Way Cool Waterer (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, yours truly is providing the prompts on my blog.

Please feel free to use some of the prompts, none of them, or all of them as you see fit.  The point is to get the creative juices flowing in whatever manner your muse leads you.

This week's prompts are

protest

trap

analysis

confidence

gap

abnormal

and/or

plaster

way

purse

neighbors

opener

record

Charlotte (MotherOwl) has selected Mouse Grey as the colour of the month.  If you can include it in your story she and I will be grateful.

She came in the house through the inner door which led from the garage, dropping her PURSE in the chair on her WAY through the den as always and headed to the bedroom to change out of her work clothes.

The cat greeted her and she stopped to give Vander a good scritch.  Once she was dressed she headed back to the kitchen to get started on dinner and saw her husband in the hallway.

"You left the garage door open again," he said, and she stopped.

"The inside door or the big garage door?" she asked.

"The big one," he said.

She shook her head in confusion and had to PROTEST.  "I know I pushed the button to close it on my way in, and this time I even stopped to watch it close and make sure it didn't reopen."

"Well, it was open, so something's wrong," he said.

"There has to be something ABNORMAL going on," she said.  "Remember a few days ago we heard the garage door open at 2am?  And before that, both of us were in the den watching a movie and we heard it?  I'm closing it, but something's wrong."

"I'm going to call the company that installed the automatic door for us and see if he has some ideas," he said.

A couple of days later the nice technician installer from the company was there.  He looked everything over, did an ANALYSIS of the whole mechanism, and couldn't find an explanation.

"It doesn't look like it's been tampered with by vermin," he said, to which she said, "Wait, what!"

"Vermin.  You know, mice, rats, the little Mouse Grey things that sometimes manage to get in houses through any GAP, live behind the PLASTER or sheetrock, those little things.  Sometimes they gnaw on stuff, including wiring, and you can get a short."

"If we have one of those things in the house, we're moving!" she said, looking panicked.

"If we have one of those things, we'll set a TRAP," her husband calmly said.  "In fact," he added, seeing her face, "I'll set one anyway.  It'll stay empty, though, you'll see."

"Only other thing you might check," the technician said, "is to ask any close NEIGHBORS with automatic garage doors to check if they have one on the same frequency.  It can happen, and when the neighbor opens his door, it opens or closes yours, too."

"We'll check with them, thanks," he said as the technician left.  She still looked a bit startled and he put his arm around her shoulder.  "Don't worry, I have every CONFIDENCE we'll get to the bottom of this, and we have no mice."

Over the next few days they did check with neighbors, and started trying to run out to the garage every time they heard the mechanism opening, trying to see if they could figure out what in the world was going on, but to no avail.

Then one day it happened they were both in the den and at the same time looked at the cat as it jumped up into the chair where she left her purse.  The chair was simply there in case they had company, neither of them sat on it regularly, and she'd gotten in the habit of knowing her purse was always there.

It was a nice soft cloth purse, and apparently, the cat liked it.  Vander jumped up and prepared to make himself comfortable, wiggling and stretching and then they heard it.  The garage door mechanism went off, and she said, "I keep my remote control OPENER in my purse!  Do you think he could have..."

"I think he just did," he said.  "The cat has been opening the garage when you put your purse there and he climbs up there to sleep, he hits the button!"

They both laughed, and she lifted Vander and pulled her purse off the chair.  He looked miffed, so she gave him a pillow, which he begrudgingly accepted.

After that, the purse had a hook on the wall with the coats, and when he called the technician to tell him how it had turned out, the guy laughed and said, "That's one for the RECORD books!"

(Based on a true story, the cat did it!)

