Month: November 2021

The Ultimate Food Fight

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There is an significant ideological schism between the two sides. Neither group is inherently good or bad, just different. The winning team would be the one that could create the biggest wallop and potentially herald in a period of conciliation without either side feeling cheated.

So now, ladies and gentlemen, the time has come to announce the winner of this great debate. Will it be the ubiquitous russet potato or the holiday favorite, the sweet potato?

And the winner is…

Written for these daily prompts: Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (schism), The Daily Spur (good), Your Daily Word Prompt (wallop), Word of the Day Challenge (herald), My Vivid Blog (cheat), and Ragtag Daily Prompt (sweet potato).

#WDYS — Four Generations

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She was his great grandmother and he was now in her care after her daughter, his grandmother, and her granddaughter, his mother, had both succumbed to COVID-19 last year. Her own husband was long gone, and was her late-daughter’s husband. Her late-granddaughter’s husband, the boy’s father, had skipped out on his wife and son shortly after the boy was born. So it was up to her to take care of him.

She lived in a relatively rural setting and there was no school nearby to send the child and she felt she had to do whatever she could to prepare him to survive in the trouble world around him. But she had to do it quickly because she was very old and didn’t know how much time she had left.

She used most of her savings to buy the boy a laptop, hoping that he could use it to learn things that would help him in the future. She wanted him to understand how to use technology and to discover all he could before she left him on his own.

The boy was smart and she was amazed by, and very proud of, how quickly he absorbed information. And he was thrilled to share with her all of what he discovered on that laptop.

One day she sat with him on the wood deck outside their small cottage. She told him that she would soon be moving on and that he should, even after she was gone, continue to educate himself. He cried and promised that he would not let her down.

“I know, my dear child,” she said. “I will still be with you in your heart and in your mind and I know that you will make my spirit very proud.”

She passed a few days later and the boy took some clothing and his laptop and went out into the big wide world, feeling confident that his great grandmother had put him on the right path.

Written for Sadje’s What Do You See? prompt. Photo credit: Sasint @ Pixabay.

WordPress Responds

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If you read my response last week to Paula Light’s The Monday Peeve, I was on a rant complaining how, for more than a year now, the WordPress iOS app for the iPhone was causing issues with my ability to both like and comment on some other bloggers’ posts.

I opened up a support message and attached a link to my TMP rant. This is what I got in response:

Hi again, Fandango,


Thank you for reporting this! I’ve tested this, and I could reproduce it on WordPress.com sites with a custom domain. In my case, I couldn’t like a post at all, even after a refresh. My “likes” didn’t get saved on the post, and this is frustrating! I understand how annoying this is. We will keep a close eye on this one.


This is similar to the issue that the WebView (Apple’s library for providing a web browser experience within an iOS app) doesn’t recognize that we’ve logged in to the app and WordPress.com. I have reported this as a bug to be looked into by the developers, but as you already know, I can’t promise you a timeline for when this will be fixed. However, I will highlight this to the team and hope they can prioritize this bug since it’s been happening since iOS 14 was launched.


Once again, thank you very much for your time in reporting this. We appreciate your patience while we look into this matter.

Note the “Hi again, Fandango.” Obviously this happiness engineer was one of those who was involved last year when I exchanged myriad emails with the support team. At least she agreed that this bug is frustrating and annoying. But once again, she seemed to be assigning blame to Apple for the issue. She committed, just as she did last year, to have the WordPress developers “look into” this, but failed to offer a timeframe for resolution. Again, this bug surfaced almost 13 months ago.

I wrote back and said this:

I hope your developers will give this issue a high priority. One of my blogging friends suggested that I switch from my iPhone to an Android device, but no one should have to do that in order to use the WordPress app for a smartphone. I’m sure there are many WordPress users who, like me, blog primarily on their iPhones, so this bug must be affecting a lot of us and is seriously detrimental to our WordPress blogging experience.

Here’s the response I received…from a different happiness engineer:

I agree and we understand how frustrating this is. We will keep a close eye on this one. Thank you again for reporting it. We really appreciate that.

So things are pretty much as they have been for more than a year. An acknowledgment that there is a problem, that it’s frustrating and annoying, and that they’re going to have their developers look into it. And, once again, no ETA on when I might anticipate a resolution.

Déjà vu all over again.

Truthful Tuesday — Holidays

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Frank, aka PCGuy, has published another one of his Truthful Tuesday posts. Frank is changing things up a bit on this Truthful Tuesday prompt. Instead of asking us specific questions, he is giving us a topic and asking us to discuss it. This week’s topic is “holidays.” Frank wants to know…

Whatever holidays you may celebrate this time of year, how ready for them are you?

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, along comes Omicron. While Omicron sounds like it should be the name of a high tech company or the latest Android operating system, it’s actually the name of the latest coronavirus variant. Omicron is supposed to be highly contagious and because it’s so new, scientists don’t know how effectively the current batch of COVID-19 vaccines work on Omicron. So much for holiday plans.

