Tag Archives: Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge

September 20, 2023 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Would You Move to a Mars Settlement? Explain

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Two astronauts wearing space suits and holding hands as they stand on a red rocky surface and look out at miles of dead, red stone and red mountains in the distance. This may be Mars as there is no vegetation or animal life to be seen anywhere. The two people are the only living creatures to be seen. Well, it depends on the specifics of the situation!

My answer to this week’s question is yes if:

1) Everyone I love is coming with me,

2) The settlement has been established for long enough that they’ve figured out how to protect people from radiation and the many other dangers that would come from living on Mars. Life expectancy on Mars would need to be the same as it is here on Earth,

3) We would all be free to return to Earth on the next available flight back there if we’d had enough,

And

4) There was something mind-blowing to experience in person there. For example, maybe there is life on Mars that can be interacted with safely? That would make a trip there worth it for me.

 

My answer to this week’s question is no if: any of the above items aren’t true or if I have any other indication that living there would be unsafe for any other reasons.

Basically, I’d want a lot of other people to be the guinea pigs and iron out all of the creases in Martian living before I thought about moving there.

 

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September 13, 2023 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Favourite Fairy Tale or Legend and Why

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An iron sign that has the name Wool Pit carved out of iron in it. The sign also has a carving of two children, a church, and a wolf on it. The rest of the sign is comprised of thin rods that are needed to hold everything together. You can see a great deal of the grey sky and the empty tree branches through it. My favourite sorts of fairy tales or legends are the ones based on true stories.

For example, I am endlessly fascinated by The Green Children of Woolpit.

It was harvest time during the reign of King Steven (so somewhere between 1135 and 1154). A boy and a girl who had green skin, spoke a strange tongue, and were wearing odd clothing appeared in the village of Woolpit.

They were taken to the home of Richard de Calne and refused to eat anything until someone finally offered them broad beans a few days later. That was the only food they ate for a time, although they gradually adapted to the typical diet of people living in the U.K. in the 1100s. Their skin slowly lost its green hue during this adjustment period as well.

One version of the story says the boy died soon after he was baptized. In another version, both children lived and began sharing stories of their previous life once they learned to speak the language of their rescuers.

The girl (or the children) said they came from St Martin’s Land where everything was green, the sun never shone, and the sky always looked like twilight. She or they said they’d found their way to Woolpit while they were out herding their father’s cattle and heard a loud noise.

Her rescuers named the girl Agnes, and she was a servant in Richard de Calne‘s home for many years before she married someone named Richard Barre.

Did these kids come from a magical alternate reality? Or had they simply gotten lost in the forest and wandered in from a village that was just far enough away from Woolpit that the folks there didn’t recognize their language or clothing?

Travelling was much harder back then, after all, and the local cultures, languages, and customs could change dramatically from place to place.

As for their green skin, was it a mistranslated description of children who might have had complexions that were a little darker or lighter than expected? Were they aliens from another planet? Did they have chlorosis (iron-deficiency anemia) which can cause a green hue to the skin but disappears once you have a better diet? Or maybe they had a case of mild arsenic poisoning that killed the boy but that little Agnes survived?

Some people think this tale is much, much older than the 1100s. Maybe the children are an allusion to the first human inhabitants of Europe who were all but completely replaced by new waves of immigrants to that continent between 5,000 and 9,000 years ago.

Something can evolve a lot over the generations while still retaining a kernel of truth about the people or places featured in it, after all. There is an aboriginal tribe in Australia who has a legend about a violent meteor strike that scientists recently confirmed really did happen 4,700 years ago.

So I think it’s plausible that some of the other “myths” people like to share could be just as old as that one even if certain details might have changed over the years depending on how rigorously a culture trains their storytellers on getting every word right.

The possibilities are endless. You can chalk everything up to purely logical explanations or choose much more fanciful ones if you prefer. Either way, I think this is an excellent story and I wish we knew more about what happened to Agnes after she got married and where she really came from.

