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November 24: A Hardscape Redo Using Chat GPT

hardscape~

easier maintenance

for two aging

bodies to maintain curb

appeal on a farm house……

We started re-thinking the hardscape bed right outside our front door back in August. We fiddled around in Home Depot and Lowe’s, checked out designs shared on social media and websites, and thought of our own needs for a low-maintenance bedding design that will require less care than the one we just pulled out that had been there for 17 years. A Confederate Jasmine was running rampant, taking over the entire brick wall out front and serving as a nesting ground for birds. The one shrub we left was a gardenia bush just because I love the smell wafting by when I sit on the front porch reading in the late summer. I carefully dug up the Giant Elephant Ear bulbs to replant them in pots instead of the ground.

We looked at all different possibilities for a redesign.
I spent a Sunday putting down new landscape fabric to cover the rocks that have been there for 17 years. We will add newer, cleaner rock while letting the first base serve as additional weed killers.

Once we finally decided on the rock we wanted to use, we set off to Lowe’s with the truck and trailer to get two pallets. Little did we know that it would not go as far as we thought it would. Our entire budget for this project covered only a third of the bed. We reconsidered using pine straw for budget purposes, but decided ultimately that the bugs it brings to the foundation (and Copperheads love it, too) was not in line with our original decision, so we went back to the drawing board.

We used the tractor to make the work load lighter. We emptied the bags of rock right into the bucket and used the bucket to hep spread the rock.

Ultimately, we will have a black and white hardscape design with evergreen shrubs in pots, along with several gray hardscape boulders. We like the straight lines rather than the waves, but we are considering a curved line to account for the additional white rock we will have to purchase to make the straight line work.

Chat doesn’t understand that our sidewalk runs in a different direction, but it does understand that we needed to see the concept of the design. We’ve decided on small black polished river rock to finish the bed, and we will work to that end…….meanwhile, we will have to re-vamp the budget and decide when to add the additional features.

For today, we have a half-finished hardscape and high hopes we can get it finished before the landscape fabric blows away!

Chat GPT can make mistakes, it says.

And here’s a blooper to end the day on……just for giggles. Chat GPT has the driveway going completely in the wrong direction and added grass in the hardscape bed. At least it shows us how badly we can goof up if we try hard enough.

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Storied Recipes – November


We picked up our grandson to spend the day together as a Thanksgiving time. When we asked what he wanted for supper, he was quick to reply – a broccoli/rice/chicken/cheese casserole that he helped make! He even pounded the Ritz crackers to go on top and showed me how he likes to take them to a fine powder.

We were out shopping for wreaths earlier in the day, and he helped us assemble a large 60″ pre-lit wreath for the front of the house between the garage windows (and possibly even higher, if we can get the ladder to cooperate). It melts my heart that this kid just loves the simple things, and was over-the-moon happy to receive a mix-matched set of golf clubs that had belonged to my father but had been curated from various sets by my brother, specifically with Aidan in mind.

We have always stood heel to heel to check height, and over the past year, he has surged well ahead of me by nearly a half a foot. I asked him if he knew his height. He replied, “A couple of months ago, I was 5’10”.” Imagine his expression when I asked, “Are you aiming for 6’7″?” He rolled his eyes, smiling, knowing he’d been had.

I told him I’d been writing 6-7 poems all week, and he asked, “SERIOUSLY, NANA??”

Yes. Seriously, Aidan. So here’s one for our grandson Aidan.

6-7: Height Comparison

Today he’s 6-7 inches taller than his

Nana, who is shrinking in height

even as he reaches the clouds now ~

he’s surpassed his “short little Nana”

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November 22: Wreath Seeking

The tree is up – all we need now is a Christmas wreath!

Today we’ll go hunting for a new wreath to go on our exterior garage wall and one for the back door. It’s the best way to spend a Saturday – seeking wreaths! We’ll have one of our grandsons along to help, too, and we can’t wait to spend the day with him.

Last year, on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, we rented a car in Boston to make a loop through Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts following the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Convention I was attending at the time. As we left Kennebunkport, I spotted what I thought was a fruit stand on the side of the road. It looked a lot like where, in my rural Georgia county, we would pull over and buy watermelons or tomatoes. But as we neared, I could see that the people who were gathered around the long tables were not tenderly squeeze-testing tomatoes or thumping watermelons. They were creating fresh wreaths using the greenery stacked in piles on tables behind them.

