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Sharing My World 2016 Week 12
It’s time again to Share My World, courtesy of Cee. Thanks for the questions, Cee!
Wanting something to quench your thirst, what would you drink?
Definitely something cold and fizzy. If it’s not (preferably ice) cold, it doesn’t work. I generally go for something with a good bite to it, like Diet Coke. I also always have a stock of diet lemonade in.
Mmmm. Nearly no calories of tasty refreshment.
What made you feel good this past week?
Hmm, same old same old really. I did go to a great gig in the village hall on Friday. It was a guy with an acoustic guitar and a guy with a violin playing Irish, Cornish and Scottish music. The organiser is one of my best friends (and mother of my godson) and she supplied me with home-made brownies and cupcakes throughout (I got extras after I agreed to babysit tomorrow evening). I also won a big heavy wooden cheeseboard in the raffle!
When you’re alone at home, do you wear shoes, socks, slippers, or go barefoot?
I have quite thick soft carpets so just socks generally (whether I’m alone or not). If I spend significant time in the kitchen when I’m making pizza dough or preparing a big vat of chilli I wear an aged pair of slippers, as the floor in there is wood.
Would you rather live where it is always hot or always cold?
Tricky – I don’t do well in extremes of temperature. Of course one gets used to a certain temperature after a while. A couple of days last week were over 10C which I found quite warm, whereas if we get 15C in mid-summer I find it freezing!
Although I like snuggling up in the cold weather, it gets old after a while (and my electric/gas bill during the winter is many times that in the summer), so I’m going to go with (drum roll….) always hot!
Daily Prompt: Worldly Encounters
Wow, I haven’t done one of these for a while!
Worldly Encounters: The friendly, English-speaking extraterrestrial you run into outside your house is asking you to recommend the one book, movie, or song that explains what humans are all about. What do you pick?
So this extraterrestrial’s friendly is it? Wants to learn ALL ABOUT US does it? Hmm, I’m suspicious.
Even if he/she/it is telling the truth, what about its friends? For this reason I pick the film “Independence Day”.
Taken from Wikipedia
This would serve as a warning to keep them civil, just in case they get any funny ideas about making our planet (or what’s left of it) “their own”.
They’ll soon see that if they step out of line, we’ll stuff a USB key in their mother ship’s dashboard and infect their little green asses with viruses and trojans and maybe a bunch of spam selling “enlargening equipment”. And their shields will fail as well.
Now that we’re clear on the ground rules, “Welcome to Earth!”
Image Wikipedia, believed to be copyright 20th Century Fox, low resolution version unsuitable for reproduction etc etc.
Promptarama!
Daily Prompt: A Little Sneaky – Are writing prompts a useful exercise, or do you find them to be too limiting and/or hokey?
Okay, it’s a terrible title for a post. It’s not even a word. However, fully 10 minutes of Private Practice Season 6 Episode 8 have been and gone and I can’t think of anything else.
I love prompts! Here’s some history.
This blog was always supposed to be “my life musings”. Things that happened to me, “bloggable incidents” if you will. Things that occurred to me. However, it didn’t take long to discover the flaw in my plan.
Nothing ever happens to me. Nothing ever occurs to me.
It didn’t take long to run out of ideas. I limped along for 18 months like this. I posted maybe three or four times a month. I had a couple of followers (you’re still with me, you know who you are and thank you!), a few likes and maybe a comment or two.
Although I’m not writing this blog for comment-fuelled validation, everybody likes comments and “likes”, right? It shows us that people are reading our posts and are moved to say something”.
I’d seen the Daily Post but didn’t know much about it. I didn’t know if I wanted to get involved in writing posts to prompts, but in January of this year I gave it a go and did my first Daily Prompt. I really enjoyed it, and better, not only did a bunch of new people stop by to say hello, I discovered loads of great new blogs to follow!
I don’t find prompts limiting. I do the ones I want to do, I feel no obligation to do them all. They give me ideas and sometimes I can expand on them, or maybe find a different angle. I can see other peoples’ takes on the same starting point and discover great new writers to follow. And the more we write, the better we get (theoretically).
