Dominoes (April A2Z ~ Misty Memories)

Shall we play a game?

Welcome to my April A2Z posts! This time, I am officially signed up on the challenge sheet and will be visiting other bloggers on the list. My theme is "misty memories," which will include a bunch of rambling about old stuff in my life, and hopefully some of it will be accurate, but if not, there's no one around to contradict me. Today we continue with D for Dominoes.

I spent a while debating whether to spell "dominoes" with the "e" or without it. I even went to Amazon to look up some games, but they were both ways, so that wasn't helpful. Do you know that dominoes come in colors now (if you prefer)? Kind of cool. I might get some... for the grandkids. I decided that I liked the "e" because it goes with potatoes and tomatoes. English is so random. The dictionary says that a domino was originally a French word for a black cape that a priest wore over his white surplice. After 1750, in both England and France, the word referred to a hooded cloak with a mask that people wore at carnivals or masquerades. I do recall this from romance novels, where all sorts of shenanigans occurred while people wore masks. The game pieces appeared around the same time in both countries.

Anyway. My parents played a lot of games with me (again, I thought this was what everyone did, but it turns out that some families never played dominoes or gin rummy or Scrabble, etc.). We liked to use a double set of dominoes to "make things interesting." I have sweet albeit fuzzy memories of playing dominoes on the floor with my mom (sometimes with my dad too) while listening to Johnny Cash records. Or the Doors or the Zorba soundtrack or Swan Lake. Very eclectic mix of music! This was when we lived in apartments in New York. After we had a house with more room, we would work on large puzzles while watching Creature Feature movies.

My mom and I also played a lot of gin rummy, Scrabble, and regular and Chinese checkers. It's hard to find peeps who like Chinese checkers, especially the way we played it with the whole board (circle) filled up. We each had three triangles of marbles to move, which caused a huge traffic jam. So fun! We played a lot of hangman, plus there was this weird game of drawing one line at a time to make squares, which you would then initial. The person who initialed the most squares won. It was a very simple game where all you needed was a pencil and a sheet of paper. What the heck is that even? Does it have a name? My dad taught me to play chess, though I never became good at it. 

I still love games and regularly attend game nights with friends.

Cookies (April A2Z ~ Misty Memories)

My first cupcake?

Welcome to my April A2Z posts! This time, I am officially signed up on the challenge sheet and will be visiting other bloggers on the list. My theme is "misty memories," which will include a bunch of rambling about old stuff in my life, and hopefully some of it will be accurate, but if not, there's no one around to contradict me. Today we continue with C for Cookies.

When I was growing up, it seemed like cookies were one of the basic food groups, and it wasn’t until later that I discovered most folks don’t have to eat dessert after every lunch and dinner. For my first decade of life though, it felt perfectly normal.

My father had an enormous sweet tooth. He was happy with any dessert, but his go-to sugary treat was cookies. His favorites were from Nabisco: chocolate marshmallow pinwheels, pecan sandies, fudge stripes, sugar wafers, and any kind of chocolate chip. Oreos were good too. He was not a fan of peanut butter, however.

Some weeks, my mother and I would bake cookies or brownies (our brownies were more like cookies than cake because we used only one egg). Cookies were made from scratch, but the box mix from Duncan Hines for brownies was great, so we used that. Nowadays, I think Ghirardelli has taken the brownie box mix crown (especially when you add mini M&Ms). Usually we made the traditional Tollhouse recipe chocolate chip cookies, except around Christmas, when we went nuts with the cookie press. Green trees with sprinkles (and a tooth-cracking silver sugar ball at the top), red bells, green wreaths (with sprinkles), beige reindeer, etc., all graced our table.

My mom also made rum balls, which I thought were from a super secret recipe, but it turns out that everyone makes them. (Smashed and rolled vanilla wafers with powdered sugar and a rum glaze.) I loved rum balls when I was younger and would sneak them out of their tin before Mom declared they were “ready.” Nowadays though, I find them kind of nauseating. 

Mom made her own special fruitcake too. Dad loved it, but I was not a fan.

I still have a gargantuan sweet tooth and prefer sugary snacks to chips and and salty food. While I went through a cupcake phase, I am back to basics once again with cookies. There are so many varieties, and they're easy to transport. In fact, I am taking another cookie decorating class tomorrow with a couple of coworkers. It's a great way to have a couple hours of fun and tune out everything else (similar to doing jigsaw puzzles and painting). 

Books (April A2Z ~ Misty Memories)

Mommy and me, around 1965

Welcome to my April A2Z posts! This time, I am officially signed up on the challenge sheet and will be visiting other bloggers on the list. My theme is "misty memories," which will include a bunch of rambling about old stuff in my life, and hopefully some of it will be accurate, but if not, there's no one around to contradict me. Today we continue with B for Books.

