2. Later, I regretted not taking a picture of the guy I saw sitting at an outside café feeding wild sparrows. He was surrounded by about twenty birds with several of them perched on his fingers.

3. HERE is a video clip of the presentation my husband (founder of Inward Bound Mindfulness Education), gave at the Healing the Hearts and Minds of Youth conference, which brought us to San Diego in the first place.

4. At the first hotel we stayed at, I was awakened one night by the sound of a lone late-night skateboarder skating across sections of sidewalk below our room.  I thought it was the clogging of a horse’s hoofs on the boardwalk.

5. Getting ready to board the plane to fly across the country, I remember thinking to myself:  There are so many ways to die.   I’m surprised more of us aren’t dead already.

6. The last time I was overtaken by emotion: This morning while eating breakfast at sidewalk café  when I saw an older guy in a Red Sox cap who walked like my father and was reminded of how much I miss him. He died in 2005.

7. “She’s fallen in love with humanity but doesn’t like anyone in particular.” ~ line heard while listening to a CD by poet David Whyte.

8. Recently googled from the  retro-motel on the beach where we also stayed : How to make tea in the microwave.

9. Thank God for Starbucks.

10. A lot of people run here but when Joe and I tried it, I think we looked like we had just come from a robbery because we didn’t have running shoes and spanks on, or M3P player wires in our ears.

11. What’s the difference between a ledge and an edge?

12. Soon we’ll be heading to LA and driving down Santa Monica Boulevard which is why THIS song is in my head.

13. Watch a crazy swarm of sandpiper birds HERE.

 Thirteen Thursday

2. You’d be surprised how many times you can fit “phase two in which Doris gets her oats” into a conversation.

3.  Sign seen on Facebook: Senators should wear uniform like NASCAR drivers so we could identify their corporate sponsors.

4. I think saying that there’s absolutely no link between the rise in autism and vaccination is like believing there were weapons of mass destruction (in spite of the lack of evidence) because that’s what the party line was saying.

5. THESE fur-lined flip flops are an oxymoron.

6. What’s the difference between graffiti and ancient cave drawings?

7. “The people who run our cities don’t understand graffiti because they think nothing has the right to exist unless it makes a profit. The people who truly deface our neighborhoods are the companies that scrawl giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff.   Any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours, it belongs to you, it’s yours to take, rearrange and reuse. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head…” Banksy

8.  Like a painter has a favorite model, the moon is my favorite poetic subject.

9. When I go to trainings or long meeting, I like to bring pens so I can doodle. I did it long before discovering that studies have shown that doodling helps you pay attention.

10. Me to my grandson Bryce (son of the boy pictured above): “Do you know anyone who smokes?” Bryce: “Yeah, that dog” (from the nursery rhyme Old Mother Hubbard HERE).

11. Found bathroom graffiti: Happiness can’t buy money, Death is hereditary, Graffiti should be obscene and not heard, “Fighting for peace is like having sex for virginity.”

12.  “Things could be better. They could also be worse. These cancel each other out. Things are simply things.” ~ My Dharmacratic friend Will

13. I’m with Maxine when she says, “My idea of a super bowl is a toilet bowl that cleans itself.”

More 13 Thursday bloggers HERE.

2. A crow goes sledding HERE. You have to see it to believe it.

3. Seen on Facebook next to a picture of Gingrich:  Family Values – Using daughters from your first wife to convince everyone that your second wife is lying about your third wife.

4. His name makes me think of the Grinch of rich. My friend Alwyn says he looks like Caesar and we should beware of his aspirations for empire.

5. Speaking of Rome, my dharmacratic friend Will recently posted on Facebook: “Romantic love is just the bait the soul covers its hook with.”  When someone questioned his post in a comment he replied:  “I’m a barbarian who is suspicious of anything connected with Rome.”

6. Last night the moon looked like a Mona Lisa smile with Venus as the unblinking part of a wink.

7. I have a painting I bought directly from an artist named Shelton Miles when I lived in Texas. He signed all his painting SMiles.

8. The picture above is of my son Josh (right) and his friend Kamal putting on a play at Blue Mountain School back in the day.   It’s part of a series of photos I’ve been scanning for the school’s upcoming 30^th year anniversary.

9. My grandson Bryce used to cry when the butter on his bagel melted.  His 15 month old brother Liam cries when we pop popcorn on the stovetop.  (It makes a lot of noise and sometimes the cover pops off).

10. “Take the money we’re no longer spending at war, use half of it to pay down our debt, and use the rest to do some nation-building right here at home.”  ~ Quote from Obama’s State of the Union speech last night. More quotes HERE.

11. I had a dream about the copperhead I killed in the fall.  In the dream it morphed into a Native American woman in buckskin who, after appearing, disappeared into the log walls of my home. I remember thinking I didn’t have to or want to kill her but would have to learn how to live cautiously with her. In the dream I made everyone put shoes on.  The next morning when I woke up, I looked at the floor before putting my feet down.

12. It’s so hard to be in the present, rather than worrying about the future or trying to recreate something pleasant from the past, which is the reason I wrote THIS poem

13. Quote seen on Facebook: worrying is like praying for what you don’t want.

~ More playing 13 Thursday HERE.

2. On the same night I laughed uncontrollably watching an 80 year old woman punk a young man at an airport with an offer to get together in flight for a “high mile” club rendezvous. It was one of the candid camera like pranks on Betty White’s new show “Off Their Rockers.” You should have seen the look on the guy’s face.

3. Speaking of guys, a few new country names I discovered while reading the local obituaries are Venston, Bitley, Histon, Ezess and Worth.

4. The old mountain names are fascinating to me, like today’s hippie names, they seem completely made up.  Woman’s names I’ve recently come across are Fressie, Villie, Arnilla, Ezma, Drema and Treecie. God bless them.

5. After hearing about the youtube clips of S*it Girls Say, I discovered some on S*it No One Says, which I liked even better with lines like Twilight deserves an Oscar, My bazooka gum still has flavor, I miss my dial-up, I just have too much money and The Beatles suck.

6. Of course the Beatles don’t suck and neither did the five-star music duo performance we saw at the Floyd Country Store Sunday night.  Ketch Secor and Critter Fuqua are old-time revivalists from Virginia and two of the founding members of the famed Old Crow Medicine Show. They play what I think of as “contemporary traditional” music (I know, it’s an oxymoron). The also have a knack for comedy. They premiered a nearly finished song about hillbilly robots, called Hillybillybot, and they spun some really good yarns. HERE they are doing the band’s signature song that has gone gold.

