Brrr....and a movie review

These fisherman enjoying the last of the mild weather for January will probably not be on the pier this weekend...daughter and I just came back from errands - baby, it's cold out there. We just watched Water for Elephants - they did justice to the very good book by Sara Gruen (book was, of course, better) and the actor - the Twilight star guy - made you forget he was the Twilight star guy, said my daughter, and it was true - high praise indeed.

Sunday Quote

"My way of thinking is completely different," he says. "I have no such mountains to scale; basically, I find that living itself is a struggle, and if I'm satisfied, if I have just done that, lived well, in the evening I sigh and say, 'It was okay.'"

"Do you have bad days?"

"Yes, but it's important to put them in the perspective of insignificance. Even if you have achieved great things, it is a sort of theatre playing in your mind. You think it is so important, but actually you have not made a difference to anyone's life."

"So you're saying, Karma, that both our greatest achievements and our greatest failures are equally insignificant?"

"Yes. We like to think we really made a difference. Okay, in the week's scale it may have been interesting. Take another forty years, I'm not so sure. Take three generations, and you will be forgotten without a trace."

"And you find this a source of comfort? I find it terribly depressing."

"No, as we say in Buddhism, there is nothing greater than compassion. If you have done something good, then in the moment you should feel satisfaction. I used to kill many flies and mosquitoes every day because they give me some fear of malaria, but sometimes I don't do that. I have a moment of pause and think, 'Well, he is not harming me, not directly threatening me. He is defenseless. Why am I crushing it? So then I release it, and there is a moment - it is an insignificant act, I know - but there is a moment of genuine peace. I just let it go."

Conversation between Karma Ura and (author) Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss

Zen - the Detective on PBS

Watching the suave and debonair Zen on Masterpiece mystery PBS the other night and thinking how much is said through gesture, expression, the raised eyebrow, the curve of a mouth. So much is said without words and said so adroitly that it made me consider how I must dilute a lot of what I say with all my endless cha cha cha of words...how do gulls play into this thought? Well, they got very chatty later when an older woman threw bread from her car window in the parking lot by the water...and on such a pretty fake Spring day, I could not resist a swing by seaside after a slice of great Sicilian pizza at Pizza Centre (the best) with my man.

Why, Blogger, why

Having a rough enough day, why do you have to screw with the template thing? Do you want us all to migrate elsewhere? Like Wordpress?

that sort of day

Sunday Quote

Happy First Day of 2012 - a wonderful year ahead full of promise and hope.

What Santa does post-Christmas

The Bliss of Nothing

The brilliance of three days off post-Christmas. Day two finds me reading, scribbling, playing with new Christmas toys, cozy in my ridiculously cozy slippers and yoga pants and flannel as it drizzles in the gray outdoors, drinking dark magic coffee with a scoop of vanilla ice cream instead of milk...if I could I would purr.

Not a creature was stirring...except...

Tucker who was mighty sick of posing in his Santa costume. Merry Christmas to one and all!

The dog is afraid...

walking at night, some of these festive decorations seem a tad sinister, hmmmm....

Don't want this light bill

Every year we enjoy swinging by this house a half mile or so from ours and taking a gander at their ever-growing display (much more than I have portrayed here, half my photos came out blurry). The youngest, now 12, is so over the whole thing, so the 25 year old and I enjoyed it (she's getting old enough to get nostalgic!). Usually the joint is jumping but we went late on a Monday night and had it pretty much to ourselves.

Sunday Quote

Breath of Heaven Lighten my darkness
Pour over me your holiness
For you are holy
Breath of Heaven.

-Chris Eaton

O Christmas Tree

The more the years gather, the more bittersweet Christmas becomes...here's
a wee song that feels about right.

Lunch Story

Could have had lunch at my desk

but decided to go to Starlite and grab a special - half a turkey on rye sandwich with a cup of soup, tea, and the good company of the Beatles.

Took a stroll afterwards - nothing much to see in a winter gray small city. Just an angel,

soem beautiful decorative ledges (had to look up, always a good thing to do),


amazing the little details of even the most pedestrian things...


A lonely mannequin would agree perhaps...especially if he knew that

a friendly Western family was just a block away in another store front.




















maybe I just needed a sign



to tell me to look around for inspiration - like roses blooming in December.

Sunday Quote

Some good reds in the city and bad blogger

Some street shots from our small city, I like the pops of red - my favorite is the rusted red side of a large dumpster. Beauty everywhere.
And blogger is messing with the design sites so now the header photo will not adjust to the size of the header. All of this happened already when I tried to change up some stuff at my infrequently posted upon other blog, Library Mermaid, and really ruined the look of it. Growl. Blogger, why "fix" it if it ain't broke? Truly dislike their new template set-up. Anyone else using blogger having issues?
Well, I will grumble myself off to bed and try not to dream of technology run amok.

Back when - and blogger mystery

I must be the last person in the USA to not know that Ceelo's song "Forget You" is not really that F word. So much for that music in my car this morning on route to work. I only knew the Glee version which is not what comes out from my interlibrary-loaned Ceelo Green, The Lady Killer, cd I played (briefly) this morning. I ended up singing along to this song to recover.

Then onto here where my header photo is not the photo I thought was up, a cropped version of a mug on a quilt photo - at home on my computer, it is a closeup of the mug and a bit of the quilt and I think it is quite appealing. At work where I nearly never do a thing to my blog - it is the whole quilted mat in the slightly grimy storefront window, a quick snapshot in Edinburgh last summer. So - any blogger friends reading this - which picture do y'all see - the close-up one or the whole storefront one? And what weirds me out is how did blogger get the whole storefront one when the one I uploaded to blogger was my cropped and saved version? Can blogger go into your Kodak account and pull out random photos? Weird.

Oh, nostalgia, when you just played your radio and it was whatever came up - the best when a favorite song came up, when it was so rare to hear anyone swear on the street everybody would turn and look if somebody did, when stuff on tv before ten pm didn't make you have to tell the kids to leave the room, oh, yes, nostalgia Friday, my Dad should have lived long enough to see his youngest daughter going on like this, how he'd be laughing.

Paper Scotland

Here is the completed and wonderful story of intrigue and whimsy in Edinburgh, Scotland - was glad to see it updated by a FB friend. It's a rainy, wind-whipped night here (would be so much more romantic if same weather found me in Edinburgh but oh well, we bloom where we are planted).

the fog crept in ...

Sunday Quote

You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.

- Jeremiah 29:13