Converting work into virtue

I am retired but I live by the clock (and watch). I have found that using Google Calendar keeps appointments straight, if I remember to look at it.  My phone and iPads are Apple products and not very welcoming to Google anything but the Google products are free, they are well laid out and available on anything that is connected to the internet.

I am a habitual person.  Habits are easy for me to develop.  We go to bed at 10 PM and wake up at 6 AM.  I usually eat breakfast at 7:30 and so it goes, by time all day.  At the end of a day, when I have met all the times squarely, I know I am a good boy, just what my mother wanted.

Was I her teacher?

Our health insurance company uses "home visits", where an employee comes to our house, takes some vital signs and gathers information and impressions about us and our ways of living. We have had two or three of them, one a year.  This last one had some vague recollection of maybe having a course with me.  

My wife asked her about the memory and the visitor described taking a statistics course where she watched on tv at 6 AM on Sundays.  Neither of us consulted any records.  How many education professors had a basic stat course broadcast at that hour on that day of the week?  It was me!

Not working means try again

I started using computers in 1965 as part of my graduate school.  I have rarely had reason to wish the machines were faster.  I realize if I had some deeply complex task or some enormous amount of data to churn through, I might wish for more speed.  But lately, living where I do, I have been finding that services and tasks fairly often don't work, especially in the early morning.  I have gotten so that when something doesn't work, I try again.  Sometimes after three or four attempts taking the same steps, I have success. I realize that something might not be turned on somewhere along the line.  If I took a failure to mean an impossibility, I would have quite a few more complaints.

S1 Episode 3

I have been touting the excellence of the TV series "Call the Midwife" for a while.  "Popular" is a section of London.  Nonnatus House is a Catholic charity that includes both trained midwives and nuns. A real woman wrote memories of events there and her notes are the backbone of the TV episodes.  

As World War II ended and the world began to change, there was often some difficulty or problem with a pregnancy.  The experienced midwives were often called on to assist with pregnancy or a birth.  Popular is not an area of wealth but sex goes on, in all sorts of situations and often results in desired or in unwanted pregnancy.

The two of us have been re-reading books we once read and re-watching movies and tv shows we have watched in the past.  The series is available on Netflix and to my mind, is the best tv I see.  The other night, we watched the third episode of the first series.  I didn't remember having seen it but this time, I am older and quite aware of the likely good an attractive young femme can do an older gentleman whose life is rather lonely and boring.  Wow!

My blog and my website

Normally, I post a comment on my blog every day.  I started writing to explain how meditation could calm a teacher but over time, so many sources became available that explained meditation, I could see I wasn't needed. So, Fear, Fun and Filoz  

https://fearfunandfiloz.blogspot.com/

came to be a place where I could write whatever I was thinking about.  I now have over 5500 posts from 2008 to now.

I made up the word "filoz" to try to say "philosophy"without being too explicit.  I later found a reference to an Indian pancake by that name.  

I email copies of the day's post to the blog page provided by Blogspot, Google's blog service, and to about 100 recipients.

My website "Kirbyvariety" is a collection of information from my teaching and my reading.  When the first website reached maximum allowable size, I added a 2nd so there is a Kirbyvariety1 and a Kirbyvariety2.

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

Books and movies over again

I guess it was from re-reading parts of C.S. Lewis's book "An Experiment in Criticism" where he gets strident over literary and non-literary people, according to his thinking.  The main difference between the groups is that his version of literary types doesn't reject reading a book if it has been read.  The book "On Repeat" by Judith Margulis explores repetition in music listening.

From that theme, augmented by my interest in what people generally remember after reading a book, the two of us have purposely redone a book and a movie.  We will probably repeat again.  The book was "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert and the movie was "9 to 5".  Both are excellent and of course, we are older, wiser and more broadly thinking now than on our first exposures.

I asked myself what books do I tend to recall often.  I think the number one such book is "Incognito" by David Eagleman.  Number 2 is probably "The Female Brain" by Louann Brizendine, MD.  Incognito is a good book for emphasizing how complex we all are and how our often simple linear notion of a thought followed by an action is quite different from how we actually operate.  The Female Brain emphasized for me how marvelous a woman is.  I think it is a hoot how every human comes out of a woman and yet men puff up and pride themselves on how terrific they are.

Today is 3/4

I think it may have been the novelist Tom Robbins who introduced me to the idea that the 4th of March can be considered a day on which the date itself issues a merry challenge to "march forth!"  I used my favorite search software, Duchduckgo, and am impressed by how many people and organizations use the 4th of this month as a marker for optimism, boldness and initiative.  So, if you haven't mentioned your affection for him to your nephew or your admiration for his father, this might be a good day to March 4th and send a note of appreciation.

What about loudmouths? What about climate change? What about very attractive people?

I am interested in my friend's mind and thoughts.  Her thinking, her principles, her background remind me of my vague notions of those of my mother, at least what I think I know of my mother.  This friend is in the midst of the book by Chris Hayes called "The Sirens Call".

The book is about attention: what we do with it, how we use our ability to focus on a subject or source.  It is possible to get all worked up about attention that kids, teens and others pay to their smartphones.  Of course, it is possible to get all worked up about most things.

I minored in psychology and in philosophy in grad school.  The first course I was required to take in psych was Psychophysics, how human senses work, especially sight and sound.  I have had experience with written worries about too much television watching, too much sitting, too much eating, too much worrying, too little worrying.

One strategy that is sometimes used is to find another worrisome or possibly worrisome topic and ask "What about ……?"  So, what about shrinking governmental support for medical research?  What about sexism?

Our trip

We left one Saturday and came back the next.  We had been to St.Simons Island off the coast of Georgia before.

Lynn has a stronger desire for trips that I do.  She often selects a destination and asks if I'd like to spend some time there.  Her parents were born in Ironwood, Michigan.  Ironwood grew up on mines.  Her father's family is Finnish and the town of Ironwood now is listed at about 5,000 people.  Her dad had a strong desire for education and arranged to get a master's degree.  He met Lynn's mother in high school.  With a few stops in between, he found work and interest in Washington, D.C.  Relatives in Detroit and Ironwood were a continuous draw for Lynn's family during her childhood.  

Another aspect of trips and thinking of elsewhere was the background of Lynn's mother, the daughter of a Cuban sister who had accompanied her sister out of Cuba as the wife of a Swedish mining expert from Ironwood who met his wife on a special trip to fix problems in a Cuban mine.  There are few Cubans in Ironwood.  

It is also true that Lynn keeps house carefully and rigorously so a trip to some place with less housekeeping is a pleasure. 

My family is split between New Englanders and rural Marylanders and I have not developed the desire for trips that Lynn has.  My first major trip was early in my college teaching when my university accepted me as the leader of a Semester Abroad group to England.  

I have been accepting my quiet, lazy attitude toward less trips and the two of us have been wondering if she is going to have to satisfy her travel drives without me.  She has done some of that before and could repeat the practice.  But I can see that some disruption and travel and relocation can be helpful prods for me, too.  Flight times and required waits of hours, not having something left at home, there are always little differences that can be a pain,

CNN photos of the week 3/2/2025

You can't expect me to be able to put a whole week in a different locale AND the impressive photos of CNN for a week into just one blog post.

A post this afternoon and meanwhile a link to CNN's Photos now:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/27/world/gallery/photos-this-week-february-20-february-27/