7. Because I got a front row seat at the concert I was able to capture THIS, my son’s girlfriend volunteer to go on stage and do a slow polka with champion flat-footer Rick Sutphin.

8. THIS banjo player from the Hackensaw Boys (far right in picture four with blue shirt) stayed at my house with my son and others from Asheville who came to hear the show.

9. Only in Floyd can you be out helping a friend with disabilities collect litter and run into a neighbor who jumps out of her car, pulls out her banjo and plays you a song in the middle of the road. See the picture HERE.

20. HERE is the beach version of 13 Thursday’s Front Row Seats.

11. On two occasions in my life I’ve come across completely naked people having sex, once on the beach and once at a summer solstice gathering.

12. At least I have never come across a dead body like my blog friend Naomi at Here in the Hills.

13. What would you want a front row seat to?

Thirteen Thursday

2. Interesting that as the globe is literally heating up and the people on it are heating up too, protesting injustices here and worldwide.

3. If tingle is a quieter version of jingle, is tangle less mangled than jangle?

4. I like to lie about my age by a year to give it some buffering time.

5. With neuroscience, we can confirm what our ancestors took for granted—that letting babies get distressed is a practice that can damage children and their relational capacities in many ways for the long term. We know now that leaving babies to cry is a good way to make a less intelligent, less healthy but more anxious, uncooperative and alienated person who can pass the same or worse traits on to the next generation. More at Dangers of Crying it Out, Psychology Today HERE.

6. It had to happen sooner or later. While googling where I live, Floyd Virginia, I came across a blog by a woman named Virginia Floyd.

7. I’ve loved fat since I was a little girl and a friend asked me what I had for supper and I answered “fat.” Turns out “Fat is Where It’s At.”  See why HERE.

8. Love makes the world go round. It revolves, evolves and resolves to solve (which is basically a statement using all the same word with the letters moved around).

9. Best use of the word EVOLVE HERE.

10. When I was growing up a flip was a popular hairstyle, bump was a dance, fink was the word for geek and neat was what came before cool.

11. Flip also meant giving someone lip.

12. Today’s soundtrack HERE.

13. The year 2011 in 2 ½ minutes HERE.

The Thirteen Thursday Hub is HERE.

1. Tingle and jingle not only rhyme, they mean close to the same thing, only a tingle is less loud than jingle.

2. Things that make me curse: when I fix a fresh cup of tea on my way out, put on the floorboard of my car, and it spills before I have a chance to take a sip.

3. In the north we say “swear” instead curse or cuss.

4. I recently woke up thinking that I’d like to wear more dresses this year. Does that qualify for a New Year’s Resolution?

5. My friend Jayn made me my own mock mince meat pie for Christmas, which I’ve been enjoying a little bit of each day.  I especially enjoy the crust because I can see her pressed fingerprints around the edges, making the gift such a personal sharing.

6. Listening to the poetry and the wisdom of David Whyte on living a meaningful life, recorded on a six CD series call What to Remember When Waking, is like going church for me.

7. When Whyte reads his poetry, he frequently repeats the lines twice, like I listen to his poems and repeat the lines by rewinding so I can write them down.

8. I just watched the movie Larry Crowne and can’t believe how much Tom Hanks is starting to look like Walter Matthau. His humor is similar too.  He’s the Walter Matthau of his generation.

9. If you look at THIS for a full minute, I guarantee you’ll be spooked.

10. I went to Times Square on New Year’s sometime in the 70’s and thought it was overrated.  This year I saw a news clip of the mess after everyone went home and thought that would be more interesting to me (to see and photograph) then being stuck in a mob that I couldn’t see beyond.

11. In an article about writing poetry, Wendy Cope says: “I find that the most important and helpful question to ask myself when I’m working on a poem is “Am I telling the truth?” T. S. Eliot said that the greatest difficulty for a poet is to distinguish between “what one really feels and what one would like to feel”.”~ From She Writes.

12. Stars are like snowflakes that rarely fall, like pinholes in the world’s fabric that make me want to know the light on the other side.

13. “Create a sense of spaciousness around your approach to life, which involves allowing the unconscious to be itself without constantly try to convert it into names which would be too small for what is about to occur . A good relationship with the unknown is just as important as the pointers.  ~ David Whyte

Thirteen Thursday headquarters HERE.

2. I forgot today was Thursday because I forgot yesterday was Wednesday and that Tuesday was Tuesday and so on.

3. I love the name Yellow Dubmarine for THIS Beatles reggae tribute band that I found because it was posted on the side of my Facebook wall.

4. I once bought a whole box of fortune cookies so I could find a fortune message I liked.

5. I forgot today was Thursday because all I knew was that today is the day I need to finish a story deadline and set up interviews for two more to be done by Sunday night.

6. A very cool (pun intended) snowflake slide show is HERE.

7. The only New Year’s resolution I could come up with last year was to stand up straight and resist the recently developed urge to lean against the sink when I’m combing my hair and brushing my teeth.

8. This year’s resolution builds on that theme: Whenever I find myself using the railing to pull myself up the stairs, I let go and run the rest of the way.

9. It’s something of a zen koan to me that self forgetting leads to self awareness and by that I mean when I lose myself in an activity or in giving to others, I’m more likely to find the truest me.

10. The woodstove howls like a banshee / for the copperhead I killed in the fall / when it crawled from my dream into my kitchen / and laid at the threshold of girl and crone / The washing machine hums like a bard / spins the tale of a black bear intruder / that left paw prints in my garden / fresh scat at my front porch door / Thoughts turn to poisoned confrontations / and boundaries that were crossed / I save seeds for Persephone and grieve for Pandora / whose box is unlocked but too heavy to bring home … More HERE.

11. I feel like Cinderella trying to get this Thirteen Thursday list done by midnight because if I don’t it will turn into Friday and I might be missing a shoe.

12. Today I had a migraine aura. In the past I’ve described an aura as seeing stars but it’s more like not being able to stop seeing the tip of your nose through a rabbit hole kaleidoscope snow globe of broken chards of glass.

13. Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday. ~ Dale Carnegie

~ More playing  Thirteen Thursday HERE.

2. THIS is my current favorite Christmas song.

3. Floyd’s Heartsong singers, founded by my friend Rosemary, sing hymns and other songs (mostly spiritually comforting) to homebound and hospice people. Listen HERE.

