Camping!

For the weekend, I went and slept in a tent for the first time in about five years. The trip was to Capitol Reef, where I'd never been, and that is some lovely country.

There were pictures taken from passenger windows: 

There were pictures taken from the back:

There were side canyons:

There were views to admire:

There were trails that turned out much longer than we thought they'd be: 

There were miles to go before we slept: 

There was golden desert light:

Needless to say, it was a good weekend for my inner hippie.

Friday Unrelated Information

1. This Married to the Sea post has inspired a catchphrase between me and my friend: "Don't be the lefterly cow".
(click image to enlarge)

2. And the last line of this entry in the "Shit Certain Social Groups Say" video meme has become my new catchphrase:

NAMASTE!

Today's Thought

I guess this is five thoughts, really:


Via Pinterest.

Grammar Wednesday #5

This one was another request (which makes me so happy): How can you tell when to use drink, drank, or drunk? Or sink, sank, or sunk?

Drink and sink are pretty easy, since they're in the present tense. (I'm pretty sure nobody gets confused about saying "Drink up!") But drank and drunk and sank and sunk are both past tense verbs, so how can you tell which one to use?

Drank and sank are simple past tense verbs: "The ship sank." "I drank too much last night." But drunk and sunk are a past participle, so they need a helping verb--no, don't tune out yet, that just means drunk and sunk always appear with a form of "have": "They have drunk my potion!" "The submarine has been sunk by the spies."

So here's my trick: Drunk and sunk have a U in them. Have has a V in it. U and V come right next to each other in the alphabet. S0 use that trick to remember that drunk and sunk should always appear with have.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Accessories

I made my mom a scarf for her birthday. She's really hard to buy for and making her something requires that she like it (it's a Mom Law), so it seemed like a good idea. Besides, accessories are a pretty flexible gift.

I used two-thirds of the Liberty prints from last week and followed this tutorial, just making the square a little smaller. There was a lot of hand sewing to finish but it went pretty quickly.

Weekend Report

Look who came to my house on Sunday to celebrate his grandma's birthday! This was the first time I'd hosted a family event in the new place.

"Reading" the card he "signed."

Party table!

Other notable weekend events: Going to Brooks Brothers and attending my first Greek Easter celebration. There was drinking. There was dancing. There was an entire lamb on a spit, head and all. (At the Greek Easter celebration, that is; not at Brooks Brothers.)

Friday Unrelated Information

1. My mom will be 64 this Sunday, so pre-emptive happy birthday! I know I posted this same video a few years ago for her, but it's extra-appropriate now that she is 64 and has a "grandchild on her knee":




2. I don't like eels, not one bit. But eel puns are almost OK:

Incredible

Here's a rough trailer for an upcoming documentary Alive Inside, about music and how it helps "awaken" people with memory loss. (Bonus Oliver Sacks!) Like my dog rescue video last week, this one starts off sad, but at least watch from about 3:00 - 4:00.



Incredible. If I ever decide I want to use my powers for good, maybe I should go into music therapy.

Happy Birthday Mark Strand

I still like your poem in the Gallivan Center downtown the best:

Visions of the end may secretly seduce
our thoughts like water sinking
into water, air drifting into air;
clouds may form, when least expected,
darkening the glass of self,
canceling resemblances to what we are.

Even here, while summer sunlight
falling through the golden
folds of afternoon
brightens up the air, we mark
our progress by how much
we leave behind. And yet,
this vanishing is burnished
by a slow, melodious light,
as if our passage here
were beautiful because
no turning back is possible.

It is our knowledge of the end
that speaks for us, that has us weave,
as slowly as we can, an elegy
to all our walks. It is our way
of bending to the world's will
and giving thanks.

Tuesday Project Roundup: "It Never Goes Bad."

My old roommate used to stockpile things like soap and laundry detergent and use the rationale of "it doesn't expire!". Similarly, I use that line to justify stockpiling fabric, even when I'm too busy to really sew.

Yes, this is more Liberty of London. It never goes bad!

Something To Ponder

(Via Pinterest. In my head, I hear this being read by Master Yoda.)

Friday Unrelated Information

1. Here's a fiesty (and profane) piece about the benefits of working in advertising if you're creative. The writer makes some good points:
You can try to make it with your band or be a novelist in your free time. But during the day, you may as well learn about how to work creatively with other people, and how to accept rejection and outright failure, even if you still think that Verizon catalog copy you wrote was a masterpiece.