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September 6, 2023 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Song Lyrics I’ve Misheard

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A close-up of a sheet of music on a music stand. The stand is next to a window that is covered by horizontal blinds.

This isn’t the sheet music to my answer. It’s simply a nice thing to look at.

I thought this topic was going to be an easy one, but it almost stumped me. Only one answer came to mind.

Artists and Song: Lloyd Feat. Lil Wayne, “I Want You“

What I Heard: “She’s 5’2,” but I want you.”

The Actual Lyric: “She’s fine, too, but I want you.”

I spent years wondering why height matters at all to these rappers. I don’t notice a meaningful difference between someone who is 5’2” versus an inch shorter or taller than that unless I have some compelling reason to pay close attention their height.

It feels weird to publish such a short post, but this one can help to balance out some of my earlier Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge posts where I gave long, chatty answers because I simply had to give two or more responses when only one was technically called for. Ha!

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August 30, 2023 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: The Weirdest Thing I Loved as a Child

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A photograph of a very old graveyard. The gravestones are covered in moss and have most of their etchings either hidden by moss or worn away. The largest and nearest one has begun to bend over and looks like it might soon fall over entirely. Please note that this post includes references to child mortality and epidemics because little Lydia read tons of stories about (typically Victorian-era) children who caught all sorts of unpleasant illnesses. This will be a general overview, and I will not be going into detail about specific characters, individuals, or causes of death.

The weirdest thing I loved as a child was visiting the pre-1950 (ish?) sections of graveyards, figuring out how old the people there were when they died, and trying to guess what might have killed them and if they would have survived if they had access to modern medicine. I was most interested in the gravestones of those who died young because almost everyone I knew who died had done so at a ripe old age.

Why was I interested in this? Well, there were a few reasons for it:

1)  I’ve always thought cemeteries are beautiful and peaceful places to remember the dead. I liked seeing the pretty tombstones, reading names on them that maybe weren’t so commonly used these days, and pondering their creative epitaphs.

2) Getting sick made me anxious in small part because of how many classic novels I’d read about kids being disabled or killed by all sorts of diseases that can now be cured with medications like antibiotics or prevented entirely with vaccines. (See also: Beth March from Little Women, Helen Burns from Jane Eyre, and Mary Ingalls from the Little House books). It was always nice to go to the library later on, or maybe ask my mother who was training to become a nurse back then, and learn about how modern medicine has radically changed the world in this regard.

3) It made getting vaccinated slightly less horrible. I still hated needles, but at least I knew why vaccines were so important.

4)  I liked being scared, and it was frightening to read lists of names on a gravestone who died one right after the other and realize they were probably related and suffered from the same illness.

In conclusion, I have a bit of a gothic side. Don’t tell anyone. 😉

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August 23, 2023 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Three Fun Facts About Myself

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The numbers 1, 2, and 3 are beige coloured and lying on a red surface. Beneath each letter is a small lego: a white one underneath the number 1, a black one underneath the number 2, and a red one underneath the number 3. Once again, I’d like to have a crystal ball so I can see how you all answer this question! Will you be telling us a secret? Posting pictures? Sharing funny childhood stories? Or maybe something else entirely?

Here are three fun facts about me that I don’t think I’ve shared on my blog before:

1. I once stopped driving and pulled over to the side of a quiet, flat, country road to save a turtle that had been flipped over on its back. There were no other vehicles anywhere to be seen in either direction, so I was not putting myself in harm’s way by doing this. The turtle was a greenish-brown little creature that was about the size of a small dinner plate. It wasn’t at all heavy to pick up and probably weighed no more than 5 pounds. It didn’t look anything like a snapping turtle, but I’m not sure which type of turtle it was. I picked it up, brought it to the edge of the road, and made sure it was walking into the grass safely where it would live happily ever after before I drove off again.

2. I was born with an innocent heart murmur that wasn’t diagnosed until I was an adult. It’s called an innocent murmur because it doesn’t cause any health problems and doesn’t need to be treated. Some of you may have one, too! About 10% of adults and 30% of kids have them, so it’s a pretty common variation of normal. I only ever think of it when I meet a new doctor who pauses and listens again to my heart while examining me.

