
This photo was taken in the community garden.
Cee’s FOTD 8/31/20
This photo was taken in the community garden.
Cee’s FOTD 8/31/20
Lens-Artists’ Photo Challenge this week is Pick a Word: Choose one (1) word or more – choose all of them if you like! The words available are the following:
Comfortable
Growing
Tangled
Crowded
Exuberant
Fandango’s last theme for his Dog Days of August is “your plans for September are.” Do you have any? If so, what are they? They can be anything, from posting more (or less) frequently on your blog, taking a trip, learning a new skill, getting married, engaged, or divorced, getting more exercise? Or are you just going to play it by ear? Share a story, a poem, a photo, a drawing, some music, or whatever you wish to share about your plans for September.
I don’t have any specific plans for September except to enjoy the warm weather while it lasts. Due to Covid-19, I don’t have much of a choice. But my husband and I are going to go out more: We have a day trip planned for this Thursday to go to the western suburbs to see some kitschy things I found out about in the newspaper. (Stay tuned! I hope to post pictures!) We can’t stay overnight anywhere, unless we don’t mind being quarantined for 14 days afterward (yes, I do mind!).
Another excursion we will be doing perhaps next week is to the Chicago Art Institute. The parking is a bitch and we don’t feel comfortable taking public transportation so…we’ll just have to pay for parking. I’m a member so there’s no admission fee. Right now there are two very different exhibits I want to see: special exhibit on El Greco and another on an artist from Mozambique with really wild, colorful art.
I also will make plans for a future trip abroad. If I book a tour before the end of September, the company I’m planning to use (Overseas Adventure Travel – I strongly recommend them!) will give us a couple of discounts. So I will be spending the next couple of weeks perusing their catalogs. That will be fun!!
Other than that, it’s the same-old same-old, doing the things I’ve been doing to wile away my time for the past several months: reading, blogging, exercising, working on photo books of past trips, artwork.
As the election approaches, I hope to get involved in some get-out-the-vote initiative.
I’m ready for another Share Your World Meets Harry Potter! The Harry Potter questions this week are inspired by The Goblet of Fire, but you don’t have to be a Harry Potter fan to answer them. These questions come from another blogger, Roger Shipp, who is collaborating with Melanie and her Share Your World, which are the second set of questions.
Roger’s Magical, Mystical Questions:
What is the last song you sang along to?
I’m not sure – there’s always music in my head, and sometimes it isn’t what I’d like to have repeating ad nauseum, but I think the last one I sang along with the recording was Old Man River a couple of days ago.
What was your scariest nightmare about?
I can’t remember it anymore, but I screamed out loud and it woke both me and Dale up.
What food do you crave most often?
ice cream, cookies, chocolate in general
What’s your grossest bug story?
The grossest and most horrible bug I’ve ever seen is a giant cockroach. Any cockroach, really. They usually appear where I least expect them and they run incredibly fast.
When I lived in northeastern Brazil with my first husband, we had all our personal effects shipped to us, and they arrived in these huge boxes, so we had large cartons sitting around the house for quite awhile. One day I was sitting on the couch in our living room and I heard a scratching noise. I went to look for the source and found a giant cockroach climbing up one of the boxes! These cockroaches lived in the grass in the surrounding area, which is why I never, ever, laid anything on the grass there. We also had a cesspit, and had to get it cleaned out occasionally – of course, that pit was crawling with them. It makes me shiver to think of even now. I thought of downloading a picture from Google and posting it here, but I can’t bear to even look at a picture of those horrible things!!
For Cee’s FOTD 8/28/20, I am posting a photo of one of our tomato plants, just bursting with round red baby tomatoes! Even though I have given away bags of them to several friends and left them in the main building for anyone to take, we still have more than we can use! Well, they do make good snack food!
The Ragtag Daily Prompt today is the word lies. There is a lot I could write on this topic (for instance, most of what happened at the RNC these last four days). But I was just made aware of a John Oliver (I love this guy!!) show from a few weeks ago that is very relevant in the wake of the recent tragic events in Kenosha, Wisconsin and the protests and looting that have been going on all summer around the country. Why is this happening? Why is there so much racial unrest? Why are they saying black lives matter – don’t all lives matter? Everyone has an opinion, but too often their opinion is based on ignorance or downright lies.
