Posted in Amuse-bouche du jour, tagged birds, Blog, Gail, Parrot, Pet, Wordless Wednesday on May 7, 2014| 3 Comments »
If a picture is worth a thousand words, look at this one! It looks like a bird, but it doesn’t fly. It looks like a parrot and it can talk. A word to the wise…Things Are Not Always What They Appear To Be.
Let me know in a comment what you think this is really a picture of????
A shout-out and thanks to Gail for sending me this photo – pretty amazing!
What Am I?
Posted in 100 Word Challenge, tagged Arts, Blog, Linky Tools, Publishers, Screenwriting, Tools, velvet verbosity, WordPress, Writers Resources on April 10, 2014| 3 Comments »
An orange candle burning in a dark environment with a bright flame. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I saw the usual signs; She was pale, haggard-looking and yet still animated. I tried to get her to listen knowing full well she wouldn’t. Yesterday she was so anxious to go out. Not home even an hour and she was jonesing to leave. Meeting her friends at the mall and then out to a movie. The night before she went to a party and even though she made it home by her midnight curfew, she was still up for hours on the phone. It’s no wonder she was feeling sick. She was always burning the candle at both ends.
BURN is the word in this week’s 100 Word Challenge through Velvet Verbosity. You can read more at http://www.velvetverbosity.com/
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Posted in BY THE WAY, Smooth or Crunchy, tagged Blog, Chris Phillips, Cooking, Facebook, Germany, Home, Murray Head, WordPress on July 26, 2012| 1 Comment »
Oh my that’s quite an arrogant headline, now isn’t it? Well I just felt the desire to shout from the cyber rooftop that I just received an award! The Liebster Award actually…
I’ve been nominated!
Of course it certainly helps to have wonderful friends in the blogosphere – and YES I do have a friend in the cyber world, Lora, who is an expat living in Germany with her husband. Lora nominated my blog along with a few others. I love and follow her blog as she explores her new home, her new life and how she is adapting day by day. I’ve learned a lot about German customs, something I am keenly interested in as I am half-German. But that’s only part of what Lora has done with her blog, http://liferealities.wordpress.com/ ; She loves to cook and create wonderful meals and with that love and talent, she started a group called “What sha Cooking“. It is a group of men and women who love to cook and each month there’s a theme for your creation. Photos are posted on the Facebook page and we all vote.
This award is along the lines of Pass it forward! Now that I’ve received the honor, I will pass it along to some bloggers who I follow and who I think deserve some recognition for their efforts.
1. Spinny Liberal http://spinnyliberal.com/ Spinny was writing daily about local, regional and especially national politics. She has a sharp wit, and sometimes a sharper tongue when she explores issues that light fire in the hearts of many liberals and conservatives also. Last I knew Spinny was taken a hiatus from blogging due to some medical reasons. However, check the website often, she is brilliant.
2. Photo Nature Blog http://photonatureblog.com/ I don’t remember how I came across this blog, probably through Freshly Pressed. His photographs are just amazing. He takes photos of birds, flowers, clouds, bugs and his style reminds me of pbenjay’s own photographer, Murray Head. Everything becomes the thing of beauty it is through his camera lens.
3. Devastating The Obvious http://josiahblacksblog.wordpress.com/ So Josiah Black a/k/a Captain Obvious is one very bright young man. He is clever, sardonic and I am continually amazed at his subject matter. Actually I’m a bit in awe of his talent, not to mention envious!
4. Texana’s Kitchen http://texanaskitchen.com/ What’s not to like here? I’m going to quote her heading here because it truly says it all; Yummy recipes, Pretty pictures, Pithy commentary. There are hundreds, nay thousands of food-related blogs. Some are full of extraordinary time-consuming recipes and some are devoted to making thrifting with food an art form and neither of them are for me. Probably what really endeared Texana to me was her blog on ice cream, need I say more?
5. A Detailed House http://adetailedhouse.com/ I do love design, I have been in real estate for over 40 years, I love the color pink, I have built 2 houses, decorated 4, am a certified Home Stager ergo – I love this site! Amazingly, they’re doing it themselves for the most part. The home is magnificent. Go to and take a visual tour.
Well there you have it, I have passed it forward. Congratulations to one and all, you have been nominated for a Liebster Blog Award.
Posted in BY THE WAY, Smooth or Crunchy, tagged Arts, Blog, Blog award, blogger, Creative writing, Search Engines, Twitter on May 18, 2011| 6 Comments »
Seek and ye shall find
Can’t seem to get the blog posts out in the order of topics of my week, for a couple of weeks now…true I’ve been busier than usual; very busy working on an exclusive listing of mine which is sold ( I hope) and will be more officially sold once the contract is signed AND I did have Finley Ray over the weekend BUT still….
I look at the stats every day and the number of readers is amazing to me HOWEVER, they are not readers of these daily posts, these are people coming to the blog thru a search engine. Of course if I were just counting numbers I should be thrilled BUT what the majority of visitors are coming to read is not what I’m writing about now!
