Tag: #rdp

The Entmoot in the Exotenwald

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I first came across the word moot when reading Lord of the Rings. An entmoot – if there should be anyone that doesn’t know – is a meeting of the ents, the shepherds of the forest, where they debate their important issues. I happen to live next to a forest which is called the Exotic Forest because some farsighted Earl in the mid 19th century started to plant trees from all over the world on a large scale.

Occasionally, I meet a tree which might have been an ent and grown silent only in recent years.

Isn’t that Treebark looking down on me?

A relative of Quickbeam, possibly.

This looks like a young enting to me.

I know that the ents have lost the entwives but maybe I have spotted one recently.

And this screaming, disrespectful ent looks like he is disrupting the entire moot.

The Ragtag Daily Prompt: Moot

It Starts with a Bean

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I can only think of today’s prompt in connection with a cup of coffee for a reason. Our bean-to-cup coffee machine has unfortunately given up and we are looking for an new one after almost ten years. I still remember coffee being ground in old coffee grinders before being brewed, now the machine does it for me, ceramically.

The Ragtag Daily Prompt: Grind

Spectators’ High

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No matter how non-competitive we purport to be, a running group attracts a fair amount of crazies who take running seriously and they end up running in official street races.

As a group we want to support even these deviant individuals. However, being the audience in a street race is almost as boring as being the audience in a bicycle race (basically the same, only faster). You stand at the curb, you wait a long time until the front runners run past, you clap and cheer, and then you wait an inordinate amount of time until your friends run, walk or limp past. You clap and cheer and possibly jeer. And the excitement is over in less than two minutes. Then you either go home or you move towards the finish where you find your friends, console them and take them home. As I said: boring.

We decided that was just not us. We formed a PuB team (that’s “Pompom & Beer” although we are not adverse to any associations with literal pubs), dressed up, armed ourselves with lots of noise makers and nutritional supplements (i.e. beer) and devised a cunning plan so that we could see our friends at least three times on the road of the Frankfurt Halfmarathon by cleverly navigating between various locations.

And then we decided not to stand around being bored and freezing while waiting for our friends – we started to cheer everybody. The runners carried their first names on their numbers and how we cheered for Rebecca and Beate and Gert and Ingo and all those other runners we didn’t know! And they loved it! Particularly the slower runners for whom it was all about participating smiled back, they clapped for us, some even did little capers. After the race we were approached by a couple of runners who thanked us and told us that our support had nudged them on.

And we enjoyed ourselves so much that we have since cheered at the Frankfurt Marathon and the Frankfurt Iron Man. The latter was particularly fun because many competitors displayed their nationality and we became truly international. To this day I can cheer in Hebrew!

The photos are all from our first outing at the Frankfurt Halfmarathon in 2017.

  • The front runners are approaching.
  • They were so fast the picture is blurred.
  • And we never even got their names
  • We got a smile for “only 20 k to go”!
  • Those were the more serious runners.
  • Concentrated on their time rather than the experience.
  • The slower ones took notice. The lion even lost traction!
  • Shaking pompoms for the last stretch.
  • And a beer to carry over the finishing line.

The Ragtag Daily Prompt: Marathon