Peggy's prompt is offishal for today

fish on strings 

and fish-shaped hedges

fish on lines

and fish in boats

fish in sauces

served on toast

Photos above supplied as prompts
by Peggy Goetz

fish in oceans

fish in rivers

fish in streams

and fish in creeks

being caught by

human critters

big ones, tall ones,

short ones, small ones

fish are even

caught by bears

Wikimedia Commons

caught by bears?

oh yes—bears dare

to eat the salmon

as they spawn,

loading up on fish

(nutritious)

for the winter

when bears sleep

Wikimedia Commons

dogs like fish

and cats like fish—

do dogs like dogfish?

do cats eat catfish?

Wikimedia Comons

dogs and cats

would prefer

their fishes

in their dishes

salmon salad

sardine sandwich

tuna sandwich

(chicken of the sea)

fish-oil capsules 

with Omega 3

good for you

good for me

By Kay Davies, July, 2013

Posted for

Peggy's Prompt at the

Imaginary Garden with Real Toads

Peggy provided the first two photos of phishes or phish-like creations, and asked us to write about fish. We were left to find the rest of the way on our own.

As everybody knows, "C is for Cat"!

My brother and his wife took photos of their cat, Bailey, as a kitten and as a one-year-old cat, both times atop his cat tree.
He doesn't seem to know he's overflowing it now that he is a Cat with a Capital C, and not a kitten anymore.
And in the Davies family, of course, C is also for Clint, one of Bailey's proud owner/parents.

Photo by Maria Davies

Photo by Clint Davies

Posted for
ABC Wednesday
with thanks to Denise Nesbitt and Roger Green for all their work, and to Carver, who is hosting today's letter C.

Our World Tuesday looked like fire

Photo by Richard Schear

There are many greenhouses in our neighborhood. My husband and our dog Lindy pass several in the course of their daily walk, and Dick captured this reflection of the setting sun looking like a fire storm behind a cloud.

Posted for
Our World Tuesday

Open Link Monday at the Imaginary Garden

"Anger is a wind

which blows out the lamp of the mind." 

 Robert Ingersoll

anger is all that

and anger is more,

Wikimedia
Commons

anger is painful

and anger is sore.

it hurts the head,

the stomach, too,

there’s no end to

what it does to you.

after it’s rotted

your insides out

(awful for something

 begun with a pout)

it ruins your home

and it ruins your life—

the lives of your children

the life of your wife,

your in-laws,

your out-laws,

your neighbors

(they hear you)

and now nobody

wants to be near you.

                          Kay L. Davies, July 29, 2013 

Posted for Open Link Monday at the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads.

Succinctly yours: woven

Photo provided as prompt

Every week, posted at the blog known  as Grandma's Goulash, is a photo meant to inspire micro-fiction.
Succinctly Yours consists of the photo plus a separately-chosen, unconnected word of the week. Unconnected, that is, unless some writers can use the word with the photo.

This week's word is "woven" and SY entrants can use it in a short story of 140 words or a short-short story of 140 characters. It's been a while since I've entered this brevity competition, but I always enjoyed going for the gusto...in such a case, gusto would consist of only 140 characters, including spaces and punctuation. Here are my contributions for Week 123 of Succinctly Yours:

One's walk out the pier was always spoilt by a billboard advertising hairnets woven of softest silk. Walking back was more scenic, he found.
 (140 characters, including spaces and punctuation.)

* * *

Shadows were beginning to lengthen as the pickpocket, having woven his way through the crowd at the end of the pier, walked quickly ashore.

 (139 characters, including spaces and punctuation.)

* * *

Pet Pride: I'd rather be eating, thank you

Posted for Pet Pride
hosted by Lindy's friend Bozo and his family
at their Pets Forever blog in Mumbai, India

Lindy says: "Hi Bozo. Here I am, coming out of a big lake in British Columbia, after my dad tried to get me to swim.
"I didn't want to swim, and I told him so, but you know what? He took me back there the next day and tricked me. We walked into the lake, which was fine, but he wouldn't let me sit down. He offered me a treat, and actually lured me out into deeper water where I had to swim.
"Wow! That was what I call sneaky, but I showed him: I ate the treat and then turned around and pulled him back to shore.
"It would have been much nicer if they had taken me for a picnic. I can swim, of course. I am a retriever. But I much prefer eating."

Photo by Kay Davies

Doubling up for the Imaginary Garden

At the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads the other day, Corey (aka Herotomost) challenged us to: "write something using a few different literary devices to pour your heart out to us...be it happy or sad, angry or glad, rant political, rant philosophical, but use some of the tricks of the trade to emphasize the emotional content."

Today, Joy Ann (aka Hedgewitch) invited us to write in the form of an etheree, a 10-line poem beginning with a one-syllable line and increasing by one syllable each time until it reaches 10 lines. It can also be written in reverse, starting with 10 syllables and decreasing to a one-syllable line, or can be a 20-line poem using a combination of the two.

from
Wikimedia Commons
By David Lorenzana

I decided, instead, to do a combination of Corey's prompt and Joy's prompt. If this were to have a name, it would be "Destructive Greed" or something equally appropriate, but I can't come up with anything properly poetic.

sad

sadder

wondering

how the rich

can justify their

destruction of our land,

our water supply, our air,

the fish we catch, the food we eat,

for corporate profit, when the rich

can’t breathe more air, drink more water than I

Kay Davies, July 27, 2013

Shadows provide respite on a hot day

Photos by Kay Davies and Richard Schear

Wonderful old buildings and tall green trees provided welcome shade in the southern part of British Columbia in midsummer. We stopped for lunch in a town I've admired for years: Greenwood, BC, on Highway 3. Dick teases me because I always say, "I could live here quite happily" whether we're in BC or South America or Spain or France.

