Diurnal ~Reminiscing

When I was a kid, still going to school, I always took such immense pride in two things~my fabulous vocabulary, and my obnoxious sense of humor.

 

 

The good news is that I knew perfectly well that the word ‘Diurnal’ means ‘daily, quotidian’.  The bad news is that if a teacher of mine would have ever dared to ask me to use that word in a sentence, I would have been so sorely tempted to respond with, ” recently when I went into the boys’ room, I sneezed so hard I missed diurnal.”

 

 

This is my very first ever attempt at the Ragtag Daily Prompt. 

Annunci

Happy Song, Sad Occasion

Leo and Sylvia have always been quite square and stuffy, but they’ve also been quite happy and agreeable about anything their less conventional friends, Gunther and Lucille would ask them to do. 

 

 

One night, the colorful couple invited the reserved couple to see a hypnotist’s show at the local public school. 

 

 

All went well at first until the Great Albondigas invited Leo and Sylvia onto the stage so they could participate. 

 

 

They both carry harmonicas with them wherever they go, so he took advantage of this.  He told them, as a post~hypnotic suggestion, that they would play ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ on their harmonicas everytime they heard anyone say ‘His Sire was from Castile, his Dam from Aragon’.

 

 

Because of its having been such an undeniably obscure phrase, he didn’t even bother to snap them out of it before they left.

 

A couple of days later, the couples, along with their friends,  Francis and Hildegarde, went to a funeral for a neighbor.  Hildegarde, a somewhat neurotic English professor, was constantly mulling over her notes for the class she was to teach the next day.

 

 

At the very beginning of the funeral, Hildegarde spontaneously blurted out, ‘His Sire was from Castile, his Dam from Aragon’.  

 

 

To put it as mildly as possible, their neighbor had quite a distinctive processional song at his funeral.  

 

 

Here is my very first ever effort for Page And Line Challenge.  I have always been a compulsive bookworm, and I have a bottomless pit of literature credits among my transcripts, so I picked Line 4, from Canto XXXVIII, of George Gordon Lord Byron’s classic poem, “Don Juan”.   In my copy of a collection of Byron’s poetry, it’s on page 195.