2. Being Easter weekend, it's time for my annual religious experience: listening to Bach's St Matthew Passion.

3. It's also this guy's first Easter (and nearly his first birthday)! I had to resist buying him the bunny ears costume I saw at Target.

Because obviously he doesn't need ANY clothes to be cute!

Mary Frances On Going To Restaurants

From "D is for Dining Out," in An Alphabet for Gourmets, by my BFF Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher:

I had a happy beginning in [the] neglected art and much abused privilege [of dining out], one that has sheathed it in unfading pleasure for me when it is done well. When I was no more than five or so my father and mother would begin to prepare my spirits for Easter, or Christmas, or a birthday, and when the festival rolled around, there I would be, waiting to greet it...on the pink velvet seat of the region's best restaurant.

I admit I am prejudiced about it. I seldom dine out, and because of my early conditioning to the sweet illusion of permanent celebration, of "party" and festivity on every such occasion, I feel automatically that any invitation means sure excitement, that it will be an event, whether it brings me a rained-on hamburger in a drive-in or Chicken Jerusalem at Perino's. The trouble is, I'm afraid, that I expect people I dine with to feel the same muted but omnipresent delight that I feel.

Worthy Of Dr. Sagan

You guys. Phil Plait at the Bad Astronomy blog has outdone himself. He's describing a massive, massive infrared survey of the sky--over 150 billion pixels, showing a billion stars--and he does it really, really well (click through to see how he gives an idea of scale). But it's at the end of the post that he gets really Sagan-esque:

Think on this: there are a billion stars in that image alone, but that’s less than 1% of the total number of stars in our galaxy! As deep and broad as this amazing picture is, it’s a tiny slice of our local Universe.

And once again, we’ve reached the point where I’m out of words. Our puny brains, evolved to count the number of our fingers and toes, to grasp only what’s within reach, to picture only what we can immediately see — balk at these images.

But… we took them. Human beings looked up and wondered, looked around and observed, looked out and discovered. In our quest to seek ever more knowledge, we built the tools needed to make these pictures: the telescopes, the detectors, the computers. And all along, the power behind that magnificent work was our squishy pink brains.

A billion stars in one shot, thanks to a fleshy mass of collected neurons weighing a kilogram or so. The Universe is amazing, but so are we.

Tuesday Project Roundup: What I'm Knitting

Um, not this:

This was going to be a pair of striped legwarmers that used two different variegated yarns to created the effect of many colored stripes, something like this:
(Image from Google; knitters, you recognize this, right?)

But the colors were just not working. I pride myself on my sense of color and I'm usually really confident in it--but when I get it wrong, it is pretty spectacularly wrong.

Ah well, by the time I finished it wouldn't be legwarmer season anyway.

A Belated Toby-versary

I knew I was coming up on 4 years with the love of my life, but I'm ashamed to say that last night I realized I had missed the actual date (March 23rd). I can't feel too bad, though, because the love of my life also missed it (unless one of his highly varied and operatic "MEOW!!"s was meant to be a reminder).

Dates aside, happy anniversary to my friend, my "something to love," my entertainment. He meows, he chirps, he sings, he knows many, many words and phrases, he knows our routines, he lets me know when those routines are different ("MEOOOOOW!!"), and he pulls an endless variety of faces:

Wise.


Crazy.


Unconvinced, with a side of disapproval.


Wondering.


Helpful.


Approving, yet tired.


Darling.

Friday Unrelated Information

1. As a work field trip, the creative team went to The Leonardo museum yesterday afternoon. Did you know they have a huge collection of photos from the civil rights era? It was really moving to read about something that changed so monumentally less than 50 years ago.

2. Another thing that moved me (to tears) yesterday was this video, the title of which sums it up: "Blind Dog Rescued from Trash, Regains Sight."



You may also be moved to donate to the rescue organization.

Trying Times

I have felt off for the last few weeks, and I can't tell if it's because of the unsettled weather, having less time to myself, professional issues, or just not going to enough yoga classes with my awesome teacher.

For times like this, there are hippie platitudes--I mean, quotes from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying:

Above all, be at ease, be as natural and spacious as possible. Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature.

Think of your ordinary emotional, thought-ridden self as a block of ice or a slab of butter left out in the sun. If you are feeling hard and cold, let this aggression melt away in the sunlight of your meditation.

Let peace work on you and enable you to gather your scattered mind into the mindfulness of Calm Abiding, and awaken in you the awareness and insight of Clear Seeing.

And you will find all your negativity disarmed, your aggression dissolved, and your confusion evaporating slowly like mist into the vast and stainless sky of your absolute nature.

