This week's Poetry Friday entry are the terrific poems from yesterday photopoetry of 15 words or less. Here was the picture:



And here are the poems!



Watch your step
you never know where they go
way down
into depths of despair
-- Anne McKenna

Watch Your Back
Planks remain bare

Poisonous vines
don't tread visible paths

They climb directly
into your heart

--Laura Purdie Salas

Conquering
Breath catching
Heart palpitating,
searching depths
Mastering fear,
Take a step!
been afraid too long

-- melissa

I'm so glad
I'm not Jimmy Stewart
In that movie
VERTIGO
Instead,
Here I go!

-- slatts

The view--spectacular!
But now....

Spinning, spiraling....

Where's Jimmy Stewart
when you need him?

-- Kathy Q.
wordsrmylife

Round
and round
redwood tight-gripped
I wish
life
had so graceful
a bannister.

-- sartorias
 

Wasn't sure
where I was headed.
Pick a card,any card.
Life's a gamble.

--  Martha Calderaro

Round and round
One step down.
Round and round
Two steps down.
All around. Ground.
-- Louise Henriksen

July 9 Post - 15 word poem
Cycles, circles go around,
Until the way of dusty death and ground.

-- G Grenley

Each day
fans out
from Summer
separate
but connected
in their uniformity
of season.

-- Diane M. Davis

Steps too narrow.
Feet too long.
Thanks--
I think I'll stay
up here.

-- Cynthia Cotten

Board

Board, so bored,
with the same steps.
Time to stop looking back and go up.

-- Sue Douglass Fliess

The Board Monster
Board monster's here.
Couldn't nail him down.
It spins wooden paddles
spanking kids in town.

-- Joyce Lansky

Here I stand at the top of the stairs
Wondering which way to go.

-- Barbara Van Deusen







Jama has the round-up of all the Poetry Friday posts today!
 

the body falls
into an upturned truth
its been waiting to meet
all its life

-- Shutta Crumm

What does this make you think of? Are you going down or freezing at the top in fear?

If you'd like to play, just choose any topic this image makes come to your mind and write a quick 15 Words or Less poem. Your poem doesn't have to describe this photo. The picture is just a jumping-off point.  Basically look at the picture and write a poem of 15 words or less inspired by the photo. Please add your byline to the poem so I can include it in the poetry Friday roundup.

Go on. You know you want to.

Cassie is better than any alarm clock I've ever had. At 6:30 she stands up, gets out of bed and then plops down on the floor next to me with a groan that sounds like she is 100 people years old. I think it is a warning to me that it is about time to get up. At 7am she sits up and watches me. I peer at her from between mostly closed eyes. She comes over and nuzzles my hand then moves back a few steps to her sitting position. There's no way I'm getting up at 7am so that's my cue to roll over and tap my husband on his shoulder so he can get up with Cassie and get ready for work. As soon as I poke him awake she runs to his side of the bed and lets loose a flurry of moans and quiet yips and such a variety of noises I've never heard from a dog before. She only makes them in the morning. For him.

I have no idea why she doesn't wake him up first but this is our routine. During the week I get to sleep and on the weekends my husband (yes, one of the good guys) gets up, takes her out and then brings her back to bed again. She likes having breakfast about the same time ever day, after her morning walk and before her morning nap.

Every day, At 9:15 and 3:15, the dripper turns on to feed the birdbath. She can't hear it but still, at 9:16 and 3:16 every day she rings the bells to go outside and watch the water flow from the top bird bath to the lower one. She needs to work on her suntan twice a day, once in the backyard and once in the front courtyard. Before bed, every night, there is the nightly inspection of the yard. She walks the fence line, sniffing in a purposeful fashion as though to make sure everything is as it should be before bed.

With Cassie there is a time to eat, a time to exercise, a time to work, a time to play and a time to nap. She staggers her events throughout the day with a regularity that amazes me. Cassie's been with us almost a year now and I've watched her go from a nervous, sad dog to a mostly calm and always happy dog. Stress for her is mostly a thing of the past. She follows her routine, filling her day with the things she loves, and crawls into her fluffy dog bed at night, making another, different, assortment of sounds that say to me, she's a happy dog.

