Month: March 2021

Chill weather, lots of sleep #WeekendCoffeeShare 2021-03-26

by Lizl/Liz Bennefeld
cocker spaniels on loveseat, asleep, scattered toys on the cushions
Afternoon Nap

Welcome to my weekend! Coffee and tea are hot, and cheese and flax bread are on the table. It’s early enough in the day, so far, that I have just finished breakfast, which consisted of mixed nuts, a square of vdark (90%) chocolate, and hot Toddy coffee reconstituted with milk, rather than water. The latest batch of coffee concentrate turned out to be a bit strong. Need to dilute it with more water, this week.

Overcast sky, today, and humid, but no snow or rain, yet. I’d rather, the snow, but we’ve now got the rain. The Weather Service page headlines include a “Latest Drought Briefing”, rather than spring flood forecasts. Oh, my!

This week, I usually slept until my alarm clock rang at 9:00 a.m. Mostly, I slept for at least eight or nine hours a night, although one night I was up until 4:30 a.m., writing poetry, lifting hand weights for a while, and then fooling around with my Patchwork Prose domain WordPress blog. Really need a place where I can find what I am looking for (poems, song lyrics, stories, essays, &c.). I have been forgetting to eat, though.

I feel like I was more interactive, this week. The one-hour social Zoom meeting for last Saturday turned into a two-hour social/co-working session, instead. Yesterday, I enjoyed the live two-hour webinar event by the city of Redmond, Washington, featuring a poetry reading by five of the city’s Poets Laureate, of whom I know two, if only via the Internet. I think I’ve got all of Jeannine Hall Gailey’s poetry collections to date. The other, Michael Dylan Welch, coordinated the February National Haiku Writing Month end-of-month poetry-reading sessions via Zoom, the last weekend in February.

Again this week, I took part in the Wednesday evening Poetry Heals workshop. I wrote a poem, that evening, the prompt being the current violent civil unrest occurring throughout the country. Our metropolitan area has not been immune to it.

After taking some time away from writing and photography, I restarted my outdoor exercise routine of using the stationary bike in the backyard gazebo. Up from 0.3 miles to 3.0 miles, this week. Wearing my face mask when outside definitely helps! Tuesday through Thursday, the forecasted pollen level had increased from 0.7 to 3.0 (scale of 0-12). I also got a few photographs taken, more towards the end of the week.

This weekend, I hope to continue my poem-a-day writing, leading into National Poetry Month on April 1. I should also finish my computer data backups and get another backup drive to the safe deposit box, next week. Sunday evening (7 p.m. my time, I think, Speculative Poetry presenting a poetry reading on Facebook and Zoom by Terese Mason Pierre. New to me, and so I may look for some of her published work beforehand. Two weeks later, the scheduled poet is Jennifer Crow, whose poems have sometimes sung to me. I hope to hear more.

Getting on toward the Scampers’ next mealtime, and so I must put this post aside for the time being. Best wishes for your weekend and the week to come. (Finally back to finish up and it’s almost eight o’clock at night!)

Love & many hugs,
Lizl

Our host for #WeekendCoffeeShare is now Natalie, of Natalie the Explorer, whose post for this weekend is both fascinating and eclectic. You may find her current post and Link party here: https://natalietheexplorer.home.blog/2021/03/26/5-themes-for-a-fun-week/

Endings and beginnings, 19 March 2021 #WeekendCoffeeShare

by Lizl/Liz Bennefeld

dogs, asleep together
Naptime

Welcome! Choice of hot black tea or Toddy coffee, cold or hotted up. Also, cheese and apples, today. I have already switched from Toddy coffee to my first pot of tea for the day. The sun is shining, again today, and there’s no mention of snow in the weather forecast, now, until the middle of next week. A few photographs from Thursday:

Afternoon rain

This past week has been relaxed. I have spent a lot of time napping between chores. I have not been feeling busy or ambitious. The air quality has not been as good as I would have liked, as the snow has melted and molds become a problem. I keep forgetting to put on a face mask before moving from the air-filtered room—a habit that has faded away over the winter. I did get out to the gazebo, this week, to use the stationary bike. Will take me a while to work up to where I was last autumn. Note: Yesterday (Thursday). I completed .3 mile on the stationary bike, not wearing my face mask; today, wearing the mask, my total was 2.3 miles. Guess I’ll work harder at remembering to take one with me whenever I go outside. 🙂

May I mention that winter is my most favorite season of the year? This past winter was, in terms of snow and cold, quite inadequate. I think that my energy level and enthusiasm, excepting outdoor photography, plummets by ~90% with the arrival of spring. It always takes time to readjust to the relative hot.