(From here, via said awesome yoga teacher. Yes, I visit that site nearly every day.)

Grammar Wednesday #4

(Today's tip was a request from a friend, which made me feel absurdly gratified. Grammar matters to more than just me!)

Probably because of their visual similarity to "chose" and "choose," people tend to confuse "lose" and "loose" as different tenses of the same word (the way "chose" is the past tense of "choose").

My friends, they are NOT the same word. They are not related in any way. Lose is, of course, "to cease to have" something--a verb; something that is loose (an adjective) "is not firmly fixed in place."

So how do you keep it straight? You can think of the adjective/verb difference, or you can use this tip: If you mean "to cease to have something," use lose with one O. You can remember it by thinking that it has ceased to have the second O.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Almost

So yet again, a leopard-print knit dress has not turned out the way I pictured it. But on the bright side, I think I can fix it.

Here it is with the skirt attached. See how the top part blouses out above the waistband and the skirt a little?

Yeah, that effect is being accomplished with pins right now.

Since my fabric is a knit, I didn't take into consideration the fact that a knit waistband would stretch. Without pins, the waistband slides down and pulls the top down with it, giving the whole thing a much straighter, drop-waisted effect:

But as I said, I think I have a fix for this: I'll add some elastic in a channel behind the waistband to keep things where they should be...just not this week. You can only struggle so much with something, right?

"The wind. The wind."

It's a dramatically stormy Monday morning here (but at least it's rain, not snow) and it made me think of parts of a Neruda poem:

Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes.

The birds go by, fleeing.
The wind. The wind.
I can contend only against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.

(The whole thing is worth a read, because it's Neruda, obviously, and because of that famous last line.)

Friday Unrelated Information

1. I took the day off today. So far I have slept in and received a gift of cognac-fig ice cream made from goat milk (thanks, Amber!). If these things have happened before 10:00, what greatness will the rest of the day hold?

2. Actually, I think the "greatness" will be working on house projects and professional projects and maybe even sewing. I will think of this Isak Dineson quote:
When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.

Space News

Another new supernova has been found as of March 16. This one in barred spiral galaxy M95, which is roughly the size of our own Milky Way galaxy and about 37 million light years away. Supernova SN 2012aw is the really bright point at the end of the spiral arm that goes down and to the right--see it?
Oh, space. You provide such good perspective.

(Picture from APOD; you can read more about the supernova on Bad Astronomy.)

Happy Birthday, Johann Sebastian

It's Bach's birthday today, in 1685. Here's a happy little piece from the sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin: the Prelude from the E Major Partita.



I love the ending, starting about 2:40.

The E Major Partita has always sounded like spring to me, which is appropriate since yesterday was the equinox.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Half A Roar

Well, all my hopes for more time to work on this leopard knit kind of got blown out of the water last week and into the weekend, but I did manage to make some progress before then:

The pattern I'm using is for a woven, not a knit, but I the only modification I'm making for the knit is I'm leaving off the side zipper, as a knit should stretch enough to pull it over my head. I'm happy to report "so far, so good" on the fit.

Now it just needs the skirt. Surely I can find time to attach two rectangles to this top, right?*

(*This is where you say, "I don't know. And don't call me Shirley!")

Reassurance From The Beatles

Oh yes, I'm still getting my hippie on with late Beatles tunes. I never cared much for this one until I listened to the lyrics (past the "love, love, love" part); now, I like hearing that there's "Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time" and there's "Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be."



Bonus Ringo at the end. Mr. Conductor!

Friday Unrelated Information

1. Adding cat heads to something makes it funny. (It's a law, I'm sure of it.) That's why Cat Scientists of the 1960s is so great:

There's even a Cat Carl Sagan!!


2. I don't really have anything else this week. But come on--there are cat heads AND Carl Sagan. I think that's enough, don't you?

Hippie Quote Thursday

“Quietly go to work on your own self-awareness. If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.”

- Lao Tzu

3.14

Happy Pi Day and happy birthday to Albert Einstein. (How perfect is that?)

Tuesday Poem

I've been able to get some sewing in this week but not very much, so I don't have anything to show today. Instead, how about this poem? It's a good one for spring, for being sad, for navigating tricky times.

Horses At Midnight Without A Moon

by Jack Gilbert

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there's music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets. It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,
can hear them breathing.
Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.

Happy Birthday, Ti-Jean

It's Jack Kerouac's birthday today, in 1922 (his parents were French Canadian, so "Ti Jean" was the family nickname for him).