4. “An economist says that essentially more for you is less for me, but the lover knows that more for you is more for me. If you love someone their happiness is your happiness, their pain is your pain. Your sense of self expands to include other beings. Love is the expansion of the self to include the other. That’s a different kind of revolution.” ~ Author of Sacred Economy on Occupy Wall Street

5. I feel bad for the workers in India who hand sewed the sequins on my new shirt, and I feel bad for myself because it took a couple of hours to cut them all off.

6. Large is the new medium: I’ve been complaining for years about how women’s bathrobes and nightgowns are usually only available in pastel colors and how men have a better selection of shoes and boots. Now I have a new complaint. Recently while shopping I’ve become aware of how hard it is to find clothing in size small and how the stores stock an overabundance of size large.

7. Information is to the internet what math is to a calculator.

8. Last year at Christmastime I posted a sign on my blog that said “I Brake for Christmas cookies and Narnia in 3D.”

9. We had some trouble keeping our candles lit at the solstice spiral last night, but the potluck was great and so was the music jam. Listen HERE.

10. And Mara read the essay she won a prize for on what love means, which will appear in the April issue of for Real Simple magazine (video clip HERE).

11. As a writer, I personally relate to Leonard Cohen’s comment during an interview with Terri Gross about his writing: “Someone like Cole Porter, his rhymes are, you know, much, much more elegant than mine. I have a very, you know,  a very limited kind of expression, but I’ve done the best that I can with it and I’ve worked it as diligently as I can.”

12. What exactly is a doornail and why is it dead?

13. Frosty the Snowman Meets Johnny Depp HERE.

~ Thirteen Thursday

1. Check out THESE thirteen strangely different Christmas trees.

2. And THIS bizarre Christmas Card sent out by a Puerto Rican Mayor and his family.

3. Some people go to Florida to retire. Others go HERE.

4. Speaking of bizarre, I’m doing a story right now on an artist who uses red and white polka dots in all her painting, symbolic of the amanita mushroom and as a symbol of good luck and magic. During our interview she explained that images of this mushroom have been used on Christmas and New Year’s cards all over Europe and the world and that some believe the Santa and the flying reindeer story originated from Shaman’s in Siberia who collected the mushrooms in sacks and used the them in vision quests.

5. My 14-month-old grandson, Liam, has pouting down to a science. This pout that he lays on thick when someone says “no” to him didn’t exist even a week ago. It makes me wonder if emotions are innate or learned and if I should laugh or be scared when he makes this face.

6. While Liam was pouting his 3 year old brother Bryce played with a small plunger (ala’ Mario), that he called a “plummer.” Makes sense to me.

7. I went to the Silent Auction and fundraiser Feast for Blue Mountain School at Natasha’s Café Sunday evening and the first thing I said upon walking through the door was ‘why is there a chair on a table?’ It was a beautifully renovated antique chair and turned out to be one of the items donated for the silent auction.

8. Brotherly Love HERE.

9. Guaranteed Tearjerker HERE.

10. When I recently took a favorite purple wool sweater out of storage and saw that it had some moth holes on it, I said, “Darn it!” which was exactly what I did.

11. I posted THIS picture on my Facebook Wall and it just broke my record for “likes,” 40 so far and 10 comments.

12. While driving around looking at old barns and churches, Beyonce’s song “Put a Ring On It” comes to my mind, only in my version it’s “Put a Wreath On It.”

13. With warnings like: You better watch out …You better not pout … You better not cry I’m telling you why … and lines like … He’s making a list … checking it twice …. Gonna find out who’s naughty or nice …  and …  He sees you when you’re sleeping … He knows when you’re a awake … THIS song scared me as a child at Christmastime.

Thirteen Thursday

2. If I get a weird look I follow that by scolding, “Don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden. Your father had an accident and he was put in a pie.”

3. It’s interesting to me that driving on interstate 95 from Massachusetts to DC ten years ago took about five years off my life but killing a poisonous snake that got in my house added a couple.

4. Only in Floyd: My friend Jayn came to our house for my son’s 16 Hands Studio Tour. Sitting on the porch with our cups of tea, I noticed the sweater she was wearing and said, “Hey, that used to be my sweater. You got it at a clothing exchange and it was Eli Gralla’s before it was mine. I got it at a Barter Faire.

5. According to the news story linked HERE, Einstein was a Hopi chief named The Great Relative, which is an interesting play on words, considering his fame for the theory of relativity.

6. Coyote is coy / his name tells us / Do you know why yuppie says up / and hippie says hip? / Or why hopi says hope / and prophet says poet? ~ From an old poem titled Right the World with Words

7. “Either we find the courage to live the dream that brought each of us to life or we live a ‘half-life’ of fear and resignation in the face of growing uncertainty and increased exposures. Near the end it is important to have ‘mythic sense’ and a ‘story-mind;’ not a fantasy to escape with, but grounding imaginations that can hold the two worlds of spirit and matter together. At the ends of time we find the roots of eternity again.” – Michael Meade

8. When I’m feeling uninspired and searching to find the right blog to post, I’m like a doctor with a hammer looking for a reflex kick.

9. I don’t understand why people call the internet “internets” like I don’t get people calling Massachusetts MassaTUsetts.

10. Said to Joe while dancing to Donna the Buffalo Friday night: “It’s pretty bad when you don’t step on your partner’s toes but step the couple’s dancing next to you.” (I take up a lot of space and often dance with my eyes closed.)

11. Seen on Facebook: Dear Santa, ….define good.

12. So I was flipping around the few channels we have and landed on Michael Buble’s Christmas special where I watched Justin Bieber perfor but I couldn’t enjoy it because I was in fear the whole time that his pants would fall down.  See HERE.

13. Check out the cast of the Floyd Country Store’s Radio Show (done in the spirit of Prairie Home Companion) join in with featured musicians to sing a Christmas Time’s A’comin, and get in the spirit HERE.

Thirteen Thursday Headquarters is HERE.

2. At our Thanksgiving gratitude circle of about 15 people our host suggested everyone shut off their cell phones for an hour. Curious, I asked the group how many didn’t have a cell phone.  I was the only one.

3. Recent Occupy Wall Street Sign: Black Friday. Because in America, you can pitch a tent for capitalism, but not democracy.

