#NaPoWriMo First Contact Day

Keep a safe distance
First time greeting aliens
Live long and prosper

Star Trek: First Contact 1996

Captain Jean-Luc Picard : The date. Data, I need to know the exact date.
Lieutenant Commander Data : April 4th, 2063.
Cmdr. William Riker : April 4th, the day before first contact.
Lieutenant Commander Data : Precisely.

 

Hello readers and welcome to day five of NaPoWriMo – aka First Contact Day. Sorry for the interruption of your regularly scheduled prompt.
NaPoWriMo Prompt – Our (optional) prompt for today is one that we have used in past years, but which I love to come back to, because it so often takes me to new and unusual places, and results in fantastic poems. It’s called the “Twenty Little Poetry Projects,” and was originally developed by Jim Simmerman. The challenge is to use/do all of the following in the same poem. Of course,  if you can’t fit all twenty projects into your poem, or a few of them get your poem going, that is just fine too!

In other news, we pulled off a very successful birthday celebration yesterday (the day before first contact).

 

Festive ambiance
Wish many happy returns
Casa de Hosking

Decorate backyard
She does not reveal her wish
Quarantine party

The dinner portion of last night’s celebration was a bit tricky. We all went to Hayashi Hibachi for Shawn’s birthday at the end of February and Gretchen actually ate and enjoyed the sushi. She wanted to make a return trip for her birthday and then the stay at home order came. Well even before then, restaurants weren’t offering dine-in services, but I told her there is no problem ordering take-out. Mom was wrong Hayashi Hibachi has virtually no online presence and we could not find a menu to view. Shawn actually drove over to the restaurant; yes management is aware of the sucky online presence but they’re a chain and don’t have much of a say. Dad took pictures of the sushi options and we made our selection here at home; Dad placed the order and then went over to Total Wine to wait. He actually took a picture of the parking lot as no one was around except for the wine store. Yes folks if you have to be stuck indoors with your family for a month and more we all need alcoholic beverages to cope. Of course in my opinion, a little bit of poetry doesn’t hurt. Hope every has a safe and happy first contact day!

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#NaPoWriMo 2019 Day 4

Birthday email card

Morning Blues

Morning snooze gone
Five am alarm clock blares

Too early to rely on

Beware

Sleep deprived mom
Dad put the coffee on
Everyone stay calm
The week is almost over
And will soon turnover
Beautiful Saturday
Just one problem
Six am alarm clock blares

NaPoWriMo Prompt Day 4 – Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own sad poem, but one that, like Teicher’s, achieves sadness through simplicity. Playing with the sonnet form may help you – its very compactness can compel you to be straightforward, using plain, small words.

Good morning and welcome to day 4 of NaPoWriMo. AzMerit testing is over and we were back to a five am wake up call. Once I got Gretchen off to school at 6:30 and the dishwasher loaded and started, I went back to bed. Then Shawn got up and asked if the coffee was started. Lol! In his dreams. And yes because Gretchen takes college classes through the ACE program, we are up early on Saturday mornings too. But on the plus side, she will be graduating high school with 24 credits from the community college.

Today may be tough
All the birthday wishes rough
It’s never enough

The #haikuchallenge word today is rough and yeah I’m kinda on a rhyming kick. Gretchen went off to school hoping no one would acknowledge her birthday. Guess what, her future university put a birthday video together and sends it in an email to their students.

The Misadventure of 45

My 45th birthday was on Saturday and my Uncle Pete was in town staying with my cousin Russell and wanted to see everyone and take us out to dinner. We arranged to meet at Red Lobster over near my cousin’s house. On a normal day, it should only take about half an hour to get over there. But 45 has a bad connotation and it proved to be accurate for my birthday. The I10 was a parking lot with an accident around 107th ave. We got caught right on the on ramp at Dysart Road. Stuck in traffic going nowhere; it took us 2 hours just to get to the next exit at Avondale Boulevard. Needless to say, I sent a text to my cousin telling him we’d be late. At that time he said the restaurant gave them a 50 min wait. We figured that shouldn’t be too bad; we didn’t think it would take two hours to make it up one exit on the thruway. Ha-Ha what did we know.

