Welcome to Weekend Coffee Share! This is a time to catch up with everyone’s news from last week, plans for the next, and current preoccupations (see our host Allison’s Coffee Share page for this week at her blog: Eclectic Alli). The InLinkz for Weekend Coffee Share is HERE!

I appreciate your dropping by for coffee and a chat, this afternoon…or whenever you do arrive. My week has had activities in it. We attended a volunteers appreciation dinner on Wednesday evening, and on Friday we got together with my brother Tim and his wife for an early dinner; they had come into town from Minneapolis to attend a memorial service for one of Tim’s life-long friends on Saturday morning. A sad occasion, but a very enjoyable meal. As my husband said afterward, getting together with them is always wonderful. The time goes by too fast, and we are sorry to see them leave again. We are not snapshot people, but if we were, I would share a photo of them across the restaurant table. I miss them when they’re gone.

If we were having coffee together, this afternoon, I would tell you that I have not been feeling well for most of the week. I do think that I didn’t appropriate enough “down time” between the photography workshop and the Poem-a-Day activity during the month of November. Speaking of which, Minnesota’s governor proclaimed November to be “Speculative Poetry Month”. I have now written a poem for each day of the month, through the tenth of the month. This does not surprise me, since I note on the Revision notes at the bottom of this page, that I started this post three days ago. Also, very few of my daily poems (which one can find at theartofdisorder.blogspot.com) are speculative poetry. The prose poem written for 9 November is (“No Questions, No Answers”}, though. Several poems have written themselves in streaming mode, so far. Almost always pleased by the results…when not unsettled by them. Okay, it is unsettling. But I don’t delete all of them. “Lost and Found” and “Covert Activities” (the 7th and the 2nd) survived the cut.

During the past week, I have been taking a nap over the noon hour. Trying to get to bed earlier, but that’s actually when my mind gets into gear. Late at night and first thing in the morning. Now that winter has arrived, I am not out with my camera so much, but once the poetry-writing month has finished, I am planning to dig out my photo archives for April through the first week in November, review them, and decide what to delete and what to keep. Easier to do, now that I am no longer taking my camera to family gatherings. Sometimes one doesn’t want to exchange memories for evidence.

As evidenced by my prose poem for the ninth, I am rereading the science fiction novels written by one of my favorite authors. Good companions to Francis Fukuyama’s two Political Order books. I have found over these many decades that I am an optimist living in a dystopia. It’s…interesting. As my brother indicated in our conversation, Friday, I disappeared into my bedroom sometime before my sophomore year in high school (I was the oldest surviving child of seven) and was seldom seen, after, by family, friends, or anyone else. But I completed several of the study programs that accompanied our Great Ideas Today volumes, and I read an awful lot of books.

After our parents died, having passed my Great Ideas Today set (but not the accompanying Encyclopaedia Britannica study guides) on to one of Tim’s children, I received the entire set including yearbooks from 1951 to the last year the yearbooks were issued. I’m pretty sure. The ones from home actually still have my notes in them. (Yes, I write in books, although not other people’s. Unless absentmindedly, having forgotten the book is not really mine. My subconscious still believes that all books that I own, have read, or want to read, should be and therefore are mine. Combatting that, I now have 2000 or more eBooks; in the early days, we did not have DRM, and so a lot of mine are in text and HTML formats)

In addition to buying my own set of Great Books of the Western World, once I graduated from college and got a job, I first bought my own piano and a new cornet. I had an apartment upstairs of a handicrafts store on downtown Broadway, where the tenant across the hall also played cornet. We played duets from my technique duets book; at home, I played duets with Tim, who had a trombone and the technique book in a suitable key. Later, I played for some years in the community band, although I quit the college concert band after one semester.

Curious! When you left home, what staples of civilized life did you find you needed to replicate/replace in order to survive in good order?

Again, my thanks for dropping in! The Scampers have informed me that it is time to eat and are now patiently waiting for me to grab the food bowls and fill them.

It’s been fun! I look forward to our next visits!

Hugs & much love,

Lizl