Weekend Assignment #212: Celebrate Poetry Month!

If you think you saw a totally different Weekend Assignment topic posted here earlier today (Friday), no, you're not crazy. I found out today that it's National Poetry Month, and regretted not going with an idea I had last night that happens to coincide with this occasion. Since nobody has posted a response yet to the topic I wrote about last night, I'm going to bump that one in favor of this one. Forgive me?

Weekend Assignment #212: It's National Poetry Month in the United States, but poetry itself is a worldwide phenomenon, existing in many styles. Let's celebrate the form. How? By writing a poem, of course! It can be silly or serious, haiku, limerick, rhymed verse, blank verse, free verse, two lines long or fifty, or anything in between. All I ask is that it be a new, original poem, not something you wrote in high school and trot out occasionally.

Extra Credit: Do you have a favorite poet?

I'm rushing this entry onto the Outpost in the hope that nobody is thrown too badly by my switcheroo; consequently I haven't written my poem yet. But here's a placeholder:

My brain arranges
Today's news into regret.
But words lag behind.

I can do better.
Images will become text
Quite soon: watch this space!

(this picture is a rerun from 2005).

Okay, I've put this off long enough:


Dog in the Nighttime

More barks disturb the night: they cry;
I listen, try to tell
If it's a neighbor dog nearby
Or one with which I dwell.

I study pitch and speed, and tap
The style and the tone.
Is this a lonely toy dog's yap,
Or hound dog's worried moan?

Of course I try to gauge the sound
Direction most of all.
Is it in our yard (this round)
Or well beyond the wall?

To the north and to the south,
And straight out to the east,
Barks and howls come from the mouth
Of every canine beast.

That could be Tuffy, I'm afraid.
And that my Pepper's yelp.
Did they hear some cat invade,
And rush outside to help?

I've tried, but I still can't quite tell
The source of every bark.
The canine chorus starts to yell;
I peer out at the dark.

I tap the glass, call out their names,
Hope Pepper doesn't hide.
Tuffy thinks I'm playing games,
'Cause she was safe inside.

"Go get her, Tuff!" and Tuffy goes
A few feet out the door.
Pepper follows Tuffy's nose
And they're inside once more.

The door is shut; it can't be them,
But dogs I can't control.
Mine sit out the shrill mayhem
That wakes each sleeping soul.

KFB, 4/20/08



Oh, and favorite poet? For me it's a toss-up between E E Cummings and Ogden Nash. Or A.A. Milne. Or Theodore Geisel. Hmm. Let's go with Dr. Seuss.

If you don't usually write poetry, here's your chance to stretch those writing muscles. If you do, here's a chance to show off your mad skillz. Write a new poem in your blog or journal, and be sure to include a link back here. Then leave a link to your entry in the comments below. Our online poetry festival will be posted next Thursday night. Have fun!

Karen

Weekend Assignment Results: Black Thumbs and Green

John's variegated fuchsia, with flowers at the base

For last week's Weekend Assignment, I asked about your gardening skills. I'm mostly relieved to learn that I'm m far from the only person around here who isn't very good at that sort of thing. On with the responses!

Carly shows us how it's done: "I am a happy gardener right now. And with the ladybug's help, the roses that had been infested with Aphids, are beginning to perk up."

Mike, on the other hand, confesses: "My gardening skills are non-existent. Everything dies in my care. I've killed a cactus before. A cactus! A cactus can survive in the desert, and I killed it."

Bea confines her remarks to the comments thread: "I have no green thumb... I just get lucky once in awhile... my husband is the gardener. I just appreciate the fruits of his labor."

Martha also answered in the comments: I don't need to do a whole entry -- I could kill a silk plant. Any questions? ;-)

Becky said, also in comments: "LOL Martha beat me to it. I was going to say my thumb is BLACK and I manage to kill silk plants. Extra credit...our next door neighbor is an AMAZING gardener. Their yard is easily the showplace of our street. Ours...not. I wish they weren't our neighbor. LOL They make us look soooo bad."

Saqib confides: "So what color is my thumb? I would have to say that it is chrome plated because I am a bit of a metal head and have no gardening skills. I found plants to be...ehm...boring."

