Tag Archives: Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge

September 18, 2019 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: What Is My Superpower?

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What a fun prompt this one was!

I have several different superpowers. Almost all of the humorous things I was going to include on this list fit better into the Strange or Useless Talent prompt that’s coming up in November, so keep an eye out for that one. It’s going to be delightful.

1. Analyzing stuff. That is, I’m really good at picking a story apart, figuring out what did (or didn’t) work in it, and then writing a solid review about that book, TV show, or movie.

2. Working quietly behind the scenes. I’m a little too bashful to want the spotlight pointed at me, but I excel at keeping things going behind the scenes while someone else gives a speech or otherwise acts as the public face of whatever it is we’re working on.

3. Using up leftovers. I grew up in a family culture that deeply disliked waste, especially when it came to food. If there was only half a serving of rice or potatoes left, it went back into the fridge and someone would eat it before it went bad. Sometimes this means my meals are a little nontraditional, but I love the feeling of making sure that everything that is cooked is eaten. For example, I recently ate three ears of corn, two hardboiled eggs, and a slightly soft pear for dinner because that was what needed to be used up in the fridge. I like those kinds of mish-mash meals, though!

4. Seeing the best in people. If someone does something I find perplexing, I do everything I can to find a rational explanation for it. We all have off days, and I have a lot of grace for people who accidentally say or do the wrong thing.

5. Making and updating spreadsheets. This is something I’ve done for years for fun. It’s so satisfying to see neat, little rows of numbers in a document.

Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question. The image below is the list of upcoming prompts for this blog hop.

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September 11, 2019 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Books I Keep Meaning to Read (But Haven’t)

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I’m hoping to find plenty of interesting things to read in all of your lists this week! Mine was a lot of fun to put together.

Title and Author: Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories by Ellen Datlow
What It’s About: The title says it all.
Why I Haven’t Read It Yet: Halloween is my favourite holiday, so I want to wait until we’re closer to that time of year before reading about spirits and hauntings.

Title and Author: In West Mills by De’Shawn Charles Winslow
What It’s About: The lives of various members of an extended and sometimes overly-close family between the years of 1941 and 1987.
Why I Haven’t Read It Yet: The library list for it has been ridiculously long. I’m nearly at the top of it now, though!

Migraine: A History by Katherine Foxhall

Title and Author: Migraine: A History by Katherine Foxhall
What It’s About: The title says it all.
Why I Haven’t Read It Yet: The release date for the library copies of this book keeps getting pushed back!  I’m on the waitlist for it, so I will have it eventually.

Title and Author: Becoming by Michelle Obama
What It’s About: The former First Lady’s life from birth to present day.
Why I Haven’t Read It yet: I actually have read some of it! I’ve been reading this memoir so slowly over the last few months because I want to savour every last word of it. Mrs. Obama is a wonderful storyteller.

Title and Author: Daughters of the West Mesa by Irene I. Blea
What It’s About: The murders and burial of eleven women and one fetus. This novel is based on a real case from Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was recommend to me by a fellow WWBC participant.
Why I Haven’t Read It Yet: My local library doesn’t have a copy of it. I’ve sent a request in that they buy it and am waiting for a response before I decide if or when to get my own copy of it.

Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question. The image below is the list of upcoming prompts for this blog hop.

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September 4, 2019 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Books That Deal Well with Tough Topics

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When I originally saw this topic on the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge List, I thought it would be an easy one. It turns out that most of the books I’ve read recently have not been about tough topics, and the ones I have read are not necessarily titles I’d recommend. So I had to dig deeply into my reading history to answer this prompt.

Title and Author: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Issues It Covers: Racism, Police Corruption, and Injustice

Title and Author: The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Issues It Covers: Second Wave Feminism, Sexism, and Mental Health

Title and Author: As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl by John Colapinto
Issues It Covers: Gender, Medical Malpractice, and Mental Health

Title and Author: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Issues It Covers: Childhood Sexual Abuse, Mental Health, and Racism

Title and Author: Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life by Henry Cloud
Issues It Covers: Mental Health, Unhealthy Interpersonal Relationships, Toxic People

Title and Author: A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness
Issues It Covers: Grief

Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question. The image below is the list of upcoming prompts for this blog hop.

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August 28, 2019 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Books I Had to Read in School and Liked

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This list will be a long one. I had some truly wonderful Language Arts teachers over the years. While there were a few books they assigned to us over the years that I didn’t like, I found something enjoyable in the vast majority of our assigned reads.  

I’m assuming that all of the WWBC participants have at least heard of these plays, poems, novels, and other works if they haven’t read them. I chose not to write commentary on them to keep this post from turning into a 1000+ word essay, but I’m happy to expand on anything that you’re all not already familiar with. This is roughly sorted by the age when I read them. Little House in the Big Woods was a fourth grade reading assignment, I believe.