I blame Kerouac (and Salinger) for nurturing my hippie tendencies--open any page of The Dharma Bums at an impressionable age, read about hitchhiking and backpacking and mountain climbing, and then throw in something like this? No surprise there.

There were now early spring mornings with the happy dogs, me forgetting the Path of Buddhism and just being glad; looking around at new little birds not yet summer fat; the dogs yawning and almost swallowing my Dharma; the grass waving, hens chuckling. Spring nights, practicing Dhyana under the cloudy moon, I'd see the truth: "Here, this, is It. The world as it is, is Heaven, I'm looking for a Heaven outside what there is, it's only this poor pitiful world that's Heaven."

Friday Unrelated Information

1. I'm going to see this little guy tonight:
Yes, he's sitting in a pot, and he looks so unsure about it, he needs a hug from his auntie.

2. How about a little MST3K for Friday? I feel like Gypsy all the time when I deal with people:

No Thaw

The 2-4 inches of snow we got Monday night disappeared by Wednesday. It made me think of the part in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe where spring comes to Narnia in about four hours:

And now the snow was really melting in earnest and patches of green grass were beginning to appear in every direction...Every moment the patches of green grew bigger and the patches of snow grew smaller. Every moment more and more of the trees shook off their robes of snow. [...]

"This is no thaw," said the Dwarf [to the White Witch], suddenly stopping. "This is spring. What are we to do? Your winter has been destroyed, I tell you! This is Aslan's doing."

Birthdays

It's the sixth "birthday" of this blog today, which took me by surprise. (I have big plans in the works to give the blog a facelift and get a new portfolio site up, and I wanted to have it done by the blog birthday. Obviously, I thought it was later in the month.) But 1,565 posts, 3 jobs, several relationships, and one cat later, here we are.

It's also the birthday of my oldest friend, who I think has been reading for all six years and has helped with the technical end of things for the same amount of time. Happy birthday, Amber!

Tuesday Project Roundup: Cat Lady Goals

I cut out the next sewing project Sunday and it's another attempt at a leopard-print dress in knit fabric. You may recall I tried the same thing last spring, but I am undaunted: I will look like Toby in a wrinkle free, easy-to-wear style!


I'm not working so late these days and the time changes on Sunday, so I'm feeling cautiously hopeful I may get this one done in under two months.

"Morning Poem"

Oh Mary Oliver, you are a hippie poet extraordinaire. I love how you put this: "there is still/ somewhere deep within you/ a beast shouting that the earth/ is exactly what it wanted".

Morning Poem

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches ---
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead--
if it's all you can do
to keep on trudging--

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted--

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

Friday Unrelated Information

1. If being creative makes me distrustful, as yesterday's science news said, what can I blame on this study of personality changes and the single-celled parasite--found in cat poop!--that causes toxoplasmosis? "How Your Cat is Making You Crazy"

2. My nephew has discovered the piano. If you listen carefully to the video my brother posted, you can hear Skyler tell the piano "hi" before he plays it.

3. This llama has something to tell you:


More delightful drawings here.

Come To The Dark Side

As you know, I'm working on trusting the universe in my personal life, and I've been thinking about being creative in the context of my work. Now I have an article that unites the two: "The Dark Side of Creativity," which presents research that shows us being creative apparently isn't all right brain and Steve Jobs quotes--and maybe it's the reason I have a hard time taking good things at face value:

Consider this: being distrustful means being more likely to distrust surface appearances and have a desire to work out what is really going on. In other words distrust breeds a sort of 'what-if' mindset: exactly the sort of mindset associated with creativity.

Distrust may also breed flexibility in thinking. Instead of taking things at face value, people with suspicious minds try to see things from different angles. That's yet another marker of creativity.

I like it. I'm not neurotic; I'm creative.

Grammar Wednesday #3

Are we ready for more grammar? This one is a pet peeve of mine, so hopefully my tip can spread throughout the world and end the egregious practice of using "everyday" when we really mean "every day."

What's the difference? "Everyday" is an adjective, i.e., it can describe things. "Every day" is a another way of saying "each day." It's a phrase. But because it's one thing to know this and another thing to use them well, here are my tips:

Check to see if "everyday" is correct:
Try to substitute an adjective (such as "normal" or "blue") for "everyday" and see if it works.
"It was an everyday occurrence" = "It was a normal [or blue] occurrence."
"These are my everyday pants." = "These are my normal [or blue] pants."

Check to see if "every day" is correct:
Try to substitute a day of the week with "every day".
"I come here every day." = "I come here Tuesday."
"Every day, I get the blues." = "Tuesday, I get the blues."

