Saturday Wordzzle Challenge - Week 3

Welcome to the next installment of my wordzzles game.

Thank you so much to Dianne for playing last week - and coming up with a positively brilliant solution. My incredible and clever niece Diana just posted responses for last week and this week in the comments section from my last week's post. Newcomers can also find additional information on how the game works and some hints for how to have more fun doing it. I'll let anyone who is interested check out what she came up with for last week's words, but I'll paste her solution for this week along with mine. Hopefully nobody will notice that the muse seems to have abandoned me just when I need her most because the muse is being very good to Diana.

The words for this weeks challenge were: Yowling cat, ink stain, fever, river bed, home improvement, laughable, motorcade, broken camera, crafty and bourbon
Here's my niece Diana's paragraph:

"Are you going to fix that damn broken camera? It's been sitting on the kitchen table for 2 weeks!"I didn't mean to lose my temper, but this is starting to wear on me. The list of home improvement projects is mounting. He wants to be more crafty and handy around the house, and I know I should encourage him. But it's laughable, really. The heater sounds like a motorcade every time it turns on, the poor yowling cat can barely get to his food bowl with the piles of kitchen tile laying on the floor. After last night's rain, our lawn looks more like a river bed from where he *started* to put in what was to be a lovely rock path. "Oh god, what have you done to the curtains!!! Is that an ink stain???" He tells me it's nothing that a little bourbon and seltzer can't take out. I think I need to lay down. Maybe I have a fever or something. I feel faint.

And here's mine:

The yowling cat stood proudly by the broken camera while the huge red ink stain spread slowly across the white carpet. This was his idea, apparently, of home improvement. Martha hoped desperately that the scene before her wasn't actually real, that it was an hallucination brought on by the high fever she was running. She could hardly believe that even Mandrake, the Governor's decidedly "creative" cat, could have managed such total mayhem in the brief five minutes during which she had sat down to rest her aching head. Now, with her head hurting far worse than if she had at least had the pleasure of drinking a bottle of bourbon to engender such misery, she would have to trap and lock up the crafty animal before it could do any more harm and then get the study clean and spotless before the gathering of dignitaries - due any minute - arrived with demands for food and drink. On some other occasion it might have been laughable, but not today, not with so much at stake from this particular meeting. Particularly ironic was the fact that she herself was responsible for introducing this four-legged nightmare into the governor's mansion. Yes, it had been she, nobody else, who had spotted Mandrake's then frail body barely breathing in the dry river bed and persuaded the reluctant governor to rescue it. It would be good publicity, she had told him, especially since they were struggling to get increased funding for mandatory spay/neuter and spay/release programs for their state. "For you, Mandrake, they should re-institute the death penalty," she muttered. At these words, with typical cat wisdom, Mandrake gave his sweetest "mew," looked up at her with the face of an angel and, purring loudly, rubbed his soft body against her leg. As though by magic, she felt her mood shift and her headache lift. "You should run for office, Mandrake," she laughed. " You know how to charm your public. Now get out of here so I can undo your art work before the governor's motorcade arrives. You are a love, you rotten cat. Now shoo."

One of Dianne's readers, requested a mini challenge so I have provided a 5 word challenge for anyone who preferred it. (Feel free to do both if you want. I did.)

Words/phrases for the mini challenge were: outer limits, Lucifer, automobile engine, monk's habit, peanut butter & jelly

Here's my mini-challenge offering:

Peanut butter and jelly sandwich in hand, Frank Jones was so completely engrossed in the episode of The Outer Limits blaring on his TV that he didn't hear his wife's angry good-bye, didn't hear the automobile engine start up, didn't see her drive away with their young son. On the TV, Lucifer, disguised in a monk's habit, was "compassionately" giving bad advice to a young husband whose wife was feeling neglected. "Come here, hon," Frank bellowed obliviously to the empty house, "this show is great. You'll love it." Perhaps she would have, but he had called too late and she was gone.

I said in my previous posts that I'd share an old words exercise from my past just because I had so much fun doing them and because anyone who wants to can select those words as a third option for the challenge. This week's golden oldie is the very first one I ever did: Jelly beans, bowling ball, Dolly Parton's brassiere, Easter Bunny, mysticism, ice cream, apple pie, life, sequence of events.

Margaret's bowling ball dropped with a thud, tottered slowly down the alley, and trickled feebly into the gutter. "Good one!" guffawed Blanche Smith. Margaret, smiling sweetly, whispered, "Stupid Bitch" under her breath. "Cow." Just because she had breasts so big she could wear Dolly Parton's brassiere, she thought she was some kind of beauty queen. And now she was a bowling critic. Bitch. Margaret hated her life of squalling kids, dirty dishes and laundry. She hated her Mom and apple pie husband and his nice 9-5 job. She hated schoolteachers, peanut butter, Christmas trees, and the Easter Bunny. She hated chocolate cake, hamburgers, French fries, frozen yogurt, and, oh, how she hated jellybeans. If she found one more jellybean in someone's pocket or on the floor or in the bed, she'd scream. There'd been jellybeans in her bowling bag, for God's sake! Pretty much, she hated everything about her life, Margaret decided. Except ice cream. No one, not even Margaret, could hate ice cream. Ice cream was love and serenity and inner peace. It was a religious experience. And again, she cursed the sequence of events that had led her to this frantic, empty, frazzled life where there was no room or time in which she could comfort her lonely, hungry soul with the food it needed to survive: art, writing, Yoga, an hour of meditation, the study of Eastern Mysticism, or even a moment or recognition in her husband's eyes of who she was. A person. Not a Mom. Not a wife. Someone with a self. Margaret! She was Margaret! She had rights. She deserved more than she was getting and it was time she demanded it. She smiled. Good old Chuckie had a few surprises coming. "You're up, Sweetie," Blanche bellowed. Margaret rose quietly and in a swift sure move, rolled a lovely, perfect strike. "Top that, Bitch!" she breathed with a deep, contented sigh. Yes! A new day had dawned.

Guess that's it for this week. I look forward to seeing what people have come up with. I continue to invite suggestions from participants for words/phrases so I don't have to make them all up myself. Here's what I came up with for this week. I try to just put down whatever comes into my head first. This week, that was not such a good thing. I dread coming up with a solution to my own puzzle. Sigh.

Next week's challenge: Bolivia, Green Goddess, virtual reality, laundry, ample evidence, matches, your mamma don't dance, sugar, saucy, sofa cushions

Next week's mini challenge: olive groves, paraphenalia, sausages, moose droppings, store front

Have fun!