Category Archives: Random Thoughts and Musings

Twittering Tale #44 – 7 August 2017

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About the challenge: Each Tuesday I will provide a prompt, and your mission, if you choose to play along, is to tell a story based on that prompt in 140 characters or less. If you accept the challenge, be sure to let me know in the comments with a link to your tale.

A final note: if you need help tracking the number of characters in your story, there is a nifty online tool that will count for you at charactercountonline.com.

I will do a roundup each Tuesday, along with providing us a new prompt. Have Fun!

Twittering Tale #43 – The Round-Up

 

From Michael at Morpethroad:
Ray loved to make tattoos.
Secretly he loved the pain his clients felt.
The buzz electrified him.
The heat of the iron rushed through him. 
(136 characters)

From Reena at ReInventions:
This is an elite business, and I only take committed clients. Don’t worry, it is not about the pain. My tattoos last beyond relationships.
(138 characters)

From Fandango at This, That, and The Other:
Said he was a professional tattoo artist for fifty years. Looked like a trustworthy grandfather. Who knew he couldn’t spell nothing?
RegretNohing
(132 characters)

From Kitty at Kitty’s Verses:
No amount of coaxing relieved her of pains of separation.While time works in a funny manner, a tattoo would ease his pain.
Character count:- 122

From Jim at newepicauthor:
Now my arm will be worth over $600 after this beauty. This will put my whole body up over 7 grand. Next week I’ll get one on my face. Sweet!
(140 Characters)

From Sight11 at Journey:
A lingering ache
Periodical Intake.. 
Skin, absorbing time
#Senryu

From Di at Pensitivity101:
He’d wanted to be a dentist really, but white was boring.
So much nicer to be working in colour.
95 characters.

From Sandi at Flip Flops Everyday:
The true story behind his tattoo:
“…but I want an Evil Calypso!”
“All you can afford is an evil hippo.”
In his inebriated state, he agreed.

canceled_project___calypso_by_fan_the_little_demon-d823f5d

In his mind, he got this

 

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In reality, he got this

140 characters

 

 

From Leena at Through My Heart Web:
No Place Left On Me To Ink, Now Lets Tattoo Others N Fulfill Burning Desire.
(Months Later)
“Hi, I Want Smthng Btfl On My Neck”
“U Love Fairies?”

From Cara at Do the Flash:
17-year-old Daisy, who had bone cancer, designed a tattoo for her life. Uncle Aziz etched her vision on her shoulder with tears in his eyes.

From Willow at Willowdot21:
Telling 
A story
Totally absorbed in his art
Tantalizingly catching the eye
Only he can transform your skin
Oh! It hurts but it’s what you want.
(140 Characters)

From Michael at Flawed Masterpieces:
“I know she loves John Lennon, but did she have to get “Come Together” tattooed on both her cheeks?”
(Character count: 100)

From Kirst at Kirst Writes:
At your age? her kids smirked. Her husband was furious:
What have you done? Of all the trashy… I’m disgusted.
She grinned. The desired effect.
(140 characters)

From Martin at Martin Cororan:
With each stab of ink the message slowly revealed itself: I’ve only paid up to the words ‘I’ve poisoned you’. Wire £1m for the antidote…
138 Characters

From Kathryn at Another Foodie Blogger:
You didn’t want to get sent to Tim for your mandatory numbered tattoo. Word is if you got Tim you left with more than a tattoo on your body.
(140 Characters)

From  Ghostmmnc at TeleportingWeena:
AS STILL as a CORPSE
After practicing his ink art on cadavers,
Gramps was happy to have his first live client.
88 Characters

 

From Peter at Peter’s Ponderings:
A dotted line with a message, “Follow the dots”. Starting at the neck, they now snaked down his stomach to his groin. Almost finished. OOPS!
(140 characters)

From Radhika at Radhika’s Reflection:
A tattoo “I love you my darling wife” would be a perfect anniversary gift thought Jim.  But was aghast. The wife got tattooed as “wifi”!!!
Character count: 137 letters

From Jane at Jane Dougherty Writes:
She sent him to have the new kitten tattooed. She began to worry when he phoned to ask, a bouquet of roses or a two-headed Chinese dragon?
(139 Characters)

From Dermott at Postcards from a Pigeon:
She talked him into tattoos of each other’s names, night of the ‘long talk’. One look love. She died, time the tattoo faded, not the memory.

 

From Lady Lee at Lady Lee Manila:
My hard life tattoed on me, every aspect and all lessons learned.
It’s like I’m bearing my soul for all to see.
I am who I am.
Let me be me.
(137 characters)

From Kalpana at Gemini in the Sky:
blue marks left on my body
are medals of your anger
indelible lashes on my soul
I veil them under the guise of blue tattoo art.
both gel well.

