Tag Archives: Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: How I Feel About Staycations

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A photo looking down at someone’s legs as they stand on a porch next to a welcome mat that has the word “home” written on it in a thick black font. The “o” in the letter home has been replaced with a red heart. I have mixed feelings about staycations.

Sometimes they’re the perfect choice if you’re exhausted and/or don’t have the budget to travel elsewhere.

They can be a nice, relaxing way to recharge under those circumstances. There is definitely something to be said for keeping things low key and thrifty.

On the other hand, there’s the temptation to treat a staycation like any other time of the year and not make any fun memories during them at all.

This happened to my spouse and I years ago. We didn’t have the funds to travel anywhere that time, and I totally understood and accepted that.

The problem was that we didn’t do much stuff that was out of the ordinary for us during our staycation from what I can recall. I still washed the dishes and did the grocery shopping, (most of the) cooking, and laundry. We still ate out at the inexpensive fast food restaurants we’d normally visit if I’m not cooking that night for whatever reason.

Other than not working, it was completely like any other week. We didn’t try any new places from what I can recall, and I only remember going to one free place that I’d previously enjoyed. The rest of the time was spent watching tv and wandering around a local mall. (No offence meant to people who think that sounds like the perfect vacation, by the way! To each their own. It’s simply not my cup of tea.)

These days I’m more assertive about staycations. Yes, I’ll stick to whatever the budget is for the week, but I am going to break my daily routines and go to some nice dairy-free bakeries, parks I don’t get to visit very often, or free local events at the bare minimum! My spouse doesn’t have to accompany me, and I certainly won’t fill every day with long lists of places to visit or anything like that. A couple of hours every other day or so to spend on stuff I really love to do is enough to make me happy.  That leaves plenty of time for walking around the mall, watching tv, or doing nothing in particular, too. 😉

I simply need more from a vacation than doing the same things we always do and then going home to do chores. That’s not my idea of a good time.

Staycations can be a wonderful option if you treat your local community as if you’re a tourist there and go to places you normally don’t visit (or places you’ve visited before and already know are perfect for your tastes!)

They can also be disappointing, at least from my perspective, if you stick to the same old routines every day and don’t branch out at all.

So much depends on how you plan ahead for them and how much effort everyone puts into the experience.

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Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Funny Things I’ve Googled

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A distinguished little Yorkshire Terrier is lying on a white surface. The puppy is wearing black glasses and a black and yellow striped scarf. There is an opened book in front the puppy, and he is looking up as if we’ve just interrupted his reading. Here is a quick snapshot into the funny sorts of things I look up online.

This post is making me miss the search engines from years ago. I feel like the results these days are so tainted by ads and content written by chat bots that it’s much harder than it used to be to find genuine content, especially from non-commercial sites like blogs or small, quirky websites about hobbies, local news, favourite authors, and the like. May that change someday soon!

 

What I Asked:  Why are some people so argumentative online?

Why I Asked It: I’m a peacekeeper by nature, so it’s odd to me to run across folks online who not only seem to enjoy getting into arguments about often inconsequential matters but also actively seek them out. Sharing cool nature photos or telling Dad jokes seems like a much more amusing way to spend your free time in my opinion, but I accept the fact that not everyone is wired the way I am.

With that being said, I also reserve the right to step away from fruitless conversations about, say, what the best condiment in the world is.

 

What I Asked: Do pigeons hold grudges?

Why I Asked It: Toronto has a pigeon problem. They are so well-fed and have so few predators that their population is much larger than it would be if the land up here was all still swamps, meadows, and forests. This means that not every interaction a pigeon has with a person, a dog, or another pigeon is necessarily going to be a positive one.

Seeing them fight over dropped food or fly away in a burst of energy when an untrained dog lunges at them makes me wonder if they remember who bothered them in those moments and if they feel a little grumpy the next time they see that particular pigeon or dog in the future.

(So far as I could tell, pigeons are not like crows in this regard).

 

What I Asked: Why does Google think everything is a symptom of a terminal illness?

