Wrote this last week....

Work today, since I am taking part of the coming week off.

Left mid-day to go to a memorial service for an elderly friend of mine.  I met her when I was newly married and we first moved to Whittier.  She had just retired from a career as a school teacher/librarian.  That was 25 years ago.

The speakers (her sons and grandkids) emphasized her patience, good humor, and enjoyment of life.  She was in hospice care, and had chosen a couple of pieces to be read at her funeral.  One was a lovely poem about a garden, which I am not locating on the interwebs.  It is not either of these:

My Mother kept a Garden...
God looked around his garden.....

Or anything similarly mawkish.  It was about roots, and branches, and bore passing resemblance to the poem I want read at my own funeral, which is Edwin Muir's One Foot in Eden.

Ah well, what matter that there is one fewer decent, kind, hard-working tolerant person in the world.  We have too many of those anyway. 

Real life captcha

Found letters, for Carolbaby's edification.

Birthday plusses and minuses

I should do one of these, since my birthday is somewhere around this time.  I am at the point were each birthday marks a slow progression to the grave, and this was not one of those milestone birthdays that confers special privileges (like the breakfast special at Dennys).....so here we go:

Birthday downs:

1) surly teen
2) spent the whole day doing accounting, not even taxes, just accounting, mostly
3) no-one noticed it was my bday, well almost no-one
4) I have not noticeably reformed my life or accomplished anything significant this year

Birthday ups:

1) surly teen may or may not have finished most of his homework, here's hoping
2) I dont' mind accounting (if I did I would be SOL for 40+ hours each week) and today's project resolved itself smoothly and in record time.
3) Two co-workers, plus the world of facebook, did notice it was my birthday, plus I had a fun event yesterday and I have one coming up on Wednesday to look forward to
4) Despite lack of significant forward progress over the past year, I'm not in a bad place for this age and this station in life.

Christmas at the edge of the world

It cleared up enough last night for them to launch the latest Atlas V rocket from our coast (with super duper secret payload that will probably kill us all, or at least document our every move for all eternity).  So the SGH, ratdog and I headed down to the beach and caught a spectacular view of the liftoff from about 20 miles north of the site.  View enhanced by a power outage in our area, so no pesky streetlamps to invade the darkness. Quite stunning, couldn't help but be excited, easy to see why some people drink this kool-aid. (And ratdog had a worthwhile beach experience as well, since he went nose to claw with a sand flea and came out the winner.)

I read a book!

I read a historical novel, "A Conspiracy of Paper", by David Liss.  Nice entertainment for a holiday weekend, sort of like an extended episode of "Law and Order, Eighteenth-Century Financial Crimes Unit".  Lots of Georgian squalor and corruption. 

More stressed than I care to be, woke up humming this song from the Squirrel Nut Zippers, which is a dead ringer for my mental state right now.

Exiled

Short stay away from home on family business, providing unrequested but much needed downtime.  Just retreated to coffee shop (our lodgings are at casa de sketchy internet).  But how about a picture from last month's trip, from New Jersey:

That was the very end of April in northern New Jersey.  B1 (now GrownUpOne) took it in woods that his father, grandfather, and a couple generations of great grandfathers had stomped around in before him.