A wreath-making stand! There is still a part of me deep inside that craves this L.L.Bean-style wreath that is all made of fresh evergreen and so natural and simple that it would rival any wreath that feels the need to proclaim Christmas in any other way than through real live nature, just greenery and berries. So it just might be that we find a wreath frame and some zip ties and twine and wire. It just might so happen that we take our little hacksaw and sharp camping axes and put on our hiking boots and go to the back side of the property and gather evergreens that we cut fresh to put on the frame and make one ourselves, New England style.

It would do my heart a lot of good to make a wreath with our grandson today. But we’ll have to be careful to watch for the elusive lellow bear if we trudge out into the woods. He’s out there somewhere…..

Wreath Seeker’s Haiku

it’s wreath-seeking day

balsams, firs, cedars, spruces

today we seek wreaths

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November 21: A 6-7 Kenning

Last weekend, we wrote kennings with Mo Daley of Illinois as part of the November Open Write through http://www.ethicalela.com. A Slice of Life blog inspired 6-7 poems in last week’s post. I combined two forms today: a kenning in 6-7 format (six words, seven words) as I think ahead to our Thanksgiving plan next week. Since we spent time with all of our children in for a week in October, they will be spending time with other family members during Thanksgiving this year. We’ll be in a camper in a state park in a back corner campsite with a fire going, the dogs in their portable pen, and books in our laps in our camp chairs. Hopefully, there will be warm blankets involved to guard against the chill of the air.

What will we be reading? My husband will be finishing Killing the Legends by Bill O’Reilly, and starting Killing the Mob by the same author. I’ll be finishing The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life by Helen Whybrow, and starting the next book my book club will be reading. We drew a slip at our monthly meeting last night from everyone’s suggestions to determine the next club choice: The Book Club Hotel by Sarah Morgan.

We’ll duck quietly into a favorite local restaurant in the area where we will be staying, and we’ll prepare to-go plates of turkey, dressing, cranberry sauce, and all the fixings on Thanksgiving Day, then return to our hideaway to eat by the fire. We will be feeling grateful, blessed, and relaxed. Since we were all together with all the kids and grandkids in October for a glorious week in the mountains, we won’t have the feeling that we should be anywhere else. Finally, after Dad’s death in June and all the long weekends of travel to his home on the coast to clean out storage rooms and have sales, we will be able to enjoy some much needed down time for the better part of a week.

And for this, we are ever so grateful.

Thanksgiving 6-7 Kenning

we’ll dwell in a forest-castle

get lost in page-turners by the fire

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November 20: Zeno Zine

I’ve got a bad case of FOMO this week as all my writing friends and fellow English teacher buddies gather at NCTE to share time breathing the most fantastic air ever in Denver, Colorado. Some of them will be giving a presentation on various formats of poetry at a roundtable session, and my fellow authors of Assessing Students with Poetry Writing Across Content Areas will all be at a book signing sponsored by Routledge/Taylor & Francis. I’ll miss my small group of Stafford Challenge writers, my EthicalELA pals, those with whom I’ve collaborated on writing a few other books, and the Slice of Life writers who will be gathering for dinner and rich conversation. I am thrilled for them, but I feel such longing in my heart that I cannot be there this year to celebrate all things Literacy.

My friend Margaret Simon, who blogs at Reflections on the Teche, will be one of those at NCTE, and she will be hosting a roundtable of Zeno Zine writing. Here is the link to her blog, where you can read the format for a Zeno and Margaret’s Zeno. She writes, “. A Zeno poem is one in which the syllable count is 8, 4, 2, 1, 4, 2, 1, 4, 2, 1. The challenge is each one syllable line rhymes.” When I read her blog yesterday morning, it was all the inspiration I needed to write a Zeno. Since yesterday was our annual Friendsgiving feast at work, that will be my topic today.

Friendsgiving Zeno

smells from the kitchen wafting through

the office hub

find my

nose

turkey, dressing….

Heaven

knows!

spoons scoop YESes

know no

NOs

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November 19: Silent Book Club Sidlak

Books people were reading on Monday night at the Silent Book Club

My friend Denise Krebs of California introduced the Sidlak form yesterday in her blog post. She explains that it is a 5-line poem, and the syllable count of the first four lines are 3/5/7/9, and the fifth line contains a color and any number of syllables. You can read her Sidlak here. My poem for today will take this form, about a new experience: a silent book club.

