A Bunch Of Nonsense

To distract myself from myself, I’m going to answer these super intrusive questions about myself from Melanie…

1. Tell us how you met your partner. Please be specific in telling your tale.

I don’t have a “partner.” I’ve been divorced since 2011 and all my attempts at dating were documented disasters. Right now, it might be nice to have someone to be cooped up with though. Or maybe not.

2. What is your most romantic experience, again with details?

I have a post in drafts called Skyloft. It’s about the best first date I ever had ~ my last first date. I had a couple more first meetings since, but they don’t count as first dates. This man was also a disaster, like the others, but worse because I’d finally begun to trust again, and after him everything was impossibly shattered. The date itself was incredible. It was the hottest day of the year, and I was sick, had been sick for a month, which made the whole experience surreal. I felt I was in a painting, with all the colors and sounds and tastes and smells so exquisitely bright. When he touched me, I felt transported to another plane. Nothing was the same again… it still isn’t. He kissed me at the beach, with the turquoise waves crashing in, just like a dream. I will never forget this, no matter what he did later.

3. What is the most extravagant purchase you’ve ever made, and why did you buy it?

I have not bought anything extravagant for a really long time. I’m super careful. I’ve spent money, sometimes a lot, but on stuff that’s necessary, such as a car (a sensible one). I simply can’t think of anything. Oh! I know. My daughter went to Costa Rica several years ago and brought me some very cool artwork. I spent $400 to have it framed. But I love it. ❤️

4. What is your favorite swear word or expression, and when are you most likely to use it?

I’m an equal opportunity swearer. I try to give all the bad words a good workout daily, but I must admit that since I haven’t been driving they’ve been sitting in a sad heap on the sofa watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island and munching potato chips. 😢

5. What is your favorite kind of pie? With or without ice cream?

Ooh pie! I had the best pie up in Northern California ~ key lime with whipped cream and a thick graham cracker crust. That is my fave, followed closely by lemon cream and then cherry. No ice cream necessary.

6. While we’re on the subject, what is your favorite ice cream, and where did you last eat it?

Cookie dough! I don’t remember when or where I ate it last. I don’t eat ice cream often because I’m always freezing. 🥶

7. Who is your most unique friend and why? (May be someone from the past.)

My daughters are both brilliant and hilarious and totally unique. I love them to bits! My besties! 💖💖 (Why? Because I raised them! Duh.)

8. What is your most irritating habit?

Yelling at my cat to quit yelling. 🐱

9. Who was your favorite teacher and why?

I loved many of my philosophy and writing professors at CSUN.

10. Do you like being alone and if so, what would you probably be doing?

I enjoy choosing to be alone; I don’t enjoy this forced isolation and not being allowed to go to work. It’s super depressing. When alone, I read, write, play phone games, chat with peeps online, etc.

11. What is the most outlandish thing you’ve ever done?

Probably picked up hitchhikers and taken rides from strange men back in Illinois. Nothing bad ever happened even though this is a terribly stupid thing to do.

12. What superstition do you always follow?

I count things a lot, which isn’t really a superstition, but more an OCD, except not that much since I don’t do it consistently. I just feel things will work out better when there’s the right number of ’em.

13. What famous person or animal have you met? Tell us about the meeting.

Not really. I’ve seen various celebs in the Los Angeles area, but haven’t hung out with any. I don’t think celebs or royals are better than anyone else, and people ought to quit making such a fuss over them. 😛

~*~

Image credit to Bitmoji.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Self-Isolation Report 2

Friday Morning

8:30 ~ finally got up after sleeping until 7ish & then lazing in bed playing games on my phone until I ran out the battery

9:00 ~ Noon… had coffee but wasn’t hungry for breakfast, chatted with friends online, played with cats, took shower, read news to further terrify self, ate a protein bar, had tea

Friday Afternoon

12:30 ~ drove to Crystal Cove State Beach & walked around for a couple hours taking pics

Later Friday

3:00 ~ stopped at grocery store to get fresh produce, milk, bread (they were pretty well stocked)

4:00 ~ put groceries away, ate late lunch of spicy vegan black bean burgers topped with melted non-vegan brie (yummy)

5:00 ~ FaceTime with elder daughter

6:00 ~ tea and phone games

7:00 ~ contemplated writing… decided to do this report first and also the SOCS and the SLS… plenty of time to write… plenty… my gosh, I’ll be knocking out so many new books soon they’ll probably ban me for hogging all the Kindle space! 🤣

~*~

Images from Bitmoji and me.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Self-Isolation Report 1

Thursday Morning

8:00 ~ cleaned cat box, vacuumed, did laundry, cleaned bathroom, read blogs

9:30 ~ had coffee & an avocado 🥑

10:00 ~ dusted, cleaned kitchen

11:00 ~ exercised to a video

11:30 ~ downloaded phone games

Thursday Afternoon

1:00 ~ played phone games, ate cookies 🍪

5:00 ~ thought about writing, took a walk in Huntington Beach

Thursday Night

7:00 ~ ate instant noodles, made tea, started work

8:00 ~ freaked out about Gov Newsom telling us we can never leave our homes again and began frantically chatting with friends and daughters

11:00 ~ finished work, had more tea

Midnight ~ made this post, feeling too anxious too sleep, glad I still have some Valium

Yah… so just like the olden days when I was all upset about some dumb man, I can’t get my mind in a clear enough state to switch over to the fictional realm. It’s too cluttered with stabby bits of reality and what ifs.

