozen entries:

Stuck at the in-laws-
No access to the 'net;
Books: my only escape.

***

Longing to escape
monotonous eight to fives..
Damn, Facebook is blocked!

***

Emma caught on film:
She's locked out of the kitchen,
longing to escape!

This evening's Inspiration!

Be sure to join the fun!

 

Hello, Stranger

I have written several dozen different posts this past summer. All of them in my head since my only Internet access prior to this weekend was at work. I can't promise that this will be an altogether coherent post since I have just so much to say and I want to say it all and keep some of it to myself and tell you all everything all at once!! Yes, I am a tad bit excited to be back at my blog!

For now I'm going to just do bullet points and later on I will write out additional posts on things I need or want to discuss further. I apologize for the run-ons and poor sentence structure, bullets just seem to call for poor grammar sometimes ;)

• June 8 we abandoned the majority of our belongings in Florida, rented a car and spent three days driving back to Nevada. It was so much better than I expected, and regardless of the circumstances it was actually kind of fun and I want to take more road trips.



• Immediately returned to work that Monday. Not nearly as good as I had it in FL, but it is familiar at least.



• Bought a car, since we left ours to be sold, eventually, in FL. One week later the car was vandalized and we spent a month waiting for the insurance company to pay to fix it. That is probably the only positive to this summer being unusually dry in Northern Nevada-my daughter would not have appreciated the rain pouring through her missing window if it had rained at all.



• Signed up for a new cell phone service and received awesome new phones-with Internet access and potential bloggy access. One week later my phone was stolen (well first it was left on my car, then a stranger picked it up and proceeded to use the Internet and make long distance calls, which were free, luckily. Yay for signing up for "unnecessary" phone insurance! That is until I found out you have to have the phone for more than one month to make a claim, and making a claim prior to that one month means you void the possibility of making a claim on the same phone after the month has passed.



• Summer was otherwise uneventful, quite boring in fact. We stayed with my brother-in-law, his wife, and their five children. They did not have wifi, and the only computer was in their master bedroom, so I rarely ever used it.



• September 1 we signed a lease for an awesome apartment in an awesome neighborhood. It's right at the edge of my comfort level as far as affordability goes, but its cheaper than some we looked at and it is in the part of town we wanted to live in.

Now that I have that all out of the way I can go back to writing randomness here and there and writing here and there and not feeling like I need to catch myself up completely beforehand. I missed it more than I expected to.