Driving to dinner
Standstill traffic a burden
Birthday goes awry

My Uncle and cousin were seated long before we even got off the highway. Then there was an 8 car pile-up on Avondale Blvd, slowing that street down. After getting past all that, Shawn backtracked to Dysart to head north before going east. FINALLY almost 3 hours from when we left the house, we made it to the restaurant. My birthday dinner and the conversation and company was very nice. And we do have quite a story to share about our commute.

Trapped in car for hours
Will not crush my birthday plans
Family dinner

Crushed cars on thruway
Traffic going nowhere fast
Birthday adventure

Happy Birthday, Old Man

Happy 45! Shawn and me at PF Chang’s Goodyear AZ

 

Time stops for no man
Birthday marks another year
Succeeding at life

 

The above photo was taken last year so the old man 😉 is now 46. The #haikuchallenge word today is time so it works out well to finish #NaHaiWriMo with a birthday poem. And I have successfully written at least one haiku-esque poem a day. 😀

This was not the first time I used the #haikuchallenge to write Shawn’s birthday poem. A couple years ago, I even included photos from the Exotic Show at the Alwun House.

Double Dactyl

Blankety Blankety
Veronica Hosking
Stressing on writing form
Double dactyl

Stretching her lexicon
Ubiquitously
Finding six syllable
Words to tractile

Hello everyone! Welcome to May. I survived #napowrimo writing more than 30 poems. This month is going to be a busy one for the Hosking family. On Friday May 6th, First Friday, my husband will have a photo on exhibit at the 9 gallery. He dropped it off yesterday and I texted him, I want seafood. He replied, I’ll see what I can do. I sent him a link to the Angry Crab Shack and the address of the Goodyear restaurant, thinking we could go for Mother’s day. A while later I get, What do you want? Seafood market prices it’s not going to be cheap. I know a bag of shrimp set me back $13. You’re there now? I LOVE you. Yes, he brought me home a bag of steamed shrimp and we shared it last night.

On May 12th, Rachael will be graduating from EMCC and then on the 18th, she graduates from AAEC. We have family coming from out of town. I spent a good portion of yesterday cleaning my bedroom. We have the dry wall repaired and Shawn moved the furniture back. He declined Parker and Sons doing the painting with our unique color scheme, they’d have to paint the whole bedroom. Mind you they would take care of moving furniture and such. But Shawn has so many knick knacks and trinkets decorating the room, he doesn’t want others moving everything. In the search of all my star trek books, I cleaned out under the bed. Oy vey, I don’t think Parker and Sons knew what they would have signed up for – dust bunnies were vanquished yesterday though. The company is supplying the paint for Shawn to repaint our bedroom though. Just sent in the color choice yesterday.

May 20th is Rachael’s 18th birthday and freshman orientation at ASU. Then May 28th is her graduations/birthday party at Nonnie’s house. If you don’t see many new posts from me this month, you know why.

NaPoWriMo 2016 Day 4

April Math Fun

Free Verse! Wait…What?

April is the cruelest month
Poet accosted by math
Working on rhyme and meter
Stress every other syllable
Is there any rhyme or reason?

April is the cruelest month
Poet takes a crooked path
No perfect rhyme to greet her
She adds lines, padding billable
Free verse! Wait…what?
After all it is tax season

Happy square root day! AKA the Little One’s birthday. She got the lovely shirt above and as luck would have it, a new Doctor Who book with the 11th Doctor, Amy and Rory. Of course if I could bill by the line, maybe her 11th birthday poem would work better. We had a pretty good tax season this year. Not only did we get a refund, we won $1,000. 😀 All because our oldest wanted to get her FAFSA in as soon as possible.

