I received a nice email from one of my son Christopher’s teachers the other day, explaining that if he didn’t get an assignment completed he would fail the course. The course is photography. The assignment, landscapes.
I only had one chance this weekend to get out with him, and that was at 7:30 this morning. So we went to my favourite spot, the Waterfront Trail so he could take some pictures. I couldn’t resist getting a few myself.
Please click for a better view.
Live each day to the fullest, but not as though it is your last: the danger in this is it can lead to fear. Living in fear is not living at all.
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Anyone who would like to try it out, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do, you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. To execute a ping back, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below. Please ensure that the One-Liner Wednesday you’re pinging back to is this week’s! Otherwise, no one will likely see it but me.
As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS), if you see a ping back from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.
Unlike SoCS, this is not a prompt so there’s no need to stick to the same “theme.”
The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:
1. Make it one sentence.
2. Make it either funny or inspirational.
3. Use our unique tag #1linerWeds.
4. Have fun!
Perhaps because of my Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt this week, I thought of an interesting way to connect today’s Japanese lesson with a fascinating story. Please keep reading after school’s out… don’t worry, the lesson’s a quick one.
Neko (ne-ko). Translation: cat.
That’s that. On with the story.
Now I know I’ve written this story out before, but I can’t for the life of me figure out where. I can’t find it on my blog which leads me to believe that I wrote it in the comments. Anyway, if you’ve heard it before, I apologize.
It was ten years ago, the first time I visited Japan. I stayed in a little town called Onomichi. My hotel was right at the top of the mountain.
See the white building on the right at the top? That was me. When I arrived in town I took a taxi up. (Note: I had to point. Luckily I knew from the internet what the place looked like because even in a tiny little place like Onomichi, unless you have GPS coordinates, you ain’t goin’ nowhere.) Once I was settled in, I decided to walk back down into town. And you got it – I got lost. The stairs down the mountain looked a little like this.
Actually, they look a lot like this. These are the actual stairs. So I was walking along, minding my own business when I realized I had been walking “along” and not “down” for quite some time. I stopped when I came across a cat, sitting on a waist-high wall. I stared at him and he stared at me, and I said to him, “I’m lost.” I figured he didn’t speak English but I thought what the hell. He’s just a cat. He regarded me for a few seconds more and then he got up and started walking along the top of the wall, back the way I’d come. So I did what any rational human being would do: I followed him. We took a few turns and a couple of times he stopped and looked back to make sure I was still behaving myself and I hadn’t turned and gone back the other way. He didn’t stop and sit down, however, until he got to the stairs. He stared at me, and then down the hill and back at me. I said, “Thank you,” and went on my way… sure enough, I went straight down to the town.
What I found really funny was this:
There’s a Cat Street View of Onomichi. Watch the video – you’ll see the stairs I walked up and down ten years ago. Apparently the neko know best.
Every time I go down to the lake for a walk, I end up with goosebums.
Geese
…diving for food
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Anyone who would like to try it out, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do, you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. To execute a ping back, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below. Please ensure that the One-Liner Wednesday you’re pinging back to is this week’s! Otherwise, no one will likely see it but me.
As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS), if you see a ping back from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.
Unlike SoCS, this is not a prompt so there’s no need to stick to the same “theme.”
The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:
1. Make it one sentence.
2. Make it either funny or inspirational.
3. Use our unique tag #1linerWeds.
4. Have fun!
Do you ever experience something when you’re alone that’s so incredible, you just have to share it with someone else? It happened to me the other day, kind of. I was strolling along the waterfront trail when came across an elderly man who was sitting on a bench facing the water. He turned to me and I smiled and he said to me, “Do you want to see something?”
I said, “Sure,” and walked over to where he was sitting.
He pointed at a heron, standing close by on the rocky shore. “They don’t normally let you get this close,” he said to me. “Isn’t he beautiful?”
I agreed and then I respectfully oohed and aahed; I hadn’t the heart to tell him I’d been even closer to one of the huge, majestic birds just a few days before. When I walked away I felt good that I had been the one to share his wonderful discovery with him.
Here’s the first heron I saw:
Isn’t he beautiful? 😉
As you may have read, I had to give up my paper route last spring because of the pain in my shoulder. I wasn’t very happy about it. Being a newspaper carrier gave me a reason to get out and walk every day, as well as the occasional reason to post about the adventures I had when I was out. In lieu of that, I started going to an indoor track when the weather was bad – either too icy, cold or rainy, or too hot and humid. But now that the weather is getting nicer again, I’ve begun exploring the neighbourhood in which I’ve lived for the past six (yes, six) years. This is what I discovered, less than a ten minute walk from my house:
There’s a turtle pond due south of my abode, complete with a waterfront trail that stretches about a half a mile in both directions (west and east) before it pauses to take up its journey again past houses and busy roads. The Waterfront Trail in its entirety goes all the way from Niagara Falls to the Quebec border, with breaks in between for roadways. Some of the breaks are vast, but in all it goes around the western end of Lake Ontario, through Toronto, and follows past Kingston (where the lake ends) and then all the way down the Ottawa River. Minus the breaks, it is 450km (280 miles) long. (Source, Wikipedia.)
