movin’ on – New Blog
Visit me at my ‘new’ blog – still aimless – but purposeful.
the pumpkins are here!
The Pumpkin Patch Fundraisers began more than thirty years ago. A farmer with some pumpkins, Richard Hamby, met a minister with a need for funds. The farmer agreed to let the church sell the pumpkins and they would share the proceeds. There was no contract, no legal proceedings, just a handshake and trust in each other. Thirty-one years later, while the minister has moved on and the congregation has changed, that church is still doing a Pumpkin Patch every October to fund their programs.
The pumpkins are raised on the Navajo Reservation in the Four Corners area of New Mexico.
death came a knockin’
Elizabeth Caldwell Coslett
March 15, 1918
September 27, 1980
the multigraph
The multigraph was a printing machine designed by typewriter salesman Harry C. Gammeter in 1902. The machine was so popular that parts were still being sold in 1965.
GAMMETER, HARRY C. (ca. 1870-11 Apr. 1937), the inventor of the modern multigraph and one of the founders the American Multigraph Co., was one of 8 children. Although little is known of his early life, as an adult he worked as a sales engineer for the United Typewriter and Supply Co. of Louisville, Kentucky. On a sales trip to Cleveland he observed a stenographer endlessly copying circular letters and wondered if was possible devise a machine that would print a complete line or page of type with a single stroke. In 1900, he built a crude model of such a machine, demonstrating its feasibility to Clevelander Henry C. Osborn of the Osborn-Morgan Co. consulting engineers. Osborn designed, produced, and financed a duplicating machine based on the rotary drum principle which was patented 10 March 1903.
In the meantime, Gammeter and Osborne had organized the American Multigraph Company in 1902, manufacturing the machine in a small unsightly one-story wooden structure at E. 40th St. and Kelley Ave. Gammeter’s duplicator, often referred to as the “waffle iron,” evolved into a broad line of sophisticated multigraph equipment. Soon after the company was founded Gammeter’s health began to fail, and in an effort to recover, he developed Green Springs, Ohio as a health spa, while maintaining his residence in Cleveland Heights.
Gammeter was married to Maude Fry, and they had two children, Electa and Harry F. He died in Cleveland at age 67 and was buried in Green Springs.
a prayer
A Prayer
by Max Ehrmann
Let me do my work each day; and if the darkened hours of despair
overcome me, may I not forget the strength that comforted me
in the desolation of other times.
May I still remember the bright hours that found me walking over
the silent hills of my childhood, or dreaming on the margin of a quiet
river, when a light glowed within me, and I promised my early God
to have courage amid the tempests of the changing years.
Spare me from bitterness and from the sharp passions of unguarded
moments. May I not forget that poverty and riches are of the spirit.
Though the world knows me not, may my thoughts and actions be
such as shall keep me friendly with myself.
Lift up my eyes from the earth, and let me not forget the uses of the
stars. Forbid that I should judge others lest I condemn myself.
Let me not follow the clamor of the world, but walk calmly in my
path.
Give me a few friends who will love me for what I am; and keep ever
burning before my vagrant steps the kindly light of hope.
And though age and infirmity overtake me, and I come not within
sight of the castle of my dreams, teach me still to be thankful for
life, and for time’s olden memories that are good and sweet; and
may the evening’s twilight find me gentle still.
you are in for a Real Treat
if you read this delightful book!
David Wroblewski (author of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle) writes on the jacket of the book:
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt is a gorgeous, wise, riveting work of, among other things, cowboy noir. Comic, too, but of a species that arrives bearing a scorpion’s stinger. You smile, then you wince, then you turn the page to find out what happens next, happily disarmed all the while by the voice of Eli Sisters as he puzzles his way back to humanity. Honestly, I can’t recall ever being this fond of a pair of psychopaths.
I was sitting outside the Commodore’s mansion, waiting for my brother Charlie to come out with news of the job. It was threatening to snow and I was cold and for want of something to do, I studied Charlie’s new horse, Nimble. My new horse was called Tub. We did not believe in naming horses but they were given to us as partial payment for the last job with the names intact, so that was that. Our unnamed previous horses had been immolated, so it was not as though we did not need these new ones but I felt we should have been given money to purchase horses of our own choosing, horses without histories and habits and names they expected to be addressed by. I was very fond of my previous horse and lately had been experiencing visions while I slept of his death, his kicking, burning legs, his hot-popping eyeballs. He could cover sixty miles in a day like a gust of wind and I never laid a hand on him except to stroke him or clean him, and I tried not to think of him burning up in that barn but if the vision arrived uninvited how was I to guard against it? Tub was a healthy enough animal but would have been better suited to some other, less ambitious owner. He was portly and low-backed and could not travel more than fifty miles in a day. I was often forced to whip him, which some men do not mind doing and which in fact some enjoy doing, but which I did not like to do; and afterward, he, Tub, believed me cruel and thought to himself, Sad life, sad life.
