This would be an amazing prompt if I had any pets of my own. I do, however, live with roommates that have pets and I visit family regularly who have several pets. Between the two groups there are five cats and five dogs.
One of my brother’s cats, named Paul, has picked me out as one of his favorite humans. I don’t typically have a problem with him, except when he finds it necessary to jump from the floor onto my shoulders.
He’s not the real focus of this post, but I wanted to share anyway.
No, the real focus would be on the dogs. My roommates two dogs are generally very chill, they sleep most of the day, play some, run around the yard, doing dog things. Including bark like maniacs when they see someone walking up to the door, even us, or if they here a vehicle door slam closed from one of the neighbors. In most cases, it’s alright because it makes for a good alarm system of sorts. They protect the house! If there is just ONE thing I could communicate to them it would definitely be something along the lines of “all clear” so they will stop barking their heads off after I’ve come to confirm that nothing is wrong.
My first name is fairly common, or at least very commonly known courtesy of Taylor Swift, but the etymological background might be lost on the current generations.
“An Anglo-French occupational surname, Taylor is thought to have arrived through the Norman occupation, derived from the Old French ‘tailleur’ (cutter of cloth) or English ‘tailor’. The surname Taylor is common across the British Isles (fourth most common in the UK overall – fifth most common in England) and other countries traditionally colonised by the British, though far less common in Ireland (where it mostly exists only in Northern Ireland – potentially brought over by English and Scottish settlers). Taylor can sometimes be found as an anglicised version of the German word ‘Schneider’, a direct translation of the same term.”An Anglo-French occupational surname, Taylor is thought to have arrived through the Norman occupation, derived from the Old French ‘tailleur’ (cutter of cloth) or English ‘tailor’. The surname Taylor is common across the British Isles (fourth most common in the UK overall – fifth most common in England) and other countries traditionally colonised by the British, though far less common in Ireland (where it mostly exists only in Northern Ireland – potentially brought over by English and Scottish settlers). Taylor can sometimes be found as an anglicised version of the German word ‘Schneider’, a direct translation of the same term.” – Findmypast.co.uk
All I was ever concerned with is that it was from the English occupation, but the fact that it has ties to the similar spelled/pronounced French occupation makes sense.
Unfortunately, I am not very ambitious with cloth, thread, and needle, so I don’t actually concern myself with the occupation. That doesn’t mean I’m averse to sewing, though, because as an adult I have very much needed to fix up some clothes when I didn’t have the money to buy new.
So there you have it, a quick and dirty post with little extra exposition from me because the information already exists elsewhere on the Internet for any and everyone to read if they were so curious.
Super simple question for me today! I can get behind that when I’m getting sucked into playing the hottest new early access game.
My dream job has changed a couple of times between childhood and adulthood. Today, it is becoming a professional author and being able to support myself on that kind of income.
I’m working on bettering my daily habits to write consistently, like answering these daily prompts. I’m over 100 days in a row of writing every day, and I’m getting used to the idea that it is okay to put less important things aside to focus on writing if I hope to improve my habits and reach that goal. Hopefully, someday, I can publish something and be successful enough to quit my job and keep writing. Then my days would be wildly different! I’d have MORE time to do the things I want to do in tandem with writing, because I would end up substituting time spent working in an office with time spent writing.
I know I can do it if I stick with it, and I know I can keep up with writing demands if I look at the results of my NaNoWriMo 2023 daily word tracking. It is completely possible for me to write 300k+ words per year. I just have to dig in and go for it.
Leading isn’t for everyone. If it was, we would constantly run into the issue of “too many cooks in the kitchen”. What makes a good leader can also be a bit subjective, but I’m sure if I did some digging (beyond my fuzzy memory of professional symposiums and conventions) I would be able to point out specific traits that have been identified through extensive study.
Additionally, there is a BIG difference between being a manager and a leader.
Being a leader, in my opinion, requires empathy. Lots of it. Without it you can’t understand the needs of the people following you. Being a GOOD leader requires self-control with that empathy, because otherwise it’s possible to be swept up in the emotion and problems of everyone else. Leaders need to look out for the good of the group, and not allow themselves to be consumed by the needs of one person.