I've been laid off from my old day job for eight months now. The only routine I have is that I have no routine. I've never been especially good at setting them in place but now that I am writing full time I can see the need for one. I need time to read, time to write, time to exercise, time to garden and time to sit still with Cassie and just be. My ability to focus on any one thing has been hard of late for a variety of reasons that don't really matter here. Some of it is, I think, about getting older. I used to be able to jump from diapering a baby to making dinner and talking on the phone (back when they had cords) and not skip a beat. Heck, some days I did that all at the same time.

I think I'm going to take another lesson from Cassie. No more Superwoman trying to do it all or do it all day all the time. I'm going to chop my day up into bite-sized pieces that work for me and see if I can plug them into a routine that works for me.

Any routine that includes nap time has to be worth checking out, right?

For this week's memory challenge I'm trying to remember the various neighbors on my block. Next door on one side, when I was very young, was an old woman named Jenny. Jenny made the best congo bars, a chocolate chip bar cookie, that was so sweet my teeth probably started to rot before I ever took a bite. I wore out a hole in the hedge going back and forth between her house and mine on cookie days. When Jenny was no longer there the Tuey family moved in. They were the ones who had the only Chinese restaurant in town. There was Linda, a few years younger than me but a playmate, a younger brother named Timmy I think and a baby I couldn't remember. Their grandmother lived with them too and took care of the baby while the parents ran the restaurant. I remember that they grew a lot of the vegetables for the restaurant in the backyard and some of the greens would be washed and actually hung on the clothesline to dry. They had a cool clothesline that came into the kitchen. You could put the clothes (or the salad greens) on the line and then hand over hand bring in empty line and send the stuff out to the sun to dry. When Jenny lived there the house was neat and clean. When the Tueys moved in it was total chaos. Three kids and two working parents probably helped that along.

On the other side of that house was the house that straddled the corner. I don't remember the adults that lived there but there was twin boys who came to visit and I would play with them. They loved to play up in my attic playroom with my mother's storybook dolls. Alas the strongest memory I have of them is them throwing the dolls down the stairs and breaking them. They had a basement (well so did we) but there's had one of those slanted doors that you could climb up and let trucks roll down. For some reason I remember sitting on the basement door and singing the song, "Oh playmate, come out and play with me."

I don't remember the neighbor directly next door when I was little. It must have been an unfriendly adult because I remember I wasn't allowed to trick or treat there. But along about 5th grade the Truitts moved in. A big baseball loving family with a girl named Jan that was my age. Jan and I were friend on and off again. She's the one who punched me in the mouth when I had braces for no reason that I ever understood and then lied about it.

Across the street was my grandmother's best friend, Lisa deBenedetti. They had a ground level basement and you had to walk up this steep flight of stairs to get to their front door. The stairs always scared me because there was a space between each step and I thought I would fall through. What I loved best about their house was the basement. It was the collecting point for the yearly rummage sale put on by their Druids group. I used to get to try things on first and buy old handbags and high heels and hats for playing dressup. When the grandchildren came to visit we would play in the tiny backyard. I remember their clothesline...one of those freestanding ones with a center pole. I always thought it looked nicer than ours that was just a bunch of pipes my grandfather put in the ground and ran wire through. Oh, I just remembered they had a hedge of olive bushes around the front yard. Every year I would watch those olives ripen and rot on the bushes. I loved olives so much and wanted to pick them and bring them home to do whatever it was you did to olives but we never did. As far as I know they never did anything with them either.

Next to that house was Grandma Stotts (everyone in the neighborhood called her that) and Gilbert and Hazel Hills. I remember Gilbert as being really really tall and thin. Hazel had white curly hair and used crutches but I don't remember why. She taught piano lessons.

Next to that was the duplex that, for a short time, my father lived in back when he first met my mom. It must have been a rental because I never remember anyone staying there for very long until junior high and Elivira Dorris moved in. That was about the time we had crushes on Bobby Sherman and Davy Jones and David Cassidy so we spent a lot of time listening to their records and pretending which one was going to fall in love and marry us.

There were more houses on the street but I don't remember the people who lived there.

Your turn. Who were the people in your neighborhood?

 

One good thing happens when you are offline and not able to go check things out on the Internet - you engage your brain in other useful pursuits, like cleaning and writing and getting organized. We were offline for much of the weekend due to router issues and while I did do some writing I did more thinking and planning and trying to get my act together in a couple of areas long overdue - files and emails.

