Poetry Monday on a Tuesday

Yesterday was Monday - Poetry Monday. I did not write any poetry. Instead I visited an optometrist who had some good news for me. My good eye is a bit better, and my bad eye no worse. No injections of any substance in either eye required, see you in four months!

Happy MotherOwl!

And now, for Poetry Monday, I composed a short Haiku. I'm not happy with it. In my head I wrote a better one during the train ride home, but it was forgotten in the hustle and bustle of family life and joy in the late afternoon. I had to make a new one with the same contents, but the wording is not as good.

The topic is Grandma's Kitchen.

My Grandma's kitchen
Now lost to the mists of time
Yummy smells and love.

- - - - -

Next Monday: The Bus.

Fredagsfrustration ~ Coops mange ansigter

Coop prøver at være alt for alle. Jeg er bange for at de ender med ikke at være nok for nogen.

Friday Frustration
Once again that Supermarket chain. Trying to be all things for everybody. But as the old tune goes ... 🎵 you can't please everyone 🎶 ...

In January - when the news of Irma's closing reached me, I wrote about Irma on this blog:

Coop is closing down one of their chains. the only really good, mostly organic and not expensive supermarket in Denmark. It is being closed by short-sighted, visionless, un-understanding, power and money-seeking people. It's also one of the oldest and the brand is widely known - even as far away as Japan.

Discountmatch - well, det klarer Netto og Rema1000 bedre. Og bemærk lige, at de kæmper med sig selv i form af 365discount.

-  0  -

Matching the cheapest prices on 500 select items. Well the true low price markets do this better - and a fun detail: Coop is a conglomerate, and one of the chains they claim to match, is their own (365discount)

Så har de deres "ansvarlighedskampagneside". De fleste "handlinger, som de kalder dem, er enten bare varm luft - vi lever op til EUs krav på området udsat for fine ord, ting Irma begyndte med eller ting, der ikke længere findes - fordi Irma ikke længere findes!

- 0 -

This is their "we care about nature" page. The caption is a pun. It means "Time to do something" and "Time to go shopping". This is the best part about this page.
Most of these initiatives do not exist any longer, are just hot air and big words, or were discontinued with the closing down of Irma - that branch of theirs, I spoke of earlier.

     Billede af den lokale Coop. Discountmatch, Bedste indkøbsoplevelse OG Irmavarer. Jeg synes ikke rigtig det passer sammen.
     Uoverensstemmelserne er iøjnefaldende i mine øjne. Og oplevelsen indenfor er langt fra den bedste, som den Irma, i først Helsinge, og senere Gilleleje eller Hillerød leverede.
     Alle tingene på hylderne er bare de samme som i ethvert andet supermarked rundt omkring. Der er ingen sjove ting som krokodillekød, gedemælk eller kængurubøffer. Alt det købte jeg i den meget mindre Irma. Og heller ingen mærkelige frugter, ingen frosne delikatesser ... og så videre, og så videre.
Det er trist, discountagtigt og luset.

--  0  --

The local Coop seen from the outside:
Discount-match -- The best shopping experience in Northern Zealand -- Irma's best have come to our shelves.
The discrepancies are glaring in my eyes. And the experience inside is far from the best, which the old Irma in first Helsinge, later Gilleleje or Hillerød delivered.
All the things on the shelves are just the same as in any other supermarket around. There's no fun things to be had like crocodile meat, goat's milk or kangaroo steaks. I bought all of this in the much smaller Irma. And also no strange fruits, no frozen delicacies ... and so on, and so on.
It's dreary, discount-y and cheap.

Words for Wednesday, November 8

This challenge started a long time ago. Now it has turned into a movable feast with Elephant's Child as our coordinator; and the Words provided by a number of people.

The general idea of this challenge is to make us write. Poems, stories, subtitles, tales, jokes, haiku, crosswords, puns, ... you're the boss.
Use all Words, some Words, one Word, or even none of them if that makes your creative juices flow. Anything goes, only please nothing rude or vulgar.

 It is also a challenge, where the old saying "The more the merrier" holds true.

So Please, remember to follow the links, go back and read other peoples' stories. And please leave a comment after reading. Challenges like this one thrives on interaction, feedback and encouragement. And we ALL need encouragement.

-- 🪐 --

The prompts for today as for every Wednesday in November are provided by Alex J. Cavanaugh, and made public at EC's blog.

