D.G. Kaye's Blog, page 46

Time for an Update – U.K. Plans and Mexico

Like many things, our intentions don’t always come to fruition.   I know for months now I’ve been talking about my plans to go the U.K. as I anxiously awaited the arrival of my bestie to get here for a visit and my plans to fly back to the U.K. with her after. But sometimes plans change, and in my case, I’ve rearranged my plans and wanted to update you here, especially since I’ve chatted about my plans with several of my British and European friends in anticipation of meeting up with some of you.   So why the change of heart?   After losing my husband in April then moving in June, exhausted both mentally and physically, and full of grief, the only thing I wanted to do was to jump on a plane and get the hell out of Dodge. But Covid restrictions hampered those plans. Our airports didn’t open up to foreign travelers until early fall, and that kept my friend from getting here until late October.  She will be leaving back for the U.K. without me, later this week. Besides the fact that U.K. is experiencing higher Covid numbers again, and that my intentions of staying in U.K/Europe for a good month or two would have had to have been cut shorter because it’s so late in the year already, the upcoming holidays, and my having to prepare for my winter vacation in Mexico beginning late January, my husband’s gravestone is not yet erected and I’ve been anxiously awaiting that to happen so I can plan a celebration of life gathering for him with our friends because he was ripped off of a proper large funeral gathering at the time of his passing.   I’m feeling very unsettled about the headstone going up without my being around to acknowledge it and my plans for a small gathering to honor my husband’s life once the stone goes up. It seems that even headstones are in delay due to the Covid. So with all those factors rolled into one, I decided it’s best for me not to take off right now. I can’t even believe that in two months I’ll be on my way back to Puerto Vallarta!   I’m already dreading the holidays here and wishing away December. But I’m very much looking forward to a winter escape to a familiar place where I can somehow still feel like my husband’s spirit will be with me. As a newly minted widow, the thought of going anywhere else this winter gave me anxiety with first time being alone again traveling after a quarter century of traveling as a couple. But I decided to go back to PV and stay at the same location as we always did because we have many Canadian snowbird friends who stay at the same location annually, and at this time in my life I’m grateful for the familiarity I will be in and I won’t be alone there. I’ll have friends to gab with at the pool and to join up with for outings. I’ll also be having a few of my friends from home come down for a stay, so I should be quite comfortable back in PV in the land of wonderful people, sunshine, the ocean and beautiful sunsets. And I will have new plans come next spring for visiting both the U.K. and Europe. So just know my friends, I will get there. And hopefully by then, the Covid will be less of a worry, and I’ll be traveling in a warmer season.   ©DGKaye2021    

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Sunday Book Review Plus – Bonus Documentary Recap on Joan Didion – The Year of Magical Thinking