A few weeks ago – around the time John Lewis died – John Oliver on his show Last Week Tonight talked about how Americans learn history wrong. Maybe it has gotten better, but there are still some (any is too many) white people around who say stupid stuff like, “Slavery was bad, but those people were lucky to come to a great place like America.” (Meaning being a slave here was better than living free in African societies.) Textbooks for young children dumb down history, saying things like the colonists “brought slaves with them to help with farm work and chores.”
“Washington freed his slaves” is another myth. Instead of teaching kids lies like George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and then confessed to his father, saying, “I cannot tell a lie,” why can’t we teach kids that yes, Washington was the ‘father of our country’ and he should be honored for being the first president, but he also OWNED SLAVES and he DID NOT free them when he was president (or afterward, either)! I admit, I never learned a single negative fact about Christopher Columbus or George Washington until I got to college. Why can’t students learn both the positive and the negative – i.e. the FACTS about these historical figures?
Well, don’t we need heroes? Yes, but kids, even elementary students, can understand that people can be both good and bad. Acts of heroism don’t erase the rest of a hero’s life. I’m not dissing heroes. I just think we need to be honest. And although any history teacher knows that one year in high school is not enough time to teach all of American history, we shouldn’t ignore important events that are more convenient to ignore than to teach our students. (American history should be taught for at least two years, or part of it every year.)
As a result, many Americans graduate from high school ignorant about American history (and forget about world history). We need to help students understand why racism continues to survive. We need to connect the past to the present, help our students make the connections, so they can understand what is happening now.
This is an excellent video that is worth spending the 28+ minutes to watch.
I need to say here that I do not necessarily approve of taking down statues of people like George Washington. But the idea of the so-called “cancel culture” is a topic for another post.
Cee’s Black & White Photo Challenge this week is feet or shoes human and animal.
Collections of shoes and other footwear
I’ve never participated in this challenge before, because I just found out about it today (thanks, Fandango!), so even though it’s Wednesday, I’m going to join in. Truthful Tuesday is hosted by PCGuyIV.
What’s something that seemingly everyone else just can’t stop talking about that you just never got in to, and why not?
I feel as though I am woefully behind in cultural trends nowadays. Maybe that’s a part of getting old. I used to tease my mother when she didn’t know about some cultural icon, like Robert Redford. Now I am my mother!
Two TV series that never interested me at all were Game of Thrones and Seinfeld. Yet it felt like everyone else was addicted to these shows. Seinfeld, of course, is several years older than Game of Thrones and I guess people had their favorites. But certain quotes or characters got into our media culture so there are cultural references I just don’t get.
I used to watch a lot of TV and see lots of movies, but haven’t done much of either in the last several years. It started when I got too busy with work to get interested in any shows or have time to go out to a movie. Now I’m just used to it. Every once in a while, someone will mention a Netflix series that sounds interesting, and my husband and I will watch it. PBS is where I found most of the shows that I like to follow. Now that I don’t pay attention to it, I feel like I’m missing out on something.
The second question for the week is pretty much the exact opposite of the first:
What’s something that you hold near and dear, but it seems as though no-one else has heard about it, or at the very least, has no interest in it?
I can’t think of anything in particular. But I do remember that there have been products we found out about and started buying at the supermarket, only to have them discontinued a short time later. My husband’s been complaining that a lot of the turkey substitutes are disappearing, like turkey ham, turkey pastrami, etc. When I wore contact lenses, I was allergic to thimoseral, so I had to use a product that didn’t have thimoseral in it, which became increasingly harder to find. Eventually I couldn’t find it at all. There may have been other products I could have used but I didn’t know what they were, and later I gave up on wearing contact lenses altogether.
There have also been TV shows that we really thought were wonderful, but were cancelled after only one season – even though the writing was brilliant and the plots engaging. Oh well, I guess they had to make time for more reality shows and crime dramas. On Netflix, there were three seasons (amounting to about 8-9 episodes each) of Anne With an E, basically the story of Anne of Green Gables, but with original plot lines added. But there are three books in that series, yet they cancelled the series before getting to either of the other two! Same thing with Outlander (I forget which network it was on) – I think it was discontinued after 4 seasons (corresponding to 4 books in the series) but I’ve also heard rumors that it’s coming back eventually.
I don’t know how many people were interested in any of these things other than me, but it seems we have very little influence with the people in charge of deciding whether to continue something or not. One thing I like about PBS is that when one of their series is very popular, their writers are hired to write more episodes. I don’t think Downton Abbey was expected to last more than a few seasons, but it was so popular that they gave us more seasons and a movie too!
But of course, all good things eventually come to an end. (It seems like the not-so-good things, like this Covid pandemic, are never going to end….)