Category: junk drawer

  • hello

    my one burning desire
    is for someone to
    smile hello

  • A close hit

    Photo by Warren Umoh on Unsplash

    Chatting with my mother last night, she mentioned that she had seen a new close relative that she didn’t know on a DNA service we both have used in the past. Color me intrigued, mostly because my mother knows distant relatives intimately, so it seems impossible that a close match could avoid her knowledge.

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  • Bookhaunting and a little flirter

    Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash

    Yesterday, I took the twins out shopping for used books. Even if they don’t find something that captures their fancy, they still enjoy the act of seeking for hidden treasures. And, while I try to keep engaged with these young tween women, there are very few activities that we can agree on being exclusively in the realm of “fun” to do together. Treasure hunting for books is one of them.

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  • Foxes — a Ji Yun quote

    Photo by Freezer on Unsplash

    Humans and beasts are different species, but foxes are between humans and beasts. The dead and the living walk different roads, but foxes are between the dead and the living. Transcendents and monsters travel different paths, but foxes are between transcendents and monsters. Therefore one could say to meet a fox is strange; one could also say it is ordinary.

    Human beings and physical objects belong to two different categories; fox-spirits stand somewhere between the two. The paths of light and darkness never converge: fox-spirits stand somewhere between the two. Immortals and demons go different ways; fox-spirits stand somewhere between the two.

    ~ Ji Yun, 1789, in Notebook from the Thatched Cottage of Close Scrutiny

  • Ray Bradbury Quote

    Photo by Sasha Matveeva on Unsplash

    “First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren’t rare. But there be bad and good, as the pirates say. Take September, a bad month: school begins. Consider August, a good month: school hasn’t begun yet. July, well, July’s really fine: there’s no chance in the world for school. June, no doubting it, June’s best of all, for the school doors spring wide and September’s a billion years away.”

    ~ Something Wicked This Way Comes, Prologue

  • digging in the middens

    I am having a bit of a dry spell when it comes to creative writing, which is neither unusual or much of a bother.

    When the desert decides to take up residence in my head, I sometimes power through and other times I find “less creative” ways to keep writing (like this post). I don’t let it bother me when the ideas go fooom and I am left with a cranium filled mostly with fluff. But I do keep writing when that happens because I invariably discover something I want to write about as I am “just writing”.

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  • stupid words

    sometimes
    it is all just shite
    and there's nothing
    to be done but write
    every stupid word you think

    t'hell with poetry prose
    give them a bop on the nose
    and run away run away
    run away 'til you fall
    off the cliff of egocide

    and sometimes
    what you write is still
    nothing but shite
    and a bruised ego
    is all that's left for show...

    runawayrunawayrun

  • Half-penny thoughts — 29sep25

    I made it to my fourth crochet row on a non-project (no goal other than getting more comfortable with crochet) before everything got really ugly and went terribly wrong. That’s progress beyond just beyond getting a foundation row more than five loops long. I won’t be crocheting any afghans soon, but it is progress.

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  • September reads and doings

    Image of a writing journal and a pencil.
    Photo by Dariusz Sankowski on Unsplash

    I’ve been devoting more time to reading books and attempting new hobbies in my effort to reduce the amount of content I consume from the internet.

    Since the beginning of September, I have read six novels and abandoned one novel after a record 30 pages (I couldn’t take the convenient miracles any longer, they were that obvious and that poorly written). The month has a few days yet and I am working on two more books. There is always a chance I’ll make it through my seventh, but I wouldn’t count on it.

    If you are curious as to what I’ve been reading, check out this “living” page that gets updated as I consume, including planned and current reads.

    Six books is not huge, but it is a positive effort away from social media and news that, let’s just say, feels like a low-quality circus right about now.

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  • Half-penny thoughts — 16sep25

    Have you ever started reading a book and find the descriptions of the backdrop to be too rich in the details? While in which the characters seem far too paper-thin and inauthentic?

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