3. I  have always loved educational stuff. When I was a teenager, my family visited some family friends in a big city. There was a gorgeous, huge museum there I desperately wanted to see. Our hosts said museums were boring and wanted to show us a local mall instead. Mom took me aside and told me to be polite, so I smiled and said nothing more about it.

My only memory of that excursion is of patiently sitting in a food court with a neutral expression on my face as I silently felt the sting of disappointment and the grating texture of boredom that somehow seems worse when you’re a kid or teen.

On a positive note, I have visited that museum multiple times since then and always have a marvellous time examining their fossils, paintings, and artifacts in detail.

But I still don’t like going to the mall. Ha!

(This is in no way a judgement of people who love shopping or malls, by the way. May you enjoy those hobbies to your heart’s content. Our hosts and I simply had wildly different ideas about what is fun in life, and I doubt they realized what a rare treat visiting a museum was for rural people who didn’t have a lot of disposable income.

We had a mall in the town we lived in, but it was about a one-hour drive to the nearest small museum and  several hours to a full day of driving for the large ones. Due to the cost of gas, multiple meals, parking fees, highway tolls, and possibly renting a motel room or two for the night in addition to buying general admission tickets to a museum, we were only able to afford to do this about once every five to ten years when I was growing up. It was a huge deal whenever it happened, and it was one of the many reasons why I moved to an urban area as an adult).

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August 16, 2023 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: A Documentary I Liked

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A photo of a dinosaur skeleton against a black backrgroudn. The skeleton has been pieced back together and is standing up straight and tall as if the dinosaur is still alive. You all may remember how much I like nonfiction. I enjoy watching documentaries about science, history, medicine, and other topics just as much as I do reading about them.

I think documentaries are the perfect thing to watch whenever you need a distraction for any reason. You can learn so much about the world through them!

I’ve been anticipating this week’s topic so much that I’m going to give two answers to it. (Honestly, I wanted to give like a dozen…but I won’t overwhelm all of you with my enthusiasm for documentaries).

 

 

I recommend Prehistorical Planet to dinosaur fans age 5 and older

Poster for season two of the documentary Prehistoric Planet. It shows a close-up drwaing of a dinosaur’s eye. The dinosaur has blue feathers and a yellow-brown iris. You can see the reflection of a flying dinosaur in this dinosaur’s eye which is cool.Prehistoric Planet is a 2022 and 2023 British-American miniseries about what life was like for dinosaurs and other animals in the Late Cretaceous period. It’s based on the latest scientific research of that era and was filled with information about how those creatures hunted (or tried to avoid being hunted), found mates, built nests, and raised their young.

If there are any elementary-aged or older kids in your lives who love dinosaurs, this is something they can enjoy just as much as adults do. The second season just came out in May, and the writing felt like it was meant to appeal to viewers from a wide variety of ages and backgrounds which is delightful. This one is for everyone!

 

I recommend Shiny Happy People to teen and adult viewers only.

Poster for the documentary Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets. Image on cover shows a photo of the Duggar Family that has a happy smiley face covering the actual face of every single member of the family.

Shiny Happy People is a 2023 documentary about the Duggar family and their relationship with the Institute of Basic Life Principles which was founded by Bill Gothard.

The Duggars have been a staple of reality TV programs on The Learning Channel since the early 2000s due to their frugal lifestyle and having 19 children.

They cultivated a wholesome image, but there were years of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse going on behind the scenes both in this family and in Gothard’s organization in general.

This was not an easy thing to watch by any means, but it was educational. I especially appreciated the sections that pointed out some of subtle signs people can inadvertently give off when they’re being abused but trying to hide it as other programs on this topic will often only mention the biggest red flags of something like that going on.

There were so many people who could have reported these crimes but either never did it or were not listened to when they did. I think there’s something to be said for being aware of what to look for and alerting child protective services when warranted. Sometimes it takes more than one report for the authorities to take action.

