Daily Prompt: I Got Skills 2 – You just have to find them

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If you could choose to be a master (or mistress) of any skill in the world, which skill would you pick?

Snow remains Migros Langendorf

Before Christmas, when the skiing season opened, we had no snow. Skiers were confronted with green slopes. When the competition season began with the ski downhill runs and slalom, the art of snow making had to be applied. There were only green slopes covered with grass. Ski cannons were employed to cover the slopes with snow, but only the slopes used for professional skiing competitions. It is expensive to produce the snow. It is fired onto the slopes by forcing water and pressurized air through a ski cannon. I have never seen it in action, only on the TV. I do not ski, have never had skis on my feet and it is generally known that it would be too dangerous for me. Some years ago I accompanied a family to the slopes and they gave me a sledge. Beginners have to start somewhere I suppose. I felt quite happy on my sledge, but after steering the sledge over the skis from a person that was in my way, I decided it was not my thing. At that time my knowledge of Swiss German was luckily not so good, so I did not understand the meaning of all the profanities he uttered.

The pile of snow on the photo was collected at the local supermarket parking place after the New Year snow attack. Being in Switzerland there is no problem. The Swiss know where to go with the snow masses. Our local authorities have a super solution. A truck arrives, the snow is piled into it and it is driven to the banks of the local river. Yes, it is tipped into the river. What could be better?

My last endeavour to tell everyone all about the skill I needed was “How to ride a bicycle”. I still cannot ride a bicycle proving I was not prompted to learn how to.

I can walk, although with age the ability does not improve. I can drive a car, more or less, although some might say I could do it better if I had the born talent. I can write if I am prompted. I have now discovered how necessary the push and prompt are when writing. The death sentence has now been pronouced, the decree has been issued. RIP Daily Prompt, although they still appear. We cannot kill it, it is still raising its head, but we now have a plausible explanation why.

I now have a decision to make. Shall I continue with the daily prompt or has the time come when I must wave goodbye with a tear in my eye.

“No Mrs. Angloswiss. You cannot do that. I need you. I would be unemployed if you go. Heed not what the others say. You are the reason for my existence.”

“Hello Wordy, I though you had left me forever and found a new, younger prompter, eager to plough their way through the field of daily prompts telling us all about it.”

“Mrs. Angloswiss, how could you? You are the light at the end of my prompting path, my inspiration and I so love the chocolate cake that you make.” As he uttered these words of praise his eyes were all over the kitchen searching for some chocolate cake crumbs.

“No problem Wordy, look.” And he pounced as I produced todays chocolate cake, fresh from the oven. “I hope you like it, I flavoured it with vanilla and mixed some ground almonds into the mixture.”

“It is delicious Mrs. Angloswiss.”

“Glad to oblige, but I have a solution to the problem. I have decided to carry on, despite the prompt repeats. I always have something to say. I even discovered a page called Events. Unfortunately I soon discovered that most of these events were ignored, left to sink into the oblivion of the WordPress dungeons, with very few interested bloggers.”

“Do not give up Mrs. Angloswiss, I need you. How could I feed my family without a regular job.”

“But Wordy I am not your only customer.”

“Mrs. Anglosswiss I was created for your needs. I was programmed for chocolate cake and blogs about Switzerland, the Swiss, and felines.”

“Wordy, you have a family? I thought you were a robot, with circuits, wires and flashing lights.”

“But I have a heart of pure Android. The wife and I have 5 mini androids to feed with knowledge collected from our master, which is you. Please Mrs. Angloswiss carry on the good work and make my family happy. I read the little ones your blogs as a good night story every evening.”

“Ok Wordy, I will continue and stop crying you are making the chocolate cake wet and soggy.”

Daily Prompt: I Got Skills 2 – you just have to find them

21 thoughts on “Daily Prompt: I Got Skills 2 – You just have to find them”

  1. Wonderful post! I really love the way you write…
    but wait! Where is The Daily Post prompts? I cannot see any on my reader nor in my email.. 😦 I keep on being left behind. 😦

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      • I do not know if I will keep at it — no idea, actually. I was glad they said something, but what they said was a PR way of saying, “We’re not really interested in the Daily Prompt any more or you people who write it.”

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        • I already made a comment on one of their notices the day before yesterday. They did not reply to my comment but I got a personal e-mail from the lady in charge explaining what was going on and telling me a public notice would be made, which happened. For met the case is closed, but I will find a way, I always do.

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  5. We haven’t had significant snow yet, but when it does come, it will just keep piling up in the parking lots, taking away more and more spaces. I guess we don’t haul it away because there’s nowhere to haul it to. Or maybe we use too much salt and crap on the roads.

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    • I have really only praise for the Swiss road workers when it snows. They are on the roads with their snow ploughs as soon as the snow falls, and generally the roads are clear mid morning. There have been occasions of ice if it rains on top of the snow, but generally we can be happy the way things are looked after. They salt the roads and sometimes put down gravel, but we would be in dire straits without.

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  6. I assume you got the official email yesterday in which they assure us that they will continue to rerun the old prompts because:

    “We started publishing writing prompts on a daily basis back in October 2012 — a near-eternity in internet terms! 785 prompts and one free ebook later (not to mention tens of thousands of posts generated and shared in response to these prompts), we thought it was time to tweak the way we approach prompts on The Daily Post.

    What’s new?
    In the final days of 2014 we started publishing a mix of older prompts from our archives, along with the occasional new prompt. We still feature prompts suggested to us by our loyal, incredibly creative readers, and will continue to do so in the future (if you have a prompt idea please share it with us here). Everyone can still share their posts via pingbacks, which will appear in the grid below each individual prompt; the technical issues we’ve experienced with pingbacks last month have been resolved.

    While daily prompts are currently available on our homepage, we’re working to make sure they also appear in your WordPress.com Reader as well as delivered via email to our followers.

    Given the depth of our prompt archive, the vast majority of bloggers visiting our site will never encounter a prompt to which they’d already responded. That said, if you see a prompt you’d previously used, or if today’s prompt leaves you cold, we’ve got you covered. We’ve added a “Try Another” button to our homepage as well as to individual prompts’ pages, letting you browse through as many prompts as you wish until you hit one that inspires you to write a new post.”

    And there it is. That’s the bulk of it. You aren’t going to see new prompts unless you and me and others suggest them. They are much too busy, it would seem, to do it themselves.

    At least we know where we stand.

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    • Actually I did not receive an official standard e-mail. It was an individual e-mail to me, which was quite clear in the way it was written and an answer to a few questions I had placed when I made a remark on one of their postings. The explanation was quite plausible and no, there will not be any new prompts. I am not changing direction, but at the moment can continue on my way, either writing my own thing or joining in on a prompt that I might have answered a couple of years ago. Funnily enough the “try another” button today was really a prompt that I had never written. Might have been one posted when I was in england. I often found the prompt suggestions from others not so good. I don’t think they are too busy, I think they have simply run out of ideas. 365 ideas per year are a lot.

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      • I didn’t start doing the prompts every day until late this spring, so there are a lot of prompts I never did. But even the old ones have been done a couple of times, just under various titles. What is obvious is that those of us who have been around a while are NOT the people they are targeting. Maybe there are not enough of us to matter. Whatever, we aren’t the people they are concerned with, so we need to be concerned with one another.

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        • There are days when I can write and there are days when I have to push myself. I am learning to live with the new prompt life. I think I have been doing them for more than a year, perhaps almost two years, so it is a matter of course that I find the same thing repeating itself. And now to see what my felines are doing.

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