onsdag den 18. marts 2020

Next Morning - WfW 18 March

  I repeat myself once again: This Wednesdays words by Mark Koopmans, was posted at Elephant's Child's blog as every Wednesday in March. 
   The story continues from last Wednesday. Again we meet Susan from Unicorn Farm, but there's no magic in this. Mark's words are not vehicles of magic for me.   
  I did not use all the words. It's not that they are challenging, but they are too modern, too heavy and grown-up for a story about a girl and her life - magic and mundane - in the late 70es. I painted red the words, I do not intend to use. and crossed out the ones I used. Maybe more story will follow. 
  I'm afraid these small pieces of Susan's mundane life are boring, but it is what I can come up with. 

Toilet               and/or               Ashen
Sunlight                                     Brexit
Dogma                                       Colgate
Spurs                                          Distillery
Vine                                           Elegance
Wilting                                       Flighty

  Next morning Susan awoke, as she always did, the moment their father left the house. She quickly dressed and went to the toilet where she looked out of the window. She did that every morning. Across the yard, on the wall separating their backyard from the backyards of the people in the next street, a vine was growing. It was very old, the stem near the ground was thicker around than Susan's leg. And always something happened in the vine, many birds lived there, and ladybirds, bumblebees, and earwigs. In autumn the leaves went red, and the man living on the other side of the wall peeled all the growing branches off his workshop windows, and let the branches hang dangling and wilting down Susan's backyard wall. Then Susan's father hurried out with a ladder and shears and snipped off all the hanging branches before they pulled down the rest of the vine. Susan's father said a lot of angry words while snipping and hauling down the vine branches, but as the man with the workshop did this every Autumn because his workshop had a flat top roof with skylights and the vine slowly covered these, Susan's father could do nothing but cut off the thrown over branches and swear to cut them earlier next year; which he always forgot. But this morning the vine was shining green and thriving, stretching its green tendrils up towards the sunlight and the workshop windows.
  She brushed her teeth more thoroughly than the evening before, reminding herself to write a tube of her favourite brand of toothpaste on the shopping list. Unlike Linda and their Dad she did not like the taste of Colgate, it was too strong.
  She hurried downstairs, put the kettle over for tea and crammed her schoolbooks into her satchel. Mum arrived bleary-eyed and began making tea and preparing their lunch-packets and breakfast.
  Linda arrived too, and ate a bowl of oatmeal with milk and sugar. Susan preferred toast with butter and honey. While putting on socks and shoes and braiding her hair in front of the mirror in the hall she kept an eye on Mum. Honey and toast with a note of liver pate was awful, indescribably awful. But today Susan avoided that fate, ate her toast and gulped the hot tea. Then she and Linda grabbed their school satchels and ran out of the door. School would begin in only four minutes. 


Maybe to be continued ... And oh yes, I'm still faithfully copying everything to my Unicorn Farm Blog

mandag den 16. marts 2020

Poetry Monday :: Money

  Diane of On the Border and Jenny of Procrastinating Donkey are taking turns hosting Poetry Monday.
   This week Jenny is giving us Money!

  Normally Mimi is also participating. 
  Am I the only one hearing ABBA singing "Money, money, money Must be funny ..." inside my head?

All the good rhymes on money
was taken by ABBA and Sonny
First they rhymed with "funny"
And then they used "sunny".
And Elvis grabbed "honey".

All they left me is "runny"
And runny's not funny,
Unless it's runny honey.

Next week we'll tackle Pets, we've known and loved!
Given to us by Diane.

lørdag den 14. marts 2020

In the Attic 2 - WfW 11 March

  This Wednesdays words by Mark Koopmans, was posted at Elephant's Child's blog as every Wednesday in March. 
   The story continues from last Wednesday, again we meet Susan from Unicorn Farm, but there's only hints of magic in this. Mark's words are not vehicles of magic for me.   
  I did not use all the words.

Nuclear
Foxtrot
Klan
Rollover
Utilities
Xeroxed

And/Or

Audacious
Zinc
Plastered
Identification
Wheeling
Fixated


Susan looked despondently at the papers on her tables. Even though they had been xeroxed, and thus were a huge improvement over the old hand cranked, smelly ones produced by the spirit duplicator, they could have been written in Chinese for all Susan understood of them. Statistics were her least favourite subject in school, closely followed by PE, where Miss Hansson were trying to teach them to Foxtrot. Susan read through the questions once more. "Identification of respondent groups." Their teacher in Social studies Mr. Smidt was fixated on grouping people according to income or salary or other to Susan equally useless variables. But this questionnaire, made by Susan and her class mates only contained information on whether the respondents had been to the cinema for the last two months. And if they had, had they seen the movies The Klan, or Freewheelin' Franklin, or Nuclear Apocalypse? And then a bevel of questions on candy. Not a word on income levels or social classes. But wait, only rich kids went to the movies, she could make three distinct groups, non- movie goers, one time movie goers, and repeating movie goers. And then correlate to their candy consumption. There might not be a correlation, or there might be, and Mr. Smidt would not be happy anyway. There actually was a not surprising positive correlation between movie going and candy consumption. Susan quickly wrote some paragraphs on this and packed the papers into her school satchel.
As she brushed her teeth rather quickly - mum and dad were still in the attic partying. Her eyes fell on a tube of zinc liniment for babies' bums. This reminded her of her experience with babysitting. She had plastered the smallest child's bum with lots of said liniment, to the great amusement of her bigger sister, who liked the white colour. Their mother had been less than amused as the liniment was everywhere on baby's clothes and on the carpet in the living room. When Susan had had the audacity to ask for her money she was only given half the amount, the rest was going to pay for the cleaning of the carpet. And that had been the end of Susan's baby-sitting days.


mandag den 9. marts 2020

Poetry Monday :: Sports

  Diane of On the Border and Jenny of Procrastinating Donkey are taking turns hosting Poetry Monday.
   This week Diane is once again teasing our brains with Sports!

  Normally Mimi is also participating. 
  I am really not the sporty type. I like biking through my peaceful forest, but not in a race, balls make me want to hide, and running, well ... to catch a bus is all. 
An elfje was what I could manage. 

Sports,
Strange things
Leave me flushed
and out of breath.
Watching

Next Monday we have to rhyme with: Money.

lørdag den 7. marts 2020

En radise - One Radish

     I dag lugede Uglemor i domen, og ud over en masse ukrudt kom hun til at luge en stor radise op. Den skulle måske være blevet stående og give blomster til radisesalte, skulper til at spise og måske også et par radisefrø, men den blev altså luget op. Nu får vi se, om den kan spises.

-- 🥕 --

To day MotherOwl weede the dome in the wonderful sunshine. She pulled up lots and lots of weed and one giant radish. It was an accident, it should have been left standing, giving lots of flowers for herbal salts, siliques (radish seed pods 😉 ) for eating and seeds to plant later. Now we'll have to see if it is edible.