Cobalt bubbles tossed
Ashore, angry winter storm
Stranded, shriveling

Thank you Clare at My Creative Cosmos for inviting me to join this wonderful challenge.

This photo was taken December 7, 2013.

Every once in a while strong winds will drive large swarms of Portuguese man o’ war up onto our beaches. There will be so many that it is hard to walk on the sand without stepping on one. The tentacles sting by means of venom-filled nematocysts that can still actively trigger after death, so walking barefoot on the beach when they are around is a very bad idea. These creatures are not really a “jellyfish” in the traditional sense. They are an organism known as a siphonophore that consists of a colony of zooids that work together to create one living creature. So while as a colony organism they represent the epitome of teamwork, as a swarm they are ironically at the mercy of the wind and current. I find them strangely beautiful and their mass casualty a sad event. This type of stranding tends to be more common in the winter when the storms roll in off the Gulf of Mexico. This particular morning was cold and overcast with a misty, ethereal quality to the beach. Iridescent cerulean sails tangled in golden sargassum streamers were strewn about the sugar white sand as raucous gulls raided the spoils for morsels of trapped food. This force of nature went on for weeks with each pounding wave tossing more passive victims ashore to their ultimate death.

OK, here is where I am going rogue. I am not going to follow the strict rules and pay it forward to five other folks. An elaborate explanation of why can be found on my Five Photos, Five Stories – Day One: Fog post if you care to read my obnoxious rant. Here are my rules: If I follow you, I admire and respect your work. If you would like to take on this challenge, please do so as I would very much like to follow what you create. I will be posting one more of these photos, haiku and stories guilt free with the hope of inspiring someone else to take a shot at it. If you take on the challenge and want to follow the original rules, I think that is great so here are what the rules are supposed to be:

The Five Photos, Five Stories Challenge rules require you to post a photo each day for five consecutive days and attach a story to the photo. It can be fiction or non-fiction, a poem or simply a short paragraph – it’s entirely up to you.

Then each day, nominate another blogger to carry on this challenge.

Accepting the challenge is entirely up to the person nominated, it is not a command. Today, I invite (insert nominee here) to join the challenge.

I would like to give a special “Thanks” to all of the wonderful bloggers that follow and support me and especially to Clare for being so patient with me.

This is also a response to the Weekly Photo Challenge: Forces of Nature which inspired a theme for my five day challenge and will be incorporated in each of the five posts.

Rising flood water
Drowns all land that it covers
Fish play in driveways

Thank you Clare at My Creative Cosmos for inviting me to join this wonderful challenge.

This photo was taken April 30, 2014.

As if the great freeze of January 2014 wasn’t bad enough, the following April we had a 500 year flood event and our city turned into Venice Italy overnight. As usual, I got up before the sun so I did not realize the seriousness of the flooding until I stepped outside to go to work and found a good foot of water under my house (I am on pilings so I did not have any serious damage). I took this picture while wading chest deep to check on my 80 year old Mother’s house, five streets down from mine. Her car was totaled but she was OK. Many people in the area were not so lucky. Lots of folks lost their homes and most of the homes destroyed or flooded were not in a traditional flood zone so they did not have flood insurance. It was just horrible. We had over 24 inches of rain in 26 hours. We broke every rain event record known for the area. I work for the local government so again, I was ordered to stay home and await emergency management orders. I knew there were some long days ahead for everyone once the water receded. We made international news that night. Oh joy. Just once I would like our area to be on the news for something good instead of for a catastrophe. Pictures circulated of folks peering down into a ravine filled with cars where a major road washed out and collapsed thirty feet below. What the folks in the picture did not realize at the time, revealed by the photos taken from across the wash-out, was that they were standing on a mere 4 inches of pavement overhang with absolutely nothing underneath. How’s that go, “Stupid is as stupid does”? Miraculously only one person was killed due to the fast rising water sweeping away their car and I say “only” because it could have been so much more tragic. Entire homes were washed away in mud slides or flooded to the roof line. At least 28 roads and bridges washed out or collapsed. To make matters worse, the flooding happened in the middle of the night with much of the area without power. It took the rest of the year to get the major infrastructure repairs completed. It will take even longer for those that lost everything to rebuild their lives.
Now back to that photo. Speaking of stupid; yes, I had assessed that there were no live power lines in the water; yes, I was on high alert for snakes and had a big stick in my hand. What I hadn’t counted on and you can’t see in the picture are the thousands of pissed off fire ants and spiders rafting to get above high water. “I” was above high water so suddenly “I” was very popular. Not fun. Nope, not fun at all.

