Month: January 2021

Downtime — #WeekendCoffeeShare on 30 January 2021

by Lizl/Liz Bennefeld
photograph by Tea Creative | Soo Chung @teacreativelife
Wish List for Afternoon Tea

Welcome! Tea, coffee, and yogurt for the fruit. Help yourself! I have been enjoying a slice of ham and a cup of baked beans. Fruit and yogurt for lunch. I think I had just Toddy coffee and a square of chocolate for breakfast. That’s my regular morning fare. It would be nice to have tea with guests, again, someday.

Moon behind the clouds

The week has passed quickly, here. The weather has been variable. This weekend, we’ve had freezing rain and snow advisories. My husband has scheduled additional volunteer shifts, so he will be out and about one weekday and both weekends for a few hours. I did get out a few times with the camera. This is the photo that I liked the best. Taken from the back step, looking West.

Poems that I have written since my last Coffee Share post: Tired, Butterfly Moments, Rough-Chopped Breakfast, Inside/Outside, Beginnings, and Time’s Flight. Looking through my text files, I find that I have started rough drafts on at least half a dozen other poems during the last week or two. I’ve been sorting out the files, today, and deciding what I want to do with each…delete, rewrite, or polish and finalize.

Reading in progress:The Octagonal Raven(Modesitt, reread), The Listening Path (Julia Cameron, new), Blood Banked (Tanya Huff, short stories),The Quiet Gentleman (Georgette Heyer, reread), and a couple that I decided I didn’t like enough to finish reading or wasn’t in the mood for at the moment.

Again, I have slept a lot, in addition to reading.  The air quality, again, has not been good, even though the classification for pm2.5 is “Moderate”, which has kept me inside and mostly near the air cleaner. I look forward to colder weather outside and drier air. The past few days, I have been able to exercise for short time periods. Not enough.

I enjoyed my two-hour Zoom meet-up with Liz D. and friends, Saturday afternoon, while Al was away. Tomorrow, I hope to make it to the 11:00 Meeting for Worship, also via Zoom. The app has not been cooperative, recently. Thinking overloaded systems somewhere. And this evening, I uninstalled my Microsoft 365 module, on this (13″ screen HP convertible), and I now have LibreOffice on both of my laptop computers. It is nice to not need an office suite anymore. I’ve used so many of them over the past 34 (?) years. I do believe that Microsoft’s Office software has been the most frustrating of the lot. Happy to leave it behind.

I’m finding that my eyes get quite tired at this time of night, and so I must go away and get some sleep, now. I am looking forward to my appointment (only seven months late) with the optometrist, this coming week.

Natalie, at Natalie the Explorer blog, is the new host for Weekend Coffee Share. Her post for this weekend is at this URL, along with the Inlinkz link party with web addresses for other participants in this weekend’s coffee share.

Thank you for stopping in! I appreciate it very much.

Love and best wishes,
Lizl

Featured photo by Tea Creative │ Soo Chung on Unsplash.

The end of a long week | #WeekendCoffeeShare on 22 Jan. 2021

by Lizl/Liz Bennefeld

Well, almost the end of the long week.

Welcome! This is a decompression day (2nd of 2 for the week.) I forgot I was to get up and make breakfast, and so I am eating now, before lunchtime catches up with me. There’s v. dark chocolate, mixed nuts (with or without peanuts), Toddy coffee (of course), and fresh mozzarella cheese, and also filtered water, cold for drinking or ready to heat for tea.

It was nice to visit the dentistry office, on Wednesday. Too long since Al and I last took the drive to Hawley. Next month, if all is well, I get to meet with the optometrist, also. I’ve a small cavity starting on the gum line, so hope to go back, sometime after the eye exam, if the weather and pandemic cooperate.

Wednesday evening, I attended the free Poetry Heals workshop via Zoom, which was fantastic and just what I need. Listening, being heard, and writing poems together. Yesterday, a lot of notes for more poems and resting. Catching up on sleep. The Scampers and I also attended, via Zoom, the weekly noon Meeting for Worship for Healing.

We (the Scampers and I) awakened before the alarm went off. They had breakfast, but I had not. The nuts are good, and the chocolate was delicious. I’ve a Zoom meet-up scheduled for this afternoon with the four oldest siblings in the family. That would be the Bay area in California, eastern North Dakota, the Twin Cities in Minnesota, and Connecticut. I need to fit a lunch into the next hour.

Tomorrow noon, I will enjoy an hour’s Social gathering with Liz Danforth and friends via Zoom. This week, I have been rereading a 2-book story arc by L. E. Modesitt, Jr., comprising The Parafaith War and The Ethos Effect, both of which have informed my view on current U.S. events; Blood Banked: Stories from the Blood Verse, by Tanya Huff, in ebook format., so I can read them comfortably ; and I have just started rereading William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth: A Deep Map, which merges prose and prose poetry—quite addicting.