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Today is:

Assyrian Martyrs Day -- various Assyrian communities

Battle of Boyaca Day -- Colombia

Festival Wednesday/East End Parade -- British Virgin Islands

Harvest Holiday -- Slavic Pagan Calendar (reaping ceases for a few hours in honor of Volos' beard; bread is eaten and offerings given to Mother Earth and Volos for a bountiful harvest)

Independence Day / National Day -- Cote d'Ivoire(1960)

National Lighthouse Day -- US (American Lighthouse Foundation) 

National Raspberries in Cream Day

Particularly Preposterous Packaging Day -- sponsored by Wellcat Holidays, and especially the kind no one can open without a machete, what's with that!

Professional Speaker's Day  

Purple Heart Day -- US (originally instituted this day in 1782 by George Washington)

Say "Cheese" Day -- begun by ecard companies looking for something to celebrate; in my family, we do not say "Cheese", we say "Chicken Lips!" Try it some time when walking past tourists who are trying to get a good photo, and watch them smile genuine smiles and come up with a good picture.

Sea Serpent Day -- no one knows why today, just enjoy

St. Albert of Trapani's Day (Patron of Carmelite schools; Messina, Italy; Trapani, Italy)

St. Cajetan's Day (Patron of job seekers and the unemployed)

Take Last Winter's Snowballs Out of the Freezer and Have a Fight Day -- in the northern hemisphere, it's certainly hot enough

Birthdays Today:

Charlize Theron, 1975

Harold Parrineau, 1963

DeLane Matthews, 1961

David Duchovny, 1960

Alberto Salazar, 1957

John Glover, 1944

Garrison Keillor, 1942

B.J. Thomas, 1942

Abebe Bikila, 1932

"The Amazing" James Randi, 1928

Carl "Alfalfa" Switser, 1927

Stan Freberg, 1926

Ralph Johnson Bunche, 1903

Rudolf C. Ising, 1903

William Boyd McKechnie, 1886

Billie Burke, 1884

Mata Hari, 1876

Nathanael Greene, 1742

Today in History:

Battle of Crannon between Athens and Macedon, following the death of Alexander the Great, BC322

Construction of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore begins in Florence, 1420

Coup again the Tianshun Emperor by the Ming Dynasty Chinese military general Cao Qin, 1461

Francis Drake's fleet returns to Plymouth, 1573

The first documented performance of Macbeth, at the Great Hall at Hampton Court, 1606

Sieur de La Salle's brigantine Le Griffon becomes the first ship to sail the upper Great Lakes, 1679

Cherokee Indians take Ft. Loudon, Tennessee, 1760

George Washington creates the Order of the Purple Heart, 1782

Simon Bolivar triumphs over the Spanish at the Battle of Boyaca, 1819

The long simmering tension between the Hatfields and the McCoys on the Kentucky/West Virginia border erupts into full scale violence on election day, 1882

The Peace Bridge opens between Fort Erie, Ontario and Buffalo, New York, 1927

IBM dedicates the first program-controlled calculator, the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (known best as the Harvard Mark I), 1944

Thor Heyerdahl's balsa wood raft the Kon-Tiki, smashes into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands after a 101-day, 7,000 kilometres (4,300 mi) journey across the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to prove that pre-historic peoples could have traveled from South America, 1947

Explorer 6 transmits the first TV photo of Earth from space, 1959

The "artistic crime of the century" occurs when Philippe Petit of France, after months of planning and smuggling in materials, makes an illegal tightrope walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, 1974

Viking 2 enters orbit around Mars, 1976

The Washington Star ceases all operations after 128 years of publication, 1981

Takao Doi, Mamoru Mohri and Chiaki Mukai are chosen to be Japan's first astronauts, 1985

Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants breaks baseball great Hank Aaron's record by hitting his 756th home run, 2007

Australia's Sally Pearson sets a new Olympic record when she wins the 100 metres hurdles in 12.35 seconds at the 2012 Summer Olympics, 2012

The Mendocino Fire becomes the largest recorded fire in California's history, at 290,600 acres, overtaking The 2017 Thomas Fire, 2018

The US Senate passes an Inflation Reduction Act in an attempt to help stabilize the economy, 2022