~*~

Images from Bitmoji and me.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Pointless Meandering

Welcome to my new featured series: Pointless Meandering! Posts in this series will appear… whenever I feel like making them. I know, I know. That goes against all the marketing rules. You’re supposed to brand yourself with consistent posts on set subjects at scheduled times. Well, to that I say… pffft! 😛

I had a lot of trouble thinking of the name for my new feature. Names are important! First, I thought of meaningless babble or jabber. But after a while I didn’t really like “meaningless” because some of my posts could be meaningful, idk. I wouldn’t want to limit myself right from the start. The idea is just to be unstructured, but I didn’t want the word unstructured because it makes me think of bras. Does it make you think of bras? Well, it will now! 😂

Then I latched on to the word “pointless.” I like this word a lot… and it seemed perfect for my feature. Posts that have no point in particular. They aren’t peeves. They aren’t responses to prompts. They don’t tell a story. They aren’t funny or poetic. They just exist, floating in the Sea of Blogovia for no reason whatsoever.

But pointless what? Aye, there was a sticky wicket! Jabber and babble had lost their luster somehow. I gravitated to pointless musings. But I’m never sure how to pronounce muse… is it mewse or mooose? That’s a whole new digression… how I don’t say some words properly. I discarded this and considered pointless overthinking. I almost had it put away… had the logo done and everything. But then I thought, is it really overthinking if it’s cathartic and helps me? Maybe it’s the right amount of thinking… 🧐

Oh, speaking of the picture, which I found at Pixabay (a fab source)… I had my heart set on a butterfly, 🦋 but butterflies don’t engage in pointless behavior. All that flitting and nectar-nomming has a purpose. So, I contemplated a twisty path through the woods, but none of those pics appealed to me. (But that’s when meander began to take hold as the noun.) I thought of drifting, but when I looked up drift I got a bunch of racetrack photos. I tried float and when the jellyfish pics came up, they hit my sweet spot.

I could have used my own jellies, I guess, but I liked these. Anyway, I held onto the meandering idea even though I gave up the path in the woods photo. The jellies really seemed like the right choice. I added the text… first I used green, but I saw I had green on my peeve kitty and didn’t want to become branded as the green text blogger. I changed it to hot pink at that point and am pleased with the outcome.

This was fun. I’ll do it again sometime. 💖

~*~

Image originally found at Pixabay.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Why Do You…

Happy February! I’m participating in Bee’s fun music challenge again and hope you’ll join in (you don’t have to play every day).

Today’s theme is a love song with flowers and I’m sharing one of my old faves. While the tempo is upbeat, the message is rather frustrating, with one person putting all the effort into the relationship and the other one acting selfishly. Isn’t that so often the way though? You always hope that things will change if you just keep trying…

~*~

Written for Love Is In Da Blog Day 21.

Image credit to Happy Color.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

20 for 2020

I haven’t answered questions for a while. These are from Ally at The Spectacled Bean. Check out her blog! 🙂

Your most memorable fancy dress costume?

I dressed up as a glittery fortune teller for Halloween once. I guess that purple and black costume was one of my fanciest. I haven’t been dressing up much lately, even though I still think it’s fun, because my eyes are too sensitive for makeup. If I can’t glop on a ton of mascara, it spoils the festive look.

Which social media platform do you use the most?

WordPress. I also like Twitter.

Favourite season?

Summer. I used to say fall, but I’m really craving hot weather and longer daylight.

If you had to choose the beach or mountains, which would it be?

It depends. I love the beach… nothing is more peaceful than the rhythm of the waves. I could walk on the sand and/or just watch the water forever. If there were no other people around! But that’s rare. The mountains can be quieter, though they are often cold. Scary things are in mountains though, like snakes and bears and curvy roads that drop you off a cliff… but oceans have tsunamis. And also didn’t someone just discover a whole new species of gross disgusting penis worms living under the sand? THANKS FOR THAT!

I’ll just stay in my office.

What can you play very well?

Devil’s advocate.

What kind of cheese do you like?

Brie.

Life goal?

To make a goal.

How many cities have you lived in?

I’ve lived in the three largest US cities: NY, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Plus, I’ve lived in a scattering of towns around these cities.

What language do you wish you could speak?

All of them.

What can’t you stand?

Most things. I’m highly intolerant.

