Verse:

Proverbs 15:31

"The ear that listens to life-giving reproof will dwell among the wise."

Farewell, for a little while

My family is taking a break from "screens."

It is very bittersweet, for I, authoress of this blog, am torn between sadness at not being able to post, and gladness at having help not wasting time on the computer. Sometimes self-resolution needs a little parental help. =D

So, I am going to program a series of very short posts, using blogger's miraculous technology. That way, this blog doesn't die, but I still get to escape technology.

Plus, just after recovering from tendinitis, I have buckle-fractured my wrist and I am now back to typing with one hand. At least I get a cooler-looking splint this time.

Michael who?

Just kidding! =D

Polls and Life Aspirations

Here are the results to my previous poll.
Pork Rinds =D 6 (9%)
Potato chips 13 (21%)
Tortilla chips 1 (1%)
Cheese curls 6 (9%)
Carrot Sticks 4 (6%)
Grass 5 (8%)
Apples 26 (42%)
I was feeling on top of the world, but 61 votes seems a little outrageous, so I suspect someone had the assistance of some library computers. Perhaps I merely am of a suspicious nature, and thus cut out to begin a sparkling career as a detective. Hmmmm...
I think not. I am going to be a fish monger and toss fish through the air if PETA doesn't get there first. Apparently throwing fish is a "Glorification of Marine Animal Cruelty." I guess I never thought that it would bother a dead fish to be tossed through the air.

NEWSFLASH: Bracie and I are victims of this current depression! Our small Alpaca Pasture maintaining job is now terminated, ended because our employers sold all of their Alpacas. *Sniff* Back to babysitting.

Hullo.

Yessssss-sir-ee-bob-I-am-back!

That lovely picture is me smooching my former turtle. P.T. was released back into the wild sometime in spring. He is probably having a lot of fun without me. What a depressing thought.

I shall attempt to post slightly more regularly, but let's face it: it's summer and I have stuff to do, like, well, live! Not, of course, that I am not grateful for all the miracles of modern invention. I am simply relishing swimming, and riding, and writing (with a pencil) and running, and drawing, and all those other primitive activities.

Monday's Idiom (Or question?)

A ubiquitous "word" that my mother has always deplored is "Duh."
The expression is found commonly among the youth, working as a response to an obvious question. It is pronounced several different ways: all unattractive and all designed to compel a sense of inferiority in the recipient.
Example:

Person A: "So December 25th is Christmas, Right?"
Person B: "Du-uh" (stressed to two syllables to call attention to how stupid [pardon the adjective] the question is.)

A by far less humiliating response, as coined by my only uncle, is
"Does ten pounds of flour make a big biscuit?"

Not only does it endear you to the questioner far more than the depressing "duh" it is almost guaranteed to produce a smile.

Bye!

Cheerio!

Tootle-pip!

TTFN!

Ophelia is signing off for some length of time to care for her dear little siblings whilst her Dear Mother and Older Sister are in SC for a speech tournament. Isn't that magnanimous of her?

P.S. That was a rhetorical question.

P.P.S I am also extending the deadline for the Weird is the new Normal photo contest to an unknown date.

Rant.

You know something? Birds; cheeping trilling, twittering, chirping, cawing, and rising dawns never seem very poetic at four in the morning, unless I go to bed early.
Writing this, I know, puts me at risk of seeming very lazy and lugabed, but I firmly take a stance that four is not the hour for rising. Let's hope I never work on a dairy farm. And what is it with poets and Unhuman hours?
Try google-ing "Birds at Dawn poem." My search afforded 1,330,000 results. How about some nice haiku as a comfort to my weary soul?

Birds singing
in the dark
—Rainy dawn


The morning songs of birds awakening
In the misty dawn
Sets my very soul aquaking
Like windblown grass of lawn.
The springtime morns
especially treat me
With the springtime birds of song
The robins come to early greet me
The blue jays also come along.

Bleh. Gag me. It's four in the morning and I feel like strangling the author of that poem. My poetic nature is absolutely "aquaking" right now from birdsong. Let's hope it recovers.