4. Much Ado About Stuffing:  On a recent Jon Stewart segment about the far right being upset that Obama left God out of his Thanksgiving address (even though he actually  hadn’t left God out), Jon reminded his viewers about the true roots of Thanksgiving: “a bunch of pagans teaching religious zealots how to farm.”

5. I think the press should start reporting when murderers and people who commit suicide are on anti-depressants when they commit their acts in the same way they comment on whether fatal car crash victims were wearing seatbelts or not.

6. Picasso had a blue period / casting all his subjects in its mood / singers sing the blues / not to wallow in melodrama / but because they want / to tell the truth … Read the rest of the poem HERE.

7. Are the “end of the internet” scares like the ones I keep getting in emails like the “end of the world” scares that have gone on since time immemorial?

8. After hearing from friends about the African glass eater who recently performed in Floyd, I was sure it was a trick until I did some research on the internet and found out that some people actually do eat glass by avoiding soft tissue in the mouth while they chew it down to sand.  I also discovered that some glass eaters get addicted to eating glass.

9. “If you tell the truth at all times, you will have clear relationships with everyone.  If you do not, things will get out of control very quickly. To get back into the flow of harmony, all your have to do is look to see where you stopped telling the truth to yourself or someone else, and fix it by telling the truth. Most of us arrive at our adult relationships with a backlog of ancient hurts, fears, and angers. The source of these wounds has often has been forgotten, so that it looks like our current relationships are causing us to hurt. In fact, our current relationships are the area in which we have the opportunity to clear up the free ourselves of these patterns from the past.”  ~ Read somewhere online during my research on co-dependency

10. “Withdrawal and projection are the natural outcomes of withholding. When you withhold, you keep inside yourself things that should be expressed. The very act of hiding these things takes you one step back from the relationship. A result of this withdrawal is that you will begin to project. In other words, you will begin to attribute to other people things that are actually issues of your own.”

11. Driving home from Roanoke last night I saw a lit-up sign that read “24 Hour MACY.”  I thought it was odd because I didn’t know we had a Macy’s in the area and because the store was small and dark with no advertising out front, and then I got closer and noticed that lights for the letters PHAR had burned out.

12. I also saw the worst bumper sticker ever on a truck. It was a picture a Confederate flag next to the words “Nuke the North.”

13. “Why is it easier to believe that 150,000,000 Americans are being lazy rather than 400 Americans are being greedy?”  ~ Another OWS sign

~ Thirteen  Thursday hub HERE.

2. He was so worn out from playing at the golf course with Opa Joe that he was eating a sandwich in his car seat with his eyes closed. Three bites later it fell from his hand and his head dropped off to the side.

3. I love the Senator Bernie Sanders quote seen on Facebook and pictured below, but I almost didn’t read it because I mistakenly thought the picture was of Dick Cheney and I’m not interested in what he has to say.

4. Cheney reminds me of Homer Simpson’s boss Mr. Burns or Scrooge.

5. Sign seen at Occupy Wall Street after the occupation was broken up by police: “If they enforced Bank Regulation Like They Do Park Rules, We wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.”

6. Letter seen on Facebook: Dear Congress, I am wondering where I can get some pizza seeds. I’d like to grow some pizza in the spring or do you start them with cuttings (slices)? Signed, Puzzled in Floyd

7. It’s pretty bad when Facebook has to remind you of your own sister’s birthday.

8.  I am disappointed in Obama but not enough to not vote for him and THIS clip titled “Why I’m not disappointed in President Obama” puts my doubts in perspective.

9. It was sad that while at a NASCAR event in the name of a charity supporting veterans First Lady Michelle Obama got booed and then, adding insult to injury, Rush Limbaugh’s off the wall comments made it worse?

10. Today’s soundtrack HERE.

11. Last year I was with my family in Massachusetts for Thanksgiving, which is very rare. Listen to the Redman family Thanksgiving gratitude circle (if you can understand the Boston accents) HERE.

12. “You don’t understand. A parking garage. I can’t even pull in there. It’s like going to a prostitute. Why should I pay, when if I apply myself, maybe I could get it for free?” George Costanza

13. Now have a great Thanksgiving and don’t forgot to “Say Something Nice” HERE!! 

2. I keep a rock by my bedroom window in case I have to scare away the neighborhood bear that might want to eat the deer that my husband Joe has hanging from the tree (our year’s supply of hunted meat.)

3. Sometimes I think that shadows are the real world and physical matter is a dream.

4. Joe has always said if he found the right tattoo design he might go ahead and get inked. I feel that way about an Occupy Wall Street. If I could come up with just the right sign I might go join the occupation.

5. I think it’s fitting that the word pie is in the word piece.

6. Strangest search that landed someone on my blog this week: mind altering potato chips.

7. I get residual royalty comments from these past posts more than any others: Poet’s Hotline, Primland Resort, and Speaking of Collage.

8. Can a Pope be recalled or required to get therapy? “Benedict claimed that as recently as the 1970s, “pedophilia was theorized as something fully in conformity with man and even with children.” In this climate, the Catholic Church’s actions were merely reflecting the moral relativism of the times: “It was maintained — even within the realm of Catholic theology — that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself,” Benedict said. That is, church leaders weren’t sure if child sexual abuse was wrong, since secular society seemed to accept it. More HERE.

9. All my dreams are basically the same, involve being completely lost and relate back to early abandonment issues. Last night I dreamt that I walked all the way to Roanoke in the rain to take care of a little sick girl. It took everything out of me. A high school boy who tried to kiss me was looking up bus routes online to help me get back home.

10. Every morning one of the first things I do is look out the window and scan the yard for that resident black bear. This morning I was still half asleep when I saw a black cat pounce out of the shed and run across the yard and I thought for a split second that the bear had shrunk.

11. I almost wish I still lived in Massachusetts so I could vote for HER. Maybe she’ll run for president some day and I will.

12. THIS is the song I want played at my funeral.

13. Bursting bubbles for “justice” HERE.

More TT’s HERE.

2. Speaking of shoes, get a kick out of THESE.

3. I learned another new term this week when Tabor of One Day at a Time complimented THIS photo of mine and told me it looked so miksang.

4. Watch THIS trick. It’s funny.

5. The movie In Time, which Joe and I saw this weekend, was perfect metaphor for the economic inequality of these times.  In the movie time is the currency and when you run out you die. As soon as the people in the ghetto get ahead, the powers that be raise the rates of everything so more rich people can be immortal.

