It's a Zoo Around Here

While demolition is fun, restoration is not.

In the middle of the night when my brain monitor is off, the immensity of the yard job ahead plagues me. Remember the tractor fun we had in the yard? Now it’s a mess.

Sleep experts say that as we sleep our brain monitor turns off. That turn off gives our primitive brain a chance to plays games with us.

Hum.

Experts tell us all sorts of things.  The other night  I watched a Bible scholar explain the four ways Jesus got to be God. And that his own disciples didn’t know who in the heck he was.  Was He always God?  Is He separate from the Father? Are He and the Father one? How then, can he pray to the father? (Intuition?) Was he “adopted?” Did he claim it?

It’s enough to scramble one’s brain.

And it did scramble a lot of brains until one old Emperor got tired of all the squabbling and declared one aspect to be right. The Trinity won out. Three in one, that can really scramble the brain.

And of course, there was the Council of Nicea who decided which books were inspired by God and therefore deserved to be in the Bible.

I bet there was a lot of arguing there.

I am feeling overwhelmed.  One aspect is the torn up yard where my back looks at it and says, “Don’t dig.” But that (front) yard has become an embarrassment. My daughter said yesterday, “Only now?”

“Well, the first week it was construction. Now it’s a mess.”

And yesterday I found that some thief had transferred $2,200 out of our checking account, and it took all afternoon with me in the Bank and the Banker on the phone to the Fraud Department to clean up the mess. Now we have a new account, and that means I need to reschedule all the automatic additions and subtractions, and I’m leery about going online, and about the security of the Bank.

Confession is good for the soul, so they say.

My other site “Brunch for the Soul,” is gone, kaput. I figured it was too sweet for someone with an edge such as I have.

I changed that site to Plot Twist 747. I figured since I was all over the place I might as well declare it.

And 747?  Well, that’s a fast plot twist. (Think Boeing 747.) Besides, I couldn’t get the simple name of “Plot Twist,” as a domain.

And I turn around and hear a “Cluck cluck.” The hen followed Lafayette, the dog, into the house.

Lafayette can push open the back door, and the hen rides shotgun, entering on his heels.

And how is it at your house?

Carry on.

Keep the faith.

Joyce

 PS. I purchased the wine glass, so I ought to use it. I thought it was cool that you can see through the glass to whatever background is behind it. My background is a simple swiping of watercolors. One way to get my favorite colors. http://www.plottwist747.com

Why Do We Like to Watch Train Wrecks?

Train wrecks are exciting. They’re dramatic. They get the adrenaline flowing.

 Sports events,  Rodeos, Bungee jumping, Parachute rides. Wow, jumping out of airplanes. Well, I rode horses, that can be dangerous too, and I have scars to prove it. 

When I complain to my grandson that there is a lot of fighting on video games he says without it nothing would happen. 

Well, crumb.

It’s a temptation to write about tragedy. Why do you think the motto of journalists is “If it bleeds, it leads?” 

It gets attention.

A blog or so ago, I mentioned the song How Great Thou Art and how rousing it is. Rock and roll has it’s inception in gospel music—those writers were no dummies.

Think of the old tent revival meetings, without rousing music those meetings would be droll. Well, I guess threatening the congregation with Hellfire and Brimstone had its effect too.

No Hellfire or Brimstone here, but I’ve known some train wrecks in my day.

They sneak up on you, sometimes don’t they?

And while those train wrecks get the adrenaline surging, which we want, the train wreck we don’t want. 

We want to be Superman.

Or Wonder Woman.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51137764

Put on your bracelets.

Get ready to rock.

One Sure-fire Way to Get Smarter

Read more books.

Wait, here I have to vent here or a lump will stay stuck in my craw.

That lump is the statement from people who say they only read non-fiction.

And there I am, a person awaiting the publication of my own non-fiction book.

Don’t get me wrong, non-fiction can carry you to heights unknown, but fiction? Fiction will carry you to the Universe and Beyond.

Fiction will teach you ways you won’t know until years later when some thought will come zinging in like one of Zeus's lightning bolts.

One aside is that many of the most respected entrepreneurs -- from Bill Gates to Elon Musk -- are voracious readers.

