New Art...

New photographs on the Photography Arts page and a couple of new canvases on New Art page!!

For Juliette

10 Thoughts of the Day

1.  I'm ready for March Madness to be over...does anybody care who wins anymore?
2.  I'd rather watch UConn women play anyway.
3.  I want to plant flowers but it was in the 30's last night.
4.  I can't wait to eat grilled fresh veggies every night.
5.  I'm SO looking forward to the first homegrown heirloom tomato of the season.
6.  When is the beach trip?
7.  It's camping weather...maybe next weekend?
8.  I think we need to crank up the boat and go fishing this week.
9.  None of my thoughts involve cleaning the house....hmmmmm...
10.  Must be spring.

Zyrtec, anyone?

I have a love-hate relationship with pollen.

First let me say that I love spring.  It's my favorite time of year.  When things just start turning green, the first daffodils begin to appear and forsythia bushes everywhere just burst with their yellow flowers, I absolutely love living in the South.  The birds won't leave me alone on the deck and my indoor dogs just want to lie in the yard and let the wind blow gently over them.

BUT.

Everything is yellow already.  The deck, my car, the outdoor furniture, EVERYTHING is yellow.  I can't touch anything or sit anywhere without wearing it.  My eyes itch and my throat is scratchy.  I feel like I have a sinus infection but I know it's just the pollen.  Even the dogs are transporting it when they come back inside.

Don't get me wrong.  I majored in Biology, and I completely understand the necessity of pollen.  It contains the sperm nuclei necessary for the continuation of the species that I love.  This green color all around me, the trees I would miss so much if I lived anywhere else in the world, none of them would be able to reproduce without the nasty yellow stuff covering everything I own.

However, I do feel that 3939 on a scale of, oh I don't know, 1-1500, seems a tiny bit excessive, don't you think??  I'm not making that number up; according to AtlantaAllergy.com, the pollen count for March 24, 2011 is really 3939.  Anything above 1500 is considered extremely high.  But 3939??  That's just crazy.

We have oak, birch, sweetgum, and mulberry primarily to thank for this yellow-tinted world we're living in right now.  But if you think about it, the alternative is dessert, and I'll take whatever causes my world to be green anytime.  And it won't last forever.

Soon it will be time for flower pollen instead!

Scattered, smothered, covered?

You know the best thing about a Waffle House?

I think it's the vanilla cokes.  They almost taste like the old-fashioned vanilla cokes from the drug store in Tullahoma, Tennessee across the street from the Methodist church downtown.  I can (or I think I can) remember having them after church at the soda fountain on Sundays.

Actually, maybe it's the chocolate ice box pie.  My daddy would stop and get me a slice while he sipped his coffee.  This was when I went with him while he worked for Southern Wholesalers. We drove all over Tennessee (or it seemed like it to this 5-year old) as he called on customers.

Or maybe it's the memories of going there really, really early in the morning after staying out really, really late at night.  Sitting there drinking coffee and eating waffles and bacon at 4 in the morning laughing with college friends who know way too much about you but can't tell those stories 'cause they know you know way too much about them.

Then again, the best thing might be going there when you are finally working for a living, making your own money and struggling to pay your meager bills (they seemed awfully big back then, didn't they?) and knowing you can afford to go to Waffle House when you can't afford much else.

No, I think the best times at Waffle House had to be when the kids were really young and you went there after church, waiting with everybody else in the chairs on the side, drinking coffee and wishing those people would hurry and eat those eggs and empty that booth by the window in front.

Could it be the times you went there with minivans and SUV's full of kids after their soccer games (or baseball, football, etc....) and let them eat and laugh and forget the score (and loosen the salt shakers when you weren't looking?)

I'm thinking that maybe the best thing about Waffle House is knowing that no matter where you're going when you visit your grandchildren, if you drive along any interstate in this country there's going to be a WH at the next exit, if nothing else.

I guess I really don't know why Waffle House is special to me.  I'm not even sure it has anything to do with the food.

This is what I do know.  A lot of my favorite memories have a Waffle House somewhere in the background.  And I really do like their vanilla cokes.

The Big Oak

Sometime around 1680 in the plantation town of Thomasville, Georgia, a tiny acorn germinated into a a tiny oak seedling. Since that time it's been growing.  A lot.  In case you can't read the fine print in the photo below, the Big Oak (talk about understatements) stands at 68 feet tall.  That's impressive, but it isn't what makes the big oak the Big Oak.

The trunk's circumference is 24 feet.









This unretouched photo doesn't do it justice, but it does show the size of an SUV compared to the live oak.











The city of Thomasville is trying to make its citizens aware of the importance of staying off the tree branches, which touch the ground in many places.

(MANY places, since the branches spread 162 feet!!)

Apparently, though, no one told this squirrel about staying off the branches!

 So if you are lucky enough to find yourself in Thomasville, Georgia, take yourself to the corner of Crawford and Monroe Streets.  You'll find the tree.  I guarantee it.

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Today is the birthday of one of the most important people ever to appear on television.

Born in 1928 in Pennsylvania, Fred McFeely Rogers grew up to entertain millions of children while hosting his "neighborhood" for more than thirty years.  I watched him as a child and as a parent.  Who among us doesn't remember Daniel Striped Tiger, X the Owl, and Henrietta Pussycat?

