Now I'm Scared (Wordless Wednesday) and Words for Wednesday

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Linking up with Wordless Wednesday, BeThere2Day, and Sandee at Comedy Plus.     

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Words for Wednesday was begun by Delores and has become a moveable feast of word or picture or music prompts to encourage us to write stories, poems, or whatever strikes our fancy.    

This month, the prompts are being provided by Lissa.  

This week's prompts are valentine-inspired words:

1 - love

2 - happiness

3 - chocolate

4 - single

5 - dinner

And/Or

6 - hate

7 - sadness (note: i cheated and used the word "sad" instead)

8 - lemon

9 - attached/double (can use either or both)

10 - breakfast

I have no idea what's the opposite of chocolate so I chose lemon because it's sour/bitter but if you can think of a better word, use that instead.

Charlotte/Mother Owl has chosen a color for each month, and this month's color is white (or signal white, a white with a bit of gray in it).  She would appreciate if it could be worked in on Sunday Selections photos or Words for Wednesday as an additional part of the challenge.

Even the most optimistic only gave them two years at the outside.

"They're too different," most agreed.  "Night and day," others affirmed.

She was an early bird, he was a night owl.  She insisted on BREAKFAST, he only wanted toast and coffee.  By DINNER she was starting to wilt and generally only ate a small portion while he scarfed his evening meal like a farm boy after baling hay all day.

He had a dog and while he didn't HATE cats, he was dubious about them.  "I've never really gotten to know any cats," he told her when they first met.

He met her two cats and she, being an animal person in general, fell in LOVE with his dog right away.  "I haven't had time to walk and play with a dog since I was little," she explained, "and when my family lost our Benji, we just didn't get another dog.  Having cats was so much easier."

HAPPINESS, to her, was staying home.  To him, it was getting out of the house.  She was glad he had a bowling league although at first she looked askance at poker night with his friends.

"I don't like losing money, so I don't gamble," she told him.

"I don't like losing, either," he'd said, "it's a SAD thing to waste money foolishly, that's why I don't go to the casino.  My buddies and I bet, sure, to make it fun, but it's low stakes and mostly it's to have a beer and eat snacks and talk shop.  None of us ever bring more than twenty, maybe twenty-five bucks for the evening."

Once she realized he wasn't a gambler at heart, she didn't mind it.  In fact, she said, "It keeps him out of worse trouble, and if he's out of the house a couple of nights a week, it gives us more to talk about when we are home together!"

In her estimation, if it wasn't CHOCOLATE, it wasn't dessert, and the more chocolate, the better, while he couldn't get enough LEMON squares and root beer floats with vanilla ice cream.

They did agree on one thing, WHITE chocolate was forbidden.

He was a mechanic, always coming home with grease stains and dirt under his nails.  He could fix just about anything around the house, and his "projects" went on forever.  It made her crazy sometimes, living in a house that almost always had some part under construction or being redone in some way, and of course like the shoeless cobbler's wife her car was always on the brink of disaster but her college minor in philosophy came in handy in this case.  "It could be worse," she'd say, "he could fix nothing, ever!"

Her life growing up was reading and books, so she became a librarian and loved it.  She didn't know a spark plug from a hole in the ground and made him laugh every time she tried to describe what sound her car was making this time.

Raised in different parts of town, different schools, different social circles, parents of different political and religious persuasions, from the outside friends thought they didn't have a SINGLE thing in common.

Friends, in this case, were wrong.  They made each other laugh, uproariously.  They had the same taste in movies, old movies, B-flicks, cult classics, comedies.  Neither quite agreed with their own parents on either the politics or religion questions, both voted independent of any party line and they found a non-denominational church that scandalized both families but suited them perfectly.

They both found themselves becoming ATTACHED in spite of friend and family predictions, and their marriage flourished long and happy, although of course there were ups and downs as in any relationship.

It's been years since I've heard from this couple, as they were in my old hometown, but they showed it's not always possible to predict what will bring a couple together, sometimes it pays to take a chance.

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Today is:

Candlemas -- on the Julian Calendar, and in the Orthodox Christian Churches

Decimal Day -- UK (anniversary of the 1971 currency conversion to the decimal system)

Flag Day -- Canada (Maple Leaf adopted this date 1965)

John Frum Day -- Tanna Island, Vanuatu

Kamakura Matsuri -- Yokote, Akita Prefecture, Japan (Snow Cave Festival; through tomorrow)

Kuromori Kabuki -- Kuromori, Yamagata Prefecture, Japan (traditional Kabuki, through the 17th)

Liberation Day -- Afghanistan

Lupercalia -- Ancient Roman Calendar (remembrance of the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus)