My friend and fellow book club member Janette Bradley and her husband Chris attend a silent book club, and they invited my husband and me to come read for an hour in a fudge shop on a Monday night. We arrived and sat down at their table, then ordered ice cream (my husband) and a cold mocha coffee (me) before we began reading silently for one hour on the clock. It was a great way to read completely undisturbed, and we plan to attend again on an upcoming silent book club month. If you haven’t tried, this, I’d urge you to find a silent book club near you and attend one. I like that there was no pressure to have read chapters ahead of time and no need to discuss whatever books we chose to bring. It was low-stakes, and we thoroughly enjoyed it!

Silent Book Club Sidlak

silently

we read for one hour

from a book of our choosing ~

Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life

set in Vermont’s Green Mountains heals the soul

*A special thank you to our friends Janette and Chris for inviting us to the book club!

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6 – 7 Prairie Dog Poem

Cuteness Overload

Last week, a post by fellow blogger Anita Ferreri gave me an idea: could we possibly use the viral “word of the year” 6-7 to inspire poetry? This random response from students was driving teachers and parents all over the country a little batty at Halloween, when some schools began banning it. Others embraced it and adopted it as a way to dress up, inviting folks to come to school dressed as 6, 7, or 6-7. Our ninth grade academy was one of those schools, and the fun was never more math-y.

All week, I’ve been writing 6-7 poems. Some have six or seven lines, others have six or seven syllables on each line. I haven’t written a concrete poem in the shape of 6-7, but perhaps that will be a challenge for an upcoming snow day.

As I sat in Denver, Colorado last week during an AI Summit, we decided to take a quick walking lap around the building to stretch our legs. One of our colleagues noticed something rolling in the dirt in the empty lot beside our hotel. He stopped in his tracks.

Is that a prairie dog? (I felt a Slice of Life happening…)

Our heads snapped left to get a better look.

Indeed, it was. And once I knew they were there, I couldn’t keep my mind off of them. We keep taking random laps just to bask in their cuteness. My window, not facing the view of the Rockies but facing north toward the Aurora Borealis at night and now these just-discovered prairie dogs, was just the reminder I’d needed to be thankful I hadn’t given in to my first instinct to ask for a room with a better view. The good Lord was working the reasons for this odd room choice far away from the rest of my group. These prairie dogs WERE the view, and, like the Northern Lights, so entertaining to watch. Who needs the Colorado Rockies when there are prairie dogs? It took me back to Amarillo, Texas the morning we were leaving for Cadillac Ranch and I’d have preferred to have stayed and watched the prairie dogs in the vacant lot next to our hotel in that city, much like this deja vu situation.

So today, here is a 6-7 poem about these cute critters.

Colorado Prairie Dogs

took me out of my summit

more playful than AI

popping up here and there

tunnel infrastructure

underground labyrinths

far more captivating

than AI’s mindlessness

Tune in next Tuesday to see where our thinking about the prairie dogs took us during one part of the summit when our minds began drifting……(hint: we rethought the mascot for our new voluntary professional development club that starts in December)!

Just call him Petey…..the squeaky professional development prairie dog
Special thanks to Two Writing Teachers for providing space and inspiration for teachers to write in community
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Open Write Day 3 of 3 November 2025: Gratitude Kenning with Mo Daley of Illinois

Mo Daley of Illinois is our host for the third and final day of the December Open Write. She inspires us to write Kennings today. Here is a part of what she shares, but you can read her full prompt here.

November is a month of gratitude. It’s a great time to reflect on the people, places, and things that mean so much to us. The Kenning comes from Norse myths or legends. A Kenning is a poem that uses two-word phrases as metaphors to describe something. For example, you might use tree-hugger instead of environmentalist.

Think of a person, place, animal, or thing for which you are grateful. Develop a list of attributes and actions for your subject. Think of fun and creative ways to describe your topic without saying who or what it is. Your poem can have as many or as few kennings as you’d like. Think of your poem as if it were a riddle. The hardest part for me was giving the poem a title without giving away my subject.

I’m continuing to write 6-7 poems this week, so today’s poem is 6-7-6. Fitz is one of three Schnoodles we have rescued over the past decade, and he is the star of the show today. He naps in a brown velvet chair and often throws his arm up over the arm rest as if he is a person. Sometimes I think he would look best in a a tophat with a gold chain eyepiece, smoking an old-fashioned pipe. He came to us as Henry, but we renamed him Fitz, after F. Scott Fitzgerald. The name Fitz fits, but we realize that he was aptly named Henry after Thoreau himself. He’s far more of a thinker than he ever will be a party animal.

