Tag Archives: Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge

October 25, 2023 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: If You Could Create a Holiday, What Would It Be?

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If I could create a holiday, I’d tell everyone to go take a hike. No, literally! We could call it National Nature Day or something.

One of the reasons why I struggle to enjoy many mainstream holidays is how consumeristic they tend to be. There have been times in my life when money was in very short supply and it was hard to come up with gifts for others that they would enjoy and that I could actually afford to give. Even when I can afford to buy gifts, I prefer to do so spontaneously and with items or experiences I know the recipient will genuinely enjoy.

Photo of a country road through a gorgeous autumn landscape filled with orange leaves on the trees and even more leaves coating the land below them. The sun is shining warmly on everything and making it look like the beginning of fairy country. It would be lovely to have a holiday that was purposefully designed to encourage spending time in nature with whoever you want to socialize with that day.

I don’t know about all of you, but I need more of both of those things.

Just go outside and enjoy nature in whatever way you can depending on your interests, current level of fitness, and how warm, cold, wet, or dry the weather report might be for the day.

It could involve hiking, nature walks, playing group or individual sports, rock climbing, birdwatching, photography, cycling, having a picnic, swimming, running through the leaves, playing catch with a dog, or similar activities.

Whatever outdoorsy stuff you’re into would count, and no one would be expected to do things outside of their comfort zone.

It sure sounds like a good way to spend a day to me.

 

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October 18, 2023 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Favourite Scary Monster

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There are mild spoilers for The Last of Us and The Girl With All the Gifts in this post. 

Black silhoutte of a zombie in tattered clothing lurching forward with their hands outstretched as they look for new prey. Zombies are my favourite scary monster.

I know a few of my readers are grossed out by them, so I picked the least graphic stock image of one I could find and will not go into gory details in this post.

They deeply frighten and fascinate me because there are no mystical rules controlling where they’re allowed to go or what they’re allowed to do. Unlike the vast majority of other monsters, zombies are 100% unaffected by:

  •  Sunlight
  • Holy water
  • Wolfsbane or other herbs that can harm, say, a werewolf
  • Garlic, onions, or any other food
  • Whether or not you invited them into your home
  • Fire
  • Having a wooden stake thrust into any portion of their body
  • Silver bullets
  • Prayers of any sort
  • Excommunication by a priest, pastor, or other religious leader
  • Unfinished business from their previous lives
  • Any sort of disturbance of their gravesite
  • The presence or absence of a full moon
  • Where they died (unless they’re trapped there…for now)
  • If their soul has found peace after death
  • Any attempt to communicate with them, whether in person or through an Ouija board, psychic, etc.
  • Whether or not they have food, water, shelter, medical care, weather-appropriate clothing, oxygen, or sleep
  • How much sage you burned to cleanse your house and keep them away

A zombie will chase you until it gets distracted by someone else or it can no longer physically move due to being injured, stuck, etc. Unless you’ve destroyed their brains, they can wait as long as is necessary and under any circumstances before you can no longer outrun them or they meet their next victim.

That’s so scary to me that I only watch or read this sort of story in broad daylight. I love the tingly sensation of being scared silly occasionally, but I do not want to bring certain images into dreamland with me.

In some modern retellings of this monster like The Last of Us or M.R. James’ The Girl With All the Gifts, there can be people who are only partially affected by the zombification process. I don’t want to give away too many spoilers for those who aren’t familiar with those worlds, but having characters who have one foot in each camp adds all sorts of creative twists to how this sort of story usually goes.

I prefer zombie fiction that has realistic (ish) explanations for how these creatures were created and that focuses more on people fighting zombies and figuring how to survive than in humans fighting each other.

Zombies are scary enough in and of themselves if you ask me. It’s hard to defeat a foe who has so few weaknesses, after all.

It’s interesting to me to see how people react to this threat and how well they do or don’t work together once the plot speeds up and the living dead outnumber the living.

You can get a lot of memorable character development from those sorts of situations if you have the right storytellers and a decent storyline to work with. My favourite versions of these tales are the ones that gently poke fun at the silliest parts of the horror genre in a way that invites the audience to laugh along and agree that trope X was good in the past but is now overused, trope Y is as ridiculous now as it was back in the 7os, and trope Z is woefully underrated.

I find zombie fiction even more fun when I get to mix a little critique into discussions about them.

So that is why zombies are my favourite monster and why I enjoy this sort of storyline ever so often.

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October 11, 2023 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: The Most Creative Halloween Costume I’ve Worn

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So here’s the thing about being a preacher’s kid: it can give you a childhood that’s a little off the beaten path in certain ways.

My family didn’t celebrate the secular, mainstream version of Halloween until I was 11*, so I only had a few years of trick-or-treating and picking out a costume before I aged out of that tradition. I  was so thrilled to finally be able to dress up, get some candy, and say “Trick or Treat” that I didn’t worry about choosing creative costumes. One year I was a nurse, another one I was a mime, and I don’t remember what I decided to be that third year. I wasn’t allowed to pick anything scary or gross, and late October used to be a much colder time of year than it often is now, so I probably picked the warmest costume I could find.

*We went to Harvest Festivals instead which are a Christian alternative to Halloween for some denominations. They were an interesting mixture of the sort of cute Halloween or autumn party you might throw for a class of preschoolers and some scary skits about various religious topics like the spiritual dangers of trick-or-treating. I don’t believe we were allowed to dress up for them because that was considered sinful, but we did get candy, a few small toys, and to play fun games like bobbing for apples!

The most creative Halloween costume I’ve seen on someone else was made to look like a pink birthday cake. This person spent hours decorating cardboard to look like a cake, and I think they used pink and white tissue paper or something to give the appearance of light, fluffy frosting on the cake. It was a beautiful costume but apparently rather stiff and uncomfortable to wear.