Why I Asked It: The first time I googled a minor symptom and this happened, I was a little nervous. Now I just roll my eyes and try to find results for a hangnail, headache, runny nose or other temporary annoyances that don’t assume the worst. You’d think the algorithm would choose the most likely answers, though, instead of focusing on the tiny percentage of people who might be far sicker than they think they are.

 

What I Asked:  How can I stop dreaming about stressful high school math and science tests?

Why I Asked It: I was curious because I keep having dreams about surprise math, biology, or chemistry tests I am in no way prepared to take despite the fact that I graduated from high school quite a while ago. (I was an average student in math and science, but they were not my favourite subjects by any means). Brains can come up with such vivid dreams sometimes, although sadly there doesn’t seem to be any scientific answers about why we dream about the things we do.

 

What I Asked:  Do pets know that they are adorable?

Why I Asked It: Because this is obviously critical information that all animal lovers must know. Also, I was curious to find out if other people’s dogs understand it when I tell them they’re cute and wonderful little creatures. I hope they do.

 

What I Asked:  Will the United States ever take over Canada? Will they enjoy poutine if they do?

Why I Asked It: Your population is about ten times larger than ours, after all, and we do have large swaths of land in Northern Canada that are filled with fresh water lakes and wildlife but are only very sparsely populated by humans due to how cold it is up there. With droughts happening in so many parts of the world and growing seasons lengthening in colder areas now due to climate change, it makes me wonder if the U.S. is going to decide that 50 Nifty United States isn’t enough for them.

As for the poutine question, all of the Americans I’ve known who have tried it have loved it. But I promise you can enjoy it without invading us. 😉

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Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Stories I Wouldn’t Revisit and Why

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A closeup photo of about a dozen DVD cases, including cases for Friends, Pulp Fiction, Django, and several other films that don’t have English titles. The original topic for this week asked about books, films, and TV shows that I wouldn’t revisit. I’ve decided to pick one answer from each category.

Book

The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien

Why? 

As much as I enjoyed seeing how everything ended, the pacing of this trilogy was too slow for me to ever revisit it. The long, flowery descriptions of the landscapes, settings, and characters painted a vivid picture in my mind, but they were also so numerous that I did find them a little tedious after a while given how much writing styles have evolved since this series was published.

(The films are still cool, though).

Film

Any action film ever.

Why? 

I do not enjoy this genre. On the rare occasion I watch one, it is usually to make my spouse happy instead of out of any innate desire to see a character break the laws of physics and defy the limits of human anatomy as often as tends to happen in these sorts of stories.

 

TV Show

Old sitcoms.

Why? 

The sexist and homophobic jokes in them. What may have been acceptable 30+ years ago doesn’t always age well in modern times. I do not judge others who can look past those things, by the way. I simply don’t find that sort of humour amusing and would rather watch something else instead.

 

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Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Villains I’d Root for Instead of the Protagonists

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A topiary that’s been trimmed to look like a person. It has a big, round head and broad shoulders. Sometimes antagonists are more interesting than protagonists. I suspect it’s because, at least for some writers, villains have more freedom to say and do whatever they wish than characters who are supposed to set a good example for everyone.

Here are some villains that I liked better than the protagonists I was supposed to be rooting for in these stories and why I enjoyed them so much.

Spike from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 

He was a creative, emotionally intelligent, and hilarious bad guy. I also enjoyed seeing his character development over the seasons as he slowly learned how to be a slightly better vampire than he’d been before thanks to the time he spent with humans he liked among other reasons.

 

Gollum/Smeagol from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings novels

As critical as it was for his gold ring to eventually end up in other hands for plot reasons, I felt terrible for Gollum when he was separated from his Precious. He’d lost everything else important to him in life, and the magical effects of the ring had warped his mind and body beyond repair over the many years he spent with it. The poor guy.

 

Wile E. Coyote from the 1950s children’s cartoon Looney Tunes 

I never wanted the roadrunner to be eaten, but I did wish that Wile E. could catch him just once!

 

The Blair Witch from the film The Blair Witch Project 

Think about it. The Blair Witch went off deep into the woods to live alone and would have been perfectly content to not have any contact with the outside world at all until the protagonists of this film decided to invade her territory and steal her possessions. This happened after the main characters had been warned by local townspeople to stay out of the woods, so it’s not like they were unaware they were wandering into danger.