Leaders also participate in the work being done. They work alongside everyone, not lording above them, to accomplish their goals. Understanding the work and the needs of the people doing it is a necessity.
The final thing I’ll say about what I think makes a good leader is centered around accountability. Accountability for themselves AND their people. They know when to own a mistake and not just shift blame. They understand that sometimes there are consequences and they’re responsible for making sure things are taken care for the good of the group, such as if someone else were to make a mistake they would provide some measure of corrective action and guidance for improvement. It’s not all bad, though. A good leader, when thinking about accountability, also knows how to celebrate the successes of others and raise them up for due recognition because that provides a positive example to others of what it means to be accountable for the work being done.
I mentioned before about there being a difference between being a manager and a leader. Take all of the examples above and reverse them. Managers simply tell people what to do but they don’t always understand the work being done. They can lack empathy and simply see people as means to an end. They punish others by shifting blame away from themselves when they make a mistake, and they don’t often celebrate the successes of others unless it celebrates themselves.
Granted, there are exceptions to what I’ve stated above about managers, but if you find someone with the title of “Manager” and they’re doing all the right things that make a good leader then they’re not a manager. They are a leader who may be unduly recognized for their skills. If that sounds like your own “Manager” and you have a good team around you then I’d wager that not only are they a good leader, but also the reason people stick around.
If you could un-invent something, what would it be?
This has me thinking “what an odd prompt” and I can’t quite put my finger on why. Maybe it’s because the past few months of prompts have been dominated by lots of introspective questions around who we are at our core. This just gives me silly ideas.
What could a person choose to un-invent and not totally mess up the world? I could choose smartphones, probably, because then it would change the social media landscape and how information is passed along, but I’m sure something else would eventually replace them. Maybe I should choose a food item.
Let’s un-invent high fructose corn syrup. In the US the food companies love to put that shit in everything. Maybe we’d be healthier without it, but again I bet someone would figure out a reasonable substitute or the manipulative corporate big wigs would find other ways to get people addicted to unhealthy foods.
Wait, is there high fructose corn syrup in some brands of ice cream? I wonder how that would mess things up…
Can you share a positive example of where you’ve felt loved?
Positive and negative emotions are wildly different. Recognizing some of them can be difficult sometimes, and that includes love.
So, trying to pick out an example, a specific memory, when I can tell without a doubt that I felt loved by someone else, was a challenge. For the most part, its a semi-constant state of how people relate to each other, and not a strong burst of an emotion. It’s subtle. Subtle actions, kind words, can often be taken for granted and the recognition is missed.
Thinking about this prompt was difficult, if only because within my family we take care of each other and never really think anything of it. It’s all a matter of course. I did eventually pick one moment out.
Right about my 26th birthday was when I received the news that I was being layed off. Two weeks later I had appendicitis. Having just turned 26 meant I no longer qualified to stay on my parents insurance, and I was a contractor through a third party organization that didn’t offer health insurance. So, ER visit into an appendectomy without health insurance!
The pain was almost tolerable and I had debated on just trying to sleep through the night, but eventually I just couldn’t take it. I lived alone at the time, and I was kind of a recluse with almost no friends in town at that point, so I drove myself to the hospital.
I got admitted sometime around 10pm and placed in a room. They did some scans of my abdomen, and they found that my appendix was in an odd position so they almost missed it. It hadn’t burst yet (they used the term “perforated”) but it was definitely getting closer to that. They promptly scheduled my surgery for the morning and wheeled me back to my room.
At this point, knowing what my situation was, I had texted my (local) siblings and my parents to give them the emergency update. After that, I posted about it on Facebook and got an exasperated text message from my sister (who lived six hours away) about how she was finding out about it this way. Oops. I had initially planned on telling her in the morning afterwards because I didn’t want to worry her when she couldn’t really do anything in her situation, but the jig was up.
Lots of text messages back and forth between me and my family, and then I finally got some sleep before surgery. I get through surgery just fine and I’m taken to recovery. I eventually get back to my phone and text everyone the update. Later that day, my parents drove up from the farm (they were only 30 minutes away) and they picked me up. We run by the Walgreens where I get my prescriptions, me riding with my Dad and my stepmom driving my car, and we get everything the doctor’s said I needed. Eventually we make it back to my apartment, my parents drop me off and make sure I’m okay, checking again if there was anything else I needed before they left.