One year I also saw about a half dozen people dressed as dominos (the game pieces, not the pizza place). I always wondered how they decided who would be which domino and where they got their costumes from.

a hazy pink photo of a ghost standing in a hallway that’s lit by a pink light. The viewer is looking at it from the perspective of a pitch black room where nothing else can be seen in the foreground. I’ve never gotten into dressing up for Halloween as an adult, but I know what I’d pick if I did.

A ghost.

Think about it: you get to stay warm, comfortable, and anonymous under your cozy bedsheet, gently frighten the locals without resorting to anything gory or offensive, and maybe even rattle some cool metal chains.

What’s not to like about that?

It’s a vastly underrated costume choice if you ask me. I haven’t seen anyone dressed up as a ghost in Toronto in years, and I think this deserves a strong comeback.

If I’m going to dress up, it’s going to be in something comfortable and practical even if it is Halloween.

Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

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October 4, 2023 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Do You Believe in Karma? Why or Why Not?

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Content warning: Brief references to physical and emotional abuse.

I believe in karma if the term is used to describe natural consequences for your behaviour and why it’s important to help others when you can and build warm, loving relationships with a core group of people.

A three-paneled comic strip that features three white figures carrying a log over a grey patch of land that has a gigantic hole on it. In the first panel, the first person nearly falls into the hole while carrying the log, but the two people behind them support them and keep walking. The second panel shows the second person in the same predicament, and likewise with the third person in the third panel. It is meant to illustrate the importance of community and we should all take care of each other during hard times because hard times happen to everyone. When I called the people white, I mean their entire bodies were white, they weren’t wearing clothes, and we only saw little back lines to represent their mouths, noses, and eyes. Let me give some examples.

My maternal grandmother has been kind, generous, and welcoming for her entire life. When she needed knee surgery years ago, she was surrounded by love and support. Some of her adult children travelled long distances and gave up scarce vacation time to look after her. Friends and local family members stopped by with food, to help with chores, and/or to give her some cheerful company during her convalescence. (She’s doing great now, by the way).

A different relative of mine has been emotionally and sometimes physically abusive since the 1970s. They talk about how lonely they are now, but they also refuse to stop being abusive or to take even the slightest bit of responsibility for the serious harm they’ve caused.

(I do not mean to say that relative #1 is perfect or that relative #2 has never done anything good, by the way, but their lifelong patterns of behaviour have greatly influenced their reputations and their relationships – or lack of relationships – with others now that they are senior citizens).

For the past decade, I have only seen relative #2 rarely, briefly, and when I can’t possibly avoid it.  Our conversations are only about the weather or similar topics because they have a long, ugly history of twisting even the most innocuous information into fodder for more abuse. This is one of those situations when small talk is a lifesaver!

I believe that both of these people are reaping and will continue to reap the consequences of their actions. How you treat those around you is important in and of itself even if the specific people you help are never personally in a position to return the favour. Others notice how we all behave, too, and this can affect what kinds of help you will (or won’t) receive when you need it.

So, yes, I do believe in karma to a limited extent.

With that being said, I do not assume that everyone who is going through a difficult time (or, for that matter, is wildly successful) is any worse or better than the rest of us. That’s too simplistic in my opinion. Both positive and negative things happen to all of us eventually no matter what sort of person you are.

Being kind and good will not automatically protect you from everything, and people who choose to harm others terribly are not doomed to face immediate consequences. Some of them prosper for many years.

Life is complicated, and you never know what’s really going on behind closed doors or what someone might be privately struggling with. Sometimes it takes karma a long time to kick in, and not everything has been accounted for yet by any means.

I have seen people suddenly reap the consequences of their actions in both positive and negative ways years or even decades after those deeds were done. You never know what the future holds, and I choose to believe that people who quietly help others will reap the rewards of their kindness someday.

Even if I’m wrong about that, I’d still rather do what I can to make the world a better place in the small ways I can than to twiddle my thumbs and do nothing at all.

But I’m still never going to be a caregiver or regular visitor for relative #2 if or when they live long enough to need assistance. That bridge was burned to the ground many years ago metaphorically speaking, and I’ve planted a peaceful, healing garden in the ashes of it that only safe people are welcomed to enter.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean you subject yourself to more abuse, friends. Ironclad boundaries are an excellent thing for unfortunate situations like these.

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September 27, 2023 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: How I Shake Off a Bad Mood

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A white iPhone is lying on a wooden floor. The screen of the iPhone is black except for a yellow face that has an angry expression on its face. The top of its head is pink and just beginning to turn red in anger. My assumption for this week’s prompt is that we’re talking about bad moods that have innocuous, non-medical causes and aren’t a sign of anything seriously wrong in life.

I’m usually a pretty upbeat person, but we all have grumpy days eventually. This is what I do to shake off those feelings.

1) Eat a snack. Low blood sugar can cause a bad mood for me.

2) Take a nap or go to bed early. I can get a little grouchy when I haven’t had enough sleep, too.

3) Read or watch something comedic. It’s hard to laugh and still feel out of sorts afterwards.

4) Take a long walk out in nature.

5) Spend time alone. I love people, but I also need to charge my introvert battery regularly.

6)  Mute the news for a while. The negative slant they bring to everything in order to get more clicks and views is sometimes too much for me.

7) Perform a random act of kindness.

8) Write a thank you note to anyone who has done something nice for me lately. It could be for a friend, relative, clerk at a local business, or anyone else who made my day better.

9) Dance or lift weights. Exercise is such a great mood booster.

A combination of these things usually works well for me if one of them doesn’t do the trick on their own.

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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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