6. Exist and Exits about sums life up like evil is live spelled backwards.

7. There are video clips all over the internet of high fashion models walking down runways in freaky high heels and falling down.  They’re posted to be funny but I think they’re demeaning to women and about as funny as Chinese foot binding, the tradition (now outdated) of breaking the toes and folding them under the foot with binding in order to give the appearance of having small feet, a status symbol.

8. “Medical reports suggest that high heels could lead to foot deformities, posture problems, neck injuries and permanent damage in some cases. A 2001 Harvard study also found that high heels can set the stage for osteoarthritis of the knees … A worrying trend is that women are getting cosmetic surgeries to fit into their Manolo Blahniks and Jimmy Choos.” More HERE.

9. While eating at Mickey G’s last week, a woman sitting behind us was surprised when she looked up from her meal and saw me because she was reading my blog post about restaurants in Floyd on her smartphone at the time.

10. Favorite Loose Leaf boot HERE.

11. The power of words, watch HERE. 

12. Woohoo! I discovered I can still roller skate after not skating in 15 years. I think it’s probably easier than walking in high heels. See HERE.

13. A Native American on Daylight Savings Time: “Only the government would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it to the bottom, and have a longer blanket.”

Thirteen Thursday

2. I don’t know how I ended up in Walmart on Halloween but I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw that they were selling bags of pine cones like the ones all over my yard.

3. There are some things we can’t get in Floyd: water filters, printing ink and electric curlers.

4. I can’t explain THIS or understand it but it sure is fun to watch.

5. Is this an onomatopoeia? Susurrus: the sound leaves make as they rustle and fall.

6. Sweetest internet search that landed someone on my blog this week: “why joe loves colleen.” They landed HERE.

7. The picture above is of the first place I met Joe: the town laundry mat (closed now).

8. He was tie dying shirts for a Blue Mountain School fundraiser and I was filling the trunk of my car with apples from a nearby tree when we met.

9. I already killed a copperhead in my house. Do I also have to fight off a bear? Apparently and according to the bear scat (droppings) left on my front porch we now have a resident bear that is not afraid to get up close and personal.

10. Listening to Terri Gross interview Tom Waits on the drive home from Christiansburg on Monday I realized that I have never enjoyed Waits’s singing voice, which he admits he barks out like a dog, but I enjoy his lyrics and I love his mind.

11. A music critic described the sound of Waits’s voice this way: it’s like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon, left hanging in the smokehouse for a few months, and then taken outside and run over with a car.

12. Waits described his wife and music collaborator this way: “She’s a shiksa goddess and a trapeze artist, all of that. She can fix the truck. Expert on the African violet and all that. She’s outta this world. I don’t know what to say. I’m a lucky man. She has a remarkable imagination. And that’s the nation where I live. She’s bold, inventive and fearless. That’s who you wanna go in the woods with, right? Somebody who finishes your sentences for you.”

13. I recently asked a friend I was writing about how he met his wife. He told me she fell for him when she visited his house and saw that he was a singlguy who put up a Christmas tree and decorations for Christmas.

 Thirteen Thursday

2. Last night I was ordering pictures from Walmart.com, watching a video of Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie at Occupy Wall Street in New York and writing a poem all at the same time.

3. I was also reading about and watching slideshows of the fantastic work of Haas & Hahn, an artistic duo that’s been painting giant colorful murals on buildings in slums, described by some as “rescue by design.” HERE.

4. I have a friend who I sometimes walk with who presses fall leaves in between the pages of her bible. I press mine in my dictionary. I think that says a lot about who we each are.

5. Concerning the fact that some words like “fart” were taken out of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (because they were considered unpleasant), one Scrabbler created a laminated bookmark of the banned words, called the Poo List, that he sells at tournaments. (Poo is also not in the OSPD.)

6. Tile and Error: the biggest scandal to rock the Scrabble tournament circuit since a player accused another of eating a tile: a missing “G” tile led to accusations of cheating and a demand for a scrabble competitor to be strip-searched at the world championships. Read more HERE.

7. Speaking of farts, THIS clip of Vince Vaughn, P Diddy and Sarah Millican talking about farting on a date is very funny.

8. Seen on Facebook: The trouble with quotes on the internet is that it’s difficult to determine whether or not they are genuine. ~ Abraham Lincoln.

9. Get really creative with pumpkins HERE.

10. Steve Jobs on the afterlife and why his products don’t have on and off switches as told by his biographer to 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft: I remember sitting in his back yard in his garden one day, and he started talking about God. He said, “Sometimes I don’t. It’s 50-50. But ever since I’ve had cancer I’ve been thinking about it more, and I find myself believing a bit more. Maybe that’s because I want to believe in an afterlife, that when you die it doesn’t just all disappear. The wisdom you’ve accumulated, somehow it just lives on.” But then he paused for a second and he said, “Yeah but sometimes I think it’s like an on-off switch. Click, and you’re gone,” he said. Paused again and said, “And that’s why I don’t put on-off switches on Apple devices.”

11. “We expect President Obama to do the work of the people. The people are not going to go away. So he can either go down as a historic president, who becomes the FDR of this century, or he can be remembered as the man who was in the pocket of Goldman Sachs.” Michael Moore at Occupy Wall Street.

12. I love the way paradox rhymes with pandora’s box.

13. Also seen on Facebook: A lot of pain that we are dealing with is really only thoughts.

Thirteen Thursday headquarters

2. I haven’t been good about matching my socks lately. At least they are all black.

3. THIS guy has explaining Occupy Wall Street in less than a minute down to an art.

4. And  THIS guy is making amazing art that’s driven by the power of wind.

5. A Psychological Word Search: The first three words you find are supposed to describe you HERE.

6. When my book about losing my two brothers a month apart, The Jim and Dan Stories, first came out I sold quite a few of them out of my car. I called it “drive-by sales.”

7. The word “ride” is in “drive,” and they are nearly the same word – like note and tone – except that drive has an added V, which makes perfect sense because V infuses words with vibration and vitality.

8. It’s no mistake that “VERB” begins with the letter V.

9. And that “embarrassed seems to say “I’m bare assed.”

10. My initials spell CAR.

11. Today’s Soundtrack that never goes out of style HERE.

12. I saw Godzilla and the Beatles from the cover of Rubber Soul on the shadows reflected on my closet door HERE.

13. Quote seen on Facebook: Life has no remote. Get up and change it yourself.

Thirteen Thursday

2. In the last couple of weeks I’ve heard (and danced to) live music by Love Farm, Mighty Shakey, Ember Swift and Boris Garica.

