Ms. G's New Toy (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 Hilary Melton-Butcher and we've enjoyed them very much, thank you, Hilary!  They will be posted by Elephant's Child.           

story

This week's prompts are:

• Clawing
• Sunglasses
• Landscape
• Grandee
• Anodyne 

And/or

• Descriptive
• Resilience
• Country
• Slice
• Finger

Hilary also offered us some 'extra' words:

• Rainbow
• Coriander
• Falling
• Art
• Exhibit
• Sage
  

Charlotte (MotherOwl)  has given us Turquoise Blue as the colour of the month.  If you can also incorporate it into your stories she (and I) will be grateful.

Jane was raised out in the COUNTRY by a mother whose RESILIENCE pushed the children to break the poverty cycle and make better lives for themselves.  From a family CLAWING for existence in an unfriendly LANDSCAPE, her mother and stepfather raised the his/hers/ours family to all go to college, a feat unmatched by any of the other branches of the families.

This second to youngest daughter majored in design and decorating and after FALLING in love with a man she thought was a wonderfully solid church member and doctor, married and had a happy life.  She had her ART on EXHIBIT in local galleries and was sought as a design consultant.  They had twin boys and she enjoyed so much being a wife and mother.

The RAINBOW was shattered when he had an affair and left her, marrying the other woman.  Jane took the high road and would not ever say a bad word about him, especially to the boys.  The most DESCRIPTIVE word for the divorce settlement was she was shafted, and that quite royally.  She got the house and a small amount of child support.  That's it.

During the marriage, the house in a very small subdivision outside the city had been their pride and joy.  Then came the neighbors.

They were friendly enough, if they got their own way.  Their house plans violated the subdivision code, but they poured the concrete before the committee in charge of such things noticed, and not wanting to start a FALLING out with new neighbors right off the bat, the committee just let it slide.

This meant Jane and her husband had to build a fence they didn't want, for privacy.

The neighbor lady often behaved like a GRANDEE although she was nice on the surface.  She gave a party for the ladies of the neighborhood wearing an outrageous Turquoise Blue outfit more fitting for an evening grand ball, burned SAGE "to make sure the atmosphere stays pure," served FINGER sandwiches sprinkled with CORIANDER and SLICEd so thin it was hard to pick them up, and spent the whole time complaining about every topic under the sun.

The house Jane and her former husband had built had one story, and a couple of years after the divorce she got the opportunity, by what she calls a miracle, to add a partial second floor.  The neighbors found out and the neighbor lady accosted her one day to demand, "You aren't going to have windows on this side of the house, are you?"

"Well, yes," Jane said.  "The plans do call for windows on this side."

"My husband and I have plans to build a pool in the back yard," she said in a very cool voice.  "We also want to entertain our friends from Brazil, where, as you know, we travel often.  Of course, we and our Brazilian friends prefer to swim in the nude.  It wouldn't be a good idea for you to have windows on that side of the house, I suggest you change the plans."

Jane was nonplussed, and simply nodded and walked back in the house, preceded by the one of her twins who had been outside and privy to the conversation.

He went skidding in and yelled to his brother, "Guess what!  The neighbors are going to build a pool and they want to swim naked!"

Both boys were shocked by this and were jumping around like fleas on a hot brick and babbling about it when Jane said, "Boys, boys, boys, calm down.  The first thing we do is pray," which they did.

A couple of hours later, outside in her front garden Jane saw another church member who happened to be a lawyer driving past.  She flagged him down and told him in confidence about her conversation, and asked for his advice.  He told her, then told the story to another lawyer friend in the church asking him to weigh in, and by the time it all got back to her Jane said, "And I thought women were gossips!"

Anyway, a few days after this, both neighbors were outdoors and asked Jane if she'd had the plans altered.  She said that upon legal advice, no, she was not going to do that.  The wife, in a fit of pique, threw her SUNGLASSES to the ground and walked off in a huff.

The husband, a much milder mannered person than his wife, said, "Jane, I wish you would reconsider as you know, we are going to build that pool and we can do anything we like in our own back yard, including nude sunbathing."

"Actually," Jane answered, "the law doesn't allow you to do anything you want just because it's your property.  If you had a huge plate glass window in your front room facing the street, it would be illegal for you to get out of the shower nude and go stand in front of it every morning, exposed to any and all who pass, even while you are within your own home.  According to legal advice I've received, if you want to swim nude, you have to make certain no one, especially young, impressionable children, can see you, ever, at any time, including from a neighboring house or just by climbing a ladder and looking over the fence."

He just shook his head and walked off, and the next thing they knew, the neighbor lady, as an ANODYNE for her hurt feelings, had a company come in and plant a huge border wall of bamboo between the two properties!  It was supposed to be a screen large enough to prevent anyone on that new second floor from seeing over into the yard.

This wall of bamboo caused both the neighbors and Jane no end of trouble, but it was worse for the neighbors as they not only never built the pool, when they went to build the house, in true stubborn fashion, they held out against every offer to buy that included "seller remove the bamboo" as a condition of sale.  They finally had to concede as this was included in every offer to buy, and it cost a whole lot more time, money and effort to remove the pesky stuff than put it in.