Sarah has no garden, but her highly horticultural parents more than make up for it: "I'd probably do okay with houseplants if the cat didn't eat them.... As the offspring of the people who founded this community gardening organization, and a horticulture teacher, I sure as heck do know people who are better at this gardening stuff than I am."

Florinda: "I used to describe myself as having a black thumb, but I learned several years ago that this isn't entirely true. When my ex-husband and I separated, most of the house plants were left with me, and I actually managed not to kill any of them."

Kiva explains her plant philosophy: "My main approach to gardening is benign neglect. If the plants are hardy enough to survive, they will. If not, I have cleansed the gene pool."

Thanks, everyone! Now, if I can just think of a new topic, I'll post that shortly!

Karen

I'm officially too old. Hooray!

One thing that social networking sites do very well is nag the user. Once you're on Flixter or Reunion.com or Twitter or Fandango or whatever, there's a seemingly endless series of emails telling you of someone visiting your profile (and you can find out who, by upgrading to a paid account) or about some cool new feature you ought to try as soon as possible. If you actually log on to the site, the screen will crankily inform you that you haven't yet used the new poll feature or created a quiz or added photos or told the world about your five favorite movies.

Anything that requires a paid account I can generally do without, so if you've signed my guest book on a school reunion site, I'll never know it was you. Sorry. Nor will I pay to access those genealogical and government databases. But if all the site wants is for me to type a few movie titles, upload an avatar thumbnail or click a button next to some actor's name, I'll probably do it. Just last night I spent at least half an hour clicking through Amazon recommendations. It wasn't a total waste of time: I added two Scalzi titles to my wish list, and found out about a few other titles that interested me.

And tonight it was Flixter that caught my attention. Specifically, it was Flixter's page of rotating, user-created polls.

Sample poll:

Which actor is better ?
A Johnny Depp
B Brad Pitt
C Harrison Ford
D Denzel Washingon (sic)

I probably clicked through these things for an hour or longer, answering some and skipping others, hoping in vain to find one that was interesting or insightful or relevant to my own tastes. No such luck. Instead I was treated to a series of questions about Johnny Depp*, Tim Burton and/or Orlando Bloom (separately and in combination), Nintendo games, celebrity scandals, The Family Guy and Disney Channel shows, polls about tween heartthrobs from High School Musical and elsewhere, and at least a dozen virtually identical polls asking which Harry Potter book or film is the best/my favorite. Nearly every poll simply asked for the best actor, singer, or film from the list provided. The names Depp, Bloom, Knightley, and Witherspoon frequently appeared as options. The names Bogart, Heston, Peck, Chaplin, Cagney, Dietrich, Davis, Garland, Monroe and Swanson did not appear once. A few people set up polls about fashions, cars or favorite colors, whether their pets are cute, and whether the pollster himself or herself is hot and should date some Disney Channel star.

*An excellent actor, but I don't feel the need to say so once every 35 seconds.

Gak. Gahh. Ick. Bleah.

And oh, yeah: which band is the best: the Beatles, Mingmongs in Aspic, The Curtlies, Jojo McFriendly, Billy Boytoy or Nothing But Darkness and Pain Ever Again. Okay, so I fudged the names of all the young artists whose work I've never even heard, nor care to. But you get the idea.

Clearly, these polls aren't intended for a 51-year-old accountant and fantasy fan who grew up listening to the Beatles. They're for kids aged 11 to 19, with a cultural memory that gets pretty vague looking back past the millennial divide, and who can't be bothered to check whether maybe someone asked about Harry Potter already. Spelling is, of course, irrelevant, even if it means that an actor's name appears in the poll as Jonny Depp, Jhonny Dep and even Jhonny Deep.

Eventually, of course, I got disgusted enough to tear myself away. I stopped looking for any redeeming value in the Flixter polls, anything that I could conceivably want to see and give an opinion about. Presumably the fans of HSM, HP, PotC and those kids who play Zack and Cody are having fun making and answering these repetitive, misspelled, one-question polls. I should just accept that this little piece of the Internet, like MySpace and Facebook, is not for me. I'm too old to appreciate it. Heck, one poll asked my age, and I had to click on "19-22 or above." Yeah, just a bit above that. Thanks for asking.

