Prompt

OK I said i would give some prompts from time to time

So here is what I have for you:

The stationary I used for the letter I just wrote says " Life is tough, I recomend getting a mnicure and a Really cute helmet"

1. Why would that be?

2. What two things do you recommend tho help with life? Why?

 I wrote the below rambling letter while making a gross of cookies for my daughter swim team sponsored swim-meet this weekend. I suppose that I will not be on line all weekend or not much at any case.
This is a letter for a pen-pal swap on swap-bot.

Dear J,
I’m sitting down to write you this letter trying to think of what to tell you.
It’s funny I can talk for hours these days when once I was too shy to talk. But when I was much younger I could write eleven page letters to friends far away.
I’m not sure what happened but that stopped sometime when I was in college. I suppose the pressure of paper writing over took the need or ability to write letters. I think since then I have been spoiled by the internet. Email became the main written communication tool for me in the early 1990s. It was the telephone that kept me in contact with friends but as we spread out the expense got too much.
I have decided that 41 is not too old to have a Pen-pal and I have never had one that wasn’t a friend first.
So I am a 41 year old mother of an 11 year old girl and a 5 year old boy. I’ve been married for almost 14 years to a good man I met in college.
That 14 years has been the most geographically settled in my life. This is neither a good nor bad thing. I just traveled with my family most of my childhood.
My father is an English Professor at UCLA and he took the job in 1969 in hopes of moving to a small college like he and my mother went to (and I did) after a few years. Seeing that he has been there for 41 years that never happened. That Did however afford him the opportunity to teach and study/research abroad.
This started in 1972 or 3 when he was took a postion with the University of Leiden in Holland to teach there on exchange for two six month session with six months in between.
So off my family went. I attended a Dutch kindergarten and had my tonsild out in Holland.
After that he tried to find a way to go over seas as often as possible. We had many trips to live in live in England as short as nine months and as long as 2 ½ years.
A result of this is that I don’t have a High School diploma. I have ‘O’ levels and ‘A’ levels which are the exams that are nationally taken in England or at leat were in 1985-1987. I think they have changed since.
I think this letter is probably rambling. But one has to note that I keep getting up to bake cookies. I am tasked with making 10 dozen for my daughter’s swim meet this weekend.
I do love to bake and it is often more adventurous than planned. Well as my finished batch of cookies  cools and the next batch chills and some butter bowls soak in warm soapy water. I want to comment on some of your profile (although if you are anything like me you are now wondering what you wrote.)
I am fascinated by the fact that you have both an art gallery and a small farm. The part that fascinates me the most is that the most creative family I know have chickens rabbits and goats (as well as dogs and cats) as well as pursuing artisitic careers Dad is a retired very successful interior designer, Mom is a painter and a potter daughter is a modern artist who does wall sculpture with beach plastic and son is a poet. Daughter sells her art as well as working for an art board and a program called Art From Scrap. It is  really cool they focus on doing art from discards and trash.
I was thinking about how you like short stories and old movies. I am reading a fun book that is a series of letters between and author her agent or publisher and a few other friends that is set in the 1940s around the end of World War Two in England. I find it a good In Between book to read bits of it goes quickly and is not too hard to put down and pick back up later. It is called “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows.
Well I am off to eat something fast before I pick up my son it is hard to do much when he is around he is a very active and busy boy.
I may just write a letter about my Kids some time.

Yours,
Me
PS I have enclosed some scraps of paper that I think could go well in collages.

Postcards-Where do you want to go?

I have joined Swap-Bot  which means that I am doing all sorts of fun stuff one of the things I have decided to do is postcard and letter swaps. There are others too but these are the ones that I will be posting more than photos of here:

Tonight I wrote two post cards for the Ice-Breaker Postcard #3 swap.  I think I will do some more in the series as long as I can find a new postcard source (If you are reading this and have an idea let me know)

The premise of this swap is to send a post card to your assigned partner and answer a “ice-breaker” type question.

With this on the Question is: “What place in the world would you most like to visit? Why?”

That is a fun question for me and is not one that is easily answered in a couple of sentences. So I wrote 2 slightly different answers to the question. Although the result is the same.


To partner in England:

Dear partner,

    Before I can answer the question “What place in the world would you most like to visit? Why?” you need to know that I traveled a lot as a young person. My father is a professor and I often was with him when he studied, researched or taught abroad. 5 years of my life was spent in England. I even have ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels to show for it.