If you have an hour to kill on your hands, what would you do?

Waste it reading garbage, probably.

Your favorite routine?

Start to like some dude and imagine how things might be nice between us and then think of all the reasons why it would likely just be another horrible disaster and get so annoyed at wasting any time on this that I’m snippy the next time I see him causing him not to like me at which point I say to myself aha it would never have worked!

When do you become hyperactive?

After half a coffee!

Text message or phone call?

Text message.

Your most precious treasure?

Note that living creatures aren’t “treasure,” imo, so I’m going to say handmade cards from my daughters.

Your latest foreign language mistake?

This is funny. I was listening to a guy make some plans with me in what sounded like English, but it was really inverse English, so everything was a not-plan. Boy, did I feel silly! 🤪

What’s the best therapy for you?

Writing.

If you could be a fictional character, who would you be?

God.

Where would you like to travel?

Assuming I could afford it and not have massive migraines and backaches the whole time… Maine, Boston, NYC, WDC, Nashville, Santa Fe, Taos, Yellowstone, Montana, Idaho, Utah, Vancouver, Israel, Greece, Ireland, England, Scotland, Aruba.

Where did you meet your spouse/partner?

At the Orange County Animal Shelter.

~*~

Image credits to Bitmoji and Google and me.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

FPQ57: Hey La 🎶 Hey La 🎶 Fandango’s Back! 🎶

Well… he wasn’t totally “gone,” but he wasn’t around as much, and he had been recycling old FPQ’s. 😱 Green is good for the environment and for our wallets, but for prompts… not so much. Since I was also busy, I took the opportunity to bail on the whole reheated casserole. But now, it’s A RETURN TO NORMALCY!!! In Blogville anyway. Everywhere else? Complete freaking chaos.

Today, Fandango provocatively asks…

Are humans better at creating or destroying?

It all depends on your perspective. Humans are very good at creating… other humans. Good god, there are a lot of them/us! Just a few hundred years ago there were way fewer and a few thousand years ago? Pffft. Hardly any compared to now. We’ve really upped our output. 😎

As we continue to produce gobs of new humans, we tend to destroy other things, such as clean air and water, open spaces for other mammals to graze and hunt, forests and wetlands, etc. We kill loads of animals to eat and waste vast amounts of acreage for animal food while people starve to death. 😢

We also create lots of products for humans to spend money on, most of which have to be constantly replaced and tossed into giant junk piles on land and at sea, which are destructive. There are lots of creative people coming up with new ideas for new products all the time, some for fun, others for science, medicine, etc. Many humans are working to destroy the environmental problems that humans themselves have created. 👍🏻

Some people also create art, music, poetry, literature, etc., to be enjoyed by others. Not all creation is tangible ~ some folks have ideas that they try to transmit in various ways in the hope of uplifting other people’s spirits, though not everyone will receive the message as intended, of course. How discouraging is that? A human comes up with a brilliant new idea that will help everyone on the planet to live more happily and the rest of the humans tell him to get lost? Geez, he might as well have invented yet another brand of cat litter! 🐱

What was the question again? 🤣

~*~

Image from Fandango himself.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Far Beneath The Bitter Snows

Happy February! I’m participating in Bee’s fun music challenge again and hope you’ll join in (you don’t have to play every day).

Today’s theme is a love song about spring and this one by Bette Midler has always resonated with me. It’s so lovely and full of hope. Who knows, right?

When the night has been too lonely and the road has been too long
And you think that love is only for the lucky and the strong
Just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snows
Lies the seed, that with the sun’s love in the spring becomes the rose

~*~

Written for Love Is In Da Blog Day 16.

Image credit to Happy Color.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Friday Smile

What’s so special about this photo?

Glad you asked! While it may look like an ordinary sunset in Irvine, it’s something I haven’t seen in a while: light at 5:50pm. Yep, when I’m on Main Street heading home, it’s been dark… and it seems the darkness has gone on a long, long time this winter, though of course it’s the same as it’s always been. I don’t know why. I haven’t been depressed. But I haven’t been exactly bubbling over with joy either.

So, here we are a month into 2020. I’m tired. I’ve been exhausted from moving and all the things. I’ve had a bunch of stress that didn’t magically disappear because the calendar ticked over to a new year. Yet, it brightened my Friday to see that the days are getting visibly longer again. It made me really happy in fact.

Onto February! 😻✨❤️

~*~

Written for Trent’s Weekly Smile.

Image credit to Paula Light.

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Daybreak

Streaks of gold slid over the sky, warming the night like melted butter. She tried to forget the strange happenings of yesterday, but they kept flashing through her mind like a virus on the screen. After all these years of tormenting her, that vile man had decided to waltz off without even a wave goodbye. She breathed a sigh of relief as she absorbed the colorful healing beauty of daybreak’s aesthetics. The possibilities were endless.

~*~

Written for Sue Vincent’s Daily Echo

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.