Quote of the Day - 02/29/2012

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Everything mourns for the forgotten, For its own springtime dream - Anna Akhmatova in The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

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We are forging into springtime (in the northern hemisphere) - the grand reawakening of all outdoors after the ‘sleep’ of winter. It’s is easy to spot something growing fresh and new…to be caught up in the wonder of the present and lean toward to make the future…warm summer fruits and bountiful harvest of fall.

In the midst of this waking dream of springtime, we sometimes have a niggling at the edges of our thoughts for things not quite remembered or maybe not known at all. This brings an overlay of nostalgia to springtime. For me ‘mourns for the forgotten’ does not exactly describe it. It is a savoring of what I do remember and recognition that there are some things I will never know. I’ll never know any details of my great-grandparents relationship or what really happened to my grandfather’s older sister that died as a teenager or my great-grandmother’s feelings about leaving behind all her family in Europe or how my great grandfather’s fiddle playing sounded.

Quote of the Day - 2/28/2012

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I live the history that I can tell.  And of course the history today in books that’s written a lot is not really the true thing, as it was lived. – May Wing as quoted by Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson in The Women's West

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Most of us probably start out thinking ‘history is history’ and we learn whatever is required for the test. But later we realize that history is quite complex and reflects the perspective of its author(s). One good analogy is that in most cases, history is a thread, rather than the woven cloth, of the past. Eventually we may construct a cloth but it is still loosely woven and rather forlorn compared to real life.

Of course, individuals have their own field of view and even living through important events of their time provides as single viewpoint of the event. A life is more than a linear series of events.

The passage of time is sometimes helpful to the extent that the threads having the greatest impact on the present can be traced back. Even then - the perspective of the person doing the track back influences selection.

Older pioneer women have often expressed the sentiment that ‘a lot is not really the true thing, as it was lived’ and some of their stories have been captured. Those efforts have enriched the historical ‘cloth’ for that time period but also made me more cognizant of how narrow the perspective is in traditional history.

Fifty years from now will the challenge not be a lack of perspective of this time but the tangle of threads - a myriad of perspectives…that won’t fit neatly into a woven cloth of history at all.

Quote of the Day - 2/26/2012

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Brilliance in youth does not guarantee worth in maturity. - Isabel Allende in Daughter of Fortune

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Brilliance. Isn’t it strange that there would even be an assumption that ‘brilliance in youth’ would correlate to ‘worth in maturity?’ Yet - somehow our culture hones in on how ‘smart’ a child is more than any other characteristic. When positive differentiation occurs in school - it is most frequently based on criteria of brilliance. We know it is imperfect but it can reduce the complexity of the school by grouping the students into more similar groups…and then curriculum/teaching can be more finely honed to their needs. It works very well for some students…but not all.

In a perfect world, learning opportunities would be abundant and tuned to the individual rather than a group…and brilliant or not so brilliant…everyone would have the opportunity to develop a ‘worth in maturity.’

Worth. Oftentimes we associate ‘worth’ with how much we are paid or have accumulated. That is a quick way to quantify worth but is it the whole story? For some it might be…for others it is clear that their value…their worth…to their family or community is much higher than the quantification would indicate. For example - someone that cares for young children may not have a high salary but the worth of that job to the families of the children is tremendous.

In summary -

brilliance transformed into worth

is what we are after. Making the transformation is the key.

Gleanings of the Week Ending February 25, 2012

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The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week:

 

 

The Symbolism of the Spiral

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Almost all primitive cultures seem to create spirals --- pecked into rock, painted on to cave walls. They appear in nature --- the fiddleheads of ferns, the snail shells. 

spiral 2.png

I’ve always liked spirals and enjoyed drawing them as doodles. They imply multiple things to me…perhaps one of the reasons I find them so attractive. 

 

  1. Continuum of time… past - present - future
  2. Perspective looking from now…is it backward (history) or forward (future)…it is good to consider both positibilities
  3. Curves seem a more natural shape to life…not right angles and straight lines that humans seems to love creating. Curves are comfortable.

What does the spiral symbolize to you?