3. I was watching the PBS special “The Rise and Fall of Rock Radio” when a clip of Arnie (Woo Woo) Ginsberg broadcasting from the Surf Ballroom in Nantasket Beach, the town I grew up in and the place I used to dance every weekend, came on. Ginsberg was a well known Boston radio disc jockey I grew up with in the 60’s and 70’s who got his nickname from the train whistles and other sound effects he used on the radio.

4. Like a beach town in summer, our tourist season in the mountains is fall. Cars are crawling all over the Blue Ridge Parkway like ants, including mine.

5. Monday I had a Tai massage by a woman who is new to Floyd. She and her husband moved here from Japan because she was pregnant and didn’t want to expose herself and her baby to the radioactive fallout of Fukushima nuclear plant.

6. Love Farm on Oddfellas Cantina stage with a guest spoon player HERE.

7. We just got a new hand water pump. It wasn’t cheap, but it was a lot cheaper than solar panels we were looking into in order to be able to access our water “when the shift hits the fan.”

8. “America is far from broke. Our problem is too much money in the wrong places.” ~ Best selling author David Korten. Read Korten’s thoughts on what the Occupy Wall Street protesters want HERE.

9. “Occupy Wall Street has basically been a four week Downtown Manhattan live-in, causing the media to move its coverage dial from Blackout to Circus. Those are the only two settings they have.” ~ Jon Stewart

10. At the “Cliffs of Moher” (mother) we hiked and took in the breathtaking coastline view from very high up. Nearby was St. Bridget’s Well- a holy pilgrimage place of prayer that had such an effect on me that I wept. There was a gentle waterfall above the well and a passageway full of devotional items, momentums and pictures of loved ones. All through Ireland there are holy wells. The Irish recognize the sacredness of pure water and its connection with spirituality and healing. The drinking water was all good in Ireland, by the way. ~ Excerpt from my 1999 travelogue of Ireland.

12. Poet Wallace Stevens played Thirteen Thursday HERE.

11. I think we could have our own budding poet in the making in our 3 year old grandson. Me: Bryce, are you going to finish your brown rice? Bryce: Brown Rice and Bryce are the same. Me: Yes, they rhyme!

13. A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality. Yoko Ono

Thirteen Thursday

2. My son Josh, who has a composting outhouse on his North Carolina property, makes a good point when he says that future generations will balk when they hear that we used such a valuable resource as water to flush human waste.

3. My dharmacratic friend Will thinks we should move away from the gold standard of measuring wealth and replace it with a “pure water standard.”

4. The growing global economic disparities,  the corporate infiltration into our political system and the increase of disastrous events attributed to climate change have prompted me to come up with a new rallying cry in preparation for when “The Shift Hits the Fan.”

5. More reasons to repeal the tax cuts on the richest 1% of Americans and why there is protest on Wall Street: “The income gap between the nations richest and poorest is the most powerful indictor of a functioning healthy society. Why should all Americans care? As income disparity spikes so too does rates of homicide, drug use, mental illness, anxiety, teen pregnancy and high school dropouts.”

6. “Much of the sloganeering at “Occupy Wall Street” is pretty silly — but so is the self-righteous sloganeering of Wall Street itself. And if a ragtag band of youthful protesters can help bring a dose of accountability and equity to our financial system, more power to them.” ~ Columnist Nicholas D. Kristof from Bankers and the Revolutionaries

7. Kristof also reported that the protesters have been ordering pizza online from a pizzeria that quickly added a new item to its menu: “the Occupie special.”

8. Another good slogan that someone else came up: We are the 99%. The video HERE. The Song HERE.

9. At Floyd’s Jacksonville Center for the Arts recently I noticed that that parking lot was full and that something looked out of place. All the cars were new and clean, unusual for our rural county. I walked around and noticed license plates from Maine, Illinois, South Carolina and Massachusetts and wondered if maybe it was THESE guys.

10. Driving down the Blue Ridge Parkway to Roanoke on a recent morning to babysit the boys, I didn’t see a single car but saw so many deer that I felt like I was playing a virtual video game, the goal of which was not to hit deer but to miss them.

11. “Ladybugs kill bugs and they saved the town.” ~ My 3 year old grandson Bryce.

12. Seen on Facebook: Try organic food, or as your parents called it FOOD.

13. On the well funded and politically connected efforts to mine uranium in Virginia: “I am sorry I referred to it as horse-shit before. That is doing a disservice to the horse and it’s shit.” ~ a Keep the Ban supporter

The 13 Thursday headquarters is HERE.

2. It’s always good when I go dancing and apple picking and get a massage all in the same weekend.

3. Virginia is for Lovers, or is that Smokers? Read my brother in law’s (alias Horace Harker) write up on Sherlock Holmes Pipe club about his experience at Floydfest X as it relates to cigars HERE.

4. A Newspaper update on Abraham Cherrix, the young man who made national news and whose parents were charged when he refused traditional cancer therapy, the young man who moved to Floyd after that and who I wrote about is HERE.

5. “There have been studies that actually show you get a hit of oxytocin [aka the love or cuddle hormone] when you social network or get a call or email from someone. It feels good, so we want to do it over and over again.” ~ Tiffany Shlain – Filmmaker and director of Connected, a new documentary about technology, family, and the way the Internet has changed how we think.

6. Shlain’s father, author of The Alphabet Vs the Goddess, believes that literacy reinforced the brain’s linear, abstract predominately masculine left hemisphere at the expense of the holistic, iconic feminine right one and that the invention and current prevalence of media based on images – like photography, film, television and computers – is rewiring our brains in a more right brain pattern and is moving the culture towards an equilibrium between the two hemispheres, between masculine and feminine, between word and image.

7. The song my friend Michael Kovick sang at this weekend’s benefit concert in support of the ban on uranium mining in Virginia titled “Copopration’s Not Person,” would be a good one to sing at the Occupy Wall Street campaign protesting the influence corporate money has on politicians in Congress.

8. I can’t find my poetry. I think it left town to join the protest on Wall Street.

9. Favorite video of the week: THIS guy is good in a Napoleon Dynamite way.

10. Can you guess which modern American president holds the record for increasing U.S. debt? See HERE.

11. Best quote of the week: “If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.” ― Stephen Colbert

12. In response to the recent changes at Facebook that make it harder to get a most recent online feed – or maybe because it’s recently been revealed that Facebookers are never really logged out of the site so the company can track users across the web, someone posted this: Tomorrow, Facebook will change its privacy settings to allow Mark Zuckerberg to come into your house while you sleep and eat your brains with a grapefruit spoon. To stop this from happening go to Account> Home Invasion Settings> Cannibalism> Brains, and uncheck the “Tasty” box. Please copy and re-post. It will save lives.

