Photo a day: mail

Like anyone, I have a love-hate relationship with mail. Love, love, love to get postcards and letters from friends and birthday cards from family. Doesn't matter if you "see" me on facebook every dang day. Snail mail I can touch with my hands, reread in 50 years.

Most mail isn't so fun. Paying bills online helps, but I still get the rent notice in the mailbox, and tax forms. I was hoping for good travel reading in the box this morning, but alas. There was, oddly, an unscheduled envelope from my landlord. Left it in there. Back later.

Photo a day: Colour

With a "u", they spell it. In French, you get two u's: couleur. Is a hue or a value or a shade or a wavelength more refined the more u's it has?
At work we add colors to an Excel table to mean things. Grey is just ok. Bright yellow screams for confirmation. Pink for unclassified variants, a paler shade of Red for Danger: Mutation. It's our way of adding an extra dimension to a flatland spreadsheet.
Red light: stop!
Green zone: safe.
Red cherry: eat.
Green apricot: wait.
Colors mean stuff - you just can't always tell what.
Trayvon: blood as red as yours.

Photo a Day: April

My friend Lisa has been doing this photo-a-day thing on Facebook since March now, and she's put up some pretty clever images. Every time, I say to myself - I should do that! But then I don't.

The list for April has been hanging around in my notebook for a week, and, having time to write but not to photograph/dig through my archives, I've decided to make it a word-photo thing. A 100-word thing.

I've got hours of train-time today. Perhaps I can catch up. First theme: my reflection. What is this whole post but a reflection of me?

100 words : Drought

Drought?

What, already? It’s barely April.

But yes. The winter was so agreably dry and warm, hardly a winter at all (excepting those 20 days that froze my radiator, still unrepaired). Any particular day without rain is a nice day. But string them together and what happens?

Payback time.

The bucket is back in the bathroom, no down-the-drain while heating the shower. One in the kitchen as well. The garden is thirsty.

My effort is miniscule, but that’s no reason not to do it. It’s the little bits together that make a difference. Either way. Be on the plus side!

100 words: Summer (again)

Yes, again. Shame on me for complaining about an excess of clouds !
Am I nuts ? I have 8 weeks a year to do with what I will. I have the means to travel. Or stay home and tend my tomatos and my cats.
I have the luxury of time. Whine about a spot of rain ? My house doesn’t leak. Noticably. I have 3 umbrellas. Three !
How many in this world don’t know what Vacation is, have no word for it in their language ? How many toil every day, every day they can, just to live.

100 words: summer

Where is it ? My season of sun and relaxation ? Of relaxing there is some : with everyone off for two weeks here and three there, work is quite relaxed. Assorted crises aside !


But where is the sun ? May was dry and hot and got gardens going early. July, however : sweaters all day. Rain and gloom. Autumn before its time. My lawn hammock has stayed in the cellar, dissassembled. Barbeques cancelled. Long hikes not taken.

Summer come back !

I have a week off before school restarts. Should go to Morocco; make up for lost rays.

100 words: IMF bis

Yesterday’s post was written last week, actually. I’m so behind. This week around here the IMF is all Christine Lagarde. Our heroine Christine. Tall, straightbacked, straighttalking, take your medicine Christine.

And yet, hate to disappoint you Frenchies, but it’s time the IMF went truly international. Non-European, that is. The fund is not your pet. You’re its biggest clients - don’t expect to control it as well!
Besides, if there’s one leader in France with her head on straight and her integrity intact, we should guard her jealously here. Don’t let her get away. Politics these days isn’t overcharged with competence.

100 words: IMF

This one has been in the bucket from the beginning, the kickoff random sampling from the Economist (which often has something or other to say about the IMF: I mean, what issue of the E doesn’t). I’d been wondering how to work it in, what sort of alternate initials to cook up.
But now IMF is all DSK. What is it with men in power? He consented, sure! She had possibly never heard of the IMF, never seen his face on a magazine, could not care less who he was. Just another fat cat jerk owning the world. Yes, you!

100 words: Dryer

I feel so much greener in the summer. I mow the lawn with an old-fashioned push mower. I eat what I can from my garden (though not yet! Not just yet. Many things underway, few ready. Lent made this thin time a virtue.) I get plenty of exercise keeping it all nice. The heat is off in the house, and it’s been a month since I switched from drying laundry over the radiator in the living room (so class) to letting it dry on the line along the vegetable patch. It’s a bone-dry spring so far: jeans done by lunchtime.

