Updates

The two ice storms broke many trees and branches.  The community is still clearing up, with many very large piles of tree trunks and branches to be picked up from lawn edges.  

We once had nicely functioning phones in six locations around the house but with internet changes and aging electronics, things aren’t so peachy now.  One of the main changes is the dependence of our phones, including cellphones, on the internet.  Another is the shrinking or elimination of “broadcasting” and more reliance on that same internet. All of that takes time, often years or decades and years and decades are aging agents working on us and on our electronics.  Between ice storm damage and services changes and aging, we spend several hours in our internet supplier’s office, working with a nimble-fingered young man getting our accounts, our equipment and our credentials in order. 

Changed plans

We thought we would be gone but we aren’t.  I thought I wouldn’t write today but I am.

We did drive to another town but we found that we weren’t that interested.  We talked and decided to come home.  We did.

Blog pause

I have events coming up and will pause my blog, probably until Friday of this week. There are 5960 entries already, some of which are worth re-reading.  During the pause, you read some at fearfunandfiloz.  You start your own blog but if you do, I encourage you to make notes during the day of possible themes.  I also encourage you to make a blog comment every day, not just on the days that stand out.  You may be surprised to find the inner resources you possess to see and comment.

I can write

English is the only language I know well enough to use to write.  I am confident that my studies in Latin, French and German have been sufficient for me to use some app or program or digital tool to translate writings into one of those other languages. According to OpenAI, there are about 3000 languages that have a system of writing and I suppose I could find some tools to translate this blog post into most or all of them.

Writing and speaking are special for teachers and others who attend to the inner thoughts and feelings of others.  If I am feeling grumpy and grouchy, you might conclude that by seeing my facial expression but generally what I say or write is a more incisive guide to what I feel inside and why.

I used every page in my notebook recently and I am now on the first page of a new notebook.  I imagine that in ten centuries such documents will be sold for tons of money or jewelry or property.

56 times

I taught various courses at the University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point.  Just about every spring, the radio station on campus, WWSP 90FM, 89.9FM, runs “the world’s largest trivia contest”.  It has done so 56 times.  The contest is noticeable since many cars are parked near some houses from Friday evening until midnight the following Sunday.  My son-in-law and my daughter live nearby and they host a team.  Some people have been team members for years and some have aged enough that a contest that runs from Friday at 6 PM until Sunday midnight is too long.

The contest includes 300-400 teams scattered all over the world.

Perfection problems

Ezra Bayda and Frederic Nietzsche have writings that emphasize that our lives have disappointments and troubles.  Bayda and Elizabeth Hamilton were both followers of Charlotte Beck.  Beck died in her 90’s in 2011.  She was a teacher of Zen.  

Bayda’s book “At Home in the Muddy Water” and some of the writing of Nietzsche point to learning to think of a satisfying life without imagining no troubles of any kind, with just steady ongoing bliss.  We have nervous systems built for troubles and disappointments and both men saw that disappointments and troubles and genuine “messes” are part of being alive.  When we think of moving to our favorite scenic canyon or seaside in the hope of zero messes and failures, we tend to under-appreciate our need for challenges and bringers of despair and tears.  Admittedly, it can be temporarily impossible to be thankful for troubles and pains.  But if we stay aware and open, we can come to appreciate falls, errors and bothers while striving to avoid or minimize them.  We are built to handle downers and benefit from the handling.

Greening

We didn’t have an especially cold winter but it is fully into spring now.  Plants and trees that need a bit of time to green up are visibly doing so.  Now, when I look at trees, it is not an illusion that buds and little leaves are there.  They really are.

Lawns are now green, too.  It is really spring.  We went to lunch and neither of us wore a jacket.

Yuck! A leg!

I rarely try to read something that is difficult to pay attention to.   But last evening, reading Oliver Sack’s “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Stories”, I read chapter 4, “The Man Who Fell Out of Bed”.  Sacks was a neurologist and the book in question is about unusual conditions that patients developed.  I may have fallen out of bed sometime but not lately and not often.  This chapter tells of cases of loss of the sense of proprioception, our sense of our own bodies and where our parts are, currently.  Chapter 4 is about a man who awoke only to discover a LEG in his bed!  Yuck and a half!  Some prankster must have put a severed leg in his bed.  Stressing and straining, he managed to push the repulsive thing out of his bed but as he did so, he fell out of bed, too.

Yes, it was his leg!  Nicely and properly attached to him, just as it should be.

Chomping at the bit

I have had little experience with horses.  The horse I was given at a riding stable in Britain tried to roll over on his back with me in the saddle.  If I hadn’t dismounted as he went down, he would have pinned beneath his weight.  As I recall now, our guide said something like “Oh he will do that now and then.”  

I realize that virtually everybody once depended on horses for transportation, as well as breeding and racing and plowing.  

When I can feel internal eagerness for something, I sometimes think I am “chomping at the bit”.  I looked the expression up and found it was once “champing at the bit”, that is, biting onto the metal bar that passes through the horse’s mouth as part of the gear used to guide the horse.  I have never bitten repeatedly on a metal bar, but I sometimes do feel I wish time would move along since I am ready and energized and eager.

Prices then and now

When I was a kid, things were different.  For one thing, a candy bar cost a nickel, you know, $.05.  Now, I received an email from a younger friend asking where were candy bars selling for “only” one dollar.  So, was a nickel the “right” price and a dollar “much more expensive”.  

I think prices need to be evaluated relatively.  If a nickel was very difficult to obtain then, but a dollar is easy to obtain now, there is probably a good argument to be made that the candy bar is cheaper now.  Sometimes, prices are evaluated in terms of minutes or hours needed to be paid that much.  To a large extent, minutes or hours of work seem more or less the same now as a couple of decades back.