Blog pause

I probably won't post anything after this notice until March 2. There are currently more than 5500 posts and some of them are pretty good.  Look through the index of them and try a few.  Or, use this time to start your own blog. From what I have seen, most people who start one drop it after a few posts.  For me, the longer I write, the more I get out of composing something each day. I look around, I write down ideas.  If I get to five ideas, I stop, figuring that is enough.

Little kids and grandparents

Lynn found this in her Facebook account.  I messed with the format some.  At first, I managed to get a file of 80 pages each with a single column of letters. 

How young children perceive their grandparents. 

1. I was in the bathroom, putting on my makeup, under the watchful eyes of my young granddaughter, as I'd done many times before. After I applied my lipstick and started to leave, the little one said, "But Grandma, you forgot to kiss the toilet paper good-bye!" I will probably never put lipstick on again without thinking about kissing the toilet paper good-bye....

2. My young grandson called the other day to wish me Happy Birthday. He asked me how old I was, and I told him, 68. My grandson was quiet for a moment, and then he asked, "Did you start at 1?" 

3. After putting her grandchildren to bed, a grandmother changed into old slacks and a droopy blouse and proceeded to wash her hair. As she heard the children getting more and more rambunctious, her patience grew thin. Finally, she threw a towel around her head and stormed into their room, putting them back to bed with stern warnings. As she left the room, she heard the three-year-old say with a trembling voice, "Who was THAT?" 

4. A grandmother was telling her little granddaughter what her own childhood was like. "We used to skate outside on a pond. I had a swing made from a tire; it hung from a tree in our front yard. We rode our pony. We picked wild raspberries in the woods." The little girl was wide-eyed, taking this all in. At last she said, "I sure wish I'd gotten to know you sooner!" 

5. My grandson was visiting one day when he asked, "Grandma, do you know how you and God are alike?" I mentally polished my halo and I said, "No, how are we alike?'' "You're both old," he replied.

6.  A little girl was diligently pounding away on her grandfather's word processor. She told him she was writing a story. "What's it about?" he asked. "I don't know," she replied. "I can't read."

7.  I didn't know if my granddaughter had learned her colors yet, so I decided to test her. I would point out something and ask what color it was. She would tell me and was always correct. It was fun for me, so I continued. At last, she headed for the door, saying, "Grandma, I really think you should try to figure out some of these colors yourself!" 

8. When my grandson Billy and I entered our vacation cabin, we kept the lights off until we were inside to keep from attracting pesky insects. Still, a few fireflies followed us in. Noticing them before I did, Billy whispered, "It's no use Grandpa. Now the mosquitoes are coming after us with flashlights." 

9. When my grandson asked me how old I was, I teasingly replied, "I'm not sure." "Look in your underwear, Grandpa," he advised "Mine says I'm 4 to 6." (WOW! I really like this one -- it says I'm only '38'!) 

10. A second grader came home from school and said to her grandmother, "Grandma, guess what? We learned how to make babies today." The grandmother, more than a little surprised, tried to keep her cool. "That's interesting." she said. "How do you make babies?" "It's simple," replied the girl. "You just change 'y' to 'i' and add 'es'." 

11. Children's Logic: "Give me a sentence about a public servant," said a teacher. The small boy wrote: "The fireman came down the ladder pregnant." The teacher took the lad aside to correct him. "Don't you know what pregnant means?" she asked. "Sure," said the young boy confidently. 'It means carrying a child." 

12. A grandfather was delivering his grandchildren to their home one day when a fire truck zoomed past. Sitting in the front seat of the fire truck was a Dalmatian dog. The children started discussing the dog's duties. "They use him to keep crowds back," said one child. "No," said another. "He's just for good luck." A third child brought the argument to a close. "They use the dogs," she said firmly, "to find the fire hydrants." 

13. A 6-year-old was asked where his grandma lived. "Oh," he said, "she lives at the airport, and whenever we want her, we just go get her. Then, when we're done having her visit, we take her back to the airport." 

14. Grandpa is the smartest man on earth! He teaches me good things, but I don't get to see him enough to get as smart as him! 

15. My Grandparents are funny, when they bend over, you hear gas leaks and they blame their dog. 

Toddlers and joy

We attend a large group exercise class at the local Y. As we leave, we walk past a large window into the toddler room.  I make a point of looking at the little kids at play.  Many philosophers have counseled attending to one's surroundings and concentrating on the miracle of it all.   These little kids are way ahead at doing that.  I can see them look at a chair, a toy, a companion with amazement.  How did it, he, she, they get like that?  What are they doing? Can I do that?

I feel a joy rise in me, seeing the way they walk, cooperate, oppose, ignore, worship - all in less than a minute.

Naming a newborn

I read a few years ago that one or more African nations had passed laws that a baby could not be named too weirdly.  I am just writing to drop a word of encouragement for naming a child with a somewhat traditional name, not something too weird.  I have just read in the last few days that Elon Musk has 12 o3 13 children with a set of four different mothers.  I guess one of his children is named "X".  I hope that changes.