OK, here is where I am going rogue. I am not going to follow the strict rules and pay it forward to five other folks. An elaborate explanation of why can be found on my Five Photos, Five Stories – Day One: Fog post if you care to read my obnoxious rant. Here are my rules: If I follow you, I admire and respect your work. If you would like to take on this challenge, please do so as I would very much like to follow what you create. I will be posting two more of these photos, haiku and stories guilt free with the hope of inspiring someone else to take a shot at it. If you take on the challenge and want to follow the original rules, I think that is great so here are what the rules are supposed to be:

The Five Photos, Five Stories Challenge rules require you to post a photo each day for five consecutive days and attach a story to the photo. It can be fiction or non-fiction, a poem or simply a short paragraph – it’s entirely up to you.

Then each day, nominate another blogger to carry on this challenge.

Accepting the challenge is entirely up to the person nominated, it is not a command. Today, I invite (insert nominee here) to join the challenge.

I would like to give a special “Thanks” to all of the wonderful bloggers that follow and support me and especially to Clare for being so patient with me.

This is also a response to the Weekly Photo Challenge: Forces of Nature which inspired a theme for my five day challenge and will be incorporated in each of the five posts.

Ice crystals on palms
Tinkling shards of clear glass
Dropping from the sky

Thank you Clare at My Creative Cosmos for inviting me to join this wonderful challenge.

This photo was taken January 29, 2014.

Yes, I live in Florida; Northwest Florida. What most people don’t realize is the we get our share of cold weather. Not Maine cold (I lived there for almost four years) but cold enough to freeze pipes, harm animals left outside and kill the tropical plants people insist on planting in our non-tropical climate. We typically dip below freezing for a week or three every year. If we get down in the teens for more than a few days we are basically screwed. The pipes here are only buried about six inches underground so they freeze under these conditions. On top of that, my house is on pilings so my pipes are exposed to the cold on their way from the ground to the house. They are insulated, heat wrapped and I leave water running but sometimes even that is not enough. The problem with pipe splits are that you don’t know it has happened until the thaw -and God help you if you are not home when the ice plug finally thaws and the split lets itself be known. Nothing makes my stomach drop quite like hearing that distinctive “pop” followed by a continuous “hiss”. Due to our weather patterns, the cold arctic air that sometimes dips down into our region is usually dry so we rarely get snow. Once in a while you will see some flakes in the air that melt the minute they hit the ground. More commonly we get ice but that is normally a night time re-freeze of past rain. On this particular day we had a full-blown ice storm. It was dangerously beautiful. The real hazard was happening out on the roads. Locals were absolutely freaking out. They acted like they had never seen ice before. I was lucky enough to have my employer tell me to stay home until the roads were safe but many folks felt compelled to try to get to work. Being from the Northeast, I know how to drive under very bad conditions. I also know there is nothing you can do to safely navigate glaze ice, especially in an area that has absolutely no clue or resources to handle it. So I stayed home and safely documented the beauty with photos. Later that night for entertainment I watched the local news ice induced demolition derby stories and all I could think was, “Calm the fuck down you crazy Floridians. This is what happens when you combine precipitation and freezing temperatures. Stay home”.

OK, here is where I am going rogue. I am not going to follow the strict rules and pay it forward to five other folks. An elaborate explanation of why can be found on my Five Photos, Five Stories – Day One: Fog post if you care to read my obnoxious rant.  Here are my rules: If I follow you, I admire and respect your work. If you would like to take on this challenge, please do so as I would very much like to follow what you create. I will be posting three more of these photos, haiku and stories guilt free with the hope of inspiring someone else to take a shot at it. If you take on the challenge and want to follow the original rules, I think that is great so here are what the rules are supposed to be:

The Five Photos, Five Stories Challenge rules require you to post a photo each day for five consecutive days and attach a story to the photo. It can be fiction or non-fiction, a poem or simply a short paragraph – it’s entirely up to you.

Then each day, nominate another blogger to carry on this challenge.

