Orange
an Obstinate word at times
imperfect in its consonance
Obfuscating rhyme
An exceptional singularity
much like One and Only
despite Ovidian Orchestration
it cannot be but lonely
no wonder then
it Overpowers
groups and congregations
such Ontological Opacity
defies all explanation
O
See what is Out and about in the entries of Frizztext’s OOO – Challenge.
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Artisans of the world unite in the entries of
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Statues, Carvings, Sculptures.
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Find the outlines of the entries in
A Word in your Ear’s Word A Week Photo Challenge – Silhouette.
Reach the pinnacle in the entries of
Where’s my backpack?’s Travel Theme: Height.
Although blessed by the bounty the land brings us when you live in a climate like ours, no, we are not thankful that the freedom of hot August days are long gone. Now we have to hunker down, put up, store away, make sure that there is enough of everything to span those months when the possibility of no electricity or heat surrounded by six feet of snow are much more of a reality than any television show. Everyone around us seems off-balance, suddenly reminded that there is much to do before December’s clarion call of familial duty and forced cheerfulness – so throw in one long weekend, a turkey, too many carbohydrates and a few vices of choice and you have a recipe for interesting times.
Did our ancestors feel the same way? Did our French forebears complain about having to go out and shoot one more grouse because ma tante had decided that she was going to grace them with her presence after all? Did our First Nations brethren grumble that it really wasn’t the best time of year for Still Water and his brood to stay for a few days? Did our English and Irish pioneers rue the day they left green pastures and a good cup of tea as they looked out into the wilderness? Perhaps, and like this week’s Two Cents Tuesday Challenge, they also may have been comforted by their new world’s rich – Harvest – one that, in essence, has not changed a whole lot over the course of a few centuries.
“How do you see harvest at this time of year?” – Pumpkins sweet and squash to eat, family near,the holiday blear, pilgrims and the past or things that don’t last, falling leaves or the hopes we retrieve …
We would love to see your vision.
For all those who are new readers to Across the Bored, here are some guidelines for the challenge: HOW DOES THIS WORK?
Nuts they said
and Nought for Nothing
Nightwalking Nonconformist
still Naked as the day you were born
But Now
Nailed to a Nameplate
Nine-ironed into Nitrous dreams
Narcissus lurks
and Nicks Nitty gritty
Narrative Nascent
does Not take No for an answer
but Nods in time
to our Noiseless Nocturne
N
Notice the Ns in the entries of Frizztext’s NNN – Challenge.
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See who else has been caught red-handed in the entries of
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Candid Shots
Take a minute to appreciate the entries of
Where’s my backpack?’s Travel Theme: Relaxing.
How many of us remember being little? We all have some moments that stand out, larger than life, be they good or bad, joyous or heartbreaking, the snippets of time and sound, smell and taste that all come together to cast a long shadow on who we have become. We colour them accordingly and they are often seen through a lens that casts a particular light – soft focus, panorama, macro even fish-eye.
No matter what our memories of being a kid are, we seem to remember an awful lot of them as looking up – staring up at adults’ odd faces, up at towering shelves in stores, up at tall trees and huge clouds and endless skies on those days when life couldn’t seem to get any better or even any worse. Everything looked so much larger than it actually was. In those days, big held the promise of better – the biggest bear to cuddle, the big birthday cake we had anticipated, even that big box of chocolates you might be allowed to have two from, but many years down the road this particular adjective has come to be loaded.
We tend to look at the enormity of something in more complicated terms and much gets blown way out of proportion when really it ought not to be – yes, it was a big mistake to not tell the hairdresser to put down the scissors when we realized he was becoming manic, no, the gigantic drama over youthful fashion dilemmas are not worth getting involved in and perhaps, just maybe, the sheer volume of what we carry with us like some great titanic baggage should just be dropped in the ocean of our experience and cast away. It might do us all good to realize that small and less is not such a bad thing after all. Like this fortnight’s Two Cents Tuesday Challenge theme – Size – it all depends on your vantage point.