It gave my seriously flagging blog a new lease of life. It now contains musings, poems, flash fiction, doodles and cartoons. Armed with my little fifty quid point and click camera I’ve even participated in a couple of weekly photo prompts!
I know people say that a “focussed” blog is the way to gather thousands of followers, but I’m not interested in that. I hope that my blog contains something for everyone lots of people. Ignore the fiction and enjoy the cartoons. Read the fiction but ignore the dodgy poetry.
I’ve participated in Rarasaur/Queen Creative‘s Prompts for the Promptless. I (very) recently started writing to the Friday Fictioneers photo writing prompts, and I’m really enjoying that (I’ve done two so far) – I hadn’t written any fiction for years and I’m rediscovering my love for it and it’s amazing to read all the other great entries.
So in conclusion, it’s a big thumbs up to prompts from draliman!
We Don’t Need No Education
Daily Prompt: Fifteen Credits – Another school semester will soon begin. If you’re in school, are you looking forward to starting classes? If you’re out of school, what do you miss about it — or are you glad those days are over?
I would like to start by making it clear that I don’t agree with Pink Floyd’s cleverly ironic assertion “We don’t need no education” – I just thought it was a cool title.
However, that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t complain if I had to go back and do it all over again. I’ve often heard it quoted that “school days are the best day of your life.”
Excuse me? I don’t often use swear words on this blog, but I’m afraid that this quote earns a bit fat “bollocks”. For anyone who has heard this quote and is still at school, please don’t panic – it’s not true!
Kids go back to school in around 3 weeks or so and I am so glad I’m not one of them.
Just to clear up any misunderstandings here between various countries, here are the UK definitions:
“School” – ages 5-16 (compulsory age range), occasionally also 16-18 if the school has a “Sixth Form”
“College” – ages 16-18, also adult education (“Further Education”)
“University” – ages 18 up (“Higher Education”)
I believe that some countries use the word “school” for more than just your compulsory education – this post is about the standard 5-16 year old education. I wanted to make this clear because university was awesome (I never went to college so I can’t speak for that).
My very first day at school, they rang the bell after playtime and I went to the wrong class. When I got to mine, I couldn’t open the heavy sliding door so I stood outside looking in until someone noticed me. Obviously this wasn’t the best of omens for the next 11 years of my life.
At senior school (age 12-16) I was fat, in all the top classes and wore big thick government-issue glasses. I was also the spitting image of a loser in a very popular kids’ TV programme. I’m not posting the photo again, it’s too embarrassing. You can find it here.
This combination does not bode well. I was bullied a bit, but not in the way that “bullying” seems to be these days. Nobody stole my lunch money and I was only ever punched once (right in front of a teacher, ha ha), and I must admit I was passive-aggressively winding the guy up all through the lesson. So possibly I was “asking for it”.
I hated maths lessons. I couldn’t do maths then and I can’t do it now.
Yoinks – what can this mean?
Don’t get me started on Latin. Wednesday afternoon – “Triple Latin”. Triple Latin? That’s illegal, surely.
Triple yoinks!
We were treated like kids because we were kids, but that didn’t make it any easier to take.
University, now that’s a different kettle of fish. The ideal middle ground between freedom and responsibility. Bills to pay, looking after yourself but with the freedom to live your own life all within the safe university environment, with plenty of people to help you out. A sort of training ground to life. I loved it!
I wouldn’t mind living my university days again, but school – never.
Fade Away
Daily Prompt: Standout – When was the last time you really stood out in a crowd? Are you comfortable in that position, or do you wish you could fade into the woodwork?
I’ve had to struggle to remember the last time I stood out in any crowd. I think we’ll have to go back over ten years to “the dark drinking time”. Emboldened by Dutch Courage I was MC at a work pub quiz. I was the fill-in act – told jokes, gave away prizes, that sort of thing. Apparently I was quite good!
One year for a university Christmas party I wrote a song (a spoof on the university to the music of the Eagles “Hotel California”) and got together some backing singers and some amateur musicians (physicists are less boring then one might expect!).