Let me just say this straight  off - I am not a natural organizer. I love the IDEA of being organized. I love looking at pictures of beautiful organized offices and workspaces and computers. But it doesn't come easy to me and it isn't my natural state. I need a certain amount of clutter around me to feel comfortable but one place I dont need clutter is online. I am tied of feeling weighed down by so many copies of emails and documents and who knows what I have saved to my virtual "junk drawer." (Yes, that's the name of the folder.)

I decided to start with email. I use Outlook because I do like the integration with the various other MS products and the calendar/reminder system. But a few years ago I was still using Eudora and so when I set Outlook up I just ported over all my old emails. Let me say that again in case you didn't hear me. ALL. My. Old. Emails. Oh my. I had email going back to 1997. Why? I have no idea. I am slowly, year by year, folder by folder, throwing them away. What a relief! It has been easier to do that than it has been to tackle my overwhelming In-box which, at the beginning of the weekend had about 800 emails in it because I had either read it and not deleted it, read it and had to do something with it or not read it yet. I'm now down to 87. Working my way toward single digits.

One of the tricks I remembered and started to implement again is to take off the setting to have it fetch mail for me every so often. When I was at the dayjob I had it set to grab new mail every ten minutes because you could never tell when something needed handling. I realize I don't need to do that at home. I can grab the mail when I know I will have to to process it, at least a first pass (delete the junk that made it past the filters, etc) Huge sigh of relief there. Less stress than seeing the little Outlook notification that would float over the bottom right hand of my screen as every email came in.

While I use Gmail as a first line filter for most of my mail (and when I had the day job it was nice to be able to check my mail if I was waiting for something important) I like being able to sort my mails into folders. But I have been saving way too much and mostly because I was too lazy to process email correctly the first time. There are some mails to save, interesting conversations between friends, usually about the process of writing or brainstorming a project. Those aren't things I'm not going to find online when I want them. But the internet has changes from way back in my early days of Delphi and bulletin boards. Thanks to our friend Google it is easier than every to find book lists and reviews and a lot even archives from various listservs.

So what I am trying to figure out is how to process mail going forward. I am reducing the number of folders I have for starters. I am making better use of Outlooks FLAG and CATEGORY features. (Would love to hear if any of you use those and how.) I have set up "rules" in Outlook to automatically file some mail in specifi folders so that I don't have to move it myself later. It comes in and stays in my "unread" search until I read it. Then if I don't delete it, it is already filed. What I have to remember is that if I read it and don't need to keep it or do anything with it I need to delete it right after reading. That's probably the biggest new habit I have to develop.

The hardest thing for me to figure out what to do with is the outbox of sent mail. My husband (also an Outlook user for work) just lets Outlook archive it all but he doesn't send as much mail as I do. There are a lot of mails that I don't need to keep a copy of but trying to remember to clean out the sent mail box is tough.

So what do you do? How to you process/handle/save/organize/trash your email? What's your system?

I really want to know.



 

I think a lot about the life Cassie might have had before she to live with us. We'll never know the real story but I can piece together some of it from the adoption agency, some more from what the pound report said, and because I'm writer, I can imagine even more than that.

We were told that she had been found running as a stray, taken to the pound, and then adopted. She was back at the pound in a few days after being told that she made too much noise and didn't get along with the other little dogs in the house. I can buy that story because I see how she acts when she sees the little dogs on our walks. This 70 pound dog stops and backs up until she is standing behind me, putting me in-between her and the dogs that are barely the size of the stuffed gorilla she plays with at home. She will nose around me, wanting to sniff but afraid of what might happen if she does. She's been burned before.

The part of the story I know is that the people who adopted her from the pound had several small dogs. They adopted Cassie and named her Patton. Yes, for a female dog. Cassie barked a lot and didn't get along with the other dogs. She went back to the pound. End of story.

Or is it? The part of the story I made up goes like this: Woman had several small dogs that were spoiled rotten and had the run of the house. Man wanted a watch dog. A big dog. A man's dog. Goes to the pound and sees a German Shepherd and knows they are supposed to be fierce dogs. Doesn't bother to learn about the breed, about their intense love and devotion and NEED to be a part of the family. Takes the dog home and chains it in the backyard. Doesn't try to get to know it. Doesn't give it any love. Doesn't let it come in the house but lets the little dogs out all the time.

Close your eyes and I bet you can see what I see. Patton/Cassie on a chain, unable to get away from the little dogs who are yapping at her, biting her ankles, doing whatever they want to her. And she just has to take it because she can't run away and no one seems to care what is happening to her.