Now that we know this, we can apply it in any situation. Is the phrase "Lunch specials are available everyday" correct? Well, are lunch specials available blue? I hope not.

Tuesday Project Roundup: Done and Mostly Done

Check it out--the yogi legwarmers are done:

I can give them to the teacher at class next week. I hope she likes them!

And the dress I was making out of the fancy Liberty of London fabric I got over the new year just needs some hand sewing and a hem:

The pattern is the basic shift from the Built By Wendy Dresses book (again), modified this time to have a round neck and bell-ish sleeves. I wanted to copy something like this, but I'm wondering if the sleeves get a little too "1970's Sleeping Beauty" when combined with a print that includes owls, horses, bunnies, deer, and roses.

I guess we'll see if I start singing "Once Upon a Dream" while wearing my little forest friends.

Courage

Here's some Rilke to get your inner hippie on board for the week. (My new thing is trying to trust the universe, so of course I liked this):

We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; if there are dangers at hand, we must try to love them.

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples--the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses. Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are waiting for us, beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

Friday Unrelated Information

1. This has been making the rounds lately, but I like it. Sadly, that last one isn't currently true. (Click for larger.)

2. It would have been the 57th birthday of Steve Jobs today. Here he is on creativity:
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people...The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

(from Wired, February 1996)

Better Than A Space Picture

Can you even stand the cute?

In the words of Napoleon Dynamite, "There's more where that came from."

Happy Birthday, Edna

It's the birthday of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay today. You have to love a woman who wrote sonnets and built an artists' colony.


IV

I shall forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favorite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And vows were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far,–
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.

(From from A Few Figs from Thistles (1922).

It's Tuesday (That Feels Like Monday)

Sit on a dining chair and turn your back on it.

Friday Unrelated Information

1. For cat lovers and font lovers: 20 Cats as Fonts. Including:




2. Comic Sans Cat looks like I feel after this week.

3. I continue to cope with hippie songs. Any song where you can sing "Om" is a good one:

The Universe Loves You

The little space within the heart is as great as the vast universe. The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun and the moon and the stars. Fire and lightning and winds are there, and all that now is and all that is not. --The Upanishads

(Image from the Heart and Soul nebulae via Bad Astronomy; quote via my inner hippie. )

Grammar Wednesday #2

Today's tip is courtesy of my lifelong friend Amber, and is dear to my heart after all the years I spent working in social stationery:

How do you remember which spelling of "stationery/stationary" is the correct one in a given situation?

• Stationery that means paper you write on and send in the mail has an E in it, for ENVELOPE. Envelopes go in the mail!
• Stationary that means standing still and not moving is the other one. (You can also remember it with an A for stAnding still.)
  

Tuesday Project Roundup: I'm Glad I Knit

I'm glad I knit because yarn is much easier to buy than anti-anxiety meds, and nearly as effective. (I don't travel well, if you couldn't tell.) Look what I got (nearly) done on the business trip yesterday:

These are the legwarmers for my yoga teacher. I think I will knit the fold over cuff, as discussed before--probably because I just. kept. knitting. on the plane and the ribbing got a little long anyway.

Guess Where I Am Today?

One-day business trips, you are brutal. But at least this destination gives me a catchy tune to have stuck in my head.

Friday Unrelated Information2.

1. Have you seen Better Book Titles yet? It redesigns book covers "to give you the meat of the story in one condensed image"--one hilarious condensed image, that is:





So many more here.

2. Happy birthday to Marxist/alienist playwright/composer Bertolt Brecht today. I don't know about you, but I'm going to be singing "Show me the way to the next whisky bar" when this week is finally over tonight.

Bad Days

Sometimes all you can do is accept that the bad day wins, get takeout, make a drink, and listen to Bob Dylan (who I find soothing; your mileage may vary). My inner hippie really loves "Mr. Tambourine Man," because my inner poet thinks the lyrics are so pretty:

Then take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind,
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves:
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

That last line is like a tagline for bad days! Also, be sure to watch the video soon if you find Bob soothing; I found it on a Turkish (?) site and it may not be up long.

Something To Consider

Does anyone else do this? Build up events so they seem to "mean" more than they really do? I didn't even clearly know I did it (just wondered why I felt disappointed so much) until I encountered this part of The Hours years ago. So let's revisit the helpful quote for the third time on this blog:

It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than 30 years later, to realize it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book.

[...] What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond while the mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.

"It was happiness...that was the moment, right then. There has been no other." Michael Cunningham, you simultaneously destroy me and make my life so much better.