Hi, guys. I hope you all had (and are having) a wonderful holiday weekend with great food, good company, and minimal stress. Mine’s been nice. Quiet with a combo of idle days, a few industrious hours of DIY on the house, and world-class Thanksgiving leftovers. I expect by tomorrow I’ll be back up to full blogging speed. But for now, I’m still idling about. So to ease gradually back into action, here’s a two-parter I posted four years ago. I recalled this when a member of Claire’s Cabal introduced a topic on memorable travel experiences. This piece involves an encounter…
Category: Mind and Spirit
Spirituality, moods, feelings, and thinking free to live free.
Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. I hope you’ll all be feasting today and enjoying either good company or welcome peace and quiet. I don’t like the forced sociability of the holidays, but I like taking a day for gratitude. I have much to be grateful for, not least the community of individuals around this blog. Today I’m debating between feasting courtesy of a lodge in the next town over, which is putting on a whatever-you-want-to-donate banquet with my Neighbor J as one of the volunteers, or eating lite with goodies already in supply here. Someone at Claire’s Cabal posted linked a simple…
Some progress for gun owners who also use medical cannabis. But it’s still Reefer Madness at NASA, which will investigate SpaceX because Elon Musk smoked a joint. Inspiring words from the city government of Republic, Washington, after passage of the freedom-stealing Initiative 1639. Global warming was not a significant factor in recent California fires. Cuba has withdrawn its employees from Brazil’s More Doctors program, because Brazil’s new president insists they be paid properly and be allowed to have their families with them instead of held hostage back on the island. Ah, the wonders of socialism! Even better — communism (even…
Stories and photos from a remote, off-grid community in Scotland. There is yet another e-coli outbreak linked to romaine lettuce. The FDA recommends tossing any romaine you might have. (I got this word from MJ yesterday evening … five minutes after finishing a big salad made with guess what? I seem to have survived the experience so far.) How a six-year-old survived being lost in the woods while walking 18 miles toward safety. He’s 39 now and revisits his trek with a writer from Outside. FBI data shows that armed citizens are 94% successful in stopping would-be mass shooters. (Via…
Today is the 40th anniversary of the Jonestown murder-suicides. This horror will always be relevant because it’s such an extreme version of such a normal, acceptable thing — following a charismatic leader straight into hell. It’s also relevant because of the role Jim Jones, a socialist and a power broker, played in changing San Francisco politics in the years just before the move to Guyana. Records have conveniently been “lost” that would fully reveal the corrupting role of Jones and The People’s Temple in making SF the left-wing factionalist place it became. But nobody can “lose” the words and pictures…
I have no business being disgruntled or depressed. Here it is, November 15, and it’s still shirtsleeve weather. The sun is shining. The air is still. The critters and I are reasonably well. There’s really not a thing to complain of and quite a lot to be joyful about. But it’s been a discouraging few weeks, for reasons too petty to go into. If you got me started, I’d produce an embarrassing rant and I don’t want to do that. So early this afternoon I shut the computer, packed Ava into the car, and took her out for a latte…
Commentator Gerard Van der Leun is — was — a resident of Paradise, California. Now, burned out of his home along with another 30,000 people, he’s taken refuge in Chico. He writes beautifully about the individuals and businesses of the town “leaving it all on the field” for their bereft and desperate guests. A must read. There have been a lot of dramatic and moving reports out of Paradise. But nobody says it better. Van der Leun concludes: They all were leaving it all on the field everywhere in Chico. From Penny’s in the Mall to the Birkenstocks Store downtown…
I don’t indulge in the boxes of freebies the thrift store puts out; they’re usually loaded with junk. But Friday morning, a huge number of the freebies were … art books! Oldish art books, but in good shape; once obviously some painter’s cherished possession. I grabbed seven or eight, and along with them the book on the right, 101 Classic Homes of the Twenties, with floor plans and photographs. 101 Classic Homes is one of those marvelous books Dover does, where they find some quirky, usually artsy, material in the public domain and reprint it. In this case, it’s a…
Note: This first got published without its ending, a fact I caught 10 minutes later. My apologies to anybody who saw it in its naked state. —– I mentioned the other day that life at the moment is pleasantly dull. That’s still the case. After an extraordinary October, we’ve begun an extraordinary November. Cold, foggy mornings, but blue skies all afternoon. Perfect weather for winter preps and completing fall projects. Yesterday I hauled out my little Honda inverter-generator to give it its seasonal checkup and run under load. I’ve never had to use it in an emergency, but it will…