The new neighbors, Jane tells me, are much nicer and easier to live with.

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Today is:

Birth Anniversary of Guru Rinpoche -- Bhutan

Constitution day -- Ukraine

Festival of Terrible Poetry -- according to The Daily Bleed, and since there is some hilarious, if terrible, poetry out there, go find some, and bust a gut

Insurance Awareness Day -- now who do you think invented that!?!

International Body Piercing Day -- on the birthday of James Mark "Jim" Ward, "the granddaddy of the modern body piercing movement"

International CAPS LOCK DAY -- a parody holiday created by Derek Arnold, a user on Metafilter, in 2000

Kirkpinar Oil Wrestling Festival -- Kirkpinar, Edirne, Turkey (since 1362, the oldest wrestling festival in the world as well as the oldest continually running, sanctioned sporting event in the world, in which men clad in leather britches and covered in olive oil wrestle; through Sunday)

Mnarja / L-Imnarja Festival begins -- Buskett Gardens, Malta (folk festival for Sts. Peter and Paul, begins this evening and continues through the 29th)

National Ceviche Day

National Tapioca Day

Paul Bunyan Day -- the tall tale hero of the lumberjacks; celebrated at different times in some parts of the country, but most sites cite this date

Ra goes forth to propitiate the Nun -- Ancient Egyptian Calendar (date approximate)

Stonewall Rebellion Day -- now seen as the start of the gay liberation movement in 1969

St. Irenaeus' Day (Patron of Mobile, Alabama)

St. Paul's Feast -- Kato Paphos, Cyprus (religious festivities with the archbishop officiating and a procession of the icon of St. Paul through the streets, through tomorrow)

St. Peter's Eve -- English Christian tradition, night of bonfires and continuation of midsummer celebrations

Vidovdan (Festival for St. Vitus) -- Eastern Orthodox Christian, based on the traditional Julian Calendar date

     a recognized holiday in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Anniversaries Today:

Harry S. Truman marries Bess Wallace, 1919

Birthdays Today:

Kellie Pickler, 1986

Steve Burton, 1970

Danielle Brisebois, 1969

John Cusack, 1966

Mary Stuart Masterson, 1966

Mark Grace, 1964

John Elway, 1960

Thomas Hampson, 1955

Alice Krige, 1954

Kathy Bates, 1948

Gilda Radner, 1946

Bruce Davison, 1946

Turkan Soray, 1945

Pat Morita, 1932

Mel Brooks, 1926

Maria Goeppert Mayer, 1906

Richard Rodgers, 1902

Clara Louise Maass, 1876

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712

John Wesley, 1703

Peter Paul Rubens, 1577

Henry VIII, King of England, 1491

Debuting/Premiering Today:

The Nutty Professor(Film), 1996

"Amos 'n' Andy"(TV), 1951

"Quiz Kids"(Radio), 1940

Today in History:

Fighters of the First Crusade defeat Kerbogha of Mosul, 1098

Ottomans defeat Serbian army in the bloody Battle of Kosovo, opening the way for the Ottoman conquest of Southeastern Europe, 1389

Guadeloupe becomes a French colony, 1635

The coronation of Victoria of the United Kingdom, 1838

The Théâtre de l'Académie Royale de Musique in Paris premieres the ballet Giselle, 1841

The first conformation dog show is held in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, 1859

Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria and his wife Sophie are assassinated in Sarajevo by young Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip, the casus belli of World War I, 1914

The Treaty of Versailles is signed in Paris, formally ending World War I, 1919

The Irish Civil War begins with the shelling of the Four Courts in Dublin by Free State forces, 1922

Israel annexes East Jerusalem, 1967

COMECON, as part of the last vestige of the Soviet Bloc, is formally disbanded, followed by the Warsaw pact 3 days later, 1991

Slobodan Milosevic is deported to ICTY to stand trial, 2001

The Republic of Montenegro is admitted as the 192nd Member of the United Nations, 2006

The U.N. reports 10 million people are suffering from the effects of the worst drought in 60 years, 2011

Christine Lagarde becomes the first woman to head the International Monetary Fund, 2011

A power company uncovers a Neolithic wooden trackway 2,300 years old in Suffolk, England; it will become one of the largest archaeological digs in Europe at 16,000 square meters, 2018

For the first time since the position was created in 1343, Amsterdam elects a woman mayor, Femke Halsema, 2018

Due to lack of rainfall dropping the water level in the Mosul Dam reservoir, a 3,400-year-old Bronze Age palace from the Mittani Empire is uncovered on the banks of the Tigris River, 2019

AirCar, a prototype flying car capable of flying 1,000km (600 miles), at heights of up to 8,200ft (2,500m), completes a 35 min test flight between Nitra and Bratislava airports in Slovakia, 2021

Rocket Lab launches NASA's CAPSTONE from Mahia peninsula, New Zealand, to orbit the Moon, research for future Gateway and Artemis missions, 2022