I’m looking forward to taking lots of pictures as the trees change. There are herons and swans, ducks, cormorants, seagulls, and geese, and of course, turtles in abundance. The indoor track, though handy and free, is going to seem very dull when the snow necessitates it.
It all started last night – two fruit flies sat on the edge of a ledge in my kitchen. Side by side. So close that I could kill them both with one slap. I wound up for the hit (they were big fruit flies, okay?) and I… missed. The fruit flies that is. What I hit was the fruit fly trap (that’s not working). It fell off the shelf knocking a wine glass into the sink where it broke. Damnit! I thought. I smashed a wine glass for nothing.
But that’s not where it ended.
This morning I was getting Alex ready for camp. He followed me into the kitchen and started complaining that his foot hurt. I didn’t get a chance to look at it; someone knocked at the door. While I dealt with that, Alex began to scream. He didn’t come out of the kitchen and the man at the door (the postman) is Deaf, so I ignored Alex and finished up with the postman. When I got back into the kitchen there was blood everywhere. It took me a while to figure out where it was coming from – turns out there was a cut–a hole actually–on the bottom of his foot. Yes, the fruit flies strike again.
So while I was discussing with Alex whether or not he would go to camp, Chris, my Autistic son came downstairs and began to insist I take Alex out of the house. He had plans to spend time in the living room (rather than the computer room where he locks himself whenever his little brother is home). When Chris has plans, they’re not easily changed. He ranted. He yelled. He swore. He threatened. He banged doors and hit walls. And then he went for a walk. Luckily by the time he came back he’d calmed himself – he even apologised and gave me a hug. I still couldn’t help imagine what might have happened if he’d been hit by a car or something while he was out. It’s the writer in me… and I’ve always had a bit of a morbid imagination. Anyway, I could just see it.
Officer: What happened, Ma’am?
Me: Well you see, it all began with an attempted murder… of two fruit flies.
The morals of the story? Karma’s truly a bitch. And never underestimate the significance of a fruit fly.
As many of you know, my epic work-in-progress (my novel The Great Dagmaru) is a paranormal romance about a magician and his assistant. As many of you also know, I have great fun doing research in the interest of making the book as believable as possible. This research has in the past included staying in the haunted mansion in Kingston that inspired the setting, and traveling to Ottawa to spend an afternoon backstage at the National Arts Centre, where one of the performances in my novel takes place. (Check out the links. There are pictures.)
Now I have a new and exciting opportunity ahead of me. This time it’s a little more nerve-wracking. Last weekend when I was again visiting Kingston, I met a magician. And he’s agreed to let me interview him! A real live magician! *ahem* Once the interview is complete I plan to make an article out of it and sell it to a publication. Depending on the slant I put on it, I may pitch it to an online magazine for kids, a parenting magazine, or even as a general interest piece for the Huffington Post. At the moment I’m still coming up with questions. I have quite a few already, but I don’t want to miss anything important. Some of them will pertain to background information that might not even make it into the novel, but they’re things that are necessary for me to understand. Most of the interview will, I hope, shed some light on what makes a magic show fun to watch and what makes a magician want to perform. Not too much light though… it’s the mystery that makes watching worthwhile.
An awful lot is going into the making of my novel. With this article, not only will I have the benefit of the knowledge of someone in the business (a real live magician! *ahem*), but I’ll have something extra to add to my resumé. One way or another, I’m having a blast. It’s all adding up to an experience that not a lot of people get.
Go me!
I used to be very much a horse person. I loved horses as a kid – wanted to spend all my time with horses, so I talked my parents into sending me to horse camp where I learned how to ride. I remember being assigned my horse at the beginning of the week – the one I would ride twice a day. Oh how happy I was when I finally graduated to the more high-spirited horses!
I began of course with the ones that just plodded along. The ones that give the rider the illusion that he or she is in control but in fact there is nuthin’ that’s gonna change that beast’s mind about following the horse-bum in front of it. I swear sometimes those kinds of horses are sleep walking.
