My focus Today

Facebook Home: "'I am passionate about eating in a way that nourishes this lovely body of mine.'"

Upcoming Events

Upcoming Events

Homesick at home.

What do you do when you are feeling homesick, yet you are home?

I mean, I am in my house and I have my amazing, loving, entertaining, keep-me-constantly-on-my-toes grandkidlets sleeping close by. That is wonder-full!

... and yet they are sleeping, and I am not.

I guess that too much of my heart isin't home.

Barbara and Donn are in Wyoming, Amber and Kirt are in San Fran, Bob and Ryan and Matt and Elli are in Dallas at the TX-OU game, and last, but very much not least, Brad is in Boston.

I am feeling like the feeling you get when you hear the BoDeans sing, "Far Far Away From My Heart".

Sigh.

Hook 'Em TV Dinners

In honor of TX-OU game this weekend.

TV Tray Folding Table Texas

Immensity of the Purpose

I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.

Norman Mailer

In Search of Masahide's Moon

Barn's burnt down --

now

I can see the moon.

~Masahide

KINDNESS

KINDNESS
by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes any sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Excerpted from Ten Poems to Open Your Heart by Roger Housden. "Kindness" from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye.

Little Altars Everywhere

"We are swinging high flying way up, higher than in real life. And when I look down, I see all the ordinary stuff--our brick house, the porch the tool shed, the oil drum barbecue pit, the clothesline, the chinaberry tree. But they are all lit up from inside so their everyday selves have holy sparks in them, and if only people could see those sparks, theyd go and kneel in front of them and pray and just feel good. Somehow the whole world looks like little altars everywhere."

~ Rebecca Wells

Worry leads to atrophy.

What real courage is ....

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”

- To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

QUOTE OF THE DAY-- Mark Twain

"Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it" - Mark Twain

How to do what is overwhelming to you.

My new quote when it looks like the task at hand is next to impossible to achieve?


"The best way to eat an elephant -- is one mouthful at a time."

Saddleback Church

Saddleback Church

check this out

a little fun with photos

Check it out!

Adios, Sound Bites & Fat Cats - Obama is Changing Politics

The ecosystem of political media has changed, with sound bites losing their authority. Consumers of news are less easily manipulated by the 24/7 barrage of bites and images (Hillary Clinton doing whisky shots, Obama bowling), which are dissected endlessly on cable. Voters search for their own context.

read more | digg story

QUOTE OF THE DAY-- Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

"Don't fight darkness - bring the light, and darkness will disappear"
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Nerdfighter Happy Dance Song

This is better than photo light therapy or prozac! I dare you to watch it and not feel a bit happier.

;^)

Quote for the day: Courage

"Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear." Ambrose Hollingworth Redmoon

Good? Oh Man!

I just finished the Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett book, Good Omens. I have intended to read it for a very long time and finally decided to read it as a car book, (for those times I am waiting in a car to pick up a kid-let). The book was so entertaining and witty that I carried it back in the house with me the first day I started reading it and I have carried it anywhere I can sneak a few minutes to read. I have stronger Zygomatic major and Orbicularis oculi muscles from the constant smile that was on my face as I read Good Omens.

It is a satire of sorts of all those Omen movies-- you know, the Apocalypse in near, the End of Days is upon us. But it is also very cheeky in that lovely dry yet loopy British manner. Think Monty Python, Dr. Who, Red Dwarf. It also will be loved by anyone who enjoyed Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe.

Here are a few of my favorite quotes from the book (in no particular order):


"God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players,* to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time."
* i.e., everybody."

"Newton Pulsifer had never had a cause in his life. Nor had he, as far as he knew, ever believed in anything. It had been embarrassing, because he quite wanted to believe in something, since he recognized that belief was the lifebelt that got most people through the choppy waters of Life. He'd have liked to believe in a supreme God, although he'd have preferred a half-hour's chat with Him before committing himself, to clear up one or two points. "

'You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don't you?'"

"She herself had short red hair and a face which was not so much freckled as one big freckle with occasional areas of skin."

"Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men."

""You see, evil always contains the seeds of its own destruction," said the angel. "It is ultimately negative, and therefore encompasses its downfall even at its moments of apparent triumph. No matter how grandiose, how well-planned, how apparently foolproof an evil plan, the inherent sinfulness will by definition rebound upon its instigators. No matter how apparently successful it may seem upon the way, at the end it will wreck itself. It will founder upon the rocks of iniquity and sink headfirst to vanish without trace into the seas of oblivion." "Crowley considered this. "Nah," he said, at last. "For my money, it was just average incompetence."