NaPoWriMo Prompt – In his poem “The Wasteland,” T.S. Eliot famously declared that “April is the cruelest month.” But is it? I’d have thought February. Today I challenge you to write a poem in which you explore what you think is the cruelest month, and why. Perhaps it’s September, because kids have to go back to school. Or January, because the holidays are over and now you’re up to your neck in snow. Or maybe it’s a month most people wouldn’t think of (like April), but which you think of because of something that’s happened in your life. Happy (or, if not happy, not-too-cruel) writing!

Birthday Not Complete Failure

Rush in Phoenix November 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shawn is a huge Rush fan. We saw them in concert in 2012. Sorry for the poor picture taken with my phone and somewhat shaky. I’m not a fan of heights and as you can see we’re pretty high in the arena. Dayton Ward wrote a short story for the 2113 anthology due out in April. Through him, I learned they had an advance sample going out of one story. Of course I had to order and it came in time for Shawn’s birthday. He was even impressed it’s an autographed sample.

2113 sample story

 

 

 

 

Stories inspired
by music of Rush. Under
Pressure, Oops wrong band

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Okay, I couldn’t help it. I know bad poem, but since writing my other pieces this morning, Queen has been playing in my head.

Happy Birthday!

Shawn Hosking at Alwun House

 

Forty-fourth birthday
write poem under pressure
wish it was better

Okay I was late writing a birthday poem for my husband. Actually did not work on anything so I copped out and made this with the #haikuchallenge off twitter.

Shawn’s 3D donut painting

 

Cream filled donut may
spurt sprinkles under pressure
teased by playful tongue

NaPoWriMo Day 19

Normal

Locked away inside behavioral
family does not see how this is detrimental

How am I a danger to myself
trapped within these four walls, I can only lend myself

to constant surveillance day and night
stuck inside behavioral, out of mind – out of sight.

Normal ship sails away

Twitter has another great image of the quote.

NaPoWriMo Prompt – And for today’s prompt (optional, as always!), I’d like to challenge you to write a landay. Landays are 22-syllable couplets, generally rhyming. The form comes from Afghanistan, where women often use it in verses that range from the sly and humorous to the deeply sardonic and melancholy. Check out this long investigative article on landays for a fascinating look into a form of poetry often composed in secret, and rarely written down. You could try to write a single landay – a hard-hitting couplet that shares some secret (or unspoken) truth, or you could try to write a poem that strings multiple landays together like stanzas (maybe something akin to a syllabic ghazal?)

It may not be such a secret that writers are crazy. After sharing my tyburn yesterday, my sister said, “well, you yourself are rather strange”. Life is strange after my first visit to the behavioral unit of a hospital, we are given landay as a prompt?!

Anyhow on a happier note… Today is my Dad’s birthday!

Dad
Seventy
Calculating score…
Happy Birthday; where was I?
Fore!

And I, by no means, gave away his age. 😉

NaPoWriMo Day 3

Postpone Time

It started fourteen years ago, my baby girl was born
I walked into her room today astounded she has worn
A dress to celebrate her birthday picture proof she’s grown
In beauty over years; the time I wish to keep postpone

Teenage girl

Baby girl

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NaPoWriMo Prompt – And now, for our optional prompt! Today I challenge you to write a fourteener. Fourteeners can be have any number of lines, but each line should have fourteen syllables. Traditionally, each line consisted of seven iambic feet (i.e., an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, times seven), but non-iambic fourteeners also exist. The fourteener was popular in 16th and 17th century England, where it was particular common in ballads, but it also is the form in which “Casey at the Bat” is written. The form is versatile enough to encompass any subject matter, but as the example of “Casey at the Bat” shows us, it is particularly useful in narrative poetry, due to the long line and the step-like sense of progression created by the iambs.

Guess who will be a fourteener tomorrow? Yes, my baby girl. I know the picture on the right is not very good. I took it down the hallway after I saw she was dressed so lovely today. Later I asked if she would pose for a picture because she looks pretty, but of course she refused. The picture taken secretly may be the best we get.

As you can see, I’ve tried to keep the fourteener in iambic. I don’t do iambs well but the point to napowrimo is to write a poem a day not to stress over beauty or form.