She could have turned mean. She could have chomped down on those little dogs or the people who were supposedly her caretakers. She didn't. All she did was speak up, she barked a lot, which was the only way she had to express her displeasure with her current situation. Thankfully she didn't have to stay there long. While she is better with little dogs now she is still nervous, tentative when it comes to saying hello, unsure if the new little dog will be a friend or not.

I've started three different dog stories today and now, here it is 10:30 pm and I haven't finished a single one of them. It's been one of those days that's rough around the edges where nothing seems to be going right and I am either opening my mouth and sticking my foot into it or running into brick walls that only seem to get thicker instead of crumbling at my feet. It's a frustrating kind of day where not much gets done and your self-worth goes down instead of up because you can't for the life of you figure out what it is you keep doing wrong. All you want is to connect and the only way you know how to do that is to speak up.

Writers write to connect with the world. Not everyone is going to agree with you. Not everyone is going to want to hear what you have to say. Not everyone who needs to hear you will hear you and a lot of people will hear you and forget you.

But still you try.

Because if you're lucky the right people, or just one right person, will hear you.

And your world, and theirs, will never be the same.
 

It's almost lunchtime here so I figured that would be a good inspiration for this week's memory challenge. It will come as no surprise to anyone who has gone out to eat with me to learn that I am a picky eater. (I will not tell the green beans and roast beef story here since it has nothing to do with lunch.) 

When I was a kid my mom would cut the sandwiches off the crust of my sandwiches for me to take to school. There was a time when I would eat no bread at all so I would get bologna and cheese (those Kraft prepackaged sliced things) with mustard rolled up and held together with a toothpick. I think I remember some early kind of plastic container that she would put them in. Fruit? Nope. Never ate it as a kid and don't eat much of it now. (Mostly it's a texture thing.) I never ate peanut butter and jelly (again, it was the fruit and texture thing) but peanut butter and honey was a big hit. I loved the way the honey would soak into the bread during the day and by lunchtime the edges of the bread would be almost crunchy as a result. I took a lot of pickles to school, great big juicy dill pickles, like the kinds you would get in the big old barrels. Loved those. There was always dessert in a school lunch, Hostess cupcakes or Ding Dongs or HoHos. Sometimes cookies, Mother's chocolate chips or chocolate covered graham crackers or those pink and white animal crackers. Oh, and sometimes an actual box of animals crackers but school lunch never gave me enough time to play with those.

If I was home and my grandfather was still alive, lunch might be a grilled Spam sandwich. Other lunch favorites was a grilled cheese, made with Velveeta cheese that melted so well. I used to love the way the cheese would spill out onto the grill and burn. I alway ate the burnt cheese first. And of course my favorite lunch was much much maligned by everyone else in the world, peanut butter and sweet pickle sandwich. Mmm mmmm good. So good that it's what Oliver eats in Oliver's Must-do List. So good that it is still one of my comfort foods and my husband makes sure there is always a jar of sweet pickles in the refrigerator waiting for me should I feel the urge.

Your turn - what did you have for lunch as a child?

In response to the letters I wrote to characters yesterday, the characters have written back. Yesterday was one of those wonderful writing times when I started writing the letter to Flyboy and suddenly had several plots items fall nicely into place. It opened the door to a couple of great scenes and some nice potential conflict. I love it when my weird process works!

Dear Clueless Author,

Did you see the size of that dog? He was catching steel-belted tires in mid-air. There is no way I am going anywhere near that monster.

So you're telling me that you can't remember the dog my babysitter had when we lived in Iowa? The one the who grabbed hold of my ankle when I was on the swing and decided to use me as a pull-toy? If Wilson hadn't come home when he did and turned the hose on that wolf I might have lost my foot. How is it that you can remember what altitude I'm supposed to be flying but you can't remember something as important as me getting bit by a dog? Sometimes I wonder why you even want to tell my story.

Okay, maybe you need glasses. That would explain the dog thing. Did you take a look at Spencer? I mean, she had a tank top on so tight that she wasn't leaving much to the imagination, if you know what I mean. I took one look at her . . .  well, at her and I decided that keeping the truck between her and a certain part of my anatomy was probably a good thing. I have no idea who Edna is but please don't make her look anything like Spencer, will ya?