I have always been an avid reader. It’s genetic! Both my parents loved to read, and my daughters do too. It could be environmental, of course ~ if a child sees people enjoying books, naturally she will want to pick one up and see what the big deal is. The first book I remember reading on my own, maybe around age 4, was called Artie the Smartie. It was about a fish. I liked the Bobbsey Twins books a lot when I was around 8-9 years old, and then I graduated to adventure books about dogs. I began as a dog-lover, and my twenties, I switched to cats, though I still love (nice) doggos.

At 10, I read The Velveteen Rabbit, a beautiful story which made me cry and still does. I reread it from time to time.

By the time I was 12, I was reading adult romances ~ yes, the kind the drugstore sells. At first, they were "light" Harlequins, but that's just a gateway drug, and eventually I moved on to steamier stuff. As I have mentioned before, this was bad for me, and as a parent I wouldn't have allowed it (luckily, my daughters had no interest in romance novels and still don't). My parents, however, were of the hippy dippy 70's mindset that nothing should be censored from anyone, and they also believed that reading was so valuable it shouldn't be discouraged. I suppose that's a fair point, as I did have a much wider vocabulary than my peers. 

Anyway, I read everything, and I mean everything. The Happy Hooker. Playboy. Hustler. This was all lying around at my parents' house and at the houses of people whose kids I babysat. (OK, sometimes I had to search for it, lol.) A lot of this material was inappropriate for a young teenager because I couldn't put it in context or process it properly as fantasy. It messed up my head and self-image. I didn't look anything like the women I read about, and in my mind, physical appearance became tied to love: if you weren't beautiful, in very specific ways, you weren't going to be loved. That is how my 12-17 year old brain processed this reading material.

I also read tons of mysteries and detective novels and some biographies and autobiographies of celebs. I still enjoy those genres. For decades, I continued with the romances, gravitating toward novels set in the Regency period, but right now I'm tired of them all. I'm also a bit bored with thrillers, as after reading hundreds of them, they aren't that thrilling. 

I still love books though, just not the reading rut I have been in lately ~ I have struggled to escape and return to the magic of books! These days, I'm apt to choose one that's simply different from stuff I've recently read. Poetry, biography, science, philosophy, etc. Case in point: at the moment I am reading Love of Goldens, a non-fiction "coffee table" book with loads of photos of gorgeous golden retrievers interspersed with adorable vignettes.

Everything old is new again, eh?

Aunts (April A2Z ~ Misty Memories)

Aunties and Grandma

Welcome to my April A2Z posts! This time, I am officially signed up on the challenge sheet and will be visiting other bloggers on the list. My theme is "misty memories," which will include a bunch of rambling about old stuff in my life, and hopefully some of it will be accurate, but if not, there's no one around to contradict me. Today we begin with A for Aunts.

When I lived back East, decades ago, I thought I had several aunts. It turned out, however, that they were technically my great-aunts, sisters of my paternal grandmother, Louise. I also had regular aunts, my mother's sisters, but I hardly saw them. My mother had had a falling out with her family in Ohio before moving to New York, and it wouldn't be for many more years until she was in semi-regular contact again. So, as a little kid, I really only knew of my father's relatives. All these sisters were much older than Grandma Louise.

I believe Aunt Dora was the eldest of the siblings (there was also a brother in the mix, who died young). I didn’t see Aunt Dora often. She was married to Charlie, and they had one child, a little girl who died from pertussis when she was only three years old. MAHA! 

Aunt Jenny was next. I saw her infrequently and only when I visited her daughter, Aunt Sylvia, who was not technically my aunt. Sylvia didn’t have children and didn’t seem to like them either. Her husband Emil was much more easygoing. 

My Aunt Lily was fun: a redhead who wore a lot of purple and told bawdy jokes. She may have had a son, Jerry, or Jerry could have been someone else’s son. There are too many people to keep track of!

Speaking of, I think one of the sisters was Aunt Hazel, but I can’t recall anything about her.

I saw Aunt Rosie more than the others, not that I really knew her well. She had two daughters near my dad’s age, and they hung out sometimes. One daughter was a career woman and had no children, and the other, Leah, had two, a son and a daughter. The daughter had one son. 

Finally, when I was in my teens, I was able to get to know my mother’s side of the family a little. She was the eldest of seven ~ two boys and five girls. Aunt Darlene is especially nice and recently sent me a family tree book. I doubt I will ever see her in person again, or any of these peeps, since I am not in regular contact with them, and I dislike traveling.

I have some good memories of visits with my mom's family in Ohio, where aunties (and others) acted happy to see me, and there were loads of animals to play with, especially kittens and horses. Once, I fed a baby goat with a bottle, which was an incredible experience. I wish I knew my aunties all a bit more.

Today's TToT

I'm participating in Ten Things of Thankful today. Thanks to Missy for hosting and also to Di for making me aware of the challenge. This will probably be my last post before the A2Z challenge, which will begin on Wednesday, as I am expecting to be super busy at work tomorrow and Tuesday.