Accepting the challenge is entirely up to the person nominated, it is not a command. Today, I invite (insert nominee here) to join the challenge.

I would like to give a special “Thanks” to all of the wonderful bloggers that follow and support me and especially to Clare for being so patient with me.

This is also a response to the Weekly Photo Challenge: Forces of Nature which inspired a theme for my five day challenge and will be incorporated in each of the five posts.

Wispy fog hovers
Swirling into ghostly patterns
Glistening dew drops

Thank you Clare at My Creative Cosmos for inviting me to join this wonderful challenge.

This photo was taken May 8, 2015.

This is a haiku that I texted my husband the morning after I met him seven years ago. Of course I didn’t know we would eventually marry when I met him, but I did know he inspired me. Not a bad start.
I recently found a picture of the haiku that I snapped off the old phone I was using at the time. We had a habit of texting poems to each other and when I upgraded my phone I realized the record of our relationship which historically would have been archived by paper (yes, I’m “paper” year old) was going to be lost every time I did an upgrade. So, I started taking pictures of our texts so that I would have a record of our courtship (yes, I’m “courtship” years old too) and our poems. So when I found the long lost copy of this haiku amongst my photos I thought, I need to post that on my blog but since my self imposed challenge is “a poem and a photo” I had to come up with a picture. Normally by May, our days are hot enough that fog is a remote possibility so I figured I would have to hang on to this haiku until the fall. Then lo and behold, this morning there was fog swirling everywhere when I woke up. The water was still cool enough compared to the air that fog formed over night. I excitedly grabbed my phone (another internal challenge is to take photographs with just my phone) and headed outside to see what I could find. By the time I spied the dew drops forming on the bamboo, the sun was already burning off most of the fog but I still managed to get a few “keepers” before the sun baked everything dry. I kept meaning to start this challenge but life kept getting in the way. Then today’s weekly photo challenge was: Forces of Nature and a light bulb went off in my head. OK, now I have a focused theme and I can do this challenge. Fog is a more gentle force of nature but it is a mood inducing force none the less.
Was meeting my inspiring husband seven years ago a “force of nature”? I’d like to think so.

OK, here is where I am going rogue. I am supposed to nominate five folks for each of the five days I post. I even started to ask permission of a some folks of who’s blogs I love and admire if I could nominate them before realizing that these folks either have a policy about not being nominated for awards or have already met this challenge. I eagerly accepted this challenge from Clare (even though I am usually adverse to them) because I really liked it, I was inspired by what Clare created and thought it was a perfect fit for my type of blog. I was also attempting to get out of my comfort zone and expand my writing beyond the haiku (I found this aspect to be the biggest challenge especially with my hectic work schedule, not to mention my lack of writing confidence). Plus, Clare asked me ahead of her posting so I had plenty of time to decide if I wanted to accept her nomination which I did eagerly -although that was two months ago. With that being said, the only part of this challenge I did not like was asking someone else to participate. While these so-called-award nominations can be a wonderful way to honor a respected blog, they are also a vehicle for passing on the “hot potato of guilt” by putting that someone on the spot. Let me be clear, I was in no way put on the spot in this challenge but I have certainly been put on the spot before and I don’t like it. My inability to nominate folks for this challenge is my problem. So here is how I am going to tackle my problem: I am not going to pass on this guilt. If I follow you, I admire and respect your work. If you would like to take on this challenge, please do so as I would very much like to follow what you create. I will be posting four more of these photos, haiku and stories guilt free with the hope of inspiring someone else to take a shot at it. If you take on the challenge and want to follow the original rules, I think that is great so here are what the rules are supposed to be:

The Five Photos, Five Stories Challenge rules require you to post a photo each day for five consecutive days and attach a story to the photo. It can be fiction or non-fiction, a poem or simply a short paragraph – it’s entirely up to you.

Then each day, nominate another blogger to carry on this challenge.

Accepting the challenge is entirely up to the person nominated, it is not a command. Today, I invite (insert nominee here) to join the challenge.

I would like to give a special “Thanks” to all of the wonderful bloggers that follow and support me and especially to Clare for being so patient with me.

This is also a response to the Weekly Photo Challenge: Forces of Nature which inspired a theme for my five day challenge and will be incorporated in each of the five posts.