"Shadwell hated all southerners and, by inference, was standing at the North Pole."

"DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH."

"You can't second-guess ineffability, I always say."

"In our Sunday paper it said there was thousands of witches in the country," said Brian. "Worshiping Nature and eating health food an' that. So I don't see why we shouldn't have one round here. They were floodin' the country with a Wave of Mindless Evil, it said." "What, by worshipin' Nature and eatin' health food?" said Wensleydale."

"It wasn't a dark and stormy night. It should have been, but there's the weather for you. For every mad scientist who's had a convenient thunderstorm just on the night his Great Work is complete and lying on the slab, there have been dozens who've sat around aimlessly under the peaceful stars while Igor clocks up the overtime."

"Most of the members of the covent were old-fashioned Satanists, like their parents and grandparents before them. They'd been brought up to it and weren't, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren't. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow."

"It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people."

"There are some dogs which, when you meet them, remind you that, despite thousands of years of manmade evolution, every dog is still only two meals away from being a wolf."

"Crowley always found [Satanists] embarassing. You couldn't actually be rude to them, but you couldn't help feeling about them the same way that, say, a Vietnam veteran would feel about someone who wears combat gear to Neighborhood Watch meetings."

"There were people who called themselves Satanists who made Crowley squirm. It wasn't just the things they did, it was the way they blamed it all on Hell. They'd come up with some stomach-churning idea that no demon could have thought of in a thousand years, some dark and mindless unpleasantness that only a fully-functioning human brain could conceive, then shout "The Devil Made Me Do It""

"...the whole point was that the Devil hardly ever made anyone do anything. He didn't have to. ... Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind.

"On those occasions when the angel managed to get his mind into the twentieth century, it always gravitated to 1950."

"[Humans] were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse."

"There had been times, over the past millenium, when [Crowley the demon had] felt like sending a message back Below saying, Look, we may as well give up right now, we may as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and everywhere and move up here, there's nothing we can do to them [humans] that they don't do themselves and they do things we've never even thought of, often involving electrodes."

"God does not play dice with the universe: He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time."

"Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your own home."

"It wasn’t a dark and stormy night. It should have been, but that’s the weather for you."

"It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people."


"Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn't work, 2) didn't do what the expensive advertisement said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighbourhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser's own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches. Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: 'Learn, guys.'"

"He was just killing time until the main event, but he was killing it in such exquisite ways. Time, and sometimes people."

"NOTE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND AMERICANS: One shilling = Five Pee. It helps to understand the antique finances of the Witchfinder Army if you know the original British monetary system: Two farthings = One Ha'penny. Two ha'pennies = One Penny. Three pennies = A Thrupenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A Sixpence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and one Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 pennies). One Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea. The British resisted decimalized currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated."

"The device is named after a real person?" he said. "Oh, yes. Fine old Lancashire name. From the French, I believe. You'll be telling me next you've never heard of Sir Humphrey Gadget--" "Oh, now come on--" "--who devised a gadget that made it possible to pump out flooded mineshafts. Or Pieter Gizmo? Or Cyrus T. Doodad, America's foremost black inventor? Thomas Edison said that the only other contemporary practical scientists he admired were Cyrus T. Doodad and Ella Reader Widget. And--"

"He'd have liked to believe in a supreme God, although he'd have preferred a half-hour's chat with Him before committing himself, to clear up one or two points."

"Getting in touch with Heaven for two-way communications was far more difficult for Aziraphale [the angel] than it is for humans, who don't expect an answer and in nearly all cases would be rather surprised to get one."

"It was then that Marvin got religion. Not the quiet, personal kind, that involves doing good deeds and living a better life; not even the kind that involves putting on a suit and ringing people's doorbells; but the kind that involves having your own TV network and getting people to send you money."

"On the orders of Head Office I will encourage the belief in Intelligent Design – despite the fact that the human airway crosses the digestive tract. Who thought that was intelligent?"

"Have a nice doomesday."

The Mom Overture

I found this at YouTube and couldn't resist sharing. Great to watch when you have had a stressful day with the kids.

Dentopedology

"Dentopedology is the science of opening your mouth and putting your foot in it. I've been practising it for years."
Attributed to Prince Philip

I don't know if this is truly a word, but it should be. I have suffered from the affliction of foot-in-mouth disease for most of my adulthood. I thought of it privately as my own cogno-linguinistic dysplasia but I think the Prince Philip word has a bit more panache. I also think that since a British Royal said it, that should make it an official part of the lexicon.