Welcome to my Sunday Book Review with an added bonus. Today I’m going to review Joan Didion’s book – The Year of Magical Thinking. But before I share my book review, I’m going to share an overview of the 2017 Documentary currently on Netflix – Joan Didion – The Center Will Not Hold, where 86 year old, literary icon, Joan, reflects on her intimate stories from her writing career and struggles, and her forty year marriage to author John Gregory Dunne, brother to author Dominick Dunne. The documentary was directed by her nephew, Griffin Dunne.   My 5 Star Review Documentary Review:   Joan Didion was born December 5, 1934 in Sacremento, California. She’s an American novelist and essayist and screenwriter. Joan is known for her incisive depictions of social unrest. Joan says she began writing at the age of five and was a shy ‘bookish’ girl. She never considered herself a real writer until her first published book. Joan struggled with social anxiety and took up acting and public speaking to help ease her anxieties. As a young teen, she spent much of her time typing out books by Ernest Hemingway so she could learn how sentence structure worked. Joan had a sordid childhood as her dad was in the army during WWII, with moving a lot she didn’t attend school regularly until returning back to Sacremento in 1944.   After watching the documentary and learning about the demises of both her husband and her daughter Quintana, my heart went out to Joan and I was compelled to read her book, The Year of Magical Thinking, because she wrote it after John’s death. It was first published in 2005. In the documentary, Joan’s publicist talks about how he urged Joan to write her novel published in 2012 – Blue Nights, for both, John and Quintana.   John and Joan met in New York City when Joan won a poetry contest at her senior year in Berkeley for her essay, Prix de Paris, and the prize landed her a job as research assistant at Vogue. John wrote for Time Magazine at the time.   They bounced ideas off one another, each wrote their own books and essays, but they collaborated on screenplays together – Needle Park (1971 with Al Pacino) and A Star is Born (1976 Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. Joan’s logline for Needle Park – “Romeo and Juliette as junkies.   In this documentary, we get a deep inside look at this author from her beginnings as a journalist writing hard stories, Joan would say that she writes about disorder because she’d then find the situation”less scary”. She wasn’t happy with the way some of her books were portrayed for movies, such as, Book of Common Prayer, complaining her characters were totally different than what she’d written.   Joan admits that much of what she writes contained pieces of her. Her interests in writing were mostly about stories of humanity and the bad things going on in the world. Her visit to El Salvador prompted her to write political stories and essays, and an eventual book called El Salvador. She talks about the lie of the Central Park 7 – propaganda spurred falsely in the accusation of the rape of a jogger in Central Park, N.Y. and on VP Dick Cheney, “Bully of the Bush war,” “He took the lemons, made lemonade, spilled, and made someone else cleanup.”   John and Joan kept a low profile in the celeb world. They adopted their daughter Quintana at birth. When Quintana was asked what kind of mom Joan was, she replied, “Okay, mostly remote.” Joan began questioning how parents are sometimes on auto-pilot and don’t realize child neglect.   In 2003, Quintana took ill and was rushed to hospital when she went into septic shock resulting from pneumonia, which turned worse and ultimately left her in a coma at the time of John’s death. John and Joan had just come home from visiting Quintana in hospital on December 30, 2003, and they were sick with worry about their daughter. Joan made dinner, the two sat down to eat when John had a massive, fatal heart attack. Later, looking in her husband’s closet with a friend to pack up his clothes, Joan said, “What if he comes back?” That was clearly a grief statement because I could so identify with not wanting to let go. After she wrote The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan said it was the hardest book to write, but had to write it to get through. I totally get that. She told herself that after writing the book she would learn to let go. This woman lost the love of her life while their daughter lay in a coma.   Months after Quintana’s recovery, she fell and hit her head, suffering a massive hematoma and resulting in six hours of brain surgery. As Quintana was recovering her major illnesses in 2004, she came down with Pancreatitis in 2005, and ultimately died from it in August 2005 at age 39. Didion wrote Blue Nights in 2011 for Quintana. That woman was broken.   Joan was/is a tiny woman, and after losing her family, her wonderful friends stepped up to take care of her and made sure she ate at her already weight of 75 pounds. Joan then wrote the play for the book The Year of Magical Thinking, which starred Vanessa Redgrave, in the nonfictional soliloquy.   Joan wrote Blue Nights after the play, about Quintana – a book she said she didn’t want to write. On her life when asked if she had regrets about things, she said, “The failure to plan for misfortune,” her guilt of failing as a mother.   In 2005 Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and became a finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award.  She won a Pulitzer Prize for her book, The Magical Year of Thinking. In 2015, President Obama awarded Joan with the Mastery of Style in Writing Award for exploring the culture around us and exposing the depths of sorrow and for her ‘startling honesty’.     Poignant Quotes:   “Everyone has moved on except the one left grieving.”   “See enough and write it down.”   “A journal – a forgotten account paid with interest.”   “Remember what it is to be me, that’s always the point.”         I recently finished reading Joan’s book, The Year of Magical Thinking. After seeing the documentary and having only read one other of Joan’s books, I felt compelled to read.         Blurb:   NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.   Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later—the night before New Year’s Eve—the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.   This powerful book is Didion’ s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness … about marriage and children and memory … about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”     My 5 Star Review:   An accounting of love and loss. In this often, heartwrenching book, Joan Didion champions her once simple writing life alone, without her husband, best friend and consultant on all her writing. Joan reminisces on her life and writing with her husband John, always with her – writing, walking, traveling, filming – they did everything together, despite them both being individual writers, with the exception of a few collaborations.   Joan takes us through her life in vignettes as she shares memories of incidence on vacations the family took together, the circles of people they traveled with, their routines, when they adopted Quintana, motherhood, and mistakes. But most poignantly, Joan focuses on the time of John’s death, the surreal moments, the most insignificant things becoming big things, the most minutest details overlooked while she was living numb are being realized in this story. She begins her story with the the eve her and John went to visit Quintana in hospital, while she was in an induced coma. They were both worried sick about their daughter. Joan makes dinner, they sit down to eat and John has a fatal heart attack right in front of her on December 30, 2003. Her details are precise. She talks about her different kinds of grief, comparing the variation in grief between losing her parents, to how different her grief felt when John died. Joan shares what it was like waking up the next morning alone. She’ll take you right into her realizations. So identifiable for anyone who has ever deeply loved and lost. I know much of what Joan speaks, like not even remembering if we ate or not, mostly not. It’s a numbness that takes over to break the impact of the shock.   Joan bares herself with raw honesty on what grief leaves on someone, the stages of steps involved until reaching acceptance, but I wonder how many ever get there. Joan shares how she came to decisions about giving her loved one’s clothes away, as Joan in her denial stage held hope he may come back. Joan discusses her concern of having to break the news to Quintana about her father’s death, after she awakes from a long coma. Joan shares her fears about her daughter getting sick again overshadowing her grief – “Until now, I had been able only to grieve, not mourn. Grief was passive. Grief happened, Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.”   Imagine trying to stay sane!   Joan Didion is an iconic writer. As a journalist, she followed stories of humanity, out in the field. She said it was easier to deal with war if she could see it. She’s a tiny frail woman who can barely move her hands now at age 86, but that doesn’t stop her from still using them to articulate what she speaks. She’s lived through hell and back TWICE, first losing the love of her life, then her daughter. I can only imagine the amount of courage it took to write about such pain. It’s not surprising this Warrior Woman has won so many awards. I was drawn to this book after watching a documentary about her, The Center Will Not Hold on Netflix after my own husband’s passing, and I would recommend this book to anyone, especially those who have loved and lost.     Poignant Quotes that resonate:   “Life changes fast.   Life changes in the instant.   You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.   The question of self-pity.”   “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.”   “I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death.”   “Marriage is memory, marriage is time.”   “For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes. I did not age. This year for the first time since I was twenty-nine I saw myself through the eyes of others.”   “I have trouble...

