monkeys and ponies

I’ve been rather swamped, trying to get some things organized at home (with little progress, alas) and doing a lot of work for the Women’s Storytelling Festival which is less than 2 weeks away. You can still get tickets here, either in-person or virtual. And you get access to the recordings for an entire month.

Theatre Going: After my trip to New York in early February (which I already wrote about here), I saw a couple of shows locally. I went with my friend, Cindy, to the Taffety Punk Theatre Company production of Beowulf at the Capital Hill Arts Workshop was wonderful. Storyteller Marcus Kyd mixed the story of Beowulf with other stories about heroes - Eddie Aikau, John Henry, and the Oversteegen sisters. He was a very engaging performer and managed to get a whole bar full of people singing Hrothgar’s genealogy to the tune of “This Land is My Land.”

At the end of the month, I went to see The World to Come at Woolly Mammoth. Pretty much everything I’ve ever seen there was pretty strange and this was no exception. The plot involves a group of four people (three women and a man) at a Jewish home for the elderly. The world has started crumbling and everybody over the age of 75 has been forced to move into a retirement community, where they’ve slowly been cut off from the rest of the world, being deprived of television, mail, and visitors. And then the flesh-eating ostriches show up ...

Storytelling: I also went to three story swaps. One was at the Quince Orchard Library in Gaithersburg. It had multiple themes - love (for Valentine’s Day), Asia (for the Asian New Year), and Horses (specifically, for the year of the Fire Horse). I combined all three to tell a Mongolian story about a wife taking revenge on an abusive husband. The next one was the monthly Voices in the Glen swap on-line and I recited a poem I wrote about looking for my muse. I recited the same poem the next day at the Community Storytellers on-line story swap.

Poems: Speaking of poems, I am still keeping up with the Stafford Challenge. Here are the titles of my poems for two more weeks.

Week 6:

21 February 2026 - Soup

22 February 2026 - People of the Notebook

23 February 2026 - Novocaine

24 February 2026 - Game Night Haiku

25 February 2026 - Holiday Edition

26 February 2026 - Levi Strauss

27 February 2026 - The End of the World

Week 7:

28 February 2026 - Silly

1 March 2026 - Measuring Time

2 March 2026 - Hospital Waiting Room

3 March 2026 - Poe-try

4 March 2026 - Midweek Meditation

5 March 2026 - Whelmed

6 March 2026 - The World’s Longest Running Brief Meaningless Fling


A Few Medical Things: I had an annoying periodontist appointment, involving deep scaling of one quarter of my mouth. I hate waiting for novocaine to wear off. And I hate the noises involved.

I also had my mammogram. Taking flat pictures of round objects is painful. At least nowadays, you get the results back in under an hour. And all is well.

I still need to do some bloodwork and my annual physical.

Moving on to March, I took Cindy to the hospital for outpatient surgery. I am not good at sitting still, so waiting for four hours was hard on me, even though I had a good supply of books and puzzles with me. Still, us older women need to support one another.