13. Crickets or grasshoppers? Alligators or crocodiles? I get them all mixed up.

Thirteen Thursday hub is HERE.

2. I spent the weekend working on a story and waiting for the sun to shine so I could do some laundry. It never did so I made soup instead.

3. I’m on a toasted cracker with mozzarella, tomatoes, and pesto kick. I’ve been eating it every day for a couple of months and will continue to as long as the garden tomatoes last. Then it’ll be apple crisp.

4. I got a comment on last week’s Thirteen Thursday saying that my list was a weird mix of funny and scary stuff. “I call it the “Mash” model, a mix of comedy and serious drama,” I answered.

5. “The small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is known internationally for two things: high visa fees, which reduce the influx of tourists, and its policy of promoting “gross national happiness” instead of economic growth.” This is for real. Read more HERE.

6. I wonder why they aren’t using Ron Artest’s legal name “Metta World Peace” on Dancing with the Stars.

7. I’ve been fascinated by how sounds in nature can be soothing and how the brain knows the difference between those sounds and unnatural noise like TV, which can be draining. Because I have energy deficiency and can’t afford to waste it, I’ve noticed how people’s voices can be either soothing or draining. The sound of children playing always strengthens me.

8. “I’m thinking that thinking without thinking about what we’re thinking is only thinking that we’re thinking and not really thinking at all.” Posted on Facebook by Dharmacratic friend Will

9. De-Mock-Crazy. Ain’t it grand? ~ Also on Facebook by Pat.

10. Age activated attention deficit disorder: Do you have THIS?

11. The first time I saw a woman shopping in flannel pajamas I thought she was sleepwalking on Ambien. I saw it since then and then again yesterday at Best Buy, and so now I’m thinking it must be a kind of fashion fad like pulling down your pants and showing your underwear or wearing a baseball cap backwards.

12. I recently bought some weights to ward of osteoporosis, but I’m wondering why carrying 3 pound weights in each hand is good for you but gaining 6 pounds isn’t.

13. A soundtrack of birdsong / a wireless wind / I’m tuned in / to the virtual reality / of sunlight warming blossoms open / and borderless skies of turned up violet / I’m plugged in / to the solar powered village / of moon and star / to the data base of the highest technology / I’m turned on / to the smart reality / in the real world wide web / of earth’s diversity / with fragrant green / life size trees / and all the very best / in graphics ~ written before I had a computer and when I didn’t want one.

More posting 13 on Thursday HERE.

2. Joe and I went out  for a drive the other night to look at the full moon and take pictures, but I couldn’t find the black camera case in the dark car at night. “It’s camouflaged,” I suggested. “No, it’s cameraflaged,” he corrected.

3. It’s fun to imagine a visual for the word “brainstorm.”

4. 533N 0N F4C3B00K: 7H15 M355463 53RV35 70 PR0V3 H0W 0UR M1ND5 C4N D0 4M4Z1N6 7H1N65! 1MPR3551V3 7H1N65! 1N 7H3 B361NN1NG 17 W45 H4RD BU7 N0W, 0N 7H15 L1N3 Y0UR M1ND 15 R34D1N6 17 4U70M471C411Y W17H 0UT 3V3N 7H1NK1N6 4B0U7 17, B3 PR0UD! 0N1Y C34R741N P30PL3 C4N R34D 7H15.

5. Republican candidates for president on what they would bring to the White House – Santorum: A new bedroom. Gingrich: Ballet and music and some other stuff. Paul: “A bushel of common sense” and a course on Austrian economics. Perry: “I’m going to bring the most beautiful and thoughtful First Lady this nation has ever seen.” Bachmann: The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Romney: Copies Perry, said he’d bring his wife. Cain: “A sense of humor because Americans are too uptight.” Huntsman: Ever out to prove he is the coolest candidate, Huntsman said he’d bring his Harley.

6. Pants on Fire HERE.

7. Sadly, I’ve come to the conclusion that the world – with all its doublespeak, big government lies, intolerance, war, environmental degradation and corporations that care more about profit than people – is like a dysfunctional family that I need to have healthy boundaries from. But that doesn’t mean I turn a blind eye.

8. Our oral tradition is like an endangered songbird / crowded out by the starling chatter / And we are like old growth forests / replanted in pines / We twist language / distort its limbs / cough up slogans / like words were money / we were too poor to spend.

9. “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut

10. Michele Bachmann finally got something right: It was wrong that Texas governor Rick Perry bypassed his own state legislature to mandate that the HPV (gardasil) vaccine be given to all sixth grade girls, especially considering its record of serious side effects and Perry’s ties to the big business pharmaceutical company that makes the vaccine.

11. According to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a federal vaccine tracking system, as of June 22, 2011 there have been a total 68 reports of death among those who have received Gardasil. More HERE.

12. Toyota 52 Deaths, Gardasil 49. Toyota Recalled.

13. Deja Moo: The feeling that you’ve heard this bull before.

Thirteen Thursday

2. Watching a hummingbird check out a pink plastic ball in our yard yesterday reminded me of the time a goat tried to eat my floral print dress.

3. I look pretty normal but am still right arm disabled, which is why I had my friend Jayn cut an onion for me when she was here helping me put the Museletter (our community’s cut and paste newsletter) together and had Joe pre-cut all my morning bagels.

4. Last night I dreamed that I was fixing ham sandwiches for my boys when they were young and there was a guy who wore a wig but didn’t need it because his hair was the same under the wig.

5. Could this be the reason why the long haired Native Americans were excellent trackers, why the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time in 80 years after most of the players grew their hair long, and why Sampson lost his power after his hair was cut:    Hair is an extension of the nervous system, it can be correctly seen as exteriorized nerves, a type of highly evolved \’feelers\’ or \’antennae\’ that transmit vast amounts of important information to the brainstem, the limbic system, and the neocortex.  Not only does hair in people, including facial hair in men, provide an information highway reaching the brain,  hair also emits energy, the electromagnetic energy emitted by the brain into the outer environment. More on that and why the government reportedly studied the benefits of long hair from The Truth About Hair and why Native/Indians would keep their hair long HERE.