Quote of the Day - 2/18/2012

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She awoke from long childhood in which she had always been protected and surrounded by attention and comforts, and not responsibilities. - Isabel Allende in The House of the Spirits: A Novel

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Two thoughts on today’s quote: 

  1. It is interesting that we associate childhood as a time without responsibility. Our laws embed the concept in our formal legal system. But having or not having responsibility is not a binary thing. It is more accurate if we think of a child’s growth as a continual path of increasing levels of responsibility. At some point a child becomes responsible for dressing themselves, putting food in their own mouth, completing a household chore, completing homework without prompting, getting their first job, etc. At what age do they cross a threshold that says they are no longer a child? Certainly when they are financially independent…but probably before and the use of age is a simplifying criteria for our legal system which may work on average but not for all individuals.
  2. In the past, the optimum in our culture was for women to continue in a child-like state (i.e. without acknowledged responsibilities) for most of their lives. The things that they did were important to their families but were not appreciated by society as responsibilities. The quote reminds us of the awakening that happened for many women as that ideal began to crumble.

 

 

Gleanings of the Week Ending February 18, 2012

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The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week:

Which countries grew the most GM crops in 2011? - US, Brazil, Argentina, India, Canada…the post includes a nice graphic

A 3-D Printed Jawbone - For an 83 year old woman. Made from 1000s of layers of titanium dust melded with a laser

Zebrafish May Hold Key to Repairing Serious Eye Conditions - Lots of research on approaches to help people with macular degeneration and glaucoma. This is one.

Motherhood 'Detrimental' to Women's Scientific Careers, Study Concludes - It’s not biased hiring or evaluation…it is outdated policies that are the key stumbling block now. How much progress can really be made as long as there is an underlying assumption that an academic has a stay-at-home spouse?

Alexander Graham Bell and Mabel Gardiner Hubbard’s Love Story in Photos - posted by National Geographic for Valentine’s Day

Raining rainbows - a messy but pretty project

Crock Pot Ideas - Does everyone have a crockpot? This site will encourage you to use it more. Applesauce Chicken sounds good to me. (My crockpot (see photo at the right) is almost 40 years old and still turning out great meals!)

Obama Hikes Royalties on Oil Industry by 50% - Bringing the fees for oil drilling on public land up to those for offshore drilling and for renewable energy generation on public lands. The royalties paid to the government had not increased since the 1920s!

NASA Map Sees Earth’s Trees in New Light - a map that show the height of the world’s forests

Nanoparticles in Food, Vitamins Could Harm Human Health - Think exposure to nanoparticles is something that may be a future problem? Maybe it is already happening

Quote of the Day - 2/17/2012

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The stream of time often doubles on its course, but always it makes for itself a new channel. - Frederick Lewis Allen in Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's (Wiley Investment Classics)

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When we hear an news item comparing what is happening today with some earlier time - we should always be aware that while the situation may look the same, it is ‘a new channel’ and the next event may, or may not, be similar to what happened in the past.

 

This is true in our personal lives as well. The passage of time alone guarantees that the situation is different. That wonderful vacation or birthday party from 10 years ago cannot be duplicated. The elements that made them stand out for you could even seem repetitive and not at all special the second time around.

 

As we navigate our ‘stream of time’ - let’s rejoice in the prospect of discoveries in our own ‘channel.’

 

Lessons About Work/Life Issues I Learned from My Grandmother

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In honor of a grandmother than would have been 105 years old this month….. 

My grandmother ran the family mill/feed store while I was growing up in the 60s. She had assumed the role after the last of her 9 children started school. The feed store office where she worked accommodated young visitors and I enjoyed at least one day with her every time we visited my grandparents. She was probably the only professional woman that I observed both while she worked and at home during that time period. Here are some things I learned from her: 

