Month: July 2010

QOTD

All from Papa Hemingway – 1899 – 1961

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.

A writer’s problem does not change. It is always how to write
truly and having found out what is true to project it in such
a way that it becomes part of the experience of the person who reads it.

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?

Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how
justified, is not a crime.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel
good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

—————–

This made me think of my friend Azahar of  Casa Az and Azahar’s Sevilla fame.    She took and blogged about that little quiz “I Write Like” that’s so popular right now.  Apparently she writes like Stephen King.  I’ve always loved the way SK puts words together and the tone he achieves even if I don’t like the subject matter – and with Az I feel the same way except I generally like her subject matter.  I’m all about food and cats.    And technology.

Anyway, she’s good and always interesting to read.   So much so that she was invited to do a guest piece about tapas for Travel Intelligence which I quite enjoyed.  People who are going to Spain should read it and then call Azahar as soon as they step out of the plane.  Or sooner.   I’m plugging this because she is an undiscovered foreign food guide GEM whom I would look up and use the entire time I was in Seville if we ever go.  Her services are EXACTLY what I would want to use when absorbing a foreign culture via my taste buds.   I hope she builds a network of people who do what she does, and then I will travel around the world with the best food guides and experiences available.

Now that I’ve posted that, I hope she gives me a discount when we’re in Spain.   🙂

Miller Time

… or whatever the equivalent is in youthful celebration speak, because …. [sound trumpets]

My mother passed the Real Estate exam this week. First time.  Got the license printed on her birthday.  She is 76.

This, the studying and cramming and changing gears so radically this late in the game, is her reaction to getting her retirement benefits cut to nothing since  the company she worked for, some 20+ years, went broke and quit paying the promised, anticipated, and planned on retirement pay.

In between studying for the real estate license she applied for every job in her field and numerous others.

I’m so impressed with her I’m speechless, except –

Ma – Get a job already!

🙂

Wow.  As Mair said, “You da man, Mom!”

tweet

@gruber: If you think of it as a miracle that wireless networking works at all, AT&T is doing just fine.

Gawd, this made me lol.  No, really.  All my iPhone-loving buds curse AT&T while they simultaneously stroke their phones.  Me included.   If they think it’s painful now, wait until enough of the new iPhone users start making all those video calls.  Can  you say PAAAAAAAIN, PAAAAAAAIN?  (if you thought of Spock and the Horta there, extra points.)

Being in IT and all, I know that for most of us there are certain machines that are the proverbial “Black Box”  because they are not necessarily our area of focus.   And really, shouldn’t wireless networking be one of them?

S’up

For those of you playing along, here’s the score:

A young couple from a nearby town have put an offer in on our house.  We accepted.  It’s low, low, low, but we think the market is going to get worse before it gets better and it would be nice to sell this place while we still have some equity in it.  It was the only valid offer we’ve had in 6 months.  These kids are getting a GREAT deal.  Bob has taken exceptional care of the whole place for years.   And the peaches and nectarines will be ripe in a couple of weeks.   I hope they raise healthy, happy kids here.  It would be hard not to – this place is beautiful and safe and secure and snug.  But it’s in Bumfuck, Egypt.

Just in case the young couple’s loan doesn’t fall through, we’ve put an offer in on a cute little place in Sacramento, or, rather, one of the little burbs right outside it.  If this happens, I will have at most a 25 minute drive to work if the traffic is heavy.   The current commute is an hour one way IF there’s no traffic.  Two and a half hours was my record for a painful commute.   I will not miss that.  At all.

This has been a long 6 months, folks.  Having the threat of showing the house at any given moment meant it needed to be picked up, cleaned up, always tidy all the time.  Toilets and sinks sparkling.   I HATE having to constantly be this clean, and now I’m afraid it may have become a habit.  Feh.  We’re not showing it anymore and I’m still putting things away.  Life changing, I tell  ya.

I’m sure it’s a good thing, but being really messy is one of the basic components of my personality.  My parents called me Mess for years.   I don’t think they meant anything too bad by it, but I’d get going on some project for hours and then something else would get my attention and I’d drop everything and they’d come into the room and freak out over the gigantic mess I’d left in my wake.  Never, ever figured out how to clean up after myself adequately.   Until now.  Whew.  Old dog, new trick.

Mimi and Eunice

This is a bitchy little comic I’m enjoying.  It’s um, rather pointed in certain panels.  Most panels.


Check out this comic and more on mimiandeunice.com!


Check out this comic and more on mimiandeunice.com!

Also?  I do the last one on a regular basis, in between moments of forgetting other moments of really perceptive clarity.  I’m taking things in hand, though, and will attempt to write them down.  It’s only taken 30 or so years to figure out that I have these blinding flashes of understanding and that and forget them just as quickly, no matter how much I repeat them to myself in the moment.

Of course this will probably shake out a bit differently.  In my troubled youth I smoked a great deal of good weed during one of my experimental phases.  I thought the conversations and insights were brilliant during these trials but I couldn’t remember them.  One night I finally wrote one of the blinding flashes of insight on a piece of notepaper and put it where I’d see it the next day.

It read, “It sure is smoky in here.”

Kids, just say no.

Happy 4th of July

If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.
– Carl Rogers, 1902 -1987

When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default, it can never be recovered.
– Dorothy Thompson, 1893 – 1961

Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
– Thomas Paine, 1737 – 1809

What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1821 – 1881

We are now to rank among the nations of the world; but whether our Independence shall prove a blessing or a curse must depend upon our own wisdom or folly, virtue or wickedness…. Justice and virtue are the vital principles of republican government.
– George Mason, 1725 – 1792

If we confuse dissent with disloyalty — if we deny the right of the individual to be wrong, unpopular, eccentric or unorthodox — if we deny the essence of racial equality then hundreds of millions in Asia and Africa who are shopping about for a new allegiance will conclude that we are concerned to defend a myth and our present privileged status. Every act that denies or limits the freedom of the individual in this country costs us the … confidence of men and women who aspire to that freedom and independence of which we speak and for which our ancestors fought.
– Edward R. Murrow, 1908 – 1965

All from Van’s Quotes of the Day.  All subscription options (subscribing, unsubscribing, changing address, vacation stops) are available from the Quotes of the Day subscription page at http://www.qotd.org/subscribe.html.