Years later as an adult I went back to farm where I had formerly gone to camp and got a job taking out trail rides. The number one rule for guiding a trail is to watch the customers, meaning that as a guide, I’d spend three quarters of my time twisted around in the saddle facing forward but looking back. This includes while trotting and galloping. I remember my first trail – my God was I nervous! Nervous as in I didn’t have a single drop of spit in my mouth nervous. Riding backwards while running turned out to be the least of my worries that day.
You see, every once in a while we’d get a real ass (and I’m not talking about a donkey) go out for a ride. It was normally a young guy who wanted to show off to his friends how skilled he was on horseback. Invariably the ass had no idea what he was doing. Normally we could spot them 100 miles off and stick them on one of the aforementioned plodders. No problem, right? I got one of these guys my very first trail ride ever. And somehow he managed to do the one thing that would get a plodder’s attention.
We had on the farm a thing we called “the gallop strip.” It was a stretch of trail facing away from the barn (because if you gallop a horse in the direction of the barn it ain’t gonna stop) that nine times out of ten the more high-spirited horses would behave themselves on, and the plodders would get up to a trot… which was hilarious when we got one of our macho men on one, because he’d be bouncing all over the place totally out of control. Not so much on my first time out.
My macho man managed to hold his horse back through sheer brutality when everyone else started to run. Me, not being experienced, tried but failed to slow everyone else down (a lesson I quickly learned). So when the plodder, freaked out that his horsey friends’ bums had left without him, he finally bolted. The horse passed the trail line, passed me and took off for the barn. There I was screaming at the guy as he’s getting farther and farther away (with not an ounce of spit which was difficult) to pull back on the reins and stop squeezing with his feet which was what was making the horse go faster, I couldn’t chase him because the rest of my trail would chase me…
Needless to say I ended my first trail ride as a guide in tears. But, as they say, you’ve just got to dust yourself off and get right back on, right? I loved that job; I did it for about five years. And I’ve got a million stories to go with it.
So much for my letter of the alphabet today, eh? Oh wait – one of the synonyms for “high-spirited” is “dashing.” That works. 😀
Me, at 12 years old
BATZAP by Doobster @ Mindful Digressions
Though after eleven days I’d had plenty of time to miss my family, it was with a deep sense of sadness that I packed up all of my belongings and set out from my hotel room on the morning of December 17th, 2014. Since my flight wasn’t scheduled until 5pm, I was pleased that the hotel agreed to hang on to my luggage, so I was able to wander about for a while before I made my way to the airport.
I figured, why not go on a little adventure? I’ve been on the London Eye, so I figured I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to go on the Giant Wheel in Palette Town. Among many pictures were these:
From Daiba Park:
Here’s what I wrote in my notebook:
Palette Town, ODaiba, Tokyo – Tanto Tanto Restaurant, Venus Fort
Spent the first part of the morning packing and checking out of the hotel. They kept my bags so I’m out wandering. Went on the Giant Wheel where it was VERY windy. I think I may have prayed a little not to die. Walked a lot after that – to Daiba Park and then back here for lunch. The solitude in Daiba Park was almost overwhelming. I felt like I was alone at the ends of the earth.
The restaurant and the Venus Fort mall were pretty amazing. Here are some pictures – the first two were taken from my table in the restaurant:
It wasn’t until I got back outside that I found out I could have had the “dog.”
For Jason
And finally, Haneda Airport.
I had an incredible time in my eleven days of wandering, getting lost, meeting some wonderful new friends in person – Jay Dee, Susie, and Shigeyoshi – (please click on their names for links!) sightseeing and taking pictures and really just re-discovering who I am and what I’m capable of. And of course, the spectacular concert which was the reason I went.
I was there!!
Japan is a truly amazing country. Its people, its culture, its natural beauty… all of it. Rather than try to write something new, I’ll leave you with a journal entry I wrote the first time I left there. For me, nothing has changed and as I said at the end of this, “Japan, I will return.”
October 31, 2005 4:58pm, Kansai Airport, Japan
Well, this will be my last entry here in Japan. I’m sitting at the gate with my Starbucks tall mocha looking at the plane I’ll be spending the next 10 hours in.
What am I going to miss about this place? The fact that you can smile at anyone and they’ll smile back. The bowing. (There’s nothing quite like having a gorgeous young man bow to you, particularly when he’s a tough looking goth type.) Eating with chopsticks. The endless *different* scenery, both natural and manmade – for the natural scenery, you can’t look in any direction without seeing mountains. And of course the faces. Amazing how many Japanese people there are here!
I really do feel home here. I feel like I belong. Is there time in my life to find this place as I should, and everything that belongs to me here? If it is within my power I will return
Nihon ni kaerimasu.
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