I don't know what's in the wallet because, as you might remember if your brain wasn't fried from being old, I dropped the wallet when that security guard caught me and it's still sitting under a plane at the airport. At least I hope that's where it is.

Now you have to figure out how I can convince Spencer to take me back there so I can get the wallet before someone else finds it. And while you're at it can you make sure Wilson isn't too pissed off at me whenever I finally do get back home again?

Signed,
Flyboy
 

Dear Author,
You know those bugs you found? Well they're important. Especially the one that creeps you out. If I were you I'd make sure to keep checking the yarrow for bugs and taking pictures. I'm not sure what I'm going to need them for but I'm pretty sure they're important to my story.

Here's the thing. Summer time, nice weather like you're having now, well it might seem like the perfect time for working on my story but you'd be wrong. Not a time to be moving those native plants around. It's too hot and there's no water and everything's in a state of rest. That's okay. Underneath those 4 inches mulch there's a lot happening. Worms are churning up the soil something fierce. Tap roots are finding their way deeper and deeper underground, looking for that water table. And all kinds of micro organisms are banding together like a family of their own to make the soil healthier than it was before. Stuff's happening above ground too.  Seeds are ripening and then falling out of the flowers and onto the mulch where they'll wait (if the birds don't get 'em first) for the rains to come and start everything a'growing again.

So it's okay to wait.

But yeah, there's still a big old hole in the roof, almost as big as the one in my family. Nan, she waltzes in and out of our lives whenever she wants. Can't seem to find a place to sink her roots and grow. Grammy, well she likes to pretend Nan's okay but I know better.

Signed,
Plant Kid

Dear Writer Person,

I'm waiting with the gypsy lady until you have time for me. Can't figure there's any reason to speak up when I know you're not going to listen. I'm used to being invisible. I like it when people don't notice me. Less chances of getting hurt that way.

Signed,
Max's friend

It's been a while so I thought I would check in with each of my characters via letters.

As always, they surprise me.


Dear Flyboy,

How is it that I never knew you were afraid of dogs? When did that happen? I thought you and Zero were going to be the best of friends. And why won't you get in the darn truck? Spencer is going to lose patience with you and that is not going to settle well with Edna. You need Spencer on your side or haven't you figured that out yet?

Also, I really need to know what you found when you looked in the wallet. You did remember to pick the wallet up when you dropped it at the airport right? When the security guard was chasing you? Because if you don't have it I don't know who does and boy is that going to cause some problems.

Signed,
the author who only just this second realized you dropped the wallet. Whoa! Thank you for that plot development.

Dear Plant Kid,

I hear you talking to me every day and I'm really sorry I haven't had time to sit with you lately. I agree that the time to be working on your book. I think of you when I pull weeds or collect seeds or take pictures of the various bugs I'm finding in the garden. And yes, now that I better understand the real theme in Flyboy's story I understand that the two of you are completely different and have completely different stories to tell.

But one thing I still don't understand about you...are you living with your sister or your grandmother or both? And is there still a hole in the roof?

Signed,
the author who thinks you have at least three different stories to tell her.

Dear Max,

Where did you go? I haven't heard from you in a long time and I fear that Cooper has moved into your place in the WIP line. Janie might be there in front too. Along with the non-fiction projects. If you don't speak up I fear you disappearing completely.

Signed,
Me

Saturday Lynn Hazen and I taught another class on Social Media for authors, this time an all day event at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco.

We had a full house (almost too full as it was tough to get between the tables so we could help people) and I think everyone had a great time and hopefully learned a lot. Quite a few people set up their first blogs while right there in the room with us and I think they were a bit amazed at how easy it was. I am still trying to figure out what to tell people about the differences (minus java script capability here on LJ) of the various platforms and why you should choose one over the other.

Hats off to all your fearless people who took the class and then took the plunge into the the social media madness.

It is still such a HUGE topic to try and cover in one day, especially with so many people at different stages.

I think I am going to set up a local social media "drop in" clinic sort of thing, maybe once a month, where people can bring their laptops and work on a particular aspect of their own social media system with my help. If you're in the Silicon Valley area and this sounds interesting to you, leave me a comment and I'll add you to my notification list.

If you are looking for more info online, don't forget to check out the new blog in town, The Happy Accident, where Greg Pincus, aka Gottabook, encourages you to play in traffic and set yourself up for the "happy accidents" that often occur with social networking.