I was on my own again, recovering from my surgery, but I was home with no fussing or frustration. Except, obviously, from my sister.
I look back on this moment (and one other involving my Dad and stepmom) and think about how much it meant that they came to help me out like that. The whole drawn out situation, all the time spent with them making sure I had what I needed was a large but subtle showing of how much they loved and cared.
I had a conversation with a friend about this last year. We were talking about our personal writing goals and the things we were going to try to do to stick to them. The discussion eventually leaned towards the subject of working spaces.
Technically you can write anywhere, so long as you have a writing utensil and paper (traditionally). Every writer is, however, different in their needs. Working space, atmosphere, location, background noise in a public area. You get the idea. Well, for my friend and I, we had different needs in those categories for what would help us be productive. The one thing we really had in common was the overwhelming need to declutter our preferred working spaces.
My dilemma when it came to decluttering was a combination issue. I have a wide variety of hobbies, which means having a lot of stuff, and not a lot of space to call my own. Naturally this means spillover. Currently, I’m doing my best to keep myself and my stuff contained in one of two places, either my bedroom or my little corner of the basement. My space in the basement is where my gaming and crafting/painting spaces live. That space is less important for today’s topic. My bedroom is where I have a separate computer I use for writing, but I often also use it for researching deck building tips and ideas for Magic. That little desk gets cluttered with stacks of Magic cards. It also becomes the collection space for other odds and ends that I haven’t decided where they belong.
Back to the original conversation about decluttering, I had already done this a couple of times over the course of last year. It also desperately needs to be decluttered again so I can use that computer for its intended purpose. Guess I know what I’m doing this week!
I answered a similar prompt back in late November, but rather than being the singular ‘animal’ that one was plural. You can read my answer to that prompt here if you like. It’s a quick rundown of the progression of my favorites over time.
For this prompt I’m going to dive a bit deeper into the history of why my favorite (mythical) animal is the dragon.
If you were a kid growing up in the 90’s and early 2000’s then you probably watched, or at the very least heard about, a little cartoon show called Jackie Chan Adventures. This was probably my earliest encounter with the Chinese Zodiac that I can recall, and is how I began to learn about the different animals of it.
Shortly thereafter is when I learned that I was born in the Chinese year of the dragon in 1988, so between that and other popular/mainstream uses of dragons in storytelling is how I started to develop an interest in dragons (but funny enough, that year is an Earth Dragon year, and I didn’t know that until about ten years ago when I was first figuring out a new handle for Twitch, which ultimately led to the artistic theme of my channel and naming inspiration for my blog).
As an additional side note for the element of Earth, a few years prior to Jackie Chan Adventures was when I had a brief encounter with the Five Elements Theory (Wuxing) of Chinese philosophy via the live-action fantasy martial arts film Warriors of Virtue where five anthropomorphic kangaroo warriors represent each of the elements of Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water. I wanted to mention this because, again until about ten years ago, I had no idea that Wuxing and the Chinese Zodiac were tied together.
Alright, so that should cover my connection to dragons, but not why they’re my favorite.
Dragons are incredible things in so many ways, and their existence somehow spans hundreds of years of history and multiple continents. They’ve taken on slightly different forms but always have similar features. Huge, scaled, magical lizards that breathe the elements as weapons? AND most of them fly? Awesome, sign me up. Their portrayals in stories were always fascinating to me. There are even some who were amazingly intelligent and manipulative, either sending a mortal human being on a quest for glory or to simply be rid of them and watch them die.
If you’ve read Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card then you’ll probably recall there was a Dragon Army at the Battle School that Ender gets sent to, so there’s another reference for you (the first time I read the book was probably 98-99). Again, I didn’t make the mental connection to the (potentially symbolic) importance of dragons, but it’s another source that most likely influenced my future interest in the creatures.
Okay, I think I’ve rambled enough about dragons and why I like them so much.
This seems like a fairly straightforward prompt that doesn’t need embellishment.
I use a wide variety of ways to communicate online. Discord. Facebook Messenger. Instagram. Twitter (I refuse to call it by its current “name”).
Technically, using your cellphone over WiFi makes SMS/text messages “online communication” rather than just over the cellular networks, but even those are now connected via major high bandwidth backbones.
