Warning regarding the new version of blogger!

I decided to try a new templet to give my page a fresh look. In the old blogger, the look changed, but the templet was still in basic html coding. This time, to my horror, all of my links, my counter, any extras had disappeared. I'd spent over two years adding my links. When I used the new blogger tool to add links, I discovered that they had to be done ONE AT A TIME. Impossible. The old html templet was gone, too, replaced with a code that didn't resemble any html I'd seen. I still had a copy of my old templet, but no matter where I tried, blogger refused the code. Finally, in the help section I spotted their note about the 'revert' button.

It worked. Whew! My blog may be less colorful, but everything's back.

Heed my experience.

Diego Kieros does it again!

If you scroll down, you'll see a graphic the talented and generous Diego Kieros did from a photo of me as I look now. This is from a photo taken when I was 30. I love it, Diego, and thank you! (click to enlarge).

Once agan, his website is http://www.diegoquiros.com/

Pris

Colorless Days

In the lineup of old lovers,
he never appears,
yet he was the one who peeled back my skin,
slipped fingers beneath breastbone,
took heart into hand.
Odd, this disappearance, when a decade
of heartbeats had to thump past
before flesh closed and healed.
I wonder if his next love remembers.
Perhaps the one after that still carries his photo,
touches it surreptitiously when paying a bill.
Maybe those men who once slung our hearts
'round their necks, painted hieroglyphs
on our breasts with their tongues,
wake now in colorless rooms,
bewildered to find no woman beneath them.
Perhaps they remember a certain face,
a laugh...a sigh,
& dream of those days when their touch
still forged fingerprints into the hollows of our time.

The Inside of a Heartbeat

I shiver, naked under my cellophane raincoat,
walk in the traffic
hope this wanton behavior will provoke
a sudden rush of weeping birds,
a Paul Revere on panting horse
to shout his word at deafened ears,
the clang of bells at town centre...
hope it will flush out our heroes
whereEVER they might be hiding.

A bum on the streetcorner
grasps my hand
drags me from the path of a six wheeler,
hands me blanket and cardboard box.
Here lady, sit out the storm, he says,
never blinking an eyeat my puckered nipples,
never noticing we sit alone in the rain,
that Superman doesn't appear,
or that the silence that surrounds us
is like the inside of a heartbeat.


(Note: Blogger just now only would let me sign in by signing up to the new version and has swept me over, not knowing how this new version works. I hope readers with the old version will still be able to comment. We'll see.)

Big Brother is watching!

I downloaded a Kim Komando recommended program called Google Earth. Got the free version. A business version was available for 400 dollars. It shows locations in far greater detail then the free one can.

Below is a view of my street and housetop:




And here is the ocean three miles to the east of my house, with the hole still in the pier from the hurricanes of 2004.



All I have to do is type in an address, then click search and I go there on the map. While countries other than the U.S. aren't as much in the program yet, I found a friend's home in Yorkshire, U.K. and a tiny town where another friend lives in Wales, including the beach road she walks each day to work.

Now, this is my question: If I can see the vehicles in my driveway, the trees in my yard, the boat trailer in the side yard on a free program, what can our government see with its far more sophisticated satellite systems? Were it not for the increasing legalized intrusion into our privacy already, I might not be as concerned, but , under Bush, the government now has the right to open mail without due cause. Will the government soon have shots on file of my next jaunt out to the back yard??

Something to ponder.

And, btw, off the subject, I can't get to my dashboard anymore without going through the 'application' to upgrade, only to be told that one of my blogs is too big to do it now. Whoops, just looked and it's a group blog I asked to be deleted from a long time ago due to lack of energy/time. Just wrote another letter. Perhaps soon I'll be in the new one. Brian Campbell posts that it works really well for him.

Rediscovered photos (click to enlarge)

I dug out my dusty old slide storage box recently (remember slides, anybody? :-) and rediscovered a number of photos taken in slide form before I stopped using slides in the mid seventies or so. I thought it would be fun to share a few I discovered from that time. The slides were old. Some were dark. Some had dust spots, but, kind of like going through an old diary you hadn't looked at in years, these brought back memories. Who knows? Maybe one will even spur a poem or a graphic. Our memories, along with the present, are so often a wellspring of our creative side. After all, the past is what brought us to where we are now. Tomorrow, today will be a memory.





You'll see one photo of me with the commune cat almost hidden in the shadows of my bedroom in Boston, another climbing a mountain trail in Acadia, Maine in the days before my body decided to put a halt to such things, another in the miniskirt days in Boston with my 'Jane Fonda' shag haircut, and one of the beautiful Pali mountain range in Hawaii from the year I lived and worked there. Oh, I threw in one just before a giant pastry pigout on a long winter's weekend drive up there.