  • Blend (rather than balance) activities as often as you can. She enjoyed having a grandchild with her at work. The scales for trucks and bags of feed were opportunities for practical learning. There always seemed to be something going on. Sometimes it was just being together and quiet: I read and she continued writing her letter to a faraway daughter. She would get an extra case or two of ‘soda pop’ when the truck came to deliver to the vending machine…and take it home for a family gathering. She brought seeds for vegetables home and delighted in my grandfather’s garden experiments.
  • Let people know you have high expectations of them. For grandmother - ‘people’ included children as well as adults. It didn’t take being around her very long to understand the boundaries of acceptable behavior and a very strong desire to live up to her expectations.
  • Speak with confidence – reflect the authority you have. She very seldom raised her voice. She assumed that people would do what she told them to do; it worked for children and the people that worked for her. In retrospect, she was a very good ‘situational’ leader; there were times she gave very detailed instructions and other times minimal information - she honed her requests for the individual and her judgment of their abilities was very finely tuned.
  • Use the best tool for the task. She actually articulated this axiom in the context of food preparation but she applied it everywhere….and she was constantly looking for new and better tools. If she were alive today, she would be using email rather than snail mail and maybe she’d have created a family social network online.
  • Ask for assistance. She knew when to ask for help although most of the time she received assistance before she even asked. She never lifted the sacks of feed herself - sometimes she had to ask one of the men to come from the mill to load up for a customer but most of the time they just appeared to do the job. She told a story on herself about an experience in an airport on the way to Alaska. Evidently she didn’t know exactly where her next gate was and, being unfamiliar with the airport, stopped to read a sign more carefully. Within seconds, someone stopped and asked her if she needed assistance. They probably saw this small lady (just over 5 feet) with white hair staring at the sign…and concluded she needed help. She probably smiled at them and accepted their assistance gratefully even though she was seconds away from figuring it out herself.
  • Wear comfortable shoes/clothes. Look professional. The mill/feedstore was not air conditioned and it gets pretty hot in the Oklahoma summer. Grandmother wore light weight, pastel shirtwaist dresses she made for herself (so they fit perfectly) with sandals. She always looked comfortable; she also looked like she owned the place --- which was true.
  • Eat wisely. She always took her lunch to the mill - mostly ‘rabbit food’ - and stored the part that needed to be kept cool in a cubby hole in the ‘soda pop’ vending machine that she had discovered. At home, when there were large family gatherings and lots of food, she was always the one that was most choosy about what she ate. She liked a wide variety of food but she was very conscious of the way she needed to eat to feel satisfied and stay about the same weight.

Sometimes we think of our world changing so rapidly that nothing stays relevant for very long. When I make a list like this it helps me realize that my fundamental approach to life may not need to change; it’s the things around the edges that are changing. It’s OK for those edges to be volatile…in fact - I enjoy that kind of challenge.

Note: The dogwood picture reminds me of when my grandmother visited me after I moved to the east coast in the mid-80s. We sat on the patio for a picnic lunch while the dogwood petals wafted down around us.  

Gleanings of the Week Ending February 11, 2012

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The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week:

Song of a Jurassic cricket - Scientists at the University of Bristol made a recording of how these extinct crickets probably sounded based on fossil evidence and what is known about crickets that survive today

All the food you eat is why you’re fat - very graphical presentation from Fast Company. The big 5 reasons: diet soda, driving, your mom, your job, your fork!

Hans Christian Andersen collection - The Zvi Har’El site that provides background material and the H.P. Paull 1872 translation of Andersen’s fairy tales.

Timeline of Ancient Origins of Plastic Surgery

In Depth: Weather on Steroids - Article on the UCAR site discussing “when greenhouse gases enter the climate system, what kind of weather comes out?”

The Open University - a site with free online courses in many topic areas

Pearl Guide - A large site containing information about pearls

Jack Horner: Shape-shifting dinosaurs (TED talk video) - Where are the baby dinosaurs?

Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation books on Internet Archive - Lots of recent postings - many with color images of 20th Century art that can be easily viewed online.

Quote of the Day - 2/8/2012

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Over the course of the next few years the house changed into a ruin. No one tended the garden, either to water it or to weed it, until it was swallowed up into oblivion, birds, and wild grasses. The blind statues and the singing fountains filled with dry leaves, bird droppings and moss. - Isabel Allende in The House of the Spirits: A Novel

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In the early years of my daughter’s life there was a house we noticed on the way to her favorite park. It was a two story white farm house that seemed misplaced near a heavily traveled road. There as a large oak tree shading it, tended flower beds and a neatly mowed lawn with a grassy field behind. Over the course of the next few years, it became abandoned…was boarded up to keep vandals out…and decayed enough that it was finally torn down - well before my daughter went off to college. The big tree that shaded it was cut down and the grassy field became a staging area for highway construction.

It wasn’t as grand as the house and garden with ‘blind statues and the singing fountains’ but it had the same sort of feel about it. I often find myself wondering about the story behind that house. Was it as simple as the state claiming the property well in advance of the highway construction or a more complex story about the decline and death of an older person that has started out as a farmer, living in the house for years and years on the proceeds of selling parcels for the housing developments that had grown up around it?

It often seems to me that there is a story in every abandoned house. Allende told us about one of them in her book.