The first paragraph of Patrick deWitt’s novel, The Sisters Brothers.
six legged zombi maker
Insects are even teaching us about mind control, and maybe even about consciousness itself. A tiny wasp called the emerald cockroach wasp can do what many renters cannot: direct the movements of a cockroach. The wasp does this not to rid a kitchen of scuttling invaders but to feed her brood. Many wasps provision their young by paralyzing other insects or spiders and carrying them back to the wasp’s nest. The paralysis, as opposed to out and out killing of the prey, helps the prey stay fresh while the young wasp larva feasts on the flesh. Of course, paralyzed insects can’t put themselves into the nest, so the wasp usually has to do all the heavy lifting, staggering under the weight of her groceries as she flies back to her young. Except, that is, in the case of the jewel wasp, so named for the glittery emerald sheen of her exoskeleton. The female wasp doesn’t send the roach into an immobile stupor; instead, she makes it into a zombie via a judicious sting inside the roach’s head, so that its nervous system, and legs, still function well enough to allow it to walk on its own. Then, as science writer Carl Zimmer describes, ‘The wasp takes hold of one of the roach’s antennae and leads it, like a dog on a leash, to its doom’
Source: Delancey Place, quote from Sex on Six Legs by Marlene Zuk
let us once more praise the rain
by Conrad Aiken
Let us discover some new alphabet,
For this, the often praised; and be ourselves,
The rain, the chickweed, and the burdock leaf,
The green-white privet flower, the spotted stone,
And all that welcomes the rain; the sparrow too,—
Who watches with a hard eye from seclusion,
Beneath the elm-tree bough, till rain is done.
There is an oriole who, upside down,
Hangs at his nest, and flicks an orange wing,—
Under a tree as dead and still as lead;
There is a single leaf, in all this heaven
Of leaves, which rain has loosened from its twig:
The stem breaks, and it falls, but it is caught
Upon a sister leaf, and thus she hangs;
There is an acorn cup, beside a mushroom
Which catches three drops from the stooping cloud.
The timid bee goes back to the hive; the fly
Under the broad leaf of the hollyhock
Perpends stupid with cold; the raindark snail
Surveys the wet world from a watery stone…
And still the syllables of water whisper:
The wheel of cloud whirs slowly: while we wait
In the dark room; and in your heart I find
One silver raindrop,—on a hawthorn leaf,—
Orion in a cobweb, and the World.
unknown realms
Some things cannot be spoken or discovered until we have been stuck, incapacitated, or blown off course for awhile. Plain sailing is pleasant, but you are not going to explore many unknown realms that way.
David Whyte
each day is a miracle
People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.
― Thich Nhat Hanh
even with the garbage can in the foreground - what a lovely sight
different styles
There are so many different kinds of writing and so many ways to work that the only rule is this: do what works. Almost everything has been tried and found to succeed for somebody. The methods, even the ideas of successful writers contradict each other in a most heartening way, and the only element I find common to all successful writers is persistence-an overwhelming determination to succeed.
— Sophy Burnham
How long has this been going on?
She has been described as a ‘musician’s musician.’
One of the more impressive jazz singers to emerge in the ’90s, Karrin Allyson is a great scat singer but also highly expressive on ballads. Born in Great Bend, KS, Allyson grew up in Omaha, NE, and the San Francisco Bay Area — during which time she began taking classical piano lessons, in addition to performing as a folk singer and in an all-female rock band, Tomboy. Upon graduating from the University of Nebraska in 1987 (and receiving a degree in piano), Allyson sang regularly at a Kansas City nightclub owned by her uncle, a locale where Allyson decided to settle down and call her permanent home base. Signed to the Concord Jazz label, in 1992 Allyson issued her debut, I Didn’t Know About You, which led to such accolades as being name-checked in Playboy’s Annual Reader’s Poll alongside such greats as Ella Fitzgerald and Shirley Horn. Subsequently, Allyson assembled a fine backing band consisting of fellow Kansas City musicians: pianist Paul Smith, guitarists Danny Embrey and Rod Fleeman, bassist Bob Bowman, and drummer Todd Strait, who have played on the majority of her recordings.
source: New Music
a good system!
Thank you, Lord!
read a banned book!
How many banned or challenged books have you read?
The ones in color are the ones I’ve read and some I want to read again! In addition, I want to read some for the first time (The Awakening has been on my To Read List for years, for example).
1. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses, by James Joyce
7. Beloved, by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
9. 1984, by George Orwell
11. Lolita, by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
15. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
23. Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son, by Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
33. The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
36. Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin
38. All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren
40. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
45. The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair
48. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D.H. Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
50. The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
53. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
55. The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie
57. Sophie’s Choice, by William Styron
64. Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Lawrence
66. Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
67. A Separate Peace, by John Knowles
73. Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs
74. Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
75. Women in Love, by D.H. Lawrence
80. The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
84. Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
88. An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser
97. Rabbit, Run, by John Updike
my senior moments
aren’t as bad as I thought they were!
When the famously distracted Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős met a colleague at a conference, Erdos asked the other man where he was from. “Vancouver,” he replied, “Oh, then you must know my good friend Elliot Mendelson,” Erdős remarked. His colleague gave him a funny look. “I am your good friend Elliot Mendelson!”
– Tom Friedman, 1,000 unforgettable Senior Moments
Grace
attentiveness
It is this simple
aimless - 2011 - with purpose 