6. Did you know that at least 1,500 American architects and engineers dispute the official explanation that the 47 floor World Trade Center building 7, which was not hit by a plane, collapsed due to fires fueled by office furnishings and believe it was a planned demolition?

7. “If one looks at 9/11 as a demonstration of the worst of humanity in action – as terrorism is and as any mass murder is – the way human beings responded in the moments of it happening and in the aftermath is really a demonstration of the best of humanity.”  ~ Alice Greenwald, director of the 911 museum.

8. Daybreak: a humpty dumpty morning.

9. I saw the original musical Hair in Boston in 1968. It was great but confusing because it was at the peak of the 60’s flower child era in Boston and I thought the cast members were just a bunch of hip peers when they came out in the audience to mingle as part of the play. Apparently, the remake didn’t live up to the original, as this review demonstrates:  “I just watched “Hair” and I can’t do a thing with it. It’s like sitting in the middle of a giant commercial for, oh, Gap Tie-Dye or McPot.”

10. The highlight of last week was when Joe and I pulled over while driving home from town to watch a distant lightening storm at night against a mountain view on the hill at Stokers Knob with the smell of sweet grass and nearby garden flowers wafting in the air and the chirp of summer insects in the background.

11. My 3 year old grandson Bryce likes the book about insects that I brought him from the library, but he doesn’t like me to be the only one reporting the names of the bugs, so he makes up some strange names for many of them and informs me what they are.  I don’t correct him.

12. This week I’m looking forward to photographing Ilima Ursomarso’s dance company’s fire dance performance at the intermission at of Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann’s new band at Dogtown’s Sun Hall.

13. Play your own music HERE. It’s fun!

More posting 13 Thursdays HERE.

2. Two under-the-radar Floyd blogs with a focus on sustainability and simple living are HERE and HERE.

3. I like to round numbers up when it comes to time, unless, of course, it’s my birthday.

4. It’s often too early but hardly ever too late. ~ Said to my friend Katherine when she called me at 10 p.m.

5. The whole time I was interviewing local vegetable farmer Gladys King, and working on THIS story for All About Her, I kept calling her Gladys Knight.

6. I hadn’t been paying much attention to the weather news in the lead up to the recent hurricane, so when I read an email about my friend Bob’s party being cancelled because his girlfriend “Irene” wouldn’t cooperate the first thing that came to mind was, ‘I didn’t even know Bob had a girlfriend.’

7. During the Virginia 5.9 earthquake I couldn’t explain why the chair I was sitting on in front of the computer began to tremble. Then, when the lights started to rattle and the whole house shook at its core, I thought Joe had decided to move the refrigerator and that he dropped it. Meanwhile, Joe was out on the porch working and thought our resident bear had gotten into the house and was stomping around and trashing it.

8. Most poetic Google search that landed someone on my blog this week: happy girls waiting in open sky.

9. Looking up the etymology of the word “koan” while writing THIS poem, I came across this: “Two monks were arguing about the temple flag waving in the wind. One said, “The flag moves.” The other said, “The wind moves.” They argued back and forth but could not agree. The Sixth Ancestor said, “Gentlemen! It is not the wind that moves; it is not the flag that moves; it is your mind that moves.” The two monks were struck with awe.” – The Mumonkan Case 29, translation by Robert Aitken

10. Not just one, but two recent studies have concluded that watching TV can have serious repercussions. If you’re over the age of 25, every hour spent in front of the TV cuts 22 minutes off your lifespan. That can equate to five years’ worth if you watch TV six hours a day. TV watching has also been linked to aggression and obesity in children and has been shown to increases the risk of Attention Deficit Disorder because it overstimulates and rewires the young developing brain, causing damage to neural pathways. More HERE.

11. Listen to what Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, had to say about Dick Cheney’s new book: ‘This is a book written out of fear, fear that one day someone will “Pinochet” Dick Cheney,’ says Wilkerson, alluding to the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who was arrested for war crimes. Wilkerson also calls for George W. Bush and Cheney to be held accountable for their crimes in office. ‘I’d be willing to testify, and I’d be willing to take any punishment I’m due,’ Wilkerson said.”

12. Most people wanted to know what happened when they saw my arm in a sling. I’m not much for fiction, because I think the truth is more interesting if told right, but I couldn’t seem to make the boring story of how I tripped and fell interesting and got tired of telling it, so I began to use a line that a friend provided when he asked, ‘What’s the matter, Colleen? Do you have writer’s cramp?

13. I think I could also work the recent earthquake into my explanation.

More blogging 13 on Thursday HERE.

2. Sometimes we fall in love or fall for something because we are gullible. We fall out of grace or off the wagon. Other times we just fall.

3. Said to my husband Joe after 3 hours in the ER waiting in a closed room for a doctor to read my x-rays after falling and fracturing my right forearm: This would make a pretty boring ER episode, wouldn’t it?

4. My 3 year old grandson has been known to cry when the butter melts on his toasted bagel. If he doesn’t see it he doesn’t believe it’s there.

5. After I tripped on an uneven part of the cement stoop at my cellar door because I was distracted, thinking about something else while carrying too many things, I lay and on the ground for a few minutes cursing, S—, S—, S—.

6. In Massachusetts we say swearing instead of cursing and bum instead of butt.

7. I think SMASH is an alternative plural of MASH.

8. Description of the Virginia earthquake posted by Facebook friend Joey: Reminiscent of my first sexual experience. A lot of people asking if they felt anything, people screaming for their lives, and a few people sobbing.

9. “You are such a blogger,” I said to my husband after he snapped a picture of the accident scene (above).

10. I think the powers that be (pun intended) don’t want us to know how bad the Fukishimo nuclear disaster is because they don’t want us to lose confidence in nuclear power due to the money at stake. Filmmaker Brian Rich has created a moving and high energy chronology of the industry (which creates radioactive waste that is deadly for 1,000′s of years) and its impact upon the world. Watch HERE.

11. In the bath last night I realized that I can do a lot with my left arm but it can’t wash itself. Other things that I had taken for granted that I can’t do one-handed with my left hand include putting on my eye make-up, flossing my teeth, blow drying or styling my hair, cutting my morning bagel and spreading butter on it and eating it .

12. If you love two people at the same time, choose the second one, because if you really loved the first one you wouldn’t have fallen for the second. – Johnny Depp

13. A wonderful diversion is HERE