Quote of the Day - 2/7/2012

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By 1935 and 1936 the American camera manufacturers and the photographic supply shops found their business booming.  Candid cameras were everywhere. - Frederick Lewis Allen in SINCE YESTERDAY - THE 1930s IN AMERICA

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When do the candid images start in your family…ones that were not taken in a studio? There may be a few from the 30s in my family but they ramped up considerably in the 40s. When my mother was a young teenager, she enjoyed using her Brownie camera; one of her more memorable pictures was of the head and shoulders of her young twin sisters looking out from the bathroom window (obviously more interested in being outside than taking a bath).

Cameras have certainly improved since the 1930s. There have been incremental improvements in the technology - black/white to color to faster film to better lenses to easier flash lighting to miniaturization to digital rather than chemical images. Many people now have a camera with them all the time (since it is in their cell phone).

The cultural change the candid images of the 1930s initiated is still with us and now the ease with which images can be shared with a very broad audience (i.e. the world via the internet) is causing another cultural change. Our lives can very easily become a lot more public than ever before.

Do we understand the world better with the increase in images? We expect more visuals now in just about every aspect of our life. It is easier for us to absorb but there is no guarantee that we understand what we are seeing. A picture is only worth a 1000 words if we understand the context and content of the picture!

Quote of the Day - 2/5/2012

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Flagstone floors can present us with a…picture of harmony between contrary forces. There are floors in which large, obtuse stones have been persuaded by a mason to take their place within a methodical grid. One senses how the excesses in the character of these stones was tempered, how they were educated out of savagery still evident in the craggy cliff-faces from which they were heaved….we can appreciate order without danger of boredom and vigor without the shadow of anarchy. - Alain de Botton in The Architecture of Happiness (Vintage)

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There was a flagstone floor in the central hallway of the oldest building where I went to college. I always felt that the floor had more panache than the whole rest of the building. The irregularity of the cut edges of the stones and the slight unevenness of their surface always caught my attention as I made my way to class. The cleaning crew must have spent a lot of time on that area too because it was always spotless. It seemed that the floor would last longer the building - like it was on a different time scale than the cinder block, linoleum, and sheet rock. When I found the quote above, I realized that that floor was one of my most vivid memories of the architecture of the school. Perhaps the ‘order without danger of boredom and vigor without the shadow of anarchy’ of that flagstone floor is what made it so.

Gleanings of the Week Ending February 4, 2012

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The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week:

Magnetotactic Bacteria found in Death Valley National Park - evidently these bacteria are unique because they can biomineralize both greigite and magnetite; they may prove enabling to mass produce these minerals

Severe Python Damage to Florida's Native Everglades Animals Documented in New Study - Near complete disappearance of raccoons, rabbits, opossums in the southern part of the Everglades where the pythons have been the longest (11 years)

Learning-Based Tourism an Opportunity for Industry Expansion - lifelong learning and personal enrichment travel increasing among affluent and educated people

Are Diet Soft Drinks Bad for You? - A study finds that the answer is ‘yes’ if you drink one or more a day.

The National Mall gets more efficient LED lighting - Note the paragraph at the end of the article about the phase-out of incandescent bulbs

Snowy owl Invasion - Video from the Cornell Ornithology Laboratory

iRobot ventures into Telemedicine - The company that makes the Roomba robo-vacuum is entering the hospital robotic arena

Innovation without Age Limits - More complex innovation takes more training…and that often takes time.

Yellowstone in winter (video) - a short video just over 4 minutes…full of vignettes of animals…snow…mists

Evolution of the Businessman (infographic) - Does the very bottom (Today’s Businessman) jive with your observations?

10 Years Ago – In February 2002

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Many years ago I started collecting headlines/news blurbs as a way of honing my reading of news. Over the years, the headline collection has been warped by the sources of news I was reading…increasingly online. Reviewing the February 2002 headline gleanings - I forced myself to pick 10.

  1. Intellectual Resources May Help Soldiers Stave Off Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
  2. Second space tourist to take stem cells, HIV experiment
  3. The recent discovery of two giant Roman water-lifting machines near St. Paul's Cathedral in London
  4. Study shows the average sleep for Americans of seven hours per night is safest
  5. Texas A&M Clones First Cat
  6. Enormous Iceberg May Be In Its Death Throes; Collisions With Another Large Berg
  7. Plague fears spark panic in India
  8. A cold front that killed about 250 million Monarch butterflies in central Mexico last month may reduce next year's migrations.
  9. Glacier melting could contribute 0.65 feet or more to sea level this century
  10. One of the odd possibilities that could emerge from global warming is that much of Europe, robbed of the ocean current patterns that help keep it warm, could rather abruptly enter a deep freeze and have a climate that more closely resembles Alaska than the modest temperatures it now enjoys.