Transcendental Two-Toothed Love Beggar

he’s my radiant heater

this fierce lizard hunter

my brown velvet chair napper

Fitz , our senior-most rescue Schnoodle

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Open Write Day 2 of 3 November 2025: Traditions Tanka with Mo Daley of Illinois

Mo Daley is our host for today’s Open Write at http://www.ethicalela.com. She inspires us to write tanka poems to share our traditions. This may be one you’d like to try today, so I’m including her directions below.

Mo writes, “This time of year always gets me thinking about traditions. There are many my family and I look forward to celebrating with each other. I really love hearing about other peoples’ traditions, too. Hayrides, Oktoberfest, pumpkin patches, bonfires, corn mazes, pumpkin carving, and cooking might be some of the traditions that come to mind when you think of fall. Today’s poem is a way for you to flex your poetic muscles while letting all of us learn a little bit more about you and the traditions you observe.” 

Mo inspires us with these words: “Write a tanka or series of tankas telling us all about a favorite, or maybe least favorite, fall tradition. A tanka is a traditional Japanese poetic form of 31 syllables over 5 lines. The syllable count is 5/7/5/7/7. Usually there is a turn in the third line. Consider focusing on sensory images to help us feel like we are right there with you. “

You can read Mo’s poem at the Open Write today by clicking here. In my poem below, I feel the need to clarify the spelling of the yellow bear. My first grandson could not say yellow, so when my son suggested they go on a bear hunt on our farm in rural Georgia to find the highly-elusive-never-before-seen yellow bear, my grandson couldn’t stop talking about the lellow bear, and none of us have called it anything different ever since. I still have the picture of them setting out to find it, and it warms my heart to think that one simple moment, one slight of the tongue, became a family tradition that remains to this day.

Traditions Tanka

first, the pumpkin bread

that started when they were kids

I tie the apron

sift the flour, mix in the eggs

add sugar, spices, pumpkin

dominoes thunder

onto great granny’s table

the one I redid

while the bread bakes, we play games

we pair with grandkids

we all walk the farm

looking for the “lellow bear”

every eye stays peeled

lellow bear is elusive

someday, we might catch a glimpse

the coffee pot stays

full of fresh brew to help us

keep up with these kids

Scrabble (turntable version)

for adults, post-kids’-bedtime

togetherness fills my soul

I take a deep breath

they were born last week

now here they are, with their own

tears of gratitude well up

Several years ago ~ from the time of his first bear hunt to early teens
The walk that started it all: the first hunt for the elusive lellow bear
Today, the hunts continue
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Open Write Day 1 of 3 November 2025 with Mo Daley of Illinois: Clean Up and Clean Out

Our host today for the first day of the Monthly Open Write for December is Monday Daley of Illinois, who inspires us to write cleaning poems since it is National Clean Up Day. You can read her full post here, along with her mentor poem and the response poems of the writers who participate.

Earlier this year, those in the school district office where I work were saddened to learn that our favorite custodian had taken a job in a neighboring county because of lower wages in our own. We understood. But we grieved that daily absence of one who was more than a custodian to us. She was a friend who shared about her children and the concerns of her country. She was family. She’d given us her number in case we ever wanted to call to have our own personal homes cleaned, which she offers as a service on weekends.

The older I get, the more difficult cleaning is, and if I’ve learned one thing from my father’s aging process, it’s this: stay on top of the cleaning. As I near 60 years of age, I hear my own words of advice to him echoing through the veil of time: “Hire someone. Don’t try to do all this by yourself. There are professionals out there who know what to do and how to do it better than you can.”

So two weeks ago, I called my friend Dianelys to come and meet with me about cleaning. She brought her mother along, the one who loves plants but doesn’t speak any English. I saw her mother giving approving nods to the plants as we walked through the house so I could show her what I would like to have done. I’ve been establishing some Night Blooming Cereus stalks, so I plan to leave one out today with a note for her and her sister in law to take to her mother, on this first day that Dianelys will clean our house with her cleaning partner.

And so today, on this National Day of Cleaning, it seems fitting to write my 6,7 poem to celebrate Dianelys and cleaning.

Taking My Own Advice

I’m taking my own advice,

Dad, doing what I thought you

should have done years ago

you’d be proud of me today

phoning a friend to help

where my abilities now

fall short ~ bending, vacuuming,

scrubbing, shining, polishing ~

I look to the Heavens

offer a gratitude smile

as always, you taught me well

one way or another

this cleaning hits the targets

that need it most ~ for me and

my friend, Dianelys

she’ll be here in two hours

with her mop bucket and rags

so now the mad dash to clean

before the real cleaner comes