Still, the Internet is big enough and cool enough to accommodate polls about Orlando Bloom's goofiest photos, as well as Draco Malfoy fanfic, in-depth discussions of the still-unanswered question posed by the show title Doctor Who, legal and ethical issues associated with copyright, reviews of new software, tips for getting a literary agent, anti-Scientology videos, amusing anecdotes about life in an old folk's home, book reviews of YA fantasy novels, Round Robin Photo Challenges, and an infinite supply of other topics. I don't have to like or appreciate all of it. I just have to find and cultivate the bits of Internet that I like, and have a discipline to ignore the rest rather than waste time on it.


But for the record, my dogs are cuter than their dogs. Even if I didn't create a poll about them.

Karen

The Allergy Arms Race

Move over, Pepper, and pass me the blanket.

Okay, since I have nothing better to say tonight, I may as well admit that I'm dragging, not because of the taxes (which I e-filed early this evening), nor late-night Doctor Who (although I did a little of that), but because two generic Benedryl (my usual double dose) proved insufficient to calm a major allergy attack last night. The second or third time I was driven out of bed, I inadvertently woke John as well, so he lost two hours of sleep. Meanwhile I went and took a third pill, watched ten minutes of "Human Nature," and finally managed to fall asleep on the couch, my legs stretched awkwardly in front of Pepper, who was disinclined to give up her spot.

I used up most of my stash of leftover napkins as tissues at work today, but now as I prepare to go to bed my only allergy symptoms are irritated eyes, a trace of cough and a patch of itchy skin on my left hand and wrist. But I don't trust the pollen. Chances are excellent that as soon as I lie down, the nasal inconvenience will begin again.

In the early 1970s my treatment of choice was Allerest, and I was quite surprised once in high school when a teacher "caught me" taking one and told me students weren't allowed to self-medicate. I suppose nowadays it would be grounds for suspension. By college, the ingredients in Allerest no longer helped and I eventually found a new over-the-counter improvement on them, featuring dexbromphenermine maleate or somesuch. By the late 1980s, I was getting shots of canelog with ACTH from Dr. E. This steroid-based treatment worked miraculously well at the time, but over the years it became less effective. Dr. E. is long dead now, and canelog has been superceded by the likes of Flonase and Nasonex. Flonase was great for about two years, and Nasonex was adequate for a year or two after that. My current doctor also tried me on various prescription pills, not one of which did a darn thing. Since then I've mostly stuck with the overdose of Benedryl at bedtime, and hoped that nobody would actually murder me over my annoying sniffles and nose blowing the rest of the time. Fortunately, my allergies aren't as bad as they once were. Not nearly. Not most of the time, anyway.

Pink pills alone, or add the expired Nasonex?

But as of yesterday lots of people were suffering considerably from their allergies, including me. Nor do I want to take a chance on waking John up when I try to go to bed in a few minutes. So I think I'll try a little bit of expired Nasonex and...no. Let's leave that for tomorrow, because an initial dose doesn't help and may backfire.

Okay then: two pink pills, as usual, with the possibility of a third. And if Pepper has to share the couch again, then so be it.

If this keeps up, I'll be on the lookout for the next big innovation in allergy treatment. Or at least a fresh prescription for Flonase or Nasonex.

Oh, and we're thinking of getting Pergo for the bedroom, on the theory that a fake wood floor harbors fewer allergens than twenty-year-old carpeting - and looks better as well.

Karen

...Taxes

Less than a month after I first started blogging, way back in 2004, I wrote a blog entry titled "Hooray For Taxes!" Then I got all paranoid and deleted the entry, lest it attract the wrong sort of attention from the IRS. The point stands, though, even if the entry didn't. Nobody wants to pay taxes. We'd all rather get a refund, or not pay at all. And we certainly don't want our money to be squandered on whatever it is we think the government is squandering it on, such as the war. Really, though, I don't mind contributing a bit of money to all those government agencies that make at least a half-assed attempt to protect us and the planet we live on, to schools and the arts and scientific research and Congress and that President fellow, even if he is the worst one evah (or as Scalzi claims, if I recall correctly, the second worst). Sure, I'd like to see the money spent more efficiently and more wisely, but when you add it all up, there's a lot there that's worth doing, and worth paying for.