If we pause and think about the experience of growing up, we can recognize the value of an ordinary name.  The guys at lunch were discussing the idea of naming a child with a word to remember the circumstances and conditions in effect at the time of the birth.  One common was a name of "Broken rubber" for a child that was not supposed to have been created.  I recommend not using that name. 

CNN Photos of the Week 2/16/2025

https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/13/world/gallery/photos-this-week-february-6-february-13

My art focused on corners

Lynn is a member of a cooperative of artists so I get plenty of contact with painters, jewelers, photographers, sculptors, potters and such. I came up with a theme of my own art but she doubted I would be accepted as a member.  She had her doubts before she had even seen one piece of my art, mostly because I haven't actually made any (and I likely will not).  

What I imagine might be some art I could produce, given my lack of persistence and my relatively short attention span, would be visual art.  Photographs, to be more exact.  When I was in the 4th grade, I had a little hobby of photography, the older kind that needed to be worked on in a darkroom, and involved a liquid developer and a liquid stabilizer and a clothesline of drying pieces of special paper.  Things have changed since then.  Now I take pictures, in color not black-and-white and they are immediately finished.  Much simpler and faster.

So, what kind of photos?  I was thinking "corners".  As I looked around, I saw many right angle corners that I could take a picture of: boxes, books, computer equipment, furniture, buildings, etc.  I envision being hailed for a steady stream of photos of corners.  I mean beautiful women, handsome men, dogs, babies, kittens and such have been done and done and done. When I was first learning to meditate, I needed a visual anchor and it was easy to focus on corners of all kinds, all over the place.  So, my art will concentrate on corners high and low, here and there.

Happy Valentine's Day!

I hope you have already had some celebration of love, affection, friendship and charity, the four loves discussed by C.S. Lewis in his "The Four Loves".  I imagine that many other fine and helpful books and other inspiring sources exist.  Various articles are available on increasing one's ability to get into understanding and maybe even learning something from those that take a different approach to who or what is loveable.

Today and maybe the next few days seem like as good a time as any to recall who you love and let them know you are thinking fondly of them.

Ginger in the morning

I like the books written by Prof. Andrew Weil.  In one of them, he advocates eating some ginger each day.  I buy 5 lbs of sugared ginger from Amazon and have a piece each morning.  I think I remember him writing that doing that was a good idea since ginger has molecules that the body appreciates and doesn't get much of in any other way.  I have read that for most people drinking coffee can be beneficial and I usually drink at least two a day. I know that tea is also a popular drink and I often have a cup at the same time as the ginger.  A friend of mine inspired me to add 6 almonds and others advocated for a small piece of dark chocolate.  Recently, I tried some salted pepitas and liked them so they are now a regular addition.

"I live a block from the mango tree"

We watched the fine movie "The 6 Triple 8", about a US Army battalion of Black women explicitly assembled to do something about 17 million pieces of mail to and from soldiers and their families.  Some discussions of the movie and its background emphasized that the handwriting in the address could be a problem as could the information in the so-called 'address'.  For instance, addressing a loving message to a soldier named "John Smith" needed more, accurate, clearly written, correct information.   The US Army in Europe included 7500 men named "John Smith".  

I am reading "The Address Book" by Dierdre Mask, about the address system in various places.  Many places have no address system but generally find life easier if they get one.  I just read about a form someone filled out that included an answer to "Where do you live?"   One written answer was "I live a block from the mango tree."

I was quite unwelcome!

I was a young staff member at a large Boy Scout camp.   Somebody arranged a bus ride for local girls to come to a staff dance at the camp.  I attended and met a pretty girl. We danced and spent the evening together. I knew the town she lived in and somehow I found her address.  Looking to enjoy her company,  I walked there on my next day off, a distance of more than 10 miles.  At the time, I didn't have a driver's license or a car.  When I found her house, I rang the front doorbell.  She came to the door and screamed, "Go away!  You will ruin my life!"

I was quite surprised and asked her what she meant.  She said word would get around that she had a boyfriend and her social life and dating would end.  I thought we had had a good evening together at the dance and I was very surprised at her reaction.  I walked back to the camp.  Of course, that was years ago and I have forgotten all about that now.

Computer instead of a phone

 I am urging people to arrange to use a computer for emails to friends.  I realize that email is old-fashioned among many people.  However, if you have a group of people you want to communicate with, email can be good.  My wife has an email account that is not Gmail and she finds that it is inferior in several ways to Gmail.  

I am a poor typist but I am better and more comfortable using a separate keyboard and both hands at the same time than using the keyboard on my iPhone. The phone keyboard has smaller keys and they are closer together, arranging for me to strike the wrong key or two keys.  The Gmail interface enables me to delete all my email messages but I feel too cautious to do that.

The Gmail interface in Windows makes it easy and quick to reduce my account to 500 emails.  About once a month, the total is about 1000 but I can quickly and easily load the oldest emails and delete them 100 at a time.

