Brilliant!

I'll leave a light on for ya'!

Baking Day!

Mmmmm, look what I discovered when I came home!

SWMBO has been busy in the kitchen. That's an apple tart and mini-blueberry muffins. Yummy!

She's taking a nap right now and I could sneak a taste but I won't.

Someone already has!

Monsoon clouds

(They're bigger and better if you click on them)

The beginning

I received some unexpected photographs this week from a friend of my family. I hadn't seen anyone from that family since they moved to California back in 1953. That was the year my mother died at an early age. I decided to post several of the photos.

This is my mother. SWMBO says her hair was probably done with a "finger wave."

A little later . . . 1940 . . . I came on the scene.

At the age of 2, I was a plump young boy. Now I'm 70 and after decades of skinniness I'm . . . more than a little plump again.

I was interested to see that I had an affection for the feline, even way back then.

Mag 27

The esteemed Willow, of Willow Manor, tweaks our minds every week with a photo prompt. She invites her readers to write a poem, an essay or a story based on the photo. Here is this week's photo.

They had been married nearly 60 years. Walter and Agnes had been young at heart when they wed. It was 1952.

Many things happened that year of their marriage.

A pretty young English woman became Queen Elizabeth II when her father died.

In the United States a former general, Dwight Eisenhower, was elected president.

"The Diary of Anne Frank" was published.

In Argentina, Eva Peron died of cancer at the age of 33.

Television debuted in Canada.

Jimmy Boyd’s recording of "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" was released.

During the many years of their marriage, history continued to be made as well as the passage of thousands of sillier events.

Walter and Agnes had their losses over the years. They had never had children but had suffered the loss of their parents.

Walter thought of all these things as he struggled to turn the wrench on the old water pipes in the basement. He stopped for a moment, staring at the rust around the pipe fittings.

"That’s what I am," he thought. "Full of rust."

He put the wrench down and walked slowly up the stairs, feeling the aches in his joints with every step. He went into the living room, where Agnes sat reading a book. He bent over and kissed her cheek.

She looked up, surprised, and asked "what was that for?"

Walter smiled and said "for the rust."

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I invite you to visit Magpie Tales to read the submissions of other writers.

A-way out west . . .

A-way out West . . . where only the power lines interrupt the landscape.

Who do I write like?

I was reading one of my favorite bloggers this morning - Jerry at Gently Said and he intrigued me with an exercise to determine who one writes like. He got the tip from another blogger who mentioned a site called "I Write Like". You can find it here. You submit a piece of your writing and hit the "Analyze" button and in seconds the program tells you who your writing resembles. Jerry's experiments produced Isaac Asimov and James Joyce. Not a bad couple of scribblers.

Well! What egotist in his garret could resist this?

So I submitted my latest Magpie Tale. I expected it would tell me my writing resembled some English writer - Chesterton or Conan Doyle or someone of that ilk. But the program said it was Raymond Chandler! Still not so bad. Hmmmm (sez I), let me try another piece. This time it came up with Harry Harrison. Now I'm not a sci-fi or fantasy enthusiast so I've never read any of his work but I knew the name. Well, let's try a third piece. This time I got Stephen King.

Now I didn't . . . like many other submitters . . . draw a James Joyce but still, those aren't bad writers to be compared with. (I wonder how many of them perpetually end sentences with prepositions!)

Hey! I've got an idea. I'm going to try submitting this blog post and see what the program says. Hang on.

Well . . . I'll be darned. Cory Doctorow. The Canadian blogger, journalist and science fiction writer. (I had to go to Google to learn this.)

It seems everyone writes like someone famous. I like this program.