How Are You Doing?

 

What can I say? My hands are freezing, so I can hardly type. The heater hasn't chased the night chill out of my office yet—I don't know where it will go—it's beautifully sunny outside, so maybe the sun's warmth will soak it up.

 

Sweetpea is happy, though. She's under my desk with the heater. I've been watching the Discovery channel's documentary about The Alaska Bush People, and I think some of their weather drifted down here. Those Alaskan people, The Browns, lived in the bush, off the land, hunted, fished, slept in sleeping bags, on the ground, in make-shift huts, cut trees to make shelters, scavenged items from dumps, and finally got a house built. The next thing was to create a bed for the parents. (There are nine in the family—seven kids.) They hauled the bed, which weighed a half-ton, for it was made of logs, up to the second half-story, and who was the first to hop on the bed? The dog.

 

Those kids aged 12 to 32 are well-spoken, well-educated, hard-working, inventive, with definite personalities and playfulness. And all were home-schooled. They know how to hunt, fish, build inventions like smokehouses, elevators (for moving meat up a tree to keep it away from bears), and a clothes dryer. And they often recite poems at night under the glow of a campfire.

 

They do find they bump into modern conveniences once in a while when one gets sick or injured, and then, there is the challenge of finding a mate.

 

This contrasts with billionaires who live in palatial mansions with more conveniences you can shake a stick at. (Ode to my mother, I still wonder what “shake a stick at” means.) I'm not saying one is better than the other physically. Instead, I'm curious about values, morals, and living instead of existing.

 

Don't think I'm longing for Alaska, though. I prefer warm climates, although my hands are still blocks or ice.

 

We tried living off the grid once—it could work with a few more solar panels, and you don't take all your worries with you when you go.

 

You know, I've talked about our time on the Big Island in the book The Frog's Song by Joyce Davis. I still honor Jamie Royal, CEO of Regal Publishing, for feeling it worthy of publication. Only some people find it worth buying, though. I need to learn marketing—for, with excellent marketing, people will buy books worse than The Frog's Song. 

 

And this week, I'm gradually learning some of the intricacies of the computer, for a new Real Estate website has yet to be made live. And I've screwed up my laptop, removed plug-ins, jammed things up, and put them back—it works better now. So I figure it's the storm before the calm.

 

It will come together.

 

Tell me about your week.

 

 

"Breathe in the sweet air of limitless possibilities and make life as rich as you know it can be." 

 

Ah!

 

 

In Case You Missed It:

 Rude but funny.

 

You know what the most significant distraction for anyone who works on the computer is don't you? Of course, the Internet.  Yet it's fun to start the day with a chuckle.

 

From Jay Leno's Late night came this from a 100-year-old woman: 

Leno: "I heard you went to Universal Studios yesterday."

 

"Yes," she said, "the wind was blowing and I was wearing a skirt and holding onto my hat. 

 

"A young man came by," she said. He told her, "Lady, you better hold down your skirt. We can see everything you've got."

 

"Honey," she said, "everything I've got is 100 years old. But this is a new hat."

 

 

Here's a challenge:

 

Read the excerpt from the children's book, The Snail with a Right Heart, and not buy it.

 

I couldn't.

 

https://www.themarginalian.org/the-snail-with-the-right-heart/ 

 

 

 

With fascination, I read the lengthy excerpt of Maria Popoya's book printed in The Marginalian--biology, the origin of life, snail reproduction, and Jeremy, the snail with a shell coiled the opposite direction of most every other snail. And with his its internal organs opposite as well.

 

And then came a "but," and the excerpt ended.

 

What?

 

What happens next?

 

It's going to make me cry, I know it. 

 

The book is in the mail.

 

 

★ A Kirkus Best Book of 2021: A Best Informational Picture Book

★ A Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) Loveliest Children's Book of 2021

★ A Spirituality & Practice Best Spiritual Book of 2021

 

All of the author's proceeds will go to the Children's Heart Foundation, whose quarter-century devotion to funding research and scientific collaborations is shedding light on congenital heart conditions to help young humans with unusual hearts live longer, wider lives.

 

 

And on the home front--a friend who is cruising into a broken heart.

 

Take a lesson--don't get scammed by a promise of romance with sweet talk and I love you's from a chat room.

 

My husband says romance/money scams are a billion dollar business. And schools to teach the scammers how to prey on hopeful hearts.

 

Here's her story: He is (supposedly) off-shore on an oil drilling rig, and has mortgaged his home to invest in some scheme that will make him 9 million dollars, so he can retire in style.

 

He says he has a Scottish accent and immigrated to America with his father when he was 20. Our friend and he are only texting, no speaking, but have exchanged pictures.

 

He says he is off the shore of Louisiana, which would be in a 3-hour time zone from where she lives, yet their visits are 12 hours apart. Hum. What's wrong with this picture? Many things actually.

 

She's in love with him and thinks they're engaged. Yesterday he sent word was that there was an explosion on board the rig and financial loss. [Plus an Emoji sad face.]