Book cover for The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor EstesLittle House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder 

The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes

Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

The Pearl by John Steinbeck

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Edgar Allen Poe’s works, especially “The Raven” and “The Masque of the Red Death”

Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

Othello by William Shakespeare

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Emily Dickinson’s collected poems

e.e. cummings collected poems

The Iliad by Homer (I think we only read excerpts of this one),

Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question. The image below is the list of upcoming prompts for this blog hop.

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August 21, 2019 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: What I Read When I’m Not Feeling Well

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There are three different types of things I like to read when I’m not feeling well. I’ll give everyone a few examples of each one.

Comic Strips

All of these comic strips tend to be a mish-mash of whatever it is their creators have been thinking about recently. There are few if any continuous storylines in them. That makes it hard to explain them to new readers but also a great deal of fun to explore. We never know what might pop up in them next!

The Oatmeal.

Will 5:00 Never Come?

War and Peas.

Humorous Blog Posts and Essays

Doctor Grumpy in the House.

If you enjoy medical humour, this doctor’s blog is fantastic.

The Red Brick Blog.

Sadly, this hasn’t been updated in almost two years, but the archives are filled with some wonderful posts.

Mock Ramblings.

Michael and I have been friends for so long that I no longer remember how we met. If you haven’t already scrolled through his site after reading his previous WWBC posts, I highly recommend doing so sometime. He blogs about everything from his strange dreams, to snippets of the stories he’s working on, to recaps of the amazing D&D games he organizes for his kids.

Not everything he writes is necessarily funny, but when he writes humorous stuff he truly excels at it.

SFF Stories

I’ve chosen not link to specific tales from these magazines because of how particular I am about my science fiction and fantasy. In general, I find that all three of these publications do an excellent job of selecting unique, well-developed stories that show off under-appreciated authors in the SFF genre. If you have any interest at all in speculative fiction, I do recommend scrolling through these links to see what might appeal to you.

Fireside Magazine.

Syntax & Salt Magazine.

Lightspeed Magazine.

Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question. The image below is the list of upcoming prompts for this blog hop.

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August 14, 2019 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Books I Had to Read in School and Didn’t Like

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I was the sort of English student that teachers loved. Not only was it my favourite subject, I enjoyed almost every writer that was ever assigned to us in those courses. Often I’d even go out and read as many other poems, essays, or books by that same author as I could find for the sheer fun of it, but I’ll save those stories for August 28 when we all blog about assigned works that we really enjoyed in school.

There were a few exceptions to my love of literature, however.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. 

I struggled so hard to connect with this book, but the characters were simply too vain and materialistic for me to bond with them at all. Those are simply two personality flaws that I have little patience for in fiction or in real life.

Walt Whitman

While I immediately enjoyed other nineteenth century poets like Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allen Poe, Whitman was too verbose for my tastes. He had wonderful ideas, but I kept wanting to edit his poems down to a third of their original size when I read them.

King Lear

There are several Shakespeare plays I really like watching on the stage and will gush about in a few weeks, but King Lear is not one of them. The idea of playing favourites with one’s children deeply irritates me. I’ve seen the longterm effects of that in other families, and it’s destructive for everyone involved.

Due to this, I found it hard to sympathize with King Lear. It seemed to me that he could have easily had a peaceful retirement if he’d only chosen to treat all three of his daughters equally.

 

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August 7, 2019 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Books I Loved But Never Wrote Reviews For

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I’ve written countless books reviews over the years, yet there are still plenty of books out there I love but have not written reviews for. There simply isn’t enough time in the day to do everything! Sometimes I also question if it’s ever a good idea to write reviews for older titles. What do you all think?

  • The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
  • Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  • Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  • The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel
  • Every book ever written by Octavia E. Butler (but especially The Parable series)
  • Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
  • Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
  • The Little House on the Prairies series by Laura Ingalls Wilder
  • The Anne of Green Gables series by L.M. Montgomery
  • The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

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July 31, 2019 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Favorite Food and How I Use (+ Recipe)

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Fellow participants, I have one word for you: strawberries.

They’re in season in June and July here in southern Ontario. My grandmother serves strawberries, milk, and sugar to relatives as a light supper on hot days when no one is that hungry and she doesn’t want to heat up the kitchen.

Most of the time, I slice them up and eat them plain. They’re so sweet and juicy that they really don’t need the extra sugar in my opinion.

Occasionally, though, I make my family’s shortcake recipe and eat it with almond milk and sliced strawberries.

This is a pretty forgiving recipe. You can use half the sugar if you’re serving it someone who needs to watch their sugar intake. It works well with many different combinations of flour, fats, and types of milk, too, so feel free to play around with it if you need to avoid certain ingredients for whatever reason.