While I certainly didn’t want anyone to get hurt, everyone would have been better off if this camping trip never happened. There was never any need for the Blair Witch’s privacy to be invaded, and I would have been annoyed, too, if I were in her shoes!

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Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Songs That Confused Me When I Was a Kid

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If anyone is interested in reading a great essay about how common sayings, phrases,  and even certain logos can be misunderstood, go check out Knowledge Is Power. France Is Bacon.

I normally avoid discussing sensitive topics like religion online, but I must bring it up today due to the sort of childhood I had.

A closeup photo of a mic in a mic stand on a stage. The lights from the upper portion of the stage make it impossible to see anything in the distance. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I was a preacher’s kid and was homeschooled for the first several years of elementary school.  The combination of these two things meant that I knew very little about secular pop culture until I was about eleven or twelve and my parents began gradually relaxing their rules about music, tv shows, and films.

(They were less strict about books for some reason, but even there I mostly read the classics, Bible stories, the Inspirational genre, and fairy tales until I was old enough to go to the library with less adult supervision and, ahem, bend the rules just a little bit by borrowing children’s ghost stories and Choose Your Own Adventure books. 😉 )

Therefore, I suspect that my first two answers might not be familiar to some of you. I mixed it up as much as possible and included secular music, too, to increase the odds of someone knowing at least one of my answers!

Apple Red Happiness

Apple Red Happiness is a kids’ worship song about the Fruits of the Spirit, which are a list of virtues from the New Testament. They include love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. 

What confused me about this song were all of the food references that had nothing at all to do with the topic at hand. What on Earth did food have to do with being kind or peaceful? I couldn’t figure it out, so I was always left feeling puzzled and a little hungry during this song.

 

I’m in the Lord’s Army 

I’m in the Lord’s Army is a kids’ worship song about committing to being in service of God that uses a lot of militaristic imagery to get its point across.

There were motions we were supposed to act out at specific portions of the song. For example, we’d pretend to pull the string back on a bow and shoot an arrow every time we heard the world artillery or pretend to hold a bridle and gallop like a horse every time we heard cavalry.

Given the large number of pacifist German Mennonite relatives I had, this song also utterly confused me. When I learned what metaphors were, I concluded that this was a metaphor….well, at least until I learned about the Crusades and other holy wars when I grew older. Then it was back to permanent confusion.

As protective as my parents were, though, some secular music did seep through.

 

Kissed By a Rose

I believe I heard Seal’s Kissed By a Rose on a radio that was playing in a store somewhere when I was a kid.

It sounded a little medieval to me and was nothing like I’d heard before. I loved it!. For several years I assumed that this song was hundreds of years old and had only recently been rediscovered and recorded for a new generation.

 

Stop! In the Name of Love 

One of my elementary school classmates would randomly sing Stop! In the Name of Love by The Supremes when we were at recess. (Or maybe some other artist did a cover of that song that I wasn’t aware of?)

I had never heard of this group before and had zero cultural context to understand what I was supposed to stop doing, what love had to do with it, or what other rules love might compel someone to follow in order to avoid breaking anyone’s heart. None of it made sense, and for many years I assumed that kid simply enjoyed making up silly things to sing that weren’t supposed to make any sense.

It also didn’t help that he only sang those five words over and over again and only occasionally included the next five (“before you break my heart”).  Maybe he didn’t know the rest of the lyrics and was secretly just as confused as I was?

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Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Introvert vs. Extrovert – Which One Are You?

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A drawing of four different batteries standing next to each other. The one on the left is nearly fully drained, and has a red bar on it showing it desperately needs to be charged. The next two have two orange and three yellow bars on them respectively, showing that they are draining but still have some juice left. The battery at the left has four green bars on it and is fully charged. I am an introvert because my emotional battery is charged up by being alone.

When I was a kid, introversion wasn’t understood as well as it is today. (Or at least not in the rural areas I grew up in where extroversion was a strong social norm and you were considered a little odd if you didn’t fit into that box. Cities might have been different in that regard as one could pick from a much wider range of social circles in such places!)

