Category: Challenges
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Getting ready for the road
It seems scarcely feasible that only two months ago Harry Hymer was stuffed to the gunwales with endless ranks of chattel, clothes, and everything that hadn’t made it into the big truck for storage. And yet, bit by bit, the stuff has been shifted out, and now Harry is clear for the next journey. That…
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When you do something you hadn’t thought you could possibly . . .
Moving into a new place brings all kinds of joy, as well as disappointments. The posty finally delivered the correct phono connectors to plug the ageing cassette deck into the big beast of a receiver, so I inserted a cassette, powered up and hit the Play button. Nothing happened. The photo-compare image shows first (or…
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The clock’s ticking . . .
While we consolidate and settle in, another parameter of life is returning: a sense of a routine, a schedule. Since we are such creatures of habit, the disorientation when the routine has been thrown awry can be discomfiting. Just as worrying to me, however, has been the sense that I’ve taken on too much again,…
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Catching up is good . . .
I think that moving is especially fraught because everything is in disarray, all around, and it feels like you just can’t settle down to a normal task. It’s all just accommodating to the new space, putting things here and then then, and then back again. Testing out new living arrangements, fixing a few things that…
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When snow is light, fluffy, pretty . . .
The snowfall was off and on last night, and the flakes began to fall again late this morning. It’ll put folks off the resumed LING Lunch, perhaps, but for those of us who know a bit more about the trials and tribulations of snow, this soft and gentle fall could only be pretty and pleasing.…
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Sharing the notes . . .
It’s intriguing, it is, how a shared set of thoughts becomes something else altogether when someone else thinks along with you. My notes on our walk a couple days ago raised a comment, and in the ensuing email conversation the concept of ‘poetic process’ came to light. I had to confess that I couldn’t see,…
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Sleeping on it . . .
It’s a commonplace, isn’t it, to sleep on a problem, hoping to awaken with a solution. As we went to bed last night, I was wrestling, somewhere in my subconscious, with a poetic problem that I thought I’d resolved. My dreaming mind thought otherwise. A better resolution than I’d even considered woke up with me…
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Notes on a marshland walk
For my joy this morning, I can’t do better than to relay some contemporaneous notes of our afternoon walk yesterday. Who knows, one day these notes may find their way into another poetic effort, perhaps less formal than the sonnet of my previous joy. But for now I’ll go with the joy I have in…
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The subtlety of a job well done
The repair job seems to be holding up well, so perhaps I can be quietly satisfied with my fixing strategy. In the melamine-coated chipboard, the fixing screws top and bottom of the fridge door were coming adrift. With the sag, the top cabinet door was increasingly binding on the lower door concealing the freezer half.…
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A new, tangible project
Although we’d carried my beloved’s Harris loom from one home to another, over the past four decades (London’s Shepherd’s Bush; Edmonton, Alberta; Burnham, Berkshire; Geneva; Sparty Lea, Northumberland), we finally realised that it was time to divest. It was a big floor-standing loom all right, but the real issue was the crawling around underneath to…
Roads to Joy 