    But as a teenager I asserted my independence and refused to go on some family holidays.  I missed out on Ireland and Italy. Because of that I want to visit them. Beyond that I want to go to New Zealand to see some of the places that “Lord of the Rings” was filmed.

Yours,

Me

To my partner in Arizona:

Dear Partner,

    To answer the question “What place in the world would you most like to visit? Why? You need to know that I have lived in Wisconsin longer than any other place in my life and I have only just made it to half my life. I have lived in England, California, Holland, Illinois, and Montana. I have visited Denmark, France, Canada, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona Minnesota, Brussels and I know there are other places that I could list but escape my mind. My father is a professor and many of these were family trips when I was a kid. I rebelled in my late teens and skipped family trips to Ireland and Italy and I now regret this. So I’ll start with Ireland. I’ll finish with New Zealand because I want to see where “Lord of the Rings” was filmed.

Yours,

Me

Now to get ready to write a letter.....I haven't done that since before the 1990s and the internet.

Thoughts in the dark.

I couldn’t sleep last night.
I thought about all the things I wanted to write as I lay in the dark trying to get to sleep.
I kept thinking that I should get some paper or my computer but in the end I didn’t and some time after 2:45 I feel asleep.
I don’t remember anything.

From a raw nerve....

I used to joke that I wrote poetry when I was in some sort of deep emotional pain.

Tonight while I deal with some internal pain this came oozing out of my pores. I reminds me of stuff I used to write in college. Full of angst and something....

Bruises and Scrapes

I met myself as I fell down
She stood looking at my plight
My skinned and bleeding knees
Elbows raw and open

She laughed out loud
And helped me up
Sprayed Bactine upon the wounds
Bringing more tears to my eyes

With a wry smile
She reminded me
Pads and helmets
Protect from injury

With cynical frown
I reminded her
Pain is a fact
That makes life full

Skating off to my next adventure
I left myself behind
Knowing that she
Would find my pain again.

A Poem for Ron: Unhappy Anniversary

A poem for Ron

(Preface: I believe his was written during the summer 1991 a year after my friend Ron Baker was murdered. I have typed this directly from the paper I scratched it on.)

Unhappy Anniversary

A year has past since
You were taken
How could they take
You, whom I share
A love that only
Two friends could share

You were the only
Person that I could
Trust to care for me
No matter who I was
I wish for a reason
For the madness that
Ended that…..

Buying the Bike

Today was the day. His father and I had talked about it and postponed it for long enough. It was time to get the boy a bike. At 41 inches and 33 pounds of energy, that would more than sufficiently keep a child twice his age 10 year old going strong we are always worried about when he will need to go to the ER for a broken bone or stitches.

He had now survived two weeks of rollerblading in PE class at school and has been ice-skating twice and nothing more than very minor bruises have resulted on his lithe and rubber like frame. So we were going to find him a bike.

I picked him up after school and after trying to remember the address and put it into the GPS unit I decided to trust my memory of where the desired bike store was.

This bike store is full of used (and some new) bikes and staffed by Kids that have graduated from the Boys and Girls club. They sell these bike learn to maintain them and run the operation with mentorship and instruction from leaders in the program.

We arrived easily enough just a little trepidation when I couldn’t see the sign from the highway. The boy walked into the store with large eyes and hardly a need for my hand that he usually hold when he is nervous. He went straight for the bikes that were his side. Few staff were in the store as we entered and we were one of three pairs that entered. The store was crowded and full of bikes and biking equipment.

As we walked around the seemingly disorganized line of small child bikes a stream of older teens steamed out of a small office. One large very dark skinned young man came over and asked us if we needed help.

“He is in need of a bike.”
“I am” came a self-confident voice from my little boy.
“OK, Come over here so I can see what size.” Came a hint of professionalism from the young man.
I lead the boy over and He was stood against a colorful graphic that showed the height measurements for people of all ages and what size bikes they need.
The young man brushed his hand gently over the top of my boys head. The contrast of color between the two shin tones was beautifully shocking. He pronounced that we would need a 16 inch bike and showed me when I asked how he knew.

We walked back the row of bikes and he showed us which bike were the correct size and which were definitely available. We quickly narrowed it down to a red or a blue and green. The red bike was tried and the joy reflected from my boys face into the dark skinned teen showing both his youth and his joy in helping a child find something great.

As we took the bike in the young man’s professional ism melted as he was now unsure of what to do. He was given instructions from a curt young woman and we paid a very reasonable price for the bike that would be cleaned fixed up and training wheels mounted by the time we returned from our brief trip.