I guess I should also include my blog! There’s really just too many ways I use the Internet to communicate, and somehow I’m doing alright.
That about sums it up. No need to really dive in too deeply on this subject so I’ll end here. We’re about halfway through Bloganuary, and I hope everyone is doing well with trying to build up that consistent writing habit.
Have you ever had a road trip where your vehicle broke down? Have you been on multiple road trips, along the same route for several years, and one particular vehicle seemed to break down near the same place for different reasons? That’s what this prompt makes me think back on.
My parents have had to have a truck for a long time now because of their horses. One of the trucks in particular, a red Ford, was a troublemaker. It broke down on us at least twice, and needed multiple things fixed on it that most vehicles never have issues with.
The two times it broke down on us happened just outside of a place called Big Springs, Nebraska near the northeast edge of the Colorado border. I was present both of those times, and it’s one in particular that always comes to mind.
My older brother and I had been asked if we would trailer a horse back to Colorado for one of my Stepmom’s friends, which wasn’t a problem. I had made the trip several times, both solo and as a passenger/back-up driver, but this would be the first time I drove with my older brother. The trip down was mostly uneventful but we were kind of on a tight schedule. We made it to Colorado and dropped off the horse, no issues. My brother had some things he wanted to pick up from an old friend of his, and we both wanted to eat some of our favorite foods from our hometown.
The trip home was a little nerve-wracking. We got done with everything we wanted to do a little later than we intended, but we were confident we could handle the 12 hour drive home just fine. The truck, however, had other plans. A couple of hours of driving later we made it to Big Springs. We got a couple miles further down the interstate when the truck decided to break down. The lights were dimming and flickering, and we used the momentum carrying us onto an exit ramp to help us turn around. We had hoped we could just turn on our flashers and limp the truck back to the truck stop at Big Springs, but it couldn’t handle that so we stopped. We called our parents to let them know what had happened and they made some calls for us while we checked the truck and trailer. I should probably add that at this point it was night time on a dark country road in what was effectively the middle of nowhere. This made my brother anxious and paranoid.
After a while we saw some headlights coming up from behind us, and my brother’s anxiety made him take some cash and stuff it in his sock for fear that we might get robbed or something. Thankfully it was a tow truck that our parents had called from a small town just inside the Colorado border. We explained the situation further to the nice tow truck driver and he knew just what we had to do at this point. We disconnected the horse trailer, he loaded the truck onto his flatbed, and then I watched something I didn’t know was a thing. He lowered this hydraulic powered towing hitch and connected it to our trailer! I had never seen that before, and it set me at ease that we wouldn’t have to just leave the trailer on the side of the road.
By this point it was a little after 10pm, and we were worried about where we would stay. The tow truck driver surprised us again. He had called ahead to the Motel 6 at the truck stop and made sure they would let us have a room. Which, thankfully, they did despite it being well after check-in time. So we had that problem covered. We thanked the incredibly nice tow truck driver for his help, checked into our room, and then made for the bar that was attached to the motel. The bar was mostly empty for a Saturday evening, but it was a truck stop and the actual town of Big Springs was further off the interstate by a couple miles.
Anyways, we had a couple drinks, chatted with the bartender, and joked about how this was our new life so we better see what kinds of jobs there were in Big Springs. The next morning we walked over to the truck stop proper and had breakfast while we waited for an update. It turned out that the tow truck driver was able to figure out the part we needed, a new alternator, and was able to track down a rebuild kit which was apparently hard to do because there was a big car show over where he was and all the other mechanics were busy. Regardless, he got the truck fixed and brought it back to us. We thanked him profusely for all the help on such short notice, made sure he was paid for the tow and the repairs, and then we were off.
After that ordeal, the rest of the trip was fine. We made it home with no other issues, and told ourselves we weren’t doing that trip again in that truck. This was probably about ten years ago now, and since then he and I haven’t hauled horses again. The truck eventually got to a point where my family didn’t want to take anymore chances and they got it replaced.
Now that I’m typing this all out and thinking about it, I don’t think I’ve spoken to my older brother about this incident ever since it happened. Almost like we silently agreed to never bring it up again, at least to each other.
The Dragon's Grove 