 

The plot thickens.

 

The heart is a lonely hunter, someone said, and wrote a book by that title. Luckily, he's across the globe, and she's here, and she is holding onto her money with an iron fist.

 She could read a novel, but this is more fun.

  

“No man* knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains… [there is] a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence.”—G.K. Chesterton

Charlie

 I don't know why this impacted me so.

 

I've lost pets, and I've grieved over them. However, when I checked in again to www.dailycoyote.net. I was impacted a second time over the loss of Charlie, the coyote. And for Shreve Stockton, who is still grieving. 

 

Charlie was almost fourteen years old, a good age for a coyote, and he lived a happy life on the farm with Shreve, Mike, her partner, a hound dog named Chloe, and Eli, a tomcat. 

 

And I found that Shreve had taken a year off from writing. 

 

I have followed Shreve's site since reading her book, My Daily Coyote in 2009. She was riding a Vespa from San Francisco to New York when she stopped in Wyoming and found a home. She made it to New York but went back to Wyoming, where she fell in love with the land and a man. When her partner brought home an orphaned coyote pup after his mother had been shot for killing sheep, she had a family. That family expanded to another dog, two cats, numerous cows, and chickens. And the one coyote who entered the fray as one of the gang. 

 

Someone wrote that this story wouldn't have a happy ending. They thought the coyote would eat the cat and bite Shreve's face off while she slept, but Charlie cuddled with the cat and dog, and they frolicked and played together. When Charlie was sick, a magpie came to Shreve. As magpies were not familiar in that area, she felt it was Eli, who came to help Charlie transition to the other side, or maybe it was to help Shreve.

 

Over the years, I worried that he might get shot, but he lived to a good age and died of natural causes. The story ended sadly, but his legacy lives on, and his life was happy.

 

Thousands of people fell in love with Charlie. And a ten-day-old, eyes-not-yet open coyote pup became a phenomenon.

 

I thought of how we become embroiled in other people's lives, and although Charlie was a real flesh and blood animal, I only knew of him through Shreve's magic words and photos. She is an excellent photographer and began taking a picture a day of Charlie and sending them to friends who sent them to friends. And with the blog and a nod from Rosie O'Donnell, it got national attention. And I know Charlie and Shreve more intimately than some acquaintances in real life.

 

Fiction can be that way as well, for we know the characters in ways real people will not share. We know their thoughts and feelings. We ache with them, are embarrassed with them, and take joy in their joy. I remember reading that in England, when Jo, a character in the novel Little Women, died, the country went into mourning.

 

 

For a fun read, check out, A Journey into Inner Earth by jewell d on amazon.com

 

 

SCUBA, whales, a school bus, six kids, and a journey to the North Pacific and into a land inside the earth. (A review would be lovely.)

Maybe What We Need Now is A Course in Miracles.

 Tuesdays with Jo

All through Greece and Italy, my 13-year-old daughter kept saying, “I could be in A Course of Miracles.” (Never take a teenager traveling.)

I’m not going to say how many years ago that was. However, I will say that now my daughter is the finest traveling companion I could ever wish for. However, she was young then and had a boyfriend at A Course in Miracles meeting. (A little motivation there.)

A book titled A Course in Miracles was the rage then, and we were going to a weekly meeting by the same name. Mainly it was a sharing of what miracle we had that week. We would draw from the cards that accompany the book and read it to the group. We used those cards as an oracle. It was fun and a gathering of like-minded souls. We laughed a lot and got a lot of hugs, and it was a fun time.

Strange that I didn’t know who wrote A Course in Miracles.  the word around was that Marianne Williamson wrote it, but she didn’t, although she was strongly associated with it. I guess she was promoting it. And people said the writings in A Course in Miracles was “channeled.” 

The funny thing is it was written by two arguing Professors whose boss told them to get their act together. 

They were Helen Schucman and William Thetford, Professors of Medical Psychology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York.

Our copy of Miracles must have ended up at Good Will along with a stack of other books. You know how some things are pertinent in our lives, and then for whatever reason, they melt away. Maybe we’re fickle or looking for the next great thing to give us either an adrenaline jolt or a new perspective.

Helen Schucman, one of the authors, wrote this about herself:

 “Psychologist, educator, conservative in theory and atheistic in belief, I was working in a prestigious and highly academic setting. And then something happened that triggered a chain of events I could never have predicted. The head of my department unexpectedly announced that he was tired of the angry and aggressive feelings our attitudes reflected, and concluded that “there must be another way.” As if on cue, I agreed to help him find it. Apparently, this Course is the other way.”

This morning I received an email from Steven Pressfield (The War of Art) who said he had the book, A Course in Miracles in his library. It isn’t an easy book to read, Pressfield said, but it’s one we should have on our shelves to pick up on occasion.