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Fleeting Thoughts: How Do We Wish to Be Remembered?

  Have you ever thought about when your turn is up on earth, how, if, or what you’ll be remembered for? Not to sound depressing, but just thinking about impressions we leave behind as our mark in the world as our legacies. Will we leave an indelible print on someone’s heart or mind? Will we be remembered for any words of wisdom, humor, quotes or empowering messages?   I try not to think about my eventual non-existence in this world and had never really thought about what I’d leave behind in people’s minds and hearts. I have occasionally thought about my not having any natural children through the years, which leaves me wondering if when my time comes, will anyone remember me?   What would I like people to remember about me, if asked? Well, I’d certainly like to think that in some small way, the words I leave behind in my books and stories and definitely in my social media footprints may make a difference to someone or many someones as the world goes by. I’d like to think my caring and compassion will occasionally come to mind as a fleeting thought or in discussion by any who may have known me, or perhaps, from my writings, or by some who never knew me. Would all my scribbles across numerous notebooks and scraps of paper be scrutinized? Cherished? Tossed in the garbage?  Will more people read my books after I’m gone, like so many now famous authors of the past who were considered unknowns while they lived? Will anybody ever even remember that I once existed?   I wonder if other writers ever think about our writing and what will happen to all the words we leave behind once we’ve fulfilled our purpose on this earth.   Do you ever wonder about how you’ll be remembered?   Nobody really knows the answer to any of these questions, and of course, me being a curious soul, am just really thinking out loud. But wouldn’t it be interesting if we could actually ‘look down’ after whisked away to another dimension after our time here on earth is done and get a glimpse of how others perceived us and our work?     ©DGKaye2021    

