BLIZZARD!!

!  Pepco (local power outfit) has called me to warn me about power outages, and wot to do, etc.  I am touched, but holy crap..... nobody ever called us in Fargo, ND, and told us wot to do when  we had REAL blizzards.  Everyone is totally excited about this "blizzard" coming.  I forget that where I live now is the SOUTH.  Not to sound snarky, but they don't know wot a BLIZZARD is.  They think of it as a big snowstorm.  They have never experienced the bitter cold, and they have never gone outside to play in such a storm, and built snow forts, where the temperature inside is less than freezing. I love my life, I love my childhood...and here I am in the City of Satan.

crossword puzzles are good for your brain....most often...

OK, I admit to being a crossword fan.  but sometimes I am stumped.  The Thursday NYT crossword this week starts with "ARCTIC RESIDENT' 4 letters.  My immediate response was "POLE."  But Poles do not live in the Arctic as a rule, even though there are two of them--North and South.  All the other suspects don't fit:  Inuit (5 letters), eskimo (6 letters), ice (3).  Bear with its 4 letters fits, but the cross word clue is "school allowance" (8 letters).  Whatever the hey that might be if it starts with B.  I'll have to keep on checking the cross words.  #2 is "immortal flower in 'Paradise Lost'."  Milton??...and so it goes. Feliz Sabado, y'alls!

New Year....

Love this quote from the 27-year-old Albert Camus:

"We have not overcome our condition, and yet we know it better. We know that we live in contradiction, but we also know that we must refuse this contradiction and do what is needed to reduce it. Our task as [humans] is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks [we] take a long time to accomplish, that’s all."

Thanks from Brainpickings.org