And my take on the photo…
“I feel like crap. Damn Tequila. What’s this? A tattoo? Who the hell is Sheila?”
“Morning you. I made coffee.”
“Uh, hi? You must be Sheila…”
(140 Characters)

I loved the tales this week! Your twittering tales were so fun…and some were poignant and inspiring! There were some really heart-wrenching, lovely tales, some funny “oops” moments, a few creepy stories and I learned about pet tattoos too. I posted a few of the photos that were included. Be sure to check out everyone’s page though. You all are awesome writers. Thank you all so much for joining the challenge last week.

This week, I picked a close-up of a microscope. What is the story of the person at the other end of the eyepiece lens? What is staring back at them from the slide? Does the microscope itself have a story? There are several possibilities for this random photo. I hope you have fun with this prompt. See you next week at the Round-Up.

Twittering Tale #44 – 7 August 2017

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Photo from Pixabay.com

Dr. Cole was convinced he’d found the antidote, but the virus was resistant. He assembled his notes with a warning for those who’d find him.
(140 Characters)

~kat


Shi Sai Sunday’s Week in ReVerse – 6 August 2017


Most of you know I have a day job. Sometimes the day job encroaches my free time, launching me into an exhausting week of all work and no play, or in my case no time for writing. I managed to scribble out a few lines but I admit even the magnetic words felt overwhelming to me by week’s end.

Fortunately, since I began blogging, I have grown to appreciate the effectiveness of a 6 word story or a tweet. I’m bummed that I missed several of my favorite challenges this week. They were all good ones. I just couldn’t even…

But it makes me pay attention all the more to the words that did spill out of my brain this week, finding voice in prose or poetry. Six lines made it to the finish. There’s that number again. And today is the 6th day of August. Six…you have my attention. What are you trying to tell me? (So of course I am pausing here to look it up…be right back!)

From the site, mysticalnumbers, I learned:

*The number 6 is a symbol of completeness.
*Number 6 symbolizes beauty and high ideals.
*Number 6 is A Perfect Number. The *Pythagoreans acknowledged number 6 to be the first perfect number.
*Number 6 is the symbol of luck, the highest number of the dice.
*The number 6 is the symbol of Venus, the goddess of love.
*In the Tarot, six is the card of the Lover – The Lovers naturally symbolizes anything to do with the heart; love and also inner peace and harmony.
*June is the 6th month. (my birth month)
*The number 6 is the atomic number for carbon.
*The standard flute has six holes.
*The standard guitar has six strings.
*Insects have six legs.
*In the beehive honeycomb, the cells are six-sided.

And as I shared this week, I have lived on this planet 6 decades. It seems like such a small number but it is a perfect number. It is a symbol of completeness. What I glean from all this is that even though I was not allowed to spend more time writing, the words that I did find, and my simple little six line ReVerse, are a perfect representation of my life this past week.

My boss told me to be ready to hit the ground running this coming week. Looks like another week chasing a dollar. If only I didn’t need food and shelter to survive, I could spend all my hours writing. But would more words tell my story any more eloquently? I’ll hang onto that thought when I find only a moment, here and there, to write. There is perfection in brevity.

Peace out! Have a magical week! I’m ready. Here we go…to infinite perfection and beyond!

Shi Sai Sunday’s Week in ReVerse – 6 August 2017

your life is poetry in rhythm
Morning, you. I made coffee
cut flowers die
I don’t need to know all the answers
my tack is a pen
full moon dusking

~kat

A shi sai or ReVerse poem is a summary poem with a single line lifted from each entry of a collection of work over a particular timeframe and re-penned in chronological order as a new poem. Unlike a collaborative poem, the shi sai features the words of one writer, providing a glimpse into their thoughts over time. I use it as a review of the previous week.


Hobbyhorse – Friday’s Word of the Day


When I think of a hobbyhorse I imagine a stick with a horse’s head or a rocking horse, ridden by children, which is, in fact the second definition for today’s word of the day on dictionary.com. The first definition, a pet idea or project is not something I ever associated with the word hobbyhorse. 

A look at the word’s origin tells a different story. According to etymology online the word hobby actually means a “small, active horse,” from hobi short for hobyn (mid-14c.; late 13c. in Anglo-Latin), and was probably originally a proper name for a horse that is now extinct. Hobby as a shortening of hobbyhorse also was used in the “morris horse” sense (1760), or as Dictionary.com states “in the 16th century hobbyhorse meant several things, e.g., a figure of a horse made of wicker worn in morris dances, pantomimes, and burlesques; a child’s toy consisting of horse’s head on the end of a stick or a rocking horse; a horse on a merry-go-round or a carousel in the 1680’s. By the 17th century hobbyhorse developed the meaning “pet project, favorite pastime.” Hobbyhorse entered English in the 16th century.”