100 words: warble

My cat Natalie is the sort who doesn’t need to come in for dinner; she’ll just pick up the odd mouse or bird as it suits her. Some years ago, possibly in the acquisition of such a catsnack, she suffered an injury to her throat. Some thing that clawed back, or bit. She has not meowed properly since. Last night she woke me after midnight to come in, and spent a while gagging and coughing from some part gone down wrong, calming down then starting up again, finally getting out a warbly-normalish meow by two. Then we could all sleep.

100 words: Drenched

The first words dropped into the 100 bucket came from random finger-pointing in the Economist, and the non sequitur of “...safer if drenched...” caught my eye. I’ve been toying with it, waiting for the right joke to form itself around a punchline. Never happened. The world is in such a state, the evening news has barely run any of their usual local stories of car crashes and sports scores and unemployment and who’s running for head of the socialist party. Instead it’s been:

Nuclear fuel rods: safer if drenched.

Triangle Shirtwaist Building: safer if drenched.

Qaddafi’s gunpowder: safer if drenched.

Potato

I was digging in the garden on Sunday, turning over dirt, tossing away grassroots and dandelions. Preparing for spring. Anticipating.
The dirt is really alive these days. Ready to go. With the roots and the other roots and more roots and the multitudinous earthworms and stray bits of brick or plastic, there was something unusual down there. Something small and round and light brown. Big around as a 2-euro piece. A couple of atrophied roots straggling. A potato! I thought I’d dug them all up last fall.In the fridge it goes. In a week or 3 I’ll replant it.

100 words: Out

Bandersnatch is in. Bandersnatch is out. Natalie is out. Sienne wants in. Bandersnatch is in. Natalie has jumped from the fencetop to the windowsill and is looking in at me. Sienne tries the other door. I take the trash out: cat exchange! Bandersnatch is out. Natalie is in. Sienne is in. The catfoodbowl is empty. The catfoodbowl is full. Bandersnatch is in. The catfoodbowl is empty. Natalie tries to get out by pawing her way through the window. Sienne is on the bed. Bandersnatch is on the pillow. Natalie is out. Bandersnatch is out. Sienne is out.
I am out.
.

100 words: Pie

You won’t find proper pie here. Cakes, donuts, flaky pastries filled with cream, check.
I have to say, the Americans have something to teach the French in the kitchen, and one of them is

PIE

Not those prissy thin tarts they serve: deepdish pie.
They’ve got crust alright; what’s the problem with filling it up? Lest I not be fair - they do. With chicken and mushrooms and ham and potatos and that sort of thing stuck together with eggs.
No, I want it filled up with sweets, with spiced apples and sweet peaches and clever wild blueberries.

Real Pie!

100 words: Mainland

Yesterday's post was awfully technical, so here's a 100-word counterweight (am still working on "pie" - how to keep it to just 100).

.

If I were to go back to the mainland, my own that is, the motherland, I’d be stuck. I have yet again utterly forgotten to renew my driver’s license.
You need one there. No going without in favor of walking or the click and jiggle of the rails. But here I barely notice. A few minutes on the bus, a welcome and calming stroll, and the month is gone. The year is gone.

My friends think it must be such a terrible hardship, a constraint on my life. Not at all, here far from my mainland. I let it go.

.

100 words: Facebook

JR: the man we loved to hate.
Fb: thing we hate to love. Useless timewaster, full of nonsense about what some cousin I barely know is thinking of having for dinner. Why do we share this inane minutia? Who cares?

Yet there it is, running in the background, behind spreadsheets and reports. My high school friend is taking the dog out? Trade you for the latest sparkling gem from my boss/student/tech. Love how the advertising on the sidebar changes to include a word I just posted. We think we are communicating. We’re just talking to ourselves and our big brothers.

100 words

100 words is a meme snitched from two of my favorite blogs.
You pick a random word and write, obviously, 100 words about it.
An interesting exercise. Thinking of the words oneself, however, is not at all random, no matter how you promise to clear your mind and say the first that pops up.
Those words are always heavily laden, or deliberately frivolous.
For future topics, I solicit words from the audience, which will be kept on a list on the sidebar. To start, I flipped though the Economist and came up with:
Mainland
Facebook
(safer if) drenched
IMF .
Avanti!