Posted for
Shadow Shot Sunday

Always a cute kind of critter

Photos by Richard Schear

Our friends Carola and Ken have a charming garden of flowers and vegetables on their farm in Winfield, BC.
Far from discouraging feathered visitors, they always have many bird houses and feeders, inviting feathered friends to their garden. We enjoyed visiting on their patio and watching the birds earlier this month.

Posted for Camera Critters

hosted by Misty Dawn. Thanks, Misty!

also posted to
Hootin' Anni's I'd Rather be Birding
Thanks for the invitation, Anni. Great to hear from you, and an honor to be invited to post to your bird blog.

Three bridges over a waterway

Richard Schear, photo

Although I do have some lovely reflections from our travels this month, I ran across this photo yesterday and I almost felt I should post it before the reflections disappeared. Have you ever felt like that?
My husband was in a vehicle traveling across a road bridge last November, when he photographed a wonderful old brick covered bridge, plus a pedestrian bridge beyond it, in the German city of Nuremberg.

Posted for
Weekend Reflections
hosted by James of California. Thanks, James!
And thanks also to my talented intrepid photographer...thank you, dear.

Watching the sky out my window

Photos by Kay Davies, July, 2013

Lindy, on her window seat,
snoozes through all
the excitement.

In the middle of summer the sunset here is in the southwest, which is the direction I'm facing when I turn in my computer chair to look out Lindy's window, the one where she has her window seat.
Earlier this week, I grabbed my camera and went out our north door, calling to my husband to bring his camera, too.
I don't have his photos yet, but here are some of mine, not as sharply clear as his would be, but showing the light around the darker clouds, and the peach/apricot pink and yellow of the sunset.

Posted for Skywatch Friday

Dear sweet Jenn suggests bird butts

My friend Jenn, a gentlewoman with a compassionate heart and, I suspect, a rather adventurous soul, published a number of photos of the back ends of birds on her blog today. She also posted a linky, and asked her friends to find photos of bird butts to publish and link to her.
Well, who am I to resist a challenge when I'm almost healthy and have a tiny bit of energy and imagination?
I found lots of butts, not all of them bird butts. I found plenty of dog butts, a gorilla butt, and more, which I'll have to save in hopes someone suggests a butt challenge again, with a wider scope.
Meanwhile, just for Jenn, I have a few back ends of birds.

Richard Schear photo

This isn't technically a butt, but it's the back of a hummingbird sitting on a branch, not an easy capture for my intrepid photographer.

Parrots in San Diego, California

Robin, in Alberta.

This yellow bird is not in banana tree, but on a planter stake here in Alberta.

European birds. I know because the photo
was taken in Germany.

Metal bird sculpture, from the back.
Somewhere in Germany.

Male Redpoll feasting on our ornamental crabapples,
which were frozen all winter and thawed in the spring.

Also in Alberta, but I forget its name.

Starling in Alberta.

Red-winged blackbird, Alberta.

Robins in Alberta.

Female redpoll finding ornamental crabapples
on the ground in our yard.

European goose and ducks.

British Columbia, Canada

San Diego waterfront.

Back of a peacock, San Diego, California.

Do you have photos of birds who turned around at just the wrong time?

Want to share them? Post them and link them to Jenn at

Cottage Country Reflections

M's list: mix it up in the Imaginary Garden

Propelled

By Kay Davies, July, 2013

tender fury

growls shrilly

typical aunt

curious still

perching on the surface

shaking blue grit

from a slice of root

while urge-factor

wends apace

The words provided by M (aka Grapeling) for today's prompt at the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads were: propel fury tender curious surface growl pace shrill aunt slice grit blue factor shake perch root still wend urge typical

We were urged to "avoid punctuation, to cross up usage, using verbs as nouns,  for example, rather than using adjectives (oops), to try not to sound contrived or forced despite the fact that poetry is specifically contrived to contravene 'normal' speech."

  

I hope I have mixed it up sufficiently. I admit I made slight changes to some of the words: shrilly, apace, shaking, etc.

B is for beach butterflies

While in the central Okanagan Valley this month, we wanted to take Lindy to a dog beach to see if she would swim. She had already managed to find her way from a rest area to a river, have a drink of it, and sit down in it, and she even tried the same thing with the Pacific Ocean, which didn't taste very good, so we thought we'd give her a chance to swim in a lake.

Kay Davies, photo

The beaches in the downtown area of Kelowna do not allow dogs, but this one, at Cedar Creek in the Okanagan Mission area, welcomes them. Some dogs were off-leash, although Lindy went into the water with her leash on. She did swim, eventually, but was not impressed by the experience. In the photo above, she is walking with Dick, but he soon brought her back to me because he had found something other than Lindy to photograph.

Butterflies. Bunches of beautiful beach butterflies!

He couldn't get close enough to the group above,

but this one, below, posed prettily for him. 

Richard Schear, photos

Posted for

ABC Wednesday