Notice that weather and climate figure prominently in this list (6, 8, 9, 10) since it must have been and area of interest to me in 2002. The last blurb must have been from a story about global weather models; I wonder if the low temperatures in Eastern Europe this year are going to happen with increasing frequency.

Item 8 about Monarch butterflies was a turning point in our summer activities. For several years before 2002 we had collected Monarch eggs and caterpillars from the milkweed behind our house, feed them well while they were caterpillars, and released them when they hatched from their chrysalis. There were not enough Monarchs in our area of Maryland from 2002 onward.

Quote of the Day - 2/2/2012

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The nation at war had formed the habit of summary action, and it was not soon unlearned. - Frederick Lewis Allen in Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s

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Wars result in more than just winners and losers…changes in country boundaries. They are disruptions that often change life in fundamental ways. The quote today is about the impact of World War I on the US - pointing out that the pace of life had changed significantly. The faster pace of the 20s must have seemed quiet alien and not even the depression damped it back to the pre-World War I level.  It was a step increase rather than a more gradual trend that has happened since.

World War II set the stage for college education being opened to a much larger portion of the population. Prior to that time, the people that went to college were mostly from elite families that could afford to subsidize their children into adulthood. The GI Bill meant that almost all men could earn the opportunity to go to college. It took a while for the trend to spread to women but it did. Again - it was a step increase initiated by the war and then a gradual increase in availability and accessibility of college education after that.

Think back on your family history and talk to family members that remember the time before World War II if you are fortunate enough to have them with you. How did the war change the lives of your family?

  • Did fewer of them remain farmers?
  • Did they migrate from wherever they were before? How many ended up on a ‘suburb’?
  • Where were babies born (hospital or at home)?
  • What kind of school did the children go to (building, size of classes, type of teacher, school sponsored activities)?

Did the Korean, Vietnam, and 1st Iraq Wars have an impact that was significant? Perhaps these conflicts should have taught us more than they did.

It is probably too early to determine the most significant change the Afghanistan/Iraq war has had on our nation. Based on the amount of time and the lives lost, we should expect that there is something.

Perhaps it will be our acceptance of a dramatic reduction in personal privacy initiated by the increased surveillance in our lives (for example, airport security checkpoints). Of course, the advent of social media and data mining on the internet has happened concurrently and that did not happened because of the war. Taken together the ‘step’ erosion of privacy is probably already a reality.

Perhaps it will be our use of surrogates - drones flown by remote pilots or computer controlled vehicles - that will change things over the long haul. It depends on how the technology is translated from the military world into the day to day lives of people. Certainly driverless cars on our streets and highways would change our day to day lives.

What else might be the most significant change from the Afghanistan/Iraq war?

Quote of the Day - 1/31/2012

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Knowledge, if it does not determine action, is dead to us – Plotinus, 205-270 CE

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Data

Information


Knowledge


Wisdom

No matter where we are along the continuum - action is required to translate our understanding into reality. Simply knowing is not enough. Today - think about how you can more fully leverage what you know to hone what you are doing.

Note: This is a widely used quote. I ran across it in a book by Philip Armour (The Laws of Software Process: A New Model for the Production and Management of Software) which proposed that software development should be viewed and managed as a knowledge acquisition activity. The author provides a thought provoking perspective on the history and future of the way we capture then transfer knowledge.

Quote of the Day - 1/29/2012

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Scientific work requires intelligence, creativity, education and determination.  As a result, the history of science is always the history of a select group of individuals. - Margaret Alic in Hypatia's Heritage (Beacon Paperback)

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Which of the requirements for scientific work (intelligence, creativity, education and determination) is the most challenging for the US population today? Determination would by my top pick and the others lag behind it by quite a lot. There are plenty of intelligent people…lots of good ideas…education is available but linked to determination just as closely as scientific work is. Our high schools and colleges have plenty of capacity in science and engineering yet we hear frequently that there are not enough US students - even though scholarship programs that support science and technology studies are available to top students. So - it comes back to determination and perseverance.