Our extended family is a mixed bag of Christian, Jewish, and atheist, so we celebrate both Christmas and Chanukah. Chanukah this year is already underway and our plan was to have our kids and grandkids over to our house this coming Sunday for a Chanukah get together. And we were all planning to get together again around Christmas at two holiday gatherings, one at the home of our daughter’s significant other’s parents and the other at the home of our daughter-in-law’s parents.

This Sunday’s Chanukah party has been postponed until we know that our jabs (and we’ve all gotten our boosters) are effective against Omicron. Hopefully, by the time the Christmas gatherings come around, we’ll know whether the vaccines we’ve all gotten will keep us safe against the latest variant.

We thought, up until this past week, that we were safe and ready. And we had planned for the holiday season accordingly. Now everything is sort of up in the air.

Welcome to life in the second decade of the 21st century.

Fandango’s Story Starter #22

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It’s time for my weekly Story Starter prompt. Here’s how it works. Every Tuesday morning (my time), I’m going to give you an incomplete “teaser” sentence and your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to build a story (prose or poetry) around that partial sentence. It doesn’t have to be the first sentence in your story, and you don’t even have to use it in your post at all if you don’t want to. The purpose of the teaser is simply to spark your imagination and to get your storytelling juices flowing.

This week’s Story Starter teaser is:

When I looked inside, I saw no sign of life whatsoever, except for…

If you care to write and post a story built from this teaser, be sure to link back to this post and to tag your post with #FSS. I would also encourage you to read and enjoy what your fellow bloggers do with their stories.

And most of all, have fun.

FYI, I “borrowed” and slightly modified today’s teaser from blogger Pete (aka Mister Bump). In a line from his response to my flash fiction prompt yesterday, he wrote, as part of a sentence, “…she saw no sign of life whatever, except for….” So thanks, Pete, for inspiring today’s Story Starter.

FOWC with Fandango — Schism

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FOWC

Welcome to November 30, 2021 and to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (U.S.).

Today’s word is “schism.”

Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.

Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Please check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, please manually add your link in the comments.

And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. You will marvel at their creativity.

TMP — Wildlife

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Every Monday, Paula Light, with her The Monday Peeve prompt, gives us an opportunity to vent or rant about something that pisses us off.

Since we moved from the city to suburbia in early 2020, we have been plagued by wildlife destroying our plants and yard. We’ve got deer eating the leaves off of our trees and plants, destroying many of them. We’ve had gophers and moles building tunnels and poking holes all over our lawn. And now this:

Last night a whole litter of baby raccoons crossed my driveway and invaded my front yard.

Sheesh, we should never have left the city for the burbs.

Share Your World — 11/29/2021

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Melanie is doing her Evil Squirrel thing again for this week’s Share Your World thing. She and the Squirrel want to know…

If you had the power to strike one person in your life permanently speechless, who would it be?

Donald Trump.

If you could relive your childhood over again, what’s one thing from this modern world today you’d want to take back with you?

My iPhone. Yeah, I know that no one else would have a cell phone and the internet wasn’t around back then, but I’d still have games and my notes app and my camera.

Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple are the standard colors of the rainbow.
Name something you love (or greatly admire/appreciate) for all six major colors of the rainbow! (Sorry indigo, you’re just blue-purple. Hot pink? You’re too flashy!)

Are we supposed to name something we love with all six colors or something we love for each of the six colors? For the former, I’m going with rainbow-colored, cannabis-infused gummies. For the latter:

  • Red: red M&Ms, which are especially beautiful and delicious after eating a cannabis-infused gummy.
  • Orange: my 1967 bright orange Camaro. (No, I no longer have that car.)
  • Yellow: a yellow ribbon tied around an old oak tree.
  • Green: my 1964 British Racing Green MGB. (And no, I no longer have that car either.)
  • Blue: my blue jeans.
  • Purple: purple mountain majesties.

If you were to open the world’s most accurate fortune cookie, what would your fortune inside it read?

Santa’s tired of people leaving him out cookies and milk on Christmas Eve night! If you really wanted to get on Santa’s good side, what would you leave out for him to eat/drink instead?

A one-year’s paid membership to Weight Watchers. He’s already too fat and those milk and cookies treats are going to kill him.

Fandango’s Flash Fiction Challenge #146

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Welcome to Fandango’s Flash Fiction Challenge. Each week I will be posting a photo I grab off the internet and challenging bloggers to write a flash fiction piece or a poem inspired by the photo. There are no style or word limits.

The photo below is from Morguefile.com.

For the visually challenged writer, the image shows a young girl carrying a lantern through the snow and she is heading toward a log cabin at the edge of a forest.

If this week’s image inspires you and you wish to participate, please write your post, use the tag #FFFC, and link back to this post. I hope it will generate some great posts.

Please create a pingback to this post or manually add your link in the comments.