Twice, this past week, I got out into the snow-and-cold with the Scampers to take photographs. Hope you find something you like among them.

Poems that I wrote, this week: Winter Art,  Room Enough, and Winter Grass.

I hope to visit your blog for coffee, sometime over the weekend. Thanks for dropping by, here.

Hugs & much love,
Lizl

P.S. Natalie’s Weekend Coffee Share post for this weekend is here: Natalie the Explorer.

Winds and Snow, Poetry and Naps — 16 January 2021 #WeekendCoffeeShare

by Lizl/Liz Bennefeld

Welcome to the end of the week! Coffee, tea, filtered water…or something stronger? I am working on my first cup of tea. The weather is cold. The blizzard continued south of us, just into South Dakota. The roads are icy, here, and we’re not going anywhere for awhile. Al picked up a few things at the store last night; we settled in and waited for the day to improve. Al will be getting out today; he has picked up an extra volunteer shift for this afternoon.

Some photographs from Thursday before I quit venturing outside with the Scampers. Earlier in the week, I was able to get on the stationary bike in the gazebo, a couple days, and put in 6..5 miles total. Not much, but enjoyable.

Hoverfly on Wild Flax
Sweet Williams

My cold and sore throat are ongoing. Sneezing has begun, and I’m quite uncomfortable. My temperature, this morning, was 97°F, so I’m guessing it’s still just a head cold running its course. I sneezed enough that the Scampers are not lying on my feet, keeping them warm. If it doesn’t clear up, I expect I won’t be welcome at the dentist’s office, this next week. Ah! now Scampers.

This week was more comfortable than the previous, because I sat down to write poems and enjoyed that activity. I pushed myself to write, a distraction that gaining momentum until today, when, you know…Weekend Coffee Share. One of the poems that I wrote is on this blog, a post on the 13th: “Weather forecast”, and others from this week are on my Quilted Poetry blog. Writing poems from other people’s images/photographs loosened up my creative output, and left me concentrate on the words rather than spreading myself to the photo work as well.

Last week’s Mediterranean cooking inspired me to vary my diet a bit, this past week, with canned fish and baked beans. I  enjoyed poppy seed dressing on my afternoon green salad, yesterday. This weekend’s “excitement” is Saturday’s two-hour social/co-working Zoom session with some online friends. If I don’t sleep through it.

awakened early
by the telephone alarm
8:30 AM
let out the dogs and fed them
now we’re ready for a nap

The Scampers actually are settled in to sleep, now. I think that I will follow their example and hope to feel more alert when one o’clock rolls around.

Natalie is our new host for Weekend Coffee Share. (Thank you, Natalie!) You will find her coffee share blog post HERE: Coffee Share #2 | Words and Photos, along with the InLinkz link.
 
I look forward to reading your Weekend Coffee Share blog post as I am able.
 
Best wishes for your week!
 
Hugs,
Lizl

Decompressing | #WeekendCoffeeShare on 8 Jan. 2021

by Lizl/Liz Bennefeld

Welcome to the end of the week! Coffee, tea, filtered water…or something stronger? Friday is an uncluttered day, normally, but I have a Zoom meeting scheduled for tonight: Mediterranean Cooking demonstration and discussion. A graduate of my Alma Mater has written a book. I think I can eat most of what’s Mediterranean diet offerings, and so, why not? Novel activities are supposed to be therapeutic while one is confined to quarters.

Living in the Dakotas, a long way from either coast, I was happy to have on Wednesday evening’s schedule the weekly Poetry Heals online workshop. Opportunities to put feelings into words, share among ourselves, and end the day on an even keel. Camaraderie in a safe environment was a good wrap-up for my evening.

I have spent another week in relaxed leisure, not really writing many poems or even taking photographs, although I have enjoyed leafing through my photography archives and looking at hoverflies, flowers, and frost on the trees. Also, browsing through poems written through the last five years or so.

This week, I am/have been rereading favorite story arcs from Recluse novels by L. E. Modesitt, Jr. I am trying to write, but so many ideas run through my mind, right now, that I have text file notes saved on two laptops in addition to the journal beside my bed. I think perhaps no more poems over two or three lines for some time, and as you most likely know, the shortest works take the longest to write, once one starts thinking about getting down the right words.

Thanks for stopping by! As I mentioned last week’s Weekend Coffee Share, Natalie the Explorer volunteered as the new host, and her coffee share post for this week is here: Welcome | Two in One.

Stay safe, y’all!

Love & hugs,
Lizl