PBS just announced a new TV series called The Great American Read.

 The series celebrates what PBS has deemed America's 100 favorite novels.

To select the top 100 novels, PBS polled thousands of people and asked them to name their favorite novel. 

Then, PBS pulled in 13 literary professionals to cull down the list according to a few criteria. Each author got only one book for the list. Series such as  Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings counted as one book.

Books could come from anyplace in the world and any time-frame, but they had to be fiction, and written in English.

 It’s fun to troll through the list and see how many you have read, how many you want to read, and how many you say, “Nope, I’ll pass on that one.”

Here's the final list of America's 100 best-loved novels:

• 1984, by George Orwell

• A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole

• A Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin

• A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving

• A Separate Peace, by John Knowles

• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith

• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain

• The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho

• Alex Cross Mysteries (series), by James Patterson

• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
• Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

• And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie

• Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Maud Montgomery

• Another Country, by James Baldwin

• Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

• Beloved, by Toni Morrison

• Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya

• The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak

• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz

• The Call of the Wild, by Jack London

• Catch-22, by Joseph Heller

• The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D.Salinger

• Charlotte's Web, by E.B. White

• The Chronicles of Narnia (series), by C.S. Lewis

• The Clan of the Cave Bear, by Jean M. Auel

• The Coldest Winter Ever, by Sister Souljah

• The Color Purple, by Alice Walker

• The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas

• Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

• The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown

• Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes

• Doña Barbara, by Rómulo Gallegos

• Dune, by Frank Herbert

• Fifty Shades of Grey, by E.L. James

• Flowers in the Attic, by V. C. Andrews

• Foundation, by Isaac Asimov

• Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley

• Ghost, by Jason Reynolds

• Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

• The Giver, by Lois Lowry

• The Godfather, by Mario Puzo

• Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn

• Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell

• The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck

• Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

• The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

• Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift

• The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood

• Harry Potter (series), by J.K. Rowling

• Hatchet, by Gary Paulsen

• Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

• The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

• The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

• The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy

• The Intuitionist, by Colson Whitehead

• Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison

• Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë

• The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan

• Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton

• Left Behind, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins

• The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

• Little Women, by Louise May Alcott

• Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry

• Looking for Alaska, by John Green

• The Lord of the Rings (series), by J.R.R. Tolkien

• The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold

• The Martian, by Andy Weir

• Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden

• Mind Invaders, by Dave Hunt

• Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

• The Notebook, by Nicholas Sparks

• One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez

• Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon

• The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton

• The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

• The Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan

• The Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett

• Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

• Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline

• Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier

• The Shack, by William P. Young

• Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse

• The Sirens of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut

• The Stand, by Stephen King

• The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway

• Swan Song, by Robert R. McCammon

• Tales of the City, by Armistead Maupin

• Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston

• Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe

• This Present Darkness, by Frank E. Peretti

• To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

• Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer

• War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

• Watchers, by Dean Koontz

• The Wheel of Time (series), by Robert Jordan

• Where the Red Fern Grows, by Wilson Rawls

• White Teeth, by Zadie Smith

• Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë

I'm shocked that none of Ray Bradbury's books were listed. and I would think that Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray Love would beat out Fifty Shades of Gray, but what do I know, sex sells. The list was called The most favorite, not the best novels. 

Some of my personal favorites are: Illusions by Richard Bach, The Color of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Oh, it was not written in English). Was Don Quioxite? (I do believe that was written in Spanish and translated.) The Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilscher, and my childhood favorite The Black Stallion by Walter Farley.

What are yours?

From my pen to your eyeballs. Thanks for reading,

Joyce

PS. A comment from an eighty-something lady: “I don’t read fiction because I will get so engrossed it will keep me up all night.”

Whoa!

PPS.

Muriel Spark on writing: “If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially on some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work… the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle under the desk lamp…And the tranquillity of the cat will gradually come to affect you sitting there at your desk. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable and very mysterious.’ 

*From her character Mrs. Hawkins in A Far Cry from Kensington.)

Three minutes ago:

PPPS. There is some explanation on https://www.brunchforthesoul.com Give it a Look-see if you are so inclined. I am going to publish fresh material on that site. Ta Da.