Dull and Boring
Daily Prompt: ( YAWN ) – What bores you? Photographers, artists, poets: show us DULL.
OK, here you go. Dull it is.
Dull, in Perthshire (Scotland), picture courtesy of BBC website
As you can see, they’ve shaken things up a bit by twinning with a town in the USA.
Boring, Oregon (USA), picture courtesy of The Guardian website
If that’s not enough excitement for you, read more here:
Excitement hope for Boring, Oregon, and Dull, Perthshire (BBC News website)
Silly placenames: welcome to Dull, twinned with Boring (The Guardian online)
So Far So Good
Daily Prompt: State of Your Year – Write up a mid-year “State of My Year” post.
I’m a couple of days late with this but (as well as having no time at all on a Monday) I realised that some stuff has actually happened to me this year.
Since stuff happening to me is quite a big deal I felt I couldn’t let this prompt go unanswered, regardless of my slight tardiness.
Three, yes three whole things have happened and they’ve all been good :-).
After a three month wait, at the end of January my new car finally rolled off the assembly line. This is the first new car I’ve ever owned! Well, I say “owned”. The bank currently owns most of it. Here’s a picture (it’s a Ford Fiesta Zetec S Ecoboost thingumy, if anyone’s interested).
It’s a lovely car to drive! Since I had to wait so long for it I ended up having to sell my old car so the dealer gave me a courtesy car to knock around in (for free!). It was a SportKa with go faster stripes and sporty trim. Unfortunately, it looked like it would go a lot faster than it actually did. Here it is in all its sporty glory. It’s not really me!
Courtesy car with ironic “go faster” stripes
Next up we skip forward to the middle of February, when I was given this:
This is my AA “10 year long service medal” :-). It’s a bit tarnished-looking – it’s a sad fact that the higher the year, the longer they sit in the box waiting on a recipient. Maybe I can chuck it in some Coke or something. Apparently that’s good for cleaning coins.
And finally in June I had my little Wales holiday. Going away by myself was quite a big deal for me (I sound like a 10 year old!) and I had an amazing time. If you want to vicariously relive the experience, the photos are here, here and here.
So all in all, not a bad start to the year. And, of course, this was also the début year of DraliDoodles :-).
I hope your year is going well too!
Facebook – Friend or Foe?
Weekly Writing Challenge: Mind the Gap – Facebook – to poke or to puke?
So this Facebook thing – a force for good, or an insidious evil? A social network – some may say the social network – in a world in which the inhabitants are increasingly obsessed with sharing every detail of their lives and of course with revelling in the thrills and mishaps of others.
Let’s break it down.
Responsibility – at the end of the day, what I post is down to me
Make no mistake, whether I intend the whole world to read what I write or it’s only intended for “friends”, what I post on any social network, including Facebook, is my responsibility. No-one else’s.
In the heat of the moment it’s easy to post something I may later regret. I rarely post to Facebook using my phone (which is always nearby) – my big clumsy fingers are not phone-friendly. I often find that by the time I’ve fired up the laptop I’ve gone off the boil. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to post that after all?
How many people have found themselves in trouble for posting something “inappropriate”?
Nature, No Question
Daily Prompt: The Natural World – Describe your first memorable experience exploring and spending time in nature. Were you in awe? Or were you not impressed? Would you rather spend time in the forest or the city?
Photographers, artists, and poets: show us NATURE.
I’m the type of chap who prefers being at least reasonably close to nature. That’s fairly easy since I live in Cornwall, in the far South West of England.
Perranporth, Cornwall
I often visit Godrevy when I fancy a nice quiet walk – beaches, cliffs and moorland. It’s only a few miles from my house.
Godrevy, Cornwall
I spent many, many holidays in the North of Scotland.
Somewhere in the North of Scotland
I lived in Cork, Ireland for four years.
This little lake is either in County Cork or County Kerry – I was never sure where the border was
I’ve lived in Cork city, Guildford and Stuttgart – all cities, but I prefer nature, and it was never too far away!
I guess I’ve been pretty lucky.
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Share Your World
Friday Fictioneers
draliman on life 