A Fine Point

I’m a writer. This means I work with words, little things that have meaning and must be treated with respect.

Yes, I write in a colloquial way here, but I also know a thing or two about grammar, having spent 14 years of my career as an editor.

Phonics? Yep. Give me some phonemes and graphemes, baby.

Rhythm and flow? I’m a poet and I know it.

Spelling? Oh, heck yeah. In French, too, back before I let my French collect cobwebs.

Yet I’ve been making a giant mistake my whole life, one that I must confess to you now.

I’ve been both spelling and saying poinsettia incorrectly, as pointsettia.

PoinTsettia.

POYNT-set-ee-ah.

Ain’t no t after the n in that word.

Oops.

Anyway, here’s a little pic I took today. It’s a close-up of a POINSETTIA.

A close-up of part of a poinsettia.

Holidailies 2025!

Hello, friends! It’s time for Holidailies! What a year it has been, so I will preface this by saying I’m not sure I’m going to be able to post every day, though I’m going to give it the ol’ college try. I’m moving at the end of the month, so between that, work, and not the best of health, I may miss a few days.

Don’t worry, it’s not my heart. It’s just other crap happening at the worst possible time that makes everything that much more exhausting to deal with. And it’s Gee, You’re Pushing 60 crap, at that. Like, I’m having a gallstone scare at the moment. Right. I’ve become the crone who writes about gallstones. The Gallstone Crone. Santa, if you’re listening, please bring me a new and healthy body to live in, kthnx.

As for moving, I still don’t know where I’m moving to. Oh, it will be somewhere in the county, but I haven’t signed a lease yet. Ye gods, people, what they put people through to apply for an apartment now. They want to look at the deposit history in my bank account, run a criminal background check, confirm my job and salary with my employer, and collect a pint of blood. I once had to get a State Department background check and it wasn’t nearly that much. I asked the guy why all of it was necessary and he said it was because so many landlords are getting scammed now. Beats me. All I know is that from what I’m seeing on the socials and message boards, this kind of thing has only cropped up in the past few years, because I didn’t have to do any of this four years ago. In fact, when I first moved back here 10 years ago from Long Island, I didn’t even have a job. The prevailing attitude was “No worries. If you don’t pay, we throw you out. Simple as that.”

So that’s a bit of stress I don’t need right now.

And now for a Holidailies prompt: What have you been most looking forward to this holiday season?

Holidailies, of course! It has become my favorite holiday tradition, a time to catch up with blog buddies and get into the spirit. I’m going to see the State Christmas trees on Sunday, so I hope to have pictures worth sharing from that. You know, if the lights aren’t green again this year. If they are, I’ll find something else to photograph and post.

In the meantime, here’s the first ornament I bought this year. I got it in Arizona while I was in Phoenix for a work trip last March. It’s a little more golden than yellow, but I had to use a flash so the surrounding lights wouldn’t muddy the other colors.

A Christmas ornament featuring a hummingbird, a cactus, and some flowers.

I’d never been to Arizona before that trip, and what little time I spent there makes me want to go back for a vacation. There is something healing and restorative there. Maybe in March. The weather was lovely when I was there and some locals told me it’s really the best time to visit, before it gets too hot. Something to think about.

Until next time, ho, ho, ho and please pardon any typos.

A Dimmer

My mind is a bit muddled tonight, like my brain is saturated in goo, owing to a whopping two hours of sleep. I just didn’t feel tired when last my head hit a pillow, perhaps because I forgot to turn on my blue light filter, f.lux. That app is a lifesaver when I remember to use it. It gradually turns your screen a dark salmon color as the sun sets outside. The idea is to keep your eyes from tricking your brain into thinking it’s daylight. Daywalkers need that like a hole in the head, so I’m glad for the wonders of modern technology that counter the other wonders of modern technology.

No, this is not sponsored content. I’ve been using that app for years. An ex-boyfriend who was partially color-blind hated it, so when I stayed at his place and wanted to keep him from looking over my shoulder while I was reading or writing, I’d turn it on.

See, one night, before you could stream YouTube directly out of your TV, I VERY STUPIDLY agreed to hook up my laptop to his huge flat-screen so we could indulge our sadistic humor with some FAIL videos. I had another tab open on my browser which just happened to display an old private blog of mine that had some randy fiction I had written when earthly pleasures like that still interested me. He clicked on the tab and the first line to the story on the screen was a doozy: Jake was always up for a good, hard fuck.

“NICE.”

“Oops. I had forgotten about that.”

“Who’s Jake?”

Ah, crap. Here we go.

“Don’t worry. This entire blog is fiction.”

“But who IS he?”

“It’s FICTION.”

“Who’s it ABOUT?”

“NO one.”

After about four rounds of that I said, “Will you look at the date on this, please? It was before I divorced my ex-husband.”

“So it’s about HIM?”

“No. I said it was FICTION.”

“So you made it up?”

“That’s what fiction is, yes?”

“I guess.”

I don’t think he bought it because for three months after that he kept trying to figure out who Jake was.

Anyway, that’s when I started turning f.lux on as a deterrent whenever I was reading or writing on my laptop at his place. That was about 12 years ago, so it’s an old app.

And this, kids, is why you don’t go poking around your beloved’s laptop when your beloved is a writer. You might up in said writer’s public blog years after you break up.

Now I need refreshment, so I leave you with this:

An oil slick, with a haiku that says "dark prism/slips over surface/suffocation"
Image: Ante Hamersmit on Unsplash