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Sunday Book Review – Waiting for Frank-Bear – (Beechworth Bakery Bears)

  My Sunday Book Review is for Frank Prem’s new release in the Beechworth Bakery Bears series – Waiting for Frank-Bear. This is probably my fifth book I read by Frank. I enjoy his non conformitive prose and poetry he uses to execute his stories. And the bears are adorable. I was thrilled to receive an ARC from Frank, this book is available now on pre-order.     Available on Amazon   Blurb: The Beechworth Bakery Bears are still just as friendly and eager to please as ever. But, where is Frank-Bear? He does not come in to see them as often as before and they miss him. They would love to tell you about their lives now, and how they wait for their best friend Frank-Bear to visit. Step back into the bakery and find out what is happening in the world of The Beechworth Bakery Bears.   My 5 Star Review: Prem brings us a new treat from his Beechworth Bakery Bear series. In this poetic story he takes us into the inside musings of the Beechworth bears who are now feeling a bit perturbed at the lack of customers, and question why people must lineup to enter the bakery, only so many at a time. As they patiently await customers to come in, the bears go about their business, tidying the shop and preparing baked goods. The bears are also puzzled because they can’t see people’s full faces anymore, now covered with masks. What is going on? And where is Frank? It seems Frank is one of their favorite customers and as they go about their daily business of setting up shop, they keep their hopes up in anticipation that Frank will soon show up for a drink and his favorite snack. Another night passes as they patiently await their friend Frank-bear to visit. A sweet read!   ©DGKaye2021  

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A Biblical Questioning – Haibun and Haiku for Colleen Chesebro’s Weekly Poetry Challenge – Word Craft

It’s been awhile since I hopped on to Colleen Chesebro’s weekly poetry challenges at Word Craft. Every week there’s a different theme to work with in any syllabic style we choose. This week is Poet’s Choice.    I was going through my notebooks of things that pop into mind, generally, from something I’ve read or seen. I didn’t recall why I had scribbles written down about Moses from the bible – but I’m quite sure I did that while watching Exodus: Kings and Gods on Netflix. But I thought I’d use part of those scribbles and expand, to go with the Haiku I’d written first. Uncanny what comes to mind. It became a biblical questioning. I’ve written a Haibun and Haiku.     #TankaTuesday Weekly Poetry Challenge: #Poet’s choice     Is it Golden Idol Time?   Moses climbed Mount Sinai following the voice of God calling unto him. God wrote the Ten Commandments with his own finger, searing the laws into the stone tablets.   While Moses was gone for 40 days and 40 nights up the mountain, the natives below began to lose faith about the existence of God and began their doubts about Moses’ return. As people often do in human nature when they harbor doubt, gossip spreads among them and a new ‘want-to-be’ leader steps up and antagonizes by spewing doubt and fallacies about God, it doesn’t take people long to hitch their wagons to persuasion.   And the non believers joined together to build a golden idol to put their faith into, and pretty much broke every other law that God would ultimately write – raping, orgies and so on.   When Moses returns with the tablets in his arms and sees how little faith his people had, he threw the tablets to the ground and broke them. Of course, Moses did go back up the mountain for another 40 days and nights and received a new set from God. And as God’s punishment for non believing, he left his people to wander the desert as nomads for 40 years – enough punishment for a generation to pass in this lesson – kind of like when God was angry at what man had done unto his creation and flooded the world and started over with Noah’s Ark where only two of each species of animals, and Noah with seven other members of his family, sailed on it to survive God’s punishing flood to wash away all his creation, along with the sins of man to create yet, a new world.   I can’t help but wonder what God is thinking these days about what’s going on in his world now; what has man done now to His once pure creation? Are we beyond smug to entertain the thought that God is not afraid to start yet again?     History Repeats Instant gratification Some will never learn.     Visit Colleen’s original post at Word Craft. There’s still time to hop on!   ©DGKaye2021    