The spell/grammar checker on Gmail is clearly the best I have ever used.  It corrects wording, too.  I often type "that" where I want "than" and the spell/grammar checker finds those cases instantly.

CNN Photos of the week 1/30/2025

https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/06/world/gallery/photos-this-week-january-20-february-06?

A heavenly morning

We have many ebooks and many of them have not been read.  I want to read and re-read the ones that are worthwhile.  I asked Lynn what she wanted me to re-read aloud and she said, "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert. It was an excellent choice and we are half way through it.  The book is very well written and fun to re-read. It was also the inspiration for a movie starring Julia Roberts.

The book is the story of a type of pilgrimage by an American woman to Italy, where she eats to her delight, India, where she meditates and studies her recently divorced self and Indonesia, where she falls in love. In an Indian ashram, Gilbert concentrates on her life, her thoughts and her own personality.  She describes her reactions to her history and her thoughts.  She focuses on the miracle she actually is.  I read about that last night.

Today, we have snow.  When we moved here more that 50 years ago, I was nervous about facing the winter.  That winter was the coldest we have experienced here but of course, I didn't know that over the years, we would not have that level of cold again.  We here now are actually experiencing milder levels of winter cold and snowfall in the past few years.

Having been recently inspired by Gilbert's writing, I looked at our snow-covered trees and grounds and soaked in the quiet and the beauty we had here this morning.

The 91st of February

An academic calendar published by UWSP had a typo.  The 19th day of this month was written mistakenly as "91".  I was all set to ridicule such an error even though I make tons of errors every time I type. But when I tried to make a link to the problem, it had been corrected.  I am not surprised that those sharpies fixed it.  At least I have a printed version of the calendar showing the 91st.

Habeas Corpus

I studied Latin but I would not know how to translate "habeas corpus" into English.  I read that a usual translation is "You must have the body."  The words habeas corpus are used to name a type of legal document.  I understand that the document is a legal writ that requires the government to produce the body of a person, whether or not that person is alive. It is a document used in an investigation as to how and why a particular person has been detained by the government. 

I recently got into some computer trouble.  My bank's technical person let me know that to get back to my state of normal, it would be best if I drove to my bank and presented myself.  I did and he had seen me before but he still asked to see my driver's license.  I felt as though I was enacting the requirements of a writ of habeas corpus.

My web pages

I wanted to remind readers of my blog, Fear, Fun and Filoz,  https://fearfunandfiloz.blogspot.com/ that I have web pages that may be of interest.  My web site is related to the name "Kirbyvariety"

https://sites.google.com/view/kirbyvariety1/welcome-to-my-home-page

I imagine the main thing on the pages may be of interest is highlights from some books.  The link just above goes to the main page for two versions of the web site, after the first version reached maximum allowable size.  Both versions, Kirbyvariety1 and Kirbyvariety2 have table of contents.  The newer site is Kirbyvariety2.

Here is a link to highlights I selected in the Larry Rosenberg book: Breath by Breath.

https://sites.google.com/view/kirbyvariety1/breath-by-breath-notes

A Kindle reader has a nice feature: a person can use a finger tip to mark a passage.  The Kindle keeps the marked passages in a single computer file and will send that file to the email address on the Amazon account.  The file can be copied and pasted on a web page.  That file contains the essence of a reader's experience with the book.  It can be of assistance when thinking about the book or discussing it with others.

Today is the mid-point of the winter

Using Excel, find the number of days between the first day of winter and the first day of spring.  Take that number and halve it.  Add the half to the first day of winter = today. So what?  So, we have less winter to go than we have had already.  Love winter or hate it or something in between, it is getting to be over.

C.S. Lewis on re-reading

I like reading CS Lewis's writing.  When I learned of the book "On Repeat" by Margulis, I remembered the Lewis idea in "An Experiment in Criticism" that a literary person re-reads a book while the majority of readers feel that a book having been read is a book like "a burnt-out match, an old railway ticket, yesterday's news paper".  It strikes me as an interesting puzzle that Margulis describes a typical person, like me, listening to the same music repeatedly while rejecting the experience of re-reading a book - why does that seem like a natural choice?

Since much of higher education involves reading, I have a basic interest in how much and what parts of a book or a series of lessons people remember, adopt and put to use.  I noticed that I have watched the movie "The Russians Are Coming!" many times and Lynn has watched "Enchanted April" many times.  So movies go along with music, at least some, not with books. 

Libby Krusa art

If you want to see more photos, click here for CNN Photos of the week:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/30/world/gallery/photos-this-week-january-23-january-30

Out of trouble for now

The 2nd time I clicked on the red dot on Facebook, my computer froze and I couldn't get it to work.  A Geek Squader at Best Buy took care of it instantly.  I asked how she could do it so quickly and right in front of me.  She said Alt-escape allows for working around the frozen page with its scam phone number that leads to trouble.

When my computer is frozen up, I have only Apple devices.  They are good and well-designed but they don't use my Gmail group mailing addresses.  I could work around that with some copying and pasting from previous mailing but didn't seem worth it.  I did post directly on my blog page that I was having computer trouble.