I sat up last night waiting for the thunder. Like the meteorologists’ predictions of floods and high winds, it had teased us all day, the sound rolling on and on just on the edge of hearing, but never quite living up to the hype. The night proved to be mostly about the rain coming in waves, like the wind, building, fading, building, fading. Of course, the interesting weather always happens at night. I wish for cat’s-eyes, to see in the dark. Even without them, though, Jupiter is amazingly bright right now, at least on less stormy nights. We went for …
When I was a kid, our local paper occasionally ran stories about a kid a few years older than myself. He was attending college at 14 because his father believed he was a genius. It seems strange that it was news. We get all excited about teenagers who have stepped outside the cookie cutter conveyor belt of youth culture and public school. The bookstores are making a big deal right now about a book called Eragon, prominently displaying it in large stacks at the front of the store. The reason for the fuss appears to be that the author is …
My name is Christina, and I’m a workaholic. I have this overwhelming sense of responsibility to my to-do list, and just about everything else seems to suffer because of it. It took two hours of enforced rock-sitting at the beach yesterday afternoon before I could mentally unplug enough to take the evening off. At the risk of stating the obvious, my work/life balance must be off if work things are demanding this much of my mental energy. The Rich Dad author was talking about personal finance, but “Pay yourself first” applies to most other parts of life. The challenge, of …
We visited the McBryde Garden of the National Tropical Botanical Garden with Robert and Jo last week. Took lots of pictures; hopefully some of them will find their way to the gallery. The plants were lovely, naturally, but I found myself somewhat annoyed by the self-guided tour pamphlets’ constant reminders of how rare and endangered the garden’s plants are. It seems the precious status of the plants in a botanical garden would be a given, since there’s probably a reason these specific plants are receiving that degree of care. No one puts dandilions in a botanical garden. Surely, there is …
Watched The Order last night. Very disappointing. Convoluted plot changes direction part way through. The movie ends with too many unanswered questions, and they are not the kind that thought or repeated viewings will illuminate. In short, the movie suffers because the writer was the director, and they both forgot they were not the complete audience.
Enormously full week; feeling overwhelmed and more than a little behind. We watched an orange moon rise out of the sea one evening, five days past full, a ship on fire behind the streaming clouds, sailing for Valhalla. We sat on the beach, watching the path of light between us and the moon waver and ripple on the restless ocean. At first, the way was marked only by flashes of darkened gold on the black water, but gradually it became a highway dappled with shadows, wide enough for a tin man, a scarecrow, and a lion to walk with me. …