Anyway, these are the two most recent documentaries that I loved. I hope you all like them, too, if you watch them!

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August 9, 2023 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: The Strangest Dream I’ve Had Recently

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Five little green plants are growing in five glass test tubes as the tubes sit in a test tube tray on a white counter in the sunlight. Back in May I dreamed that I was standing in a laboratory watching scientists work. I may have been a scientist, too, although the dream logic wasn’t very clear on that.

We had a limited amount of time left to solve the biggest problem humanity has ever faced: the plants were revolting.

That is to say, every single plant on Earth had become sentient and was furious with humanity.

Not only were we eating the plants themselves, we were stealing their children (seeds) and eating them, too.

Plantkind had run out of patience with us. They were so angry, in fact, that they made a unanimous decision to stop reproducing forever.

The scientists I was working with had captured a plant specimen and was attempting to find her seeds. When they realized she had none, they decided to try reasoning with her. She was about the size of a small doll, dark green, and almost too angry to speak with us.

Didn’t she realize that her species, too, would die out if there were no seeds left?

She knew and didn’t care. So far the scientists had only strengthened her resolution to carry out her plan and encourage every other plant to do the same.

And then I woke up.

(Aren’t dreams odd sometimes?)

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August 2, 2023 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: A Job I Wouldn’t Be Good At

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A neon sign lit up against a black night sky in a city. You can see a skyscraper next to the sign. The words “Peninsula Night Club” are in neon blue on the sign. The word “liquor” is larger than all other words and in neon orange on the sign. The word “dancing” is on the bottom of the sign and in neon pink. If any of you secretly own a nightclub and are looking for people to work late hours and pressure your patrons into buying watered-down alcohol while the DJ blares eardrum-rattling music all night long, I am not a good candidate for the role for the following reasons:

1) I am a morning person who needs an early-ish bedtime and a stable sleep schedule in order to function properly and stave off ugly sleep-deprivation migraines,

2)  Migraines give me horrible noise sensitivity, so I would not be able to  remain in a noisy environment if I’m at any point in the migraine cycle.  I also really don’t want to suffer permanent hearing loss from dangerously noisy work,

3) Sales is not something I’m naturally good at,

4) When I worked roles that involved sales in the past, I only said truthful things to my customers and respected their boundaries if they didn’t want to upgrade to a more expensive model of whatever they were shopping for or add extra items to their order. I  never pressured them to buy anything they weren’t interested in and actually got in trouble sometimes for not selling stuff that my customers never wanted or needed in the first place,

5) I haven’t touched alcohol in years, wouldn’t know what to recommend other than telling everyone to go drink a strawberry margarita*, and would be perfectly honest every time someone asked if the drinks were watered down or otherwise deceptively advertised.

*Back when I did occasionally drink alcohol, it was at most two or three glasses of it per year, and strawberry margaritas were one of the handful of drinks that might entice me. I liked the fruit and the fruit juice in them a thousand times more than the alcohol, though, so now I just ask for a freshly-squeezed orange juice or something for rare celebratory moments instead.

So there it is. You now all know my weaknesses and what sort of job I’d be terrible at. Please make your hiring decisions accordingly. 😉

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July 26, 2023 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: A Job I’d Be Good At

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I’m going to give two long answers to this week’s prompt because I have a lot to say on this subject. One answer is a job that actually exists, and the other is a job that should exist.

Closeup photo of hardback, antique books with red covers and gold stars on their spines. The words “Volume I,” “Volume II,” and “Volume III” are stamped in gold ink on their spines. Professor

As far as the former goes, I would have loved to become  a professor.

I spent a few years tutoring other students to make some extra pocket money when I was in college. It was so exciting to finally figure out the best way to explain a topic to someone (or a group of people) who had been struggling to understand it.

I was lucky enough to do some training of new staff in jobs I had after graduation, too, and found teaching them to be mentally stimulating and worthwhile every single time.