Last week, Across the Bored surmised that everything is relative – “What does size mean in your world?” – Big cats or little hats, too tight rants or too loose pants, babies in arms with teeny toes, the aristocratic line of a Roman nose, change enough to fill the sky or small wonders that make you sigh … We would love to see your vision.
For all those who are new readers to Across the Bored, some great entries and the guidelines for this fortnight’s challenge can be found here. Need more info or want to browse past themes? Have a look at HOW DOES THIS WORK.
da Vinci Mad on Mescalin
May have dreamed as Much
a Multicoloured Mickey
with a lighter Modern touch
Myopia notwithstanding
pigment Merely Messed around
a Mercenary Mousterpiece
Melting Memory without sound
M
Make your Mark in the entries of Frizztext’s MMM – Challenge.
¢
Feast your eyes on all manner of autumnal colours in the entries of
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: The Color Brown and Sepia Tones
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Find out what is wrong with the entries of
A Word in your Ear’s Word A Week Photo Challenge – Mistake.
Today, when our extended family is swelling and we all seem to take up more than our fair share of square footage, our concerns run to how to juggle (or at worst rearrange) what is gobbling up airspace and ideally get rid of some of it so that we can all breathe a little easier. No easy feat. The thoughts and ideas of large personalities seem to fill the very atmosphere leaving little room for much else.
Every day we are reminded of the proportions and volume of things – from the ways it affects us physically in our health and diets, to how the questionable amount of possessions we encumber ourselves with can sometimes weigh heavily, to the length and breadth of the places we visit, the scope and scale of the projects we work on and the magnitude of the concepts we share.
The Two Cents Tuesday Challenge posits that, contrary to what we have all been told – Size – actually does matter.
Everything is relative – “What does size mean in your world?” – Big cats or little hats, too tight rants or too loose pants, babies in arms with teeny toes, the aristocratic line of a Roman nose, change enough to fill the sky or small wonders that make you sigh …
We would love to see your vision.
For all those who are new readers to Across the Bored, here are some guidelines for the challenge: HOW DOES THIS WORK?
No longer can we Labour
Lost in Lifeboats and Lilting Lovesongs
Lie awake deep into the night
Listening to Laudanum-Laced Lyrics
Lynchpinned by a Libretto
that Lures us into
such Long and winding Labyrinths
that Lead we know not where
Let that moment between
Light and not
become Liberty
L
Learn more in the entries of Frizztext’s LLL – Challenge.
Look beyond in the entries of Where’s my backpack?’s Travel Theme: Through.
R
Linger in the lush and lovely range of entries in Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Soft Pastels.
Go under and through the entries of
A Word in your Ear’s Word A Week Photo Challenge – Arch.
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Across the Bored makes a point of getting out on a regular basis with Miss Z to visit those places in town that are currently the rage and in doing so we often rediscover old haunts that have either softened with age much like ourselves or have been gentrified beyond recognition. It is nice to see new blood come in to old neighbourhoods and revitalize them, making an effort to start small businesses that are not only eco-friendly but fun and interesting at the same time. On one Friday lunch outing we caught a glimpse of vintage advertising still claiming a place of prominence on a street where new boutiques rub shoulders with old storefronts, hipsters hang alongside the homeless and the gentry come down off the mountain in search of good food and one-off fashion.
The sign reminded us of a different generation, the ones that made this area its home when they first arrived after the Great Wars, the ones that settled into too small flats with too much family, the ones that brought their food and traditions and zest for life with them from homelands that many would never see again. Their first order of business was to get a job and make money and in order to do that learning English was top of the list. In the factories and sculleries or on the street, making oneself understood was key. Like this fortnight’s Two Cents Tuesday Challenge theme – Words – were the only way up the ladder in the New World.
Last week, Across the Bored had inquired “How do words manifest for you?” – Are they printed on the page, all the rage, do they make a song or string you along, in a magazine, newspaper, novel or monitor, on the wall or as a sign, manuals long or fonts fine … We would love to see your vision.
For all those who are new readers to Across the Bored, some great entries and the guidelines for this fortnight’s challenge can be found here. Need more info or want to browse past themes? Have a look at HOW DOES THIS WORK.