A gift from the talented Diego Quiros

In Michael Parker's latest blog, he posts a graphic Diego did from one of Michael's photographs. Diego has taken most of the photos posted by members of the group cafecafe blog, a Didi Menendez run blog now in the Facebook blogging system, and transformed them into works of art. I'd like to post the one he did for me, as well, by way of thanks and to acknowledge a man who's not only an accomplished artist, but poet, as well.

You can see more of his work at his website, HERE.

Thanks, Diego, and thanks to you, Michael, for reminding me to give this thanks in a more public forum.

Tagged

Okay, Helen, am doing the best I can on this:-)

I was tagged by Helen Losse.

Favourite thing to do on the net (apart from blogging, of course!): Look at art sites

Favourite leisure activity: Reading (when clarity allows)

Favourite Meal: (this happens maybe once a year) Lobster tail, huge salad and something also very rare--fried okra

Favourite Pudding: Banana pudding, homemade

Favourite Drink: Water

Favourite Book: I can't name a favorite. Anything by Alice Hoffman...Illumination Nights was a good one. Carl Haiason books. Tom Robbins.

Favourite Film: Can't name just one here, either.....The English Patient, My First Mister, Murphy's Romance, Philadelphia, A Good Woman, Pride and Prejudice.

Favourite Music: Older Rock and Classical, esp cello concertos

Favourite Quote: “I can sail this boat lying down" Sufi

Favourite Colour: Red

Favourite Flower: Daisy

Favourite Blog: I plead the Fifth :-)


And now I’m tagging Ellen Johns and Lydia Dunford (when she returns from vacation)

Offline Again

I'm trying to keep up with email, but the past few days I've had some sort of virus hit my inner ear. I'm dizzier than my 'normal' CFIDS virus. My ears scream when I do anything cognitive at all (yes, they're getting louder now). Food tastes 'off' and I'm nauseated. No fun. It seems to be one thing after the other right now and I hope I still have some readers when I come back. I was going to try to post something, but it would have to be something old and all I really feel like doing is getting off the computer.

Hope the rest of you are doing well!

Pris

Hiking trail in China! (from a Kim Komando recommended site)

Want to like to hike more of THIS TRAIL sometime?

Click to enlarge, then look at the entire ascent to the top. Gulp.

Even Cowgirls Go crazy Sometimes

In a moment of fifties
RE-run despair,
Dale Evans whips out
her Colt, shoots Trigger,
is unfaithful to Roy
with that masked man's
loyal friend, Tonto.

I swallowed the moon,
she warbles,
(in case a pretrial
explanation becomes necessary)
unzips her June Cleaver,
Doris Day
Princess SummerFallWinterSpring
skin-fits.
Breathes.

She plays Moonglow
nonstop on the jukebox
and dances
with sexy Bill Holden
after the drunk
rips his shirt
and his own boozing
and cracked skull
take him to the
land of dead
horses,
cuckolded
husbands
and crazy,
moon-bellied
cowgirls, just waiting
to kill him
again.

What New Years Eve do you most remember?

When I lived in a commune in Boston with the man I once thought I would spend the rest of my life with, I'd flown home to have a few holiday days with my parents in the Carolinas. My flight back was on New Years Eve, due to arrive well before ten thirty and from there I would take a taxi to Brighton, on the other side of the city. The plane was running late, but I picked up a bottle of champagne at the airport when we landed, stashed it in my bag and shared a cab with another woman headed in the same direction.

Already the night was lit up with firecrackers, the streets filled with people rushing in groups to god only knows where to bring in the new year. By the time we were parallel with the Boston Commons the crowds spilled out into the street and traffic was at a standstill. I looked at my watch. R was expecting me by now and it was already 11 30. When we hadn't moved more than a block in the next twenty minutes, I told the cabbie to open the trunk. I pulled out the bottle of champagne and as the countdown, that magical 10...9...8...sounded out all around us, I popped the cork and the other woman, the cabbie and I guzzled our toast from the bottle. For a moment, we were caught in a time freeze...the moon so high in the Boston sky it floated like a pregnant woman on the smoke drifting up from the fireworks.

Finally, traffic started moving again. A half hour later I was hurrying up the steps to the commune, bag thumping on the stairs behind me in one hand, half-bottle of champagne in the other, my love at the door, warming me with his kiss, the sweet taste of champagne still on my lips christening him with smoke, moonlight, fresh dreams and our own rush into a new tomorrow.


Happy 2007!