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…
Tin was born blocks away from where Michael Jackson was born, and now lives blocks away from Louis Armstrong was born. I have to say I’m fond of both musicians. Today, instead of saving the toy trumpet for a Hanukkah gift, we gave it to him and you’d have thought we handed him gold. He has not let this go all day long and he keeps saying trumpet trumpet trumpet and improvising the notes when…
I walked the dogs this morning in the drizzle but that was better than the storm that we had all night which caused the electricity to go out in the middle of the night and made our bedroom feel like we were breathing stale air. I ran across neighbors on their porch because of the electricity, they were reading the newspaper (a vestige of the past) and I asked if the Republicans also took the…
Tin and I went to see his nanny’s Day of the Dead art show this evening. He saw her from behind and ran to her but when she turned and had her face painted, he sort of got the willies and backed off, but then he was compelled to keep going back to her. It’s odd to walk into your nanny’s house and see a side of her that you don’t see in her daily…