If the job market for English professors wasn’t so slim, I would have happily gone on to earn my Master’s degree and Ph.D. in order to pursue this line of work.

Unfortunately, by the time I started college the administrators were already replacing tenured professors who had stuff like health insurance and retirement accounts with part-time adjunct positions. There were actually a few professors who taught both at the community college I started at and the four-year college I earned my Bachelor’s degree from. They worked just as hard as anyone else in their field but had low pay, no benefits, and little job security.

I would have happily taught all sorts of composition, literature, creative writing, history, and similar courses if we lived in a world where getting your Ph.D. was more affordable and almost always ended with one being offered a full-time, permanent job with benefits that could easily pay off student loans and cover all of the other expenses of life, too.

Can’t you see me strolling down the halls of some college or university and nodding a friendly hello to students passing me by before going to my office to grade essays? I sure can. I would have kept a candy dish full of treats in my office to serve as an icebreaker for nervous students.

(Well-Paid) Book Reviewer

A white person wearing a black sweatshirt is holding up the Book Review section of the New York Times while standing outside on a cloudy day.My second answer involves a problem that many writers and publishers have that I sorely wish I could help to solve for them.

I’ve been writing book reviews for over a decade now and, without trying to toot my own horn here, have a file full of positive feedback on how thorough, kind, and honest my reviews are.

If there were some way to create full-time, permanent jobs with benefits for book reviewers, I’d be the first person in line for it.

There are so many amazing stories out there that never get enough attention because of how time consuming it is for reviewers to go through the reading, analyzing, and reviewing process even if you happen to be a fast reader and talented writer who has a lot of experience translating your reactions to a tale into review form.

This is equally true for short stories, novellas, and picture books that I’ve seen some new reviewers assume must be simpler to write about. Yes, you can often finish reading them in shorter period of time than it would take to read a full-length novel, but the review writing process is the same and may even take much longer than usual if you need to figure out how to share relevant details about it that support your criticisms or compliments without giving away spoilers.

Sometimes I need to read these stories multiple times and take detailed notes in order to figure out how to word my review fairly, accurately, and in a spoiler-free manner. For a picture book, this can be done in ten to twenty minutes depending how many notes I need to take and is no big deal.

Rereading a possibly confusing or dense 100-page novella again to catch all of the nuances to it I might have missed the first round, though, can take as much (and possibly even more) time than picking a full-length novel to begin with.

Does this happen every time? No, of course not, but page counts can only tell you so much about how you’ll react to what you’re about to read or how tricky it might be to write a good review of it. I’ve been surprised multiple times by which books were and were not easy to review.

(Now don’t get me wrong. I love reviewing shorter works that generally don’t get as much attention as novels do, but there are still no shortcuts here).

It would be so much easier for authors and their books to get more exposure and gain new readers if this sort of job actually existed. Who knows! Maybe someday we’ll have a Star Trek sort of economy that enables everyone to do the work they love the most.

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July 19, 2023 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Share One Interesting Fact You Know

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Closeup of a pale person’s hand reading braille on a white page. While doing research for this post, I stumbled across a fact that I never would have guessed is true.

The majority of blind people in the U.S. Canada and the U.K. cannot read braille.

Statistically, less than 1% of British people and less than 10% of Americans and Canadians with sight impairments can read. (I couldn’t find the percentages for other countries. If you know any of them, please share!)

There are a few different reasons why this is true:

1) Braille is harder to learn as an adult,

2) there’s a social stigma to using it,

3) some kids who are blind or partially blind have other health problems like diabetes that can reduce sensation in their fingertips and make learning Braille difficult,

4) a lot of special education teachers are carrying heavy caseloads and may not have the time to teach much Braille, and

5) some schools prioritize auditory teaching methods to teaching braille or using large print books for students who have some sight.

Other sites said the rise of audiobooks and technology like text-to-speech apps that will read for you is making the use of Braille less necessary.

Isn’t this fascinating? I always assumed that the majority of people with a sight impairment would know Braille.

 

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