Is it just me or does the term hobbyhorse sound a bit redundant? Basically one is saying horse (hobby) horse. But I digress.

Painting of a hobby horse with Morris dancers beside the River Thames at Richmond, London, c.1620


Hobbyhorses were associated with May Day celebrations, Mummers plays and the aforementioned Morris dance in England in the 17th and 18th centuries. Wikipedia explains that there were several types of hobbyhorses:

*Tourney horses- meant to look like a person riding a small horse that is wearing a long cloth coat or caparison (as seen in medieval illustrations of jousting knights at a tourney or tournament)

* Sieve horses – a simpler version of the tourney horse. Known only in Lincolnshire, made from a farm sieve frame, with head and tail attached, suspended from the performer’s shoulders. The performer wears a horse blanket (the kind that includes a headpiece with holes for the eyes and ears) that covers them and the sieve.

* Mast horses – are meant to represent the horse (or other animal) itself. They had a head made of wood, or sometimes an actual horse’s skull was used; it usually has hinged jaws that can be made to snap. The head is attached to a stick about 1 m (3 ft) long. The person acting the creature is covered by a cloth attached to the back of its head; he (or, rarely, she) bends over forwards or crouches, holding the head in front of their own and resting the other end of the stick on the ground. A tail may be attached to the back of the cloth.

And this is only a sampling of the types of hobbyhorses used in Great Britain. In fact many countries and cultures have used a form of hobbyhorse in ceremonial dance, festivals, customs and theatre for centuries. You can read all about them at Wikipedia HERE.

So how did the word hobbyhorse become associated with an obsession? According to Wikipedia the term “hobby horse” came from the expression “to ride one’s hobby-horse”, meaning “to follow a favourite pastime”, and in turn, the modern sense of the term hobby. Makes perfect sense to me! 😉

Of course there is also the literary reference to the word penned by none other than the Bard himself, “Cal’st thou my love Hobbi-horse?” (Translation: A loose woman or strumpet) – William Shakespeare, Loves Labour’s Lost, in 1588. And there is the ‘velocipede’ (sounds like a very fast many-legged slug…the stuff of nightmares!)…also called a ‘pedestrian hobbyhorse’ or ‘dandy horse’. it was a two wheeled ‘bicycle’ that the rider propelled by pushing the ground with each foot alternately. This modern marvel, a forerunner to the modern pedaled version was all the rage in the early 19th century. It was featured in The Gentleman’s Magazine, February 1819.


So there you have it; a glimpse into today’s word of the day. And here’s a little Haiku to bring it all home…

this blogs a hobby
could say, it’s my hobbyhorse
my tack is a pen

~kat


Sexagenarian Sagacity



Sexagenarian Sagacity

Six. It seems like such a small number. That’s how many decades I have lived on this planet; three score; sixty years and counting. 

When I survey the old lady in the mirror I see a face that is suddenly wrinkly and fuzzy like a peach. My hair is thinning. My belly is softening. My steps are more measured. My eyesight is fading. But there is a glimmer still, and a sense of contentment.

My quest for the secret of life doesn’t hold the urgency it once did. I don’t need to know all the answers. Six decades, three score, goes by in a blink; a mere dot on page of history. But I have found happiness along the way. A moment’s happiness is more than enough.

pencil scratch hash marks
inch up an old wall, love notes,
lost baby teeth, pearls,
patent leather go-go boots,
random memories to keep

life in full measure
bursts of smoldering passion
settling to dust

~kat
A Haibun/Tanka/Haiku for Colleen Chesebro’s Poetry Tuesday Challenge. Prompt words this week are: Hunt and Find (there are a few thesaurus aliases in this piece :))


In Lieu of Flowers

flowers-and-packing-boxes-dale-r

PHOTO PROMPT © Dale Rogerson

“Why did I even bother stating “No flowers” in the obituary!”

“Flowers are pretty. And Red Ginger and Birds of Paradise were Nana’s favorites. I think it’s nice of people to remember her this way. What’s your issue with flowers!”

“Well first of all, they’re a waste of money. We were very clear. We said, “in lieu of flowers, please make a donation to Sunset Hospice. Why can’t people respect our wishes?!”

“I’m sorry. Why are you so upset?”

“Cut flowers die. I can’t bear to watch them fade, like Nana did. Take them somewhere…please!”

“So sorry. I get it.”

~kat

100 Words for Rochelle Wisoff-Fields Friday Fictioneers Challenge based on the photo above by Dale Rogerson.