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Halloween Musings – Photos, Friends and Silliness

Time to share a few photos and friends here for some Halloween Musings. Let me preface this post by saying that as usual, my techie world still doesn’t wish to comply with my needs. Hence, some of the video clips may not surface for a long time. I spent two hours making a guess mess of the one clip I did try to edit – too bad I couldn’t edit the gum right out of my mouth too. LOL. So please excuse my amateur camera work, confirming I should just stick to writing.   Our first girl get-together earlier last week with our ‘gang of girls’, took place at Sanja’s niece’s home downtown in the city. As always, it was like years never passed, and a good forty of them we’ve all been friends. This picture below shows how we all look – pre our Halloween costumes on the weekend.   From the top left: Anna, Marg, Me, bottom left: Sanja, Al, Kokie     A rare sighting, I snapped up this photo fast of my two besties together, Anna and Sanja       It was Halloween weekend and with my bestie Sanja in town from the UK, she wanted to have a Halloween party up at her sister Kokie’s house in our great white north – cottage country where she lives. Alyson and Marg picked me up as we headed the journey up north with our many bags – food, costumes and libations. We had many a laugh as the day into night progressed. Marg dressed as an old woman in a housedress and a wig that came complete with a babushka kerchief and glasses that looked like something that ‘Flo’ from the old TV show, Alice, would wear. Pre-party, Marg demonstrated her Halloween look and insisted each of us try on her get up. I tried to refuse, but there’s no such thing as refusing around this gang.   Margaret’s head garb   Sanja looking full on Flo   Alyson looking hilarious   Yup, here I am as I couldn’t escape the clutches of Marg   And for good measure, there’s a side profile look too   My She Devil costume   Sanja and Marg acting like their normal selves   Kokie’s turn   Me, San, Kokie, Al   We danced, we ate, we drank, we laughed. And we sang. In between the good music – courtesy of Spotify, Kokie’s friend Patrick played guitar and we had some hilarious sing-a-longs. As I was busy flitting around I caught quite a few music interlude snippets on video and wanted to share them here, unfortunately, my techie madness continues and somehow my laptop wants nothing to do with downloading videos from my phone. Below is a feeble attempt at a video I tried to edit (not well), and this is what I got:   Please know there was alcohol involved in this performance 😁🤣😍🎃💄     Apparently, I lost the dance Marg and I were doing and some off-tune singing, so clearly, video editing is not my thing.   It was a fun weekend with just a dozen of us eating, dancing, singing, ping ponging, and most of all, laughing up in our Canadian great white north which isn’t yet white, but based on the temps outside now and my wearing furry socks and lounge wear indoors, I’d say the’ white stuff’ is soon on its way.   ©DGKaye2021    

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Sunday Movie Review – Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman

Welcome to my Sunday Movie Review. Happy Halloween! And seeing as today is Halloween and wanting to keep with the theme here, I want to share my review of Practical Magic. This is the title of the book written by Alice Hoffman, an author whose books I always enjoy. As what often happens, the book is collecting dust in my Kindle, but I came across the movie version. What I found interesting were the comments I read on the book page on Amazon. . .   Whenever I watch a movie made after the book, I always go over to Amazon to read reviews to read opinions from reviews on whether the book was better than the movie or vice versa. Interestingly enough, this book has thousands of reviews, but the most poignant points on most all comments from those who’ve both read the book and seen the movie were that THE MOVIE was better than the book! Also, the movie strayed a bit from the original book, yet, many appreciated the movie version more. With that said, now I’m curious to the read the book. But for now, I’m sharing my review of the movie version.   The book and blurb:     *25th Anniversary Edition*—with an Introduction by the Author! The Owens sisters confront the challenges of life and love in this bewitching novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Rules of Magic, Magic Lessons, and The Book of Magic. For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in their Massachusetts town. Gillian and Sally have endured that fate as well: as children, the sisters were forever outsiders, taunted, talked about, pointed at. Their elderly aunts almost seemed to encourage the whispers of witchery, with their musty house and their exotic concoctions and their crowd of black cats. But all Gillian and Sally wanted was to escape. One will do so by marrying, the other by running away. But the bonds they share will bring them back—almost as if by magic… “Splendid…Practical Magic is one of [Hoffman’s] best novels, showing on every page her gift for touching ordinary life as if with a wand, to reveal how extraordinary life really is.”—Newsweek “[A] delicious fantasy of witchcraft and love in a world where gardens smell of lemon verbena and happy endings are possible.”—Cosmopolitan   My 5 Star Movie Review:   This was a fun and entertaining romp of love, sisterhood and of course, magic.   Gillian and Sally are sisters. They were born from a line of witches. Their mother died of a broken heart when they were little girls, undoubtedly, because of the Owens family curse – any man to fall in love with an Owens woman would suffer a fatal curse.   Gillian and Sally went to live with their very witchy aunts as children. They both had ‘the gift’, only Sally wanted nothing to do with it until she was faced with a tragic situation, then all bets were off. Gillian was the wild child, free-spirt, and all she did was seem to get herself in trouble. But her clear psychic connection with her sister always alerted Sally when Gillian was in trouble.   Now, the present, Sally’s husband dies in an accident and spurs her to pack up her things and her own girls now and moves back into her aunts’ home. Meanwhile, Gillian had run off with some crazy guy who turns out to be a maniac wanting to be a vampire who ultimately becomes violent with her and it’s Sally to the rescue.   To get into all the shenanigans that happens because of Gillian, would be spoilers, but suffice it to say, the girls try a few methods to get rid of James, and Sally thinks she finally may have killed him, only to find this guy won’t die and tries to get inside Gillian’s body.   In the meantime, a good looking detective comes around looking for this James guy because of the evil he’s done to others. He can’t figure out whether or not the girls have killed him or not. All the while the detective gets swooped into the scene where James is trying to possess Gillian’s body, and with a bird’s eye view of the mayhem and magic going on, he realizes he’s dealing with witchcraft and not your average murder.   Throughout the action there becomes a strong attraction between Sally and the detective, but Sally is apprehensive to follow her feelings because she’s afraid of her mother’s curse taking another potential love away from her. Will she take another chance on love with her fear of the curse? I can’t tell you that. Will we see Sally, the ex- non willing participant for witchcraft form a coven of strangers to form an exorcism on Gillian? We surely will!   Despite my description, this book is anything but scary – oh, except maybe the possession part, kind of.. But it’s a fun movie to watch with plenty of love, magic and entertainment, oh, and some fine music in this film too!     I have two videos to share from this movie. One shows snippets of the film, the other is seven minutes long with actual scenes from the movie. A superb cast, starring Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock.       I’d recommend this fun, magical chickflick for a cozy Halloween watch.   ©DGKaye2021  

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#WATWB – We are the World Blogfest, #Gooddeeds – Feeding the Sick in Rwanda