National Gum Drop Day

Nirvana Day -- Buddhist; Jain; Sikh (regional observances may vary)

Remember the Maine Day -- US (remembrance of the Spanish War)

Singles Awareness Day -- although some celebrate on the 14th as an anti-Valentine's Day

Sretenje -- Serbia (National Day)

Stop and Smell Your Compost Pile Day -- snort away the winter blues and think about spring (but i think this one is just plain weird)

St. Sigfrid's Day (Patron of Sweden)

Susan B. Anthony Day -- US (birth anniversary)

Total Defense Day -- Singapore

Birthdays Today:

Amber Riley, 1986

Renee O'Connor, 1971

Jane Child, 1967

Chris Farley, 1964

Matt Groening, 1954

Melissa Manchester, 1951

Jane Seymour, 1951

Marisa Berenson, 1948

Susan Brownmiller, 1935

Adolfo, 1933

Claire Bloom, 1931

Harvey Korman, 1927

Kevin McCarthy, 1914

Irena Sendler,1910

Miep Gees, 1909 

Cesar Romero, 1907

Harold Arlen, 1905

John Barrymore, 1882

Ernest Shackleton, 1874

Alfred North Whitehead, 1861

Elihu Root, 1824

Susan B. Anthony, 1820

Charles Lewis Tiffany, 1812

Cyrus McCormick, 1809

John Augustus Sutter, 1903

Henry Engelhard Steinway, 1797

Abraham Clark, 1726

Galileo Galilei, 1564

Pedro Mememdez de Aviles, 1519

Babur, 1483 (founder of Mughal dynasty in India)

Claudius Drusus Germanicus Caesar Nero, 37 

Debuting/Premiering Today:

"Come Back, Little Sheba"(Play), 1950

"Cinderella"(Disney cartoon), 1950

"The Little Foxes"(Play), 1939

Debuting/Premiering Today:

"An der schönen blauen Donau"(The Blue Danube)(Strauss Waltz), 1867

Today in History:

Philosopher Socrates is sentenced to death, BC399

Khosrau II is crowned as king of Persia, 590

Ho-tse Shen-hui, Zen teacher, disputes the founder of Northern Ch'an line, 732

The city of St. Louis, Missouri, is founded by Pierre Laclade Ligue as a French trading post, 1764

The first US printed ballots are authorized, in Philadelphia, 1799

Sarah Roberts is barred from attending a white school in Boston, 1848

Great Ormond St Hospital for Sick Children, London, admits its first patient, 1852

A fire in Rotterdam, Netherlands, damages the Museum Boymans, 1864

American President Rutherford B. Hayes signs a bill allowing female attorneys to argue cases before the Supreme Court of the United States, 1879

Nine inches (23cm) of snow falls on New Orleans, Louisiana, 1898

The USS Maine sinks in Havana harbor, cause unknown-258 sailors die, 1898

The first Teddy Bear is introduced in America, made by Morris and Rose Michtom, 1903

Gerald Lankester Harding and Roland de Vaux begin excavations at Cave 1 of the Qumran Caves, where they will eventually discover the first seven Dead Sea Scrolls, 1949

The Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China sign a mutual defense treaty, 1950

Canada and the United States agree to construct the Distant Early Warning Line, a system of radar stations in the far northern Arctic regions of Canada and Alaska, 1954

A new red-and-white maple leaf design is adopted as the flag of Canada, replacing the old Canadian Red Ensign banner, 1965

The decimalisation of British coinage is completed on Decimal Day, 1971

The 1976 Constitution of Cuba is adopted by the national referendum, 1976

The drilling rig Ocean Ranger sinks during a storm off the coast of Newfoundland, killing 84 rig workers, 1982

The Soviet Union officially announces that all of its troops have left Afghanistan, 1989

At the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in China, a Long March 3 rocket, carrying an Intelsat 708, crashes into a rural village after liftoff, killing an unannounced number of people, 1996

First draft of the complete Human Genome is published in Nature, 2001

YouTube, the Internet site on which videos may be shared and viewed by others, is launched in the United States, 2005

A near-Earth asteroid, 2012 DA14, comes within 17,200 miles of the Earth's surface, a record-close approach for an object estimated at 50 meters, or 160 ft in in diameter, 2013

The Indian space rocket PSLV-C37 successfully launches 104 satellites in a single flight, 2017 

IBU Female Rookie of the Year Hanna Öberg of Sweden wins the individual biathlon gold medal with 4 clean shootings at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in the first victory and podium of her career, 2018

Beijing orders people returning after a Lunar New Year holiday to self-quarantine in an attempt to stop the spread of Covid-19, 2020

In the only podium sweep of the Beijing Winter Olympics, Germany takes all 3 medals in the 2-man bobsleigh, 2022