If it became an official word, then it could be a truly recognized affliction.

We could form a new branch of speech therapy - Dentopedologists or cogno-linguinists.

We could possibly even have some brilliant inventor create a braking appliance for our tongue.

I can see it now..............

;-)

Tales Of Mere Existence

The title should be Universal Tales Of Mere Existence and I could have written "I Have To Get Ready" --- as well as several of his other tales.

Finally, the truth can be told.

Hello, my name is Atlas Winks and I have a secret crush on Severus Snape.

I have felt sorry for him for some odd reason since the end of the first book and my feelings for him have grown over the course of each book. At the end of Book 6, I was aghast that he actually KILLED Dumbledore -- but my feelings for him were still there. Surely, I thought, he didn't really kill Albus! I won't spoil Book 7 for anyone, but regardless of what happend, I still have a secret crush on Severus. That poor, poor man. If I had been a character in the series, I could have made him happy, I just know it.

:|

On a brighter note - if you wish you could laugh with Snape? Check out this video: Snape is a Sex God.

For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it.......

For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing - the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smoothes our hair, and brings us wild strawberries [152-153].

Marilyn Robinson, from her Pulitzter nominated novel, Housekeeping.

To quote Jerry Springer, no less.

"Part of finding happiness in life, is to love your Monday mornings, as much as you love your Friday afternoons."
~ Jerry Springer on career advice.

Atlas Winks: I would turn on the TV but it's so heartbreaking ....

I would turn on the TV but it's so embarrassing ....

I made the linked post above on April 2nd without any comment so the lyrics could speak for themselves. The words are even more relevant today after the horrible violence at Virginia Tech. In an I-Tunes interview, Jack Johnson talks about his song Cookie Jar and about how he wrote it after Columbine and how everyone was pointing fingers and blaming all these different factors, when in fact, we are all guilty to some degree. It is a powerful song and I can't say it often enough that I think Jack Johnson is a Genius.

He takes such a soft and calming sound, adds suprisingly simple lyrics and somehow he says the things I have been thinking, but haven't found the words to really talk about. The incongruity of how he says what he says and its ultimate message make his music even more powerful and profound. A lot of his songs - like Traffic in the Sky, Fall Line, Cookie Jar, Times Like These and Gone - share similar ideas about how the materialistic underbelly of our society causes a spiritual disconnect, especially with our most vulnerable of citizens. Such a lovely melody and such simple words to indict us all - that we are all to blame, sneaking a cookie from the cookie jar and then insisting that "It wasn't me." We all share in the blame when we watch the sensational journalism instead of finding intelligent news media. We are all guilty when we let the not yet 17 year old see the R rated violent movie. We all are culpable when we buy the tabloid. We enable pandering to the lowest common denominator by not insisting on better or nothing at all. Yes they are small sins, like driving a gas guzzler or not turning off the lights, but when massive amounts of people let their apathy cause them to do small acts of evil, the ultimate consequences can be devastating.

"It was you it was me it was every man
We've all got the blood on our hands
We only receive what we demand
And if we want hell then hells what we'll have"

God Bless all the people that are grieving the losses from the Virginia Tech Massacre. And God Bless Jack Johnson.

Kurt is up in heaven now.

I was sad to hear that Kurt Vonnegut passed away last week. He was 84 and led a long and full life. Here is a link to a good article. I still remember the first time I read Cat's Cradle and Slaughter House Five and Breakfast of Champions. I very much enjoyed his works that I read, even if he did love the "anti-hero" a bit too much.

In his honor, here are some of my favorite quotes of Kurt Vonnegut's that I have saved. Starting with the most appropriate one from his work A Man Without a Country: " I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, "Isaac is up in heaven now." It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in heaven now." That's my favorite joke." -- Kirt Vonnegut

Other personal favorite Kurt Vonnegut quotes:

Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be. (or a different version) We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

Beer, of course, is actually a depressant. But poor people will never stop hoping otherwise.

I have this disease late at night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone.

History is merely a list of surprises. It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don't acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.

The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.

If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.

If people think nature is their friend, then they sure don't need an enemy.

Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything.

Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer. Many people need desperately to receive this message: I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.

What are your five most favorite books?