And yet Robert Frost declares that there is something wrong with wanting to silence any song. Ohhhhhh...
HMPH!

-Ophelia, who actually did write this at four.

Beware of the Cat

The feline in the above pictures is quite a presence at our house, making herself especially noticable to neighbor and visiting dogs. Twice, she has pounced upon and ridden on top of our neighbors' pooch. That is to say, she is particularly intolerant of, ahem, canine trespassers.

In another instance, she picked a visiting dog up in her teeth and treated the poor thing shamefully.

So, beware of the cat!

Ophelia: "silent" sufferer

This a one-handed post, meaning every character you read on this page was typed with my right hand, because I am beset with tendinitis. The condition has drastically affected my speed: it has taken me roughly five minutes to get this far.
Mayhaps you have noticed my wrist wrap in the above photo. I feel compelled to admit that the wrap is more psychological than effective, as it is not highly supportive and I am inclined to over use my injured wrist.
However, is it really fair to say, "injured?" Do you actually injure your tendons with tendinitis, or do you merely abuse their capabilities? Or perhaps you injure your wrist by abusing your tendons capabilities. It injures my mind just thinking about it. If I really wanted to know, I could go ask Daddy...
But anyhow, Dad says I inflicted tendinitis on myself by straining the fingers from typing in weird positions. Isn't that boring? Now if I had tendinitis from holding on to the hand of a person falling off a cliff, or by too quickly pulling a child from under the hooves of a galloping horse, it would have appealed much more to my sensibilities.

I, knowing just how kind and caring my gentle readers are, have realized that you probably want to type me a nice, sympathetic comment. Yet I absolutely do not desire my readers to sustain such an ignoble injury as the one I now suffer from.

Being a highly intelligent blogger, I have come up with a solution that allows you to exercise your kind-caring-comment-writing skills and prevents tendinitis 100%! As follows:

Type all comments on this post with

A. your toes
B. your chin
C. your nose

For your Information:

#1. I am done with Algebra 1 forever! Ha!
#2. I really hate hair.
#3. I am going to install a playlist on this blog, but it will not start automatically.

I know that those three important facts will help you move through your day uplifted and encouraged.

TTFN!

Post Script:

I never saw a purple cow
I hope I never see one
But I can tell you here and now
I'd rather see than be one.
Gelett Burgess

Update: The aforementioned Playlist now resides at the bottom of my blog.

Julie or Audrey?

Just wondering...

Do you think Julie would have made a better Eliza?

Or are you of the opinion that Audrey is more queenly-looking?

Ophelia Pretends to be a Ghostly Spectre

I fairly certain "Ghostly Spectre" is an oxymoron, but I am calling it a literary technique.

Anyhow, these pictures are solid proof that I have learned to make lemonade when life hands me a lemon. The specific lemon is my camera's incapability of taking a picture less than 3 seconds after I push the button. So one day, having been infected with a spirit of optimism, I got out the camera and, finding it near impossible to take a good picture, decided to take some silly ones.
This is me dissolving into flame like a comic book character. Oops, I just gave away my secret identity. Ah well.

Further along in stages of turning into a firebrand.


Here I am as a ghostly spectre.
Here I am in the act of immaterializing, which is a very tricky business to catch on camera.

I think I bear a resemblance to the evil queen's mirror in Snow White. I like how my head is floating off my shoulders, but I think that my blue shirt rather draws from the effect.

And I can't exactly recall what I was thinking at the moment this photo was snapped.

There you have it, folks: Ophelia actually, voluntarily taking pictures of herself! Never mind that she's pretending to be a ghostly spectre or that her head appears to floating above her neck...

Monday's Idiom:

A Heath Robinson is a machine or any something with lots of unnecessary apparatus that really makes things more complicated than they have to be. Heath Robinson was not, in fact, a misguided inventor, he was a celebrated British cartoonist. But you probably knew that already.

The Pancake Maker

The Potato Peeler

I am definitely going to start using this idiom. Likely I will only be able to bring in out from my idiom repertoire on rare occasions, but I am determined to use it.