1. The drive is often the best thing about traveling.
2. I love a good snuggle with my husband when I'm cold.
3. I often use pasta when I am cooking.
4. I'm reading Little Women right now; I love it.

The sun sank, and they both felt its final shudder of warmth.
Turning, he looked into her eyes.
“I feel as though you are the one I have waited for, all my life. And now you are here.”
“I’m not even sure if I believe in such a thing,” she whispered.

Yesterday I was a dog.
Today I'm a dog.
Tomorrow I'll probably still be a dog.
[Sigh!]
There's so little hope for advancement.
-- Snoopy –

Have a great Wednesday!

Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation…
-- Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1 –

Have a great Monday!

It's that time of the year again when Major League Baseball hands out its annual awards. On Monday, the first two awards will be announced, and that is the AL and NL Rookie of the Year awards.
Here are my choices for the awards and the days they will be announced:

Nov. 12: AL Rookie of the Year: Dustin Pedroia
NL Rookie of the Year: Ryan Braun

In doctor’s waiting-rooms, a decade or two ago, the tedium would have been relieved with quiet background music: sentimental songs from Broadway, popular classics like Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Nowadays, however, one hears only the thudding, mechanical music favoured by the young. Their cowed elders bear it without protest: faute de mieux it has become their music too.

When I really worry about something, I don't just fool around. I even have to go to the bathroom when I worry about something. Only, I don't go. I'm too worried to go. I don't want to interrupt my worrying to go.
-- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 6
--
Perhaps Holden needed to read Carnegie!

Have a great Friday!

1. The last compliment I got was from my husband; he/she said I was doing great on a project I have undertaken.
2. I'm reading The Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer.
3. I woke up today and thought T.G.I.F!!!!!!!

Chris Neil celebrates his game-winning goal, Nov.10, 2007.

In Grade 3, Neil’s principal asked him what he was going to be when he grew up. “I’m going to play in the NHL,” said Neil.

This morning, I received a personal email from a very astute Salingerian aficianado regarding my allusion to Salingerism in yesterday’s blog entitled I Like Airports.
In there, [and thinking myself witty as hell at the time of composition] I had said → I replied, as Holden Caulfield might have done, by saying, “Who doesn’t?”

There's really nothing like a woman's purse to tell whether she is prospering or languishing. It's not about the money inside so much as the BRAND of the purse. The smaller the better too. Mine - the one I like best - is a Fossil. Never in a million years would I have bought it for myself. Kids. Kids buy moms stuff.
-- Anonymous Woman –

Can someone, anyone out there, please tell me how it can already be the month of March?
No, seriously, though. In a matter of hours, it will be MARCH!
March?
What the hell happened to February?
Am I going senile? Did I sleep through January or something?
Even with the extra day here, the 29th, I’m sorry, but something seems mightily askew!
Why does it feel like I was just back home not so long ago, for Christmas?
Is this just a classic symptom of old age?
Is the rest of this year going to be just as fleeting?
According to Robert Frost… perhaps…. perhaps it is!

The sun was warm but the wind was chill,


Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
-- W.S. Merwin –

Absence sometimes makes the heart grow ANGRIER, I say!
I have so missed being able to blog, and to converse with my great blog-friends.
But I think I am back in business now!
The MAC is fixed!

Have a great Thursday!
**********

Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is. The fact is: You don’t know what it is. You have only covered up the mystery with a label. Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg. ….Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn’t very much. Language consists of five basic sounds produced by the vocal cords. They are the vowels a, e, i, o, u.

Two newlywed University of Illinois grads were driving through Louisiana.
As they were approaching the town of Natchitoches, they started arguing about the pronunciation of the name.

It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road.
-- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 1 –

Have a great Friday!

A University of Illinois student went to a bookstore & asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?"
She said if she told him, it would defeat the purpose.

Have a great Friday!

Years later, when he tried to remember what the maiden idealized by the alchemy of poetry really was like, he could not distinguish her from the heartrending twilight of those times. Even when he observed her, unseen, during those days of longing when he waited for a reply to his first letter, he saw her transfigured in the afternoon shimmer of two o’clock in a shower of blossoms from the almond trees where it was always April regardless of the season of the year.
-- From Marquez’s Love In The Time of Cholera –

Even in translation, so beautiful. I’m really enjoying this book.
Have a great Monday!
**********

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.
-- Thomas Carlyle –

Why am I choosing the above famous Carlyle quote as a Splash du Jour?
Because I want to go on record as saying that I DO NOT BELIEVE IN IT.

I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering bout the big things and asting bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, he say, the more I love.
And people start to love you back, I bet, I say.
They do, he say, surprise.

Do you think God gets stoned?
← I think so . . . look at the platypus.
-- Robin Williams –

Have a great Tuesday!

I am sitting at Starbucks and just randomly thinking, as I sometimes do.
I am still slogging through a couple of non-fiction books, and just took a break from that to read a bit of the Nick Adams stories by Ernest Hemingway.
Just chillin’ out after a long day at work.
In this lull of a moment, while getting another coffee, three horrendously deep philosophically challenging scenarios have sprung unbidden into my mind, and I pose them to you…

#1.
You are wandering around in a blind fog and you are starving to death. Literally, you could almost die. Then the fog lifts, to reveal the following three equi-distant buildings. To which of these would you mostly likely drag yourself?

a) McDonalds.

Isn't poetry absolutely wonderful though? I mean, really there is something about it that prose writing will never be able to quite get to. Poetry is so not reporting. It's so finicky, it is inherently allowed to appeal to a much smaller audience than prose. It is always such a narrow rolled-up newspaper telescopic opinion of something.
To a certain extent, the fiction shelves have to be saying... "I can appeal to you, you will be able to relate to this, please buy me, BUY ME," but the poetry shelves [more scantily clad and less visited] whisper to no one in particular, "This is what I am. Perhaps no one can relate. But no matter. I am not really for sale."
-- Cipriano –

Just wondering…
Have you ever gotten involved with a book like for instance

“It is like a firstborn son: you spend your life working for him, sacrificing everything for him, and at the moment of truth he does just as he pleases.”
--Dr. Urbino, on his wedding night, describing his penis to his young virgin wife Fermina, in Marquez’s Love In The Time of Cholera –
She continued to examine it, asking what this was for and what that was for, and when she felt satisfied with her information she hefted it in both hands to confirm that it did not weigh enough to bother with, and let it drop with a gesture of disdain.

Terrific book!
Have a great Thursday!

← “In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know.”
-- Steve Martin, on Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life –

Have a great Monday!

← Me.
Actual recent photo!
Today is [was] my birthday!
Yayyyyy! Happy Birthday To Me!
What did I do on my birthday?
Ummm….. → WORKED!

To be so bent on marriage – to pursue a man merely for the sake of situation – is a sort of thing that shocks me; I cannot understand it. Poverty is a great evil, but to a woman of education and feeling it ought not, it cannot be the greatest. I would rather be a teacher at school (and I can think of nothing worse) than marry a man I did not like.
-- Emma, in Jane Austen’s, The Watsons –

Have a great Monday!