I should warn you that the shortcake this recipe makes is denser than what you might find in the store, though. Think something heavier, not a fluffy baked good like angel food cake. It’s made that way on purpose so that the shortcake will soak up all of the milk you’re about to pour on it and gradually crumble into cold, soup-y deliciousness as you reach the bottom of the bowl.

Strawberry Shortcake

Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups of flour (i generally use half whole wheat and half white, but 100% white flour works well, too)
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

2 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 cup milk  (soy or rice milk works well, too)
2 tablespoons butter (oil or margarine works well, too)
1 teaspoon vanilla

Toppings:

Sliced strawberries
Whipped cream
Table sugar
Milk

Directions:

Stir the three dry ingredients in a large bowl.

Beat eggs, milk, vanilla, and melted butter together in a separate bowl.

Combine the wet and dry ingredients together. Mix everything until it’s moist, but be careful not to overmix it. The batter might look a little lumpy. That’s okay.

Pour the batter into a greased 8 or 9 inch cake pan. A square 8×8 pan also works fine for this recipe.

Bake at 375 Fahrenheit for 25-30 minutes. You’ll know it’s finished when you can stick a butter knife or toothpick into the shortbread and have it come out again without any batter sticking to it.

Serving Size and Presentation

This will make about nine servings of shortbread depending on the size of your pan.

Serve with sliced strawberries, a sprinkling of table sugar, a little bit of milk, and (optional) whipped cream.

I nearly always choose strawberries for this dessert because I love them so much, but this also works nicely with other types of berries if anyone reading this dislikes or is allergic to strawberries. Like I said before, there is plenty of flexibility in this recipe. That’s one of the reasons why I enjoy it so much!

Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question. The image below is the list of upcoming prompts for this blog hop.

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July 24, 2019 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: My Favorite Quotes from Books

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Confession: I love quotes. (Those of you who already follow me on Twitter are no doubt 100% unsurprised by this).

I had to restrain myself for this week’s prompt. It would have been so easy to write a 1000+ word post and share dozens of quotes, but I’ll try to keep things short and sweet for the WWBC community.

One of my favourite Harry Potter quotes is in the photo I picked to accompany this post. If you can’t see it, it says “I solemnly swear I am up to no good.” I giggle every time I read it.

Technically, I don’t know that the next quote on this list is from a book. I’d like to think that Mark Twain would be amused by me bending the rules slightly to include him, though!

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don’t always like.”
― Lemony Snicket

“Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying ‘End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH’, the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry.”
― Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

“There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor.”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“Do your thing and don’t care if they like it.”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

“You fail to recognize that it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be!”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question. The image below is the list of upcoming prompts for this blog hop.

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July 17, 2019 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Fictional Worlds I’d Love to Visit

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I’m guessing that a lot of people are going to pick the Potterverse, Narnia, and the (safe) portions of Middle Earth this week. Count me in for those places, too, but I’m going to spend most of this post talking about worlds that may not get as much attention this week if my predictions are correct.

The Land of Oz.

Something tells me all of you will catch this reference immediately. I’m the sort of person who senses danger early on, so I’d like to think I could visit Oz without running into any of the witches or other dangerous folks there. It would be so cool to see the yellow brick road in person and meet some munchkins.

The Gatsby Mansion from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”

While I’m not actually a fan of this story in general, I do think attending one of the parties at the Gatsby Mansion would be a marvellous way to pass a warm summer evening. The one good thing I can say about the Gatsby family is that they sure did seem to know how to throw a party!

In my imagination, every morsel of food and drink there would have been delectable and the live music would keep everyone dancing until the wee hours of the morning.

Pandora from the 2009 film “Avatar” 

Simple things like spending time in nature and exploring new places makes me happy. I’d love to go explore the bright, colourful world that the main character of “Avatar” got to know so well during his stay there. The fact that so many of the creatures there were bioluminescent only makes me more eager to see them for myself!

Pemberly From Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”

Once again, I was not a fan of the novel where this fictional country estate is from, but that wouldn’t keep me from wanting to visit Pemberly anyway. I value spending time in nature, eating delicious food, dancing, and having some peace and quiet at times. Based on the descriptions of this place, I think I could do all of that stuff with ease there.

Jurassic World (but only after the dinosaurs stopped attacking people)

Honestly, how could you not want to see real live dinosaurs in person? I’d definitely wait until all of the safety concerns had been ironed out, and I’d avoid the Tyrannosaurus area in general. I’d be thrilled to see some Triceratops, Gallimimus, Velociraptors, and other species in person once those precautions had been taken.

How about all of you?

Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question. The image below is the list of upcoming prompts for this blog hop.

 

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