Mr. Roger's Neighborhood began on PBS in 1968.  Not much changed over the thirty years it aired.  Mr. Rogers came home, put on his sweater, changed into his sneakers, fed his fish, and sang songs he composed himself. Some days he showed us videos of how things worked or how they were made. Other days we visited with the neighborhood mailman.  We went with Trolley to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe to visit the King and Queen and their friends. We listened while Mr. Rogers and his friends explained that it was normal to be scared sometimes but that bad things weren't going to happen to us.  Going to school the first day might be scary, but we would have nice teachers and learn lots of fun things.  We might be afraid if we had to go to the hospital, but the nice doctors and nurses there would make us feel much better.  Sometimes people might hurt our feelings and make us cry, but those people didn't really mean to make us sad, and we were perfect just the way we were.  He talked to us in child-like terms, but he never talked down to us.  He was the rational, soft-spoken adult who understood how important it was to make children feel special.  He wanted to make us feel better about ourselves. Mr. Rogers wanted us all to know we were loved.

Fred Rogers, musician, puppeteer, minister, TV personality, child advocate, and all-around nice man, would have been 83 today.  Sadly, shortly after retiring from television, Mr. Rogers was diagnosed with stomach cancer and died in 2003.

So today, if the weather is chilly where you live, pull out your favorite cardigan and your best sneakers, feed your fish, and remember that a simple man cared about your feelings.  And pay it forward.

Because this is what I know.  We could use someone that genuine in our lives today.  And so could our children.

Co-inky-dink, anyone?

How do you feel about coincidences? Serendipity, fate, destiny, whatever you call it, you know what I'm talking about--those events that occur which are totally independent of one another, yet are seemingly connected in some way.  


Here's an example:  Mark Twain was born on the day of the appearance of Halley's Comet in 1835, and died on the day of its next appearance in 1910. He himself predicted this in 1909, when he said: "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it." 


My favorite is this little known fact: In Psalm 46 of the King James Bible, published in the year that Shakespeare turned 46, the 46th word is "shake" and the 46th word from the end is "spear." (Really??  Who, pray tell, noticed this?)


This is what I know...whether you believe in the power of these accidents of nature or not,  many of the remarkable feats our brains regularly perform--including our ability to learn the meaning of words or decode the many mathematical equations necessary for survival in today's world--depend on our ability to notice coincidences. 


That, and they're just really fun. 
(Like physics...)

Physics is Phun! (really...)

I am retired. It's kind of like a never-ending weekend.  I don't know the date.  (Sometimes I'm not even sure what day it is!)  But I taught high school for 30 years--biology for a bunch of years and physics for the last several.

I'm telling you this because I love physics. Physics explains the world.  It's the rules of nature.  It's the why and the how.  I love that.

You might think it would take away the magic and wonder of a rainbow to know that it's only refraction and diffraction of light.  Or that you could no longer enjoy the magnificence of voices raised together in song if you understood the way pitch works together with resonance to cause air particles to vibrate your eardrum.  But I've always believed it's easier to appreciate things if you know how they work.  I think I see the beauty even more.  To borrow from Paul Hewitt, one physics guru, richness in life is not only seeing the world with wide open eyes, but knowing what to look for.

Here are some really, really cool physics phacts:
-Ignoring air resistance, a bullet fired from a gun and a bullet dropped at exactly the same time from the same height will hit the ground at EXACTLY the same time. (The horizontal component and vertical component of a projectile are independent of each other, and the vertical acceleration of each bullet is due to gravity, pulling each bullet down equally!)
-Centripetal force keeps an object moving in a circle, while the absence of force causes an object to leave that circle.  (When I was in high school, I was taught that centrifugal force did this...but now I know it's the object's own inertia that makes it move off in a straight line path!)
-If you get a cup of coffee to go and you like cream, you should put the cream in before you leave the restaurant to keep it hot; if you wait until you get to work to add the cream, the coffee will have cooled off even more and you'll have lukewarm coffee!
-A large lake will never freeze. (4 degree C water is more dense than any other water, so it sinks under the warmer water.  The entire lake would have to reach 4 degrees before any of the water could eventually reach 0 degrees and freeze.)
-Winds blow off the ocean toward the shore during the day, but off the shore and toward the water at night. (Convection currents are produced by uneven heating and cooling...the land is warmer than the water in the day and cooler than the water at night, so the direction of air flow reverses from day to night!)

Okay.  I hear some of you leaving.  Sorry, but I really, really love physics.  And I think if you could go back and do it again, you would too!

Physics is Phun!!!

The art of saying nothing

Sometimes it is important to say nothing.

I didn't say do nothing.  There's a difference.

Saying nothing is truly an art.  Not everyone can do it.  Try it for 10 minutes.  Be alone with yourself.  Listen to your breathing, your heartbeat, the voices in your head.  Meditate.

How does it feel?

You can use this technique when you're stressed, when you're too tired to sleep, or when you can't think because your life is so hectic.  Maybe your boss has added one more item for you to complete before your day is done.  Maybe your kids have you going in ten different directions at once, or maybe you find yourself wondering what you should do first from one of your never-ending to do lists.  Stop.  Say nothing.  Breathe.

You can do this when you're alone or when you're in the middle of a crowd.

It might just keep you from saying something.  And saying nothing is sometimes a really good thing.

It's an art.

Bracelets we make!!
These are a few of the designs we've done.

Day One

Is it possible to grow old gracefully?  

I've heard that phrase used several times, but what exactly does it mean?  Does it mean that you've accepted the idea of being old?  That you've decided not to make a fuss?  That you're too nice to put up a fight, so you've quietly realized that the world can and will go on without you?

Well this is what I know.  

Old is experienced, informed, and important.  Old knows the stories.  It knows the recipes.  It remembers the past.  

Old.  I'm not there yet, but I'm on my way.  And I've never been called graceful.

And that's okay with me.