The Perfect Follow-Up

July 29, 2013

Yesterday’s sermon was on how to pray, and the pastor touched a bit on what’s happening when your prayers aren’t answered (or so you perceive). 

My sister suggested that a good post-sermon hymn would have been the Rolling Stones’s “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

Count Them In?

July 30, 2013

The other day a forest ranger was describing how volunteers count butterflies on a certain weekend every year. She said that the event is set up to avoid, for the most part, counting the same butterfly twice.

I started wondering if Google Glasses might someday be programmed to notice the individual differences in each butterfly’s pattern, so that when a person spots a butterfly the image will immediately be sent to a database and the computer could tell automatically if that particular butterfly had already been spotted. It would sure take a lot of the guesswork out of the situation.

Maybe someday when I’m feeling energetic I’ll contact Google and suggest it.

The Inner Artist

July 29, 2013

If I could paint my visual migraines, I’d make a fortune. They have beautiful colors and interesting shapes, and they flash on and off…I really do wish I could record them, because they are very pretty.

What Did SHE Get Out of It?

July 29, 2013

I wonder if Salome ever said to her mother, “I could have had half of Herod’s kingdom, and you made me settle for this head!”

Life Imitates Art

July 12, 2013

A Boise summer is hot and dry. Period. No rain until at least September.

So last night we were watching an outdoor production of The Tempest and, as if the magic in the play had actually conjured up the rain, we got a few drops during the show.

That was an amateur production. Who knows what would have happened if it had been professional?

Defying Gravity

July 9, 2013

I love watching the skateboarders at the local park. Watching them defy gravity is good for what ails you.

(Like playing with kittens, except that you don't have to feed them or clean up after them.)

Holiday Humor

July 4, 2013

Isaac Asimov wrote a mystery story in which a man is unmasked as a Russian spy because he knew all 4 verses of "The Star Spangled Banner." No real American, contended the detective, knows more than one.

How far can you get?

A Morning Walk

July 1, 2013

I went for a walk this morning and saw a lone fuzzy duckling swimming in a pond. He was very nervous, and swam away from me as fast as he could. I’ve never seen a duckling move that fast. He was the duckling Olympian champion of swimming, and his stubby little wings were flapping like nobody’s business. He kept peeping, and I wondered why his mom didn’t hear him and come and get him. I hoped that by the time I came back around she’d have found him.

Farther along on the walk I saw two quail on the sidewalk. I hoped I’d get to see some babies and, sure enough, there was a swarm of them, each no bigger than a minute, which their parents herded under a bush. They are SO cute!

About the time I came back around to the spot where the duckling was, his mom flew in and splashed down. I was expecting some sort of ecstatic reunion, but she just stood on the bank and waited for him. I imagine that if she’d had arms, they would have been crossed in the universal Mom signal for, “Mister, you are in trouble this time!”

So he waddled out to meet her, and then they both got in the water and swam around, and he stuck close. Last I saw, it looked like maybe she was taking him back to the rest of the brood.

I love happy endings.