Where's the Mail?

Remember that wonderful Wendy's commercial starring Clara Peller coming round to the refrain, "Where's the beef?" Well, if you are too young to remember it, it's all over youtube and here at Wikipedia. Or clickable here at Retro Screamers Flashbacks.

Anyhoo, our wonderful mail carrier retired at the end of the year. Yes, his last day on the route was Saturday, December 31, 2011, New Year's Eve, and I got to hug him goodbye by the mailbox. Since I do a lot of walking, in good weather, my path intersected with his often, and I sometimes long to be a mail carrier...but that's another story. A fantasy story.

As I was anyhooing, on Monday, January 2, 2012, I put out the mail as usual, via yellow plastic clothespin, and it was never picked up. Nor did any mail arrive! Where's the mail?

Was Monday a holiday, too? Is the new mail carrier not yet in place? Have the troubles with the post office arrived (not arrived) at my own front door? In good faith, I have put the mail out again today and hope it will be a fine Fat Tuesday in the mailbox, with late Christmas cards, the usual bills, and the usual junk.

We'll see!

Meanwhile, also in a kind of Fat Tuesday celebration, I point you to Hunger All Inside, a chapbook of poems by Marie Gauthier, reviewed by Susan Jo Russell at Fiddler Crab Review!

Math Challenged

It's daunting and inspiring reading about everyone's goals for 2012 and/or lists of accomplishments in 2011. All I managed to do on New Year's Day was

1) all the laundry in the house
2) a bit of reading and writing
3) make new (recycled) folders for submissions, rejections, acceptances in 2012
4) some tallying of s/r/a in 2011

Along with Brett Elizabeth Jenkins, aka The Angry Grammarian, I'll aim for 100 rejections this next year. Actually, her accounting starts on September 1, so I've tallied from there and will re-tally from January 1, 2012, as well, if I can handle it given my math challenge! I think I can, I think I can...

As of September 1, 2011, I've sent out 45 packets of something (11.25 per month, yes?), with 7 acceptances and 15 rejections. So about half of those are still out there.

Looking back to  January 1, 2011, I sent out 111 packets of something (pre-100 rejection goal; only averaging 9.25 per month), with 45 rejections, 34 acceptances, and 32 still pending (including the 23 pending in the other tally).

Keep on chugging (up the hill) and breezing (down the hill) is advice from someone (over the hill). Someone who's cheering herself up on a Blue Monday, that Christmas-is-over kind of blue. But mostly I let myself feel that yesterday and distracted myself with numbers today.

Beyond Us

I wish you a good year. Today was a hibernation day for us, and last night we connected by phone with old friends, who stood in the woods looking at the moon. I am weary, grateful, and glad. Much is beyond me. Here is a book I hope to read in 2012, with many others. Reading is good. Books are good. I still like to hold them in my hand and turn the pages. I love books. In a way, they are the humans beyond us.

Limbo Fire Dancing

The limbo days and random coincidii continue.

After I declared yesterday, a Friday, to be a Blue Monday in the blog, I found my poem "Blues" up at Blue Fifth Review in the Blue Five Notebook series: Short pieces by various writers, plus a fascinating set of diptychs (here, two-part poems) from The Ghost of Yesterday, by Susan Terris, followed by her process notes.

I love process notes, and I like how hers moves to this shared sentiment: "But isn't the poet often the last one to know what he or she is actually trying to discover or to write about?" She discovered something big, so go read it!

By chance, I'd recently read Ghost, by Gaylord Brewer, and reviewed it for Prick of the Spindle, so this was particularly eerie and moving for me in that way, too. Also, this holiday season I revisited The Muppet Christmas Carol for all my ghostly needs.

Thanks to Wikipedia and Two Wings for the limbo fire dance, and to Hannah Stephenson for suggesting that we dance the limbo!

Happy New Year's Eve!

Lemon, Bowl, Walnuts, Leaves, Bees

Oh, thank you, Jonathan Koch, for this painting titled Lemon, Bowl, Walnuts, Leaves, Bees. It fits my blog perfectly on this "limbo" day "between the years," as poet Sarah J. Sloat explains/describes it in her blog, with the Germans even giving this between name to it. I have lost track of the dates, if not the days, and of the time of day. This morning the blue-gray sky seemed surely twilight, and I can't believe now it's only noonish (and in a blurry time, when I actually post this, post numerous interruptions....)

Anyhoo, it's a comfort to me to see things labeled clearly as what they are. Similarly, I love this list of books forthcoming in 2012 at the blog of poet Karen J. Weyant. Wait! Do all the poets I know have middle names that start with "J"?!

And happy birthday to The Bloggess!

As for me, I'm calling this Friday a Blue Monday in the blog. Because it's not.