Welcome to the October issue of #WATWB – We are the World Blogfest, where a group of writers share something good going on in the world to inspire and keep focused on some of the positive things happening in the world.   In this edition, I’m sharing an initiative I came across where the organization of Humanity United and  Kuzamura Ubuzima have united with the first ever Food share initiative. This initiative was formed in order to aid in the food shortage in Rwanda with the Food Forest Program, and recently added, food delivery for patients in hospitals. Food is not free for hospital stays in Rwanda and many cannot afford to buy the food, and many more have nobody to bring them food.     “Food Forests – also known as forest gardening, are a world apart from traditional agriculture. Standard farming models require that crops are planted in neat rows, segregated by species. In contrast, the food forest model revolves around planting techniques which mirror the ecosystems found in nature. This means that crops are allowed to grow in the places where they naturally thrive – think shade-loving mushrooms underneath heavy canopied trees, or plants that mutually benefit each other interspersed in the same area. Because the food forest follows patterns found in nature, it is low maintenance and self-sustaining, requiring only basic upkeep from farmers. . .”   Please continue reading about this amazing initiative at Goodnet.org.   Anyone is welcome to join in at any time to post something good going on in the world on the last Friday of each month for the WATWB by posting a link to your post on our WATWB Facebook Group Page post. Hosts for this month are:  Sylvia McGrath (https://professorowlsbookcorner.com) and Belinda Witzehausen (https://BelindaWitzenhausen.com)     ..     ©DGKaye2021    

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Enough with the Self Checkouts! My Two Cents

Today I’m talking about my aversion to self-checkout registers in stores. I hate them! What spurred this post was a meme I’d seen on social media where people are up in arms in the comment section about having to self checkout at Walmart with cart loads of stuff, some leaving their carts and walking out. Below, find a few samplings:   “I refuse to self check out. It puts people out of work and contributes nothing to the social security tax base or income tax. It’s Walmart’s way of not paying wages. Plus most folks are part time so Walmart doesn’t have to pay benefits.”   “When I’m in line waiting to pay for my groceries, and the nice assistant manager tells me there’s an opening at the self checkout, I look at them and say, “I’m sorry. I don’t work here.”   “I think we should get a “ I cashiered myself discount “ since they aren’t paying anyone to ring us up”   “Hire the cashiers back!”   I can definitely relate and not a big fan of self-checkout for various reasons besides the complaints noted above. Grocery shopping has never been one of my favorite shopping past times. I go with my list, gather my goods and go to checkout. I’m used to bagging my own things in some supermarkets, but, ringing items through on a self-checkout doesn’t necessarily mean you’re getting out faster.   I’ll take my local pharmacy, Shopper’s Drug Mart, as an example here. I’ve developed a habit of going there only on Thursdays. Thursdays are Senior Days. Ya, ya, I’d hardly consider myself a senior, but I’ve been getting that discount for years.   It began about eight years ago at the Shopper’s near where me and my husband lived for years. I’d pick up his prescriptions and do a shop. I asked one of the pharmacy girls if I could get the discount since my husband was a senior. She told me she’d certainly ring up my things with a 20% discount. That was it! Since that time, any other Shopper’s I’d spend money at on a Thursday, I’d ask for the senior’s discount and got it. At the time, I was further away from being a senior and was puzzled that I wasn’t asked for identification. I asked the clerk if she needed proof. I was told then that clerks weren’t allowed to ask for I.D. for this discount and that if we claimed we’re seniors we’d just get the discount. That worked out well through the years. . . until the self-checkout machines came around.   As you can imagine, Thursdays are the busiest days at Shopper’s. The one closest to me is a nightmare to checkout from on Thursdays. With usually only one cashier on (these days) and three self-checkout machines, prepare to spend longer in line. We have Shopper’s points cards where we earn extra points for items we purchase. The cards get scanned at checkout, but Shopper’s has yet to come up with a cure for the missing access to the ‘senior discount’ selection at self-checkout. What currently happens is the ONE cashier on duty has to leave the line of waiting paying customers to go over to the robots and swipe a ‘special’ employee card into the machine to take off the extra 20% for those who braved the robots. So we are in fact waiting on one cashier line and sharing that cashier with all the lost self-checkout customers who can’t get their discounts at the machines. Not to mention, most of the elderly seniors don’t have any concept of digital payment. Sometimes I question if the 20% off is worth my time.   This self-checkout business is a nightmare for many. I detest it more in grocery stores. How many times have you been self-checking out and an item doesn’t scan? Yes, we are at the mercy of computerized everything. And no, they aren’t foolproof. When we checkout with an actual cashier, it’s their business to call a stock person and go check the price of the item if it doesn’t scan. At a self-checkout scanning machine, it’s enough to make me leave the whole lot of stuff and walk out. This isn’t my job. I’m wanting to pay for goods and the robot I’m at isn’t complying and there’s no help. Yes, I am going to leave if there is no help around.   Now, I know that some stores have ‘helpers’ around to help serve shoppers when glitches occur, but that’s not always the case, especially since I’ve noticed less people working in these stores. It isn’t a secret that North America is recognizing a shortage of employees for many businesses. With the advent of Covid and people working from home or leaving their non-essential jobs, which are in fact, very essential to the average citizen, I’ve noticed plenty of closed checkout aisles in many a store.   I’m not sure if all those people ranting over the situation at Walmart aren’t justified in their thinking, but I do feel the same way as many of those commenters. Greed has taken over everywhere with price gauging, giving less and taking more from us from service to pricing, but, I do know it sure would be nice to see people working in stores instead of these damned robots!   What’s your take on self-checkout?   ©DGKaye2021    