We had these words for today:
Cumquat (which spell checker insists is spelled Kumquat - I leave the original spelling)
Blubber
Quest
Limestone
Furry
Purple
     And/or
Buttress
Mammoth
Fedora
Harsh
Snickerdoodle (which neither spell checker nor I knew before today)
Overlord

Alex J. Cavanaugh's Words, do not fit Susan's universe. I reverted to my habit from when first I participated in Words for Wednesday and made them all into a small, strange tale.

Qumquats and whale blubber make for a strange lunch, but on our quest to eat our way around the world, we could not be fussy. And the tangy cumquat juices really fit the fatty lukewarm blubber. The restaurant sat in a corner of an old limestone quarry, now converted to a giant greenhouse - this is where the qumquats came from, and far off we could see the ocean, where the whales played, and were caught.
For desserts we had another exotic fruit, looking like a furry purple eggplant, but it was very delicious.

Some days later we sat at the buttresses of an old Mongolian castle, gingerly tasting the vat-grown mammoth meat. The waiter, dressed in hunting greens with an overlarge fedora emitted a harsh odour as he served tea and snickerdoodles to finish the meal. He then sat down and turned on the old TV set. So we finished the tea and cookies rather faster than we wanted to. Anime are not our preferred genre, and Overlord is quite brutal. 

That same evening we boarded the Orient Express bound for Japan.

Poetry Monday :: Watermelon ~ Nothing so Far, and Why

Every time I hear the word Watermelon, today's clue, I think of a children's play I saw with my school as a small one.

I imagined finding the lyrics for one of the songs, called The Last Watermelon in Town, would be fairly easy. And then I would translate / re-poemize it for today's post.

-- 🍉 --

I just forgot the harsh Danish copyright laws concerning lyrics and scores.
An English or German tune from 1969 would be no problem to find. Not so a Danish one.
It is impossible to find more than 3 lines from the song online, and the book is only accessible from a few public libraries in Denmark. Of course none of them remotely close to where I live. I could have it sent to the library close to me, and get it there, but this is not done in under 8 days - not remotely Monday any more.

-- 🍉 --

Maybe later today more will follow. I'm squeezing my brain.

The lines I found so far in Danish:

Her kommer jeg med byens sidste vandmelon, og hvis dragen blir liggende får vi ikke mere mad eller mælk eller smør eller æg eller æbler eller flæsk. Så er det slut med ... og vandmelonerne!

November 1 :: Words for Wednesday & IWSG

This challenge started a long time ago, and now it has become a movable feast with Elephant's Child as our coordinator; and the Words are provided by a number of people.

The general idea of this challenge is to make us write. Poems, stories, subtitles, tales, jokes, haiku, crosswords, puns, ... you're the boss.
Use all Words, some Words, one Word, or even none of them if that makes your creative juices flow. Anything goes, only please nothing rude or vulgar.

 It is also a challenge, where the old saying "The more the merrier" holds true.

So Please, remember to follow the links, go back and read other peoples' stories. And please leave a comment after reading. Challenges like this one thrives on interaction, feedback and encouragement. And we ALL need encouragement.

-- 🪐 --

The prompts for today as for every Wednesday in November are provided by Alex J. Cavanaugh, and made public at EC's blog.

We had these Words:
Saturn
Orange
Festival
Wind
Spicy
Flustered
    and/or
Horror
Neon
Giant
Fight
Perfect
Flying

-- 🪐 --

I do not know what happened. This reads like something out of Larry Niven's Known Space.

Saturn was orange on the horizon when we neared the festival. The gentle wind brought enticing, spicy smells to us. We were flustered with excitement over our first visit to the festival.

Imagine our horror at realizing that the neon signs in giant letters and the enticing smells were a hidey hole for something we now have dedicated the rest of our short lives to fight. It was a perfect cover up for a criminal organization known as the Organleggers, drugging people, and removing vital organs for sale to rich people wanting eternal life. Soon after we entered our kidneys were flying to another country. Without us.

   - - - - - - - - - - -

Today is also the first Wednesday of the month. Time for the monthly Question from the Insecure Writers' Support Group

November 1 question: November is National Novel Writing Month. Have you ever participated? If not, why not?

My answer: I have tried twice. Never enrolled and all that jazz. The first time around it was a personal sort of challenge by Sue Elvis November: 30 days - 30 blogposts. I tried and failed, as documented here.

In November 2019, I wrote a lot of chapters of my mock autobiography starting here, and ending with a sum up here.

After this I swore never to participate again. It was not fun, as I prefer to write in lumps and not every day for a month. Doing different things is meat and drink to my sanity, and I am a staunch adherer of the Spiral approach principle.