Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

…no! Come back, this will make sense if you read the Post. We promise.

Hosted by Dyanne. (Hostinae Quatraenous c.2020) who has graciously, (one can be forgiven for wondering what shade of rose her glasses were when she sent the email back to Kristi), taken on the deceptively challenging job of hosting the TToT.

This is the Ten Things of Thankful (TToT) bloghop.

Enjoyed by millions.

1) Una

Warning: this photo constitutes an achronologic depiction of a post-branching of a timeline.
See Grat Item 3

2) Phyllis

3) The photo above, between Una and Phyllis? A near-perfect Grat Item. I mean, Peter Paul Mounds perfect. Here’s the story: Our backyard is basically a clearing in the middle of a pine forest*. Our practice, when letting Una out at night, is that I go out onto the deck and look for any animals that might be in the yard. That would be mostly late-night deer and rabbits with the munchies.** Usually there’s nothing out there and I open the door, Una goes out and comes back in, easy peasy. And therein lies the gratacious aspect to this adventure. Sometimes, when it’s extra cold or I’m tired, I might stick my head out for a cursory scan. (“A single grain of sand falls soundlessly from the upper lip of the Great Sphinx. Time destroys all, however limited the attention span of Man.”) Last night was not cold, so I asked Una to wait by the French doors that open out to the deck. I always scan from left to right, starting with the shed, down along the perimeter, past Ola’s grave and ending with the darkly-featureless woods. Movement caught my eye. In the middle of the lawn. My first thought was…. Pepé Le Pew! (No, seriously, the skunk was full-on black-with-white-stripe-down-its-back.) It was walking from the woods towards the shed. Kinda ambled, like Popeye, if Popeye was a quadruped, rather than the man that he yam. I said, “Holy Smoke!” The skunk took no notice. I did some calculations and, seeing how I was an arm’s length from the door into the house, figured I could outrun he or she, should, he or she, take offense at my presence. The skunk continued on, past the deck, past the garden and under the shed. I thought, “Damn! Only Eight more Grat Items left!”

4) Lizzi because, back in the late eighties, she began on a path that included creating a bloghop. (Interesting fact: She and I were among the first, at least in our circle of Facebookian friends, to do a life-video chat) Funny Doctrine insight: So we set a time to sign on, to whatever app google had back then, and there we were, face to face. I said, ‘Hello’. (transatlantic pause) and Lizzi said, ‘Hello’ And the connection dropped. My first thought, no word of a lie, was ‘She thinks you’re a creep and hung up.’ Fortunately I had a Doctrine to remind me that I was a clark and, it turns out that Lizzi did not think I was a creep. At least not then.     lol

5) The internet. It’s capacity to function as a duct-tape-and-cardboard time machine, allowing us to travel back to when things were different. (see music vids this week)

6) Six Sentence Story

7) Writing, (and the practice of writing) which takes a form that, while a part of improving my skills, is also entertaining in the process. (Now, if only physical exercise could be like that, you know, while you’re doing the exercise, you become or appear to be the end product. Somehow. In top shape and totally stylin. err…. we have two serial stories ‘the Case of the Missing Fig Leaf‘ and ‘the Whitechapel Interlude’, from the Ian Devereaux pulp detective and the Book of the Order of Lilith )

8) THIS SPACE AVAILABLE

9) something something

10) Secret Rule 1.3 From the Book of Secret Rules (aka the Secret Book of Rules): We had the opportunity to remind Lisa that, as an offset to her uncertainty about joining in this weekend, with a ‘full TToT post’, the BoSR/SBoR lets a body, with sufficiently persuasive citations of appropriate chapter and verse she might send in a list of less/more than Ten Things.

musics

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* Full Disclosure. When we bought the house, one cold January in the late 1960s, the forest of pines were of a certain age that created a full screen of green. The nature of pines includes not only growing tall, but, in that process, preventing the next generation from getting established to quickly. Pine trees block sunlight year ’round. The short form: we can see neighbors now.

** keeping the theme of the ’60s alive, ya know