There are still misconceptions about it, of course, but now I find that most people are totally understanding when I say that I’ve had a wonderful time at massive social event X but will be taking some time for myself the next day or two to recharge my energy levels.

With that being said, I can behave a little like an extrovert under the right circumstances. There are certain people in my life I adore spending time with and who drain my introvert battery much more slowly than other folks do.

These people tend to be quiet, gentle, and kind souls who are also fellow introverts. (I love noisy, boisterous people, too, but it’s easier for me to spend long periods of time with folks who enjoy some friendly silence for part of our hangouts).

Some of us are naturally pretty far on one side of the spectrum or the other, but from what I’ve observed the majority of people seem to have aspects of both extroversion and introversion in their personalities depending on how much socialization they have or have not been getting recently and what else is going on in their lives.

For example, are they currently dealing with an injury or illness that drains their energy? Have they recently had a big change in their life like moving? Are they celebrating something exciting like a promotion, new addition to their family (whether pet or human), or graduating from college?

All of these things and more can nudge you firmly in one direction or the other at least temporarily in my experience.

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Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: A Moment I Wish I Could Relive

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A photo of a soft pretzel. If I could relive one memory, it would be hanging out with my best friend Jill Scheiman.

Jill and I were inseparable in junior high and the beginning of high school. Both of us came from upper working class to lower middle class families, so we were used to having plenty of fun on a budget.

She loved music, sappy movies, and developing crushes on someone new every few months. I used to marvel at how easy it was for her to suddenly start liking someone because of how rare it was for me to do the same thing.  Her bedroom was filled with teen fashion magazines and home gym equipment whereas mine was filled with books and whatever secular music CDs I could afford to buy. I was quieter, more serious, and much less interested in romance as a genre or as a hobby than she was, but we both enjoyed finding the humorous moments in life whenever we could and talking about various nerdy things.

I wish we could spend another afternoon driving around aimlessly, going on the rambling walks we would sometimes take while we talked about everything, or enjoying some soft pretzels or slushies at the mall. We were both genuinely good kids who liked hanging out together. Giggling was about the most disruptive thing we could think to do.

(Well, other than the time that we toilet papered the car of one of our youth group leaders. With that being said, we also cleaned it all up afterwards, and the adults were amused, not annoyed, by our antics as this was many years before the famous toilet paper shortages of 2020 and they knew we didn’t mean any harm.)

They were never grand plans, but they were our plans. Even simple things in life are better if you have someone to do them with!

We mostly lost touch after she graduated from high school as she was a few years older than I was, but the last I heard about her was that she was married, had a couple of kids, and was studying to become a nurse. (She did not go straight on to college after her high school graduation, so this was later on in life).  I wish her and her family well.

But what I wouldn’t give to be a carefree kid with her again on a Sunday afternoon! Every few years I look her up online to see if I can find anything about what she’s up to these days. I haven’t had luck with that in a long time,  but I do keep trying. Maybe when we are old women we’ll have a chance to be silly again together. I included her last name in this post on purpose just in case she ever googles herself and stumbles across this message.

As an interesting aside, I recently read that today’s teenagers are much less likely to hang out at the mall than previous generations did. Some malls don’t allow unaccompanied minors to walk through them at all anymore, and other malls have gone out of business due to the Internet and cultural shifts. Almost anything can be ordered online these days, so plenty of shoppers of all ages have switched to that if they need a new book, t-shirt, or pair of shoes.

I wonder what Jill and I would have done if we were teenagers in 2024? Probably a lot of texting, social media stuff, and swapping memes, I’d guess.

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Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Books on My TBR List the Longest

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Pink sand moving through an hourglass that’s sitting on a white surface in front of a white wall that has a black abstract painting hung upon it. I usually weed through my TBR list a few times a year because even though I am a mood reader my tastes do tend to shift over time. Just because I read 3 or 5 or 10 books on topic X last year doesn’t mean I’ll continue with that pattern this year. Sometimes I will, of course, but in other cases my interest in that subject has been satiated and I want to read about other things now.

Here are some books that have been on my TBR list for many years without being read or weeded out. They are all well-known works from the 20th century, so I’m betting they will be excellent reads.