I was talking to an online friend about favorite books and she can't decide on a list, it is just too hard to limit them for her. But I am still curious what folks would say, sort of like a Rorschach test. IF you are too shy to actually post your list, want to e-mail it to me?

I so understand the hesitation to try and rate your favorite books, so just jump in like I did. (Especially as I would be very interested to see what ones you mention off the top of your head.) I was actually thinking about this kind of list the other day and I thought that it should be a multiple option question. That folks should have the option to answer the question from a few different angles.

Feel free to answer it from any angle you want.

Some possible options:

a. What five would you take if you were going to be stranded somewhere (and they were all you could read for a very long time)?
b. What five were the most transformational in your life?
c. Which five do you think were the best writing?
c. Which five had the best characters?
d. Which five kept you on the edge of your seat?
e. Which ones did you feel almost homesick when you finished the last page?
f. Which ones made you feel the most as if you were in another world?
g. Which ones caused the strongest emotional reaction in you?
h. Which ones caused you to laugh out loud and tickled your funny bone the most?
i. Which ones made you hope it was the beginning of a series because you wanted to read more about its characters?

and for those still having problems ...
j. Who are your favorite five authors?

You now only have three minutes to decide.....

;-)

I would turn on the TV but it's so embarrassing ....

"Cookie Jar"
by Jack Johnson

I would turn on the TV but it's so embarrassing
To see all the other people I don't know what they mean
And it was magic at first when they spoke without sound
But now this world is gonna hurt you better turn that thing down
Turn it around

"It wasn't me", says the boy with the gun
"Sure I pulled the trigger but it needed to be done
Cause life's been killing me ever since it begun
You cant blame me cause I'm too young"

"You can't blame me sure the killer was my son
But I didn't teach him to pull the trigger of the gun
It's the killing on this TV screen
You cant blame me its those images he seen"

Well "You can't blame me", says the media man
Well "I wasn't the one who came up with the plan
I just point my camera at what the people want to see
Man it's a two way mirror and you cant blame me"

"You can't blame me", says the singer of the song
Or the maker of the movie which he based his life on
"It's only entertainment and as anyone can see
The smoke machines and makeup and you cant fool me"

It was you it was me it was every man
We've all got the blood on our hands
We only receive what we demand
And if we want hell then hells what well have

And I would turn on the TV
But it's so embarrassing
To see all the other people
I don't even know what they mean
And it was magic at first
But let everyone down
And now this world is gonna hurt
You better turn it around
Turn it around

Favorite Books.......... Part One

When asked the mind boggling question, "What are your favorite books and why?, the only way for a bibliophile like me to answer is quickly off the top of my head without thinking too hard.

I just did this on another forum and here was my rash answer:

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, because it changed the way I think about altruism, obligation, charity and personal sacrifice, etc.

To Kill a Mockingbird, because Harper Lee's southern voice resonates with me to this day. It also helped me to be more mindful of prejudice and superficial first impressions. I identified with Scout and I think secretly I adopted Atticus Finch as a surrogate father.

Nickel Mountain by John Gardner. A brilliantly simple and quiet book that lingers emotionally. I read it over a decade ago and when I think of it, it still evokes the same feelings of quiet melancholy, of yearning to be accepted and to not feel alone and the feeling of finally being able to gracefully accept our own limitations.

Ishamael by Daniel Quinn. I had never before thought of the Homo Sapien hubris at assuming because we are the top of the food chain we are entitled to whatever we take and also the that we act in many ways as if evolution stops here.

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston, the scariest book I have ever read. Even more so that is was non-fiction.

Contact by Carl Sagan, again it changed some of my perspectives.

I imagine later I will hit myself on the head with the ones I forgot to mention. I can hear myself now - "How could I forget that one!?!" I will be berating myself I am sure for days.

Hence the "Part One" addendum to the title.

;-)

Two cool websites

If you are like me, you will waste quite a bit of time playing with this color-decorator-thingee.

Have you heard of LifeHack.org? If you want to get more organized at home - check out this article.

My Son, the World Traveler - A Few Images

Brad and a few of this friends on the Great Wall:



Brad half way up to the top of the Great Wall:


Brad at the very top!


One of Brad's Favorites - click for large version and to see Brad more clearly:


Brad in the Forbidden City. Brad said that there were street vendors all over the place selling these, shouting, "Commie Hat!Good Price! Commie Hat!"



The Three Stooges

Quote of the day:

"Inch by inch, life's a cinch. Yard by yard, life is hard."
Coach Bill Restler in Heart of the Game