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Sunday Book Review – Breathless, #Shortstory by Yvette Calleiro

My Sunday Book Review is for Yvette Calleiro’s short, powerful story – Breathless. This is a fun read involving witchery, karma and a twisted surprising end. A lovely sampling of Yvette’s writing, and I know I’ll be reading more from her.         Blurb:   What if the fairy tale kiss that always awakens the damsel in distress takes a sinister turn? What if prince charming’s kiss no longer produces a happily ever after?   Silena’s infatuation with William hits a speed bump when he rejects her. After all, she is just a maid, and he is a young, rich aristocrat in the 1920s. Why would he have any desire to waste his time with the help?   On one particularly lonely day, Silena calls upon her magic to transform into a sexy flapper for the night. Her dream to enjoy one night with William is finally in her grasp, but her magic comes with consequences that neither William nor Silena could ever imagine.   BONUS! This short story is followed by a preview of a book written by the author.     My 5 Star Review:   This is my first time reading this author and I was in the mood for a short and impactful read, and it was delivered.  Set in the 1920s, Silena is a maid serving at Walter’s parties, where she can only dream of being with the charming playboy William as she pines for his attention and is continuously overlooked. She sees how he treats women, including herself, when he shamed her for being a maid. Walter is all about the young and beautiful women so she thought she’d use her magic one day to get herself all decked out as a flapper girl and join one of his many parties. But Silena overlooked what could go wrong when she decided to put an irrevocable spell on him to teach Walter a lesson for being such a womanizer and paying no mind to women’s feelings.   Silena inherited her mother’s magical skills and she thought she’d try and see what it felt like for one night to become glamorous and desired. Silena knows better about messing with magic, but took the plunge anyway. She wanted to know how it would feel to be desired for one night.. Her plans go accordingly, but she discovers he’s just as piggish to her as he is to all the woman he collects. And after his verbal abuse, once he discovered who she was, Silena decided to put a dangerous curse on him. – dangerous because she was warned by her mother to never use her power as revenge. But she did and she didn’t take much time to think about the backfiring consequences of putting an irrevokable curse on him that wouldn’t end until it was fulfilled.   I cannot share the curse Silena put on Walter, for no spoilers here. But suffice it to say, the ‘kiss of death’ is final. Be careful what you wish for. Karma is always listening. This was a short read but lots of action to keep me glued.   ©DGKaye2021    

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