And that is going against the grain of popular culture which has tended toward the sound bite, the quick gratification, instant feedback. After a while it becomes harder to focus on one thing for very long. Determination is needed for scientific work because it can’t be accomplished without deeper thinking…and that takes longer blocks of time. It takes a commitment that evidently few are willing to make.

The ‘select group of individuals’ that make scientific history is becoming more and more self-selected based on determination rather than anything else. Statistically, it is still possible to see gender bias in some fields of science but there has been tremendous progress over the past 50 years that has accelerated in the last 20. The instances of women doing scientific work but not receiving appropriate credit are gone.  

The future health of the economy, both in the world and the US, is highly dependent on the innovations that come from the scientists and engineers among us. There needs to be a cultural inflection point toward viewing determination….thinking and acting for a longer term objective…as a positive attribute for more of our population. It would improve our capacity for scientific work and a lot of other endeavors as well.

 

Gleanings of the Week Ending January 28, 2012

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The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week:  

  • Psychology of Color infographic - Hmm…never paint a baby’s room yellow because it will cause them to cry more…other factoids. A snapshot (unreadable) version of the infographic is at right...follow the link to get more explanation and larger size (if it still isn't large enough on your monitor - click on the graphic to enlarge further)
  • Food Combining - for optimal health and weight - Goodbye meat and potatoes in the same meal (not a good combination). This article is an easy read with good embedded graphics. Maybe what we eat is not as bad as how we combine it?
  • 2011 was 9th warmest year on record - A video that shows global temps from 1884 to 2011 from NASA
  • Paper Models of Polyhedra - Wow…lots of shapes you can make with paper with templates to help you do it.
  • Smithsonian fire in January 1865 - report and pictures of the event…lessons from that fire applied to the restoration of the building and other museums.
  • Nutrient Lists - From the USDA Nutrient Data Laboratory. Lists of foods either alphabetically or sorted by content for common nutrients.
  • American Verse Project - An electronic archive of volumes of American poetry prior to 1920. If you are in the mood for poetry and don’t have a book already bought, this a great place to go.
  • The Digital Blue Ridge Parkway - Lots of photographs from during the Blue Ridge Parkway construction. This site is also an example of richness of presenting information digitally where it can be accessed from many perspectives rather than in book form.
  • Great Meals with Great Grains - a blog about using whole grains to ‘provide culinary excitement without hours of labor.’ I’ve tried amaranth, quinoa and rolled oats; maybe it’s time to try some others too.
  • How to store fruits and vegetables without plastic - A fact sheet from the Berkeley Farmers’ Market
  • Lisa Harouni: A primer on 3D printing (TED talk) - Is this the future for manufacturing in America?

 

A Surprise in Every Day

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The old proverb for physical health

'an apple a day keeps the doctor away'

has a parallel saying for creative/mental health which goes

'a surprise a day makes for an interesting life.'

What I mean by that is that if your life has a few things that are unexpected you will never be bored for long.  Make an effort to notice anything that is different than you expect. It will 

  • Increase your focus on the present
  • Prompt associations which lead to
    • Creative bursts - sometimes extreme
    • Memories of similar situations
    • Linkages that are new to you
  • Open another path into the future 

Here are a few of my recent 'surprises' - 

  • I discovered that the panel below the sink in my bathroom actually opens up and there is a bin there for toothpaste and other sundries. I’ve lived in the house for over 15 years and had never used it! I promptly put some things that had been on the counter into the new found space.
  • Chia seeds. I remembered the chia pets from years ago but was surprised when I read a about the seeds being edible and highly nutritious. I’m now trying a tablespoon a day for a month. The second surprise was how good they taste even just rehydrated in water. Will they work as a substitute for poppy seeds in muffins? Hmm…an experiment for another day.
  • At the grocery store I noticed that there were only 2 types of people shopping at mid-morning on a Friday: the group about my age that was leisurely shopping and parents with children that had come in for a single purpose. There were several surprises in that observation:
    • Why weren’t the children in school? (I found out later that it was a day off between quarters for some schools)
    • Are there more people like me (happily and newly free of the M-F work week) than I realized?
  • As I drove through the light rain this morning, I thought about how much like dusk is looked with the thick clouds and the trees in silhouette. The surprise as I scanned the scene was a hawk in the top of a tall tree. I’m happy that hawks are around in the area where I live; I enjoy having the rabbits, squirrels, and chipmunks too; it’s good to have the balance. 

Have your enjoyed your moments of serendipity today?