Every day and I mean EVERY DAY, several people search for, are you ready for this? – CANDYLAND, or CANDYLAND GAME BOARD, and BUNDLING BOARD, and CARCANO, CLUE GAME and ROBIN BIRD. This seems strange to me and like I said if I was just interested in numbers, it would be gratifying. BUT these readers are just one night stands, guerilla warfare readers.
Perhaps I shouldn’t complain – after all I made a decision early on that my blog would not just be an online diary of my life and I also knew having a structure to your blogs if you weren’t a niche blogger was the only way to keep on blogging and building your readership. So here I am today, whining about the fact that most of the readers of this blog are one-timers and what they are coming here for is information, not me. Can I handle this?
I want to write more personally than I have lately, however, a lot of what is going on in my life I can’t share with the world; first of all this isn’t a personal diary blog, secondly, I don’t feel right about sharing some of the problems/stress I’ve been having for the last several months because it involves a couple of other people who didn’t sign up to have their lives exposed and I’m honoring that as best I can. AND because if I started to write about a couple of these issues, this blog would become a rant like you wouldn’t believe! There are things going on around me that are being dealt with in ways that I totally disagree with and find that handling to be ineffective and dumb. The people that really know me, know how much I abhor stupid behavior, enabling and living in denial. I’m a pragmatic bottom line person and believe you just do it! I’ve had to bite my tongue so many times lately, I’m sure there’s a huge hole in it.
OK, well having even said that much was a bit of a vent and I feel better already. I also keep reminding myself of one of my favorite montras; people do what they want to do. It’s so simple and yet so true. You can talk till you’re blue in the face, you can reason, point out the logic, attempt to persuade and maybe the end result will be okay; However only if that person has come to believe/want to do it.
So now I still have to figure out why I haven’t posted a recipe in a couple of weeks, why my FAB FOTOS are always a day late, why I haven’t had a comment in a week!!! That is the worst of it, my readers…because either you’re not reading or what I’m writing is so banal it doesn’t evoke any comments. What to do, what to do?? You know in my business which has always been real estate sales, when you are in a slump, the boss would say go back to the basics.
I’m going to try to do that which in my case was more of a mixture of personal satirical observations of my life and the world around me and follow the post schedule to stay on track. I guess that means I need to look around me and use my creative writing skills to bring life’s every day adventures, foibles and characters to life in print in this blog. There was a TV station whose slogan was “Characters welcome” – I need to bring in some characters, lol.
Getting back on track, this is Wednesday so I best find a conspiracy theory that will enlighten us all!
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Countdown To 1000! “Help I Need Someone”…
Posted in BY THE WAY, Conspiracy Theory Wednesday, Everyday Food, Friends, From My Point of View - Personal commentary on Movies and Books, Six Word Memoirs, Smooth or Crunchy, Tasty Tidbits Tuesday, Thursday's Top Ten, tagged Apple, AppleStore, Assassination of John F. Kennedy, Blog, Directories, FAQs Help and Tutorials, History, Kennedy John Fitzgerald, Murray Head, Presidents, United States on October 22, 2013| 5 Comments »
Gemini (Photo credit: Justinsanity)
HELLO to all my followers and sometime readers. I am about to hit a real benchmark and I can hardly believe it myself! Wordpress keeps you informed on myriad details about your blog and your posts. Everyday I see how many visitors come to the blog and what the average number of views per person is as well as from what countries the hits are coming. I see which blog posts are the most popular, the number of views per month, and the search engine terms that people type in and end up on my blog.
All this information is useful and to some niche bloggers, it would be essential. Unfortunately for me I never found my niche. I write about my life, my travels, the foods I cook, the movies I see and often post information and research on dozens of totally unrelated things. I post photos of my grandchildren and the moon. I was fortunate enough to have my good friend, Murray Head send me hundreds of photos that I posted on Fab Foto Friday. Sounds a little scattered doesn’t it. I think that describes the mind of a person born on the cusp of Gemini and Taurus. At any given time, there are 3 minds at work with or against one another!
Well here’s where I’m at; I love writing my blog even though my husband and daughter wonder why. I freely admit that my blog like 99% of all blogs is more or less an egocentric stream of consciousness. Over the short life of this blog, I’ve tried various ideas to entice a following because even though I am (supposedly) writing this for myself, don’t think for a minute that I don’t relish seeing the number of hits the blog has each day. I loved Six Word Memoir Monday and may try to reinstate it but I need your input! Conspiracy Theory Wednesday was a fantastic exposeé on the Kennedy Assassination, Top Ten Thursday allows for a wide range of subject matter and Tasty Tidbits Tuesday and Every Day Food are one of my joys.
BUT now I WANT YOU! I am 7 posts short of ONE THOUSAND! WOWIE ZOWIE! I only have to write 7 more posts and I will have reached a real benchmark for myself. I would love it if you would comment and give me some ideas as to what these next 7 posts should be about; Do you want a repeat of one of your favs or do you have a scathingly (or not so scathingly) brilliant idea I can incorporate into a post?
Pretty Please?!
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