Loose Leaf Notes

1. “The squeaky wheel often needs new bearings.”  -  My Dharmacratic friend, Will.

2. Someone last week said they liked the “randomocity” of my 13 Thursday lists. Intrigued, I looked up the word and found randomocity blogs, Facebook pages and a record company, but no sign of the word in the dictionary.

3. The internal landscape is a good place to visit. There’s always something there I haven’t seen before. ~ Found in one of my old journals from 2000.

4. The term “fossil fuels” is not a metaphor or a simile. In the geological sense, it’s over. The internal combustion engine is so 20th Century. Now we can either shift away from a carbon-based economy, or find another place to live. Imagine it: we raised you on a lie. Everything you plug in, turn on or drive, the out-of-season foods you eat, the music in your ears. We gave you this world and promised you could keep it running on: a fossil substance. Dinosaur slime, and it’s running out. The geologists only disagree on how much is left, and the climate scientists are now saying they’re sorry but that’s not even the point. We won’t get time to use it all. To stabilize the floods and firestorms, we’ll have to reduce our carbon emissions by 80 percent, within a decade. ~ Barbara Kingsolver – at a 2008 commencement address at Duke University.

5. New bumper sticker idea: “I work for exclamation points,” meaning that, as a writer, good feedback sometimes takes the place of money earned.

6. I wasn’t fond of my 4 year old grandson Byrce calling me Dude. All I had to do is tell him that he can’t call me dude because dudes are boys, and it worked like a charm.

7. Yesterday Bryce asked me what the word “interesting” meant. I explained that it meant something you want to explore and think more about and that his brother Liam was interested in planes because he thinks they are interesting. “What do you think is interesting?” I asked Bryce. His answer: “Mario.”

8. FYI: How to burn 800 calories in just 30 minutes HERE.

9. If the whole world picked our president, Obama would win by a landslide. Out of 21 countries surveyed in a BBC world service poll only Pakistan chose Romney over Obama. See HERE.

10. My vote for Obama is a vote against a party that professes smaller government but then wants to pass legislation that is intrusive to my most private decisions as a woman. It’s a vote against a party that doesn’t respect the separation of church and state that protects the religious freedom and the right to not practice religion for all. It’s a vote against a party that doesn’t believe in climate change and brags about wanting to drill in national nature preserves and building a giant pipeline that would deliver dirty oil at high costs and undermine our country’s clean energy future. It’s a vote against a party that supports the extremes of the big lobby NRA that thinks its business as usual for anyone to have access to military assault weapons … If you think I left something out, it is probably HERE.

11. My two-year-old grandson Liam: a dishwasher or a scientist? You decide HERE.

12. HERE is a list of some of the jobs that I’ve had, one of which was a dishwasher.

13. And HERE is my idea of a bird’s eye view.

Thirteen Thursday