Friday Fictioneers – Detour

Friday Fictioneers! The continuing saga that answers the question, “How many different stories can people tell, if they all start from the same picture?” Take a look at Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ site to find out, and add your own story if you want to.

But first, please take a look at my version and let me know what you think of it.

Detour

It’d be funny, if I was in a better mood. I mean, who tucks a DETOUR sign between two trees with the arrow aiming you into the library? But I just figure it must be kids. Nothing to me.

I got enough to think about. Do I look to you like the kind of guy that goes to the library for fun? No? Hey, you’re pretty sharp.  I got perfectly good plans, no books involved.

No meetings either. “You show up at ten tomorrow morning”, they said, “or you know what happens.” Yeah. You know what? They can toss their job training out the window. I got to stay on track, no detours. I’m a busy man. I got banks to rob.

Colorful

Ailsa’s Travel Theme this week? Colorful. So here’s a rainbow for you. (Flowers are my fallback choice for color…but I tried to find photos of other types of things.)

Wordless Wednesday – November 26, 2014

Angularities

WordPress is asking for photos illustrating “angular” – so here goes. Hold tight – there are corners ahead.

Some things are artistically angular –

while others have both aesthetic and practical reasons for their angles.

-And then there’s the ultimate in practical angularity –

the rigging on a sailboat makes a pleasing design, but every one of those lines is there because it’s needed to control the boat.

Organized exhaustion

I haven’t been posting much lately. I definitely haven’t been posting regularly. And it’s all related to getting organized. Really.

One of the most urgent things I need to organize right now is my mother’s house – it has to be emptied and cleaned so we can sell it, and emptying it has turned out to be an enormous job. My parents always said they were organized, and the “public” parts of their house were a bit messy but not bad…but, it turns out, the other half of the house was a very different story. Clear out what you could see in one room, and you discovered yet another mess behind the first one.

So my husband and I spent a lot of the past summer working on that house, and when we weren’t at my mother’s, I was sorting through her paperwork I brought home with me. By September, I could barely use my left hand, and I was so exhausted I needed a couple of naps to get through the day.

It’s a good thing, in a way, that we had to cut way back on time spent at my mother’s house once school started; I desperately needed time to heal, and my husband wasn’t exactly bursting with energy either as he started teaching again. We’re slowly recovering – but every weekly trip to do more sorting and tossing leaves me drained again.

Aside from being too tired to post regularly, at this point I’m too tired to do more than the minimum for my own house. Even so, as soon as I finish my mom’s place, I need to start throwing out a lot of what we have here. That’s not “I need to” as in “I feel required to live up to social standards” – that’s “I need to” as in “Having a mess grates on my nerves (it never used to), and I desperately want to strip away as much as I can.”

I don’t think I’ll ever be a minimalist, but I’m starting to see the appeal.