Kiss me Kate
at the Keyboard
or at the Kitchen sink
Kiss me by the Kangaroos
smear me
with your lipstick pink
Kiss me
in Kentucky
beneath the Kites
that fluttering fly
wrap me
in your bluegrass arms
Kiss me again
and sigh
***
Kick around in the entries of Frizztext’s K – Challenge.
Across the Bored was diagnosed as myopic quite early in life – not because we were unable or unwilling to act prudently or exhibited that nasty trait of lacking tolerance and understanding but rather in the opthalmological sense – we were a small, curious child with the distinct inability to see distant objects clearly. Anyone who wore glasses in school in the 1960s clearly remembers the agony of choosing one of four available frame shapes in either black or brown and the horror of knowing the coke bottle lenses placed therein would bring taunts, cruel rhymes or worse. Like most things, we suffered through it and to this day are still plagued by less than perfect vision.
Some recommend laser surgery which seems like a fate worse than death due to the underlying fear of having needles and sharp scalpels placed anywhere in the vicinity of our eyes. So we stick to a regular prescription for just being able to get about, reading glasses for computer work and contact lens for vanity’s sake. All those people you notice taking their glasses off in the grocery store to read the fine print on the label? We are now one of them…
An odd realization struck recently, that being nearsighted had coloured the way we view the world – that we tend to see the beauty of things up close, focusing on the small details and often breaking down the larger picture into components that stand alone on their own merit. Across the Bored has written previously of the multitude of photographers and artists to be found on EyeEm – a fast scroll through our own gallery proved that indeed there were quite a few close-ups of our favourite subjects, including the one below.
It was selected to appear in NEM Painterly – Featured Art 6 curated by MaryJane Sarvis – NEM, the New ERA Museum, “takes shape mainly to spread the concept of pristine Art, affordable and available to everyone by potentially forging new artists to new techniques of digital mobile processing.” What a thrill to be included among this group of talented and groundbreaking photographers.
If you would like to see more in our gallery, click on the EyEm icon in the sidebar. The bounty of autumn’s harvest only begins…
Find all the colours of the spectrum in the entries of
Where’s my backpack?’s Travel Theme: Multicoloured.
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See the other side of the entries in Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: White and Purple.
windows are the eyes of the citySee what’s inside, outside and around the box in the entries of
A Word in your Ear’s Word A Week Photo Challenge – Square.
On a bit of a slow-down as far as blog-related endeavours were concerned, more out of suffering from a creative drought than anything else, our meanderings did lead us to an interesting post over at Flickr Comments – Make your tagxedo – in which he provides a link to a nifty site where one can create custom tag clouds. Certainly a good way to pass a few minutes (or hours depending on how obsessive one is) and design a block of text that truly reflects either a specific blog post, archive or just a group of meaningful words, it makes text fun. Why not pay a visit to Tagxedo and whip something up for this week’s challenge?A few of our own experiments yielded radically different results, much like what happens whenever we sit down at the keyboard…
Playing with the tagxedo was the first step in reminding ourselves why we are actually here in the first place – to share a vision through images and the language they engender and vice versa, to see what and how our friends and acquaintances are writing about, how they are documenting their bit of the world for all to see and in the end, communicate. A visit to our friend Cee to check out her gorgeous photography was the capper to getting Tuesday’s posts back onto some sort of regular schedule. She also participates in and runs many challenges and mentioned that WordPress has a new feature – Blog Event Listings – for those of us who just can’t get enough of a good thing. How could we resist?
The Two Cents Tuesday Challenge was lured back in and had no choice but to put it all into – Words.
The floodgates are now open – “How do words manifest for you?” – Are they printed on the page, all the rage, do they make a song or string you along, in a magazine, newspaper, novel or monitor, on the wall or as a sign, manuals long or fonts fine …
We would love to see your vision.
For all those who are new readers to Across the Bored, here are some guidelines for the challenge: HOW DOES THIS WORK?
ACROSS THE BORED 