And it doesn't hurt that we're getting a refund again this year.

Now, as you may know, I'm an accountant, albeit not a CPA. Furthermore, I use TurboTax like everyone else. But oh, how I hate doing the taxes! There's always some bit of paper that eludes me: a W-2, or the real estate taxes, or how much I gave St. Michael's, or how much I spent on my teeth, or how much I paid in medical insurance, or some combination thereof. Eventually I found all of these things, but it took a while, sorting through months of accumulated mail. John would have me do the whole thing in January, but here it is April again. He figures it's my job as an accountant, and doesn't seem to believe me when I say I'm not that kind of accountant.

And what about this retirement fund stuff? What about cafeteria plans? Does 401(k) info get totally ignored, as long as we didn't take any money out of it? Is John's current plan a Health Savings Account? How much was withheld for medical insurance from First Magnus? Their ex-employee info site has no working links at all any more. And how much was my check for my day of jury duty last September? ($24, I learned.) Okay, at least that one was easy to resolve, just two quick phone calls to the county.

I thought I had it all done, except for John checking on the medical plan. But I just found a 1099-R relating to my old 401(k) plan through First Magnus, some sort of nontaxable distribution that nevertheless needs to be reported. Except I didn't get a distribution, so what is the form about? I'll have to call about that tomorrow.*

Aargh! Remind me to never, never, never accept a job preparing income taxes.

Karen

*Never mind. I found something that says it's been rolled over into a "Safe Harbor IRA." Whatever that is.

Monday Photo Shoot: In the Next Room

Okay, this one is a little different. Don't plan it, don't put it off, don't think it over. Just do it.

New Monday Photo Shoot #16: Grab your camera. Got it? Good. Now, go in the next room, and shoot whatever catches your eye, something you haven't previously posted pictures of (well, hardly ever!). Do not set the scene. Do not move or clean or rearrange. Play it as it lies. But yes, you're allowed to edit the result!

I've previously posted pictures of practically everything in the den. Still, I was able to find a few things:

This old, rusted, beat up lunchbox was a gift from my friend Joel years ago, after I mentioned the Peanuts lunchbox he had in elementary school. He still had it, and generously sent it to me. Inside are blobs of paint from when his late mother used it as a paintbox. If you look at the Snoopy article on Wikipedia, you'll see a closeup of a section of this very lunchbox, painstakingly cleaned up digitally to remove scratches, fix the colors and bring it into focus. But I think this is the first time I've posted a picture of its glorious imperfection.

The toy dog, named Birthday, was a birthday present to myself in college, purchased from, if I recall correctly, the Syracuse University Bookstore. Its music box plays This Old Man, but with a few notes missing in the "knick knack, patty whack, give the dog a bone" part.

Not much to say about this. It's a windup robot from Yikes! Toys. I think it's a replica of an old tin toy, but it's plastic. Behind it is an old Authors card game.


I've shown you Trophy before, the old toy poodle with no fur left, which my godmother gave me when I was six years old and newly baptized. But those shots were posed. Here is Trophy in situ, all jumbled up with Br'er Rabbit and Tuffy the Toro and Fisher Price's Li'l Snoopy, an old visor, a vintage tin ray gun and a TARDIS bank. Just one big happy family on that shelf!

Your turn! Yes, I'll forgive you if you put it off until Sunday afternoon, but let's try for the spontaneity. Just walk through the door nearest you and take a picture, post it to your blog, and leave your link from there to here, and from here to there. I'll be back in a week with the results.

Karen

Monday Photo Shoot Results: To the Tower!

Last week I asked to see photos of towers. Several of you had to dip into photo archives, but still you provided:

Jama Hameed brings us the Merlion of Sentosa Island and more.

Carly brings us three towers of the San Francisco skyline.

Laura and Daniel bring us Daniel's Le Tour de Legos!

Martha takes us to the tower of the Historic Sarasota County Courthouse.

Kiva takes us up one tower to look out upon another, quintessential tower: the Space Needle!

Thanks folks! New MPS to follow shortly!

Karen