Hey, it was written by Psychology professors—that should tell us something. But, wow, the hit that woman got. It shows what can happen when a person is determined. Reading it, one would think it came from a Christian perspective, but it was intended to be non sectarian and is considered to be a universal spiritual teaching.

Maybe I need it on my shelf again. No, actually, I need it in my heart and soul. Perhaps it’s what the world needs right now, A Course in Miracles.

 The first entry in the book:

1. This is a course in miracles. ²It is a required course. ³Only the time you take it is voluntary. ⁴Free will does not mean that you can establish the curriculum. ⁵It means only that you can elect what you want to take at a given time. ⁶The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. ⁷It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance. ⁸The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite. (ACIM, T-in.1:1-8)

I remember one Course in Miracles card: “Live forever, you holy son of God.” 

It sounded like you were swearing at the person when actually you were blessing them. I used to tell my dog Jewel that. 

If you’re interested in learning more or reading any part of the book, it is available for free at https://acim.org

I just bought a used copy.

Have You Ever Gotten Caught in "Click Bait?"

 I got caught this morning wanting to know why I should put my potatoes in the dishwasher. 

Well, after clicking through about 50 other Kitchen hacks—pretty good ones, I finally found the one I wanted. You can wash your vegetables in the dishwasher. 

I knew that. Yeah, I’ve heard you can cook a turkey in the dishwasher too, but I’ve never tried that. 

I thought I would find some esoteric reason that the dishwasher would remove harmful substances from my potatoes. 

Nope. Just wash them. That’s a waste of hot water and electricity.

You see, I have a history with potatoes. 

Long-time readers may have read that I killed my two darling hens a few years ago by feeding them potato skins. (A potato peeling will never pass my current chicken’s lips.) 

It broke my heart to see my two hens, both dead, the morning after I prepared a Thanksgiving dinner, and thought I was giving them a treat to offer potato peelings. 

I’m saying this to tell people, “NEVER GIVE YOUR CHICKENS POTATO SKINS.”

I have not purchased a Russet potato since—although I probably have in a restaurant. And I do love potatoes, and I don’t want to malign them, for you know they have saved many a society. (And The Martian.). After my chicken trauma, though, I purchase only red-skinned ones. 

First, I heard that red potatoes are not sprayed, and I seek out organic. Besides, red ones taste better, and I’ve found they work well with everything I want to prepare, including mashed potatoes. Thanksgiving mashed potatoes and turkey gravy is my once-a-year indulgence.

It could have been a spray that killed my hens, for I just bought a prepared bag of commercial potatoes, and I don’t know their origin.  I suspect, though, that the Solanine tuberosum, a glycoalkaloid poison found in some species of the nightshade family, esp. abundant in potato skins, was the culprit.

Potato skins contain the same substance that poisoned Chris McCandless, the young man who went into the wilderness to live off the land and died there. (His diary stated he had eaten a poisonous plant.)

I know we have all eaten potatoes, and stuffed potato skins are delicious. If we suffered any side effects, we don’t know about them. People can tolerate larger amounts than can chickens/birds, and our potatoes are normally cooked which largely renders the poison harmless.  

Ronald Hamilton posted a paper on the Internet that brings new facts to Chris’s demise. Hamilton, it turns out, discovered evidence that closed the book on McCandless’s death.

To appreciate the brilliance of Hamilton’s investigative work, some backstory is helpful. 

McCandless’s diary indicated that beginning on June 24, 1992, the roots of the Hedysarum alpinum plant became a staple of his daily diet. On July 14, he started harvesting and eating Hedysarum alpinum seeds as well. One of his photos depicts a one-gallon Ziploc bag stuffed with these seeds. When Hamilton visited the McCandless’s home, an old school bus, in July 1993, he wrote that wild potato plants were growing everywhere. He filled a one-gallon bag with more than a pound of seeds in less than thirty minutes.

The movie, Into the Wild tells Chris’s story.

To end on a happy note: I never thought when I was growing up on a farm that chickens could be such fun. 

My dear son-in-law and grandson moved my little chicken house into the backyard. Hubby and I replaced the roof and shingled it with leftover shingles I found at Habitat for Humanity’s sales outlet. I stained the siding Cedar red and painted the trim green. Now it looks cute, and I can see it from the kitchen window. No more leaving chickens in the Wayback as fodder for the raccoon. All four chickens love being freed into the backyard. They talk to me and let me touch them. Blackie has shown them the pleasure of the shade under the lilac bush and the dust baths she has prepared. 

 

 

The first episode of my novel Song of Africa, is available on Kindle Vella#. The first three episodes are FREE. After than tokens are required for further reading.this was Kindle’s brilliant idea, for people like to read segments, and this gives a feeling for the book, and gives the reader the opportunity to keep reading or not.

Be the first to click  RAVE, or read, and please follow. I'd love it. My mom would love it, my cat would love it--the chickens would be so so.

I better get crackin’ onto Episode 2.

 https://www.amazon.com/kindle-vella/story/B09946NSS6