1. My daughter and SIL drove up for lunch yesterday.

2. I finally got to try Slice House pizza, which was delicious.

3. I did some office work at home over the weekend so Monday won't be as crazy.

4. My weirdly chapped lips are finally getting a little better.

5. This weekend my migraines abated to a tolerable level without sumatriptan.

6. Inky (my cat) has been extra cuddly.

7. We had a fun book club Teams meeting this afternoon.

8. DSW sent a $5 coupon for my birthday month (April).

9. My friends are planning a birthday party for me later next month.

10. I have written and scheduled the A2Z challenge posts through R.

Flashback Friday: Games People Play

I’m participating in Fandango’s Flashback Friday today with a post from my old WP blog that I found on the Wayback Machine from exactly 10 years ago. Note: I no longer play Words with Friends. 

Periodic WWF Rant

As some of you know, I love playing Words with Friends. I play with people I know, and I also periodically start games with random strangers, especially late at night when I’m bored. (Hey, it’s a way better idea than wandering onto yet another dating site.) It’s all super fantastic fun until I get so enraged I wanna poke someone’s eye out.

This happens one of two ways. Sometimes I’ll suspect a person of cheating ~ meaning I think he’s using some sort of software to come up with ridiculous 7 or 8 letter words that no one could possibly know. But, then again, if you play long enough, and often enough, weird words stick with you. I know some odd ones now myself. Plus we all experiment at times with different prefixes and combos and such… when the game accepts a word we didn’t necessarily expect, w00t! But still… a few oddball words in a row and I’m thinking, oh come on dude (it’s almost always a man). And if he’s also playing bizarre shorter words too, well, I just end up seething. If he’s a stranger, I’ll finish the game and then block him. If I have a few of these annoying games going on at once, I might get into a big huge mad. It happens.

The second thing that happens is someone may play a short word for major points ~ a short word that I never heard of and that WWF itself can’t even define but says is “valid.” Hey, if it’s valid, then give me a goddamn definition! And even some that are valid are iffy; some WWF words aren’t in the official Merriam-Webster Scrabble dico for sure. (Zen is one.) If this goes on repeatedly, guess what? BIG HUGE MAD.

But again… I know and play some of these words now too. New players might think wtf did she just play? Maybe they think I am cheating!* It’s all a matter of perspective. On the otter otter hand, people do cheat. I know I’m a good player, and I know about how often I “should” lose. So, I will naturally get suspicious at times.

OK, enough about people (bleh, people). Now, about the game itself. Since it’s so popular, why can’t I just download the dictionary, right? Erm, no. I went to the WWF Zynga site and looked up the rules (which are very brief and do not cover everything, such as timing out). It mentions their unique 173,000+ word dico, which includes some of their own words like zen and texting, and links to some weird coding page. I don’t want to click on anything there because I don’t know what it might do to my computer. So, no, I can’t haz their dico for reference, like I can in regular Scrabble.

Let’s talk about some of their words then. Take meh, which is now a word because it is, even though at first I was suspicious. But a word is a word when enough people decide it’s a word. We’re not waiting for a sign from the heavens after all ~ I saw meh in a newspaper headline this weekend. That settles that. But what about feh? MW says no. WWF allows it, though, along with shh, brr, grr, etc., that MW says no to. It’s annoying. (Note: the MW Scrabble dico allows those too, which is also enraging.)

I mean, I can learn all these “words,” nbd. That’s not the annoying part. The annoying part is that the game is called WORDS with Friends, not sounds with friends, not grunts with friends, but words. So, there should be some minimal standard. Like, idk, maybe WORDS perhaps? If we’re playing American English, then the words should be AE words, don’t you think? Not Yiddish, not Scottish, not noises your dog makes (arf is allowed). If brr is not a word you’d use in an essay, then why is it a WWF/Scrabble word? I don’t get it.

And really, we’re talking about rules of a game, not doodling around on a blarg so don’t bother. Do you really think I’d write “poast” in a romance novel? Feh. Grrrr.

Anyway, I may or may not give up WWF. I was hissing mad yesterday, but I’ve calmed down now. It is a huge waste of time… then again, I keep saying I’m going to start writing fiction for real again anytime now, but I don’t because I simply do not feel like it. So, with the Not Dating and the Not Writing, I have scads of time, oodles of time, gobs and globs and blobs of nothing but time…

*This new opponent quit the game after I played gleeking. Wtf is gleeking? Hell if I know. My SOP is to try anything in front of “ing” to see if it works. (It’s archaic for gibe, joke, says the dico.)

Silence

Silence is the best companion

When small talk saturates the room 

The excuses have all been spun

Silence is the best companion 

Knows your soul more than anyone 

Socializing feels like a tomb

Silence is the best companion

When small talk saturates the room 

~*~

Triolet quadrille (structured 44 words) written for dVerse Poets Pub prompt of silence.