Someday I hope to read all of them…unless my tastes change, of course!

1. Dune (Dune, #1) by Frank Herbert

2.The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

3. The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara

4. Sula by Toni Morrison

5. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

 

 

 

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Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: An Interesting Story About Family or Friends

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To give a little backstory first, my grandfather has been a farmer his entire life just like his father was before him. One of the problems with farming in certain parts of the Midwestern United States is that the land there used to be a giant swamp.

This means that anywhere from mild to much more serious flooding is common in certain low-lying areas and that they often have too much water for their crops instead of not enough. Stagnant pools of water are also a great place for mosquitoes to lay their eggs, so one must take note of that as well unless you want to become dinner for thousands of tiny little bloodsuckers.

Drainage pipes are one modern solution to this problem. My grandfather’s land is filled with them wherever he notices that he has too much water.

This is the tale of the white drainage pipe and the kids who protected it.

When my brothers and I were little, Grandpa installed a drainage pipe in his side yard. This was a little uncommon as most of his pipes were in his fields or by his barns in order to keep his crops and tools from being flooded out.

It was not a complicated job, but it was something that my siblings found fascinating. We were allowed to stand a safe distance away and observe part of the process. I have vague memories of it being muddy as they dug.

After the pipe had been placed and covered over with dirt and grass seeds again, Grandpa gave my brothers a very solemn and important assignment.

Two photos from the day when Grandpa dug the drainage ditch in his yard. In the left photo, you see a Caucasian girl with short, curly brown hair leaping over the drainage ditch. I’m probably about 5 or 6 years old in this photo. The ditch was maybe a foot or two deep and there are piles of soil on each side. I’m wearing a pink shirt, a red skirt, and white shoes that were somehow still clean despite all of the mud. I n the photo on the right, my little brother is standing next to our grandfather beside the ditcher. The ditcher had been painted red but the paint was fading. It was about 8 feet tall based on how much it towered over my already decently-sized height grandfather. Grandpa is a Caucasian man in about his 50s whose skin has been deeply tanned by a lifetime of working outdoors. He’s wearing a blue and white ball cap, a blue longsleeved work shirt, and a lighter blue pair of pants. My brother is also Caucasian, about 3 or 4 years old, and he wearing jeans and a yellow-tshirt, and has straight blond hair. Every time we came over to visit, they were to pour a little water in one end of the pipe and make sure it flowed out the other end into a nearby creek.

Some kids might have forgotten this duty after a time or two, but my siblings were not among them. Every time we visited, they would pour a little cup of water into the pipe and then we’d race down the hill with a nearby grownup to ensure grandpa’s pipe wasn’t plugged up.

This went on for multiple visits if my memory is correct. The pipe was always clear, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.

And now I chuckle at the cute memory and creative way to encourage the grandkids to burn off some energy and feel included before going indoors into our grandparents’ home.

(This post was edited to include a few family pictures I didn’t know existed from this time period. Look how big that ditcher was! And I’d forgotten that I jumped over the ditch).

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Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: A Book Trope I Wish Wouldn’t Happen IRL

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Closeup photo of pink, yellow, orange, and white conversation hearts. Not all of their messages can be read, but the ones that can be say things like “love,” “soft,” and “help.” I have two words for all of you this week: forbidden romance.

Assuming everyone in the relationship is a consenting adult and no one is being harmed, I spend exactly 0% of my time worrying about who anyone dates or marries in real life or in fiction.

This includes, but is not limited to, interracial, interfaith, age gap, multicultural, interabled, same sex, and any other sort of relationship that some heartily disapprove of.

You see people in just about every sort of “forbidden” relationship you can imagine in Toronto every single day. If someone chose to be horrified by other folks quietly going about their business, it would literally occupy the offended person’s mind every single moment of their days for the rest of their lives and they would still run out of time decades before they ran out of couples to be angry about.

Yes, I know that not every community is like this by any means….but I think our world would be a better place if everyone treated others with kindness and didn’t make a fuss about who folks fall in love with.

After all, there are more important things to discuss. For example, are conversation hearts delicious or not? I love them but my spouse does not!

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