If I calculated correctly, from the time of my birth, I’ve lived in 17 different homes. Three by the time I went off to college. Three more between college and getting married. Then, eight times before my wife and I became empty-nesters and three more times as empty-nesters. We used to joke that we didn’t take vacations, we relocated.
So take it from someone who has been there, done that. The best way to reduce clutter in your life is to move.
For his Writer’s Workshop this week, John Holton gives us six writing prompts and we are tasked with choosing one of the prompts (or as many as we want) and writing a post that addresses that (or those) prompts). I chose two prompts for this week: (1) Use the word “beer,” and (2) Write a post in exactly 8 sentences.
My task is to delete all 6,471 subscribers to my old blog. If you want to know why I am having to do that, go here.
Unfortunately, WordPress has no utility that would enable a mass removal of all subscribers, meaning I have to remove each subscriber one at a time.
It takes about 2 seconds per subscriber to remove each one and so far, I have removed 1,771, leaving 4,700 to go. At two seconds per, I can remove about 30 subscribers a minute, and with 4,700 yet to go, it will take me about 157 more minutes, or about 2.6 more hours to remove them all.
But it will actually take me longer than 2.6 hours because I can only remove so many subscribers at a sitting before my vision starts to gets blurry and my mind begins to turn into mush.
So it will probably take me a few more days to finish the job. And once I’m done and all my followers on my old blog have been removed, I’ll be more than ready to celebrate my tedious task with a nice cold beer…or three.
For this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt, Linda G. Hill has given us the word “wallpaper” to work with. This reminded me of when we purchased a 100 year old Queen Anne Victorian house when we lived in Massachusetts back in the 80s and 90s. It was a bit of a fixer-upper, and nearly every room in the house, including the kitchen and the bathrooms, had wallpaper on the walls.
Neither my wife nor I are big fans of wallpaper, and so we commenced the tedious task of removing the old wallpaper. But much to our chagrin, we discovered that most walls had multiple layers of wallpaper. In some cases, three or even four layers.
As we peeled and scraped these layers of wallpaper from every room in the house, we made a fascinating discovery. The oldest (and, therefore, the original) layer of wallpaper in a few of the rooms was a toile (or twall) pattern. Toile patterns, like the one in the image below, typically have a highly detailed, repeated pattern depicting a pastoral or natural scene, most involving people and/or animals.
I thought it was really interesting to see the kinds of wallpapers that had been applied to the walls of our Victorian era home, but I thought that the toile paper was really cool. I wasn’t able to save any of the toile wallpaper, but I told my wife that we should see if we could find vintage toile pattern wallpaper to apply to our walls.
She said no.
Welcome to May 18, 2021 and to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). It’s designed to fill the void after WordPress bailed on its daily one-word prompt.
I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (US).
Today’s word is “remove.”
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.
“Remove them, both of them,” the first man said.
“But, sir, won’t we need these signs when the students return this fall?” the second man asked.
The first man got a sad, faraway look in his eyes. “No, I’m afraid we won’t,” he answered. “We’re closing the academy. The students won’t be returning in the fall due to the coronavirus pandemic and we simply can’t afford to keep our doors open.”
“This school has been around for more than 150 years, sir,” the second man said. “Isn’t there anything we can do?”
“Just remove the damn signs,” The first man snapped.
(100 words)
Written for Bikurgurl’s 100 Word Wednesday prompt. Photo credit: Bikurgurl.
Facts, Fictions & Fantasies 