There is a toast in Spanish that is “amor, salud y plata y tiempo para gastarlo” – love, health and money and time to waste them. We got news recently that our friend in Spain who has all the love in the world and money enough has hit a major milestone with his cancer. This news has weighed heavy on T’s heart since we’ve been here and this evening, I walked on the beach in…
I could write you a 1,000 word essay right now on why I need the beach to get myself centered, I could start with a website and call it Ineedthebeach.com and I could even write a haiku like this: Yes, I need the beach Spring, Summer, Winter, and Fall NEED it, I tell you And I could wax on and on about why the beach is just about the best place in the world to…
I’m engrossed in this Cognitive Surplus book because it speaks to my heart that is it provides case studies that when people are given a task to do, they perform it because they want to but when they are compensated for it, it diminishes the autonomy and motive for doing it. I thought about this with my own blogging. A colleague had told me to focus on my fiction writing not blogging. I mean who…
The morning walk on the beach showed evidence of the BP Oil Spill disaster and it put me in mind of how much we are in a time of large transitions in our lifetime. BP’s screw up and the government’s screw up with Katrina and Rita, or our federal government’s inability to predict or defend the terrorist attacks on 9/11 – so many huge things happening. I’m reading a good book called Cognitive Surplus by…
A colleague friend was chatting with me yesterday and referred me to the psalms in the Old Testament. I was thinking about psalms this morning and how beautiful some of them are, but I have to say I meditated on this one this morning instead: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) A PSALM OF LIFE WHAT THE HEART OF THE YOUNG MAN SAID TO THE PSALMIST TELL me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty…
When we first came to Ft. Morgan we rented a friend’s house that was walking distance from the beach. The next time we came with friends who we shared a house with just about a block or two from the beach. We kept coming back to that house or the one next to it in different configurations but always with another couple because of the cost of the house. But T kept saying she wanted…
I met a source and friend of mine for dinner on Wednesday night and when we arrived at the restaurant I learned the owner’s dad had just passed suddenly. He said his mother was holding his father because he didn’t feel well all of a sudden and his father turned to her and said, “I love you.” And then died. My dinner date said that she had just been to a funeral on Monday, a…
I woke yesterday morning to a text from the nanny that she had gotten a ride to Phoenix instead. And I smiled, by the time I get to Phoenix she’ll be rising played through my head for the rest of the morning. We were leaving later to head to a beach house, where taking similar steps to last year, when we fled to the beach for Thanksgiving, we were fleeing a gris gris that has…
Yesterday when my nanny was trying to board the plane with the voucher ticket I had booked for her and they wouldn’t let her on because somehow though the reservation was in her name, the ticket was in my name. The United clerks were disinterested in customer service – which I reminded them was not in keeping with their new corporate mandate. Meanwhile, we tried to get her on a Southwest flight where the clerks…