No “special” events, this past week, except for the Speculative Poetry Reading, Sunday evening. A new-to-me poet, Jacqueline Johnson. Both engaging and thoughtful. The Wednesday evening Poetry Heals workshop was enjoyable. Good exercises. Especially enjoyed writing to the photo prompts. Thursday noon meeting for worship has been a welcome activity since it was first initiated, this past winter. My highlight for this weekend, I think, will be Saturday’s two-hour co-working/social Zoom meeting. I hope to use at least one of the 40-minute work sessions for physical exercise (dance and hand weights) and for playing the piano.

My “project” for the next while is to do something new and different with my patchworkprose dot com domain, My Notebook, which I lost track of over the past year or so. One of my very first domains. Right now, it’s just housing poems and scribbles that I don’t want to lose track of.

It’s almost time for the Scampers to wake up and ask for their noon yogurt, so I’m going to sign off. Best wishes for your day and week!

Love & hugs,
Lizl

As always, Natalie the Explorer, our current host for Weekend Coffee Share, has an interesting post to share, as well as this week’s InLinkz link party where you will find more participants from this week’s Weekend Coffee Share: How I Enjoy Spring.

Spring is ahead — #weekendcoffeeshare 2021-03-13

by Lizl/Liz Bennefeld

Thank you for stopping by, today! Short on munchies, right now. Must find more variety, next time my husband goes grocery shopping: yogurt and blackberries, fresh mozzarella cheese, and some gluten-free flax bread that I can thaw out to go with the tinned sardines. There is, however, hot tea, if you’re not a cold-brew coffee fan.

I was hoping to write my Weekend Coffee Share post on Friday, so as to clear my weekend. Didn’t happen. I am double-booked, Saturday afternoon, for social Zoom get-togethers. One of the meetings was new to me, and so I made that my priority, this first time around. I’m glad that I did not skip it. I added another writer to my Patreon list, about a month ago, is Steve Gould, who hosted the meeting. Three of his books are on my “perpetually reread” list.

I still haven’t done a lot of writing since the beginning of March. Still winding down from the Internet social activities and the poetry writing for April, which is National/Global Poetry Writing Month (Na/GloPoWriMo), and so I get to do February all over again?!?

At the beginning of the week, I wrote a poem for the Ronovan Writes Haiku weekly challenge: Silly songs. On Thursday, I came late to the daily hour-long Lunchtime Write-In, but sat down to write seven haiku/senryu during the last 20 minutes. It was a lot of fun, just copying them from my head to the computer file, one after another. Different from the photo-haiga (poem accompanied by a photograph) that I mostly wrote during February’s NaHaiWriMo. (Link to page on my Written Word journal: Thursday morning thoughts). And another, which I wrote today/Sunday morning: Remember.

I had hopes of getting an appointment for a J&J covid-19 vaccination. Schedule an appointment today for a time slot on Sunday: no time slots left by the time my alarm rang, this morning. Al has had both of his vaccinations, and so I am not concerned about coming down with the flu, myself; I spend most of my nights and days three or four feet from my HEPA air cleaner. Perhaps when everyone else who wants a shot, gets one, there will be a leftover J&J shot for me. I expect that once everything calms down, again, my healthcare provider will be able to schedule an appointment for me at the clinic.

Natalie (our host for #WeekendCoffeeShare:  Weekend Coffee Share: A Year Later) asked a question about my new reality versus a year ago this month.  Everything considered, this is the healthiest  and  physically strongest that I have felt since my breathing problems landed me in hospital, nine years ago. And the most contented. A long interval of ” between crises” that I am very much appreciating. Mostly, the creative process really does flow, and I am taking advantage of that. And, of course, I have been more and more often in conversation during the past twelve months than in the preceding nine years.

The marvels of the technology culture as the deteriorating global air quality continues to restrict increasing numbers of people into physical isolation.  Tradeoffs! Gotta love ’em! Double-pane glass and carpeting on the floor of my gazebo. Even so, my world has expanded and circles of acquaintances and new friends continue to multiply.

The bewitching hours are approaching, and my lap is filled with puppy, and so I must close this somewhat abruptly.

My Scamper and I wish you sweet dreams and restful sleep!

Lizl and Thadd

Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay