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2315 – Sunday Digest: The Week in Review

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2315 – Sunday Digest: The Week in Review

What a record-breaking week. The temperatures here for the last few days have set records across the board. Dry warm April weather that coincided with my day of rest. For those wondering I work a five days on, four days off rotating schedule so my off days shift and this week I happened to luck out and be off for some beautiful sunny days. As I return to work for the coming week the temperatures will drop to more seasonal.

The nice weather has made for a productive week. The previous owners of my home had built all the decking from old skids. What?!?!? Yeah, I said the same thing. That wood is the cheapest, softest, that was likely pest treated but is nothing remotely water or weatherproof. Sure on the deck in the back, they covered it with composite deck board but a pig with lipstick is still just a pig. The front they didn’t even try and hide it. It was covered in spruce or pine boards that they then just painted grey.

The front deck was so bad that I fell through the top last fall. It was only a skids depth, about 11cm (5″) but I was worried that my wife, son, the neighbour’s kids or the mail carrier would fall through and break an ankle. The last thing I need is to be sued by a neighbour or the post office.

The other problem with using skids is the space it leaves beneath the deck boards is perfect for all sorts of wildlife. Last year I used some old stone and pavers to evict a family of skunks and several chipmunks. Both can be very destructive to home foundations.

For the record, it wasn’t all sunshine and roses. It appears my vehicle requires new ball joints and/or tie rods. A fairly expensive job. I am pretty handy and after watching some YouTube videos thought I’d take a stab myself. I’ve done car work before and this didn’t look all that hard to do until I got the car up on blocks and realized that I’d developed a fear of going under the car. Just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Pretty sure it stems from an incident several years back when I was changing breaks. I had the car on the jack and had been sitting with my legs under the vehicle as I worked. I got up to grab a drink of water and when I came back outside the chocks had failed and the jack tipped, spilling the car onto the driveway. Five minutes sooner and I’d have lost my leg for sure. Thank God the car was not damaged either but I think the only way I could get under a car now is if I had a proper lift and I don’t see ever getting one. So I guess it’s off to the mechanic. My guy is pretty good but the job will still be expensive.

Working outside I had to have some loud music playing. Something heavy and I found myself listening to the Italian outfit Måneskin. We saw them live a few months back and the music rocks!

Now for the ‘week in review’…

Five Word Weekly Challenge

The Doll | A poem of renewal and finding joy in things forgotten and discarded by Piper at Piper’s Adventures

A Terminal Opera | A story of hope and connection written by Pankaj Kumar at The Inkwell

Four Line Fiction Challenge

Viktor Forgacs via Unsplash

A funny thing happened on the way to this week’s Four Line Fiction. The day before my post was scheduled to drop Fandango at This That and the Other, by chance chose the same image from Unsplash. You can check out the respondents at Fandango Flash Fiction Challenge.

A Mess Everywhere | A cat tale mystery by Sadje.

Staring Into the Face of Me | A introspective poem by Rockstar Girl.

Missing | My own contribution to both mine and Fandango’s challenge.

More highlights from Greg’s Blog…

16. Revenge: The Captive Soul | The four-part 16th installment of the Revenge Series written for several of Sammi Cox’s #WeekendWritingPrompt. I will eventually catch up on all of them.

T-Shirt Wisdom Wednesday

The Karaoke Cowboy | Written in response to Fandango’s Provocative Question (#fpq) The fifteenth installment in the Revenge series revealed the darkness Charlie holds within.

Decapod Delights | Written as a response to Rebecca at Fake Flamenco‘s April poetry challenge featuring sea creatures.

Around the Blogosphere…

With The nice weather and the return of baseball, I did not get much reading/blog surfing done this week.

Next week…

Look for another Five Word Weekly, Four Line Fiction. I said it last week and will say it again… Hopefully, some more new posts too.

My Blue Jays dealt the Tampa Bay Rays their first loss of the season. snapping their 13-0 start to the 2023 campaign. Thirteen straight is an impressive feat even against weaker opponents but they did not fair quite as well against another World Series contender. One of the best quotes after the streak-snapping Toronto victory was the Wizard of Oz-esque, “Yes Tampa, you’re not in Washington anymore!” referring to the woefully inept Washington Nationals who the Rays had previously swept.

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Decapod Delights

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Unknown

Decapod Delights

Pink and plump upon my plate,
Wrong place, wrong time, cruel twist of fate.

One of a million tiny eggs set free,
Upon the current of a briny sea.

Sifting through the ocean floor,
For bits of plankton, algae and more…

What’s up bruh, yo, bust tha’ rhyme,
In clicks and snaps on ocean time.

Stay in school and you’ll be set,
Against most predators but not man’s net.

Swimming in a sea of butter,
The surfer half of my steak supper.

Unknown
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The Karaoke Cowboy

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No pictures of this time period in my life exist so best I can do is a really bad composite I made.
Greg Glazebrook @ GMGPhotography

The Karaoke Cowboy

Every week Fandango over at This, That and the Other posts a provocative question. Everyone is said to get there 15 minutes, Fandango’s question asks us to explore fame and expose our claim on it. This week’s question is…

“What is your claim to fame?”

Back when I attended Lakehead University I would take the train back home. You don’t really get a feel for how big Ontario is until you try and cross it. The trip from Toronto to Thunder Bay, itself the amalgamation of Fort William and Port Arthur sitting at the western end of Lake Superior, is a 20-hour train ride. That only moves you from two points within Ontario. There is still another ten hours from Thunder Bay to the Manitoba border in the west and six from Toronto to the Quebec border in the east. Alaska and Texas are small in comparison to Ontario’s vast geographical area.

As odd as it sounds VIA Rail (Canada’s Amtrak equivalent) did not pass through the City of Thunder Bay. It ran along CN Rail’s northern route through the small logging community of Armstrong situated about 250 km and 3 hours north of Thunder Bay.

Chris Wilson via RailPictures.net

At the time, Armstrong was home to about 1300 residents, about 100 more than call it home today. The town had two bars, both nothing more than one-room dives. The first location played classic rock music through an old Jukebox and the other played country and western through a karaoke machine. This was 1993 so Garth Brooks, Brooks & Dunn, and Reba McEntire were filling the airwaves and with the advent of Soundscan to properly track record sales, the genre was seeing a resurgence fueled by young and charismatic artists across North America. My girlfriend and I were listening to “New Country” as it had been dubbed, hitting up local rodeos on weekends and spending nights cutting a rug at the local honky tonks.

Anyway, here we are in this tiny bar, me in my deerskin cowboy boots, blue and black Garth Brooks cowboy shirt and a black ten-gallon hat. Naturally, my girlfriend insisted I go up and sing her a song. She even picks out the Randy Travis’ classic “Diggin’ Up Bones” and me being a fool in love agrees to make an arsehole of myself for all to see. For my efforts, I may have spent some time in the back seat of a fogged-up car before hopping on the train back to Hogtown, but my memory is a bit fuzzy.

So here is this fool on a makeshift stage crooning to the ball boppin’ across the screen of the Karaoke display. The room is full of about 25-30 mostly Aboriginal Canadians from the nearby reservation. When the music finally ends and I set the microphone back on the stand the room erupts into applause, a few so moved they even jump to their feet to give me a standing ovation. Later on, as we were sitting at our table sippin’ on Molson Canadian, the only beer they served, one of the patrons who was clearly three sheets to the wind stopped by our table and insisted I should consider starting a career as a singer/musician, he even suggested he could talk to the owner of the bar to get me a gig for a few nights.

FYI, you will be happy (or at least your ears will) that my singing career has remained largely confined to an empty car or the bathroom shower!!!

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Missing

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Viktor Forgacs via Unsplash

Missing

Mary Two Rivers stood quietly in the place along the edge of the reservation she’d come to so often, the band Chief agreeing to one last visit even as the heavy machinery roared around her.

The pain had not softened in the years since her Emily, the dark-haired girl with a spirit set alight by a spark from the Creator’s fire, had been taken.

The worn and weathered doll she’d been gifted by the widow from the secondhand shop in town, herself long since dead, marked the last known location of the girl who’d vanished some 21 years earlier.

In a few short hours, the landmarks that provided Mary with the last links to her baby’s existence would be erased in the name of progress; another girl added to the list of the forgotten.

There is an epidemic across North America that has seen tens of thousands of Aboriginal women and girls murdered or go missing. In Canada that number is about 1200 since 1980 however it is believed to be much higher as many cases are never reported or reported incorrectly. Information on Canada’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls can be found at MMIWG.

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T-Shirt Wisdom Wednesday (2315)

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Welcome to another edition of T-Shirt Wisdom Wednesday for April 12th, 2023. This hump day feature is exactly what it sounds like. Every other Wednesday (bi-weekly) I will post a graphic that is funny, poignant, witty, honest, crude, toothsome, with bite, or just plain old ridiculous. Some I’ll have plagiarized directly from a chest near you. Others may not have been spotted in the wild but they probably should be out there.

Sometimes? More like all too often, Does January 6th ring a bell?

Suggestions are always welcome. If you come across something you think is worthy of being pasted across someone’s chest and paraded around publicly jot it down and send me a message. If it makes the cut I will whip up a graphic design template and use it in a future post. Any suggestions used will include a shout-out and link to your blog on the week it posts.

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Four Line Fiction (2315)

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Welcome to Four Line Fiction, a pix-to-prose challenge. Each Tuesday, at 9:00am Eastern Time (Canada/United States) I will post an image I have captured myself, featured from another blog or plucked from one of the Interweb’s many royalty-free image sites. You as the writer are to use that image as a point of inspiration to craft a masterpiece of fiction in four lines.

This week’s image is a dismembered Barbie-type doll laying in several pieces on a dirty stone background. The body and hair are worn and covered in layers of dirt and grime. The image is mostly monochromatic however the doll’s eyes and lips are a vibrant blue and red respectively.

Viktor Forgacs via Unsplash

Be creative and have fun. I look forward to reading the tales you spin. Don’t forget to show your fellow bloggers some love -❤️- take some time to read, like, and comment on their masterpieces.

Click here for full rules and guidelines

16. Revenge: The Captive Soul

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Lane Jackman vis Unsplash

16-1. Revenge: The Captive Soul (Followed)

Inez always came to mind in the aftermath of one of his excursions. What would she say, he thought.

Across town, his former lover walked along the trail from town. She sensed its presence, a shiver running up her spine. The treetops rustled and swayed overhead as if something was tracking her, waiting for an opening to swoop down. She hurried her step…

Unknown

16-2. Revenge: The Captive Soul (Revealed)

Breathtaking, like the air had been removed. She gasped as it settled behind her.

Deleece Cook vis Unsplash

16-3. Revenge: The Captive Soul (Understanding)

Inez awoke in her bedroom. She could feel Charles’ fingerprint on the woman sitting beside her.

“I didn’t know!” She blurted out in fear.

“Perhaps, but you sensed the potential that lay within, even showed great enterprise in controlling it for a while” Lilith’s eyes darted to the beast. “I mean no harm but you have something I need.” She said as the beast set the box down next to Inez.

“The Ring?”

Unknown

16-4. Revenge: The Captive Soul (Secret)

Inez didn’t know the ring’s secret but she could see the beast, clad in its coat of mail, flinch as she reached for it.

“Yes,” said Lilith, “but it’s more, I need you to help stop him.”

The Revenge Series

<< 15. Revenge: The Morning After

17. Coming Soon >>

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Five Word Weekly Challenge (2315)

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Welcome to Five Word Weekly. Each Monday, I will post five random words to Greg’s Blog at 5:00am Eastern Time (Canada/United States). Your task is to craft prose or poetry using any or all of the word prompts. How you participate is entirely up to you. Your work(s) can be a single piece, a series of stand-alone projects, or an epic serial. Let the words be the inspiration that takes you wherever your imagination leads.

Here are your prompt words for the week of April 10th, 2023:

opera | terminal | swath | babble | deaf

Be creative and have fun. I look forward to reading what each of you conjures up. Don’t forget to show your fellow bloggers some love -❤️- take some time to read, like, and comment on their responses.

Click here for full rules and guidelines

2314 – Sunday Digest: The Week in Review

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2314 – Sunday Digest: The Week in Review

I am not a religious person. However I was raised in a Catholic household and as a kid attended church every Sunday, and participated with my Catholic schoolmates in receiving all of the obligatory sacraments. I really can’t recall the last time I was inside a house of worship of any kind other than for a wedding or funeral.

Now that I am older I don’t believe in magical and benevolent sky beings or hateful demon creatures torturing the dead in the infernal fires of hell. The Christian holidays have become more about family getting together and enjoying our time here on earth with those we love.

The weather has finally been nice enough to get outside and start some early-season yard work. The previous owner of my current home thought using wooden shipping skids would make a great foundation for the three different decks they built but of course, the untreated softwood has rotted into a pile of mush beneath composite deck boards. I guess they believed the layer of plastic and sawdust would prevent water from getting through. No, I take that back they were just cheap.

Oops, kinda lost focus for a half-inning. The Toronto Blue Jays were sucking a** in Anaheim today but just scored six in the sixth to tie it up! Let’s complete the comeback with a “W” before returning to the newly renovated Skydome! I know but I won’t acknowledge the current corporate stadium name.

This week I found myself listening to one of the albums I cut my musical chops on as an almost teenager. I won’t say I’ve forgotten but it has been a while since I listened to Roxy Music’s Avalon. The album came to the fore again while I listening to Alan Cross’ “The Ongoing History of New Music.” He was talking about how good the album sounded on vinyl because it was originally produced in analog from start to finish. It doesn’t hurt that it was produced at a time when recording quality mattered as well. I do not have a vinyl copy but it sounds great even from my fully lossless streaming service. It was hard to pick a video to post with such great tracks as More Than This, Avalon, The Main Thing but settled on Take A Chance With Me. Hope you enjoy…

Now for the ‘week in review’…

Five Word Weekly Challenge

Lost in the Commotion | A creative use of the prompt words in a very creative look at the afterlife written by Piper at Piper’s Adventures

Ghosted | A hysterical look at what might await a player when he crosses to the other side written by Paula at Light Motifs II.

Making History | I’m hoping Carol at Therapy Bits has given us a prophetic look at The Donald’s future!

A Trick of the Light or… | Sadje at Keep It Alive gives us a truly frightening tale of technology gone wrong and the complete lack of responsibility shown by those who create it. This could be Artificial Intelligence if left unchecked.

Lila’s Adventure on the Planet of Light | A magical story by Pankaj Kumar at The Inkwell

Four Line Fiction Challenge

Pawel Czerwinzki via Unsplash

Another slow week on the Four Line Fiction challenge.

More highlights from Greg’s Blog…

15. Revenge: The Morning After | The fifteenth installment in the Revenge series revealed the darkness Charlie holds within.

Share Your World | Written as a response to Di at Pensivity101’s movie-themed Share Your World prompt.

Around the Blogosphere…

Scilla Luciliae | Delicate flowers with soft colours from Vova Zinger’s Photoblog.

Cognitive Dissonance | Fandango outlines the frustration we all feel when our elected officials seem to be so far disconnected from reality.

Next week…

Look for another Five Word Weekly, Four Line Fiction and some T-Shirt Wisdom. I said it last week and will say it again… Hopefully, some more new posts too.

My Blue Jays did come all the way back and then almost blew it again. They ended up beating the Angels of Anaheim 12-11. Woohoo, have a great week,

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2023-04-03 —  Share Your World

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2023-04-03 —  Share Your World

1. Do you have a favourite movie?

My favourite movie is ‘The Usual Suspects’. Writer Christopher McQuarrie and Director Brian Singer weave an intricately layered crime drama that has stood the test of time since its debut in 1995. Honourable mentions go to the Coen Brothers ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’, a fantastic retelling of Homer’s Odyssey and ‘Layer Cake’ a British crime drama starring Daniel Craig.

2. Who is you favourite actor and actress?

For my answers to this question, I will stay with the classic definition of gender while acknowledging times are changing.

Favourite Actress: Cate Blanchett. She has received many accolades over the years and is considered one of the best actresses of her generation. I particularly recall her performance in ‘The Shipping News’. Her performance was the highlight of a well-crafted film although not in the Hollywood sense.

Favourite Actor: Kevin Spacey. Separating the man from the work I have to say he is one of the best actors I have seen. His work in the aforementioned ‘The Usual Suspects’ and ‘House of Cards’ is outstanding. I don’t ascribe to cancel culture and the way it’s meted out in today’s world however there are people who the facts show to be reprehensible and I think it is safe to say his work in real life is less impressive.

3. Do you attend or have you ever attended a live theatre production?

I have attended many shows over the many years I’ve walked the planet. My very favourite was ‘Showboat’ which I saw at the formerly named Ford Center for the Performing Arts in North York. (A former borough of the now amalgamated City of Toronto.) The music was sublime and one of the leads had the deepest, most soulful voice I’ve ever heard live. Magical.

4. Have you ever wanted to be an actor/actress?

Not in any serious sense. Certainly not as a career but who hasn’t wondered what it would be like to walk across the stage, silver screen or beam into millions of homes. For those who achieve stardom, it’s a lifestyle those of us mere mortals can’t really begin to fathom. For others in the industry, I’d imagine it is a very tough life.

Gratitude:

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